H. G. Wells tweaks Sir Henry Rider Haggard

So, now that I'm finally done with and have sent off my Haggard paper ("SHE and Tolkien, Revisited"), it's time to clean my desk -- to reshelve books, take others back to the university library, and sort through the stacks of accumulated photocopies of various bits of resource material and file them where I can find them again (lately I've been doing it by project, which seems to work pretty well). So now seems a good time to relate a fun little bit I came across in the process of researching Haggard (who I know much less about than Tolkien).

One of the most interesting things I read was THE PRIVATE DIARIES OF SIR H. RIDER HAGGARD [1980] -- you can make the case for Sir Henry himself having been far more interesting than his books. I was much amused by one entry in particular, dated 19th November 1921. Haggard was an enthusiastic backer of the British Empire, one of his chief wartime activities being visiting the various overseas parts of the Empire as part of a resettlement scheme to get British soldiers to settle in places like South Africa and Australia and East Africa and New Zealand.*

So, when Haggard attended a banquet in celebration of The Empire, he was not expecting for H. G. Wells to make mischief by questioning whether there shd be an empire at all. Here's how Haggard tells the story:

"Yesterday I went to town to be the principal guest at the dinner of the Delphian Coterie, where the subject for consideration was 'Quo Vadis -- or the Empire a century hence?' There was a large and enthusiastic audience of a very intelligent order, gathered to welcome my fellow guest, Dean Inge, and myself. Before I spoke the Secretary read out the following remarkable and to my mind most mischievous letter from Mr. H. G. Wells: 'I regret very much that I cannot attend your gathering tonight. I hope and believe that one hundred years hence there will be no British Empire. Either it will have played its part in the development of civilisation and have changed into and given place to a much larger union of free states, or it will have become a danger and a nuisance to mankind, and have followed German Imperialism and Roman Imperialism to the dust heap.' (p. 232)

--I'd have more respect for Wells' courage if he'd made this anti-toast in person, but still it's interesting, ninety-eight years later, to see how close Wells was to the mark -- the empire dissolved right about the time of his own death some thirty-five years later. And how horrified Haggard wd be to see the bad old days slip irrecoverably into the past.

--JDR

current audiobooks: (1) THE KING JAMES BIBLE [1611], and (2) GOD IS NOT GREAT, by Christopher Hitchens [2007].

*essentially a sort of homestead act, designed to help the postwar British maintain white-minority control over nonwhite-majority populations.

There, AND Back Again

So, yesterday came a most welcome parcel in the mail: my lost notebook. The good folks at the hotel in Dallas found it in our room after we checked out -- where, I can't imagine, but of course this means in future when checking out from a hotel room I'll check in drawers and under beds even more obsessively than before. The guy in charge of security (which includes lost and found) was away on vacation when Janice called (since we didn't realize it was gone until we got back here, several days following the conference, and even then had to wait an extra day while my lost suitcase caught up with us, all the while hoping against hope it'd be inside), but thanks to the information she got I was able to get ahold of the person filling in for him on the phone, who took my information, checked, and called back the next day with the welcome news it'd been found. They got it in the mail to me, and here it is -- never to roam again. Time it was retired, & in fact I've already bought a (somewhat slimmer, more easily packed in my carry-on satchel) successor.

So, just what's in it? Well, for years* I've kept a series of notebooks, since otherwise I find that any notes I take (say, when attending a conference or event) quickly get lost in the unsorted piles I'm continually trying to reduce into the order and accessibility of neatly-labelled files. So a decade or so back I switched to hardcover notebooks, which I cd cram more into and use for longer periods than the digest-sized spiral-bound ones I'd been using since about the time I arrived at Marquette (1981). The one I started about a decade ago (May 2000) got retired early, around the end of 2004, so that I cd use its remaining pages for my Reading List (#II.2221 through #II.2860 so far).** The first entry in the one just recovered, the 'Red Book', dates from July 2006 and the last from Saturday July 11th, almost two weeks ago now. During that time I attended three Medievalist Congresses at Kalamazoo, made several research trips to the Wade and Marquette, and took part in other Tolkien events and gatherings, all recorded in this book.*** It still has about thirty blank pages in the back, but I'm not going to risk taking it on another outing after this narrow escape. Though it did turn out that the title 'There and Back Again' stamped on its front cover did prove prophetic.

