I’ve been tagged for a meme
Thanks, Dave Holford. Unlike Elizabeth at The Garden Window I’m not nearly cultured nor hip enough to make this really fun but...

1. Name a book that you want to share so much that you keep giving away copies. I recently saved several copies of the American 1928 Book of Common Prayer from being thrown out and have given some away, of course not for Protestantism’s sake but to spread and share the Godwardness and beautiful language of the first liturgical prayer I ever heard. (I read 1662’s psalter, ‘noise of the water pipes’, ‘congregation of naughty men’ — add camp remark about spikey shrine churches here — and all.)

2. Name a piece of music that changed the way you listen to music. As a kid I heard and appreciated Anglican chant and Beethoven (‘Moonlight Sonata’: bleak!) but John Lennon’s ‘A Day in the Life’ showed me a world beyond the stanza-chorus-bridge-stanza pop-song formula, as did Heart’s ‘Magic Man’, which introduced my childhood self to the concept of the extended jam session. (Huw, I like that Dan Fogelberg song too. It’s about his father, a high-school music teacher, and like Sir Paul McCartney’s ‘Let It Be’ about his mother you can read something religious into it.)

3. Name a film you can watch again and again without fatigue. These days I usually don’t see films more than once, oddly enough. I should have a list of classics to answer this but I’ll say two non-classics, True Confessions (1940s LA murder mystery and a look at the church in the period) and The Family Man (‘I work on Wall Shtreet’... a marvellous, I think implicitly Christian fable not just for Christmas).

4. Name a performer for whom you suspend all disbelief. Vince D’Onofrio as the great Detective Bobby Goren on ‘Law & Order: Criminal Intent’. That such a quirky guy is so successful gives me hope. :) He’s a Renaissance man, part Sherlock Holmes and part Columbo. The suspension of disbelief is that I’ve read the confessions he tricks out of people wouldn’t hold up in court; you never see the follow-up to the cases he cracks.

5. Name a work of art you’d like to live with. Pre-Raphaelite paintings come to mind (and painters after that school like John Duncan in Scotland). Tripp and I seem opposites on this issue but I wouldn’t mind Dalí; Picasso’s right out though.

6. Name a work of fiction which has penetrated your real life. Well, if that can mean ‘helped form my worldview’ George Orwell’s 1984, which I read that year.

7. Name a punch line that always makes you laugh. Can’t think of one in particular. Colin Stephenson in Merrily on High and most of them from ‘The Simpsons’. The one from Elizabeth’s daughter about the dog is a contender.