From shore_fragments (your first com­ment I believe?):

1. What book(s) or movie(s) [let’s say 3 total] would I have to read / see to get an ink­ling of how you see your­self? (not to be con­fused with favourites)

The first one is also a favour­ite but I think it really does fit your cri­teria. It’s When Night is Fall­ing (dir. Patri­cia Rozema). I think I’m the woman stuck dream­ing about myth­o­logy but I want to be the woman who lives the free life drenched in velvet, whis­key and the circus.

The second is also a film: Waking Life (dir. Richard Link­later). The third is the book The Glass Bead Game by Her­mann Hesse. (And omigod, thank you! Googling to check I had spelled Hesse’s name cor­rectly I found this.) In fact, maybe in some odd way, the last two are the same thing… all know­ledge is inter­con­nec­ted, the trav­el­ler must find their own road through the dream and some­times it’s a lonely road even though we are all on it together and everything is interconnected…

2. Favour­ite Tori Amos song and why (I saw her gig last night *hor­mone filled sigh*)

Oh, you’re going to hate me for this. I don’t really have one. I don’t own any of her music. She was one of hawk_eye’s favour­ite artists and while I love her style mostly and think she’s gor­geous and like the lyrics I’ve heard, there was always one point of the album he played all the time that just got too high-pitched for me and I always had to ask him to turn it off. He prob­ably left me partly because of that, really.

But for the sake of it, let’s say “Pro­fes­sional Widow” because I love how blatant it is and how sexual while it’s being utterly dismissive.

3. Ok, the earth’s about to be des­troyed and you get the chance to pass on one philo­soph­ical or spir­itual rev­el­a­tion to an alien race who have con­veni­ently appeared and are won­der­ing about human­ity – what’s it to be?

Good ques­tion. “With our thoughts we make the world”. 

4. What’s your favour­ite emo­tion? What usu­ally trig­gers it?

Bliss. Is that an emo­tion? Live music trig­gers it. Funk, drum n’ bass, per­cus­sion, brass. Usu­ally large groups on stage (Par­lia­ment of Funk has 24 people, Les Hur­le­ments de Leo has 8, Sheva has 7) but Under­world and Infec­ted Mush­room can manage it with only a couple of people and lots of technology.

5. If you could invent a new Cab­inet port­fo­lio (Com­mon­wealth Mis­tress for… 😉 what would it be called? If you can be bothered, what would it do?

Ooh, I like that ques­tion. Min­is­ter for Social Justice. Respons­ible for assess­ing and respond­ing to human rights, gender inequity, racism issues etc etc. Prob­ably fold the Office for the Status of Women into this port­fo­lio. Has the power to inter­vene in other port­fo­lios as needed. 

Ques­tions for you:

1. If you could only take one poem with you to a desert isle, what would it be and why?
2. So, hypo­thet­ical: the PhD is fin­ished, sub­mit­ted, done. What now?
3. What is the most import­ant thing you would tell your teen­aged child about love?
4. What is your favour­ite non-sexual phys­ical sen­sa­tion and how often do you indulge?
5. Can anarch­ism work for a nation-sized pop­u­la­tion? How? (Yeah, another ‘small’ question…)

Want to join in? Inter­view me!