Screwtape, on stage

So, Saturday Janice and I took the 'Link' into downtown Seattle, where after a fine meal at Wild Ginger (a great restaurant that friends Sig & Anne introduced us to and to which we get maybe once a year or so) we walked to the Paramount Theater for a four o'clock live show, a two-person adaptation of C. S. Lewis's THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS.

Now, this is the book that made C. S. Lewis famous, got him on the cover of TIME magazine, and in general changed him from an academic who cdn't get a professorship into a popular author. In recent years THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA have replaced SCREWTAPE as Lewis's best known writings (unfortunately so, in my opinion), but for a long time this was the book CSL was known by more than any other. And it's still one of the very best.

It was also one of the first books by C. S. Lewis I ever read,* while I was still in high school. And the one he dedicated to J. R. R. Tolkien, which made it a great starting point.

I'd heard about this adaptation for a while, so I had a good idea of what to expect. I have to say that on the whole I enjoyed it. McLean, the actor playing Screwtape is no John Cleese, but then who is? I wd have preferred Cleese's acerbic academic bite, but McLean's flamboyance worked well enough. I'm certainly glad we went, and I'd recommend it to fans of the book who are curious to see how they cd dramatize what is essentially a correspondence, and a one-sided correspondence at that.

In essence this is a one-man show, except with two characters on stage. Only one has dialogue, though; the other is to writhe, contort, fetch and carry, and generally act out while the other pontificates.** David Bratman compared this second figure (Toadpipe, Screwtape's secretary in the book, his factotum in the stage play) to Sirkis's Gollum, which isn't far from the mark (except that it's a largely silent 'gollum', speaking only the occasional gibberish).

As for Screwtape himself, he reminded me more of a Ringmaster than infernal bureaucrat, partly from his flamboyant outfit (a gaudy dressing gown) and partly for his doing a fair amount of gesturing while holding forth dramatically as he airs his opinions. I understand entirely why they decided to make this a two-person show, so there'd be something for the audience to see, but for my money they wd have done better to just have a one-man show: Screwtape has the moxie to carry it off, and the self-absorption of a highly opinionated senior demon (sorry: devil) wd come across even more strongly that way, I think.

In any case, the show starts with Lewis's later piece, "Screwtape Proposes a Toast", then segues into the main story; the whole only takes up about ninety minutes. Here's a link to the group putting on this adaptation, whose explicit goal is to create quality Xian drama;*** the website has a lot more about the production, and includes a good picture of the actor/playwright in costume.

http://www.screwtapeonstage.com/

I am curious about one point: the credits in the little program book say that this play was adapted by Jeffrey Fiske and Max McLean (who plays Screwtape himself), but the full listing of cast and crew later on (p.7) includes a note that this play was "Inspired by Tony Lawton's stage adaptation". If anyone out there has seen Lawton's version, how does it differ from this?

Oh, and for those interested: they announced that their next project is a similar stage adaptation of THE GREAT DIVORCE. Now that shd be interesting . . .

--John R.

*I originally wrote here "the first book by CSL I ever read", but checking my Reading List I find that I actually read the space trilogy first (I.8, I.9, I.10, from Sept 4th thr Sept 10th, 1975), while I didn't read Screwtape until two months later (I.34, circa Sept 17th or 18th, 1975). And another two years passed after that before I read another, The Great Divorce (I.157; Tues. Oct 18th 1977), shortly before I read my first Ch. Wms, All Hallows' Eve --this being the only Wms book in the local university library (I.167; Tues, Nov 15th-Th. 24th, 1977); the first Barfield came a year later, during my summer at Fayetteville, when I gained access both to campus and off-campus bookstores and the excellent Univ. of Arkansas library: Worlds Apart (I.221; July 10th-15th, 1978), quickly followed by Unancestral Voice (I.228; July 25th thr Aug 1st, 1978). From that point on, the Inklings' books come thick and fast.

