Pratchett's Quite Large Brain

So, the October 31st issue of NewScientist includes a two-page spread about Terry Pratchett (complete with a great photo) which ranges from where Sir Terry gets his hats (James Lock & Co of St James, Pall Mall, London --"Ask for a Borsalino.") and how the Discworld gets back its water that spills over the Rim ("It goes over the edge and comes back as rain. I'm not quite certain how . . .") to the progress of his Alzheimer's (he's lost the ability to type and so dictated his latest book). He's now working with a speech-to-text dictation program on his computer that has mastered his accent but not punctuation.

His particular form of Alzheimer's turns out to be Posterior Cortical Atrophy ('PCA', aka Benson's Syndrome), which causes the back of the brain to shrivel. It's his goal to keep active as long as possible, but he's adamant about two points. First, that he wants no part of being a test subject where scientists carefully monitor his decay ("I like vultures . . . at least they have the decency to wait until the donkey has died"). And second, he insists that he shd "be allowed to die how and when he wants", preferring the term 'assisted death' to 'assisted suicide'. That will be a sad day indeed. In the meantime, let's be glad he's still among us, still writing, and still enjoying life:

"I intend to go on living for as long as possible, and no one really knows how long that is, because PCA is rather odd, and also I'm rather odd. I have quite a large brain -- although my teachers would line up to tell you I never used any of it very much -- and so I'll keep going"

And, in case you missed it earlier, the new THE COLOUR OF MAGIC movie (which features Tim Curry as a villain -- ah, it's been too long -- and Sean Astin as an Innocent Abroad) ends with a wonderful Pratchett cameo in which they give him the last word.

--JDR

favorite quotes from the article:

--"self-made ghettos are hard to get out of"

--"We don't run into too many brick walls" (re. his amazement "at how the universe has opened to our inquiries")

--". . . at least [vultures] have the decency to wait until the donkey has died."

PARMA ELDALAMBERON XVIII

So, speaking of Tolkien magazines old and new, just this past Saturday came the announcement that the next issue of PARMA ELDALAMBERON (vol. XVIII) is coming out next week (I think the official release date is November 23rd). Since they have smallish print runs, and once they go out of print can remain unavailable indefinitely,* anyone who has even a passing interest in Tolkien's invented languages shd be sure to order a copy sooner instead of later. This particular issue deals both with the primitive elvish root language that underlay Quenya and Sindarin in the same Indo-European (or Indo-Hittite) underlies Latin and Welsh AND with Tolkien's invented scripts. The pre-publication cost is $30: for more information see the link below to the PARMA website.

http://www.eldalamberon.com/parma18.html

--John R.

*I missed Volume XIV and never have been able to find a replacement, even after several years' looking.

today's teas: Keemun, Yunnan, & Connoisseur's Blend

Long Ago and Far Away: The New Tolkien Newsletter

So, yesterday I had another go at the box room, and this time amongst the items unearthed (from box #130)* were my copies of THE NEW TOLKIEN NEWSLETTER and some issues of THE FANTASY REVIEW (the latter gifts from Jim Pietrusz and Roger Moore in Days Gone By). The former was, in its time, perhaps the most notorious Tolkien publication out there: it picked up where Giddings & Holland's THE SHORES OF MIDDLE-EARTH [1981] had left off, developing editor Elizabeth Holland's ideas about the secret messages she thought were encoded in THE LORD OF THE RINGS.** A fascinating exercise in source-study by stream-of-consciousness association (they placed the Shire in the Balkans and Lothlorien in Turkey on the strength of the Bolger hobbit family-name sounding like Bulgaria and Galadriel's name reminding them of Galatia, as in The Epistle to the Galatians), the book also pioneered the claim that Tolkien was deeply indebted not just to medieval literature but also to the popular writing of his time and the preceding century -- a subject that both Jared Lobdell (in the first chapter of ENGLAND & ALWAYS [1982]) and I (in my essay on 'SHE and Tolkien' [1981]) had been arguing for at about the same time. Now it's a much more accepted position, but then it was going out on a limb.

What I'd completely forgotten back when compiling my list of publications for Sacnoth's Scriptorium was that I'd written in so many letters trying to bring them round to my point of view that eventually Holland gave me my own column ('John Rateliff's Page') in later issues. There had been some dispute among Tolkien fandom about whether Giddings & Holland were serious or whether they were putting us on, that perhaps the whole thing was a huge hoax; I was soon able to find out that, however extravagant their theories, Holland at least was in dead earnest. I think I might have managed to get her to moderate the tone some later on, but then again I might have been fooling myself; at any rate, we remained on cordial terms and I went out to Bath to pay a visit during my 1985 trip to England, finding her a gracious host and a wealth of information about her home town. She had already at that point suffered one major heart attack (so that she was restricted to the ground floor of her townhouse), and died, I believe, a year or two later. R.I.P.