Welcome back!

--John R.

*starting with Mead 'Organizers' (anyone else remember them?) my first year in high school, about the same time I started keeping my Reading List (10th grade, circa 1975). I also keep a pocket notebook, but that dates back to at least 1971 and I've never found any way to organize them, though I do set aside the most valuable of them (e.g., from the 2007 Bodleian trip).

**DE NUGIS CURIALIUM [tr. 1924] by Walter Map (read May 6th-14th, 2000) and THE MARACOT DEEP [1929] by A. C. Doyle (read July 18th-22nd 2010), respectively.

***although more and more I find that notes from my visits to archives are getting preserved in Word files on my laptop, not in a physical notebook, since it's easier to add to electronic files on subsequent visits and to search them for specific points. Hence most such visits from the Bodelian research trip in Oct. 2007 and subsequent Marquette and Wade sessions aren't recorded herein.

I Write Like . . .

So, yesterday I learned from the Huffington Post about a new website where you type in a bit of your own prose and it tells you what famous author most resembles your style of writing.*

http://iwl.me/

It sounded like fun, so I decided to try it out. Since it's hard to sound like yourself when you're self-consciously trying to, Janice suggested I paste in something from one of my blog posts. I chose the one about our three cats having an unexpected and unwelcome visitor in the home a few weeks back (http://sacnoths.blogspot.com/2010/06/rigby-hastur-feanor-and.html), plugged it in, and hit the 'analyze' button. The result? It says I write like . . . Cory Doctorow. Eww. Another piece from another post gave the result H. P. Lovecraft. And a third, from yet another post, said James Joyce. So apparently I either 'do the police in different voices', so to speak or the program shows its limitations pretty early on.

Then, thinking about all the faith the anti-Hooper school put into computer word analysis programs no more reliable than this one back in the day, I thought it'd be fun to plug in a passage from Lewis's THE DARK TOWER and see what it made of it. The results: P. G. Wodehouse, of all people. A passage from THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH it indeed identified as having a different style, suggesting that it might have been written by Margaret Mitchell, while OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET registered as Shakespeare and PERELANDRA as having been written by H. G. Wells.

I have to give it credit for one thing, though: when I typed in the opening sentences from THE LORD OF THE RINGS, it said that author wrote like . . . J. R. R. Tolkien. So, score one out of eight for the system. I'm envious of THE DARK TOWER for having gotten the Wodehouse result, though.

--John R.

current reading: THE QUEST FOR SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE (ed. Lellenberg) & THE LOST EXPLORERS [1906] by Alexander MacDonald

current audiobook: THE FATHER XMAS LETTERS, read by Derek Jacobi

*apparently the site's inventer scanned in three books each by fifty different authors, so its sample size for comparison is relatively limited.

Back from the ArkLaTex

So, last night we finally got back from a two-part trip that ran a little over a week. First we flew down to Dallas, stayed a night with some friends (a former co-worker of Janice's in Allen, Texas), then went to MYTHCON, which was held in a beautiful hotel designed to make acrophobiacs suffer.

It was a thoroughly enjoyable weekend. Among the highlights were getting to meet a lot of people I've exchanged e-mails with but never encountered in person before (Jason Fisher, Randy Hoyt, David Oberhelman, Janet Croft), getting the chance to visit with friends I don't see often enough, like David Bratman and Gary Hunnewell and Bruce Leonard and Diana Pavlac, and newer friends like Merlin de Tardo, and meeting new folks -- like Tom Simon, or the Eddison scholar from New Zealand who's just spent a month with the Eddison papers at Leeds and another month at the Bodleian*, or the guy who did the presentation on folklore monsters of Japan, China, and Korea, or any of several others I'd mention if I had my program book (which is in my suitcase) or my 'Red Book' in which I took all my notes all weekend long (which is also in my suitcase).

And where's my suitcase? According to the airline it'll be here soon. Well, soon-ish. Any time now. Certainly no later than a few hours ago.

Argh.

