Taum: Twenty Years

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

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.

NPR's Top Ten

So, a few days back I learned from Jeff's blog (http://grubbstreet.blogspot.com/2011/08/embarrassment-of-riches.html)

about the current poll on NPR for people to vote for their top ten science fiction and fantasy books. And not long after, the MythSoc list started up several threads about the list, most of which revolved around definitions of what was (and was not) 'science fiction' or puzzlement where all the newcomers (books published within just the past few years) came from.

My first thought, when I skimmed through the books listed, was that half of my own top ten weren't even available as options. That's when I went back and adjusted my expectations: this wasn't the ten best books ever, it was ten best out of the pre-selected pool, as adjusted by Wolfe, Mendlesohn, & Clute. I'd completely missed the original round, but that didn't mean it wdn't be interesting to see what I thought was the best out of what remained.

Here are the ten I wound up voting for:

Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart

Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser by Fritz Leiber

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury

The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien

Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

The Sandman series by Neil Gaiman

Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay

Watership Down by Richard Adams.

of these, the only iffy one for me is the Hitchhiker's Guide, which I chose not for the novelizations but the original radio programs for which he wrote the scripts; that sort of puts it in a different medium from the rest.*

As for Bradbury being on my list twice: if you're going to pick a top ten among writers of science fiction and fantasy, you might as well include the best writer of science fiction of them all among your choices. And I suppose they can stand respectively for his work in science fiction (THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES) and fantasy (THE ILLUSTRATED MAN), more or less.

Jeff mentioned how he had trouble trimming his list down; in contrast, my runner-ups were relatively few:

The Deeds of Paksennarion by Eliz. Moon

The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

The Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay

The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien

of these, Fionavar got edged out by Kay's TIGANA, while THE SILMARILLION got edged out (in my mind anyway) by THE HOBBIT, wh. shd have been on the list. Whereas the first and last book in Moon's series and the Willis wd have made it into my top dozen.

As for books that SHOULD have been on the list, had its compilers's judgment aligned more with my own, here are the ones I think they really missed the boat by not including:

The Book of Three Dragons by Kenneth Morris

The Books of Wonder by Lord Dunsany

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H. P. Lovecraft

The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip

The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman

Hobberdy-Dick by Katharine Briggs

The Hobbit by JRRT

The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll

The Night Land by Wm Hope Hodgson

The Well at the World's End by Wm Morris

Of these, I suspect THE HOBBIT and the Pullman got bumped as 'young adult', but there's really no excuse for the others not being better known and more highly valued, alas. Those of us who know and appreciate them really need to spread the word better.**

--John R.

*Gaiman's SANDMAN doesn't post the same problem for me; here I think the impact comes almost entirely from the literary quality of its scripts, not their 'performance' by various illustrators. And it's a masterful working out of a whole new mythology, which is pretty impressive all by itself.

**the same goes for Clark Ashton Smith's TALES OF AVEROIGNE -- if anyone had ever actually published such a book (i.e., collected his 'Averoigne' stories into a single volume).

A Different Kind of Mess

So, I refrained from posting during the Debt Ceiling crisis, mostly because I found the whole thing too alarming and discouraging. But in its aftermath I thought I'd share a few links.

First, to Mr. Krugman on just how bad the resultant deal is. Given that just in the last three days we're already hearing talk about the recovery collapsing, the economy falling back into recession, AND the U. S. credit rating being downgraded anyway,* I'd say he's more Cassandra than not.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/01/opinion/the-president-surrenders-on-debt-ceiling.html?_r=2

By contrast, here's a piece by someone who rather smugly chides those who believed Obama might actually attempt to do any of the things those who voted for him elected him to do. It's one of several pieces that have appeared lately that have made me wonder if it isn't best to think of Obama as essentially a moderate Republican: an essentially decent man dedicated to not rocking the boat, whose ideal audience/potential supporter is David Brooks.

http://blogs.middlebury.edu/presidentialpower/2011/07/31/did-obama-cave/

And finally -- and here's why I'm posting at all -- here's the loony take on things: the suggestion that the treasury simply coin two $1,000,000,000,000 platinum coins as a way out of the crisis. I shelve this one with the 'sovereign citizen' loons, but hey, at least it's numismatically interesting:

http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/07/28/282471/the-platinum-coin-option/

--John R.

*given how disfunctional the government just showed itself to be, and how incapable of taking even the most obvious steps (i.e., raise taxes on the quarter-million people in this country who are millionaires).

How to Make a Mess

So, anyone can make a mess. But there's something about making a mess in a kitchen that requires a man's touch. Stories about exploding skillets or icing on the ceiling or what happens when you don't have a good grip on the stick blender. And today I'm able to contribute a point-by-point case study.

First, open up the fridge and take out the tupperware container filled with peanut soup.

Make sure you grasp the container so that when the lid suddenly comes off you have a firm grasp on the lid.

When the rest of the container, holding all the soup, surrenders itself to gravity, consider how lucky you are that it lands face up.

That's when another law of physics kicks in, actions and reactions. Or, as what they taught us in eight-grade science would have put it, the potential energy collected by the soup as it fell is converted to kinetic energy once it lands. The container itself no longer being in motion, the soul leaves it and explodes upwards, just like in those line-lapse photos of a raindrop hitting water.

This experiment works best if you use a thick, viscous soup. Even better if it's something that wd stain (say, with a lot of tomato in it). Luckily peanut soup fills the bill on both accounts.

Now, the experiment having run its course, start the clean up. The walls come first, since you want to get that off before it stains. Then the part you can see, splattered on the refrigerator shelves and all the nooks inside the door (since you had the door open in order to take out the soup in the first place). Then tackle all the surfaces you can't see: since it splashed from below, the bottoms of all those shelves in the door (e.g., the one holding the eggs, &c) have each their decorations.

