Okay, this is going to be long.

Books first. Books are my memory and my identity. We all need stories to teach us how to be human. There are the stories that have made me.

These are the authors who enthrall me. Who create worlds I want to live in, whose voices sound like the inside of my own head, who can do things to the language that leave me breathless, whose ideas that go off in my brain like fireworks.  T. H. White  is one of them- certainly one of the wisest, wittiest writers that ever was.  Connie Willis, though, I think she matches him. Comedy and tragedy are, in her hands, more than masks. They are human faces with blemishes and brilliances and fleeting details, they move... And Dorothy Sayers seems, if I may be arrogant for a moment, to speak with my own voice, were I more educated, intelligent, eloquent and aware. I believe that I have read everything these three have written, including Dorothy Sayers' translations of Dante and T.H. White's diary England Have my Bones. 

I adore Lois McMaster Bujold, whose ability to create broken people and very real societies I only wish I could imitate, and Terry Pratchett, with satirical fantasies more real than the worlds most of us live in. I've read all of their books too, and they keep getting better. I have not read all of Graham Greene, but I intend to, and I expect he may well influence me as much as any author I've found in ten years.

I could go on like this for kilobytes, I could tell you how I love Tom Stoppard,  Roger Zelazny, Pamela Dean,  Mervyn Peake, Charles Dickens,  Will Shakespeare, Charlotte Bronte, James Morrow, Robert Heinlein,  Orson Scott Card, and Judith Tarr and Robert Graves and  Arthur Conan Doyle. And  T.S. Eliot. And Edna St. Vincent Millay. And Lewis Carroll. And Tolkien. And oh, Virgil.

Just that list of names is like a sort of montage of landscapes and and athems and laughter and battle and faces of non-existent people I love nonetheless.

Non-fiction can affect me no less: Douglas Hoftstadter's ideas have crawled inside my head and nested there to such an extent that I'm looking for a university that offers a degree in Hofstadter studies. Daniel Dennet, Oliver Sacks especially, Isaac Asimov, John Gribbin, James Gleick, Elaine Morgan (the latter two I consider proof that you can make contributions to science without joining the PhD priesthood) Kaz Cooke for Real Gorgeous, which is smart and funny and has cartoons in it and undoes all the damage of women's magazines, Anne Fadiman, James Burke, Freeman Dyson. 

This is what all of these people share, in whatever medium: a fierce intelligence and a imagination capacious enough to hold whole worlds, down the the last grain of sand. And a voice I believe in. The links are there to better aquaint you with their individual glories, if you've yet to discover them. 

Now music. Music is movement. Music is something living which makes us more alive. The music I love most is melodramatic or bittersweet. This is probably because I am a melodramatic personality with a penchant for self pity that this sort of music indulges, listened to alone in a dark room. If the lyrics are a decent kind of poetry as well, leavened with humor, all the better. I like red wine music.

My first favorite, and the music I still listen to whenever my soul is out of sorts, is Paul Simon. Rhythm of the Saints, One Trick Pony, and Still Crazy After all These Years compete for the honor of "favorite album," although there are moods when the technically brilliant Graceland or Bookends, the best of Simon and Garfunkel's five albums, or the naked sadness of Hearts and Bones is most appropriate.

But Paul Simon represents a whole genre, nearly all of whom I adore. Dylan himself, of course, especially when he sounds like he does on Oh Mercy. And Van Morrison, perhaps the most musical of my favorite musicians, full of warmth and wistfulness. The Eagles, Leonard Cohen, Janis Ian and Joni Mitchell and the Beatles at their best, the stunning Nick Drake, and latter-day heirs to the tradition like Ani Difranco and Aimee Mann and Erin McKeown and Jonatha Brooke, who writes with an honesty and intelligence and vitality and sometimes brutality which makes you wonder why she's not more famous than any of them.

I had to be won over to Radiohead, but having been convinced, I am a terribly loyal listener. I fell in love with the keening vocals and big, swirling guitars of The Bends, but now I found myself defending the baroque melancholy of Kid A and Amnesiac. No one will ever call it easy listening. I do have a weakness for the shamelessly over-the-top, which attracts me to movie musicals and epics of all sorts, and I think Radiohead appeals to this.

Radiohead also represent a genre, which includes the Smashing Pumpkins and Pink Floyd and maybe K's Choice and, in my mind, Tori Amos, but I think there is not enough music like this, all swooshy deep reds and blue-black with stars.

And then there's the totally unclassifiable, like Elvis Costello and the Divine Comedy and the Medieval Baebes and Soul Coughing, and novelty music from Gilbert and Sullivan to Tom Lehrer to They Might Be Giants, which is good for listening to with friends.

And finally, I confess to an uneducated enthusiasm for vocal jazz, the kind of songs that Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern wrote for films in the 1930s, or Lerner and Loewe numbers, or, you know, stuff like "Girl from Ipanema" and "C'mon Get Happy." Like Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong duets, husky voices accompanied by horns. My own collection of this stuff is all unmatched odds and ends, but sometimes it's exactly what I need to hear.

