Tonight I'm in . . .

. . . the city where I saw the only president I've ever met and shaken hands with: Lyndon Johnson, when he was running for re-election back in 1964, when I was not quite six years old.*

. . . the hometown of Scott Joplin, the great ragtime composer. We stopped by the local museum, which boasted online and in see-Arkansas-sites literature that they had Scott Joplin's piano. Well, sort of. That is, they had a piano known to have been in town when Scott Joplin was growing up here. And it's known that some of the families for whom Joplin's mother worked as a maid allowed little Scott, who was something of a prodigy, to play their pianos. So it's possible that Joplin once played this particular piano, out of all the hundreds of pianos he must have played in his life. But there's no proof of any sort to say he did.

--I did get to see the Scott Joplin mural a few blocks away, when I was roaming around the deserted and slightly dilapidated streets downtown, looking for the (well-hidden) museum. I'm not usually much for murals, which I take to be a sign of faux-nostalia festooning decaying courthouse squares, but this one was oddly touching. In any case, it's put me in a mood to listen to some of his music, esp. SCOTT JOPLIN PIANO RAGS, performed by Joshua Rifkin (which I discovered back in the Lake Geneva library and eventually found my own copy of).** I may even dig out TREEMONISHA (or, then again, I may not).

. . . the city I was born in*** -- though given that I was almost stillborn, was repeatedly attacked by the family cat, and had double pneumonia before I was two, I'm probably lucky we moved away when I was two.

. . . the town my grandmother and oldest uncle on the Rateliff side (Uncle Aubrey) lived in the last years of their lives; I have many memories of going over to visit them, and also Aunt Polly, my father's only sister, during my high school years.

. . . and the city made famous in the old song "Cotton Fields":

When those cotton bolls get rotten

You can't pick very much cotton

In those old cotton fields back home

Well it was down in Louisiana

Just about a mile from xxxxxxxxx.****

In those old cotton fields back home.

*I'm told I was taken to see Senator Kennedy four years before, but of course I have no memory of that. And while I've met Clinton twice, it was before he was president (the first time when as Attorney General he came and addressed Boys State, the second time during a quick layover he made at the Magnolia airport while running for re-election as governor). I've also encountered President Carter twice at book-signings but only spoken to him once, and both those were after his term in office, after he'd transitioned from being a disappointing president into our greatest ex-president. So Johnson is the only president I've seen while he was president.

**ragtime eventually morphed into jazz, but we can't blame Joplin for that; in any case, he was dead by the time that happened.

***I was lucky that in those days the delivery rooms in St. Michael's hospital were on the Arkansas side of the border; I'm told they were later moved to the Texas side, which wd have had me born in Texas.

****in fact, it's more like fifteen/twenty miles, but like Keats' 'stout Cortez' the songwriter preferred a good rhythm over geographical accuracy.

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

P.S.: It took me longer than I expected to get this post written up properly.

I'm actually back home again now, but I went ahead and kept the format of this "Tonight I'm in" post as if I'd been able to finish it and post it while I was still in Arkansas.

The New Arrival: A TOLKIEN TAPESTRY

The New Arrival: A TOLKIEN TAPESTRY

So, the day before I left for my trip, the mail brought the latest addition to my Tolkien shelves, Cor Blok's A TOLKIEN TAPESTRY: PICTURES TO ACCOMPANY THE LORD OF THE RINGS. I've already expressed my opinion of Blok's artwork in an earlier post; this deeper exploration confirms me in the opinion that the story behind the picture-cycle is more interesting that the art itself. Imagine what it'd be like to discover that Barbara Remington, in addition to her gosh-awful covers for the Ballantine Tolkiens, had carried on for several years creating over a hundred more pictures in a similar style, only now to be revealed in their glorious awfulness. That's essentially what we've got with this book, except that it's the artist who did the Dutch paperback covers instead of the psychedelic American ones.

What we have here are a hundred and forty pictures, created between 1958 and 1961, retelling THE LORD OF THE RINGS (more or less*) in faux-naif art. I don't think anyone has done this extensive a series, at least not that I've seen assembled in sequence. Oddly enough I thought the back cover of the dust jacket, which creates a mosaic of some thirty pieces seen all at once side-by-side in a great collage, was the most effective presentation. The fact that there are so many pieces in this book means that some scenes that never get illustrated appear here -- Grima spitting, the bath at Crickhollow, the Fellowship being led while blindfolded in Lorien, Nob helping Merry (the only depiction of him I remember ever seeing), or Bill Ferny being hit by the apple. But Blok's art is such that he provides not just a truly inept Gollum (he looks like a splay-footed duck) but possibly the worst Goldberry ever, a truly hideous Galadriel, and worst of the whole lot a gaggle of Ents looking like walking cigars festooned with green rot-fungus.

The most valuable thing about this book is the Tolkien letter reproduced on page 6 (and a paragraph from another quoted on page 7; Blok also summarizes two things Tolkien told him regarding Blok's art on pages 15 and 25 (that he did not want a definitive illustrated edition that wd associate his work with any particular artist [e.g., Carroll & Tenniel], and that Blok had completely misrepresented Gollum by forgetting he was of hobbit-kin).

