At the Tobacconist, part two

Here's a transcript of the second half of Lesson Twenty: 'At the Tobacconist' --JDR


PART II. CONVERSATION.

The Customer [A. Lloyd James:]: Can you recommend me some pipe tobacco?

The Shopkeeper [J. R. R. Tolkien]: Certainly, sir; mild, medium, or full strength?

ALJ: Oh! -- er -- medium, please.

JRRT: I have a very good mixture of my own; would you care to try it?

ALJ: How much is it?

JRRT: It's a shilling an ounce, sir, and very cheap at the price. I just keep it for my regular customers.

ALJ: Well, give me two ounces, please.

JRRT: Have you a pouch, sir, or shall I pack it up?

ALJ: Put one ounce in the pouch and pack the other . . . thank you.

JRRT: Anything further, sir?

ALJ: Yes, let me have a box of fifty cigarettes.

JRRT: Virginian or Turkish, sir?

ALJ: Turkish, please.

JRRT: Now, this is a very good cigarette, sir. I think you'll like it. Six shillings for fifty.

ALJ: All right, give me fifty. And let me have some matches, too.

JRRT: Yes, sir. One box?

ALJ: Yes, one box. How much is that altogether?

JRRT: Let me see, that's 2/- [two shillings], 8/- [eight shillings], 8/1d. [eight-and-a-penny] in all, sir . . . thank you, sir. Good morning.

The New Arrival: Dimitra Fimi

So, yesterday (Tuesday the 27th) the newest book for the Tolkienist's bookshelf arrived: Dimitra Fimi's TOLKIEN, RACE AND CULTURAL HISTORY: FROM FAIRIES TO HOBBITS, just out from Palgrave/Macmillan. I've been hearing good things about Fimi's work from all sides for a while now, but haven't read any of it before. Not having known much about what her topic would be, I'm glad to see there's considerable overlap with a topic I'm interested in: Tolkien's drawing on folklore tradition. Even better, so far as I can tell so far, she draws on different sources than I did in my discussion of the folklore roots of hobbits and Tolkien's other faerie folk -- for instance, she makes no mention of Denham, or hobyahs, or SIR ORFEO, or the MABINOGI. This is all to the good, so far as I am concerned; I'm certain to learn something new by reading her book since she approached the topic by a different route, drawing on different sources, than I did. And although it's a relatively slim volume at 240 pages (roughly two hundred pages of text plus notes, extensive bibliography, and index), the type is small enough that they're relatively dense pages: there's a lot packed into the available space.

I shd also point out that it has a striking cover of a nice Tolkienian green, made by processing a photograph of Mosley Boy through a kaleidoscope.

More to come when I have a chance to do more than dip into it. In the meantime, I shd just observe that Fimi, who's based at the Cardiff University, teaches an online Tolkien class: for more information about that, see http://www.dimitrafimi.com/


--JDR

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current reading: MAKING MONEY by Terry Pratchett [2007]

Russ Feingold Strikes Again

So, looking at the unseemly spectacle involved in replacing the various senators who have resigned to take posts in the new Obama administration, Russ Feingold suggests that it's time we give up on letting governors appoint senators when a seat becomes vacant. For the first century or so of this country, we didn't get to elect senators; the state legislatures did that for us. That had come to seem so patently undemocratic that they changed the process to allow for direct election, just as with a state's governor, with the 17th Amendment (1913) -- a measure which was so popular that it was ratified in only a year. Now, almost a century after that, Feingold suggests it's time to follow through and make replacement senators be chosen by special elections rather than making it a really nice executive perk of the governor, as is the case in most states.

