THE PATCHWORK POLKA

So, early last month I heard (thanks to Dimitra Fimi, the leading Tolkien scholar in Wales) that a Cardiff bookdealer had an unusual Tolkien associational item for sale: a piece of sheet music by Alfred Tolkien, who seems to have been the cousin of JRRT's grandfather, John Benjamin Tolkien (Sr). The price was more than an impulse buy cd justify, but this seemed like one of those never-to-be-repeated chances, so I decided to take the plunge. And now, thanks to the good offices of a friend in England with whom I trade book-purchases (I buy things for him that are only available over here, he buys things for me that are only available over there*), it's finally arrived in the post today -- a little late (we think the post office mistakenly sent it by boat rather than airmail) but safe and sound.

The piece itself is titled THE PATCHWORK POLKA, "Composed for the Piano-Forte & respectfully dedicated to the Ladies of England by Alfred Tolkien", price two shillings and sixpence. Apparently you cd buy it either at Henry Tolkien's shop in King William Street nr London Bridge, or from J. B. Tolkien in New Street, Birmingham (Henry being Alfred's brother and thus another of JRRT's grandfather's cousins**). This suggests for me that the Tolkiens were already thoroughly Anglicized in circa 1865, when this piece was published. I don't have access to a keyboard, but I'll look forward to trying it out at some point -- although haltingly, since a swift glance convinces me it's far beyond my long-atropied skill at the piano. Rather to my surprise it's in 2/4 time, I having been under the impression that a 'polka' had to be 3/4*** -- not so, a little quick research shows; 2/4 was in fact the usual. Live and learn.

Now, if I cd just find someone with a Tolkien piano to play it on, that wd be something.

--John R.

current reading: TROY AND HOMER by Joachim Latacz, THE COMING OF THE FAIRIES by Conan Doyle

current audiobook: HUMAN SMOKE

current anime: CANAAN

*such as, most recently, the Derek Jacobi audiobooks for LETTERS FROM FATHER CHRISTMAS and ROVERANDOM on cd, to supplement the old ones I have on audiocassette.

**and thus JRRT's third cousin, or first cousin twice removed, as some folks prefer to reckon it.

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The Wife Says:

"I think I've reached a new high in baffled and bemused tolerance" --JC

CORRECTION (1/2-11): changed "3/3" time to 3/4, thanks to the my error being pointed out in the comments. Many thanks.--JDR

Christmas Bees

So, the unofficial bee-watch continues, as the honeybees surprised me once again by coming up to the hummingbird feeder for at least several hours today (late morning /early afternoon). Only about seven or eight of them at most at any one time, but still impressive, given that we've now reached Midwinter. At this point I'm beginning to think they might actually make it through the winter, keeping to their hive (wherever that is) most of the time and eating their honey to keep them going, then emerging on those days when it gets warm enough and dry enough.

If that weren't strange enough, yesterday I noticed that one patch of the daffodils I planted just before last winter are starting to come up again -- about two months early. And then this morning Janice confirmed that the alders and willows along the creek are just beginning to get that look that precedes their budding for the spring.

In short, Nature outside seems to have concluded that winter came with the snow and ice we had a few weeks ago and has now passed. I'm apprehensive about the fate of those daffodils, given how many months of official winter there still are to go. I guess we'll see. In any case, I'll keep putting out the hummingbird juice and hope it helps.

--John R.

current anime: CANAAN

current audiobook: HUMAN SMOKE

current reading: TROY & HOMER by Joachim Latacz

The Year in Anime

So, as one of my little year-end projects, I just made up a list of all the anime I have on dvd, thus replacing an old vhs/dvd list from several years back that was never completed and at any rate wd now be badly out of date. It's a longer list than I wd have expected -- almost a hundred titles -- and it's gotten me into a reflective mood of wanting to re-watch some older titles that had drifted onto back shelves. Naturally, I watch a lot more anime than I buy, thanks to Netflix and a local rental shop, but still it's rare that a month goes by without my buying at least one new series (or half-series, since that's how a lot of them are issued these days). These days there's less coming out than during the big anime boom of a decade to a half-decade ago, but there are still plenty of interesting shows being made, some of which reach us in the US sooner and some, alas, later.

