WORMWOODIANA

So, while I'm on a Doug Anderson kick, I wanted to celebrate the recent launching of Doug's collaborative blog. Doug is not just a superlative scholar but better than anyone I know in finding out things about obscure dead authors (we were once on a panel together of that name at Wiscon along with several other people, and his author was more obscure, though not more dead, than any of the other offerings).

A while back Doug starting doing reviews in a little journal called WORMWOOD. Now, as of sometime in June, he's started a blog to which he and other contributors make postings similar to the fare in the journal, although so far there seem to be fewer reprints of old impossible-to-find stories from decades ago and more articles and notes about such works--which seems to me to make the blog a good complement to the physical journal.

I haven't read all the posts yet, the blog having been already in progress when I discovered it, but already there's been at least one real gem: Sidney Sime's colour illustration of the first JORKENS story back in 1926, which features Sime's portrait of Dunsany himself as Jorkens. So far as I know, this is Sime's only portrayal of his longtime partner. It thus makes a nice accompaniment for Dunsany's intensely moving word-portrait of Sime, which he wrote upon learning of Sime's death in obscurity and poverty in the early days of World War II, the first and last sentences of which read

"We have lost, in a time of losses, when loss is nothing out of the ordinary, a genius, whose stupendous imagination has passed across our time little more noticed by most people than the shadow of a bird passing over a lawn would be noticed by most of a tennis party."

"And now that vast imagination has left us, having enriched our age with dreams that we have not entirely deserved."

(THE GHOSTS OF THE HEAVISIDE LAYER [1980], pages 168-175)


I first saw this illustration in Edinburgh during a research trip in May 1987 but have never been able to get a copy (the Milwaukee Public Library's records state that they have one, but it's in storage in their sub-sub basement, and I was never able to retrieve it on mulitple efforts). Thus, I am delighted to find it posted here (https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW8IRexvyuHZYwdv5ZzFI36OvtDbazx7Yj_i1tNMjq0ljndPItUE3iWbUAzi5Xyo2mN_tOtfvKixr9cyiWUNvj2A1k5-4XaPDiDiZYlhbYAZYxltT20JRuWySEtfWw90Zwlt6n2t8IKfc/s1600-h/Sime+Jorkens+1926.jpg). Quite aside from its associational value, it has intrinsic interest in that it reveals that by 1926 Dunsany had already gone entirely grey, if not white -- I suspect from the stresses of the war years, particularly his harrowing experiences of 1916 (which had such an impact on his work that I devoted a whole sub-section of a chapter to it in my dissertation). I had always assumed that the pictures of Dunsany that appear as frontispieces to the three volumes of his autobiography -- PATCHES OF SUNLIGHT [1938], WHILE THE SIRENS SLEPT [1944], & THE SIRENS WAKE [1945] were contemporaneous with those books' publications. I now believe they are instead pictures of Dunsany as he appeared during the years covered by those volumes, so that (for example) the photograph of Dunsany that appears in the middle volume -- my favorite image of him, the only one which makes him look like an author -- probably shows him as he was at age forty, when the book opens, rather than nearing sixty, as he was when it was published.

And all this from just a single post from a newly launched blog. WORMWOODIANA promises great things, and I've already added it to my short list of sites I check regularly; when I have time, I'll have it added to the list of recommended links on my website. Well done Doug (and associates)!

--John R.


In the meantime, here's the link:

http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/

Interview with Doug Anderson on Tolkien Online

So, about two weeks ago, a friend (thanks Jessica) sent me a link to an interview with Doug Anderson that had just been posted on the TOLKIEN ONLINE website. It's a nice piece, so I thought I'd pass along the link for anyone who hasn't seen it yet. In it he talks about the origin of THE ANNOTATED HOBBIT, books on Tolkien he'd recommend, the relationship between his book and mine, his discovery of other fantasy authors (and medieval lit.) after reading Tolkien (with a place of honor going to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series), post-Tolkien authors he enjoys (singling Holdstock out for particular praise), how TOLKIEN STUDIES came about, and what he's working on now. Surprisingly, there's no mention of his latest major project, the Flieger-Anderson edition of TOLKIEN ON FAIRY-STORIES. If you're interested in the journal TOLKIEN STUDIES at all, be sure to follow the link within the interview to the cumulative index of all six volumes, which is incredibly useful.
Here's the link to the interview itself:

http://www.tolkien-online.com/douglas-a-anderson.html

--John R.
--current reading: Jonathan Hime's essay on THE DARK TOWER.