I've always rather liked the idea of appointments to fill out terms myself -- we've gotten some interesting people in office that way who would otherwise never have gotten in, like Hattie Carraway. But recently Paterson's incompetence, and Blagovich's corruption, has so tainted the process that I think Feingold's suggestion at least needs to be seriously considered, and I don't have much doubt that this is the way we'll ultimately go, whether now or later in piecemeal fashion. Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com argues that while special elections are expensive, what better way is there to spend money in a democracy than in setting up and running a free and fair election?

here's the link:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/01/feingold-introduces-28th-amendment.html


--JDR

current cup of tea: licorice

At the Tobacconist, part one

So, here's the text for the first half of the first of Tolkien's two contributions to the Linguaphone Institute set of English language lessons from circa 1930. So far as I can tell, Tolkien is not the author of these lines; I suspect all thirty scripts were written by Prof. A. Lloyd James (Professor of Phonetics, Univ. of London), who seems to have supervised the entire project. However, James is careful to note in his Introduction to the accompanying booklet that the speakers had input and could add to or modify their parts, so there may be some genuine Tolkienian details or turns of phrase. Here's how James describes it (emphasis mine):

"This Linguaphone Course contains the language that educated people in England use to-day; and every effort had been made to ensure that the language shall be natural. None of the nine speakers has been asked to say anything that he or she would not or could not say in the circumstances; they have all been given an entirely free hand in emending their lines. We believe that as a result, students of English now have for the first time a course that is unique in that it embodies the actual living idiom spoken by educated English men and women of the early part of the twentieth century . . ."



Lesson Twenty: "At the Tobacconist"

PART I. DESCRIPTION.

If anybody were to ask me which shop-windows I found the most interesting in London, I should find it very hard to answer. My wife, I know, would be all in favour of the drapers, the milliners, and the jewellers. My eldest son would be all for the sports shops, with their golf clubs, tennis rackets, cricket bats, and footballs. The children would vote for the toy-shops -- and I -- well, I must confess to a weakness for the tobacconist's window.

Not that I smoke a lot, but there's something fascinating about seeing the neat little piles of different coloured tobaccos, the beautifully polished briar pipes, the attractive boxes of cigars and cigarettes. If you smoke a pipe, you have the choice of dozens of excellent brands of pipe tobacco; if you are fond of cigars, then you can get them at any price you care to pay; and if you prefer cigarettes, then you may have Virginian, Turkish, or Egyptian, whichever you like. Virginian cigarettes are, of course, those made of Amerian tobacco.

Matches are good and cheap, and you'll find all kinds of articles for smokers such as tobacco pouches, cigar and cigarette cases and holders, lighters, and so on, in every tobacconist's window. Many tobacconists, especially in the suburbs, are at the same time newsagents, stationers, and booksellers, so that you can also buy books, magazines, newspapers, picture postcards, and other stationary -- notepaper, envelopes, and so on.

Dunsany

So, given that I've taken the name for my blog from a Dunsany story ("The Fortress Unvanquishable Save for Sacnoth"), and given how few people read Dunsany nowadays, I thought from time to time it might be good to post here some of his work to give a feel for what his work is like. Luckily in addition to the short stories he's famous for he also sometimes wrote very brief little pieces that are more like parables or fables than short stories or prose poems, a number of which are collected together in the accurately but unimaginative named book Fifty-one Tales (1915). So, here's one of those pieces in its entirety:

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"The Sphinx in Thebes (Massachusetts)"

There was a woman in a steel-built city who had all that money could buy. She had gold and dividends and trains and houses, and she had pets to play with, but she had no sphinx.

So she besought them to bring her a live sphinx; and therefore they went to the menageries, and then to the forests and the desert places, and yet could find no sphinx.

And she would have been content with a little lion but that one was already owned by a woman she knew; so they had to search the world again for a sphinx.

And still there was none.

But they were not men that it is easy to baffle, and at last they found a sphinx in a desert at evening watching a ruined temple whose gods she had eaten hundreds of years ago when her hunger was on her. And they cast chains on her, who was still with an ominous stillness, and took her westwards with them and brought her home.

And so the sphinx came to the steel-built city.

And the woman was very glad that she owned a sphinx: but the sphinx stared long into her eyes one day, and softly asked a riddle of the woman.

And the woman could not answer, and she died.

And the sphinx is silent again and none knows what she will do.

--Edward John Drax Moreton Plunkett, Lord Dunsany
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Lessons of 1932

So, I've been curious lately in what we can learn about the current crisis from the last time we went through something like this, in the early days of the Great Depression. It's interesting how some thing from that era stick in our collective memory while others more or less faded out. For example, we all know about the stock market crash that started things off in 1929, and are familiar with the massive unemployment with its bread lines and soup kitchens and apple-sellers, the dust bowl that drove farmers off their land to become migrants. But we've forgotten about the congressional hearings that established how much of the boom and bust of the 1928-1929 stock market had been the result of corruption and manipulation. And, surprisingly for our current crisis, we've forgotten about the Bank Failures that came at the end of Hoover's term and cemented the country's economic collapse.

