Sacnoth's Scriptorium

The Greenwood Tea Room

2012-01-28T10:15:00.000-08:00

So, since I had several days in Shreveport this week, I decided that if I found myself with any spare time at all I shd try to find a little more about the city, where I stay for a night or two once or twice a year but never get a chance to poke around in outside the hotel, since I only come here on family visits. This time, I decided to try to find at least one good restaurant and one interesting walk.

Between various touristy booklets in the hotel lobby and some online searches, I found several places that looked potentially interested. Some turned out no longer to exist when I went there, or at least not at their listed locations. Some were too far away (i.e., not actually in Shreveport but in the outlying area). Some I simply didn't have time for, since most of my stay is devoted to a family crisis. But one I did try out was the Greenwood Tea Room on Line Avenue.

http://www.glenwoodvillagetearoom.com/

I admit I had reservations about the place, since it's inside a gift shop, and Janice and my's experience with a similar set up in Portland (or, actually, in the Portland area) last year had been a little disappointing. Also, looking at their web site, I discovered that the owner-operator is a big fan of Glen Beck,* so I knew her views and mine on many issues wd be worlds apart.

In the event, I'm glad I went: it turns out to be a really neat shop. I was particularly taken with some contemporary angel art that reminded me of the art in Gaiman's THE DAY I TRADED MY DAD FOR TWO GOLDFISH (wish I knew the name of the artist). I was at the wrong time of day for High Tea (given the chance, I'd have chosen what they call their Scone Tea), so I had an early lunch followed by late breakfast. That is, I had two cups of soup: one of their Victorian Soup (which was new to me) and one of their tomato basil (wh. also had a lot of other things in it, like carrots). This I followed with a freshly baked blueberry scone with lemon curd and whipped cream, all accompanied by a small pot of strong black tea kept nice and hot by a tea light.

Yesterday being my last full day in Shreveport, I stopped by one last time, and yet again found them going above and beyond. I'd thought they served until four, but it turns out this is when the shop closes; the tea room part usually shuts down at three. However, finding out that all I wanted was a pot of tea and a scone, they insisted I come in and sit down while they got together tea and scone for me. It was a comforting touch to be so welcomed by strangers: a reminder that Southern hospitality really does exist.

So, many thanks to the tea room folks for a quiet, calming moment in an uncertain week.

And now, on to Magnolia!

--John R.

*cf. for example her post re. her trip to the holy land to attend his rally last October ( http://host.pappapak12.com/~glenwood/article_21/Ancient-Israel-October-2011.htm ). I was particularly puzzled by the statement that of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims, only "one to two percent" were fanatics who hated America, which totals "91 million" radicals. It's been a long time since I took a math class (12th grade!), but I'd thought 1% of 1.2 billion was 12 million, making 2% twenty-four million. Don't know where the 91 million figure comes from (that's about seven and a half percent, by my reckoning). In any case, more projection on our part than any correlation to reality.

My Week

2012-01-27T16:44:00.001-08:00

So far this week, I've

--flown half-way across the country, and driven several hours more

--gotten a brief get together with fellow Tolkienist Jason Fisher

--spent a lot of time in Shreveport visiting hospitals

--walked along the Red River

--eaten far too many meals at Cracker Barrel (the only restaurant night-blind me can find in Shreveport after dark)

--seen a hawk, and a heron (large & white), disturbed sunning turtles, heard (but not seen) a kingfisher, saw some mourning doves, and puzzled mightily a mockingbird

--been a bit surprised by seventy-degrees in January

--bought a box of 'Promise Tea' (which comes with a scriptural quote on each tag, but unfortunately doesn't seem to come in tea flavor)

--found a v. friendly tea shop down on Line Avenue,* which I visited not once but twice

--and prepared myself for the hardest part of the trip, which is yet to come.

More later

--John R.

current reading: THE EMPEROR'S PEARL by Rbt van Gulik

just finished: BOOK GIRL AND THE CORRUPTED ANGEL (the Phantom-of-the-Opera entry into this enjoyable but disturbing series)

current ebook: THE WOBBIT (a parody of THE HOBBIT) by Paul Erickson

Tolkien Among the E-Books

2012-01-24T08:02:00.000-08:00

So, one of the v. first (indeed, I think THE first) e-books I bought when we first got the Kindle, several years ago now, was THE LORD OF THE RINGS and THE HOBBIT, quickly followed by THE SILMARILLION and THE BOOK OF LOST TALES (vols. I & II).

I'd been wanting a searchable copy of Tolkien's books for years, and here they were, available at last. At that time there were relatively few books on/about Tolkien available either as e-books or as audio-books. And, oddly enough, they tended to be not the great classics of Tolkien scholarship -- Carpenter, Kocher, Shippey, Flieger, &c -- but Xian interpretations of Tolkien's work (Kreeft, Wood, Rutledge, Arthur). By and large that still seems to be the case, but a quick check of Amazon's Kindle store shows that a lot more titles are becoming available, both by (SIGURD & GUDRUN) and about (the Jason Fisher collection, to which I'm a contributor).*

Which made the following paragraph appearing in the newest BEYOND BREE particularly interesting. Coming at the end of a piece about e-books and Tolkien, David Brawn (who oversees Tolkien publishing at HarperCollins), while not divulging sales figures, says that

". . . THE HOBBIT and THE LORD OF THE RINGS

are . . . two of the best-selling backlist ebooks

on the market . . . Tolkien's books are once again

experiencing a period of growth as we approach

the 2012 HOBBIT movie . . . while ebook sales are

increasing, so are the sales of the physical books",

concluding that while for some authors ebook sales come at the expense of their tradition books, this does not seem to be the case with Tolkien, whose ebooks seem to be selling both to those who already had the book as well as new readers -- "which is good news for the author".

--BEYOND BREE, current issue, p. 8

So, taken in conjunction with my last post about Tolkien having written not one but two of the best-selling books of all time, add in that for the present sales show no sign of slacking; he remains ubiquitous in our culture, for now and hopefully for a long time to come.

--John R.

still in Grand Prairie, Texas

*indeed, some Kindle-only books on Tolkien can be found there now; I'll have to check some of these out to see if any are worthwhile. Some look potentially interesting, while about others I am doubtful. We'll see.

Tolkien Among the All-Time Best Sellers?

2012-01-23T15:15:00.000-08:00

So, many thanks to Allan G. who sent me the link to a blog (Punkadiddle*) which is doing a countdown of the ten best-selling books of all time, as determined by Wikipedia.** Both the blog entry, on THE HOBBIT (which ranks #4 in their listing) and the list itself (and the means by which they determined it, leaving out giveaway books like Gideon Bibles) are of interest. But what particularly struck me was not the gob-stopping news that JRRT wrote the fourth best-selling book of all time (keeping in mind the disclaimers just mentioned) but that he also wrote the third all-time bestseller as well!

That is: THE HOBBIT ranks fourth on their list, with 100,000,000 copies sold. That's one hundred million copies. Which is a lot of books. But it's a distance second among Tolkien's works on the list, THE LORD OF THE RINGS having sold half again as much: 150,000,000 copies (whether sets or individual volumes they did not say). That's a quarter of a billion copies altogether for those two books.

I'm reminded of something Janice said, years ago as we were leaving a Half-Price Books up on the Brown Deer Road in Milwaukee, about imagining how our civilization wd appear to archeologists of the distant future, who wd decide that we had v. few books but really, really liked them.

I'm also reminded of the famous Locus poll (circa 1987/88, I think) of all-time favorite fantasy works, in which Tolkien's THE LORD OF THE RINGS came in first. Followed by J. R. R. Tolkien's THE HOBBIT as number two. Followed, I think by Le Guin's A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA as a rather distant third. The poll's compiler I remember went to lengths to point out that the winner of the fantasy poll outperformed the winner of the science fiction poll they ran at the same time (this being after all a science fiction journal) by a magnitude of degree.

The dual placement of both books on the Wikipedia list, which together take up a third of the list of all books that have sold 100 million or more copies, is what's really staggering, and re-inforces once again that THE HOBBIT has an audience of its own. If Tolkien had written only THE HOBBIT, I'd argue, he wd still be remembered as one of the great writers of his time.

Not just King of the Mountain: without him, there'd be no recognized genre of fantasy literature, and the people who wrote what we'd call modern fantasy wd be talented eccentrics following their individual muses, like James Branch Cabell, E. R. Eddison, and Hope Mirrlees.

All hail not the King Under the Mountain but The King Up On The Mountain, for letting us share the view.***

--John R.

--writing from what turns out to be Grand Prairie, Texas

*link:

http://punkadiddle.blogspot.com/2011/12/top-ten-all-time-best-selling-books-4-j.html

**link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books#More_than_100_million_copies

***(cf. Tolk's allegory of the tower in The Monsters & The Critics).

---------------

UPDATE (Jan. 27th): thanks to Allan for pointing out that 250,000,000 is a quarter-BILLION, not a quarter-million, as I'd mistyped. I've corrected this above. Thanks Allan! -- JDR

1st Edition Returns!

2012-01-19T20:19:00.000-08:00

So, the best news I heard today is that the original 1st ed. AD&D hardcover rulebooks -- the PLAYER'S HANDBOOK, the DMG, and the MONSTER MANUAL -- are being reprinted. Since this is the best version of my all-time favorite roleplaying game, it'll be good to see it available again after so long. Granted, it's only a limited release according to this article, but for the finest rpg rules set ever written to be back in print is definitely a good thing. And it's also for a relatively good cause, the Gygax project, which is trying to build a statue of the (co-)creator of rpgs in Lake Geneva. Here's the link:

http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/21954.html

Having only recently learned of the 'Old School Revival', I'd been somewhat baffled that fans of 1st ed. AD&D were rewriting the rules and publishing their own variants of them (e.g., Labyrinth Lord, Lamentations of the Flame Princess), rather than hunting down any of the thousands of used copies of the original books that must still be out there at Half-Price Books and various online sites. Now I find the originals are finally coming back into print, albeit briefly, and I cdn't be happier. I suspect most copies will be snatched up by longtime gamers for the nostalgia, but I hope at least some sets find their way into the hands of younger gamers who decide to give the classic game a try. Here's hoping.

--John R.

Hobbits in Bloemfontein

2012-01-17T22:05:00.000-08:00

So, I was waiting in the dentist's office today for a follow-up visit, and glanced through the latest issue of TIME. Noticing a piece on the African National Congress's 100th anniversary and its having been founded in Bloemfontein, which I hadn't known before, I thought it a pity they'd left out mention of Bloemfontein's most famous onetime resident, JRRT.

Turns out I spoke too soon. Turn the page, and there's the following paragraph:

"The short drive to Maphikela House [where the ANC

was supposedly founded] crosses South Africa's divide.

I start in leafy all-white suburbs, home to cafes, bookstores

and the Hobbit Boutique Hotel, modeled on the fantasies of

Bloemfontein's most famous son, J. R. R. Tolkien.

Then I cross the railroad track, and I'm in the township:

no trees, full of potholes and all black.

Where my tourist map indicates Maphikela House

should be is instead an abandoned warehouse, the windows

smashed, graffiti by its broken door announcing

THUG MANSION."

--"How the ANC Lost Its Way" by Alex Perry,

TIME January 16, 2012, page 36

--the part about no trees, wh. suggests Haiti-style endemic poverty, wd particularly horrify Tolkien, I thought.

I'd heard of various Hobbit-hotels and Tolkien-themed houses in California and New Zealand and Montana, but this is the first time I've heard of anything commemorating him in the country where he was born. Poking about a bit on-line, I found a pretty good description of the place here:

http://www.booking.com/hotel/za/hobbit-boutique.html?tab=1&origin=hp&error_url=%2Fhotel%2Fza%2Fhobbit-boutique.en-us.html%3Faid%3D311088%3Blabel%3Dhobbit-boutique-DPmj1RS9LLe38V3FkC8r8wS2179725843%3Bsid%3Dc5d75be287ef5d82e33b673e7baf137a%3Bdcid%3D1%3B&do_availability_check=on&aid=311088&dcid=1&label=hobbit-boutique-DPmj1RS9LLe38V3FkC8r8wS2179725843&sid=c5d75be287ef5d82e33b673e7baf137a&checkin_monthday=24&checkin_year_month=2012-1&checkout_monthday=27&checkout_year_month=2012-1

--sounds like a nice place, although their mention of a pool and doing things BEFORE breakfast makes me wonder how hobbitish it can be (Janice points out that perhaps they mean Second Breakfast, wh. wd indeed fit). For a four-star guest house, their prices are pretty reasonable: 330 Rand for three nights in the more modest rooms (about $42) and 450 Rand (about $56) for the more expensive ones.

Poking about a bit more, I found the hotel's own website:

http://www.hobbit.co.za/new/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=49&Itemid=57

The emphasis on food and comfort here does indeed show the Van der Westhuizens, who run the place, got it right, on this point at least. Must admit I'm curious about the 'historical items' they mention. There seem to be twelve rooms, each named for a LotR character. It's an interesting list, including seven of the Fellowship (no Boromir, and more surprisingly no Gandalf):

Arwen

Bilbo

Elrond

Eowyn

Frodo

Galadriel

Gimli*

Merry

Pippin

Samwise

Strider

I doubt that I'll ever find myself in Bloemfontein, but if I did I'd certainly want to stay there, and wd try out their high tea if we were just passing through (assuming I'd be admitted to a "women's tea").

*they actually have Gimli's name as "Gimley" on the website, but since they also have "Pippen" on the same list but correctly spelled (Pippin) in the slideshow, I suspect this is a typo on their website, not for the room itself.

Crow in the Snow

2012-01-16T14:53:00.001-08:00

So, thanks to Janice for sending me the following link (which she in turn got from Steve Brown's site: thanks, Stan!). It shows a crow playing in the snow with a game obviously of its own devising. That is, it's taking some kind of lid it's found, flying with it to the top of a steep roof, and then tobogganing down, wings flapping all the way. Then once at the bottom, it fishes the lid back out, flies back to the roof-peak, and does it again. Notice how it takes care to get the lidright-side-up. From the voices of the people recording this, it must be taking place in Russia (though it cd also be Ukrainian for all I know).

So: as impressive as it is seeing how smart crows are as shown by their ability to make tools to get food, somehow it's even more human to see one inventing a game with its own rules.

Here's the link. My wife insists I made hee-hee-hee noises all through watching it, which I deny.

--John R.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUBMSnHH7hc

The New Arrivals!

2012-01-15T15:56:00.000-08:00

So, Friday brought some long-awaited arrivals: three boxes filled with four copies each of the new, improved, one-volume second edition of THE HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT. These are my author's copies, mailed to me from Glasgow near the end of October; I assume they got delayed by all the holiday mail in-between. At over 5 kgs each,* they're a pretty hefty bundle.

Two are already spoken for, and the rest go on the smallish stack downstairs of my remaining copies of the first edition (the trade paperback version).

Horray!

--John R.

........................

Here's what Janice had to say about it, reposted from her Facebook:

Thump:

The sound of John's author copies of the 1 volume The History of the Hobbit arriving on the door step.

We've now got 13 hobbits. I wonder where we can find a dwarf to make up our lucky number?

*each box that is, not each book

There Once Were Two Cats from Kilkenny . . .

2012-01-11T20:27:00.000-08:00

There's a Nobel Peace Prize in the offing for whoever can resolve this one:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/kitchenfloor-conflict-intensifies-as-rival-house-c,2384/

Oh, the humanity!

Thanks to Janice for sharing the link.

--John R.

current reading: Cerebus the Ardvark (scattered issues).

The Lost HOBBIT cartoon (1966)

2012-01-10T11:26:00.000-08:00

So, here's a lost mathom: a twelve-minute cartoon version of THE HOBBIT slapped together by American animators forty-five years ago in order to fulfill a contractual obligation and keep their option on adapting Tolkien's book open.

That such a piece once existed was known, but I was not aware that the footage survived, much less had a chance to see it before.

I'll save commentary for a follow-up post: here's the film.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.337585-A-Long-Lost-Adaptation-of-The-Hobbit-Makes-Its-Way-Online

--JDR

Fifth Edition

2012-01-09T19:58:00.000-08:00

So, today Wizards announced that work has now officially begun on Dungeon & Dragon's Fifth Edition.* Here's the link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/10/arts/video-games/dungeons-dragons-remake-uses-players-input.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Observation #1: Never thought I'd see the day when D&D news was reported in the NEW YORK TIMES, or FORBES (see below), or like venues. Like Tolkien's having become ubiquitous in our culture, it's a sign that D&D is now mainstream: so many millions of people grew up playing it that it's lost that weird scary outsider tinge that caused us all so much trouble back in the '80s.

Observation #2: My reservations about 4th edition -- which I tried to like but never cd warm to** -- turn out to have been pretty much universal. Having been given to understand from various quarters that I was a troglodyte if I didn't embrace 4e, it's surprising now to see in report after report that mine was the near-universal reaction, not the exception.

As for who'll be writing it, Wizards not only confirmed months of rumors that Monte Cook will be in charge of the project (a good choice!) but went ahead and announced the entire design team:

http://community.wizards.com/dndnext/blog/2012/01/09/welcome_to_the_group

So it's Monte Cook as lead designer, with Bruce Cordell (yay, Bruce!***) and Rob Schwab (whose work I don't really know, having postdated my time at Wizards). Also glad to hear Miranda Horner is the editor: I don't think they cd have made a better choice.

As for what the game will be like, Mike Mearls (who replaced Bill Slavicsek as head of the rpg group) is saying that it'll be a universal system that's adaptable to any previous edition -- something that sounds good in a pie-in-the-sky sense as a goal but which it's difficult to see how it'd work in practice. I think rather than saying it'll taste like Coke and New Coke and Classic Coke all at the same time, he's suggesting it'll be bottles of carbonated caramel-colored water wh you add yr preferred favorings to. That's not too far off from what 1st edition AD&D (the most popular version of the game ever published) was: a core rule set which people heavily adapted with their own 'house rules'. Seeing how they try to actualize that will make for a fascinating next six months.

Now I need to get signed up for one of those playtests . . .

And keep an eye out for Ewalt's book.

--John R.

*actually ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS' 5th edition, the fifth edition of D&D, by Troy Denning (the Black Box/Rules Cyclopedia set), having come out some twenty years ago.

**to the extent that I found myself giving up playing what'd been my favorite game for a quarter-century rather than play "4e", which just didn't feel like D&D. Compare similar reservations reported in the Forbes article about the 5 e announcement:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidewalt/2012/01/09/wizards-announce-new-dungeons-and-dragons-an-inside-look-at-the-game/2/

***one thing I'm particularly proud of in my twenty-year off & on again rpg editing career is that I edited Bruce's first published adventure, THE GATES OF FIRESTORM PEAK. His work was outstanding, even then.

Have to say though I'm sorry to see from this that Wizards still has a Development Team, since it's long been the greatest impediment to their releasing top-quality product. Perhaps its role has evolved since I was there

ADDENDUM:

For more on the big news, cf. the following links. Thanks to Janice, who passed them along to me (along with the ones above), their having originally had been gathered by Miranda Horner:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/9329-Speak-Your-Mind-in-the-Next-Version-of-Dungeons-Dragons

http://geekout.blogs.cnn.com/2012/01/09/wizards-of-the-coasts-announces-new-edition-of-dungeons-and-dragons/

http://critical-hits.com/2012/01/09/new-edition-of-dungeons-dragons-announced/

http://www.wizards.com/DnD/Article.aspx?x=dnd%2F4ll%2F20120109

http://www.baldmangames.com/ddxpnews/2012/1/9/huge-ddxp-2012-updates.html

http://www.enworld.org/forum/news/316069-wizards-coast-seeks-unity-new-edition.html

Riding the S.L.U.T.

2012-01-09T19:00:00.000-08:00

So, this time we got the 'do something this month we've never done before' out of the way early. I have an appointment downtown later this week, in an area of Seattle I don't know v. well. That being the case, and given my ability to get lost when driving in unfamiliar neighborhoods,* we decided to scope out the route over the weekend, so that on the actual day I'll be less likely to take a wrong turn and show up late.

Since traffic is always uncertain, I'm going mass transit all the way. Most of the trip will be on the light rail (what I think of as the 'Orca', though that's really the name for the commuter pass to ride it), taking it from its southmost stop at SeaTac airport up to its current northernmost terminus** at WestLake station.

From there it was a short walk to the new streetcar, which I've never been on before. It reminded me v. much of those in Portland and also Minneapolis: v. nice. Not sure what they call it these days: the original name for this brainchild of billionaire Paul Allen was the South Lake Union Transit -- right up until the time they actually launched the thing and realized what the obvious acronym wd be. Now it's officially 'the S. Lake Union streetcar'.

Two stops later and I was at my destination, walking around to get a good sense of the streets leading up to it. In the course of which, I went inside a Whole Foods for the first time -- having seen this many times on TOP CHEF, it was amusing to finally enter one. Glad to report that they carry both Cheshire and Wensleydale, both of wh. I've had a hard time getting lately at my regular cheese shop down at Pike Place Market, though both highly overpriced.

From there, we walked down to the market, where we looked around for a bit and ended by having two cups of tea (Bailin Gongfu) at the crumpet place (v. nice!). Then it was back to the light rail, back to where we'd parked, and back home again for a quiet evening.

And now all's ready for the big event on Thursday: more about this later.

--John R.

current reading: THE CHINESE LAKE MURDERS by Rbt van Gulik [1960]

*not being able to read street signs till they're past plays a large role in this. I usually do lots of circling back once I realize I've passed my turn, but this is harder in a busy area with lots of one-way streets, like downtown.

**they're currently working to extend it north & east to the University District, wh. will be altogether a Good Thing; eventually it'll go all the way up to north Seattle. It wd have gone across the floating bridge to Bellevue as well, but the mayor who backed that plan didn't come into office until too late.

Tolkien's Application for War

2012-01-08T18:59:00.000-08:00

So, yesterday Janice sent me a link to an interesting document now available online, courtesy of the National Archives: Tolkien's application to become an officer in World War I.

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/firstworldwar/people/p_tolkien_app.htm

It's chilling to see this form, knowing how many men who filled it out discovered later that it'd been an involuntary suicide letter, condemning them to a horrible death in an unnecessary war.

That aside, a few details do stand out, almost a century later, about how things were done back then:

First, that this was an application for a "temporary" commission, one to last only until the end of the war.

Second, the question about whether he cd ride a horse: a relic from an earlier day and a different kind of war.*

Third, the curious question (v. high up on the list) asking for assurance that he's "of pure European descent". I assume this requirement is to screen out 'half-castes', as they were called in those days -- British citizens who had a parent or grandparent among the colonial peoples the British had conquered and subjugated. I know that in such a deeply racist society as prewar (and postwar) Britain such folk faced all kinds of societal ostracizing, but had not realized their background precluded their serving as officers as well.

Still, a remarkable document. A good example of how context and foreknowledge affects the effect of what we read and see, how something as simple as a form letter can be weighted with sinister forboding when we know what all awaited him in the next few years.

--John R.

*though in point of fact being able to ride in training camp turned out to be just about the only thing Tolkien enjoyed about his military service.