A Rebuke from 1772

So, last week I finished reading TALES BEFORE NARNIA [2008], a v. interesting collection put together by Doug Anderson as a sort of companion book to his TALES BEFORE TOLKIEN [2003]. It's a very good collection which makes readily available some fine hard-to-find pieces such as Tolkien's "The Dragon's Visit" [1937] (the original, superior version) and Kenneth Grahame's FIRST WHISPER OF WIND IN THE WILLOWS* [1944]. Also here are some real discoveries, such as a chapter from Roger Lancelyn Green's never-before-published THE WOOD THAT TIME FORGOT, which Lewis and Green both agreed had been a major inspiration for Narnia; or C. F. Hall's "The Man Who Lived Backwards", the story Lewis acknowledged in his Preface to THE GREAT DIVORCE [1946] as having been the source for one of his ideas in that book. Since Lewis could not remember the author or title of that story, Anderson's re-discovery of the tale in question is a real coup. And what's more, now that we have the story itself we can see its influence on THE DARK TOWER as well. I also found the final story, by Wm Lindsay Gresham (Joy Davidman's first husband, the father of Douglas and David), surprisingly moving -- Gresham is so often presented as a sort of walk-on villain in accounts of CSL's life that the fact he was a talented writer often gets overlooked.


All that aside, I was struck by a passage in one of the antecedents to THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS that held far too much resonance to today. The book in question, INFERNAL CONFERENCES; OR, DIALOGUES OF DEVILS [1772] is by Rev. John Macgowan, a hellfire Baptist preacher. In a long diatribe attacking the Inquisition, Macgowan has one of his devils extravagantly praise the Inquisition's work:

"One holy inquisitor goes beyond an hundred of our fraternity in the art of cruelty, which you know is the first of the learned sciences . . . Such wonderful inventions of torturing, one would have thought, could never have been contrived. What ingenuity does the rack display! How excellently formed for exquisite torture! What an apt resemblance of the infernal furnace is the dry-pan! A contrivance worthy the most skilful among the Beezebubian artists. But their watery torment, the gag and pitcher, is what raises them most in my esteem. Almost every blockhead hath some notion of a hell fire but it is peculiar to the skill of an holy inquisitor to contrive a hell of water. In this, Fastosus, we must all knock under to them, for indeed they are our betters. And, to enhance their merit, their torments are inflicted upon the unhappy wretches, who fall into their hands, under a shew of the greatest sanctity towards God, and pity to the unhappy victim of their cruelty. And so very strictly do they and their assisting familiars observe the rules of inviolable secrecy, that the world can never know the hundredth part of their villainy."


That's right. The worst thing the fervid imagination of a hell-fire and damnation preacher two hundred years ago could come up with to accuse the Inquisition of was WATERBOARDING. Worse than The Rack. Worse than being slowly roasted to death in an iron box.

And made all the worst by being done by holier-than-thou torturers who are careful to keep their misdeeds secret.

Sounds all too familiar.

--John R.







*Charles Williams fans will also be glad to find his only short story reprinted here, so far as I know for the first time since Boyer & Zahorski's VISIONS OF WONDER [1981].

Three Things

[July 22nd]

So, the day before yesterday I saw a hummingbird drinking nectar out of catnip blossoms. I'd moved the indoors plants out onto the table on the balcony to take advantage of the summer sunshine, and later I happened to look out the window while doing dishes and there it was. Since the catnip stalks are tall (between one and two feet, I'd say) and flexible, when the hummingbird licked it pushed that stalk away, and the bird followed, only to have the stalk bend back when it'd gone too far. So the tiny little bird and the catnip swayed back and forth as it worked its way through the stalks, one by one. Quite the sight.