**or whatever the infernal inverse of that wd be.

***shades of George MacDonald!

"Thank God for Mississippi"

So, we have a saying in Arkansas: "thank God for Mississippi". The reason behind it being that, as far behind the rest of the country as we may be in Arkansas (48th or 49th in things like education, poverty, &c), things were usually reliably slightly worse on the wrong (east) side of the Mississippi. I've been away now for a long time, first having gone to live up in Yankeeland (Wisconsin) and now the West Coast, but I see from today's news that some things never change. Here's the quote:

Interracial marriage laws were overturned by the Supreme Court

in 1967, but a significant minority of Mississippi and Alabama

apparently still long for their return, or are at least ambivalent

about the idea. In Alabama, 67 percent of respondents said interracial

marriage should be allowed, but 21 percent said it should

be illegal and another 12 percent were not sure.

Mississippi Republican voters were even more divided:

Only 52 percent said such marriages should be legal,

versus 29 percent who said they should be banned

and 17 percent who were unsure.

Of course it cd be worse: it's better to have just over half of the Mississippians to be on the right side of history than the other way around. But looks like it's going to be a long time before they're ready to join the rest of us in the twenty-first century.

Here's the link for the full article:

http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/03/ppp-poll-gop-voters-in-al-ms-think-obama-is-muslim-unsure-about-interracial-marriage.php?ref=fpnewsfeed

And, just to show we've got problems of our own, just today came the news that there will be not one but two 'initiatives' for the fall trying to ban gay marriage. There may turn out to be an many homophobics in Washington state as there are racists in Mississippi. We'll see.

--JDR

Derleth and the Mythos

So, one of the books I've been reading recently is DISSECTING CTHULHU: ESSAYS ON THE CTHULHU MYTHOS, ed. S. T. Joshi (2011, Miskatonic River Press). A loan from friend Jeff G. (thanks, Jeff), this is the first scholarly work from a relatively new publisher of some quality 'old school' CALL OF CTHULHU rpg adventure anthologies (NEW TALES OF THE MISKATONIC VALLEY [2008] and MORE ADVENTURES IN ARKHAM COUNTRY [2010]), which I used to run a C.o.C. campaign off and on for about a year and a half.* Now they're branching out into both Mythos fiction and, more significantly, scholarship.

This present collection is devoted not just to denouncing August Derleth, who certainly deserves it, but to attempting to debunk the idea that there ever was a Cthluhu Mythos anywhere outside Derleth's imagination. There's a lot of baby with the bathwater here; the anti-Derlethians are right that (a) Derleth's ideas were markedly unlike Lovecraft's on key points (e.g., the Xian gloss he applied -- ludicrously so, given that Lovecraft was a stark atheist) and (b) Derleth indulged himself in a good deal of fraud to pass off his ideas as Lovecraft's own.** But in trying to expunge these accretions some go so far as to deny Lovecraft's own contributions: contrary to their claims, most of 'the Cthulhu Mythos' as we know it today derives directly from H.P.L.'s writings, extrapolated from works like "The Call of Cthulhu" and "The Dunwich Horror" and THE DREAM-QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH. And the evolved form it now has owes less to Derleth (whose take on the Mythos now seems distinctly quaint) than to Sandy Petersen and his peers, and the form they gave it (which in turn builds directly on Lovecraft's own practice in his treatment of material from earlier writers like Chambers and Dunsany). Today most people first encounter Lovecraft's work not through Derleth's essays and introductions dating back to forty-plus years ago but through the CALL OF CTHULHU roleplaying game.

Stripped of their smugness and absolute self-certainty (reading the first half of this book is like skimming through a year's worth of issues of THE SKEPTICAL INQUIRER all in one sitting), the essays here range from claims that the Mythos can be restricted to as few as three stories to more general approaches that it might include as much as a dozen or so. Generally, as the volume's editor notes, attempts to define the Mythos center in on three or four elements:

(1) eldritch tomes, like THE NECRONOMICON. If every story by Lovecraft and others in his circle that mentions one of these tomes is a 'Mythos story' (as most of us implicitly accept), then the Mythos is pervasive throughout much of HPL's fiction AND poetry (e.g. the sonnet sequence THE FUNGI FROM YUGGOTH) AND a considerable portion of his correspondence as well. Several of the critics included here consider this just window dressing and so don't take it into account, but I'm wary of arguments that can only make their point by excluding great blocks of evidence.