Which brings me to the point: it turns out I have duplicate copies of two issues: #3 (August 1981) and #4 (March 1982). They're free to the first person who responds in a comment to this post that he or she would like them. If there is a good home for these strange waifs out there somewhere, better they go to it than into recycling.

--JDR

*This being the arbitrary label slapped on it by the movers when we came out from Wisconsin.

**For his part, her co-author Giddings went off on his own to develop theories about gay relationships between characters in the book; Holland told me she'd had difficulty getting him to leave out of their book his theory that not only Frodo and Sam, but Tolkien and Lewis, had a longtime affair. Giddings' obsessions eventually found expression in the collection J.R.R.TOLKIEN: THIS FAR LAND [1983] which, despite its inclusion of one wonderful essay by Diana Wynne Jones, set an all-time-low for Tolkien essay collections, still unmatched today (although one a few years ago came close).

What Did Lewis Think about 'And Back Again'?

So, thanks to Johan, I learned a day or two ago about an interesting thread on one of the Tolkien forums.* This followed a discussion about Lewis's dislike for the opening chapter of THE LORD OF THE RINGS,** which in turn seems to have been sparked by my own blog post on the topic back in September.*** Both threads have a number of thoughtful comments (e.g., comparing comments Lewis made in letters to those he made in published review), making them well worth reading. Since my opinion was solicited ("In the light of these comments . . . it would be interesting to see what position John Rateliff takes"), and since I'm not a member of that forum, I thought I'd weigh in here (Johan having promised to make a link over there for me).

Basically, the discussion started by citing Lewis's letter to Arthur Greeves in February 1933 about the newly written story Tolkien had just given him to read. I quote the full passage (from THEY STAND TOGETHER page 449) at the bottom of page xv of MR. BAGGINS, but the relevant line comes after Lewis has described the "delightful" time he has had reading it and the "uncanny" feeling that it's just the book Lewis & Greeves would have loved to have read or written when they were growing up: "Whether it is really good (I think it is until the end) is of course another question: still more, whether it will succeed with modern children"

It's that "I think it is until the end" that's in question. What about the ending did Lewis dislike -- or at least feel was not up to what had come before?

The answer, plain and simple, is that we just don't know.

Was it the shift from light-hearted adventure-story to a more serious 'heroic' tone?

--Unlikely, given that Lewis specifically praised this Wind in the Willows to Burnt Njal shift in ESSAYS PRESENTED TO CHARLES WILLIAMS ('On Stories', page 104).

Was it Bilbo's return from great deeds in distant lands to resume a normal, mundane life?

--Unlikely, given the parallel of Ransom's adventure in OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET ending with a pint in an English pub.

Was it simply that Lewis disliked the depictions of the Shire-hobbits en masse, whether at the Bag End auction or the Long-Expected Party? -- that is, that he disliked the ending of THE HOBBIT for the same reason that he disliked the beginning of THE LORD OF THE RINGS

--This seems to be the simplest explanation, but it's merely a guess on my part; I don't think there's any proof to back it up.

I can even see Lewis's being put off by the 129 pages of typescript being followed by forty-five pages of manuscript draft: perhaps the difficulty of reading Tolkien's hand (though C.S.L. shd have been an old hand at this by that time) got in the way of his immersion in the text and interfered with Secondary Belief.

Still, the one explanation I would reject is that Lewis criticized the ending because the story he read didn't have one. I find it hard to read 'good . . . until the end' as Lewis's attempt to say 'good, but it lacks an ending' (Lewis was, after all, famous for the clarity of his prose). Wayne & Christina, in their contribution to the thread, offer an interesting thought experiment that the 1933 text broke off at the end of the typescript, which was then followed by "some form of summary conclusion now lost". That might be the case, but I'm hesitant to suggest a hypothetic text as a way out of our difficulties unless we can produce some evidence such a text once existed, especially when a literal reading of the evidence avoids the need for one.****

In the end, the theory that THE HOBBIT broke off unfinished isn't supported by any contemporary evidence. Interestingly enough, but a little too late to include in the book, I turned up evidence that Carpenter himself originally thought the book had been completed in the early thirties. In his Biographical Note to the 1976 catalogue for the Ashmolean exhibit of Tolkien's art, DRAWINGS BY TOLKIEN, Carpenter wrote

"his family, now numbering four children, had been instrumental in bringing his mythological imagination somewhat to earth and encouraging it to deal with more homely topics. For them he wrote and illustrated The Father Christmas Letters; and to them he told the story of The Hobbit, completed early in the nineteen-thirties, but not put into print until a happy chance had brought it to the notice of a London publisher some years later" [emphasis mine]

--I'm not sure what, a year later, convinced Carpenter that he'd been wrong and caused him to come up with his theory that there'd been a gap of several years between the death of Smaug and the writing of the final chapters; I wish I'd discovered this passage earlier and written to ask him about it.