Anyway, as part of a winter-organizing (as opposed to a spring cleaning), I recently shifted around the anime so that older and less-rewatched items went downstairs into the Box Room, old favorites that no longer get rewatched as often stayed on the shelves upstairs, and things I'm likely to want to see again sooner rather than later stayed in the living room, where the tv and dvd player are. I'd thought it might be nice to do a 'year-in-anime' review, quickly running through some recommendations, but ran into a problem of determining just when I first watched something. While I once kept in a little notebook a viewing list of what anime I watched when, similar to the reading list I've kept for years, that anime viewing list lapsed years ago. Hence I have to rely on my memory of when I watched what, and I know that in some cases I'm off by a bit -- for instance, both PRINCESS RESURRECTION and KAZE NO STIGMA, which I planned to included, turn out to have actually arrived late in '09. So I think I'll just write up several posts over the next few days, each sharing some recommendations of things I've seen and enjoyed over the last year or two.

WHEN THEY CRY

I was reminded of this one by recently picking up a two-volume manga which forms a sequel to this story set a generation later. The anime is altogether remarkable for being cute, funny, scary, and deeply disturbing, often in rapid succession. The first disk is a pretty good example. Our point of view character is the new kid in town, a city kid whose parents have moved to a small town deep in the country, where he quickly makes friends with his new classmates. But after a while he begins to notice that the local kids sometimes behave v. strangely, and he learns that the village has a sinister past no one likes to talk about -- people disappearing (sometimes totally, sometimes re-appearing with the occasional discovery of dismembered body parts), the uneasy legacy of an anti-development group that lynched some pro-development residents, what are essentially men-in-black lurking about in sinister vans, and above all a local god's curse that the residents believe must be appeased at all costs. Things become increasingly sinister and unsettling, suddenly crescendoing into a crisis: by the end of the fourth episode, three of the story's main characters are dead.

That wd seem to be that, except that the fifth episode starts a new story arc. Suddenly time rewinds to the start, all the characters are alive again, and a similar story plays out, once again moving from light-hearted hijinxs to horror -- except this time with a different character as villain and a distinctly different explanation for what's going on. This happens over and over again throughout the series: the hero of the first story even becomes the villain (more or less) in a later story-arc, and we sometimes see the same events from strikingly different points of view (for example, two characters are twins who sometimes pose as each other: realizing which is which in a particular scene can completely change its significance). The overall effect is fascinating, and disturbing, and v. impressive.

Unfortunately, this series was orphaned when its US distributor, Pioneer/Geneon, went under mid-way through releasing it (literally, after issuing the first three of six disks), forcing those who, like me, wanted to see how it all came out to resort to buying an import. Luckily it was eventually picked up by Funimation, who completed the series -- although I hear there's a second season which has not been released over here (apparently there was such a fuss that it didn't even finish its initial run on Japanese television), as well as an ova.

So, impressive stuff, but a word of warning: this in genuinely creepy, and one of the story-arcs (the fifth, I think) is particularly brutal -- you might want to consider skipping that one, even though it retells the events of one of the earlier arcs closely (except whereas there people suddenly disappeared, we get to actually see them die one by one in this arc, and it's not pleasant).

--John R.

--current audiobook: HUMAN SMOKE

--current music: The Beatles Christmas Messages

Aslan Buddha

So, yesterday I saw an article* railing against Liam Neeson for being too open minded. In the course of which, the author accuses the Archbishop of Canterbury of being essentially a Fifth Columnist for Islamic jihad. Here's the link:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ken-blackwell/a-fatwa-on-liam-neeson_b_799591.html

Pretty mind-boggling, I thought. There's a good case to be made rebutting Neeson,** but of course to do that you'd have to pay attention to what Neeson actually said, as reported in the following piece:

http://blog.christianitytoday.com/ctentertainment/2010/12/aslan-represents-mohammed-and.html

That is, the voice-actor (a devout Catholic) isn't presuming to speak for the author but simply gave his own opinion. It seems an odd thing to get excited about -- I mean, does any F. Scott Fitzgerald scholar worry about what Rbt Redford might say?

--John R.

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* by Ken Blackwell, the Kathleen Harris of the 2004 election

**and also a good one defending his position

Reading Group

So, yesterday our reading group met again for the first time in a long time. We usually break for the summer, when it's hard to get people together because of vacations &c, and this past year all our fall meetings had fallen through. And, to make matters worse, I'd missed the last meeting before that break because I was out of town (in Kalamazoo, at the Medievalist Congress). We have about four to six members, scattered between Redmond and the University District and Queen Anne Hill and Kent, who come most of the time, plus another half-dozen who can only make it once in a while.