(2) the gods. Lovecraft may not have come up with the term 'The Great Old Ones", but like Tolkien's "A Mythology for England" it's useful & distinctive shorthand for another of the most characteristic features of his work. Is it only a Cthulhu Mythos story if it directly involves Cthulhu or Nyarlathotep or Yog-Sothoth as a character who actually appears, in person, in the narrative? That line of thought wd lead to the conclusion that v. few stories indeed qualify. Or is mentioning one of the Other Gods enough?-- wh. vastly expands the field. How about the Elder Ones (wh. seems to have been Lovecraft's name for the Titans), like Nodens? Or the Greek gods (whom he called "the Great Ones"), who figure in passing in THE DREAM-QUEST?

(3) Arkham Country. Lovecraft set some stories in Providence or other real New England towns, but many take place in imaginary towns like Arkham, Dunwich, and Innsmouth, or along the Miskatonic River, or feature some doomed professor from Miskatonic University. This is one of the most distinctive features of Lovecraft's work: it's often been observed that landscape almost approaches the status of a character in his tales. But is this subcreated world part of the Mythos, or independent of it?

(4) Joshi, the volume's editor, stresses a philosophical element: does the story center on 'cosmicism', Lovecraft's own personal brand of nihilism? Certainly there's a sense of threat from vast cosmic forces in the best of his tales, but for me there's v. much a sense of an author's reach exceeding his grasp: Great Cthulhu, whose advent is supposed to spell doom for the entire world, is defeated by being rammed by a yacht. The half-god prophet Wilbur Whateley's apocalyptic schemes end when he's eaten by a watchdog. His brother, an unstoppable massive engine of destruction, spends most of his time flattening barns and eating cows. The gap between conception and execution cd hardly be more ludicrously large. More to the point, the gods of the Mythos are supposed to evoke terror in us by representing our exposure to vast, inconceivable forces who are utterly indifferent to us, yet when they show up in the tales they act that ordinary boogiemen who delight in stalking and devouring the mere mortals whose existence they're supposed to be supremely unaware of. The core point of Lovecraft's credo -- that we wd be driven mad and instantly destroyed were we to become aware of the vastness of the cosmos and our insignificance within it -- is conveyed better by Douglas Adams' Total Perspective Vortex than by anything in any of Lovecraft's tales; the closest Lovecraft comes to dealing with the theme directly is in the story "From Beyond" -- far from his best, but the only real 'Mythos story' he ever wrote by that standard.

Taken altogether, the presence of at least one of these elements marks most of Lovecraft's work. So, if you consider each an element of the Mythos, it follows that 'Lovecraftian' and 'Cthulhu Mythos' are effectively synonyms. That's the conclusion Chaosium reached, meaning that any story by Lovecraft cd be considered authoritative and drawn on for a Mythos adventure. Personally, I find Chaosium releases like THE MASKS OF NYARLATHOTEP, SHADOWS OF YOG-SOTHOTH, and DAY OF THE BEAST truer to the pulp stories Lovecraft actually wrote than anything that anything that might correspond to an idealized image of Lovecraft as conveyed by the strictures set down in this collection.

Two small take aways that made me glad I read this book: the short essay by Will Murray on Nug & Yeb, two v. minor Great Old Ones who never play any significant role in any story. Murray shows that they're referred to with surprising frequency in HPL's letters, and collects those references to show that Lovecraft had some well-thought out ideas regard even v. minor Mythos beings. I remember Dr. Humphrey Havard telling me much the same re. Tolkien: that he only had about 10% of what he knew about any given character in his legendarium written down, and cd expound at length about any of them.

Even better is another piece by Murray about the town of Foxfield. I'd been rather annoyed when the Miskatonic River Press adventure collections each included a scenario set in a 'Lovecraft Country' town they'd made up themselves: the little village of Foxfield, Mass. Well, it turns out this is a creation of Lovecraft himself; Murray's piece tells how S. T. Joshi, back in 1994, found a hand-drawn map HPL had created of the town, which he obviously planned to use as the setting of a story. We don't have the story, nor any indication of what it might have been, and so can extrapolate only from the details of what sites Lovecraft chose to include and label on the map (rather like scholars trying to work out the conclusion of EDWIN DROOD from the illustrations Dickens commissioned for the unwritten chapters). This is a great little piece of research; highly recommended.

--John R.

current reading: A MOUSE & HIS CHILD by Hoban; ORTHODOXY by GKC

current audiobook: OVER SEA, UNDER STONE by Cooper.

