the meme of seven interests

sturgeonslawyer picked these, but I think he said he was going away for the weekend, so I wait till now to reply.

Classification: I'm a library cataloger, and classification of books - the job of finding a single path through the web of knowledge, and of finding a concise notation scheme to express it - is for me the most fascinating part. Both Dewey and LC have their deficiencies, especially rather skewed pathways through that web, and I classify my nonfiction at home by a much more logically progressive system, a slightly modified version of this.

David Lodge: One day in grad school I was walking through the modern English literature stacks when my eye was caught by a title: The British Museum Is Falling Down. Intrigued, I looked at the book and found a very funny novel about an, ahem, grad student - though he was in literature rather than librarianship, and had the problem of fitting in his rapidly growing family with the Catholic prohibition of birth control. Then I read Changing Places and Small World and established Lodge as my favorite comic academic writer.

High Fantasy: Even back before the Big Fantasy Pat Boom, I found it perplexing to figure out what I liked and didn't. Friends who knew my love for Tolkien pointed me to Dunsany, Peake, Le Guin, and they were also excellent; but they also pointed me towards adventure fantasy by Howard and Leiber, which did nothing for me. Eventually I figured out that terms like "heroic fantasy" and "sword and sorcery" were leading me in the wrong direction. Robert Boyer and Kenneth Zahorski popularized the term "high fantasy" which had a much closer correleation to what I liked.

Hovhaness: My quest for composers who wrote symphonies soon came across Alan Hovhaness, who'd written over 20. (By the time of his death it was over 60.) I listened to some, and was enchanged by this intense but often serene, powerfully spiritual music. Hovhaness held to Wilde's dictum that the artist is the maker of beautiful things, and this may be why his name was absent from the severe guides to modern music I was reading at the time. He was prominent in the record catalogs, though, and this is how I learned to trust the catalogs as the best guide to good modern composers.

Symphonies: My seminal music-listening experience was my first encounter with the opening movement of Beethoven's Fifth. The way he builds the entire movement out of that tiny motto theme just amazed me: up till then, I'd had no idea that music could do something like that. I was soon converted into a listener of the heavy classics, and quickly found that the composers I liked the best were often those who'd written the most symphonies, and those were liable to be my favorites of their works. So I made that a guidepost to my collecting. I now have recordings of 912 different symphonies, a number I can state with authority because I've cataloged them all.

U.S. History: History is my discipline; I think of things historically, and the history (particularly political and geographical) of my own country has always interested me. I majored in it in college, and among my odder talents is the ability to recite the names of the US Presidents, in order, in thirty seconds.

Vaughan Williams: Another composer of symphonies, less obscure than Hovhaness. Ralph Vaughan Williams was a Londoner by habitat, but much of his early music, with titles like The Lark Ascending or Norfolk Rhapsody, evokes the English countryside. (But he also wrote a beautifully evocative city portrait in A London Symphony.) Later his music grew tougher, and his central symphonic trilogy - the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth - are his masterwork; the Sixth, sometimes thought to depict an atomic war, has a quiet and eerie ending unlike anything else in music up to that time.