Then yesterday while waiting for Janice to get off work I saw a crow eating a banana. Someone had thrown down an old black banana peel in the far corner of the parking lot, and this crow was working on it, pulling off bite-sized pieces of banana and eating them one by one with great satisfaction -- so much so that he ignored a few peanuts I offered him. Clearly a crow who goes his own way. But then one crow who frequents that parking lot and can see me coming a mile off is the only crow I've ever know who's figured out how to solve the three-peanut problem.

And now today I noticed for the first time that the little mimosa tree in the yard has the first beginnings of what will eventually be a little pink blossom. I've raised this little tree from a seed (thanks, Jennifer!) and nurtured it through for about five years now, initially in a series of ever-increasing pots indoors until I finally took the plunge and planting it in the yard last year. To my great relief, it survived the winter and seems to be flourishing. Here's hoping that long may it thrive.

--John R.



Update, W. July 29th
This post was drafted before we left for a few days' vacation on Whidbey Island, so I can now add to the list above having recently seen a harbor seal (from a distance), harbor porpoises (from a boat at Deception Pass), guillemots a plenty, a cormorant, a bald eagle (the first I've seen in a long time who wasn't being harassed by crows), and a kingfisher (who came and went repeatedly from a dock we could see during dinner our last night on the island.

And of course having the chance to pet a marvelously friendly cat named Broadway Billie at The Kingfisher, a fine little bookstore in Coupeville: a pot-bellied little cat who purred so aggressively that you could hear her five feet away. In the words of Professor Higgins, 'How delightful!'

--John R.

current reading: Tom Shippey's piece on Screwtape and Verbicide in TRUTHS BREATHED THROUGH SILVER, ed. Jonathan Hime [2008]

Janice is Commended

One major event from last month which I should have blogged about but didn't at the time was Janice's receiving the Regional Commissioner's Citation for her work with the agency (SSA). My posting about it got deferred because the next day we left for Milwaukee, but it's too big a deal not to celebrate here.

The Awards ceremony was held at the Hyatt up in Bellevue -- a really nice venue I'd never been in before. There was a huge crowd there, perhaps not surprising given that the 'Region' covers four states: Idaho, Oregon, Washington, & Alaska.

As it turned out, Janice was the very first person presented with her award. Luckily the presenter had warned them all ahead of time that the award itself was heavy (being a big piece of beautiful cut glass or crystal with her name inscribed in it).

The specific reason given in the accompanying program book, ARCHITECTS OF GREATNESS, for her Citation reads "In recognition of sustained high productivity and accurate work in the Kent field office while shifting work assignments in the Title XVI Unit."

So, congratulations to Janice. It's nice to have this recognition of just how good you are at what you do.

--John R.

The Mythopoeic Award

So, last night at the awards banquet at Mythcon, THE HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT won this year's Mythopoeic Award. These awards are given out each year by the Mythopoeic Society, a group devoted to celebrating the work of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. There are four awards in all; the one I won is the Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies, with the others being the Fantasy award (for the year's best fantasy novel), the Children's Literature (actually, Young Adult) award, and the non-Inklings fantasy scholarship award. Here's a link to all four of this year's winners:

http://www.mythsoc.org/awards/2009/

And here's another link listing the five finalists. Scroll down to the end to get the 2009 nominees; as you can see, there was stiff competition:

http://www.mythsoc.org/awards/scholarship/


This is quite an honor -- previous winners include such works as Garth's TOLKIEN & THE GREAT WAR, Shippey's AUTHOR OF THE CENTURY and ROAD TO MIDDLE-EARTH, Verlyn's A QUESTION OF TIME, Wayne & Christina's ART & ILLUSTRATOR, Doug's THE ANNOTATED HOBBIT, and others going all the way back to Kocher's MASTER OF MIDDLE EARTH and beyond. I've actually contributed to works that won the award before, in 2002 (TOLKIEN'S LEGENDARIUM) and 1997 (THE RHETORIC OF VISION), but this time I'll get the actual award -- a statue of a lion, unofficially known as an 'Aslan' -- to put on the mantle by my grandfather's clock.

