Mail woes. Always-beens.

[mrissa]

Oh, very fine. Of all the times for my gmail to be down for 36 hours (and counting), the times when I have issues with my other e-mail are the best. Wheee.

So if you've gotten something bounced from my mail, or if you haven't gotten an answer and thought you should have, it's probably because I haven't gotten it on either front. markgritter has fixed my regular e-mail issues, except -- N.B., rysmiel and other smartasses -- you can't use anything you want at-sign marissalingen.com any more, it has to be mris for the username. (Bah.) (But even those were bouncing for awhile; please re-send.)

Gmail's response was wholly inadequate: "Oh, this problem only lasts a few minutes, please try again." No, jerkfaces, it's lasted nearly 36 hours at this point. And yes, I've cleared cookies set by them, so it's not just that I'm getting an error message that no longer applies.

Harumphharumphharumphharumph.

In other news of Things Gone Awry, they're making a Dark Is Rising movie, and they made Will Stanton an American. Whether they set the whole thing here or made him an expat over there, it's just plain wrong. This is as bad as invading Jesse and Leslie's privacy by showing us Terabithia. It is Not Okay.

Also, in my bleary half-awake state, I misread the clock and did not try to force myself back to sleep, with the result that I was awake at 5:30, which is utterly inadequate amounts of sleep, rather than 6:30, which might have done. And I'm too hungry to go back to bed. And I just used the last of the Nutella. Harumphharumph.

I didn't hear a harumph from that guy.

Okay, people. Your cheering-Mris assignment, should you choose to accept it: tell me of musicians or authors (or just one, that's fine) who integrated themselves seamlessly into your mental landscape. You know when you first listened to or read them, you just can't make yourself feel like they were ever not a part of your life. This came into my head because I was thinking about making my dad some more mix CDs, since he seemed to like the ones I made him at Christmas, and I was thinking of the playlists I composed for the drive back from California. (Not used, as it turned out: the U-Haul had no CD player, and timprov did his own selections in the car -- he was still able to drive then.) I had to think hard several times to remind myself that the "Iowa" on the playlist was by John Linnell, not Dar Williams, because Dar is a musician who feels like she has been part of our blood and bones around here. But I can remember very clearly listening to my first Dar song: Jon Truitt brought "Christians and Pagans" in for us to listen to when he was in town for the holidays in 2003, after we'd moved home. (Dad, of course, can have both. But that's not the point.) Who feels permanent like that to you but clearly isn't?

Comments

[talimena.livejournal.com]

Bad gmail!

I just got up, so might have a more coherent answer later, but: Willie Nelson and Madeline L'Engle.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Together again for the first time! :)

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Lord Dunsany.

The first time I ever heard one of his stories -- and it was heard, it was read aloud at a story party -- I felt as if I must have read it as a child in an old anthology and forgotten it. Then I felt like that about everything else of his too.

Stan Rogers. Bach. The Secret Country books.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I didn't get to buy the Secret Country books on the first go-round. I snapped up The Secret Country at Uncle Hugo's last thing in Minnesota before we moved to California, and then I couldn't find the others anywhere, and I was really upset. And then the timing of the reprints was such that I could buy The Hidden Land at Uncle Hugo's first thing after we moved home, and that made me very, very happy. I mean, finding it would always have been a happy thing, but it was just so appropriate for a homecoming present to ourselves.

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

John Wesley Harding. Guadalcanal Diary. Dorothy L. Sayers. Madeleine L'Engle. Elizabeth Enright (but just Gone-Away Lake). Robertson Davies. W.B. Yeats.

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

Dar Williams, also. I remember when we discovered her in college, so very clearly there was a Before-Dar time. However. That time doesn't quite seem real to me. In terms of music. Before Dar, I listened to Irish folk and Baroque classics. Now I listen to so much more. And I think it's because of her. So it's not just her; she's also the beginning of most of the rest of music for me.

Probably also Robin McKinley. I can't actually think of the first time I read Beauty. But books have a different place than music, and I think McKinley shoe-horns herself in to an earlier brainspace by having rewritten a fairy tale.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, and now I want to go reread The Hero and the Crown. Sigh.

[clarentine]

re: musicians, the one that melds most clearly with my mental processes and imagination is Tommy Emmanuel, an acoustic guitar player out of, I think, Australia. I'm a big fan of instrumental pieces, anyway - I love movie soundtracks - but this guy just fits, you know? Eh. You know.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I do know, though I don't know Tommy Emmanuel's music.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

Dream Theater. They instantly became sort of my default soundtrack as soon as I got Images and Words back in 1993.

There are several musicians who feel like they've always been part of my mental landscape because, well, they have. I was weaned on them. So they don't really count.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Right, exactly. There are various symphonies and bits of folk and rock I actually did hear in utero. Different question.