In any case, it was a great Mythcon. The panel I was on (with David Bratman and Jason Fisher, chaired by Merlin de Tardo) went well, and my talk on Haggard's influence on Tolkien seems to have gone okay (although the near dead silence that met me when I ended surprised me a bit). I got to go to a number of good presentations, including a reading of Ch. Wms' THE MASQUE OF THE MANUSCRIPT (which I first read in the British Library back in 1981 and never thought to see performed) and, one of the standout events of the weekend, THE MAJOR AND THE MISSIONARY, a reading of the correspondence between Major Warnie Lewis and a medical missionary in New Guinea during the last five years of WHL's life; his personality comes out as strongly here as in BROTHERS & FRIENDS. Also, I was delighted that Dimitra Fimi's book won the Mythopoeic Award -- as last year's winner, I got to read out Dimitra's acceptance speech in her absence.

Then it was on to Arkansas, where I spent some time dealing with a family crisis, more or less successfully for now; I'll be returning there soon for round two. More on this later. For now, I'm just grateful to be back home -- even after a good trip, it's nice to be home with the cats (who assure us they are Starved For Affection). Now after a good night's sleep we're settling back in. I've walked the cats and started making a few preparations for the next trip -- regarding which the arrival of my luggage wd help no end. We'll see how long it takes . . .

--JDR

current reading: THE QUEST FOR SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE: THIRTEEN BIOGRAPHERS IN SEARCH OF A LIFE, ed. Jon L. Lellenberg [1987]

*the other three authors his dissertation focuses on being MacDonald, Lovecraft, and Peake.

I Can Has Game!

So, today the mail brought a large packet that, when opened, turned out to be the copy of SOURCE OF THE NILE I'd ordered last week. This is a game I've only played once before, in the Games Library back at the old TSR in Lake Geneva. I liked it a lot, and recently when trying to think of good games to play with Janice, or solo, I thought this one might be a good choice. Of course it's been out of print for years -- I think it was already long out of print when I first played it, circa '95 or '96 -- but in these days of amazon.com and bookfinder.com &c you don't have to wait until you're at a con with Crazy Egor to get old and out-of-print boardgames, especially when it's a classic.

Which this is: it's an Avalon Hill game (from back when 'Avalon Hill' was an actual boardgame company, rather than an imprint of Hasbro). And I think the design was by Dave Wesley, the person whose attempt to interject individual objectives into a wargamer is said to have inspired Dave Arneson's creation of role-playing, which combined with Gary Gygax's rules-writing ability led to the creation of D&D, the first role-playing game.

Not that you'd know that from this box: so far as I can tell, Avalon Hill has removed the designer's name, in keeping with their house policy never to credit the people who made their games, even when they were reprinting a game that had already been published by some small press.

All of which is old water long under the bridge. I'm just glad to finally have my own copy to play, and it's an added bonus that it ties in nicely with all the Rider Haggard I've been reading for my Mythcon Paper. So, once I've had a little time to read the rules and sort things out, it'll be time for a boardgame night, I think.

--John R.

Death of a Holmes Scholar

So, a while back I skimmed an article about the strange death of Richard Lancelyn Green, best known to Tolkien scholars as having been the son (and near-namesake) of Roger Lancelyn Green, a younger friend of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis's (and even an occasional visitor to the Eagle-&-Child meetings of the Inklings) and eventually Lewis's biographer. Just as his father had been an expert in nineteenth century children's authors such as Andrew Lang and George MacDonald, the younger Green was a renowned Conan Doyle expert, who for years had been at work researching what he hoped wd be a definitive three-volume biography of Sherlock Holmes' creator. All of which made his death in mysterious circumstances seem all the odder.

Then, a month or two ago, I spotted a book at the Borders in Federal Way with the odd title THE DEVIL AND SHERLOCK HOLMES: TALES OF MURDER, MADNESS, AND OBSESSION by David Grann. It looks to be a pretty interesting collection,* but since I was only really interested in one essay I put in a request for it at the library and got in the queue. It's now come and I've had a chance to read the full essay and reflect on it, and all I can say is that it leaves one with the impression that Doyle scholars seems to have the same problems distinguishing between reality and flights of fancy as Doyle himself did.