UPDATE (Tues. Jan. 10th):

I hadn't realized that this link originated with Mike Foster, whom I shd have credited. Sorry Mike! --JDR

Tolkien's Style (Nobel, con't)

2012-01-07T18:24:00.000-08:00

So, one point I wanted to follow up on in my previous post about the news of Tolkien's having been nominated (though obviously as a long shot*) for a Nobel Prize in literature was focusing in on the specific reason given for his rejection: literary critic Anders Osterling's judgment that Tolkien's prose did "not in any way measur[e] up to storytelling of the highest quality". David Bratman, in his comment on my original post, points out the difficulty involved in judging the prose style of a work in a foreign language. I don't know how members of the Swedish academy generally handle this -- it's unlikely they're all fluent in all the languages in which the major nominees write -- but I'd think they'd be wary of making stylistic judgments based on translations. Something worth finding out more about.

In any case, I don't think Osterling's charge shd pass unanswered. Even though made fifty years ago, its only being released now means that it'll soon be seized upon by Tolkien bashers as evidence that Tolkien's really not a literary figure but simply a pop-cultural phenomenon.**

Attacks on Tolkien's style are endemic, but oddly enough some of them come from people who are otherwise well-disposed to Tolkien's work, in the midst of essays which praise Tolkien and stress his importance as a writer, which is somewhat bizarre. Prime examples include Stephen Medcalf, whom I saw giving a major presentation in which he kept reading out loud individual sentences from LotR and saying how bad they were, as if it were self evident (neither I nor I think anyone else in the audience agreed). An early and influential example is Burton Raffel in his essay in Isaacs & Zimbardo (TOLKIEN & THE CRITICS, 1968) in which he pillories Tolkien's prose and suggests readers love this stuff purely because of the storytelling.

I don't know why Tolkien scholars have been so slow to challenging the Medcalfs and Raffels in their midsts, when they've been all too eager to take on clueless outsiders like Harold Bloom and Edmund Wilson. I've done what I cd in my recent articles, esp. the Marquette lecture that appeared in TOLKIEN STUDIES, "A Kind of Elvish Craft, Tolkien as Literary Craftsman", to argue that Tolkien is a v. careful stylist who deliberately weighed the effect of each word. The only person I know of who's made a spirited and detailed defense of Tolkien's style a major aspect of their work is Brian Rosebury in the two editions of his book (the first of which I greatly admire, the second of which I've only skimmed as yet). I hope there'll be more work along these lines, so that the Tolkien-bashers aren't met with silence or worse a half-grudging admission that one of the most widely read and obsessively re-read writers of our times really cdn't write v. well. Which is nonsense, pure and simple.

--John R.

..................

current reading: THE CHINESE LAKE MURDERS by Rbt Van Gulik

*does CSL's nominating him demonstrate that Lewis was prescient about a great writer in their midst who had not yet been recognized (which is how I'd like to take it) or simply prone to cronyism (which the evidence of the whole making Adam Fox Professor of Poetry and promoting his pad Ch. Wms as among the greatest poets of the century)? Or, perhaps, some mix of the two?

**there were no comments on the Guardian piece when I first read it, but later that same day there were a long string, and even a quick skim of a few showed the Tolkien-bashers were already out in force. Any popular author, or director, or actor, generates a crowd of anti-fans who delight to deprecate his or her work at any opportunity, and Tolkien is no exception.

Tolkien's Nobel

2012-01-05T16:36:00.000-08:00

So, thanks both to the MythSoc list (thanks Alana) and also friends (thanks Bijee), today I learned about the time Tolkien was nominated for a Nobel Prize. Apparently the Prize Committee seals their records regarding any particular year's deliberations for fifty years, and for the past few years a Swedish journalist named Andreas Ekstrom has examined the newly revealed results. This year it was the 1961 records that were made public, and Osterling discovered that JRRT was one of those up for the Literature prize, along with luminaries like Rbt Frost, E. M. Forster, Grahame Green, and Lawrence Durrell: the award eventually went to Ivo Andrie (whose work I confess I've never read, and know nothing about).

It's not so much that Tolkien didn't get a Nobel that's interesting as the revelation that he was ever considered for one. And so shortly after his masterpiece, THE LORD OF THE RINGS, came out (six-seven years earlier). And that his nomination came from his old friend C. S. Lewis, who'd apparently been asked as a recognition of his status as Cambridge professor.

The reasons for some candidates' rejection are strange. Frost, for example, was rejected as too old (86), while Forster was not only too old (82, I think) but something of a burn-out case (he'd only published one novel in the preceding fifty years, and that'd been over thirty years earlier) Durrell they considered obsessed w. sex. Greene came in second place (while the article doesn't say so I suspect Greene's thrillers counted against him as lowbrow 'entertainments'), and Karen Blixen (a.k.a. Isak Dinesen) in third.

Not to have gotten the award is no disgrace -- in more recent years the committee rather pointedly refused to give it to Borges, for example, and one prominent member of the Academy went on record to say that not to have given it to Dinesen was a big mistake. It must also be said that some of the past winners strike most today as decidedly eccentric choices: I've always found it a good trivia question to ask folks if they can name the first writer in English to win the prize (Rudyard Kipling, of all people). And it's hard to feel that purely literary judgments were made when Winston Churchill got it for his histories (explaining the brilliance of his own career). But it's also gone to those whose work has stood the test of time, like Yeats (when he still had a lot of great poetry yet to write) and T. S. Eliot (who received it when he was something of a spent force, though there's no way they cd have known that at the time).

The reason given for rejecting JRRT, however, is striking. In the words of committee member Anders Osterling, "the result has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality". So we can add another name to the Edmund Wilson Hall of Fame of those who Got It Wrong. Here's the link to the piece:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/05/jrr-tolkien-nobel-prize?utm_source=Publishers+Weekly%27s+PW+Daily&utm_campaign=b0403d58d8-UA-15906914-1&utm_medium=email

One further interesting bit it that we'd known for several years now that C. S. Lewis considered Tolkien Nobel-worthy material, just not that he'd acted on it. In a January 7th letter to Alastair Fowler,* Lewis wrote

"In confidence. If you were asked to nominate a candidate for the Nobel Prize (literature) who wd be your choice? Mauriac has had it. Frost? Eliot? Tolkien? E. M. Forster? Do you know the ideological slant (if any) of the Swedish Academy? Keep this all under your hat"

--Collected Letters, vol. III, p 1224

I'd always assumed Lewis was just expressing an opinion (and one that did him credit), not that he was actually having an imput into who was actually getting nominated. And as we can see three of the four men he mentions did get consideration, while the fourth (TSE) had actually won the award almost a quarter-century earlier.

--John R.

*the same Lewis scholar who authenticated THE DARK TOWER

. . . And Back Home Again

2012-01-01T10:29:00.000-08:00

On Saturday, the third day of my lightning four-day trip, I drove up to Magnolia for some necessary chores. I got a lot done in just three hours or so, and managed to squeeze in time (at Janice's suggestion) to stop by the Magnolia Bake Shop on my way into town (right on the west side of the courthouse square with all its big old magnolia trees) and picked up some of the little tart-sized pecan pies they make so well -- the best pecan pies in the world, so far as my experience goes.

It was kind of strange visiting my home town and not seeing anyone I know (or, so far as I know, being seen by anyone who knows me). I did manage two brief stops by the yard, where I picked a few pansies from among the ones I'd planted during my last visit back in October, but didn't see any of the cats. I also stopped on my way out of town to go by the cemetery and visit my father's and grandmother's graves: the flowers still looked good.

Then it was back to Shreveport for one last evening, for more on the ongoing family crisis (which we need not go into here). I was glad to see two of my nieces, two of my great-nephews, and my youngest niece's soon to be fiance (which I suppose will make him my nephew in law). I also had the rare chance for a long talk with my sister, which I enjoyed but which kept us both up too late. During which time, a lot of fireworks began to go off. Without my really noticing it, New Year's had come.

Sunday it was time for one more quick family visit, then the long drive (non-stop) to Dallas. I'd allowed an extra hour and a half in case of slow-downs or mishaps or delays on the road, but I was in luck, which meant I was able to get together with fellow Tolkienist Jason Fisher for Second Breakfast at a place near Love Field, The Mecca. We had a little over an hour to talk about current projects, past projects, abandoned projects, other people's projects, &c., and of course the movie.

Then it was on to rental car return (which went smoothly), check=in and security (likewise), filling the thermos with Starbucks tea, and seeing if the airport had wi-fi (they did, but only the arm-&-a-leg kind, so I passed). Reading some on the Pyramids book* and, when I needed a break, starting in on LAMENT OF THE FLAME PRINCESS, filled up the time till my flight and also during the flight itself to Albuquerque. In my three hour layover there, I started re-watching the first of the Peter Jackson LotR film, which carried me through all the long flight to Seattle.

And now, reunited with Janice.

Home.

--John R.

current reading: JUDGE DEE AND THE CHINESE BELL MYSTERY (Van Gulik)

*I'd had the rare experience the day before of a waitress (at Cracker Barrel in Shreveport) admiring the book and writing down its title and author to be able to find a copy of her own later.

Tonight I'm In . . .

2011-12-30T21:29:00.000-08:00

. . . Shreveport, after a v. busy day, large parts of which consisted of sitting still, either while driving or during Visitor's Hours.

Tomorrow, it's up to Magnolia for a few hours, during which I have many chores and errands that need doing. We'll see how many I can get through and still get back to Shreveport before dark.

Meanwhile, tonight I'm reading a v. interesting book about pyramids (had not been aware that each Egyptian pyramid had its own name in antiquity); I've skipped ahead to read the section about the Sphinx.

Tomorrow, I'm hoping to start in on a booklet from one of the more notorious entries in the so-called 'Old School D&D Revival', loaned to me by a knowledgable friend. Having not even been aware there was an Old School Revival, I obviously have much to learn.

--JDR

Tonight I'm In . . .

2011-12-29T21:01:00.001-08:00

. . . Dallas, having flown into Love Field tonight. My first time to go through Love Field. Seems to be a nice mid-size airport, smaller I think than Chicago's Midway (which I passed thr to & fro on my way to Kalamazoo last year) but larger than Milwaukee's Mitchell Field (at least, that's my impression of it from a brief late night deplaning walk-through).

Another first was going through Albuquerque, a place I've never visited but which is set amid some really striking landscape, as seen from the air.

Next up: heading on to Shreveport tomorrow. My rental car is a Volkswagon Beetle: another first. Turns out they don't put the motors in the trunk anymore. What's up with that?

Oh, and back home the Green River is at Flood Level 2. That is, the stage where they send all residents in the Green River valley, like us, alerts telling us there's nothing to worry about.

Comforting, that.

--John R.

current reading: S. S. Van Dine's THE CANARY MURDER CASE (solved by the dilettante-detective playing poker with the chief suspects to discover which has the right kind of personality and mental processes to have been the murderer).

The Geekiest of the Geeks

2011-12-28T15:14:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Janice, for pointing out the following link to me, in which THE HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT* heads the list of the geekiest gifts of the season:

http://geekout.blogs.cnn.com/2011/12/27/our-geekiest-gifts-this-holiday-season/

Here's what their first contributor, Nikki Rau-Baker, has to say about the book:

"A must for anyone gearing up for the upcoming big-screen version of The Hobbit:"The History of The Hobbit" by John D. Rateliff, covers the beginnings of The Hobbit with such tidbits of information as the original names of the dwarves and the shocking revelation that the leader was initially called Gandalf."

--to which I have just two words to say: Woo and Hoo!

--John R.

current audiobook: THE WAR LOVERS [2011]**

current reading: THE CANARY MURDER CASE by S. S. Van Dine [1927]***

*the new one-volume edition, I assume -- geeks being early adaptors, they'd want H.o.H. 2.0

**(T.R., Lodge, Hearst, &c)

***a re-reading

THE HOBBIT trailer considered

2011-12-22T19:59:00.001-08:00

Here, courtesy of Richard West and Kristin Thompson, is a better link to a good site to see the new trailer on:

http://www.thehobbit.com/index.html#

Now that I've had a day or two to mull over things, and move beyond the don't-disturb-this-moment feeling, here's my take on this first trailer.

I've seen most of the little teaser mini making-of documentaries, which have done a great job of engaging the audience from the LotR films into this new project and laid a lot of the wilder rumors to rest. But this feels different: the first whiff of the real thing. They clearly want to do a lot in one short piece.

Foremost among them: to convey to fans of the LotR films that this is more of the same. That it's not just another Tolkien movie, but deeply and directly connected to the first. Thus we get to see McKellan's Gandalf, and Blanchett's Galadriel, and above all hear the sinister whispers of Serkis's Gollum. Even small details, like a glimpse of the shards of Narsil, are included -- something really not v. important for Bilbo's story, but no doubt included for the flashback to the moment between Aragorn and Boromir (and Aragorn and Arwen) in the first film: comfort food, so to speak, for the fans of the first film.

Just as important (or, for me, even more important) is establishing the new cast of this new story. We get to see a lot of Bilbo, and get used to the idea (after the initial shock, and some inner resistance) of seeing Freeman's face rather than Ian Holm's. And all thirteen dwarves are thrown at us in rapid succession, so that the full roster of Thorin & Company is presented right away.

Speaking of the dwarves, it looks like there'll be two contradictory things juxtaposed here. Their looks are quite silly (with the old silent-movie beards and moustachios), yet they turn into experienced killing machines in combat. There was some of that in the first films' Gimli; looks like there'll be even more of it here (To be fair, there was some of this in the original Tolkien too).

The exception is Thorin, whose look and behavior seems locked permanently in the serious battle-mode. In the book it comes as quite a shock when Thorin succumbs to dragon-sickness and becomes Bilbo's enemy. In later writings like THE QUEST OF EREBOR and THE 1960 HOBBIT, Tolkien anticipated those developments by including hints that Thorin was going bad, or at least had the potential, all along: anticipating the end result by drastically rewriting the character (and thus unfortunately losing the shock value of the original ending). I suspect that's what's going on here: Dark Thorin isn't the result of the character's going mad in the end but the essential character all along. I suspect he's this film's Boromir.

Which ties into an observation Janice made: this looks more like THE 1960 HOBBIT than it does THE HOBBIT itself.* There are no hints here of the whimsy of the original story, in which the dwarves bring highly impractical musical instruments along for the Unexpected Party, only to apparently abandon them forthwith, given that none of them are ever mentioned again. Jackson & Co. need not be borrowing directly from Tolkien's unfinished re-write, but they're clearly trying to achieve the same goal: recast THE HOBBIT into the style of LotR.

This ties into a point David Bratman made on his blog,** in which he suggested that Jackson is presenting THE HOBBIT as the prequel to LotR. So far as the films go, this is perfectly correct: most people who go see THE HOBBIT in theatres this time next year (and again the year after) are fans of the three-film Jackson trilogy and expect this movie to be just like the earlier films they know and love. That naturally imposes some audience expectations and means the films will probably be quite different from what they might have been like had they been made in chronological order.

---the biggest surprise: no dragon. To have a dragon and not show it is an exercise of restraint I'd not expected.

---the biggest twist: a brief tender moment between Galadriel and Gandalf.***

---the standout moment: the beautiful dwarf-song. Tolkien said Bilbo found it moving; Jackson has found a way to move the audience with it as well. Score One for Team Jackson.****

--John R.

.......................................

*Richard West made much the same point in an email today, in which he points out how Tolkien's book famously starts like WIND IN THE WILLOWS and ends more like NJAL'S SAGA, as C. S. Lewis observed long ago; here it's saga all the way through.

**http://calimac.livejournal.com/566380.html

***this is a good example of the kind of unanticipate-able element Jackson likes to throw into his films.

****it's clearly based on the king's song Aragorn sings at his coronation which, if I remember rightly, was Mortensen's own composition; hope he gets a royalty here!

THE HOBBIT trailor

2011-12-20T21:22:00.000-08:00

So, as of seven o'clock tonight, the trailer for THE HOBBIT (part one) is up.

There are many places you can see it online; I watched it here:

http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=85322

Analysis as to where they are and aren't faithful to the book can come later. For now, it's time to luxuriate in the feeling of seeing this: after years of delay, it's real, and it's coming. One year to go.

I so want to see this movie.

--John R.

Who's Naughty and Nice (Occupy)

2011-12-19T20:58:00.000-08:00

So, I haven't posted on the Occupy movement, mainly because I've had too much to say. I've gathered enough material for three separate posts, but sorting out just what to say about each aspect proved entangled to the point that none of the three actually got posted.

Then, when we were down at the Pike Place Market on Saturday, picking up my father-in-law's Xmas present (which shd go off tomorrow, and get there Thursday), I saw a Santa handing out 'Occupy Seattle' stickers. It reads simply "WE ARE THE 99%" and gives the url for Occupy Seattle .org. I've been wearing it on my jacket ever since.

I mean, if anybody keeps track of who the good guys are, of who's naughty and who's nice as the old song puts it, it's gotta be St. Nick. Plus, for those who are into 'the Reason for the Season', the Gospels are pretty explicit about eyes of the needle and all.

Good enough for me.

--John R.

current audiobook: THE WAR LOVERS by Evan Thomas [2010]

current book: ANCIENT EGYPT AS IT WAS by CHarlotte Booth [2008; 2011]

Calendrical (The Long Count)

2011-12-14T23:36:00.000-08:00

So, yesterday (Tuesday) the new Mayan Calendar arrived in the mail. I've ordered one of these each year for the past several years now: they're filled with pictures of Mayan ruins, carvings, and artifacts, making them among my favorite wall-calenders ever. Though they have to compete for space on our walls with the Tolkien calendar up in my office and with a simpler calendar we don't mind marking up and writing on in the kitchen. Last year and again this coming one that hasn't been an issue so far as the office goes, with the Mayan art easily trumping Cor Blok's eccentricities.

This year, I was curious how they'd handle 12/21/12, the date at which the "long count" comes to an end. Some folks have made a lot of fuss about this (cf. Y-2k*), as if time itself ends when we reach the end of a measurement of time. I've assumed that, just as a car doesn't suddenly fall to pieces when its odometer reaches 999,999.9 miles, but just turns over and starts again at 000,000.1, so too wd the Mayan calendar.

Turns out I'll have to wait till next year to find out. Opening up the new calendar, and admiring the art therein and the explanation in the front about how the various interlocking Mayan calendar systems work, I discovered when I reached the last page that their calendar for December is unfinished, ending at December 21st (day 13.0.0.0.0 in the long count). After this follows a note about how to order their 2013 calendar ("20% off; . . . offer expires December 21, 2012"--I thought this last touch was a hoot). As an added bonus, the art for that page is the Tortuguero Monument 6 ("the only text in the Maya world known to mention December 21, 2012 AD.").

So, I guess we'll have to wait and see how they handle the start of the New Count. It's rare for a civilization to have a mechanism for marking the End of an Age (as Tolkien wd have called it). The Mayans clearly thought a system that cd cover every date between August 11th 3114 BC and Friday December 21st 2012 was good enough for government work. I tend to agree.

*or, at a slightly less significant but similarly fussy point, folks who insisted the new century and millennium started at 2001 rather than 2000. Or, to harken back a few decades, the dawning of 'The Age of Aquarius'. At least we got a good song out of that one.

1st Edition: How It Went

2011-12-14T14:41:00.001-08:00

So, last Saturday we gathered for the long-planned AD&D 1st edition game. We turned out having a relatively small group (for us): four players and myself as DM (it wd have been more, but deadline pressure took out two other players and a last-minute cold struck down another).

How did it go?

Well, I had a blast. As for the players, you'd have to ask them -- but so far as I cd tell, it went well. I know it was slightly weird afterwards to find out that Janice, who'd gone upstairs with her I-Pad when we started rolling the dice, had been able to follow the game through FaceBook postings taking place during the event.

The scenario I chose was B1. In Search of the Unknown, by Mike Carr. As much as I respect Carr's work putting together the AD&D game,* I'd always had a grudge against this adventure, because it's not playable as published. It contains a map, a detailed history of the place, and a description of each room with some background about its original use before the underground stronghold of Quasqueton was abandoned and became a dungeon. What it's lacking are fully keyed encounters.** Instead there are two lists (not tables, or easily divisible by die rolls), one listing monsters and the other treasure, which the DM is supposed to go through and decide where to place. In short, exactly the sort of things you buy a published module in order to have already done for you.

For this adventure, I went through the room descriptions, altering them freely to match the dungeon I wanted to run (this included moving some walls and doors around as well). Most of the monsters from the original I jettisoned; instead, I went through the MONSTER MANUAL and picked out monsters I thought it'd be interesting to use and then placed them throughout the complex. In my read-through, I was reminded of just how many interesting monsters the game system has jettisoned over the years, so aside from a few classics (skeletons, zombies, giant rats) I deliberately skewed my monster selection to include things like a gelatinous cube, green slime, and a unique monster or two. I also added a few specific treasures (e.g., a nearly-depleted wand of magic missiles) that I carefully placed, relying on Carr's list for minor treasure from random encounters. Finally, to shake things up, I decided one of the lair's two builders had been an Illusionist, rather than the Magic-User of Carr's original; that allowed for a number of effects that misled the party from making the most effective response to things they encountered (e.g., not trying to Turn creatures whose undead nature was disguised by illusions).

The player characters were a mixed group: a half-elf cleric (LG), a human paladin (LG), a half-orc Fighter/Thief*** (CE), and a half-elf Fighter/Cleric (CG) whom we half-jokingly decided cd be his sister. No magic-user, which normally wd have put them at a disadvantage, but the presence of two clerics was actually v. much to their advantage, since unknown to them I'd stocked the dungeon primarily with undead (which seemed to make more sense for a long-abandoned complex than the berserkers of Carr's original, who are apparently guards who have hung around for thirty years or so waiting for their bosses to come back). Menaces they faced included

--a corpse infested with rot grubs (too bad they burned it before finding the wand of magic missiles [7 charges] still clutched in one dead hand)

--an apparently endless stream of skeletons who emerged from secret doors near the entryway to attack trespassers and cut off their line of retreat (they finally, after encountering this four times, to spike shut the doors the skeletons used to reach their ambush points).

--a kitchen in which unseen servants were chopping and slicing up the corpse of the last adventurer to come through.

--a dining room, to which the unseen servants delivered the wh apparently had a decapus in it**** who attacked as soon as they entered. Here I did a switch. In its original appearance (in B3), PCs enter a room and see a group of men around a table attacking a woman with knives with apparent cannibalistic intent. But this is just an illusion, covering up the actual menace: a ten-tentacled monster who tries to gobble up the intruders. I decided to reverse that: in my dungeon, they saw the decapus, which here itself was an illusion hiding a room full of eight zombies. A secondary motive, besides creating a tough fight, was to throw off anyone who'd figured out which module we were playing (given that one of the players, Steve Winter, was already working for TSR about the time the adventure I was using was published back in '81), which was after all a classic. By throwing in an iconic monster from a different adventure, I thought it might muddy the waters -- and for those who hadn't played the old adventures it work just fine as a stand-on-its-own encounter.