[columbina.livejournal.com]

They Might Be Giants. Dorothy Sayers. Rex Stout (I didn't read any Nero Wolfe until a couple of years ago and yet I feel like he's always been there).

There were a couple of items I listed and removed because I realized they HAVE always been there - things I've been reading or listening to since a relatively tender age. The question is what constitutes a relatively tender age in this case. I first read Sayers in very early adulthood, IIRC, so I'm letting her squeak by.

[columbina.livejournal.com]

Posted without closely reading the two comments above mine, obviously.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

Did you get an e-mail from me this week? Because if not, there's going to be trouble. I went on an e-mail purge, so I don't think I can re-send that one, even.

I have a hard time imagining music without Pearl Jam. But that was such a long time ago. Even though I don't listen to them hardly at all anymore, it seems like they were always there.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have an e-mail from you dated 5/16, and I am in the middle of answering it.

Heh. Pearl Jam is the very opposite of that for me: it's music with very, very specific dates. (In both senses of the word, as you of all people know.) But I can see how that wouldn't be the case for you.

[dremiel.livejournal.com]

No! No! No! They can't make Will an American! They better not set it here - it would make no sense. i'm not crazy about the idea of a movie at all, actually!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

No more am I. But alas, bullets can't stop them.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

you can't use anything you want at-sign marissalingen.com any more, it has to be mris for the username.

Is this going to be a permanent condition ?

Umm, things that feel like they have always been part of my mental furniture, where this clearly is not the case... the Sisters of Mercy concert in Dublin in 1997. The Leningrad Cowboys Helsinki concert which album I picked up after seeing them in Heidelberg in 1994. Leonard Cohen's I'm Your Man and The Future. The Dragon Waiting. The Crow. Douglas Adams. Watership Down. VNV Nation are on the way there, I think. And possibly Fight Club, about which I feel confident saying the film is much better than the book because the author of the book agrees with me.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Actually I got the bit of silliness you used, so that's a relief.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

Oh, Susan Cooper, actually. And that movie can't exist in my brain.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It, like the last five pages of the series, is officially Not Canon, and That's That.

[loup_noir]

Booksbooksbooks that are a part of me are a weird mix of sentimental critter tales (Black Beauty, Beautiful Joe, Bambi, Silver Chief), Twain, myths and Fafhard and the Grey Mouse - which I must have forty bazillion times, or until the covers came off and the pages started to get lost. I can't say when I started or stopped reading them. The stories are "just there," to be enjoyed whenever needed.

My mental jukebox is skewed heavily toward Nordic and Celtic folk, but there are several concept albums that are fused into me. How could my brain function without "Chess" and "The King of Elfland's Daughter?"

[mmerriam.livejournal.com]

Yeats and Frost and A.E. Housman. Zelazny as soon as I read Lord of Light. Watership Down. Jim Croce. Neko Case.

[careswen.livejournal.com]

I sent you an update last night, to three different addies. Wanted to make sure you got it somehow?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Didn't get it. Please re-send.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

If anyone really needs to know something's gotten through, my Gmail is working fine and I can pass notes across the hall.

We should maybe figure out if we want to switch your hosting around.

Also, Counting Crows.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh! Of course Counting Crows.

I can't actually remember when I did first get exposed to Counting Crows. Huh. That's pretty rare for me. Usually if I dive for that information, it's down there somewhere.

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

Casey Neill, Belly, Steeleye Span, Simon and Garfunkel, Frank Black (not the Pixies, though i love them -- but Frank is what lives with me).

[writingortyping.livejournal.com]

Patty Griffin.

I would also say James Taylor, but since my parents have always been big JT fans and he put out "Sweet Baby James" the year I was born, I can't be sure that there has ever been a moment when he wasn't in my life.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

From the stories I have heard of my birth, it sounds like I can be sure that there never has been a moment when James Taylor wasn't in my life. Or at least his music.

[pameladean]

Ani DiFranco and Dave Carter. Now there's a pair. I didn't hear Ani diFranco (whose name I can never spell, because it's always all lower-case on her albums) until 2002, but I keep feeling I knew her work as a teenager. This is problematic; I want her songs to be the soundtrack for my book, but she's too recent. Dave Carter, whoa. He uses mythology like other people use spackle. And he's funny.

The main book that comes to mind is The Lord of the Rings; the only other one(s) would be the Alice books.

P.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Using mythology like spackle is very sensible.

[haddayr.livejournal.com]

Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers, the Chieftains, Mozart's Magic Flute, Madeleine L'Engle, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Lloyd Alexander, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Beethoven's Rage Over a Lost Penny, Dr. Seuss, Shel Silverstein, Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, and endless lists of songs from The Midnight Special in Chicago.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Pete and Woody were like that for me, too: I know when I started listening to them -- although my parents sang some of their songs before then -- but they're just part of life, part of breathing.