That doesn't cover everything I like, or even everything I own. But that's most of the music that I listen to the most of, and know enough about to have opinions on.

Television and movies, then. TV first.

Well, Buffy, obviously. The West Wing, even more obviously. Gilmore Girls, less obviously. Those are the current shows. The mix of comedy and drama, the whip-quick dialogue, the consistent if slightly surreal reality each creates. The quirky characters, who often laugh at themselves and sometimes hate themselves. Latin. Latin features on both Buffy and the West Wing. Not Gilmore Girls, athough I wouldn't rule it out. Rory reads James Joyce for fun, after all.

I know every detail of backstory for Quantum Leap, Due South, Get Smart, and the original Star Trek. I'm prone to strange obessions. Also try me on '80s cartoons or anything that's ever been run on Nick at Nite. I can hold forth at length. And I watched every episode of The Incredible Hulk on the scifi channel. I still think it was brilliant. And everyone loves the Simpsons. If you don't, you're dumb. Sorry. If it makes you feel any better, I was dumb like that once too.

Movies next. I like old movies. Katherine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant. Guess what I think of The Philadelphia Story. Also Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Spencer Tracy. Yay to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Audrey Heburn and Gregory Peck, and most of Hitchcock's masterpieces. Does The Godfather count as old? And what about Dr. Strangelove? For all that it's in black and white, it feels like a modern movie, and I think it always will. I like it better than Full Metal Jacket and much better than 2001, which I think suffers from the lack of real characters.

More recently, I like Coen Brothers movies where people have silly accents, especially the Hudsucker Proxy. (Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins make a good team. The Shawshank Redemption is excellent, and made me read Stephen King. But not much Stephen King.) 

Big Edward Norton fan. How could you not be? A man who can do Fight Club, American History X, and Keeping the Faith (that's the everyman caught up in surreal anti-corporate underground, a charismatic neo-Nazi in the urban nightmare, and a priest in a clever romantic comedy, for those keeping track) has range. Really, you just fall in love with the guy every time.

I loved Shakespeare in Love, but that's Tom Stoppard, so I would. Geoffrey Rush is freaky, but fantastic, in all his movies. Gywneth Paltrow has good taste in scripts. Sliding Doors and Great Expectations also impressed me. Ethan Hawke was good in the latter as well, and in Gattaca. Apollo 13 made me and everyone else want to be an astronaut, but how many other people weighed the fact that you need a science PhD to be a mission specialist when choosing to major in physics?

I like the Sixth Sense, and also Unbreakable and The Red Violin, and Pulp Fiction, natch, to stretch the Samuel L. Jackson theme. What I said about Edward Norton and range? Ditto for Samuel L. Jackson.

I like Kevin Spacey movies and Woody Allen movies and Dustin Hoffman in Wag the Dog. Memento was completely brilliant and Guy Pearce was completely brilliant in it.

I also like Robin Williams, even in his bad movies, but especially Good Morning Vietnam and Dead Poets Society, which are not bad movies. And Ben Kingsley, because not only was he Gandhi, he was Cosmo in Sneakers, which makes me smile so hard it hurts. And everyone else in that, including Robert Redford who would be loveable anyway for the same reasons that Paul Newman is loveable, gets ten bonus points on their career total for being in it. 

I'm crazy about Harrison Ford, for Star Wars and Indiana Jones, of course. I even liked The Phantom Menace, which he wasn't in. (Too few people realize that the reason it was so easy for the good guys to win in that movie was that they lost.) 

Ewan McGregor was in that movie, though, and that alone would make me watch it. Ewan McGregor--Trainspotting. Moulin Rouge. Two of the best and most original movies I've seen in... ever. A Life Less Ordinary wasn't half bad either (Holly Hunter is interesting, and so is Cameron Diaz, speaking of whom- Being John Malcovich. And speaking of which, John Cusak. And John Malcovich, for that matter.)

Is that too many males? Okay, Franka Potente, Run Lola Run. Helen Hunt, As Good as it Gets. Jodie Foster in, well, Jodie Foster movies. Everybody in Enchanted April, my all time favorite chick flick, including Josie Lawrence from Whose Line is it Anyway. Um, Cate Blanchett, even though I thought Elizabeth suffered from a weak script and I didn't like The Talented Mister Ripley that much and she's only in Lord of the Rings, which I truly loved for being epic and over the top, for a few minutes. She's in Pushing Tin, which is good in a weird way, and she just has a kind of charisma that makes me take her seriously in whatever films she's in.

I like Muppets, so I loved Labyrinth. That and the Princess Bride and the Neverending Story (first movie only, the direct to video sequels were brain numbingly bad) and the Hallmark Hall of Fame production of The Secret Garden shaped my childhood.

Almost everything on the list, for books and movies and music, comes into the "over and over again" category. Stuff I never get tired of seeing, hearing, reading. And even though I don't buy that whole "High Fidelity" thing about what you like being more important than what you're like (because I've mentioned Terry Pratchett and the Eagles and Heaven help us, Star Trek, and therefore nobody with 'taste' will ever take me seriously) I do feel like this list of entertainment and influences adds up to an autobiography somehow. Draw what conclusions you will.