--an underground garden overgrown by mushrooms. The PCs pulled back without running into any danger here, partly because the cleric's songbird began to tweet in panic as they entered this area, and partly because some of the mushrooms started hopping towards them,which weirded them out.

--a shrine to Our Lady of Darkness, where a summoned servitor offered them healing if they swore an oath to her goddess. The paladin and LG cleric declined; the other two decided to go for it, and both gained a level (1st > 2nd level) but learned that their bodies wd spontaneously animate as undead when they died. This encounter was to insert a role-playing opportunity into the dungeon, as well as parallel the level-bumping power of some magic items and, indeed, one of the magical pools elsewhere in the original module. And of course to give the party increased odds of survival by having character potentially gain an extra level with its attendant hit points, spells, &c.

There were other encounters and places they explored; unfortunately, we ended up with a total party kill when they decided to take on some monsters they cd easily have avoided (having already learned the monsters activated when someone opened the door but did not pursue intruders beyond the room, they entered the room to take them out). Here was another case in which illusion played a key role -- in this case, hiding that the three humans in the room were actually ghouls. Ouch.

The lesson learned? Despite what you may hear, 1st ed. AD&D is really easy to run. It has lots and lots of rules, but you can ignore most of them; most of them are there to resolve specific circumstances, while the core mechanic is really simple. By contrast, in Third Edition you pretty much HAVE to play it the way it's written; the rules are so interlocked that you drop or modify one at yr peril. And of course Third Edition is so complicated that it's rare to even see a stat block with all the details right . . . but that's a discussion for another day.

It also became clear that Third Edition is a much safer world for PCs. In Third Edition, if your character dies, it's because you did something wrong, and then had really bad luck on top of it. In the normal course of play, that shd almost never happen. In 1st edition, death is always just around the corner, and your character can die at any time, not because you made a bad choice but just because of a bad die roll. Consequently, it takes much more skill to keep a character alive in 1st edition, and working your way up from 1st level to 2nd, then 3rd, &c is a real achievement you can feel proud of.

That this arbitrariness is a deliberate part of the system is shown best, I think, by the Potion Miscibility Table (DMG.119). Faced w. the question of what happens when you drink a potion while a previous potion is still in effect, the simplest solution wd be to just say each takes full effect. Not 1st ed. AD&D, which provides a handy table enabling you to determine if one cancels out the other, if one or the other's effects become permanent, or if the imbiber explodes. It helps show that you're in a weird, unpredictable world where the stakes are high and danger is never v. far away. In fact, I suspect that the style of 1st edition role-playing is alive and well today as the basis for most online fantasy games, far more than any later iteration of those rules or its derivatives.

In any case, having whetted my appetite, I want more, and hope I'll be able to organize another game sometime. We'll see. I know another member of the group has volunteered to run a D&D game, using the third edition of the D&D rules (Moldvay's BASIC and Zeb's EXPERT rules). I always played AD&D, not D&D, so I'm really looking forward to it.

--John R.

*it was Carr, as editor of all three hardbacks (PH, MM, DMG), who seems to have put together the material by Gygax (et al.) into coherent form.

**originally B3. was issued in similar unkeyed format, but Moldvay's re-write fixed that problem, and greatly improved the adventure overall. Unfortunately, B1. was never given the Moldvay treatment; the closest it came was when TSR released the compilation B1-9 IN SEARCH OF ADVENTURE -- which despite its designator omitted B1 altogether, aside from reprinting the maps!

***(he wd have been a Fighter/Assassin but cdn't quite make the pre-requisites)

****cf. B3. Palace of the Silver Princess; it's on the cover (of both the suppressed original and the standard green-cover version).

1st edition

2011-12-05T13:04:00.000-08:00

So, this weekend I'm running a 1st edition AD&D game. My thinking was: it's been too long since I played my favorite game, which I also happen to believe is the finest roleplaying game ever published: 1st edition AD&D. CALL OF CTHULHU is a fine game, and it's my game of choice these days, but that's mainly because I didn't make the jump from Third to Fourth Edition. I've played Fourth Edition, and enjoyed it, but it was the camraderie around the table I was enjoying and not the rules system. Even after a year or so of occasional gaming in 4e it never really came together for me: it felt like a miniatures game with a card game overlaid on it, with an optional roleplaying veneer on top of that. Third Edition, for all its faults, was still recognizably D&D. Fourth Edition, for all its virtues, feels more like an attempt to re-create the experience of playing a computer game. It's kind of like a novelization to a movie: a reminder of something you enjoyed rather than something to enjoy in its own right.

So why first edition? Well, consider that it's the most successful roleplaying game of all time. Millions of people played it obsessively for years. And while a good deal of time has passed since then, there's no reason to think the rules won't still work as well as they ever did. Just as there are some books I loved to read back in the day that are just as good as they ever were when I pull them off the shelf now, there are some old classic games that I still enjoy as much as ever when I get the chance to play them. Which isn't nearly often enough.

Of course, it's also true that there are some things that don't age well; once-favorite books that no longer have the same appeal. When I occasionally mention my enduring fondness for the classic game, I'm often told in response that it's just nostalgia speaking, with the implication that the game only gets better with every new edition.

So, let's see. I've got a group of a half-dozen or so who've expressed an interest in playing. I've picked the adventure and am jotting down notes as to monsters, traps, and treasures they may encounter. And I'm immersed in skimming through the PH and DMG to remind myself of the rules, rather than just rely on my memory (it has after all been a few years). Come Saturday they'll bring the characters they rolled up and we'll see how it goes.

--John R.

Oh, and The Wife Says: What's Up with all that Tiny Print?* We must have all had better eyesight back then. --JDR

*i.e., in the orignal PH, DMG, and MM.

New Lewis Fiction

2011-12-04T20:29:00.001-08:00

So, Friday the new issue of VII arrived, containing as its lead article the first publication ever of some early (circa 1927?) fiction by C. S. Lewis, here given the title the "EASLEY FRAGMENT" (THE EASLEY FRAGMENTS wd have been more apt, given that it consists of two disconnected pieces). This is something Lewis scholars have known about for a long time -- three sentences were quoted from it as far back as 1973 -- but it's only now seeing the light of day. It's quite brief: nine pages in Warnie's original transcription in THE LEWIS PAPERS and taking up pages 5-12 & 12-15 in this edition* -- and thus less substantial than, say, THE DARK TOWER (sixty-four Ms pages); more along the lines of AFTER TEN YEARS (fifteen Ms pages and similarly consisting of two disconnected pieces). Even so, I'm impressed with the generosity of the Lewis Estate in allowing this new Lewis story to appear in a scholarly journal rather than, say, in some new edition of complete short fiction by CSL.

As for the piece itself, the first chapter is a first-person account of a Bristol doctor visiting his late father's family in Ulster for the first time not long after the Great War (in which he served in the trenches, while they stayed safe at home wrapped up in their own concerns). Having always taken them at their own evaluation, he learns that they are not at all as they presented themselves in their own guilelessly self-serving accounts in the letters he has occasionally received from them. The fragment breaks off, however, before we actually get to meet them; all we get is a bit of the narrator's background and his long conversation with a self-satisfied cadger of drinks he runs into on the ferry over. So Lewis's "Irish novel" doesn't actually get as far as actually landing in Ireland itself -- though, to be fair, he opens by claiming that 'Belfast' begins at the Liverpool ferry terminal. Lewis's goal is clearly to let unlikeable characters reveal their character flaws through their speech, completely unaware of what a bad light they show themselves in, while the narrator forebears to make comment. Jane Austen cd pull this off; unsurprisingly it turns out the young C. S. Lewis had not mastered the art.

The second fragment is sometime later in the internal chronology of the story and consists of an argument between the doctor and a minister. The doctor's aunt is suffering from a terror of damnation, and the doctor accuses the minister of driving her mad with such nonsense. The minister responds that he considers a concern over salvation or damnation as a sign of mental health, not madness. The scene is not v. interesting as a piece of fiction (too talky; a thin fictional frame for a philosophical debate), but as documentation of Lewis's views it's fascinating. We know that at the time he wrote this,** Lewis was, from all accounts, in agreement with what he presents here as the doctor's point of view (the doctor also resembles young CSL in other ways we need not go into here). And yet we know that within a few years, Lewis had swung around 180 degrees and was fully in agreement with the minister's view. So can this passage be taken as a prefigurement of his shift? Or an example of how totally he switched his deepest held convictions? Or can it be read as occupying some middle ground, a way-station on the path?

The other interesting thing about this fragment is how it fits into the biographical narrative of Lewis as a failed author, which I discuss in my piece on his famous bargain with JRR Tolkien that resulted in THE LOST ROAD, OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET, PERELANDRA, THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH, THE NOTION CLUB PAPERS, and THE DARK TOWER.*** It was through his discovery of A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS and THE PLACE OF THE LION, and through that bargain, that Lewis concluded that genre fiction was the right medium for him, while Tolkien though he made a good-faith effort discovered the opposite was true for him: he had to follow his own, sui generis course. So it's interesting to see CSL here try his hand at a sort of local-color fiction, another genre outside the mainstream of his day.

And with this publication, I think we have pretty much all CSL's significant work now in print, except for his unfinished Morris-ian Arthurian romance THE QUEST OF BLEHERIS (about sixty pages) and his philosophical papers (which really shd be published in conjunction with Barfield's interlocking responses.

--John R.

*between brief headnote, notes, bibliography, and commentary by the editiors (David C. Downing and Bruce R. Johnson), it takes up pages 5-26 of this issue (VII. vol. 28).

**assuming Warnie got the date right, which seems a reasonable enough assumption -- esp. since he was compiling THE LEWIS PAPERS while living w. CSL (as I understand it, they were actually typed in a side-room in Lewis's office at Magdalen), and he cd easily have asked his brother when the work dated from. Were it not for that, I'd have thought it from the early twenties rather than towards the end of the decade.

***cf. my essay appearing in TOLKIEN'S LEGENDARIUM [2000]

Reprehensible Behavior . . .

2011-12-02T20:14:00.000-08:00

So, I mentioned recently that I'd ordered what I considered a second-tier book on Tolkien -- by which I mean one that might be interesting, but not a must-have given my particular interests. One I'd put off because of the price, but finally decided to get because of the out-of-print price madness I'd seen take place a time or two in the past that I'd rather not get mixed up in.

Turns out I was just a little too late: The book in question (Alison Milbank's CHESTERTON AND TOLKIEN AS PHILOSOPHERS) went out of print between my ordering it on November 5th and Amazon's shipping the rest of my order on the 16th. Checking amazon.com now, I find that $39.93 (pretty much the original price of the book) will now only get you a dog-eared, marked-up copy: 'like new' will run you $141.42 at least. And if you miss this one, the other two 'new' copies are priced at $160.61 and $223.29, while the remaining 'used' copies come in at $135.80 (a pretty bit jump from $39.93), $358.58, and a stunning $900.00. I have no idea who Bordee Books might be, or why they think people wd pay $900 for this book.

As for online book services, ABEbooks came up a blank, but Bookfinder came through with a lot of options. Used started at $43.92 -- which sounded good, until you realize that this is the amazon.com entry and is no longer operative. The next-best used price was $118.78 for the hardcover and $119.49 for the softcover -- though why, give the choice, anyone wd buy the paperback when they cd get the hardcover for slightly less is beyond me. After various amazon.this-or-that-country, the final (and most expensive) used option listed was from A Libris for $362.57 -- again, bizarre, because A Libris also lists it New at $181.45.

Clearly the 'New' book options looked much better at Bookfinder -- that is, until you actually tried to use them. The first one, from Barnes & Noble.com, says they're offering the book for $34.15, but once you actually click on the button and go to the B&N site, it turns out they're offering it for $117.46, $185.78, and $358.58. I don't think this is a bait-and-switch, though, so much as the price being updated as it soared in one place and not in the other. The Super Book Deals listing promises it at $42.36, but clicking on the button reveals that the book is no longer available. The Overstock.com offer of $42.90 simply turns out to be a broken link.

However, there is hope: The Blackwells.com link does work, leading to the book, new, in paperback, for twenty-one pounds. Which comes out to about the same as the original amazon.com price wd have been before they ran out of it.

The real fascination here is the price-gouging of a book that hadn't made any particular stir when it first appeared and now, a few years later, went out of print without the public much noticing. But as I understand it the online book-dealers have some sort of software that alerts them to books that go out of print and in some cases (presumably when linked to authors whose readers are as obsessive as we Tolkienists)* immediately doubles or triples the price on any remaining stock. And then others seems to have a variant of that same software than prices their just a little bit higher or lower than those results. And yet others triple that highest price, apparently in the odd belief that, given the choice, people will prefer the most overpriced of all available options.

As for me, I ordered it from Blackwells -- whom I'm happy to give my business (I've bought books from them before, but only when I was in Oxford on one of my rare research trips over there, never before on-line. Now to wait till it arrives, and see if it was worth all this hooplah.

--John R.

*the same thing happened a year or two back with Frederick & McBride's WOMEN AMONG THE INKLINGS, copies of which on Bookfinder start at about $100 (i.e., more than double its original price), with one bookseller offering it for $1503.00. And I'm afraid to say Amazon.com even outdoes this, offering a dozen or so copies in the $100 to $200 range but with one dealer asking $1995.06 for his copy.** Unless it's written on mallorn leaves by elven calligraphers, this is grossly overpriced.

**plus shipping. You'd think that might throw that in gratis. You'd be wrong.

The New Arrival: DECONSTRUCTING TOLKIEN (McFaddon)

2011-12-02T19:15:00.000-08:00

So, another book to arrive the same time as the Sammons and the Loo (but in a different package) turned out not to be anything like the book I thought I was ordering. According to amazon.co.uk, they were offering a book by Tom Piccirilli (a name new to me in Tolkien scholarship) called DECONSTRUCTING TOLKIEN. From the title, I assumed this was a Deconstructionalist interpretation of JRRT's work, which sounded bizarre enough to be potentially entertaining -- perhaps worthy to go on the same shelf as Giddings & Holland or Eaglestone. I mainly know deconstructionist theory second hand, having suffered through a lot of it while at Marquette (the department there was theory-mad in the eighties; don't know if that's the case today); my own take on it was that it stated the blindingly obvious as if it were profound, and in practice more closely resembled performance art than literary criticism (I'm thinking here in particular of a dubious talk by Gayatri Spivak, Derrida's translator), at a critical symposium Marquette hosted. But I only saw an interesting and insightful application of deconstructionist ideas for the first time this past year at Kalamazoo. That made me realize that the two--deconstructionism and Tolkien-- can actually be brought together and be worthwhile, so I decided to opt for the book.

Turns out it's not at all as advertised. For the first thing, Tom Piccirilli (whoever he is) didn't write it: all he did was contribute a two and a half page introduction. The bulk of the text that follows is by Edward J. McFadden III, who I also hadn't heard of: turns out he's the editor of FANTASTIC STORIES OF THE IMAGINATION, which is described as 'one of the largest fiction magazines in the country'.

Also, it turns out the book has nothing to do with Deconstruction; the author just used the term in the sense of getting back to basics. So too the subtitle (A FUNDAMENTAL ANALYSIS OF THE LORD OF THE RINGS) doesn't have anything to do with Fundamentalism.

As for the book itself, it turns out I'd seen it before, on Doug Anderson's shelves, when I was visiting there last year. It's too bizarre to have forgotten, but any note I made of the title at the time has since gotten misplaced, and at any rate I was certain I didn't have any book on Tolkien by anyone named Piccirilli. As indeed I still go not.

The weirdest thing about this book is not the mis-ascription of authorship by amazon.co.uk but the fact that only about every other chapter is by McFadden. The rest are by an eccentric array of authors: Edgar Poe, H. G. Wells, Jane Yolan, Chaucer, and Lovecraft. McFadden's procedure is to write an essay, then follow it up with a story (e.g., Wells' THE VALLEY OF THE SPIDERS or Poe's WILLIAM WILSON), then another essay, then another story, and so forth. Sometimes the reasons why he includes a particular story are self-evident (e.g. the Wells, which is a sort of "Leiningen & the Ants" except with spiders rather than formians). In other cases, it's nothing short of baffling (Chaucer's THE COOK'S TALE*)

And the book itself? Well, so far I haven't had time to read it, but the bits I dipped into (e.g., the chapter on changes made in Tolkien's story for the Peter Jackson film) seem okay.** I'll try to post an update once I actually get around to reading the thing -- but my first impressions remain that this book'll wind up being on the fringes -- not as far out there as Vander Ploeg,*** but still not one of those that winds up being central to Tolkien studies either. We'll see.

--John R.

current reading: ON CONAN DOYLE by Dirda

current audiobook: THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST by Larsson

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*included, McFadden says, to show how Tolkien imitated Chaucer's language in LotR

**quote #1: "picture your greatest literary influence . . . on plastic cups at Burger King"

quote #2: "I don't think that fantasy has been well served by cinema"

quote #3: I could hear the text of the book in my head as I watched the scene"

***this is the one that reveals the Elves are really lizards from outer space. No, really.

Inadvertent Piercing

2011-11-29T20:06:00.000-08:00

So, Rigby, our Senior Cat, loves to be up high. She loves to leap on things, and is apt to use us (esp. me, since I'm already somewhat stooped over) as stepping-stones to get where she wants to go. So tonight, thinking she looked a little at loose ends, I thought I'd indulge her by putting her atop the bookcases in the living room, a spot she used to visit a lot before we re-arranged things and took out her mid-points between High and Low.

She seemed pleased enough, but had ideas of her own: rather than jumping atop the bookcase, she decided to explore and climbed behind the books on the top shelf (intermittently a favorite spot of hers). Unfortunately she soon realized there wasn't room and, after an amazing act of turning around in a v. small space, came back out on my shoulder again. And that's where things began to go horribly wrong.

I thought she'd now want to continue on her way to the bookcase's top, while she debated whether to jump down or give the shelves another try. And in the process, I moved, and she moved, and then she lost her balance and grabbed hold of whatever was handy to steady herself. Which turned out to be my left earlob. Into which she sank a claw, which promptly got stuck there so she cd not draw it out.

It was at this point that I tried to convey to Janice that something was amiss, but it's remarkably hard to say what you mean in a few well-chosen words at such times. I meant to say something like 'Rigby's claw is stuck in my ear; can you help us get loose?', but it probably came out more like 'Ah - she's - um - Can you - ah! - some . . .' In any case, one glance conveyed the situation and she came to our rescue -- though by the time she reached me Rigby had pulled loose and was off. Now all we had to worry about was the blood leaking out of my ear.

Luckily, I always carry a handkerchief, and with Janice's help I soon had my involuntary piercing (luckily it didn't go quite all the way through) washed and disinfected. It bled more than I wd have expected, but then with our experience of cat-bites &c [cf. "The Cat-Bite Incident"] we know that's a (relatively) good thing.

Except that about ten minutes later when I checked to see that it'd stopped bleeding, my touch accidently started it up again. This time I had to resort to a second handkerchief, and then a third; plus a bandage, and then another; and eventually a hand-towel drapped over my shoulder to avoid getting more blood on my shirt.

All of which sounds extremely dire and yet it wasn't: it was simply a small injury that didn't even particularly hurt but that wdn't stop bleeding and stay stopped. I literally cdn't finish the dinner dishes because I had to hold one hand to the ear.

That's when we decided to consult the Home Remedy people Janice had discovered via NPR a few weeks back. Their suggestion: put ground pepper* on the little cut and bandage it over, and there'd be a good chance it'd stop the bleeding.

We tried it.

It did.

And now I'm wondering if it'll leave a mark, to go with the nonfunctioning joint from The Catbite Incident or perhaps the scar from the pillow fight. I guess we'll see.

As for the cats, Rigby is sleeping peacefully on Janice's leg, Hastur is doing the Rug Otter, and Feanor is curled up in a box on my desk upstairs. Peace and harmony restored.

So, how was your evening?

--John R.

*black pepper, that is. I wdn't advise using habaneros or anything along that line

The New Arrivals

2011-11-28T13:51:00.000-08:00

So, one of the problems about not-blogging when I get busy or just bogged down is that the things I want to blog about (books arriving, the 'Occupy' movement, unnecessary surgery) tend to pile up, so that the longer I wait the bigger the log-jam.

Case in point was the most recent post about the new book arrival, wh. was also my newest publication; finally got this off a day or two ago, after having begun a week before. During that time, another three packages with books arrived on the door step. So in the interests of playing catch-up, the following descriptions may be briefer and brisker than wd otherwise be the case.

In any case, this current lot represent books I ordered to fill in around the corners, mindful of the difficulty that can result if I wait too long (e.g., the ridiculous prices some books on Tolkien shoot up to when they go out-of-print).*

New Tolkien Book #1: Martha C. Sammons' WAR OF THE FANTASY WORLDS [2010]. This is one of two books I've been meaning to get for a year or so but kept putting off month by month because of the expense (in this case, $45 for a text that sans notes &c. runs less than 200 pages).* I'm interested in this one, because books on Tolkien and Lewis tend to conflate the two, which I think does an injustice to both: they were v. different men, with v. different ideas and aesthetics; more alike perhaps in their goals than in how they tried to reach them. Sammons, by contrast, looks to stress the differences between their writings. We'll see if she's able to do justice to an interesting thesis.

What shd have been New Tolkien Book #2, Alison Milbanks' CHESTERTON & TOLKIEN AS THEOLOGIANS, was also fairly pricey ($40 for a 200 page paperback), and while quite interested to see what she had to say about Tolkien as theologian (a topic about wh. not much has been written), I admit to being put of by the fact that what I've read of Chesterton's theology (ORTHODOXY) didn't make me inclined to read more if I cd avoid it. In this case, looks like I hestiated too long: Amazon cancelled this book from my order, claiming the book is no longer available. I can still get it used, but again there's the dis-encouragement of now having to pay $40+ for a secondhand book

Book #3 is Oliver Loo's A TOLKIEN ENGLISH GLOSSARY ("2004-2009"). That title might cause some confusion, given that Tolkien is writing in English, but the subtitle clarifies things: A GUIDE TO OLD, UNCOMMON AND ARCHAIC WORDS USED IN THE HOBBIT AND THE LORD OF THE RINGS. So, if you were a bit puzzled by words like "eyrie" and "furrier" when first read THE HOBBIT, this is the book for you; Tomnoddy, Attercop, Lob, and Cob all make an appearance. On the other hand, it's cluttered with words that are far from exotic, like "rug" and "toe"; Loo seems to presuppose that his target audience is a bright ten-year-old. Which is all well and good, but it means that practically anybody who'd buy his book wdn't need it, having already mastered difficult words like Glossary and Archaic. I'm sure his inspiration must have been the (v. useful) glossary of archaic words Christopher Tolkien appended to THE BOOK OF LOST TALES, but Loo sets the barrier much, much lower. I suspect his book wd be of most help to non-native speakers reading LotR in English but not entirely conversant in the large vocabulary Tolkien delights in using.

--John R.

current book: 1948

current e-book: THE HOUSE OF SILK

current audiobook: THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST

....................................

*Frederick & McBride's WOMEN AMONG THE INKLINGS being a case in point, having only attracted minor attention until it went out of print, whereupon prices soared.