Between Hoover's defeat in the November 1932 election and Roosevelt's taking office in March 1933, the nation's entire banking system failed. Hoover, who had been propping up the nation's banks for some time by this point, made frantic and unsuccessful efforts to stem the collapse, mainly through something called the R.E.C. or 'Reconstruction Finance Corp.' -- which turned out to be about as effective as the post-Civil War reconstruction in accomplishing its end. One of the big controversies about the REC is that Hoover and his Secretary of the Treasury, Ogden Mills (and earlier Andrew W. Mellon), insisted on keeping secret what banks they loaned money to, for fear it would undermine public confidence in those banks. John Nance Gardner, the House minority leader and then Speaker of the House (and a longtime Hoover/Mellon foe), managed to get a bill passed calling for a "publicity clause" -- in modern terms, creating transparency and accountability by requiring public disclosure of where the money was going. Hoover and his team, like Bush and Paulson, strongly opposed this because they thought it would cause a run on those banks, which was what they were most trying to avoid. Jonathan Alter more or less takes their position in his discussion of the episode in THE DEFINING MOMENT: FDR'S HUNDRED DAYS AND THE TRIUMPH OF HOPE ("The amendment requiring public disclosure of all RFC loans sounds good, but it was like posting big DON'T TRUST US signs on the marble facades of ailing bands; any institution listed as receiving an RFC bailout was now at serious risk of a run" -- page 150) -- it's rather surprising to find a journalist like Alter, who works for NEWSWEEK, approving of the government's acting in secret or thinking it better the public not find out whether or not their banks are solvent, but so it goes.

By contrast, I think Frederick Lewis Allen in SINCE YESTERDAY, his 'instant history' of the 1930s published in 1939, puts it succinctly: "Perhaps the newspaper publication of the facts about RFC loans was a factor in bringing about this panic -- though to say this is to beg the question whether a banking system dependent upon secret loans from a democratic government is not already in an indefensible position. Probably the banks would have collapsed anyhow, so widely had their funds been invested in questionable bonds and mortgages, so widely had they been mismanaged . . . so lax were the standards imposed upon them . . . and so great was the strain upon the national economy . . ." (Allen, page 98; emphasis mine).

I think not only is Allen's statement frightenly applicable to the way the TARP bailouts were managed by Paulson, but his day-by-day account of the bank collapse during Hoover's lame duck period shows just how much we owe to FDR's reforms.

--JDR

More Poe

So, this week I got some of the new Poe stamps being issued by the Post Office in memory of his bicentennial. They look great, with the portrait being based on the 'Thompson' daguerreotype, one of two photographs taken in Richmond three weeks before Poe's death (the other being the now-destroyed 'Traylor' daguerreotype). It's also nice to see that they got the name right, with his signature ("Edgar A. Poe") across the bottom -- although the accompanying text on the sheet when you buy a block stumbles and gives the familiar "Edgar Allan Poe" instead. But aside from that (understandable) gaff, the actual write-up's not bad, stressing as it does that Poe excelled both as a writer of fiction and a poet (which of course sets him apart from any other major figure of the century, English or American). They might also add that he's one of the few authors taught in literature courses from that era who people still read on their own, outside of classes.

This makes me regret that, while I have the excellent two-volume set of Mabbott's edition of Poe's complete TALES, I don't have the one-volume POEMS that preceded it. And while I know there was a belated fourth volume collecting together Poe's longer fiction (i.e., THE NARRATIVE OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM, THE JOURNAL OF JULIUS RODMAN, and some others -- all the things Mabbott died without getting around to), I haven't been able to find again the reference to who did edit that, or when it appeared.

So, I know one thing I'll be searching for on my next visit to Suzzallo-Allen.

--John R.

current reading: EDGAR A. POE: MOURNFULL AND NEVER-ENDING REMEMBRANCE by Kenneth Silverman [1991]