Blok's commentary is quite interesting, both in his history of the project** and his pointing out specific details in individual paintings -- I'd missed, for example, the fact that Gollum always appears in silhouette, with no refining detail. Reading this in conjunction with looking at the pictures, I'm forced to conclude that Blok is an Erol Otus -- his art only looks inept, and actually is the result of a highly trained artist deliberately choosing that effect -- what Tolkien called elsewhere "the modern mode in which those who can draw try to conceal it."***

In the end there truly is no arguing about taste. And I'm glad that those who find some merit in Cor Blok's work have revived and printed it (and doing a v. gd job of it too, I might add****); it's an interesting project, and worth preserving. But I hope the year after next's Tolkien calendar features somebody whose work isn't just occasionally interesting in a weird and freakish way but actually art I'd enjoy looking at for a whole month at a time per image. Say, a Hobbit calendar using the artwork in Wayne & Christina's new book. Or I'd be happy for an entire calendar illustrated by Tolkien's beautiful calligraphy, given my druthers.

In the meantime, we get Howard the Gollum in Gormenghast.

--JDR

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

*some crucial scenes are missing -- for example, Blok seems to lose interest in the latter part of the story: there are only two pictures of minor scenes following the Ring's destruction, one of Gimli and Legolas in the Glittering Caves and one of hobbit-shirriffs accompanying the four travellers.

**his 'Barbarusia' project, which preceded his LotR, was a sort of Islandia for artists; his 'Iron Parachute' which was to follow is a massive still-incomplete graphic novel with Joycean prose (think CERBERUS THE ARDVARK issued as a single volume all at one time but written in a style of FINNEGANS WAKE word-slush).

***JRRT to R. Unwin, December 1965 (cf. LETTERS OF JRRT). Was Tolkien thinking about Blok? No way to tell . . .

****I only found one likely glitch: I don't have a copy of LotR with me to check this, and it's always dangerous quoting from memory, but I'm pretty sure the quote on page 74 doesn't apply to the Inn at Bree but instead to the House in Crickhollow.

Tonight I'm in . . .

one of the larger Confederate cities that never did fall to the Yankees,* thanks to the failure of the Red River campaign. Also, or so I'm told, a place whose founder and namesake broke up a 140 mile long log jam (the 'Great Raft') in order to open the Red River to navigation -- including my birthplace, which is a good seventy miles upriver from here.

--John R.

*i.e., not until after the war was over.

Tonight I'm in . . .

. . . a town founded 148 years ago; before that it was a plantation named Frog Level.

--John R.

Tonight I'm in . . .

. . . the only state capital whose Capitol building looks exactly like the one in D. C., except with no Indian on the top.

--JDR

With a Whimper

So, the Iraqi war winds down at last. Ironically, given that the timetable for withdrawal was negotiated by Bush, who had no intention of honoring the agreement,* and that it forces Obama to keep a campaign promise that he's since repudiated. Turns out they both didn't take into account how much the Iraqis hate being an occupied colonial state run by a puppet government. And so, after killing roughly five percent of the country's population and created the chaos that led about another twenty percent to flee (either to relocate in other areas of Iraq to escape 'ethnic cleaning' or to leave the country entirely for Jordan et al), in the end we settle for the Vietnam option: leave behind massive amounts of armaments,** withdraw to a fortress-embassy, and Go Home.***

About Time.

--JDR

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/26/obama-iraq_n_1032507.html

--JDR

*kind of like Churchill's promises to free India after WWII

**when we left S. Vietnam, it had the world's third largest airforce, since we gave them most of the military equipment in the field rather than bringing it back home. It didn't do them any good.

***here's hoping there's no secret clause in the agreement we don't know about -- like Nixon's promising the N. Vietnamese war reparations

The New Arrival: Shore's Symphony

So, on Saturday came a new cd: THE LORD OF THE RINGS SYMPHONY, by Howard Shore, performed by the '21st Century Symphony Orchestra & Chorus', who are apparently based in Lucerne (Switzerland), and directed by Ludwig Wicki. This is not to be confused with THE LORD OF THE RINGS: SYMPHONY No. 1, by Johan de Meij, which has been around for more than two decades now. Instead, it's Shore's scores for the LotR films adapted into symphony form, more or less. I say 'more or less', because it's rather unusual for a symphony to have six movements (four is traditional). Here, of course, the six parts correspond to the six books that make up Tolkien's LotR, rather than (as I expected) a three-part structure deriving from the three Peter Jackson films.

So how is the music? Well, if you disliked Shore's scores (as a small but vocal minority does) you won't like this either, since it derives from the film music. Surprisingly enough, I found it less impressive than the original individual soundtracks from which it derives. Played too softly, it vanishes into the background; played loudly, I found I had some trouble identifying where in the story we were at different points (which had not been the case with the three soundtracks). I'd thought this would be tighter and have greater impact than the longer scores, but I think the opposite turns out to be the case. This shorter version seems to me to have less focus, oddly enough.

Such at any rate is my first impression. It's entirely possible Shore's symphony will grow on my over time. But for now I think I'll be more likely to re-listen to the cds I have (FR, TT, RK, the stage musical) and that this might drift towards the back of the shelf. We'll see. At least it has more impact than the de Meij, which I've never been able to listen to all the way through without my attention wandering -- though I see that there's a new recording of this out, from the London Symphony Orchestra. If anyone has heard this, I'd be interested in how it compares to the earlier recordings: does it have more character?

--John R.