My Newest Publication: Volume 258

2011-11-25T21:36:00.000-08:00

So, Thursday a week ago brought a copy of my latest publication to the porch: a reprint of my 2007 Marquette lecture " 'A Kind of Elvish Craft': Tolkien as Literary Craftsman", which had first appeared in TOLKIEN STUDIES volume four [2009]; before that it'd been the 2007 Blackwelder Lecture at Marquette. I'd been surprised and pleased when a few months ago I got a request from Cenegale (formerly Gale) Publishing, the folks who do long series of encyclopedia-sized books like CONTEMPORARY LITERARY CRITICISM and NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE CRITICISM and TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERARY CRITICISM,* asking if they cd include a reprint of my piece in their latest volume. This was new territory to me, but after taking advice I said sure, asking for a copy of the volume in question in return. And now, after being backordered for a month or two, here it is: Volume 258 of TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERARY CRITICISM.

Rather than author-by-author, which had been how volumes by Gale I'd consulted in years past had been organized, this volume has three sections, each devoted to a different literary movement: The Abbey Theatre (p. 1-123), The Confessional School of Poetry (p. 124-203), and The Inklings (p. 205-313), followed by over 150 pages of indexes. My contribution is the concluding essay of the third (Inklings) section; while familiar enough with the Abbey Theatre through my work on Lord Dunsany (whose first plays were produced there, before he had a falling out with Lady Gregory), I confess I had to look up who the 'Confessional School' were -- turns out this is their label for Berryman, Lowell, Plath, Sexton, and W. D. Snodgrass (the last of which I'd never heard of before, I'm sorry to say; the rest are all famously manic-depressive).

Since others interested in Tolkien and in the Inklings might want to know what's in this volume (besides my piece, of course), here's a run-down on the contents of their 'Inklings' section:

After an anonymous Introduction (perhaps by series editor Kathy Darrow, or one of her thirteen-person-strong editorial staff) comes a select bibliography of Representative Works by Barfield, Cecil, GKC, Coghill, Dyson, Fox, CSL, WHL, Lindsay, Geo MacD, Mathew, CT, JRRT, Wain, & Ch Wms. The inclusion of Chesterton and MacDonald, neither of whom was ever an Inkling, is explained by their being considered formative influences on the group. It may be significant that in this bibliography of suggested reading Tolkien is represented by just five works (HOBBIT, LotR, Silm, Letters, plus Middle English Vocabulary), far less than CSL (thirteen, including BOXEN) or even Wms (eleven), being about the same as Barfield (six), Cecil (four), and Warnie (five).

Next up come the reprinted essays, as follows:

(1) Gareth Knight, fr. The Magical World of the Inklings (1990) [201–214]

(2) Fredrick & McBride, fr. Women Among the Inklings (2001) [214–230] (including a section on Sayers, 'Not Quite an Inkling")

(3) Diana Pavlac Glyer, Mythlore essay (2007) [230–236]

(4) ibid, fr. The Company They Keep (2007) [236–265]

(5) Walter F. Hartt, "Godly Influences: The Theology of JRRT and CSL", Studies in the Literary Imagination, 1981 [266–270] (L & T as Xians)

(6) Maria Kozyreva, "Chesterton's World in the Mirror of His Poetry", Inklings Jahrbuch, 1996 [270–275]

(7) Rbt W. Maslen, "Towards an Iconography of the Future: CSL and the Scientific Humanists", Inklings Jahrbuch, 2000 [275–285] (which devotes a good deal of space explicating THE DARK TOWER, I was glad to see, since I consider this work overly neglected)

(8) Rolland Hein, "Doors Out and Doors In: The Genuis of Myth", Truths Breathed thr Silver (2008) [285–290]

(9) David L. Neuhouser, "The Role of Mathematics in the Spiritual Journey of Geo. MacD", Truths Breathed thr Silver (2008) [290–297]

(10) Kerry Dearborn, "The Sacrament of the Stranger", Truths Breathed thr Silver (2008) [297–303]

(11) JDR "A Kind of Elvish Craft", from TOLKIEN STUDIES Vol. VI (2009) [303–313].

--I was interested to see that three essays come from the same book, a book I happen to have published a review of a year or two back.*

Finally comes an extremely brief (two-item) list of Further Reading, being a piece by Rachel Falconer ("Rereading Childhood Books: CSL's The Silver Chair") & another by Carl Phelpstead ("Auden and the Inklings: An Alliterative Revival") [313]. Given how impresive Phelpstead's recent TOLKIEN & WALES book looks, I'll have to track down a copy of this latter, which appeared in JEGP back in 2004.

And that's basically it. I'm pleased to see my essay get picked up and reprinted in a new venue, and hope it helps disseminate my argument (Tolkien was a meticulous writer who made every detail count, who used stylistic variations to prompt his readers' creative involvement in his subcreation) to new audiences. We'll see.

--John R.

current reading: THE DIARY OF EDWARD VI, 1547-1553

current audiobook: TOLKIEN & THE GREAT WAR by Jn Garth

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*as well as, it turns out, less well-known lines like NATIVE NORTH AMERICAN LITERATURE.

**a review which prompted one contributor to write a rebuttal that has since appeared in MYTHLORE; I'd like to write a counter-rebuttal but haven't gotten around to it yet.

Well, This Won't End Well

2011-11-19T21:33:00.000-08:00

So, Wednesday morning as I was driving along Military Road north towards the PetsMart where I volunteer with the Purrfect Pals cats, I saw an unusual and disconcerting sight. I was stopped for the light when a pickup truck passed me headed east. After he'd gone by, I noticed there was something dragging behind his truck. It took me a few seconds to realize it was a red plastic gas can, resting right side up, held by some cord and scooting along the asphalt. The tailgate of his truck was down, and I suppose he'd had the gas can in the back and it'd fallen out but somehow had gotten its handle tangled in something that kept it attached to the truck. By the time I processed what I'd seen, he was gone and I had no way to overtake or catch up with him (given that I was stopped for a red light and other traffic had the right-of-way at that busy intersection). I think he may have gotten on the on-ramp for I-5 North, but I hope I'm wrong about that. I didn't hear any news reports that evening of dramatic incidents on the expressway, so I suppose it all worked out okay. Maybe the gas can was empty, though I don't think so from the way it stayed right-side up. Maybe someone else was able to flag him down before there was any damage done. I don't suppose I'll ever know, but the memory of that alarming sight will linger . . .

--John R.

Dirda on Doyle (and Dunsany)

2011-11-17T21:27:00.000-08:00

So, quite by chance on Monday* we learned that the author of a new book on Arthur Conan Doyle (called ON CONAN DOYLE) wd be giving a talk or reading Tuesday night up at Elliott Bay Books, one of our favorite (but rarely visited, due to location) Seattle bookstores. We made plans to attend, if all went well, but in the event weren't able to make it -- not surprising, considering the workday schedule, traffic, early darkness, &c. A pity, but so it goes.

Curiously enough, my attention had been drawn to Dirda just a few days before in a post to the MythSoc list by Wendell Wagner, who included the quote:

"What Conan Doyle is to the detective story, Dunsany is to the modern fantasy: the Master"

That's a statement I agree with completely. There were detective stories before Doyle (e.g., Poe's Dupin), and there was fantasy fiction before Dunsany (cf. Wm Morris). But each man remade the genre, so that everyone who came after was influenced by their achievement.** It's rare to come upon a right-minded individual who feels as I do on this point, so I'm naturally am curious to find out more, being both a Dunsany scholar (one of the few people who can claim that, I suspect) and a longtime admirer of the Holmes stories.

I haven't been able to find a copy of Dirda's book yet, but thanks to Google Books I've now discovered that most of his discussion of Lord D. focuses on the Jorkens stories. This is rare; most people who know Dunsany at all know him through his so-so novel THE KING OF ELFLAND'S DAUGHTER; those who really like him know of his early short stories (the ones written between 1905 and 1916), which are superb,*** and perhaps a few of his plays like A NIGHT AT AN INN. But, on further reflection, Dirda's praise of the Jorkens tales makes sense; they're club stories, and probably the most Holmesian of Dunsany's work (in the 22B Baker Street sense, not in the content)**** In this he's in agreement with S. T. Joshi, who also admires the later Dunsany and once chided me for my agreeing with Dunsany himself (and Lovecraft, for that matter) that Dunsany's later work marked a significant falling off. Dunsany is one of those people who kept on writing long after he'd run out of things to say, and his lesser later works damaged his reputation and got in the way of folks rediscovering his earlier masterpieces.

Still, I'm glad to see Dirda give praise where praise is due, and look forward to reading his book about Doyle -- a fascinating, talented, and gullible man who created a character more memorable than himself.

--John R.

*as in I saw part of the Seattle newspaper lying abandoned at a table when I stopped in a coffee shop at Kent Station to have some tea while I waited for Janice to get off work, and glancing through it saw a piece about Dirda's pending presentation.

**one might extend the example to include Wells for science fiction, though there the match is not quite so tight (there's Verne to consider).

***the best body of fantasy short stories in English, by far; perhaps Borges and Kafka are his peers if you go multilingual.

****Dunsany did write some fair detective stories himself, the most famous of which, TWO BOTTLES OF RELISH, Alfred Hitchcock declared the story he'd most wanted to do for ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS, but been unable to because the mores of the time wdn't have stood for it (e.g., the murderer getting off scot-free, quite aside from other unpleasant details we need not go into).

A Bad Movie and A Bad (Audio-) Book

2011-11-15T20:34:00.000-08:00

So, on Friday we sent to see a movie the former English major in me had been hankering after for a while, although Janice had her doubts and had suspected we'd be better off waiting for it to reach the three-dollar theatre.

Lesson number one: listen to the wife.

ANONYMOUS scores points as a costume drama -- if you like the look of Elizabethean England, this film does a good job of conveying it. Also, it has Derek Jacobi in the modern-day frame story (a minute or two at the beginning and maybe a half-minute at the end). Other than that, there's not much to say in its favor. And here's where the spoilers start.

As an action film, it fails: it feels like events move in slow motion, and things aren't made easier by frequent extended flashbacks. It's pretty hard to keep straight when we're in the present day of the story (e.g., 1601 or thereabouts) or a few decades (a generation or two) earlier. And the fact that different actors play the characters at different ages, it takes a lot of attention and some guesswork to figure out who's supposed to be who and when. Also, it's talky, but not in a good way (as a film about Shakespeare might well be); this movie cd lose a half-hour or more and no one wd miss it. It's a bad sign that the brief snippets of Shakespeare soliloquies jump out from among the drab-by-comparison dialogue of the movie; these people only sound like 'Shakespeare' et al. when they're quoting the real Shakespeare.

As a historical drama it looked pretty but had the fatal flaw of having characters who have the name of historical figures but are unlike the actual person in every conceivable way. This is a pet peeve of mine: if I encounter a character in a story named 'Conan Doyle' or 'H. P. Lovecraft' or 'John Tolkien', I want that character to be more or less like the actual person, or at least recognizably so. In this case the movie's cast are utterly unlike what we know of the historical people they're supposed to be: Elizabeth, the Cecils, Ben Jonson, Essex, and (God knows) Shakespeare -- who in this movie didn't just not write the works of Shakespeare but is illiterate: he can read (even sophisticated love-poetry) but not write even a single letter, like 'i'. Moreover, he's a talentless ham actor, a blackmailer, and a murderer; the actor who plays him seems to be alternately channelling Weird Al Yankovich and Ya-hoo Serious. No, really.

Why? Well, because the movie's theme is that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare. Why? Because Shakespeare was a nobody -- a working man's son rather than a rich nobleman by birth, a man who picked up how to write plays by acting in them rather than studying poetics at a prestigious university. Whereas adherents of the 'Baconian' and 'Oxfordian' theories argue, essentially, that only someone important -- a nobleman, a person of wealth in a position of power -- cd have written poetry and plays this good. This is particularly funny, because virtually all the great poetry and prose and plays of the Elizabethan and Jacobin eras* were written by commoners, people we'd never have heard of had they not been writers: Spenser and Marlowe and Jonson and all the other known playwrights (Kyd, Greene, Nashe, Dekker, Beaumost, Fletcher, &c), Donne, &c. &c.; about the only exception is Sir Philip Sydney (who died young) and perhaps Walter Raleigh (remembered for a poem or two).

Finally, as a conspiracy movie it's so far-fetched that it made my brain want to escape out my ears. I knew to lower expectations when I saw an interview with the director in which he explained about an illegitimate son of Elizabeth's being the rightful heir to the throne -- which just goes to show that he doesn't really know what the words 'rightful heir' and 'illegitimate' mean. Even worse is a line given to the nobleman portrayed in the film as having really written all the plays ascribed to Shakespeare that all writing is political; unless it has a direct political aim, what's it good for? Gah!

Basically this movie desperately needed Geoffrey Rush, and to not take itself so seriously.

And, as David Bratman observed on his own blog, the title shd really be 'Pseudonymous'

And, at the same time, I was listening to the audiobook version of THERE ARE THINGS I WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT STEIG LARSSON AND ME by Eva Gabrielsson

Lesson number two: a book about an interesting book might well not be interesting itself.

Basically, this book sets forth the claim by Larsson's longtime companion to be his Yoko Ono. She argues that she should control all the literary rights to Larsson's estate, as well as write the fourth book in his 'Millennium Trilogy' (despite the fact that she needed a co-author just to write this short memoir and manifesto) -- better known over here as 'The Girl Who . . . ' series [THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO; THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE; THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST], and decided who gets all the money from his books. Unfortunately for her during their thirty years together they never got around to getting married, and Larsson never bothered to draw up a will, which means that his nearest relatives (his father and brother) inherit the estate. She considers this monstrous, and rails against the unfairness of it all, without ever convincing the reader that (a) she's capable of writing the next book** or (b) has any more insight into Larsson than any other reader of his work -- she knows a lot more about him personally, of course, but that's not the same thing.

At least Gabrielsson's book is better, and more interesting, that ANON. But that's not a particularly high bar to make.

--John R.

*and most other eras, at that. Lord Dunsany is a rare exception for the twentieth century.

**and that's not even getting into the morality or otherwise of going the 'V. C. Andrews, TM' route.

I Am Scouted (sort of)

2011-11-14T20:01:00.000-08:00

So, about a week ago I got a call out of the blue asking if I'd be interested in dropping by a local Starbucks on Saturday and finding out more about the president's new jobs bill. I haven't been paying much attention to the latest round of debacle in DC, having largely tuned out after the disaster of the 'debt ceiling' fight --which in turn followed on the tax-cut-extention disaster, which in turn succeeded the train-wreck that was the health-care debate. After all that battering, I've scaled back on what political news I read in recent months, mostly following the bemused follies of the Republican candidates and wondering which one will be running as Third Party against Romney come the fall. Checking the calendar to find we weren't already scheduled for something else we needed to be doing at that time, I said sure.

Turns out "yes" isn't good enough; these people are persistent. They called again to confirm, and then yet again, but this third time they no longer presented it as a one-on-one presentation or information dissemination but mentioned that it was being run by the Obama re-election committee. Okay; I'd been a big supporter of the president during his run for office, and despite my deep disillusionment since at his repudiating most of the things he ran on I was curious to see what this latest proposal that wasn't going to get enacted was all about.

So, we showed up, got ourselves some tea (chai), and had a long talk with a v. nice guy who identified himself as the state director of the re-election campaign -- partly about specifics of the bill (insofar as the information sheet and little pamphlet he gave us laid them out) and partly about what the president shd or cd do to gain support. I'm afraid that while some of the bill's provisions sound good in the abstract (others, like cutting back on collecting Social Security, don't; that's just guaranteeing bigger trouble down the line), he wasn't able to convince us that it was anything but moot: Obama's assumption is that this time the other side will see reason, and compromise, and raise taxes. Why on earth shd they start acting responsibly now, when simply sabotaging the national government has worked so well for them for three years now? It was interesting to hear that he's about to resort to the 'executive orders' route of governing by fiat, which seems v. unlike his everybody-must-agree-upon-this style, but even that won't solve the major problems, all of which require funding and thus congressional support.

In the end, we were asked if we'd be interested in doing any volunteer work with the campaign. So we might end up stuffing envelopes at some point, or I may wander around the neighborhood knocking on doors; get-out-the-vote stuff (though neither of us is interested in making phone calls, having been on the receiving end of too many ourselves). Maybe at some point my enthusiasm will be rekindled, but at this point I really doubt it. Too many broken promises, too many surrenders without a fight. We'll see.

--John R.

current Kindle-book: 1956 (re. Eisenhower and the Suez Crisis)

THE ART OF THE HOBBIT

2011-11-13T22:21:00.000-08:00

So, the second new Tolkien book to arrive this past week was THE ART OF 'THE HOBBIT', by Wayne and Christina. I'd known this one was in the works for a few months, and even got to see a preview of some of its highlights this summer. It's a beautiful book, and one that anyone interested in Tolkien, Tolkien's art, or in THE HOBBIT, will want to get their hands on it as soon as possible (I got mine via amazon.co.uk). Their previous JRRT: ARTIST & ILLUSTRATOR [1995] was a major work that shd be on every Tolkien scholar's shelf, and this is a worthy, if more narrowly focused, successor.

Basically they've brought together every known illustration, map, or rough sketch Tolkien made for THE HOBBIT,* arranged them into order of where they fit into the story, and added a page or so describing each piece or set of closely related pieces. One particularly nice feature is that they've been able to use multiple gatefolds to bring together sequences, where Tolkien went through a series of attempts to capture a particular scene, like The Hill at Hobbiton, or the Elvenking's Gate, or Smaug flying 'round the Mountain.

I did my best to demonstrate the importance of Tolkien's art to the story in THE HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT, but there I only had twelve plates and two frontispieces to convey what they've used 144 pages to get across. And it's wonderful to see (particularly for those of failing eyesight, like myself -- the community of Tolkien fans and scholars alike being an aging one) the pieces are, as Wayne & Christina point out, "reproduced . . . as large as possible" [p.17], rather than shrunk down (as I needed to do to 'stuff every rift with ore', as Jn Keats wd put it). It helps that this is an oversize square-format book (ten & a half by ten & a half inches) in a handsome slipcase, resembling the original edition of PICTURES BY TOLKIEN more than it does ARTIST & ILLUSTRATOR.

The results are, I repeat, wonderful. Tolkien didn't have much confidence in himself as an artist, but like Thurber and Lofting (fellow artistic autodidacts) his work is distinctive and instantly recognizable; it's part of the tales.

And this is a definitive collection: there are a few pictures here even I've not seen before -- for example, the more detailed picture of Elrond's house [#18], or the rough sketch of Eagles' Eyrie [#40], or the first version of The Three Trolls Are Turned To Stone [#14] (I find I prefer the trolls' faces here to the final version). And many more here reproduced in sharper detail than ever before -- e.g., all the dwarven activity at The Back Door [#69]. Others I've seen at some point but not paid much attention to; here they stand out much more when placed in the right context (like #35: The Misty Mountains, which had previously been tucked at the end of the index of ARTIST & ILLUSTRATOR [H-S#200]).

This book is relatively text-light, compared with ARTIST & ILLUSTRATOR, which is as it shd be: here the focus shd all be on presenting Tolkien's art as clearly as possible. Their introduction does a good job of covering a great deal of territory in relatively little space: only eighteen pages to discuss the origins to the book, explain how the art came to be created, and comment on the "rich visual experience" of the results. I particularly admired the economy with which they addressed various complex and thorny issues -- as, for example, dating when Tolkien began and finished the story:

". . . around 1930 (the evidence is too contradictory to give a precise date), [Tolkien] began to write [The Hobbit]" [p.9]

". . . It may have reached substantially its published form by the time Tolkien lent it to C. S. Lewis around the start of 1933, or it may be that its final chapters . . . were not composed until Allen & Unwin showed an interest in the work in 1936" [p. 10]

--While I think the 1930 date is pretty firm, that's a great way of getting a lot of information judiciously into v. little space (even the choice of the word write is significant, given speculation about oral tales); likewise, they acknowledge but do not take a position re. the Carpenter hiatus. Anyone who's delved into the complexity of the evidence re. these two points can appreciate how difficult it is to clearly explain them without oversimplification: here I think there's just the right amount of simplification for this context (where the emphasis is, and shd be, all on the art).

Finally, I'm envious of one thing. They've pulled off something I wanted to do in RETURN TO BAG-END but in the end wasn't able to: assemble all eight known pictures of Bilbo** onto one spread. In my case, I simply ran out of space, and in the end agreed w. my editor at HarperCollins that it'd be better to include two more new pieces rather than devote a page to reproduction of pieces already appearing elsewhere in the book, esp. given how small the eight pieces wd have to be to all fit onto one (nine-inch by six-inch) plate. Freed of that restriction, Wayne & Christina reproduce enlargements of them all. Looking at these side-by-side is illuminating: it's clear that Tolkien had a v. clear image of what Bilbo looked like; despite his difficulty with drawing faces there's a recognizable likeness in BB's features in the majority of the portraits. It's also interesting to note that Bilbo wears some sort of footwear in four of the eight pictures (Tolkien having meant to insert a passage re. Bilbo's getting shod at Rivendell before heading up into the mountains but never having gotten around to doing so). Well done!

--John R.

.................................

*with the possible exception of the tracings of the two hasty sketches of Gandalf's hat that appear in the end of the new one-volume H.o.H. [p.901]

**at the doorstep of Bag End, inside Bag-End smoking, in the bushes by the trolls, barrel-riding (two images from different versions of this scene), bowing to Smaug (in silhouette), resting in the Eyrie, and in the sketch he drew for Houghton Mifflin, this last having first been reproduced in H.o.H.).

The New Arrivals: ART OF THE HOBBIT and MR. BLISS

2011-11-12T11:29:00.000-08:00

So, a while back my wife saw a box from amazon.co.uk that had just arrived and asked, 'have we run out of books over here that we now have to start importing them?'

Well, maybe. It used to be in the old days that the only way to get ahold of a book published in England but not the US was to set up a trade with someone in England wherein you'd buy books for them over here and ship them over there, while they'd buy an equivalent amount of books over there and ship them over here. I've had three book-trades going on over the years (with Jessica Yates, and Christina Scull, and Charles Noad), and I have them to thank for many items I'd never have been able to come across myself (such as the limited edition HOMECOMING OF BEORHTNOTH and all those Pratchetts Charles stood in line to have signed for me), and sent off many a volume from this side to hold up my end.

Nowaday with amazon.co.uk, it's easier to just buy direct -- but not always, as some items can only be sold in one country or the other (e.g., the soon-to-be-released Kindle version of THE HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT, which initially at least will be UK-only, alas). You can get killed on the exchange rate and shipping, but for some books it's worth it. And the latest such are two that arrived together on Wednesday: the new edition of MR. BLISS, and THE ART OF THE HOBBIT

To take the first one first, I remember the days when MR. BLISS was The Great Unknown: we knew there was an unpublished hand-illustrated children's book by Tolkien at the Marquette Archives but v. little about what it was about. My first letter to the Archives (which Chuck Elston showed me still in the files years later) was in fact a request to see if I cd have a copy made (they said no). And so the first task on my first weekday in Milwaukee once I arrived there in August 1981 was to go to the Archives, introduce myself, and ask to see MR. BLISS. I spent what little free time I had (this was the opening week of grad school for me to work on my Ph.D.,* and also the week I started teaching freshmen English at Marquette, along with all the business of moving into a new apartment in a new city) transcribing it into a notebook (which I still have, having unearthed it from among The Boxes not long ago). And I remember shortly thereafter when the photographers came in to take careful pictures of the original book in preparation for its publication the following year (in 1982).