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

*which unfortunately now seem to have run its course.

**On a personal level, which they don't go into here, Derleth's behavior is much more reprehensible, both in his persecution of HPL's chosen executor, Barlow, whom Derleth slandered and drove from fandom and publishing circles, and in his pretense that he represented 'the Lovecraft estate', a self-appointed role which he exploited to collect royalties he had no legal right to and to veto projects he shd have had no say over. Not to mention, of course, his occasional forgeries. Of course, on the positive side, Derleth does deserve credit for rescuing the 'Weird Tales' school of pulp horror writers from oblivion. The argument has been made, rather unconvincingly, that Derleth ghettoized Lovecraft and held him back from mass popularity and literary acceptance; even if we grant this dubious claim, there's no doubt that Derleth promoted Clark Ashton Smith, the greatest writer in that group by far, bringing new volumes into print over the decades even though Smith's books sold poorly. And he was responsible for one of Dunsany's late books having an American edition, for which he made sure to pay Dunsany a royalty, so that's to his credit as well. --JDR

Closing in on a Millennium (The Reading List)

So, so far this week has been a good week for reading. I've finished three books in the last three days, one per night. I'll see if I can't get around to making posts on all three, but quite apart from enjoying them for their own sake, they've also made me v. aware of the passage of time. That's because they're numbers II.2984, II.2985, and II.2986 respectively of my Reading List. So, just another fourteen books to go before I reach the three thousandth book I've read all the way through since beginning the list in August 1981. I keep going back and forth over whether I shd pick out some special book --say, LotR--to mark the occasion, or simply let the count fall where it may, like an odometer rolling over. Guess we'll soon see, prob. sometime this summer.

By the way, the 'II' is to indicate that this is the start of a new count, there having been a break in the continuity when I lost the notebook containing the original list of some six hundred titles which I'd started in August 1975 (I accidently left it on the Underground during my first visit to England). I was able to re-construct all but the last twenty or so entries, but still decided it was better to start over than to never get the tally right again. So, like the Mayan Long Count calendar will do this winter, I simply started over from a new number 1. One of these days I'm going to get the whole thing typed up; it'll be interesting to see how often I re-read some old favorites, how long it's been since I read some things, and how long ago some books became important to me.

The count does not include audiobooks, or any book I don't finish, though occasionally I'll group several short items into a single entry. I've recently (Jan.2010) started keeping a more informal list of audiobooks, which now stands at 35 entries --though to be fair, one of those entries is the entire FAERIE QUEENE (or rather as much as of it as Spenser wrote), and another the OLD TESTAMENT, both of wh. kept me going for months. It also leaves out manga, most rpg material, and almost everything I read on the computer -- so even at 2986 the tally only represents a selective portion of what all I read.

--JDR

Just read: DISSECTING CTHULHU: ESSAYS ON THE CTHULHU MYTHOS, ed. Joshi (finished Tuesday); THE LACQUER SCREEN, a Judge Dee novel by Rbt van Gulik (finished Wednesday); MY FIVE TIGERS, by Lloyd Alexander (finished last night).

Currently reading: Arne Zettersten's memoir/biography of Tolkien (begun Wend.), GKC's ORTHODOXY (begun last night, on the Kindle), and JUDGE DEE AT WORK (this morning over breakfast)

The Wobbit

So, one of the things I read on the Kindle while on my recent trip to Arkansas was neither a book by nor about Tolkien but a parody thereof: THE WOBBIT, by Paul A. Erickson [2011]. So far as I can tell, this is apparently only available as an e-book (http://www.amazon.com/Wobbit-Parody-Hobbit-ebook/dp/B004ZR9ELK), not in print form.

Earlier parodies of Tolkien's work, like the mysteriously popular Harvard Lampoon BORED OF THE RINGS (which I thought had overstayed its welcome thirty+ years ago) and John Ellison's wonderful re-write of THE HOBBIT as a Jeeves-and-Wooster story, have tended to be relatively short. The same is true of pieces like "The Picnic" (published I think in an early issue of ORCRIST) and the online-only VERY SECRET DIARIES, suggesting that, where Tolkien is concerned, brevity is the essence of comedy.