So, while I think there's great ambiguity in the story of when Tolkien started THE HOBBIT -- in that the evidence is contradictory and anyone putting it all together has to reject some as mistaken in order to get a coherent picture, I don't think this is the case with the ending of the story, where I'd argue all the evidence we have does fit together and does argue for the lack of such a gap. Obviously, not everyone agrees, and I think Wayne & Christina's post does the best job I've seen of summing up the opposite case.*****

--John R.

*http://www.lotrplaza.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=235832

**http://www.lotrplaza.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=235274

***http://sacnoths.blogspot.com/2009/09/c-s-lewis-on-long-expected-party.html

****I do suggest at various points in HoH that there might have been another version of Thror's Map that has not survived, since descriptions of the map in the text don't exactly match up to any of the actual surviving maps, but it's possible the 'missing' map never existed.

*****as for the 'hybrid typescript/manuscript', we know of several other examples among Tolkien's texts -- e.g., SMITH OF WOOTTON MAJOR.

Our Little Orca

So, after our visit to the Whale Museum on San Juan Island, we decided to sponsor a whale (i.e., make a small donation to the whale research people and 'adopt' a specific killer whale). The one we chose (from among those we'd seen two days before) was Calypso (L94),* who was named after Jacques Cousteau's ship.

Well, the latest "Monthly Orca Update" (for October 2009) as well as the whale museum's newsletter (CETUS) both arrived within the last two weeks, and it turns out that Calypso has just had a calf; the tiny new whale (L-113) having been first spotted on October 10th. A photograph of the baby whale, along with his or her uncle Mega (L-41) and mother (L-94), appears on page 3 of the newsletter. They don't name baby whales until they're about a year old, but it's rather nice to have a connection with a wild animal -- and one that isn't (unlike the rhinos, the tigers, and now the koalas) at present in danger of extinction.

Oh, and the mention of names reminds me: they've now given K-42 his (her?) official name: Kelp. I still think Janice's suggestion ("The Answer") was better.

--John R.

*[i.e., she was the ninety-fourth named member of L-pod, the largest of the three resident orca populations, the other two being J-pod and K-pod.]

P.S.: Today's walk: along the east levee of the Green River, from 200th street all the way up to the bridge at 180th -- which turned out to be a lot longer than twenty blocks (each way), given the bends in the river. I finally got to see Brisco Meander Park, which I've noticed on the map for years but which isn't that accessible by car. Nice place. And not protected by sandbags, which they just put across the cut-off point, leaving the park itself unprotected. Pity if it floods.

I also discovered that part of the levee I was walking on had its own name: the Desimone levee, apparently having been rebuilt in 1998, 1999, and 2002 after some flooding back in 1995/96 that I hadn't heard of before, it having preceded my moving out to these parts. Again, nice place, though it's a pity they'd obviously just cut down a whole row of big trees all along the trail.

Yesterday's walk: along the same levee a bit further south, starting from 212th street and walking up as far as 200th.

The New Project

So, a few weeks ago I found out that a project I've been trying to get permission to work on since about 1985 has just gotten approved. Obviously, I'm excited about this, and v. much looking forward to starting in on it around the beginning of the new year. Unfortunately, I can't talk much about it until it's officially announced. So, there will be postings later once things get underway.

In a sense, this is just my way of saying wow, you never know when work you've done in the past will someday pay off, and old might-have-been projects unexpectedly come to life.

No, it's not Tolkien.

More later.

--JDR

Sandbagging the School

So this morning Janice told me I'd see something interesting if I looked out the window.

She was right. There was a huge piece of construction equipment carefully placing giant sandbags around the school (Neely-O'Brien elementary). Unlike along the levees, they were stacking these two high. Obviously they were taking advantage of the students' absence because of Armistice Day to get the job done. Interesting.

This of course comes as part of their second stage of sandbagging. They've already placed them all along our side of the Green River, having finished that up around the beginning of the month (their target date, and the official opening of flood season, being November 1st). At first it didn't look like they were going to give similar treatment to the other (west) bank, which makes sense since West Hill runs close to the river and there aren't nearly as many people between that levee and safety. Still, it seemed a bit hard on the Rivercreek and other developments that have sprung up over there during the last three years or so. Not to worry: looks like they're now at work on that levee as well.

Also in the good news department, a piece in the local Kent paper says that the Army Corp of Engineers now thinks the 1-in-3 chance of flooding here they'd predicted has now changed to a 1-in-25 chance, thanks to the emergency repairs they've been making on the embankment next to the dam. Add in the sandbags, and that little extra margin of safety they provide, and they say that makes it a 1-in-32 chance.

So, while we've been working hard to get ready, it looks like the chances of disaster here are going down considerably. Still, it's a little disturbing to find out that under normal conditions (with the dam fully functional) there's still a 1-in-400 chance of a flood here every year. A fact of life it's better to know about than not.

--JDR

current reading: ANATHEM by Neil Stephenson