To be honest, while it was a thrill to read a new piece by Tolkien, the story itself was a bit of a disappointment. Unlike FARMER GILES OF HAM, which is a little gem in its own right, and THE FATHER CHRISTMAS LETTERS, which have a sort of charm of their own, I've never really warmed to MR. BLISS or ROVERANDOM (which I heard a lot about in 1987 but had to wait to read till 1998, like everybody else).

This being the case, I have to say I really like this new (third) edition of BLISS. The first combined a facsimile of the original with typeset text on facing pages -- not really necessary, I thought, since Tolkien used clear and highly readable 'uncial' lettering -- but unfortunately they decided to replace the original cream-colored pages (from natural browning of good-quality paper over the preceding fifty years) with greyish paper, which bleached out the art somewhat.

This was replaced by a beautiful slipcase edition in the same format (facsimile on right-hand pages, facing typeset transcription on facing left-hand pages) but kept the original paper-color, so that the art came through better). I saw this second edition in Blackwells while in England in 2007 but have never seen it for sale over here; they really did a nice job of it.

Now here comes the third edition, which is really two books in one. The front cover shifts the orientation of the book from manuscript's horizontal orientation (i.e., the pages are wider than they are tall) to a more normal vertical orientation (like, say, FARMER GILES or TREE & LEAF or any of the other smallish Tolkien volumes). They've also typeset the whole with the pictures interspersed where needed, making for an attractive little book.

And for those who prefer the original, all you have to do is flip the volume over and there's the whole story again, this time in its original horizontal orientation, facsimile pages, and facing transcription pages. So in fact here we have the same book twice, starting from the respective outside covers and both ending in the middle. It's an interesting and I thought highly effective layout; well done, HarperCollins! There's also a brief (two-page) introduction [unsigned] that sets the stage while adroitly avoiding the various unknowns about the tale (exactly when it was written, its inspiration, &c).

All in all, a nice little volume that shd get a little more attention to this minor but amusing little bit of Tolkien.

Next up: THE ART OF THE HOBBIT

--John R.

*and also the week of the infamous episode in which I met with my advisor for the first time, and he told me "I don't want to catch you working on Tolkien while you're here". Ah, those were the days.

THE HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT, second edition

2011-11-07T16:09:00.000-08:00

So, today brought the long-awaited author's copy of the new, one-volume, expanded edition of THE HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT.

Yay!

A quick skim shows that the new note about trolls turning to stone (citing Grettir's Saga and Helen Buckhurst) [p. 110] made it in, as did a new page of material about yet another version of Denham's list to surface (the earliest one yet) [p. 854]. The notes and citations in Appendix IV: Tolkien/Ransome, have now been straightened out. All the illustrations from the original edition are here, including both frontispieces and all twelve pages of plates, plus one new illustration: two sketchy depictions of Gandalf's hat [p. 901]. I see to my regret that the additions to the Acknowledgments, esp. my thanks to Charles Noad for all his help proofing this new edition, didn't make it in.

This new edition does have APPENDIX V: AUTHOR'S COPIES LIST, which identifies all the people on a list Tolkien drew up when he was trying to decide who to give his twelve author's copies to.* And it includes the ADDENDUM, or 'Seventh Stage': some new manuscript material Christopher Tolkien found and sent me too late for inclusion in the original edition. I've divided this into six short sections:

i. Timeline of Events [the fifteen days following Durin's Day]

ii. Notes on a Parley [detailed description of the Front Gate]

iii. Responses to Queries [some proofreader's concerns addressed by JRRT]

iv. Personae [an interesting listing of Thorin & Company]

v. Runic Charts [details on using dwarven runes]

vi. Feanorian Letters [details on writing in tengwar, including punctuation and numbers]

It's a great pity that the latter two weren't published in the Longmans Green edition of 1966, which seems to have been when the bulk of this was written -- just think how readers in the initial wave of Tolkien mania wd have loved a detailed account of how to write in Elvish (tengwar, that is). Ah well: better late (forty-plus years) than never.

There were also extensive errata that should have been incorpoarated into this new edition that I haven't had time to check yet; with in any luck, we took care of any remaining typos and fixed various small glitches here and there (Langland! Langland! Langland!)

On the whole, I find I stand by what I wrote; this edition adds a little here and there, but aside from a thirty-two page addition of new material it's substantially the same book as before -- just larger and more portable, with many small refinements of detail.

Contrary to initial report, it does not weigh five pounds, 'only' two pounds thirteen & a half ounces (1.29 kg for the metrically inclined).

As my wife said: IT'S STILL DONE. AGAIN!

--John R.

*I find it vastly amusing that he initially wrote down C. S. Lewis's name, then crossed it off

--not because he didn't want to give him one, but because Lewis already had an advance copy (in order for him to do the reviews). Still, it's amusing.

Local Election, 2011

2011-11-07T15:20:00.000-08:00

Election 2011

So, to match Janice's write-up on the various issues and candidates she posted on Facebook, here are my own thoughts re. the local election tomorrow. All opinions are my own.

--JDR

Initiatives:

1125. Normally I'd vote 'yes' on this one, since it's anti-toll road, and I'm an opponent of tolling public roads. I also like it's provision that any toll be specifically targeted to a single road or bridge and retired after that project had paid for itself -- as I understand it, that was the case w. the Tacoma Narrows bridge and the 520 Floating Bridge.

But in the end I had to vote against it because (a) there's a sting in its tail in that it chokes off funding for public transport, like the badly-needed expansion of the new light rail, and (b) Tim Eyman supported it, which means that whatever it says on the surface its true purpose is to defund government. NO

1163: reinstate background checks on nursing home workers. Given the potential for abuse, increasing scrutiny here is a good thing in my book. YES

1183, the hard liquor bill: we got not less than nine flyers asking us to vote against this one (eleven if you count portmanteaux flyers that also opposed 1125 and, in one case, supported 1163), and four against.

This is the rock-and-a-hard-place vote for me, since I'm opposed both to the law as it is and to the proposed change. I don't like the state running liquor stores any more than I like the army fighting unjust wars or a governor executing accused criminals. But on the other hand, I don't want there to be MORE liquor stores, which is what the bill would allow. So as a Prohibitionist I voted NO: fewer hard liquor outlets is better than opening the floodgates.

Joint Resolutions

8205: this is v. much an editor's bill, standardizing the Constitution's text so it agrees in various places about the state's residency requirement to vote in elections. YES.

8206, the rainy day fund. The tobacco settlement was squandered by tax deadbeats in the state legislature (think this was back in the early Bush days), and the rainy day fund that replaced it under Gregoire has been a godsend to keeping the state from going under during the Great Recession. This bill requires extra deposits into the fund in boom times so that a little of that windfall is there to offset the next crash. YES.

CANDIDATES:

County Assessor, Lloyd Hara, unopposed. Seems to have done a decent job. YES

Director of Elections, Mark Greene vs. Sherril Huff: HUFF. As Janice points out in her facebook post re. the election, Greene rambles about how they did him wrong back in '04 rather than trying to explain what he'd do if elected. And so, while it might be fun to have an anti-interventionalist playwright in a major elective post, I'm going with the incumbent here.

Appeals Court Judge, Michael Spearman, unopposed. YES. Judge Spearman sounds like a good candidate, and I trust Gregoire's judgment in having appointed him to the post he's now seeking election to.

Port Commissioner, Richard Pope vs. Gael Tarleton: TARLETON. Pope comes across as a tax deadbeat who wants to divest port assets; Tarleton talks about transparent bidding, disaster preparedness, clean air standards, and free wi-fi at the airport. This one's a no-brainer.

Port Commissioner, Dean Willard vs. Bill Bryant. Both these candidates sound good, and I cd go with either of them. In the end, I gave Willard the edge because of what Janice wrote re. Bryant's favoritism towards executives over workers. WILLARD.

KENT CITY COUNCIL

Deborah Ranniger vs. Bailey Stober: RANNIGER. Not only is she a strong supporter of city parks (one of the nicer things about living in Kent), but Stober ran a nasty attack ad in the local paper. Stober also seems to have a background of not paying his own bills, while critical of the current city council for not managing finances better (ironic, that). In the abstract, Stober is the more attractive candidate; we cd use a community activist on the city council. But the closer you look the less he walks the walk.

Les Thomas vs. Nancy Skorupa: THOMAS. Thomas lists a string of achievements that have bettered Kent in recent years, then goes and ruins it by going pie-in-the-sky, promising to cut taxes while providing even more good things. Skorupa just whines about taxes without offering anything. And so even though Thomas did some annoying grandstanding recently at council meetings, he edges out the (other) tax deadbeat.

Bill Boyce vs. Debbie Raplee: normally Boyce wd get my vote here, but his having been on the school board that provoked the teacher strike two years back has to count against him. I've been unable to find out how he voted back then, but he seems to have been on the anti-teacher side of the issue. Raplee as incumbent gets to align herself with the various good things Kent has done to keep afloat in recent years. So, RAPLEE, by default.

Dana Ralph vs. Michael S. Sealfon: Ralph doesn't make much of a case for herself, but then Sealfon doesn't really give any reason at all why we shd elect him, other than that he seems to think he shd have the job. RALPH.

KENT SCHOOLS

Larry Sims vs. Russell Hanscom: SIMS. Even though Sims didn't bother to submit a profile to the voter's pamphlet, he still outperforms Hanscom, who can't decide whether he'll serve or not if elected (cf. KENT REPORTER, Oct 21st, p.2). Ironic, given that Hanscom's voter profile boasts of how he's "committed to making the Kent School District the best . . . in the State". Yeah, right. Sims' statement printed in the local paper basically says he thinks things are on-track and wants to keep them that way. I'm okay with that.

Karen L. DeBruler: an actual teacher, running unopposed. No-brainer. DEBRULER.

Debbie Straus vs. Leslie Kae Hamada: HAMADA? Neither candidate spoke strongly to me, but Straus seemed more pie-in-the-sky about "our mission to Successfully Prepare All Students for Their Future" (caps hers), as if she thinks in bullet points.

HOSPITAL COMMISIONER

Paul Joos vs. Mary Alice Heuschel: JOOS. Flyers in the mail seem enthusiastic for Heuschel, but I'd rather have a stakeholder like Dr. Joos making decisions about a hospital than an outsider with no hospital experience, like Heuschel (a school superintendent). Besides, I like Joos' promise to reduce the number of administrators and hire more nurses instead.

--JDR

November 1st, 1931

2011-11-06T13:27:00.000-08:00

Today (Tuesday the 1st) would have been my father's eightieth birthday. It was my last full day in Magnolia, so I was able to go by and put flowers on the grave. I still picture him as looking like he did when I knew him, and since he died just after turning thirty-seven I find it almost impossible to picture what he'd look like as an old man. How I'd love to have the chance to talk to him, adult to adult, and ask his opinion of this and that. I know he'd be particularly interested in following the presidential election, the 'tea party' nonsense, and other current events. But as wistful as I am for the forty-two (now almost forty-three) years without, I'm grateful for the ten years I had with him. Storyteller, songwriter, teacher extraordinaire, and a great dad. Rest in Peace.

--John R.

Tonight I'm in . . .

2011-11-05T15:45:00.000-07:00

. . . the city where I saw the only president I've ever met and shaken hands with: Lyndon Johnson, when he was running for re-election back in 1964, when I was not quite six years old.*

. . . the hometown of Scott Joplin, the great ragtime composer. We stopped by the local museum, which boasted online and in see-Arkansas-sites literature that they had Scott Joplin's piano. Well, sort of. That is, they had a piano known to have been in town when Scott Joplin was growing up here. And it's known that some of the families for whom Joplin's mother worked as a maid allowed little Scott, who was something of a prodigy, to play their pianos. So it's possible that Joplin once played this particular piano, out of all the hundreds of pianos he must have played in his life. But there's no proof of any sort to say he did.

--I did get to see the Scott Joplin mural a few blocks away, when I was roaming around the deserted and slightly dilapidated streets downtown, looking for the (well-hidden) museum. I'm not usually much for murals, which I take to be a sign of faux-nostalia festooning decaying courthouse squares, but this one was oddly touching. In any case, it's put me in a mood to listen to some of his music, esp. SCOTT JOPLIN PIANO RAGS, performed by Joshua Rifkin (which I discovered back in the Lake Geneva library and eventually found my own copy of).** I may even dig out TREEMONISHA (or, then again, I may not).

. . . the city I was born in*** -- though given that I was almost stillborn, was repeatedly attacked by the family cat, and had double pneumonia before I was two, I'm probably lucky we moved away when I was two.

. . . the town my grandmother and oldest uncle on the Rateliff side (Uncle Aubrey) lived in the last years of their lives; I have many memories of going over to visit them, and also Aunt Polly, my father's only sister, during my high school years.

. . . and the city made famous in the old song "Cotton Fields":

When those cotton bolls get rotten

You can't pick very much cotton

In those old cotton fields back home

Well it was down in Louisiana

Just about a mile from xxxxxxxxx.****

In those old cotton fields back home.

*I'm told I was taken to see Senator Kennedy four years before, but of course I have no memory of that. And while I've met Clinton twice, it was before he was president (the first time when as Attorney General he came and addressed Boys State, the second time during a quick layover he made at the Magnolia airport while running for re-election as governor). I've also encountered President Carter twice at book-signings but only spoken to him once, and both those were after his term in office, after he'd transitioned from being a disappointing president into our greatest ex-president. So Johnson is the only president I've seen while he was president.

**ragtime eventually morphed into jazz, but we can't blame Joplin for that; in any case, he was dead by the time that happened.

***I was lucky that in those days the delivery rooms in St. Michael's hospital were on the Arkansas side of the border; I'm told they were later moved to the Texas side, which wd have had me born in Texas.

****in fact, it's more like fifteen/twenty miles, but like Keats' 'stout Cortez' the songwriter preferred a good rhythm over geographical accuracy.

................

P.S.: It took me longer than I expected to get this post written up properly.

I'm actually back home again now, but I went ahead and kept the format of this "Tonight I'm in" post as if I'd been able to finish it and post it while I was still in Arkansas.

The New Arrival: A TOLKIEN TAPESTRY

2011-11-02T13:05:00.001-07:00

The New Arrival: A TOLKIEN TAPESTRY

So, the day before I left for my trip, the mail brought the latest addition to my Tolkien shelves, Cor Blok's A TOLKIEN TAPESTRY: PICTURES TO ACCOMPANY THE LORD OF THE RINGS. I've already expressed my opinion of Blok's artwork in an earlier post; this deeper exploration confirms me in the opinion that the story behind the picture-cycle is more interesting that the art itself. Imagine what it'd be like to discover that Barbara Remington, in addition to her gosh-awful covers for the Ballantine Tolkiens, had carried on for several years creating over a hundred more pictures in a similar style, only now to be revealed in their glorious awfulness. That's essentially what we've got with this book, except that it's the artist who did the Dutch paperback covers instead of the psychedelic American ones.

What we have here are a hundred and forty pictures, created between 1958 and 1961, retelling THE LORD OF THE RINGS (more or less*) in faux-naif art. I don't think anyone has done this extensive a series, at least not that I've seen assembled in sequence. Oddly enough I thought the back cover of the dust jacket, which creates a mosaic of some thirty pieces seen all at once side-by-side in a great collage, was the most effective presentation. The fact that there are so many pieces in this book means that some scenes that never get illustrated appear here -- Grima spitting, the bath at Crickhollow, the Fellowship being led while blindfolded in Lorien, Nob helping Merry (the only depiction of him I remember ever seeing), or Bill Ferny being hit by the apple. But Blok's art is such that he provides not just a truly inept Gollum (he looks like a splay-footed duck) but possibly the worst Goldberry ever, a truly hideous Galadriel, and worst of the whole lot a gaggle of Ents looking like walking cigars festooned with green rot-fungus.

The most valuable thing about this book is the Tolkien letter reproduced on page 6 (and a paragraph from another quoted on page 7; Blok also summarizes two things Tolkien told him regarding Blok's art on pages 15 and 25 (that he did not want a definitive illustrated edition that wd associate his work with any particular artist [e.g., Carroll & Tenniel], and that Blok had completely misrepresented Gollum by forgetting he was of hobbit-kin).

Blok's commentary is quite interesting, both in his history of the project** and his pointing out specific details in individual paintings -- I'd missed, for example, the fact that Gollum always appears in silhouette, with no refining detail. Reading this in conjunction with looking at the pictures, I'm forced to conclude that Blok is an Erol Otus -- his art only looks inept, and actually is the result of a highly trained artist deliberately choosing that effect -- what Tolkien called elsewhere "the modern mode in which those who can draw try to conceal it."***

In the end there truly is no arguing about taste. And I'm glad that those who find some merit in Cor Blok's work have revived and printed it (and doing a v. gd job of it too, I might add****); it's an interesting project, and worth preserving. But I hope the year after next's Tolkien calendar features somebody whose work isn't just occasionally interesting in a weird and freakish way but actually art I'd enjoy looking at for a whole month at a time per image. Say, a Hobbit calendar using the artwork in Wayne & Christina's new book. Or I'd be happy for an entire calendar illustrated by Tolkien's beautiful calligraphy, given my druthers.

In the meantime, we get Howard the Gollum in Gormenghast.

--JDR

............................................

*some crucial scenes are missing -- for example, Blok seems to lose interest in the latter part of the story: there are only two pictures of minor scenes following the Ring's destruction, one of Gimli and Legolas in the Glittering Caves and one of hobbit-shirriffs accompanying the four travellers.

**his 'Barbarusia' project, which preceded his LotR, was a sort of Islandia for artists; his 'Iron Parachute' which was to follow is a massive still-incomplete graphic novel with Joycean prose (think CERBERUS THE ARDVARK issued as a single volume all at one time but written in a style of FINNEGANS WAKE word-slush).

***JRRT to R. Unwin, December 1965 (cf. LETTERS OF JRRT). Was Tolkien thinking about Blok? No way to tell . . .

****I only found one likely glitch: I don't have a copy of LotR with me to check this, and it's always dangerous quoting from memory, but I'm pretty sure the quote on page 74 doesn't apply to the Inn at Bree but instead to the House in Crickhollow.

Tonight I'm in . . .

2011-10-30T18:52:00.000-07:00

one of the larger Confederate cities that never did fall to the Yankees,* thanks to the failure of the Red River campaign. Also, or so I'm told, a place whose founder and namesake broke up a 140 mile long log jam (the 'Great Raft') in order to open the Red River to navigation -- including my birthplace, which is a good seventy miles upriver from here.

--John R.

*i.e., not until after the war was over.

Tonight I'm in . . .

2011-10-29T18:50:00.000-07:00

. . . a town founded 148 years ago; before that it was a plantation named Frog Level.

--John R.

Tonight I'm in . . .

2011-10-28T18:49:00.000-07:00

. . . the only state capital whose Capitol building looks exactly like the one in D. C., except with no Indian on the top.

--JDR

With a Whimper

2011-10-26T21:44:00.000-07:00

So, the Iraqi war winds down at last. Ironically, given that the timetable for withdrawal was negotiated by Bush, who had no intention of honoring the agreement,* and that it forces Obama to keep a campaign promise that he's since repudiated. Turns out they both didn't take into account how much the Iraqis hate being an occupied colonial state run by a puppet government. And so, after killing roughly five percent of the country's population and created the chaos that led about another twenty percent to flee (either to relocate in other areas of Iraq to escape 'ethnic cleaning' or to leave the country entirely for Jordan et al), in the end we settle for the Vietnam option: leave behind massive amounts of armaments,** withdraw to a fortress-embassy, and Go Home.***

About Time.

--JDR

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/26/obama-iraq_n_1032507.html

--JDR

*kind of like Churchill's promises to free India after WWII

**when we left S. Vietnam, it had the world's third largest airforce, since we gave them most of the military equipment in the field rather than bringing it back home. It didn't do them any good.

***here's hoping there's no secret clause in the agreement we don't know about -- like Nixon's promising the N. Vietnamese war reparations

The New Arrival: Shore's Symphony

2011-10-25T11:13:00.001-07:00

So, on Saturday came a new cd: THE LORD OF THE RINGS SYMPHONY, by Howard Shore, performed by the '21st Century Symphony Orchestra & Chorus', who are apparently based in Lucerne (Switzerland), and directed by Ludwig Wicki. This is not to be confused with THE LORD OF THE RINGS: SYMPHONY No. 1, by Johan de Meij, which has been around for more than two decades now. Instead, it's Shore's scores for the LotR films adapted into symphony form, more or less. I say 'more or less', because it's rather unusual for a symphony to have six movements (four is traditional). Here, of course, the six parts correspond to the six books that make up Tolkien's LotR, rather than (as I expected) a three-part structure deriving from the three Peter Jackson films.

So how is the music? Well, if you disliked Shore's scores (as a small but vocal minority does) you won't like this either, since it derives from the film music. Surprisingly enough, I found it less impressive than the original individual soundtracks from which it derives. Played too softly, it vanishes into the background; played loudly, I found I had some trouble identifying where in the story we were at different points (which had not been the case with the three soundtracks). I'd thought this would be tighter and have greater impact than the longer scores, but I think the opposite turns out to be the case. This shorter version seems to me to have less focus, oddly enough.

Such at any rate is my first impression. It's entirely possible Shore's symphony will grow on my over time. But for now I think I'll be more likely to re-listen to the cds I have (FR, TT, RK, the stage musical) and that this might drift towards the back of the shelf. We'll see. At least it has more impact than the de Meij, which I've never been able to listen to all the way through without my attention wandering -- though I see that there's a new recording of this out, from the London Symphony Orchestra. If anyone has heard this, I'd be interested in how it compares to the earlier recordings: does it have more character?

--John R.

I Am Interviewed

2011-10-24T16:10:00.000-07:00

. . . by Michael Martinez, as the second in a series of pieces he's doing with Tolkien scholars (the first, last week, was with MYTHLORE editor Janet Croft; next week's being with Wayne & Christina (Oct. 28th), followed by Michael Drout (Nov. 4th) and then John Garth (Nov. 11th). Mine mostly focuses on THE HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT, but does expend to other matters Tolkienian as well. Here's the link:

http://middle-earth.xenite.org/2011/10/21/an-interview-with-john-rateliff/

--John R.

The Doom That Came To Footnotes

2011-10-17T19:29:00.000-07:00

So, today a friend* sent me a link to the following mediation by a fellow practitioner of the fine art of footnoting, about the melancholy prospects e-books offer those of us who like our footnotes (and I do).