The main issue comes down to whether Green was murdered, as several of his fellow Holmes scholars believe, or committed suicide, as his family and the police concluded. It's a strange tale, but an interesting one about how scholars interested in a particular author become friends, collaborate, quarrel, become rivals, &c. One of the piece's oddities is referring to one Holmes scholar, who asked not to be identified (and who is described in sinister terms by the more conspiracy-minded of Green's English friends), as "The American". In fact, a few minutes with amazon.com and google reveals his name to be Jon L. Lellenberg, for years the editor of the BAKER STREET IRREGULARS' journal and the group's historian, as well as the Doyle estate's American agent. Lellenberg's most interesting book looks to be THE QUEST FOR SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE: THIRTEEN BIOGRAPHERS IN SEARCH OF A LIFE, which he edited and which includes not just a foreword by Doyle's daughter but two essays by his friend Green.

It all came down in the end to greed -- not monetary, but for access to unpublished manuscripts (a hot-button topic for all scholars, whatever author they devote themselves to). Green knew Doyle's last surviving daughter, with whom he'd once been friendly but long since had a falling out** (and, hence, also a falling out with Lellenberg, since he was associated with the estate), had a lot of family papers which she'd at one time intended to will to the British Library. When he heard after her death that the papers were to be auctioned off, and hence probably go to libraries and private collectors in America, he tried to block the sale with accusations of wrong-doing somewhere behind the scene if not outright theft and, according to the conspiracy-minded, was murdered so that the sale could go through. Or, alternatively, as the owner of the largest private Doyle collection in England, he wasn't able to face the fact that he'd never be able to plumb the depths of those papers before they were scattered to the four winds, and killed himself when he realized he'd never be able to finish his life's work.

Except that it turns out he was wrong. That Doyle's daughter divided the papers with some other relatives, and it was these grand-nephews of the author who were selling off their stuff, while all the most important material she'd kept for herself she did leave to the British Library, where it is today. So there was actually no reason for anybody to murder him, and he'd have been able to continue his life-long researching of the biography after all, which removes the impetus for suicide -- if he'd only known that, or been willing to believe it. A sad story, and an interesting object lesson for literary obsession.***

--John R.

--current book: SHE AND ALLAN

--cuurent audiobook: ROVERANDOM, read by Derek Jacobi.

P.S.

My wife's comment, after reading this post: POT. KETTLE. BLACK!

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

*for example, the second essay details the well-documented case of an innocent man executed in Texas in 2004; another recounts a survivor of 9/11 suffering from trauma-induced amnesia trying to reconstruct his movements that day.

**apparently she objected to his dismissive attitude towards some of Doyle's loonier enthusiasms near the end of his life.

***destructive obsession seems to be a theme in David Grann's work, based on the only other book of his I've read, THE LOST CITY OF Z.

Strawberries!!

So, yesterday I went and picked strawberries at the Al Duris farm along the Green River, one of the last working farms in the Green River Valley. The quality of their stuff is a good reminder of just how good this land used to be for farming, and why people settled on it back in the 1850s.

Being able to buy their strawberries right off the farm is something we look forward to each year -- there's something undefinable about just-picked fruit that's just hard to match at in a produce section, even a good one. This year they've been delayed and delayed by the rains until we thought they might not open at all, but they finally did -- for just two weeks rather than their usual five- to six-week season. But two weeks is still enough time to drop by several times and buy a half-flat (six pints) of berries, taken them home, and pop all we can't eat into freezer bags to enjoy over the coming year.

With any luck they'll still be open a few days this week. If you're going to be in the area, it's definitely worth a side-trip down that little road (Frager Road, I think) that runs past the too-quaintly named 'Old Fishing Hole' park all the way down to the West Valley Hwy.

--John R.

UPDATE (Tues. July 6th): I swung by again today, and they're still open. In fact, because the weather's turned so warm and dry they expect to be able to extend the season through this week and maybe even into the weekend. They do have a few other things from their other farms (fresh picked Rainier cherries, raspberries-- apparently their main farm specializes in cucumbers), but for my money it's their strawberries that can't be beat. --JDR