This month’s issue of 7 Questions with AAAL Members features Michael Brundin, Web and Discovery Services Librarian at MacEwan University Library.
1. What is something interesting you learned in the last month?
Although admittedly an esoteric interest, I found it revelatory to realize that the Hungarian Gypsy scale was like the natural minor scale with a raised 4th, or the Hungarian minor scale with a lowered 7th (the Hungarian minor scale is like the harmonic minor with a raised 4th).
2. If you could be any fictional character, who would you choose?
The central towheaded character in Sigur Ros’s official video for their song Glósóli (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz8iEJeh26E). The coda or denouement with the Peter Pan–inspired flight of fancy is quite poignant and affecting: “second to the right, straight on to morning.”
3. What is your favourite thing to binge watch?
I don’t tend to “watch”, let alone binge watch, but apparently, I seem to follow a roughly decennial (every 10 years) pattern, wherein I intensively revisit Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, the thirteen-part television series presented by Carl Sagan in 1980.
4. What is your favourite quote?
I don’t have a favorite quotation, but two literary passages that I am fond of are the following:
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a
sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the
catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through
images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul
between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs
and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
—Allen Ginsberg, “Howl,” Howl and Other Poems, 1956
The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-natured, she thought: still it
had very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with
respect.
“Cheshire Puss,” she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it
would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. “Come, it’s pleased so far,”
thought Alice, and she went on. “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go
from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“— so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865
Finally, although not really a quotation, I am also partial to this expression:
“Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”
—Expression in linguistics used to demonstrate syntactic ambiguity
5. What is your favourite colour?
Green. And more specifically, Shamrock green or Irish green. (This is the shade of green in the national flag of Ireland, and the state flag of California.)
6. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you go?
Somewhere in the Big Sur region, which is the region along the Pacific Ocean coast between Carmel and San Simeon in California.
7. Who inspires you?
Archimedes (ca. 287 BCE–ca. 212 BCE). The depth and range of his discoveries in mathematics, and the creativity of his engineering inventions, are truly inspiring.
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