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/books/review/will-the-e-book-kill-the-footnote.html?_r=4&src=recg&pagewanted=all

I have to say I haven't found things too bad yet, but then most of the books I read on the Kindle don't have much in the way of notes, and most of the books I read that are thickly be-noted I read as actual books (e.g., most Tolkien scholarship). Ironic that a format that shd be able to easily accommodate something like a note shd make cross-referencing more difficult and not less. Especially when audiobooks have by and large solved this problem -- I was particularly impressed by the deft treatment of footnotes in the audiobook of Susanna Clarke's STRANGE & NORRELL, where each notes was given its separate track on the cd, making them easy to skip for those who had a mind to press on, while most listeners could enjoy them as they came. But then JONATHAN STRANGE & MR. NORRELL might be a special case, since I ultimately concluded that the notes were better than the story there -- that is, that Clarke's world-building was superlative while the main plot was less interesting than the setting it took place in. That's rare.

I also admire Terry Pratchett's footnotes, which are a distinctive feature of his style of humor (or perhaps humour); a feature I think he derived (along with so much else) from Douglas Adams's HITCH-HIKER'S GUIDE. And of course in my own work I've always thought that, having learned grammatically how to construct compound-complex sentences, it'd be a pity not to use them. I'm also fond of parentheticals (a trait I share with Tolkien).** And I like footnotes. Sometimes my footnotes have footnotes (usually marked with a dagger). Sometimes I need to distinguish between two sets of notes, such as between Denham's notes and my notes in the DENHAM TRACT I reproduced in an appendix of H.o.H. And sometimes different notes do different things, as with the Notes to my commentary vs. the Text Notes to Tolkien's drafting in my presentation of the HOBBIT Mss.

So, as not just a reader of footnotes but also an inveterate writer of notes, I'd be sad to see the passing of the footnote -- but I trust that endnotes will still be with us, if a little harder to access. And if all else fails, we'll still have parentheticals.

--John R.

......................

*thanks, Doug!

**it's a feature I greatly enjoy in FARMER GILES, LotR, and esp. THE HOBBIT, and something I miss in THE SILMARILLION.

The New Arrival: Ruud's Companion.

2011-10-16T20:29:00.000-07:00

So, this week the mail brought a book I only learned about through amazon.com's 'Recommendations',* Jay Rudd's CRITICAL COMPANION TO J. R. R. TOLKIEN: A LITERARY REFERENCE TO HIS LIFE AND WORK. This is a hefty book (650 pages) at a hefty price ($75)** that seems to have just slipped out without anyone being aware it was in the works or, so far as I can tell, that it's now been released.

I think this is because its target audience is clearly libraries (the publisher is Facts on File), and its intended readers are high school and college students who need to write a book report but don't necessarily want to read the book in question. It falls into the same territory as Michael Drout's TOLKIEN ENCYCLOPEDIA or Wayne & Christina's COMPANION & GUIDE in its attempt to cover Tolkien's life and (especially) works through a series of encyclopedia-like entries, but unlike those seems to be largely a one-man show. Rudd has clearly put an enormous amount of work in on this book, but I'm not sure how many Tolkien scholars will find themselves making much use of it: its intended reader is the non-specialist.

I haven't had a chance to read the book yet, but on a quick skim it seems that Rudd derives most of his information from relatively few sources (e.g., Carpenter and Garth seem to provide pretty much all the biographical information). I haven't found any signs yet of original research, such as distinguish the Hammond-Skull, while it lacks the Drout project's all-star cast, which largely offset that production's flaws.

As usual when first looking at a great big book like this, I check the relative accuracy and quality by reading a few entries on topics I know really well -- like THE HOBBIT. Here Rudd starts by saying that "The origin of The Hobbit is well-known" and then proceeds to get several of the salient facts wrong. Oddly enough, Rudd devotes three paragraphs to describing the existence and significance of the 1960 Hobbit but never mentions that it's been published. I suspect from this that his book was a long time in the works, and so wasn't able to take advantage of books published within the last half-decade or so (just as my own MR. BAGGINS wasn't able to draw much from the Hammond-Scull).

Rudd's method is to first provide a brief overview, then a synopsis of the text, then commentary on the book, then some notes on major characters, ending with a selective bibliography. In the case of THE HOBBIT, the whole entry runs some thirty-five pages (p. 95 to 129), of which fourteen are a plot-summary. The commentary that follows is a bit eccentric -- for example, he asserts that Bilbo is the Grail Knight and Bard the Fisher-King -- and its general thrust is suggested by his including in this entry's Suggested Reading: Northrop Frye, Joseph Campbell, Jung, Propp.

The sheer bulk of the synopses indicate that this really is a book meant for the non-specialist (cf. the paragraph or two summarizing each poem in ATB). But that being the case, if this book is going to be the only authority someone checks when reading about Tolkien, it's all the more important that it get the facts right. A quick skim makes me worry on that front (e.g., "Thorin is the grandson of Thrain, the last dwarvish King under the Mountain"), but I may have just been unlucky and come across more than my fair share of the sort of inevitable slips that occur in any large project.*** I'll certainly be dipping into it and reading more over the next few weeks.

So, my initial impression: an impressive achievement, but to be used with some caution.

--John R.

current reading: THE ZERO STONE by Andre Norton [1968]

current audiobooks: The Learning Company lectures on Skspr***

.......................

*i.e., 'you seem to buy everything there is to buy w. Tolkien's name on it; why not buy this too?'

**making it the latest of a recent run of budget-busting bks on Tolkien.

***Captions are a particular problem, as when a photo of the Radcliffe Camera states that "The manuscript of Roverandom was discovered among Tolkien's papers in this library" (p. 333). Um, no. Also, at least four times cover art for movie tie-in editions of various volumes of THE LORD OF THE RINGS are inexplicably described as "coloring book editions". However, these gaffs shd not be held against Rudd himself, since captions for most publishers are not written by a given book's author and are invariably inserted into books at a v. late stage, usually too late for even the editor to double-check them.

****not surprisingly, they think Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. I gather the new movie just out about Skspr ("Anonymous") subscribes to one of the various conspiracy-theories instead.

UPDATE Oct. 17th: I've corrected the spelling of "Roverandum" to "Roverandom", as per D.B.'s comment -- JDR

New Tolkien Calendar

2011-10-14T22:12:00.000-07:00

So, today I finally managed to pick up next year's Tolkien Calendar, the second in a row with Cor Blok's pug-ugly art. The most interesting part is the 'A Tolkien Tapestry' centerfold, arranging dozens of his LotR illustrations into sequence in tiny thumbnail format. The actual monthly displays give us more of his signature pieces, such as most of his characters being armless, and Gollum-as-a-duck, which sounds like a joke but unfortunately isn't. There are some odd choices of composition as well -- has anyone else ever devoted a painting to Grima spitting? (cf the one for October). I hear there's a book due out soon explaining how he came to do this project, Tolkien's response to it (or what parts of it he saw), &c -- all of which actually sounds more interesting than the art itself. Which is, as I might have said, pug-ugly.

I did have an amusing exchange with the sales clerk at Barnes & Noble when I bought it that went something like this.

He: oh, Tolkien calendar.

Me: yes. Tolkien's said to have seen and actually approve some of the art.

He (after long, considering pause): perhaps what Tolkien saw isn't these pieces . . .

Me: or perhaps Tolkien was a kind-hearted man.

--John R.

current reading: THE STAR BEAST by Rbt. A. Heinlein (just finished)

THE ZERO STONE by Andre Norton.*

*probably my favorite book before I read LotR.

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today . . .

2011-10-07T13:13:00.001-07:00

So, I thought of naming this post something like "TSR (New Fish, Twenty Years On)", but in the end had to go with the Sgt. Pepper reference.

Today marks exactly twenty years since I started work at TSR, back in the Lake Geneva days. I was one of four new hires that month, so we all had the 'New Fish' lecture together from Jim Ward, the head of our department; my immediate bosses were Steve Winter (AD&D core group) and Bruce Heard (D&D group).

Of the four of us, I started first (Monday October 7th, 1991). Rich Baker and Thomas

Reid started together a week later (Monday October 14th) and Wolfgang Baur started the week after that (Monday October 21st). I suspect I started a week before Rich and Thomas because when the nice lady at TSR called and offered me the job and asked when I could start work I answered, well, that afternoon and the next day are pretty busy; would the day after tomorrow (a Wednesday) be okay? They assured me that the next Monday (the 7th) wd be fine, which gave me the rest of that week to finish up my paper on Charles Williams' best play (TERROR OF LIGHT) for the Huttar-Sckakel collection (THE RHETORIC OF VISION, eventually published in 1996). I was living in Milwaukee at the time, so I cd commute from where we lived on the Lower East Side; I suspect the others got hired on the same day and were given two (or, in Wolf's case, three) weeks to move into the area.

A lot of water under those bridges since then. Rich quickly became one of TSR (& later WotC)'s best designers, as well as at one point a brand manager (of the Forgotten Realms) and novelist in the TSR book line (I recommend his Ravens' Bluff novel, although my favorite of his novels, the BIRTHRIGHT one, never got published in its original form, alas). And now Rich has just completed the unprecedented achievement of spending twenty consecutive years working in the rpg department at TSR/WotC. No one else has ever done that in TSR/WotC's thirty-eight year history,* and there can't be many at any rpg company who can boast a similar record.** Well done, Rich!

Thomas*** went from editing (with the occasional freelance design) to eventually brand manager of the core AD&D line (wh. throughout the early nineties was overseen by Steve Winter, one of the unsung heroes of TSR days), before eventually leaving to work in the computer game industry, like so many others who got their start in rpgs (cf. Jeff Grubb as an outstanding example). Last I heard, he was back in Austin, still working on novels and computer games.

Wolf I see the most of, since we're in the same gaming group (though with the newborn his attendance is mostly in abeyance right now). He became consecutively the editor of DUNGEON and then DRAGON, as well as building up quite a reputation as a freelance designer, particularly of al-QADIM. He was also the first of us to leave TSR, making the move to Wizards well before TSR went on the rocks and eventually leaving WotC in turn before the layoffs started there a few years later. These days he manages his own little rpg empire, Open Design (for which I've freelanced several times), with his own magazine KOBOLD QUARTERLY.

And I, through three distinct stints at TSR (1991-1996), WotC (1997-2001), and WotC/Hasbro (2003-2005), got to work with a lot of great people, many of whom I still consider close friends, and got to work on a lot of great projects, most of which I'm proud to have my name on. And through it all, in what little bit of "free time" I cd manage, I kept plugging away at MR. BAGGINS, which I'd started in earnest just about the time TSR hired me (Taum having died in August, less than six weeks earlier), though in the end I was only able to finish it by working full-time on the thing in the year and a half after I left WotC for the final time. And since then it's been the Independent Scholar route, buttressed by the occasional freelance.

...................................

*Kim Mohan, their managing editor (the final set of eyes who proofreads every rpg product before it goes out the door) has been there longer overall -- I remember he got his twenty year pin not long before I left for the last time in December 2005 -- but he'd had a hiatus, having worked at TSR (where he was the second editor of DRAGON MAGAZINE), left to follow Gygax to New Infinities, and then came back after Gygax's new company collapsed.

**Lynn Willis of Chaosium, perhaps?

***historical trivia fact: Thomas's grandmother is one of the two people who could testify that Lee Harvey Oswald had been in the Texas Book Repository at the time Kennedy was assassinated in Dealey Plaza, having run into him at the soft drink machine as he was making his way downstairs a minute or so after the shooting (the other being Robin MacNeil, later of the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, who had a brief exchange with Oswald as the later was leaving the building).

Update: having half-drafted this piece, I fell into one of my not-posting spells that strike every now and then, and so am only now (Fr. 10/14) resuming. In the meantime I've been able to see a few more old friends from TSR days of yore: Miranda Horner, Bruce Cordell, and Monte Cook. Been good to reminisce and catch up a bit on what they're doing now. Many the best thing about working in the rpg industry is the number of really interesting, really nice people you get to meet along the way. --JDR

My Newest (re-) publication

2011-10-06T10:51:00.000-07:00

So, a few months back (February-March) I got an unexpected request from an unexpected source. The folks at Gale Publishing (aka Cengage Learning) wanted permission to reprint my essay, "A Kind of Elvish Craft: Tolkien as Literary Craftsman", which I'd originally written as my 2007 Blackwelder lecture at Marquette and then, to my great delight, had published as the lead article in TOLKIEN STUDIES (Vol. VI [2009]). Gale are famous for printing small editions of library-only books, long series about authors, and the like. My piece appears in TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE CRITICISM, Vol. 258. *

Or so I'm told. I haven't had a chance to check for myself, since my contributor's copy hasn't arrived. So, if you find yourself in a library which carries the series and happen to notice whether this new volume is on the shelves yet, let me know. Suzzallo-Allen, based on their online catalogue, seem to have most of the set but not the newer volumes yet.

But, in any case, thought I'd share. Woo-hoo.

--JDR

...................................

*Here's a link that gives an idea of what a typical volume in the series is like:

http://www.gale.cengage.com/servlet/ItemDetailServlet?region=9&imprint=000&cf=p&titleCode=TCLC&type=3&dc=null&dewey=null&id=251411

--JDR

Jack London and The Lost Road

2011-10-04T22:29:00.000-07:00

So, I've just finished reading a book I came across on one of the downstairs bookcases while we were staying at Trout Lake (nr Mt Adams, just north of the Columbia River gorge) last week, and which our hostess* v. kindly loaned to me: Jack London's BEFORE ADAM [1907]. It turned out not to be much of a book -- there's a reason that most of what London wrote goes unread these days, aside from a few classics -- but was interesting in several ways.

First off, as a early man/primitive man story, it reminded me both of a story about cavemen by H. G. Wells (the title of which I've forgotten) I came across years ago when leafing through bound volumes of THE IDLER in the Marquette Archives in search of Sidney Sime artwork (one of the ones I found I'd love to have a reproduction of: "The Brother of Ali Baba Lost in the Woods" -- but unfortunately in the years since I've lost the reference)** and THE INHERITORS by Wm Golding -- wh. I've not read and know only through a presentation on it I attended at one of the first WisCons I went to (hence, in the early 80s, since I moved to Milwaukee in August 1981 and first attended WisCon the following February).

London's story is much closer to Golding's in its bleak depiction of one race of early men being systematically exterminated by another, and I wd not be surprised if it were a source. In Golding's case, it's the Neanderthals (who are the point of view characters) being wiped out by Cro-Magnon (i.e., our ancestors). In London's he depicts a time when there were three distinct races of humans living in close proximity:*** The Tree People (who still retain a lot of arboreal features), The Folk ('missing links', who include the narrator), and The Fire People (who are more advanced, with bows and language).

What interested me are two features that v. much remind me of Tolkien's THE LOST ROAD.

First, the narrator is a modern-day man haunted by vivid dreams of a previous life in which he was Big Tooth, one of The Folk. This seems v. like the Errols in LOST ROAD and for that matter Ramer and Arry in THE NOTION CLUB PAPERS. One thing that had puzzled me in Tolkien's time-travel stories was his insistence at one point (I forget where) that the modern day characters were not re-incarnations of their Numenorean selves but inherited memories of those events through being descendents of those distant ancestors.

That didn't make any kind of sense to me -- either they were re-incarnated or they weren't -- but London's book makes much the same claim. His modern-day narrator is not the same person come to life again in a new body, but a descendent of the person who felt and thought and acted long ago. A Lysenko-ist, London believes that memories can be inherited genetically. Thus, for example, he argues that the dream of falling some people have, but always waking up before hitting the ground, is because those people are descended from hominids who fell from trees or other high places but caught themselves before hitting the ground. London claims that no one has the dream of hitting the ground, because those individuals died in the fall and hence had no descendents to passed on the traumatic memory to. Which is no more absurd, I suppose, than the modern claims some make that people are afraid of snakes because of little furry mammals being hunted by the dinosaurs (people are afraid of snakes because they're taught to be afraid of snakes. duh.).

Now, this seems v. like what Tolkien must have been getting at. The Errol father-and-son pair are not literally the two Numenoreans re-incarnated, the way elves can re-incarnate (with the same soul and personality), but ancestors of the modern-day Englishmen who under the right circumstances can re-awaken those inherited memories and re-experience events in their ancestors' lives. Which of course ties in to 'the past alive in the present' (to give one of Jared Lobdell's catchphrases from ENGLAND & ALWAYS a new application) in the NCP, where past events can erupt explosively in the present. In the abstract, described like that, it sounds much more like a David Lindsay novel than anything we associate with Tolkien. Which is perhaps just a good reminder that Tolkien's not as predictable as we sometimes think.

--John R.

.....................

*better known as Marjorie Burns, author of PERILOUS REALMS. Thanks again, Bijee.

**this was back when I was working on my Dunsany dissertation, a section of which is devoted to the wholly remarkable Dunsany-Sime partnership.

***the accompanying introduction (by McKiernan) and afterword (by Eisley) to the edition I read were careful to point out that London was quite wrong in depicting multiple hominids alive at the same time -- which, amusingly enough, is itself quite wrong, as recent discoveries such as the Flores hobbit reveals.

Dimitra Fimi's class

2011-10-03T22:16:00.001-07:00

So, today began this fall's session of Dr. Dimitra Fimi's online Tolkien class, J. R. R. TOLKIEN: MYTH AND MIDDLE EARTH IN CONTEXT. I've been interested in this since first hearing about it a few years ago, and this time around I'm going to be auditing it. Here's a brief description of the course:

http://www3.uwic.ac.uk/english/education/enterprise/courses/tolkien/pages/home.aspx

And here's more information about the specific topic for each of the course's ten weeks, presented in slideshow fashion:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-56l5lYbbM

In addition to the main course, I'm v. much looking forward to the guest lectures by T. A. Shippey and Jn Garth. Looks like it'll be an interesting ten weeks.

--John R.

current reading: SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY by Nick Rennison [2005]

current viewing: THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO [original, subtitled]

Four Teas in Four Days

2011-10-02T22:55:00.000-07:00

So, last night I finally finished my current project* (only one month late), an essay for the French Tolkien journal TOLKIENDIL. Read it out loud to Janice tonight, who didn't find any passages that needed to be toned down, so it's good to go. Sent it off before midnight, and will compile the Bibliography to accompany it tomorrow. Even better, this is really two deadlines in one: this same piece will form the core of my paper at the Medievalist Congress in Kalamazoo next May, so I'm well ahead of schedule there -- although I'll have to work out how to shorten the delivery time by half and still have a coherent presentation. But that's a good problem to have.

And so today I would be celebrating The Dance of Doneness, except that we just got back from our week's vacation to Trout Lake (near the foot of Mt. Adams), where we stayed with friends Bijee and Don (a.k.a. Tolkien scholar Marjorie Burns and her husband, Don Willner), followed by two days in Portland (and some serious poking about in Powell's--two sessions totaling somewhere between four and five hours worth, I'd say). So in a sense we've pre-celebrated. And one way in which we did so -- going out to tea together -- formed something of a running theme over the last few days.

Having arrived in Portland Wednesday night, Thursday we visited the Lan Su Chinese Gardens in Portland, a favorite of ours (this is I think our third visit there). And, as is our tradition, we ended up by visiting the teahouse after an hour or so of first the tour and then wandering about. This being a Feast Day,** I had an order of their fava beans (wh. they call 'horsebeans') and Janice their mooncake, each accompanied by fine tea in tiny pots and minuscule cups and, as an added bonus, live music on a kind of Chinese zither made of oak and redwood. Janice had an interesting thought that we were able to confirm: the Chinese music notation the perormer was using on her sheet music is nothing like the standard staves and notes we use in Western music. Interesting. And I got to see both a Magnolia and a Mimosa ('silk tree') in the garden -- though no actual tea trees. I always enjoy visiting Chinese gardens, and I'm already looking forward to the next one, whenever that eventually comes.

Friday it was the Portland Japanese Garden's turn, which we'd seen once in the company of my sister-in-law maybe a dozen years back. Unlike the Chinese gardens I've seen (e.g., the Lan Su in Portland and Sun Yat Sen garden in Vancouver), which are inclosed in a wall and include a number of buildings within the garden itself, Japanese gardens have much more open space, far fewer structures, and tend to have a steep green cliff forming a backdrop on one side (though whether this is happenstance or a deliberate feature I do not know). Now I'm curious to visit a formal English walled garden when we're over there sometime next year and compare it as well.

Afterwards we had been planning to see the Portland Zoo, but having gotten a late start we went right to the next item on our itinerary: high tea at Tea Thyme & Lavender in Beaverton, on the west side of Portland. This turned out not to be a tea room as such but an antique store; the reason they ask for reservations is that it gives them time to clear off a table and make a place to sit. The high tea that followed was unusual in having a distinct French touch (e.g., gateau rather than cake, &c). It was okay, but I find I'm of the mind that lavender is better as a scent than as a flavor ingredient in a scone.

Friday night having seen us arrive back in Kent to a welcoming array of kitties, we drove into Seattle Saturday afternoon for this year's Northwest Tea Festival, where we roamed around the room sampling many, many teas from the tiny free cups they give you when you come in. They also gave each attendee a free canvas tote bag, and I managed to fill mine with purchases of four ounces of Yunnan here, a small packet of Dian Hong there. Last year (or was it the year before?) when visiting the Tea Festival with friends Anne & Sig, we'd all seen much taken w. a 'tea wheel', a sort of color chart listing adjectives suitable for describing tea flavors and undertones. This year they had a smaller, portable version available for purchase, so naturally I got one.

And finally, today (Sunday the 2nd) we decided to make up for the rather disappointing high tea of two days ago by revisiting a tea room we'd really liked on our two previous visits (once for Janice's birthday, once w. our friends Gwen and Stan): the Secret Gardens down in Sumner. It did not disappoint: good strong tea, a pleasant setting, and most excellent tea-treats. We ate till we cd eat no more, then made our way home to reflect on an interesting vacation and prepare ourselves to plunge back into the new workweek tomorrow morning. It promises to be a busy one . . .

--John R.

current reading: BEFORE ADAM by Jack London [1907]

just finished: THE BRICK MOON [1869; 1899]

.....................

*"A Fragment, Detached: THE HOBBIT and THE SILMARILIION"

**i.e., we were off the diet.

The New Publication: RED EYE OF AZATHOTH

2011-09-24T22:28:00.000-07:00

So, Thursday the 15th I got together with friend Wolf* at a restaurant he'd recently introduced me to in downtown Renton called Naan 'N' Curry (which I highly recommend, if you're (a) in or passing through the Renton area and (b) like Indian food). Along with the chance to catch up on things, I was pleased to get my contributor's copy of RED EYE OF AZATHOTH, Open Design's first CALL OF CTHULHU release, which I edited.

This is an unusual C.o.C. campaign for several reasons. First off, all five adventures are episodes in a larger story. Also, despite being set in five distinct time periods and milieu, in a sense the Investigators are the same people in each, being linked across time and space. Third, the settings are highly unusual for C.o.C., which usually sticks to the 1920s, with some Victorian (CTHULHU BY GASLIGHT) and modern (CTHULHU NOW) adventures for the occasional change of pace.

The five settings are

(1) Lindisfarne, 887 AD, where the Investigator group is composed in equal parts of monks and of Viking raiders, who naturally enough find it hard to work together in a common cause.

