Pondering the utter tastelessness of "My Space"!
I'd like to meet:
Leonard Peltier, Riane Eisler, Jared Diamond, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Arundhati Roy, Aun Sung Suu Kyi, Bob Quinn, Anna MacBride . . . and those are just a few amongst the living.
And then there's YOU . . .
UPDATE: I DID meet Anna MacBride! An utterly charming woman who gave me great insight into her grandmother, Maud Gonne!
Music:
J.S. Bach, L. von Beethoven, W.A. Mozart, etc, etc. What's called "Early Music"--Lully, Marais, St. Colombe, Pergolisi, Josquin, Gibbons, Hildegard, Dunstable. Anything recorded by Glenn Gould--the greatest musician of the 20th century! Don't really listen to rock n' roll that much, though I love John Lennon and Kurt Cobain--and, of course B-E-A-T-L-E-S. Irish Traditional music suits me fine--especially Sean-Nos and Liam O'Flynn, and so does Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone, Jacques Brel, Pat Metheny, Willie Nelson, C.D. Stelzer, par example. Cole Porter--especially sung by Fred Astaire--sends me over the moon, though there's many a soul will say I've been out of this world for a very long time!
I've also listened to what's now called "World Music"--Indian Classical, Arabic, African, First American, Japanese--since before it became trendy.
I used to play flute and piano, but when the dogs started howling at me, I gave them up!
Movies:
"The US vs John Lennon"; "An Inconvenient Truth"; "The Corporation"; "The Smartest Guys In The Room": "Breakfast on Pluto"; "The Atlantean Quartet"; "32 Short Films About Glenn Gould"; "LOTR" ALL, Extended Versions; "Mind Walk"; "My Dinner With Andre"; "The Power of Myth"--okay it was a PBS series, but if you wanna quibble, I can direct you to some extremeley litigious pubs!):"Tous Les Matins Du Monde"; everything Hitchcock, Coppola, Murnau, Kurosawa, Fellini, Kubrick, Python, Gilliam, Cocteau, Malle, Merchant/Ivory, D.W. Griffith, Orson Welles. Love those old Hammer films, too!
Television:
TeeVee's something I strive to avoid, though I do like TG4: http://www.tg4.ie/. Still a big fan of "Star Trek"--TOS & Next Generation, "The Twilight Zone"--TOS, "Father Ted", "Fawlty Towers", and, of course, "Monty Python's Flying Circus". And let's not leave out the great BBC production "I, Claudius"!I believe that TeeVee rots yer brains, even if you do wear a tin foil helmet (a fashion MUST for me!).
TURN IT OFF!!!
Books:
"Lord of the Rings"--and EVERYTHING else by J.R.R. Tolkien; "The Chalice and the Blade" by Riane Eisler: John Moriarty; most Irish writers (DO recall that Stoker, Wilde, Swift, and Shaw WERE Irish!); the complete works of Joseph Campbell; the "Ishmael" series by Daniel Quinn; "The Atlantean Irish" and "Maverick" by Bob Quinn; the complete works of the Williams--Yeats, Blake, and Shakespeare; "Revelations of Divine Love" by Dame Julian of Norwich; "Oryx and Crake" & "A Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood; "Pity the Nation" & "The Great War for Civilization" by Robert Fisk; the novels of Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen, George Orwell, Gore Vidal (I also love the pamphlets, essays, and plays of Vidal), Henry James; complete works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Plato, and Mary Daly (go figure!). I'd say I'm fond of Aristotle, but since we only have the class notes of his students . . . . Which reminds me that I do so adore Umberto Eco, which leads me to Aquinas, and so back to the Greeks. Who's to say which has proved the tougher, Plato's beard or Homer's? I'd rather be living by the "wine-dark sea" than the "snot-green" one, but I'll "bloom" where I'm transplanted. And BTW, I have a lover's quarrel with Joyce, though the longer I live in Ireland, the more I appreciate him. And currently I'm smitten with the "Sister Fidlema" series of "Celtic Mysteries" by Peter Tremayne, aka Peter Berresford Ellis.
Heroes:
James Connolly, Rosa Parks, Thomas Clarke, Joseph Campbell, Jerzy Grotowski, Cindy Sheehan, Maud Gonne MacBride, Jesse Owens, Cassandra, Lady Augusta Gregory, Gandhi, MLK, Senator David Norris, Bobby Sands, Dame Julian of Norwich, Richard Ellmann, Harriet Tubman, Bob Quinn, the Cathars, Satchel Paige, Jackie Robinson, Hamilton Avegno, Dr. Lynn Hoggard, Marija Gimbutas . . . to be continued