Finally, take care of the pool on the floor.

Then go back and check again; you'll be surprised how many spots you missed on the first go around. Rest assured that in any case you'll be finding random spots of peanut soup hidden here and there for months.

Last of all, warm up what's left of the soup. Enjoy; you might not be getting peanut soup again for a while.

--John R.

THE BONES OF THE OX

So, yesterday's mail brought my author's copy of TOLKIEN AND THE STUDY OF HIS SOURCES: CRITICAL ESSAYS (formerly 'The Bones of the Ox', taking its cue from Tolkien's Cauldron of Stories in OFS), edited by Jason Fisher, which includes my essay "SHE and Tolkien, Revisited".* This is a re-casting and expansion of my v. first scholarly essay, which appeared in MYTHLORE as far back as the summer of 1981. I was glad to be asked to revise this piece, which seems to get cited a lot over the years. We have so much more material available to us now than then (e.g., LETTERS of JRRT, the HME, the Scull-Hammond chronology), but my basic premise still held, I think, and it was good to be able to include more evidence in support of my conclusions. And it was interesting to revisit a piece written so long ago (thirty years) -- my style and also I think my critical acumen have both evolved over that time.

I'm also glad that I'll now have a chance to read my fellow contributors' essays, which cover a range of subjects from Mesopotamian sources and the Goth/Lombard/Byzantine connection to writers whose lifespans overlapped Tolkien's own like Haggard and Buchan. It's not an exhaustive collection -- it's hard to see how it cd be** -- but it's a good place to start a look at how Tolkien handled his sources (which is as interesting a question as what the sources were).

And of course congratulations to Jason for his first book. Putting together a collection of essays by diverse hands can be like herding cats, and it's a tribute to his organizational powers and stick-to-it-ness that we now have this book. Kudos!

--John R.

*which I delivered at last year's MythCon in Dallas.

**a thought which conjures up visons of a companion volume someday with pieces on MacDonald, Morris, Dunsany, &c.

Stone of Invisibility

So, I've been reading one of the impulse buys I got in the book room at Kalamazoo, THE MAN IN THE MOONE by Francis Godwin, published posthumously in 1638. It's the story of a man who managed to reach the moon by harnessing a bunch of migratory geese together. As one of a cluster of 'visit to other planet' tales from that period,* it pulls together ideas from all over: Godwin's interest in long-range signaling and in secret languages/codes, the 'green children' legend, theories of gravity, &c. Two of Godwin's most interesting ideas involve lunar language and magical stones.

Godwin's explorer, a diminutive Spaniard named Gonsales,** finds that the lunar language consists of musical notes, so that they can communicate through singing melodies; he even uses musical notation to depict it [p. 109]. Later, when upon his return to Earth he finds he's landed in China, he suggests a lot of similarities between Lunar and Chinese (e.g., in the latter's emphasis on pitch and tone).

Gonsales also finds a new colour on the moon (shades of Lindsay's jale and ulfire, and of Lovecraft's Colour, and of Bierce):

. . . how to describe the colour of them . . .

It was neither blacke, nor white, yellow, nor redd,

greene nor blew, nor any colour composed of these.

But if you aske me what it was, then I must tell you,

it was a colour never seen in our earthly world,

and therefore neither to be described unto us by any,

nor to be conceived of one that never saw it.

For as it were a hard matter to describe unto

a man born blind*** the difference

betweene blew and Greene, so can I

not bethinke my selfe of any meanes

how to decipher unto you this Lunar colour,

having no affinitie with any other

that ever I beheld with mine eyes.

Onely this I can say of it, that it was

the most glorious and delightfull, that

can possibly be imagined; neither in truth

was there any one thing, that more delighted me,

during my abode in that new world, than

the beholding of that most pleasing and

resplendent colour. [p. 100]

A few hints made me suspect that this may have been one of CSL's source-books for OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET -- Gonsales' discovery that space is filled with light (apparently a common belief during the period), or that he discovers the Lunar inhabitants to be not just good Xians (Godwin was a bishop, after all) but in an apparently unfallen state, with no murders (it's simply too hard to kill each other, given Lunar vitality) and a peaceful acceptance of death when one's time has come. However, it's clear from editor Wm Poole's apparatus to the book (sixty pages of introduction and forty of appendices, bracketing not quite sixty pages of actual text) that Godwin's was part of a tradition, and I don't know enough about that tradition (though I plan to learn more).

One passage of Tolkienian interest was in Gonsales' description of the new types of rocks he found on the moon; here the editor notes that Godwin is drawing on THE BOOK OF SECRETS attributed to Albert Magnus; a reference to the creation of artificial shining stones might be worth following up on. Of particular relevance, though, is the passage about Stones of Invisibility:

I inquired then amongst them, whether they had not

any kind of Iewell or other meanes to make a man

invisible, which mee thought had beene a thing of great

and extraordinary use.

And I could tell of divers of our learned men

had written many things to that purpose.

They answered that if it were a thing faisable,

yet they assured themselves that God

would not suffer it to be revealed to us creatures

subject to so many imperfections, being a thing

so apt to be abused to ill purposes; and that

was all I could get of them. [p. 112]

--all v. Platonic!

--John R.

current book: THE MAN IN THE MOONE by Francis Godwin [1638]

current audio book: THE DUNWICH HORROR, HPLHS 'radio-play' adaptation (just finished)

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

*which I suspect I'll start to read my way through, off and on, one by one, prob. stating with Kepler's SOMNIUM [1634]

**referred to on the title page as "Domingo Gonsales, The Speedy Messenger" -- a distant inspiration for Speedy Gonzales, perhaps?

***cf. C. S. Lewis's story of the same name.