(2) feudal Japan, 1287, where the Investigators are samurai and court officials sent by the shogunate to find out why one obscure remote village pays its taxes, in full, every year, year after year, without fail. I wonder if the Japanese of that era had a proverb equivalent to 'ignorance is bliss'.

(3) Valencia, 1487, where the Investigators start out as prisoners in the hands of the Inquisition, and things go downhill from there. This one involves a lot of running away (hence its new mechanic, a 'Chase Table', to judge whether or not those attempting flight succeed in evading pursuit), and even more not being able to run away.

(4) Roanoke Colony, 1587, where the worst of the Old World and New come together with horrific results.

(5) Arizona Territory, 1887, where the Wild West and Cthulhu horror come together in truly apocalyptic fashion: I don't think I've ever read an sequence of descriptions that matched the climax of this adventure for conveying this-is-the-way-the-world ends, with neither a bang nor a whimper but a scream.

All of these have in common one element: isolation. In most Cthulhu adventures Investigators don't call on the authorities for help because it'd be hard to get them to believe what was going on or because said Investigators don't want too much scrutiny of their own actions. In these they're well and truly on their own: allies are few and far between, and any authorities either hostile or wholly absent. I have to say that, overall, I was impressed: there's been an Azathoth campaign before, back in 1986, SPAWN OF AZATHOTH, but that was the worst of the classic Chaosium C.o.C. campaigns.* I do have to warn, though, that the adventures in RED EYE OF AZATHOTH are gruesome, violent, and unforgiving; it's a style of play that owes a lot to early PAGAN P. adventures,** and the body count in the major encounters in each scenario are likely to be high.

It's a polar opposite to the way I usually play Cthulhu, which emphasizes role-playing, exploration, and investigation and has a high Investigator survival ratio (though their sanity tends to fray after an adventure or two, and the occasional Investigator deaths tend to be spectacular when they do occur). But I think the authors pulled it off: if you like that style of play (and a lot of people do), RED EYE OF AZATHOTH is an excellent and sustained example.

I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who actually plays through these to find out how well they worked at the gaming table for your group.

Good gaming!

--John R.

.............................................................

*SHADOWS OF YOG-SOTHOTH [1982] being by far the best, THE FUNGI FROM YUGGOTH [1984] a worthy second place, and MASKS OF NYARLATHOTEP [1984]*** rounding of the top three; after this there's a falling off with HORROR ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS [1991], an impressive project whose reach exceeded its grasp, and then SPAWN OF AZATHOTH, which was just a mess that reads like an attempt to re-hash MASKS.

Of course, if you go beyond Chaosium, Pagan P. produced not one but two superb campaigns: WALKER IN THE WASTES [1994] and COMING FULL CIRCLE [1995], which learn all the right lessons from SHADOWS and DAY OF THE BEAST and apply them with impressive results. Highly recommended.

**i.e., before they got swallowed up by DELTA GREEN, when they still did an interesting variety of settings & approaches). There's not a lot of Library Use here (though at times it's vital

***most aficionados rank MASKS the top. I don't agree. It's v. good; SHADOWS and BEAST simply happen to be better.

*a.k.a. Wolfgang Baur, The Monkey King, Kobold-in-Chief at Open Design, Editor of KOBOLD QUARTERLY, famed rpg designer, former editor of both DUNGEON and of DRAGON, and once upon a time fellow 'New Fish' at TSR with me in October 1991.

Taum Santoski XIX

2011-09-24T22:10:00.000-07:00

'Aphorisms Towards a Poetics of Fantasy'

19. Within the form of mythological epic stand some pivotal works, two based upon the form established by Tolkien. The Earthsea Trilogy and the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant are derivative of Tolkien. Earthsea presents a mythology set in a world unconnected in any way with our own; Covenant is a traveler from our world into another world, Land.

--Taum Santoski, circa 1984

Famous Last Words (1484)

2011-09-24T12:56:00.000-07:00

"Jesus Christ! More trouble . . . "

--last words of the poet Wm Collyngbourne

(paraphrased)

So, about a decade ago I read R. M. Wilson's THE LOST LITERATURE OF MEDIEVAL ENGLAND, a fascinating glimpse into works we know once existed that have now vanished beyond recall. One particular story, about the fate of a poet who annoyed Richard the Third, stuck in my mind. In any case, it's quite an interesting book, and eventually I bought my own copy, apparently during my only visit (so far) to the Bay Area, in August 2000.* But when I came to consult it some time later (probably when preparing my 2004 Blackwelder conference paper, 'And All the Days of Her Life are Forgotten'), I cdn't find the story I recalled anywhere. Eventually I discovered that there were two editions of the book, and it turns out that the passage I sought doesn't appear in the original [1952] edition I'd bought. I concluded it must be only in the later [1970] revised edition,** which must therefore be the one I read.

And so Tuesday [the 13th] when I visited Suzzallo-Allen, I not only found to my delight that the Smith Reading Room (with its stained glass windows and catherdral ceiling) is open again but was even able to sit at Senator Magnuson's desk. And while at the library I was able both to check a troubling reference in one of the PICTURING TOLKIEN essays I'd just read and to find both versions of Wilson's book. A quick check showed that the passage I remembered was indeed in the 1970 edition and not in the original.

Here's all the original [1952] version has to say about Collyngbourne [p. 199]:

". . . The well-known couplet

The Cat, the Rat, and Lovel our dog

Rule all England under a hog,***

was posted on the doors of St Paul's by William Collyngbourne.

And here's what Wilson adds in 1970:

". . . The well-known couplet

The Cat, the Rat, and Lovel our dog

Rule all England under a hog,

was posted on the doors of St Paul's by William Collyngbourne, and for this he was, in 1484,

put to the moost cruell deth at the Tower Hylle,

where for hym were made a newe payer of galowes.

Vpon the whiche, after he hadde hangyd a shorte season,

he was cutte downe, beynge alyue, & his bowellys rypped

out of his bely, and cast into the fyre there by hym,

and lyued tyll the bowcher put his hande into the bulke

of his body; insomuch that he sayd in the same instant,

'O Lorde Ihesu, yet more trowble,' & so dyed

to the great compassion of moche people.

[p. 194]

This episode serves as a reminder that Richard III was not the kinder, gentler king that Josephine Tey & others wd have us think (he was after all a usurper responsible for the deaths of many members of his own family -- in which he was v. like his successor, Henry VII; one suspects the two men were pretty much peas in a pod). Most of England's kings and queens have been pretty brutal in their dealings with those who crossed them, and those with shaky claims to the throne (like Richard and Henry) even more so than most. It's also a reminder of the days when people took poetry seriously.****

Quite aside from this, though, I think what attracted me to this quote and made it stick in my memory is the slight hint of exasperation in poor Collyngbourne's final response to what was happening to him. First hanged, then cut down, then disembowled, then having his entrails (intestines) burned before his eyes, and only dying when they reached in and started to remove his heart and other vital organs is a particularly grisly way to go, specifically designed to inflict as much pain and torment as possible. Maybe that's why Collyngborne's last words are so memorable; it's easy to feel a kind of fellow feeling for someone in extremis who sums things up so well.

--John R.

[when first drafted this post]:

current Kindle book: RENDER UNTO ROME by Jason Berry [2011]

current audiobook: NATION by Terry Pratchett [2008]

current project: "'A Fragment, Detatched': The Hobbit and The Silmarillion"

[now]:

current Kindle book: THE ATTENBURY EMERALDS by Jill Paton Walsh

current audiobook: The Learning Company: lectures on Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (on loan from Jeff)

current project: ibid.

for future reading: since reading Wilson's book, I've learned from Doug Anderson that it was inspired by a series R. W. Chambers did back in the 1920s. Given how highly Tolkien admired Chambers as a scholar, I definitely need to track down those original articles at some point.

..........................

*At least so I deduce from the fact that I've written in my name, 'Palo Alto', and the date (Friday August 4th '00) on the inside front cover, and a few pages in is a bookmark for Feldman's Books in Menlo Park.

**his preface to the latter notes that "the original work has been completely re-written, with numerous verbal changes, many additions, a few omissions, and some re-arrangement of the material . . ."

***an unflattering reference to Richard III's ministers, Wm Catesby (Speaker of the House), Sir Richard Ratcliffe (who seems to have been R.III's general assistant and factotum, & Lord Lovell (Lord Chamberlain), all of whom are familiar to generations of English students and play-goers from their villainy in Shakespeare's play RICHARD III (the 'hogge' is King Richard himself, whose personal emblem was a wild boar, just as Lovel's was a wolf).

And of course 'Ratcliffe' is the only reasonably famous literary character known to me to bear a version of my own name.

****a little online research shows that Collingbourne also plotted with Henry Tudor against Richard's reign, but the specific charges upon which he was condemned to gruesome death were (a) conspiracy AND (b) writing those verses.

Steig Larsson and Tolkien

2011-09-12T18:55:00.000-07:00

So, having now reached about the mid-point in the audiobook of Steig Larsson's fascinating if occasionally unpleasant novel THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (published posthumously in 2005, tr. 2008), I was surprised to find so far not one but two Tolkien references.

The first comes when the main character, disgraced reporter Mikael Blomkvist, takes time off from his latest assignment to go see a movie for a change of pace:

In the evening he went to the cinema to see The Lord of the Rings,

which he had never before had time to see. He thought that orcs,

unlike human beings, were simple and uncomplicated creatures.

--Chapter 11, page 169

This seems just part of the contemporary grounding of the novel, which is full of references to current events. However, the next goes a bit beyond that. At one point Blomkvist is suddenly confronted by one of his new neighbors, an unpleasant hermit, whose advent is described, apparently from Blomkvist's point of view, thusly:

Gollum had emerged from his cage.

--Chapter 17, page 247

That's the lot so far (I'll add an update at the bottom of this post if I come across any more): another indication of Tolkien's penetration not just into our (American/English/New Zealand/English-language) culture but indeed well beyond it.

--John R.

Taum Santoski XVIII

2011-09-12T18:53:00.000-07:00

'Aphorisms Towards a Poetics of Fantasy'

18. The schema of fantasy and mythological epic is not only a matter of gods, demi-gods and supernatural happenstances. Gods alone do not a myth make, and rhymes do not make a poet. What is at stake when a author chooses fantasy or mythological epic over some other form such as novel or poetry?

--Taum Santoski, circa 1984

The Tea Tree Blooms

2011-09-10T08:52:00.000-07:00

So, Thursday I discovered that the tea plant (a gift a year or two ago from Anne & Sig) had two little flowers on it. I know Anne and Sig's tea plant had bloomed earlier this year, and had assumed ours didn't because it was still struggling.

No longer the case, I think. There were two tiny blossoms, more like an apple blossom than a camellia: white petals with a yellow center, and what looked like a third blossom on the way. I took some photos and will try to figure out how to upload them, in which case I'll add them as an update at the end of this post. Just in case I don't succeed, as seems likely, here as the next best thing is a painting of a tea tree blossom:

http://www.redbubble.com/people/dosankodebbie/art/5808718-tea-blossom-camellia-sinensis

--John R.

current audiobook: THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

current reading: PICTURING TOLKIEN (last essay!), RENDER UNTO ROME, GILGAMESH.

Taum Santoski XVII

2011-09-09T08:51:00.000-07:00

'Aphorisms Towards a Poetics of Fantasy'

17. When CJRT exhausts his father's writing Middle-earth may become mothballed, standing like the empty hulk of a ship in dock filled with inert gap for preservation There are no real inscriptions, sarcophagi, coins, gems, or other remains at hand to give more information save what Tolkien has written and reported.

--Taum Santoski, circa 1984

Taum Santoski XVI

2011-09-07T23:58:00.000-07:00

'Aphorisms Towards a Poetics of Fantasy'

16. Some might feel the study of myth, and especially the myth of Tolkien, is a path to the power and moral force of our ancestors who drew their life from belief and not knowledge. Although myth is one of the highest forms of abstract and imaginative thought, mathematics is higher, but it lacks the emotions.

--Taum Santoski, circa 1984

Inklings for Sale

2011-09-07T18:08:00.000-07:00

So, on a pretty regular basis abebooks.com sends out themed ads for various books available through their site. And today, their theme is Books by the Inklings:

http://www.abebooks.com/books/oxford-tolkien-cs-lewis-eagle-child-literature/inklings.shtml?cm_mmc=nl-_-nl-_-h00-inklingVCA-_-01cta&abersp=1

One interesting aspect of this is just whom they consider to be Inklings -- Tolkien and Lewis, of course, as the co-founders and by far most famous members, with Williams and Cecil in the second tier (a lot of Inklings scholars forget how distinguished a scholar Lord David was*). Warnie and some books about the Inklings round out the list -- rather surprisingly there's no Wain here; perhaps they felt his work went too far afield and shd be grouped with the Angry Young Men instead.

Most interestingly of all, they include Roger Lancelyn Green among the Inklings' members, giving him equal billing with Wms and Cecil. I know Doug Anderson has argued that a good case can be made for RLG as an Inkling but I think this may be the first time I've seen it taken as a given. Interesting!

And, in a related note, ABEbooks.com likes to send out monthly announcements of which ten books sold on their site for the most during the previous month. Tolkien ranked on top a few months back; this month, he's #7 behind Fleurs du Mal and Dr. No and Edward Gorey, ahead of JFK and Huxley, with a set of the first-edition LotR:

http://www.abebooks.com/books/RareBooks/james-bond-edward-gorey/most-expensive-aug11.shtml?cm_mmc=nl-_-nl-_-C110901-mostexAX-_-01cta&abersp=1

--John R.

current book: PICTURING TOLKIEN

current e-book: book five in the 'Royal Spyness' series by Rhys Bowen

current audiobook: THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES [2006] and

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (just started)

*there's a reason he got an Oxford professorship so early. Though he didn't deserve F. R. Leavis's elevation of him into the epitome of all that Leavis thought was wrong with English literature and academia (i.e., that too many people listened to Cecil rather than Leavis).

Taum Santoski XV

2011-09-06T21:34:00.001-07:00

'Aphorisms Towards a Poetics of Fantasy'

15. The Peoples of Arda are the Ainur, the Valar, the Eldar and the Atani (of who all the Free Peoples are concerned).

--Taum Santoski, circa 1984

Taum Santoski XIV

2011-09-05T22:04:00.001-07:00

'Aphorisms Towards a Poetics of Fantasy'

14. The Music of the Ainur is Myth; Fate is mythologized history; Vision is the historicized myth; Free Will is history.

--Taum Santoski, circa 1984

Taum Santoski XIII

2011-09-04T13:06:00.001-07:00

'Aphorisms Towards a Poetics of Fantasy'

[page 3]

13. Poetry and Song are an echo of the Great Music; Fate is a theme of Eru woven into all beings; Vision is the gift of dreams and prophecy; Free Will is a theme of Eru.

--Taum Santoski, circa 1984

Taum's Aphorisms, parts VII to XII

2011-09-02T18:57:00.000-07:00

Here, again, are some comments and observations by me on Taum's piece I've dubbed 'Aphorisms Towards a Poetics of Tolkienian Fantasy'. As before these are just my interpretations.

(7) Here we get a sequence from pure myth (the creation story) to myth presented as history (Silm) to history with an element of myth (LotR) to scholarly comment (UT); the main thing is the pattern of withdrawal/diminishment.

(8) I have no idea what Taum is talking about here, nor if these four categories relate back to the four exemplar given in the previous paragraph.

(9) In the Beginning was The Word (Logos), so before the beginning must have come the pre-logos.

(10) This part I get, about the myth to history to myth at the end of history; I don't get what the philosophy and political structures at the end have to do with it.

(11) If there were three themes in the Protologos, should there be three competing Logi?

(12) It sounded as if myth leeches out of history progressively from the time of creation on. Perhaps the 'philosophy' of Pt 10 and Pt 12 is equivalent to the 'scholastic/academic media' of Pt 7?

This brings us to the midway point. I understand this second quarter even less than the first. We'll see how it goes with Pts 13 onward.

--John R.

current reading: THE UNSPEAKABLE OATH, #19.

Farewell, FRODO FRANCHISE

2011-09-02T16:38:00.000-07:00

So, Monday I found out the unwelcome news that Kristin Thompson's excellent Tolkien film blog, THE FRODO FRANCHISE, is shutting down, apparently effective immediately (or, rather, a couple of days ago):

http://www.kristinthompson.net/blog/

Apparently Kristin's plan all along was to write a follow-up book to THE FRODO FRANCHISE, one which I assume would have included the making of THE HOBBIT and the events of its release, impact, and aftermath. And the ongoing posts on THE FRODO FRANCHISE would presumably be incorporated into that book, or at least serve as part of the ongoing research into its creation.

That such a book will now never be written is a real loss to Tolkien Studies. Kristin's was the best of all the books that dealt with the movies,* and I'd have to say that hers is the best of the essays in the new PICTURING TOLKIEN that I've read so far.

The good news is that she's not disappearing: she'll be posting occasionally over at TheOneRing.Net and has two book projects in the works. The first she describes as "a book-length analysis on stylistic and narrative techniques in Tolkien's two hobbit novels"; this wd presumably be the same book mentioned to the endnotes of her PICTURING TOLKIEN piece, where it's described as "a book about The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings where I will discuss such points as who the protagonists of LOTR are" [page 43, Nt 10]. Being a great fan of her earlier book on the Wooster & Jeeves series, I'll be looking forward to this one.

The same applies to her other in-progress project, though that one's further afield: "a large book project on the statuary of the Amarna period" -- i.e., Egyptian art from the time of Akhenaten, the most famous piece of which is the bust of Nefertiti. Having a longstanding interest in ancient Egypt myself, I'll certainly be looking forward to this one as well, though it's outside my field of expertise.

And so passeth a Tolkien blog. It's not one that I checked daily -- more like a place I'd go once a month and read up on what'd happened lately -- but it was a reliable source of information about a specific field in Tolkien studies, one that's not my own main focus. It will be missed.

--John R.

current reading: PICTURING TOLKIEN

current audiobook: OCCULT AMERICA y Mitch Horowitz (just finished)

*of the ones I've seen, anyway -- a few are so prohibitively expensive that I haven't picked them up yet.

Another Lost Post

2011-09-01T22:56:00.000-07:00

How strange. Friday I drafted, and late Sunday I posted, a piece about affinities between the Tea Party and recurrent intolerant/racist/nativist movements in American culture & politics: the Know-Nothings/American party (1850s), Bedford Forrest's Klan (1860s-70s), the mainstream Klan (1910s-20s), the modern Klan (1950s-60s), and now the Tea Party (2008ff), united by religious hatred (anti-Catholic in the earlier movements,* anti-Muslim today), nativism (hatred of foreigners, esp. immigrants), racism (originally anti-Irish, oddly enough; perpetually anti-Black, and now anti-Hispanic as well),** all wrapped up in a sort of uber-patriotism incongruously linked to heated denunciations of America and their fellow Americans, a self-professed veneration for the Founding Fathers combined with heaping scorn upon the institutions they set up, like the Supreme Court. I ended by linking to a story about a study from some sociologists claiming to have identified common traits among Tea Party adherents.

But Monday, it had vanished from my list of posts. I didn't save a draft, so I really can't reconstruct the post now. I do still have a url for the piece I linked to, so here that is:

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/08/study-tea-party-members-cultural-dispositions-authoritarianism-ontological-insecurity-libertarianism.php?ref=fpb

In any case, after I'd made the post, Janice sent me an interesting piece about the death of a remarkable man I'd never heard of: Stetson Kennedy, who apparently played a large role in the de-legitimatizing of the Klan in the 1940s (the 1920s Klan having widespread public acceptance, while the Klan of the '50s and '60s was a furtive, though still dangerous, remnant).*** Of his books, the "Jim Crow Guide: The Way It Was" sounds like the most interesting (though I'm not clear if this is a separate book from "Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A." or merely variant titles for the same book). Luckily, Suzzallo-Allen seems to be well-stocked with his works, so I shd be able to find out soon for myself. In the meantime, here's the link to the story about his passing:

http://www.npr.org/2011/08/28/140017364/stetson-kennedy-the-man-who-unmasked-the-klan-dies?sc=emaf

--JDR

----------------------

*according to family lore, the local Klan ran off my grandmother's fiancee because he was Catholic; this was in Kentucky back in the 1920s.

**as a sub-set, we cd probably add anti-German and anti-Japanese during the world wars, though that's a special case; if we go that route, might as well bring in anti-Asian (19th century West) and anti-Eastern Europe (the Palmer Raids era). And that doesn't even begin to get into anti-Native Americanism, which is pretty much the dark bedrock this country was built on (less 'how can we learn to live together' than 'let's kill them and take their stuff').

***I'm told Leonard Cline, who's mainly remembered as a horror/fantasy writer (THE DARK CHAMBER) did some prize-winning exposes of the Klan in the 1920s that started the process.

Taum Santoski XII

2011-08-31T08:08:00.000-07:00

'Aphorisms Towards a Poetics of Fantasy'

12. History falls from the Post-Logos, all the results of the creation. After the time of language making, when myth is no longer the sole source of explanation, when philosophy enters in, History occurs.

--Taum Santoski, circa 1984

Taum Santoski XI

2011-08-30T09:06:00.000-07:00

'Aphorisms Towards a Poetics of Fantasy'

11. The Logos is the Exlamation and the Myth. In the act of creation the Logos is the sole source and by the Logos word and mind fuse only to split into degenerative and profane things.

--Taum Santoski, circa 1984

Interview re. PICTURING TOLKIEN

2011-08-29T18:11:00.000-07:00

So, today I came across the following recent interview of PICTURING TOLKIEN editors Jan Bogstad & Phil Kaveny by Kristin Thompson, herself a contributor to that collection (as am I), on Kristin's website. As fellow members of the University of Wisconsin Tolkien Society (the group that also produced Tolkien scholars Richard West, Matt Fisher, and David Salo), Kristin, Jan, & Phil all go way back. And as the author of the best book on the films, THE FRODO FRANCHISE, Kristin is well-positioned to ask good questions about what differentiates this collection from the others previously released about the films. Here's the piece:

http://www.kristinthompson.net/blog/2011/08/18/editors-discuss-picturing-tolkien-a-new-anthology-on-the-lotr-film-trilogy/

All I'd add is that, as a contributor and bystander to some of the events mentioned in the piece, I know who some of the people in their editorial war stories are, and admit to wholly unwarranted curiosity about the rest. I might add that in the Table of Contents she gives at the end, the author's name follows his or her essay, rather than proceeds it.

--John R., looking forward to the first reviews of the book.

Taum Santoski X

2011-08-29T12:06:00.001-07:00

'Aphorisms Towards a Poetics of Fantasy'

10. The Protologos is myth in its birth. And the revelation of Eru reveals the myth of Arda until the time of myth has passed and moved into history of which they have no part but to wait until the cycle brings mythology once more into Arda. This pulsing of myth to history to myth is equivalted to the generational action of philosophy and political structures.

--Taum Santoski, circa 1984

Taum Santoski IX

2011-08-28T21:11:00.000-07:00

'Aphorisms Towards a Poetics of Fantasy'

9. In the mythos the Act is expressed by three forms related to language, the Logos. All activity before the pronounced Logos is contained within the Conception, the three themes of Iluvatar propounded to the Ainur, and their Music is the Initialization. This is the Protologos. By revelation Eru shows the Ainur the birth and growth of the Logos.