This makes THE WOBBIT all the more unusual, in that while shorter than the book it parodies, it's still pretty long, and re-writes THE HOBBIT chapter by chapter, often paragraph by paragraph (e.g., cf. Chapter 7: Queer Lodgings for a Straight Wobbit). Erickson's humor comes from three sources:

(1) re-casting the plot of THE HOBBIT into terms of the recent fiscal meltdown, with the Chairman of the Board and board of directors of SmithiBank replacing 'Thorin & Co.' Thus, in what' probably THE WOBBIT's funniest line, Smaug's attack on the Lonely Mt & environs is described as a hostile takeover:

"As happens from time to time, a dragon showed up

& adjusted the market . . . [Smaug's arrival caused]

a huge loss of equity, & then Lake City property devalued.

Investor confidence failed . . . "

Similarly, Bilbo is hired to do "a quick bit of consulting", the Mayor of Lake City is

". . . v. excited w. the prospect of reducing unemployment,

stimulating the downtown business area & rebuilding his tax base",

and the human/elf siege of the Mt is viewed by the dwarves as a run on the bank:

"I suppose we cd fortify the entrance

& kill anyone who tries to close their account . . .

Paperwork & delay may yet win the day".

(2) having his version of Tolkien's characters talk like cartoons, comic book characters, personalities, and the like. Here's a not-quite-complete listing (I forget which character talks like Foghorn Leghorn):

--The trolls (Wm, Tom, Burt) = The Three Stoogies, with 'Joe, Harry, & Shirley' in place of Moe, Larry, & Curly.

--Gollum = Lady Ga-Ga (talk about a cultural reference with a ten-minute expiration date)

--the wargs = Scooby-Doo

--Beorn = the Incredible Hulk

--the first Mirkwood Spider = Charlotte (from CHARLOTTE'S WEB)

--The Elvenking = Schwarzenegger

--Bard = Dirty Harry

(3) Finally, the whole is written in a sarcastic style that's sometimes grating but once in a while throws off an effective line, as when the river-barrel stream exit to the Elvenking's Halls is described as

"a sort of riparian service drive"

Other examples include

. . . a fortnight, wh is what they call two weeks in Lake City . . .

the characters leave at 1st light and return at 1st dark

or the following line about Gollum:

"I don't know where he came from, or who or what he was,

but I'll try to make something up if I write a sequel."

Overall

My initial evaluation of this book was twofold:

(1) 'I read this book so you won't have to.'

and

(2) Erickson is no Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams;

he's not even a Tom Holt!*

Mulling it over a month later, I now think that's too harsh. I certainly don't think this book is a successful effort -- but then I'm a hard sell, and others might get more (or less) out of it than I did. And there were a few funny lines; it's just a matter of whether you personally find it worth reading through to find them.

--John R.

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

*I'm thinking here of Holt's later works, like FLYING DUTCH, in which he lapsed into flaccid faux-Pratchett self-parody, not his early EXPECTING SOMEONE TALLER and WHO'S AFRAID OF BEOWULF, which are really quite good (esp. the latter). The man has talent -- his GOATSONG is quite possibly the best historical novels I've ever read -- which makes it all the more annoying that he apparently made a deliberate decision not to use it.

UPDATE( 3/9-12)

I've gone back in and corrected the spelling of "riparian" (from 'reparian'), as per David's comment; the error was entirely mine, not the author being quoted. So too with the abbreviations, which reflect my usage, not his. Generally I wdn't use abbreviations in direct quotes; in this case I was transcribing pencilled notes from my pocket notebook, not citing directly from the e-book source. I shd have taken more care to make that clear. --JDR

The New Arrival: GREEN SUNS

So, last week (Tuesday) brought my copy of Verlyn's latest book, GREEN SUNS AND FAERIE: ESSAYS ON J. R. R. TOLKIEN. I'd had this on order from amazon.com for months last year, until they finally cancelled; you'd think they'd have added it back in on my 'recommended' list when it finally became available. Apparently not. Given that, once I heard from the MythSoc list (for which thanks) that it was now out, I decided to order it directly from Kent State.