Woo-hoo!

ahem. let me repeat that.

WOO-HOO!


Finally, while I wasn't able to attend this year's Mythcon, here's my acceptance speech that I would have delivered if I'd been there.


"Thag you very buch."

If I were as laconic as Mr. Baggins himself at the celebrations in Lake Town, I'd just stop there and be done with it. But, as the nine-hundred-plus pages of my History of the Hobbit suggest, such is not the case.

And so, on this festive occasion, I would like to thank the Society, and the Awards Committee, and Mythcon itself for this very great honor. I wish I could be among you to accept this award in person. Having first joined the Society more than thirty years ago—in the same year in which Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper shared the award for their then-new biography of C. S. Lewis—I honestly never imagined then that a decade later I would attend my first Mythcon. Or that two years after that I would help run another, or that I would present chapters from this book at two other Mythcons, much less one day receive this award.

I had originally thought of taking this opportunity to thank all the people who helped me on my book. But on second thought this might, like Bilbo's 'eleventy-first' party speech, drag on a bit for those esteemed Mythconners at this banquet, especially since it would be in the form of a person, who isn't here, thanking other people, who are also not here.

I do want to seize this opportunity, though, to thank one person whose acknowledgement inadvertently got left out from the original (UK) printing of my book. David Bratman's name should have appeared among those people before whom I presented earlier drafts of various chapters from this eternal work-in-progress from time to time, since I benefitted greatly from his encyclopedic knowledge and attention to detail. Even though this was fortunately fixed in time for the American edition, I still wanted to thank him here and now.

As for my book itself, what can I say that I have not already said, at length, within its pages? I took as my inspiration C. S. Lewis's words to J. R. R. Tolkien, back around the spring of 1936, that there were too few of the sort of books they liked to read in the world and that they needed to write some themselves. This is essentially what I have done: written the book I'd like to discover on a bookstore's or library's shelf. For a time I feared that I was the only one who would want to read it. This award has quelled those fears.

After he plowed through The History of The Hobbit, Charles Noad wrote "surely nothing remains to be said." Happily he was wrong. Trying to get to the bottom of a Tolkien story is like staring into an ent's eyes: deep wells very much in the present but filled with the memory of ages. But who wouldn't drink deep of that well, given the chance? So: the work goes on. And so my thanks for this encouragement, and this honor. Thank you very much.

—John D. Rateliff

Sunday, July 19th, 2009.

Prosopagnosia

So, it turns out there's a name for it: PROSOPAGNOSIA, the inability to recognize faces.

For most of my life, I've had the problem that when I met somebody, I wouldn't be able to recognize them again the next time I saw them, even if it was the next day or only an hour later. I remembered them of course, but I couldn't tell who they were by what they looked like unless there was something striking about them (an unusual outfit or odd hairdo). This is not a problem with people I know well, but only those I've just been introduced to or do not see on a regular basis. It's not a problem of memory per se, since I can often remember specific conversations I've had with someone I don't recognize ("oh, so that was you?"), even if it's been years since I've last seen them (for example, at GenCon or MythCon), but might pass right by them in the halls.

Well, thanks to a piece in the current FUNNY TIMES, I just found out that some other people have the same problem. I don't have the extreme form, which is usually brought on by a head injury (as in the famous case described by Oliver Sacks), for which I'm grateful. It's something I can work around -- though I used to have terrible time recognizing my students when they weren't sitting in their usual seats -- but it'd be better not to have to. At least I now know how lucky I am to have such a mild form of it.


UPDATE: With a little more checking, I see that what I have is more properly called "Congenital prosopamnesia". It's not that I don't recognize a face, it's more that it doesn't get stored in my long-term memory. In my case, this applies to names as well; I can rarely connect the names with the faces of people I've just been introduced to. Since I've had it since at least the third grade (I remember looking around trying to find the people I'd been playing with at the last recess but not being able to identify them), it's not a sign of senile decay but just the way my mind works. Or, in this specific case, doesn't quite work in the way you'd expect it to.