--Taum Santoski, circa 1984

Taum Santoski VIII

2011-08-27T20:47:00.000-07:00

'Aphorisms Towards a Poetics of Fantasy'

8. The subcreation of Middle-earth is done upon a course of realization, by artifact, word, and story. These are reducable into four types: the Completed Act, the Potential Act, the Initialized Act and the Concetual Act, each identified by a particular.

--Taum Santoski, circa 1984

Taum Santoski VII

2011-08-26T18:10:00.000-07:00

'Aphorisms Towards a Poetics of Fantasy'

[page 2]

7. Tolkien's mythology is the result of four processes, each having a dependency upon the other, the multiplicity in a unity. The Ainulindale is the mythological process; The bulk of The Silmarillion is the mythologizing of history; The Lord of the Rings is the historicized myth and Unfinished Tales is the scholastic/academic media.

--Taum Santoski, circa 1984

Taum's Aphorisms, parts I to VI

2011-08-26T10:10:00.000-07:00

So, after a lapse of several days, I'm about to start posting daily entries from Taum's piece that I've dubbed 'Aphorisms Towards a Poetics of Fantasy', though perhaps ' . . . of Tolkienian Fantasy' might have been nearer the mark.

To recap, here's what I make of the first six entries (which, conveniently, take up the first of the four typescript pages). All comments are simply my interpretations and have no authorial authority (which is why I've been presenting the paragraphs without any commentary or apparatus, to allow Taum's work to stand on its own).

(1) whereas I've come to look at Tolkien's world as teleological (that is, the foredoomed disenchanting of Middle-earth to become our everyday world is the most key thing about it)*, Taum sees it as "aetiological". That is, Tolkien's stories are the kind of myth that answers questions about why the world is the way it is: not just 'why do we have day and night' but 'why do we fear the dark?'. Having two races, Elves & Men, gives Tolkien more variables to work with in presenting his themes.

(2) Middle-earth is neither our familiar "present physical world" nor a 'Mirror for Magistrates' recasting thereof but its own coherent, self-contained (literary) reality. This departs somewhat from Tolkien's own description of M-e as our world's mythical past but chimes with Tolkien's rejection of Looking-Glass worlds as truely fairy-stories.

(3) Like Niggle's walking into the distance without finding it becoming mere surroundings, Middle-earth is a 'Golden Age' that will never be reduced to History. As one of his most memorable phrases puts it, "time never brings the Golden Age any closer". However, his statement that "it percolates through 'history' from time to time" sounds like a whiff of Ch. Wms' Logres. Here his and my approach diverge almost completely, but he nicely anticipates a Tolkienian theme that wd be revealed w. the publication not long afterwards of THE LOST ROAD and, much more strongly a few years later, THE NOTION CLUB PAPERS.

(4) Tolkien's chosen medium was language and myth. Taum asserts: "to participate in [Middle-earth's] mythic powers . . . [through the mediation of words] . . . is to re-establish a harmony with the present world." I think this resonates with the "Recovery" and perhaps also "Consolation" from OFS; on the whole, it's Taum's re-statement of Tolkien's "Secondary World".

(5) waxing a bit poetic, he points out that instead of a mish-mash of borrowings Tolkien's world has its own life, "becoming a new thing, not merely a hyrdize [hybridized?] retelling". Taum's focus on the Near East as a major source for Tolkien's myths departs from the familiar array (OE, ON, Celtic, some Roman), all of which can be summed up under his other heading of "ancient Europe".

(6) He defines History as the observation of events, vs. Myth as the perception of events. History is wholly impartial; Myth wholly responsive. I think this is entirely specious; eloquence overwhelming the argument. But perhaps I'm simply not seeing a subtlety here.

--JDR

And now, back to the real deal:

*cf. my 2004 lecture at the Marquette Blackwelder Conference, "And All The Days Of Her Life Are Forgotten", since published in the Blackwelder memorial volume.

My Newest Publication: "Two Kinds of Absence"

2011-08-25T20:44:00.000-07:00

So, yesterday my contributor copy for Jan & Phil's new book arrived, PICTURING TOLKIEN: ESSAYS ON PETER JACKSON'S The Lord of the Rings FILM TRILOGY, the latest in a growing line of Tolkien books from McFarland. This one has been in the works for about two or three years, and it's really good to have it in print. For one thing, it gives me a chance to read the other contributors' pieces.

So far I've only read four of the essays: my own (both to see how it holds up and to see if there are any horrific gaffs I overlooked until too late), Verlyn's (which focuses in on the filmmaker's dilemma of having to choose one specific way to depict things that Tolkien left open to each reader's visualization*), Kristin Thompson's (which is rightly the volume opener and sure to spark discussion, esp. since at one point she argues the filmmakers' presentation of one scene is superior to Tolkien's),** and Jan Bogstad's (about Tolkien's horses); next up is Dimitra Fimi's (on folklore in the films). On the whole, and unlike most of the essays in Croft's TOLKIEN ON FILM, the essays here are far less dismissive of Jackson's work; I suspect the two volumes will wind up making interesting complements to each other.

Since I've only read a quarter of the collection so far, for the rest I'll just give a T.o.C. of titles and authors:

Preface -- Bogstad & Kaveny

Introduction -- ibid

Part I: Techniques of Story and Structure

"Gollum Talks to Himself" -- Kristin Thompson

"Sometimes One Word Is Worth a Thousand Pictures" -- Verlyn Flieger

"Two Kinds of Absence: Elision and Exclusion in Peter Jackson's LotR" -- JDR

"Tolkien's Resistance to Linearity" -- E. L. Risden

"Filming Folklore" -- Dimitra Fimi

"Making the Connection of Page and Screen in Tolkiens and Jackson's LotR" Yvette Kisor

"It's Alive!: Tolkien's Monster on Screen" -- Sharin Schroeder

"The Materiel of Middle-Earth" -- Rbt C. Woosnam-Savage

Part II: Techniques of Character and Culture

"Into the West" -- Judy Ann Ford & Robin Anne Reid

"Frodo Lives but Gollum Redeems the Blood of Kings" -- Phil Kaveny

"The Grey Pilgrim: Gandalf and the Challenges of Characterization in Middle-earth" -- Brian D. Walter

"Jackson's Aragorn and the American Superhero Monomyth" -- Janet Croft

"Neither the Shadow Nor the Twilight: The Love Story of Aragorn and Arwen in Literature and Film" -- Richard West

"Concerning Horses" -- Jan Bogstad

"The Rohirrim, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Problem of Appendix F" -- Michael Drout

"Filming the Numinous" -- Joseph Ricke & Catherine Barnett

And now, back to reading.

--JDR

*based on my skim through the book so far, this seems to be a recurrent theme, just as the earlier Croft collection included many discussions of Tolkien's letter re. the Zimmerman script.

**one piece of good news buried in her endnotes is that she's currently at work on a book about THE HOBBIT and THE LORD OF THE RINGS

Start Saving Your Pennies . . .

2011-08-24T12:38:00.000-07:00

. . . Nickels, Dimes, Dollars, 'Folding Money', Plastic . . .

So, yesterday came an innocuous little postcard that cd end up costing me a lot of money, given that it announces this year's Antiquarian Book Fair, held once again at the Seattle Center (at the foot of the Space Needle). Visiting the Book Fair is rather like dropping by during Smaug's Open House: things you'd assume cd only be found in a rare books room of some major library are sitting out on shelves or occasionally in display cases. Pay the asking price and walk home with a Kelmscott Chaucer, or a Tolkien letter,* or a copy of Lovecraft's first book, or the original issue of a journal from the 1840s with the first appearance of some Poe story inside, or . . . -- the list goes on and on. Over the years I've picked up Dunsany's THE MAN WHO ATE THE PHOENIX (and I think also JORKENS BORROWS ANOTHER WHISKEY, though there my notes are less specific), Leiber's TWO SOUGHT ADVENTURE (the second Fafhrd & Gray Mouser collection), Hodgson's CARNACKI THE GHOST FINDER (the Mycroft & Moran edition, not the original), the faux-Poe collection THE EXPLOITS OF THE CHEVALIER DUPIN, and two Clark Ashton Smiths: THE ABOMINATIONS OF YONDO and OTHER DIMENSIONS.** In fact, so heavily do my visits to the Book Fair impact the budget that I only go every other year or so (sometimes every third, depending on how the schedule goes).

This year, it's October 8th & 9th. It looks like we'll be in town, and I don't have a deadline that weekend or the following week. So things look good right now; unless something unexpected comes up, I'm expecting to make it this year and see (a) what wonders they've got and (b) what, if any of it, can I afford. We'll see.

--John R.

current reading: PICTURING TOLKIEN, ed. Bogstad & Kaveny.

*that's where we bought my Tolkien letter, an extravagance I've never regretted.

**in addition, at least once I've seen a book at the Book Fair, passed on it, regretted it, and bought it later directly from the dealer (a collection of OSSIANIC tales from 1801). And then again once I saw an interesting book on my initial pass through the hall that was gone by the time I decided I wanted it (a profusely illustrated book on Petroglyphs of the Pacific Northwest -- I later checked it out from the library and made many, many photocopies from it, but it wasn't the same . . .).

Taum Santoski

2011-08-19T23:45:00.000-07:00

August 19th, 1991.

Twenty years ago today.

Rest in peace.

--JDR

Taum Santoski VI

2011-08-18T10:47:00.001-07:00

'Aphorisms Towards a Poetics of Fantasy'

6. If myth and history can be broken down into two categories, then their definitions must be different processes. Myth is the perception of events, the feeling of the observer imposed upon the event so far that any "impartiality" is removed. History is then the observation of events, the removal of response to an event so that any opinion of the event cannot be derived.

--Taum Santoski, circa 1984

'Terrorist Olive Oil' (Poke-em-with-a-Stick-Wednesday)

2011-08-17T21:31:00.000-07:00

So, last night I stumbled across a strange little story that startled me about how nakedly racist it was.

The whole tale's ins & outs were too complicated to rehearse here, but basically someone noted how Whole Foods is a good source for Halal (=Islamic Kosher) foods and recommended Muslims shop there for Ramadan. Somehow, as with the people opposed to a mosque's being built in New York City last year, this morphed into charges by some zealots that Israeli products were being pulled off the shelf and that Whole Foods was funneling money to jihadists.

It's weirdly comical to think that someone could use a phrase like "terrorist olive oil" (by which they meant some proceeds might go to a school in the Occupied Territories). But it's bizarre and disturbing to learn that they really mean it, both for the naked racism it shows and for the vast degree of departure from reality involved to create pretexts to vent that hatred. George Wallace and Theodore Bilbo wd be proud.

What a World, What a World, What a World.

Here are some links. The first, expressing the anti-Islam position, comes from a woman who was in the news not all that long back for expressing her pleasure that fellow American Lara Logan had been raped.*

http://www.debbieschlussel.com/40514/anti-israel-whole-foods-wishes-you-a-happy-ramadan/

The second is to the quiet, deliberately quaint website for "Canaan Olive Oil", the product that seems to have set off the bugaboo. I'm impressed how many of today's buzzwords they got in: sustainable farming, organic, fair trade, &c., even the wholly appropriate "land of milk and honey".

http://www.canaanfairtrade.com/

I know which of these I think does a better job of presenting its best face to the world.

--John R.

*at one point taunting the rape victim with the memorable phrase "Hope you're enjoying the revolution!". Ugh.

Taum Santoski V

2011-08-16T21:27:00.000-07:00

'Aphorisms Towards a Poetics of Fantasy'

5. Some of Tolkien's myths are derived from those of ancient Europe and the Near East but, being grafted onto a new stock, grow and fructify, becoming a new thing, nor merely a hybridized retelling.

--Taum Santoski, circa 1984

Taum Santoski IV

2011-08-13T23:35:00.000-07:00

'Aphorisms Towards a Poetics of Fantasy'

4. Middle-earth is a world in miniature, set up in one man's best form of expression, language and myth; to participate in its mythical powers, through these mediations of words, is to re-establish a harmony with the present world.

—Taum Santoski, circa 1984

And The WInner Is . . . (NPR Fantasy List)

2011-08-12T22:34:00.000-07:00

So, turns out the winner of the '100 Best' Sci-Fi and Fantasy books is none other than our old friend THE LORD OF THE RINGS -- the very book I'd have picked as the all-time best myself.

And it won by a huge landslide, as had been the case with the millennium polls, the old LOCUS polls (1987, I think it was), &c. -- in this case receiving about half of all votes cast. And there's an odd symmetry to see Tolkien and Lewis as far apart as possible and still be on the same list, holding the top and bottom positions, respectively, with Tolkien's masterpiece coming in #1 (with 29,701 votes) and CSL at #100 (with 1452). Or, to put it another way, twenty people voted for Tolkien for every one who voted for Lewis (with THE SILMARILLION mid-way between them at #46*).

Partly these results may have been skewed by the exclusions the judges put on the contest: no young adult books (which left out THE HOBBIT, Pullman, &c) explicitly so as to exclude Rowling fans, and no horror to keep Steven King out. They've taken down the list of nominees, unfortunately, but here's more about the rules:**

http://www.npr.org/2011/06/24/137249678/best-science-fiction-fantasy-books-you-tell-us

And for the actual votes and some observations about who won and perhaps why,

http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2011/08/11/139346998/nprs-top-100-science-fiction-and-fantasy-novels-parsing-the-results

Overall I have to say that my top ten didn't fare too well. Here's the full list of all 100 winners:

http://www.npr.org/2011/08/11/139085843/your-picks-top-100-science-fiction-fantasy-books

Of the books I voted for, LotR won at #1 (as is right and proper), but only five of my other top-ten even made the final 100.

#1 THE LORD OF THE RINGS (Tolkien)

#2 HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE (D. Adams)

#27 THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES (Bradbury)

#29 THE SANDMAN (Gaiman)

#32 WATERSHIP DOWN (R.Adams)

#91 THE ILLUSTRATED MAN (Bradbury)

This means that the brilliant BRIDGE OF BIRDS, which I'd unhesitatingly put in the top ten fantasy novels ever written, doesn't even make their top 100. LUD-IN-THE-MIST doesn't surprise me as much, and good as the FAFHRD & THE GRAY MOUSER stories are they've never had the audience of lesser writers like Howard (in a sense, Leiber is to Howard as Clark Ashton Smith is to Lovecraft). TIGANA's absence doesn't surprise me, but I'd have at least expected Kay's most famous work, THE FIONAVAR TAPESTRY, to have ranked.

As for the books that won, it's enheartening to see that four of the top ten went to living writers; a good sign that the genre's still going strong. I've read fifty-six of the books listed (counting at least one book out of a series, not necessarily every sequel).*** Interestingly, while I'd read nine of the top ten, I've only read eleven of the bottom thirty. Does this mean there's more shared experience towards the top of the list and less towards the other end, or is my experience atypical?

--John R.

*Itself a pretty good rejoinder to those who still claim that no-one ever reads it (e.g., folks like those who posted comments at npr's site about 'Tolkein', too ill-informed about his work to even know his name).

**If you click on one of the links at that page, you can get the results of an earlier (2009) poll in which interestingly enough THE HOBBIT beat out THE LORD OF THE RINGS, ranking at #14 and #18 respectively.

***Speaking of which, I'm sure Terry Pratchett wd have ranked much higher had they not picked two of his books at random and instead listed THE DISCWORLD SERIES as a single entry.

Taum Santoski III

2011-08-12T10:31:00.000-07:00

'Aphorisms Towards a Poetics of Fantasy'

3. This world of myth, when measured against our world, is in another order of time -- what Frankfort calls "absolute time" -- the mythical past never recedes any further into the distance, as indeed it percolates through "history" from time to time, and time never brings the Golden Age any closer and all the other "Golden Ages" eventually tarnish.

--Taum Santoski, circa 1984

The New Arrivals

2011-08-11T10:47:00.000-07:00

So, Tuesday brought not one, not two, but three new books into the house, all of them arriving on the doorstep.

First, there was TATTERS OF THE KING, a CALL OF CTHULHU campaign from Chaosium [2006]. I enjoy reading C.o.C. modules as well as playing them, but have to hold off reading those who others in our gaming group might run (to avoid my Investigator knowing things that wd spoil the mystery). However, I enjoy reading them after playing through them, to see what we missed and how the designer expected things to play out (often widely at variance with what our characters actually did).

In this case, Jeff Grubb (an excellent Keeper)* ran this one a few years back, and while I enjoyed it I found that I cdn't follow it at all. The overall structure of who was doing what to who and why completely escaped me, both while inside the game and afterwards. In part this might have been because of the character I was playing -- I usually play the note-taker of the group who tries to keep track of all the leads, but this time I was having fun with a Bertie-Woosterish survivor of the Great War whose brains had been a bit addled by four years of being shot at, leaving him with an obsession about personalized yacht-sized zeppelins. One of the favorite C.o.C. characters I've ever played, his point of view was not conductive to careful gathering and shifting of evidence; he simply went with the flow, always slightly at a loss and acting more on impulse than careful planning. Hence, buying the adventure now will offer me a chance to read through the whole thing carefully and see if it holds together better in print than it did in the gaming sessions.

Second, there's TOWARD THE GLEAM by T. M. Doran, a book I knew nothing about until a recent discussion on the MythSoc list -- which turned out to be follow-up comments about a book review I hadn't seen, my subscription to MYTHPRINT having apparently silently lapsed recently without my having been aware of the fact. This is the fourth (so far) in the series of recent Novels-With-JRRT-In-Them as a character, this time under the pseudonym 'Mr. Hill' (as in Frodo's 'Mr. Underhill'). Having read Downing's LOOKING FOR THE KING, Hillard's MIRKWOOD, and Michael Ridpath's WHERE THE SHADOWS LIE (of which Ridpath's was by far the best, and Hillard's by far the worst), I'm not likely to baulk at a fourth. Although it was disconcerting to find that once I bought it Amazon filled my 'recommendations' lists with books by the pope (!) -- making the bizarre assumption that people shop by publisher (in this case, Ignatius Press**) rather than author, title, or subject -- the kind of thinking that once got me listed on a conspiracy-theory website as being part of 'the Jesuit conspiracy', whatever that might be (these conspiracy-theorists being so inept they didn't realize I'm a Southern Presbyterian who attended Marquette because of the manuscripts). More on this one down the road a ways when I've had a chance to read it.

And finally, third there's BOOK GIRL AND THE CAPTIVE FOOL by Mizuki Nomura [2006] (tr. Karen McGillicuddy [2011]). This is the third in the 'Book Girl' series, the first two of which were surprisingly unflinching in their dealings with suicide, anorexia, and similar topics; a main issue in the series as a whole is survivor's guilt. I'm looking forward to this third one as well, well aware that though a quick read it'll be no walk in the park. And by the way, now that I've seen both the BOOK GIRL movie and the three 'prequel' ovas that lead up to it, I'm more impressed than ever, esp. by the movie and the one of the ovas that deals with 'Book Girl' herself (since she's not the point-of-view character of the series, that being a traumatized formerly up-and-coming young author who witnessed his best friend attempt suicide because he had more talent than the friend did. ouch.)***

So, plenty of good books still out there, despite the collapse of another major bookstore, and plenty of good reading to look ahead to. Here's hoping the new prescription for glasses I got yesterday from the eye doctor makes the struggles with reading easier. Now to pick out a good set of frames and prepare for the latest round of 'my, these are thick lens, aren't they?'

--John R.

current reading:

MARK TWAIN'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY (vol 1), resumed

TOLKIEN AND WALES

.........................

*he's running another one on Saturday, in which I get to play my Chicago gangster, Giovanni 'Smokes' Tuscani (a.k.a. Mr. Smokes), who unexpectedly has survived not one, not two, but three Goodman Games pulp cthulhu scenarios -- largely I suspect by assuming his tommy gun won't do much against the monsters (a shoggoth, a dark young, a gnoph-keh), and turning it on the cultists instead. That, and running.

**the same people who did Downing's book. I wonder if they're going to make a habit of this.

***the other two ovas are from the point of view of the friend in question and of a girl who has a crush on the point-of-view character (of which he is entirely unaware).

Taum Santoski II

2011-08-11T10:45:00.000-07:00

'Aphorisms Towards a Poetics of Fantasy'

2. The events in Tolkien's mythos are located in a world related to but not identical with the present physical world. Nor is Middle-earth a mirror-image world reflecting back the common [>ordinary], but contains its own reality, its own flow of events, its own languages, customs and patterns of behavior, which impinge very efectively, but with a newness and nowness, upon our world.

--Taum Santoski, circa 1984

Taum Santoski (I)

2011-08-10T20:07:00.000-07:00

1. The work of Tolkien is aetiological, in that it attempts to make comprehensible the human situation of doubt, fear, and hope. Men and Elves attempt to come to terms with their environment (in two distinct ways) and with the contradiction of their opposing natures in the same environment.

--Taum Santoski, circa 1984

Taum: Twenty Years

2011-08-10T20:04:00.000-07:00

And of course August is another anniversary for us, being that August 19th will mark the twentieth anniversary of Taum Santoski's death. Janice and I saw Taum virtually every day during the two long years between the time he was diagnoses as terminally ill and the end, and I think it was his death that really taught me the lesson that a friend is irreplaceable. You can, and will, make new friends, but the memories of time you've shared with those who are gone gets oddly cut off, almost self-contained, once you're the only one to remember it. It was the same with my friend Franklin, who died just within the past year; even though I'd only seen him once since graduate school, it feels v. odd to have so many vivid memories that no one else now remembers. Just one of the things about growing old, but it came as a shock with Taum, who was the same age I was (literally, having been born exactly one month earlier).

Not quite knowing how to commemorate his death, I thought I'd start posting a piece he wrote that's never been published. Back in '83-84 I started reading and thinking seriously about the history of fantasy as a genre and Tolkien's place in it. In the course of our many conversations on this topic, Taum at one point started setting down his own ideas about fantasy. But rather than an essay (the form the opening chapter or Introduction of my erstwhile dissertation would have taken), he set down a sequence of twenty-four aphorisms -- what might be called 'Aphorisms Towards a Poetics of Fantasy'. It was so divergent from my own work that I found it more puzzling than enlightening, but in the interests of those who might be more in tune with Taum's thinking I present it now, in my authority as Taum's literary executor. In order to keep the sequence distinct from anything I might say about it, I'll post each entry separately as its own blog post, labeled 'Taum Santoski (I)', 'Taum Santoski (II), and so forth. I'll be particularly interested to see what, if any, comments these might elicit.

--John R.

PARKER

2011-08-10T19:45:00.000-07:00

So, I wrote a tribute to my cat Parker (May 1989- August 4th 2002), who died nine years ago last week. But after I posted it, blogger.com somehow ate it, apparently beyond retrieving. Luckily Janice, who knew him better than anyone but me (while fond of her he was always My Cat, just as she's Rigby's Favorite Person), got to see it before it was wiped out. So rather than go through re-creating it again I'll just say: rest in peace, Parker. You are not forgotten.