Thinking about "interests"

[intertext]

Those "clouds of interest" meme things made me think about the whole "interest" feature and what it means, to me at least. gillo was asking me "if you like Steeleye Span, do you like Fairport..." and I was thinking, well, yes, but not enough to put it as an "interest," if you know what I mean... To me, those "interests" are what I think kind of define me, or represent some essential aspect of my life. Gah. That sounds too profound for a Saturday morning, but Steeleye Span for me was one of the first groups I discovered for myself as a teenager. I listened to their "Parcel of Rogues" album over and over and over and over again and knew all the words. Could sing them still,, probably. One of my interests is "chickadees" - well, they are my favourite birds in the whole world; sea otters are my favourite animals - after bearded collies of course. My second most obscure interest I think is Franz Bruggen (there's me and two others). Well, he's fairly famous now as a conductor and early music guy, but when I was in my early twenties I played baroque recorder fairly seriously, and he was IT, man; he was the only one (well, he and David Munro), making records. And I listened to HIS records over and over and over and over... (which reminds me, is early music in there? it should be...) My most obscure interest? "Computers in education"! It's literally me and one other guy!

Comments

[gillo]

David Munro! I used to listen to his Radio 3 show every evening when I was a student! We still have several of his collections on vinyl discs.

I adored Steeleye too - fond memories of singing "Gaudete" all the time one Christmas. And of being amazed to discover that Maddy's father was a Tory cabinet minister! In recent years, though, I've fallen more in love with Fairport because we've been to their Cropredy annual bash a few times.

I suppose for me the interest thing has been a way of finding a few friends through other routes than fanfic which (blushing slightly here) was probably my first motive for joining LJ. If somebody shares several of the same interests, or has interests I'd have added if I'd thought of doing so, it's a good incentive to go over and have a look at the journal at least.

[intertext.livejournal.com]

Oh, absolutely! And I've added things because of that, or explored things because of what people who shared interests were doing (like this Buffy thing...) and that's very cool, too :)

[gillo]

Buffy is so well-written and well-acted, and remarkably multi-layered. It's no surprise that there's an entire academic apparatus about the show now, even nearly three years after it ended. There are some fascinating academic treatises on the subject.