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

Led Zeppelin. Douglas Adams. T.H. White's The Once and Future King.

Wow, that list seems strangely appropriate.

Not that it really helps, but The Dark is Rising movie is set in Britain. They just chose to make Will an expat American. (And every time I type or say that sentence, my brain cramps.)

[zwol.livejournal.com]

Brother (http://brothermusic.com/). Even though I know exactly when I first heard their music.

I kinda had this experience with New York City, come to think of it. I remember stepping off the plane on my first day at Columbia, never having been there before, and being overwhelmed by this feeling that I was home, that I had always lived there. It was anti-homesickness. I never wanted to go back.

(So now I'm living in San Diego. WTF.)

[eposia.livejournal.com]

I can't believe someone else beat me to Brother! Always awesome to find another fan. *puts some Brother on iTunes*

[cpolk.livejournal.com]

Uhm.

Steven Brust, for Vlad Taltos. I know I didn't read these books until I was almost 30. I know that to be true. but...

[ckd]

Oh, my, yes.

I remember exactly how I discovered the Vlad Taltos books, and when, and the time that I devoured all of the then-extant ones in a single night, and...oh hell, I may as well tell the whole story.

I discovered the books through the Fidonet SF echo. (Hi, dd_b!) skzbrust was a frequent poster there, as was lwe, and at times so was I...and unlike many of the heavy posters, I didn't have any "point" or "offline reader" software. (Instead, I simply Had No Life.)

So anyway, this Steven Brust guy seemed to be an interesting writer based on his posts, and paperbacks only cost a pittance because this was back when a 1200bps modem was a pretty cool device instead of something you see at the History of Computing exhibit at the Museum of Science, so what the heck, I bought Jhereg. And I read it, and I saw that it was good, and there were more books, but I didn't actually have them because I was also only earning a pittance....

Shortly thereafter, for reasons lost in the mists of time having something to do with USENET (see above note about Having No Life), I had come into contact with kjc007. We eventually arranged for me to come and visit, and I duly travelled. Due to the vagaries of scheduling, she had previous plans to attend a concert during the weekend I was there; I was left to the tender mercies of her roommates for part of the evening[1], then had to just wait for her to return. But, hey, bookshelf. Bookshelf which contains a complete (at the time) set of the Vlad Taltos books, proving her high levels of taste and distinction, except for having a slight flaw in her character (namely, being willing to associate with me).

So I naturally whiled away the time by reading them all, in publication order. (I may have skipped Jhereg since I'd already read it, but I think I re-read it as well.) Jhereg, Yendi, Teckla, Taltos, and, er, well, that was all of them. Did I mention that this was a little while ago? Because it was.

Musically? Well, I've been listening to "Weird Al" Yankovic since before high school, so I think he falls into the "actually goes that far back" category instead. (In 3-D came out when? Damn, I'm old.)

However, They Might Be Giants certainly qualify, since I discovered them during my senior year of college. I can distinctly remember discovering their music, buying Flood at the Harvard Square location of Newbury Comics, and so on...but it still seems like it's been forever. (You say it has been forever, because you just looked up when Flood was released? Damn kids! Get off my lawn!!!)

[1] We went to see a movie as a group. It was either Parenthood or The Abyss. No, I don't know why I can't remember which of the two it was.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Elizabeth Peters, "editing" Amelia Peabody's diaries. I know there had to be a time when I read the first book, but it seems that I've known the characters forever. There wasn't a new one this year, however; Barbara Mertz is 80 this year, and I'm desperately afraid there may be no more.

Bob Dylan.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

What a great question. Madeline L'Engle. _The Once and Future King_. Dr Seuss. Laura Ingalls Wilder. The Jungle Books. _The Traveler in Black_. As for music, I think I was listening to Paul Simon in utero. Certainly since then. I remember discovering Kate Wolf, Janis Ian, Richard Thompson, and Peter Gabriel much later, but they're all pretty well integrated in my head.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

I noticed your email was bouncing yesterday. I will resend.

Authors: Kate Seredy. Tolkien, even though I didn't necessarily enjoy him all the time. Hawthorne. N.T. Wright. Garth Nix.

Books: The Wind Singer (http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/44467405&referer=brief_results) ; I Heard the Owl Call My Name (http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/769496&referer=brief_results) ; San Manuel Bueno, Martir (http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1922549&referer=brief_results).

Musicians: Nanci Griffith. Johnny Cash. Nick Drake. Squirrel Nut Zippers.

Songs: "Bright as Yellow" (Innocence Mission) ; "Into Your Arms" (Lemonheads) ; "America" (Simon and Garfunkel).

[mkille.livejournal.com]

Oh, and "City of New Orleans."