Wow what a book. Haven't had time to read it yet, but I already know a number of these pieces from having heard Verlyn present them at conferences and workshops over the years (some of them dating back to when we first met, over twenty-eight years ago now!) For some reason, the amazon.com entry seems to lack a Table of Contents, so here's what all's in this book [N.B.: the essay numbering is not in the original, being added by me here to help differentiate between the sometimes-lengthy essay titles*]:

PART ONE: TOLKIEN SUB-CREATOR

1. Fantasy and Reality: JRRT's World and the Fairy-story Essay

2. The Music and the Task: Fate and Free Will in Middle-earth

3. Tolkien and the Idea of the Book

4. Tolkien on Tolkien: OFS, THE HOBBIT, and LotR

5. When Is a Fairy Story a Faerie Story?: SWM

6. The Footsteps of AElfwine

7. The Curious Incident of the Dream at the Barrow: Memory and Reincarnation in Middle-earth

8. Whose Myth Is It?

PART TWO: TOLKIEN IN TRADITION

9. Tolkien's Wild Men from Medieval to Modern

10. Tolkien and the Matter of Britain

11. Frodo and Aragorn: The Concept of the Hero

12. Bilbo's Neck Riddle

13. Allegory Versus Bounce: Tolkien's SWM [Flieger vs. Shippey]

14. A Mythology for Finland: Tolkien and Lonnrot as Mythmakers

15. Tolkien, KALEVALA, and 'The Story of Kullervo'

16. Brittany and Wales in Middle-earth

17. The Green Knight, the Green Man, and Treebeard: Scholarship and Invention in Tolkien's Fiction

18. Missing Person

PART THREE: TOLKIEN AND HIS CENTURY

19. A Cautionary Tale: Tolkien's Mythology for England

20. The Mind, the Tongue, and the Tale

21. A Post-modern Medievalist

22.Taking the Part of Trees: Eco-conflict in Middle-earth

23. Gilson, Smith, and Baggins

24. The Body in Question: The Unhealed Wounds of Frodo Baggins

25. A Distant Mirror: Tolkien and Jackson in the Looking-glass

I also found it interesting that when I read the blurbs on the back cover, for once I didn't think they exaggerated at all. Here are a few representative snippets:

"No one knows Tolkien's oeuvre better than Flieger,

or presents it more accessibly"

--Tom Shippey

"It is not often that a new book makes me want

to stand up and shout 'Hallelujah!'"

--Diana Pavlac Glyer

"essential reading, not just for scholars but for all readers

who want to understand Middle-earth and its development"

--Michael Drout

"a book of insights and delights"

--Marjorie Burns

and finally my personal favorite, the one that says it all:

"these essays track a major scholar's deepening understanding

of the work of the master of fantasy"

--I know that, for my part, I'm going to be savoring these, one at a time, for weeks to come.

--JDR

*many of these's topics are self-evident from their titles, although this is not the case with some ("Whose Myth Is It?" being about the Athrabeth while "Missing Person" suggests no Christ is coming to Middle-earth).

Writing Reviews

So, I haven't been posting much the last week or two, mainly because I've been playing catch-up after my two unplanned trips so far this year. One thing that's kept me busy the last week and a half of February was a book review. Normally this wdn't be a problem, except that after having arranged to do the review last May, I completely forgot about it until asked how it was coming, just before its deadline. I've now read the book, completed the review, sent it off, and gotten a provisional 'looks okay' -- so that's done, barring any changes that might need to be done at the proofing stage. But it's got me thinking about reviews in general.

For me, it's always easier to review a good book (this is great! you shd rush out and buy it!) or a bad book (stay away from this one, folks) than a so-so book (not terrible, not great; pick it up if you're particularly interested in its subject, otherwise check out a library copy). This particular book fell mostly in this third category. I'm also more self-conscious of what I write just now, since I recently discovered there's an 'Open Letter' posted on the website of one author whose work I reviewed last year, protesting against my incompetence and malice. I don't think I'm either, actually; I just happened not to think much of his book, and said so, and explained why, as clearly as I cd. I'm not surprised he's annoyed, though; no one likes a negative review.

Having just been asked to write yet another review, this time a much shorter one of a book I'm predisposed to like, I've been mulling over the problem and realized I cd avoid such trouble in the future by only reviewing books I like, and boiling my review of said books down into seven words:

Scholar like books.

This book.

Scholar like!

--John R.