This being our annual December party, we didn't have an assigned book but instead pick books for the next few months (sometimes we've tried picking the whole next year's books all in one go, but that rarely works out for us). First, though, we just enjoyed getting together, sipping tea, enjoying book-group snacks, and playing with our host's Most Excellent cat, Max (even Max's shy companion, Maya, made a brief appearance).

After that, we revisited some of the books we wd have discussed had we managed to have the September (WICKED), October (ERAGON), and November (BEREN & LUTHIEN; TURIN) meetings. Wicked we universally found disfavor with: those who had read it all the way through (like Janice) and those who'd given up part-way in (like myself) were united in our bafflement of why people like, and praise, this book. Not only that, but why it had inspired a Broadway musical and given rise to a string of sequels. The idea of retelling a famous story from the villain's point of view, while it's becoming a bit overdone, has its potential, but here the author seemed determined to write a story about an Oz that would be utterly unrecognizable as Oz. The names were the same, but everything that made Oz 'Oz' was gone. I was reminded of LeGuin's famous essay "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie", and thought that here was a case where Elfland had deliberately been remade as Poughkeepsie -- the sense of wonder stripped out so that a dull political tale cd be substituted for it. Seeing this, I understood what the Jackson-bashers feel when they see his LotR films: a sense that he got everything that matters wrong. I think they're completely wrong about Jackson -- who I'd say sometimes screws up the details but does a great job delivering on the essence -- but just for that moment I felt their pain.

ERAGON we dealt with more summarily; the only person who'd read it strongly urged the rest of us not to, and we all pretty much felt inclined to take her advice; sounds pretty much like a mash-up of Tolkien (or Tolk-clones) + McCaffrey.

The Tolkien, on the other hand, we decided is too good to miss, so we decided to roll that over into our first meeting next year (January).

After bantering about several options (LITTLE BIG? -- no!; some Chinese or Japanese classic --where to start?; ARABIAN NIGHTS -- maybe later), we decided on what we'll be reading for the first half of next year:

January (1/16-11): THE STORY OF BEREN & LUTHIEN by J. R. R. Tolkien. From THE SILMARILLION (et al). location: our place in Kent.

February (2/20-11): JOHANNES CABAL -- THE NECROMANCER by Jonathan L. Howard. location: Chez Max.

March (3/20-11): HULDUFOLK 102 (documentary). location: Chris & Andy's

April (4/17-11): JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH by Jules Verne. location: not yet determined

May (5/15-11): WATERSHIP DOWN by Richard Adams. location: not yet determined

June (6/19-11): GILGAMESH -- the translation by Andrew George, not the novelization by Nancy Sandars.


We generally meet on the third Sunday of the month, so if you're anywhere in the Seattle area and enjoy reading & discussing fantasy books, drop us a line.

--JDR

P.S.: In other news, I was astonished to learn this week that the 'Dragonlance' series has now run its course and ended. At twenty-five years it had a good run, but I'm surprised to hear it's over.

The Wife Says

"Christmas is when the faithful demonstrate their piety by demanding the right to violate the 2nd commandment on public property."

Dueling Billboards

So, a few days ago I saw the news story about a group of atheists putting up an anti-Xian Xmas message in New York City, apparently in a spot where traffic slows down a lot as people prepare to enter the Lincoln Tunnel. Which has so incensed the Catholic League that they've taken time off from trying to stop people from reading Phillip Pullman and taken out a second billboard, one of those Christ-is-the-reason-for-the-season ones, to counter the message.

http://www.npr.org/2010/12/11/131988679/War-On-Christmas-Spreads-To-Lincoln-Tunnel

Two observations:

First, the atheists' message is self-evidently not 'reasonable', since the majority of people seeing their billboard will not in fact agree with them. So there's a self-imposed limit on how much damage a self-contradictory, smug little message like this can do.

Second, the Catholic League billboard in most contexts wd be so ordinary as to attract no notice -- we all see things like this around all the time. But it's a sad commentary that the League doesn't think God can take care of himself; that the Almighty needs them to rent billboard space. As the article-writer suggested at the end of his piece, there are more Xian uses for that money.

--JDR