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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

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

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[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!

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

Yup, I'm pretty sure that's the last e-mail. What's weird is my gmail has been fine.

PJ has specific dates and memories for me, but not as "this is the first time I heard it." It was already there, it just became more prominent. And, to a pretty large extent, you're that way for me, too: I have a hard time imagining a pre-Marissa time. I distinctly remember meeting you, but it sort of seems like I must have already known you by then.

The only reasonable explanation is that you're a time traveler. Or you used to be. If it's even possible to be a former time traveler.

[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.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

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

[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]

markgritter's and timprov's gmails have also been fine.

And yah. We have officially known each other forever. It's really the only explanation.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Didn't get it. Please re-send.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

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