itsallovernow | Five from Ria

1. Name five (or more) books you've read so far this year. What did you like/not like about them?

Ok, so far this year, starting January 1, I've read Tell Me Lies by Jennifer Crusie, Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins, Everything She Needs by A.L. Kennedy, The Secret Country by Pamela Dean, The Odyssey.

Read the Jennifer Crusie on the plane. She's fun, sexy, witty, smarter than you think she's gonna be, and really, really sharp. Jitterbug Perfume remained lackluster, despite my Tom Robbins love. It just is too much, too much philosophy without redeeming characters. He nails the concept in Skinny Legs and All and this reads like a trial run. Um, Everything She Needs is beautiful and dense, the main character is a young girl, a writer, working - unknowingly with her father. It's prose beautiful and odd. I'm currently reading The Secret Country, and a slew of other things, so I don't have much of an opinion yet except for oooh, fun - but I also just read

minnow1212's review of Gaudy Night and now have to go read that again. I imprinted on it like a fuzzy duck and it's never quite left my system. And then, The Odyssey, for the zillionth time because I needed quotes, and the Fagles translation is gorgeous, and I still think Odysseus is an Asshole. But remain fond.

2. If you had a million dollars to give to any person(s) or organization(s) you chose, which one(s) would you choose?

Oh god, first I'd give it to Sallie Mae so I'd be done with my school loans. Then a chunk to my mother so she could quit her job for a year. A bundle to Sexual Offense Services in St. Paul, MN and another bundle to Break the Cycle in Los Angeles, and then the rest to the Educational Options branch of the Los Angeles Unified School District so that they could maintain and improve their continuation high school program.

3. Describe your favorite vacation ever.

Does two days in Las Vegas lounging by the pool at Cesar's Palace, drinking very strong Daquiri's at 10 a.m. and watching the cabana boys haul stuff around count? Shouldn't. It wasn't my best vacation, but that aspect of it was very, very close to perfection.

Um, traveling in Europe for two months. Because it was the longest I'd ever been unoccupied, whether by school or work or family or boyfriend or obligation. I got to do whatever I wanted for two months. And it was glorious, and terrifying, and we spent an incredible week tooling around Ireland in this creeky little bus with a back of Aussies and just had a riotously good time and did not get blown up in Belfast. And we spent a week in Paris, and I spent five days, alone, in Rome and it was lonely and lovely and scary and really, really good for me and I read Milan Kundera for the first time in a white washed, ascetic little room near the Stazione and it's always stayed with me. I was both young enough and old enough to appreciate things.

4. What's something you can do that most people can't? Or something you can do that most people who don't know you very, very well would be surprised to know you can do?

Um, I'm a bellydancer, so I suppose most people can't do that. Or they can and just don't know it yet. And I was, at one time, a mildly good painter. There's not too much that people don't know about me.

5. Quote me 10 snippets--ideally 2 or 3 sentences long or more--from anything (books, movies, tv, poetry, drama, songs) that you can recite off the top of your head. Where are they from and why do you remember them?

1 -Early one morning the sun was shining, I was laying in bed, wondering if she'd changed at all, if her hair was still red - Bob Dylan, First line from Tangled up in Blue. Every morning for four months, this being the first thing I heard.

2- Hello Cowgirl in the Sand, Is this place at your command, Will you stay here for awhile, Can I see your sweet sweet smile, Old enough now to change your name, when somebody loves you is it the same- Neil Young, Cowgirl in the Sand. My dad played this over and over again. On the guitar, and on the stereo.

3-Come senators, congressmen, Please heed the call, Don't stand in the doorway, Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt, Will be he who has stalled, There's a battle outside, And it is ragin'., It'll soon shake your windows, And rattle your walls, For the times they are a-changin'. - Bob Dylan, The Times Are A Changin'. Because of my dad, adament against oppression, reading a speech to me in the car as we drove me to piano lessons.

4-Dull sublunary lovers' love - whose soul is sense - cannot admit absence because it doth remove the thing which elemented it - John Donne. Valediction Forbidding Morning. I love Donne. He was a scoundrel and a romantic and I've just always loved this poem.

5-When that April with its shures soothe - I know the whole prologue to the Canterbury Tales but don't want to write it out. We memorized it for 11th Grade Honors English and it refuses to leave!

6-In Xanadu, did Kubla Kahn, a stately pleasure dome decree, Where Alph, the sacred river ran, with caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea - Kubla Kahn, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I can't honestly say that I know why I know this, but I'm betting it's because of Citizen Kane.

7 - Asps, very dangerous. You go first! - Raiders of the Lost Ark. Um, yeah.

8-No I am widening my perspective. That's what makes me me. - Farscape, My Three Crichtons. Because it's just a perfect moment, and I try to keep it in mind.

9 - Mulder, Are you sure it wasn't a girly scream? X- Files, War of the Corprophages. Because no matter what kind of wretched mood i'm in that always makes me laugh.

10-"Because I... am an American. And what does an American want? Democracy? Capitalism! I want to sell out and settle down. For one day only, it's a blue light special on aisle three. My wormhole technology... and... a free set of steak knives for all the tea in China and anything you can imagine to pay me."

Ahkna: "Pay?"

John: "Yes! Pay... cash."

Kalish: "He's crazy."

Aeryn: "Isn't it fun?" (Farscape, WWS: Hot to Katratzi) Because it's brilliant, it always makes me giggle, and did I mention the brilliant. It's scary, it's reflective, it ties in with my political leanings and the delivery was one of the best things I've ever seen on TV. It's a tie though between, It's Beer O'Clock, Where the Hell is My Riot).

I'm an avid reader, and have vast passages and plots stored in my head. But mostly, what lives up there quote wise - Bob Dylan and Neil Young and John Lennon and currently Damien Rice, and then next too it lives Farscape, X-Files, Star Wars, Jaws and various other movie quotes and things said by friends and loved ones. It's a shallow sort of memory, but it often brings me great pleasure:)

Oh, and number 11, because I'm a writer and because I work with teenagers.
"Inconceivable." "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." - Princess Bride.