John D. Rateliff's Blog, page 102

Tolkien's House For Sale

So,  if you're a Tolkien fan and happen to have one and a quarter million pounds lying about, here's something you can do with it: buy Tolkien's home.

https://www.scottfraser.co.uk/S26776291/sandfield-road-headington


Thanks to friend Jeff for passing along the news (and the link) that Tolkien's house in Sandfield Road, where he lived 1953 through 1968 -- that is, from just before THE LORD OF THE RINGS was finally published to the point where he had to leave Oxford to escape his too-attentive fans.*

Of all the places Tolkien lived after he left Birmingham, three have achieved legendary status in the mind of his admirers: the house on Northmoor Road where he wrote THE HOBBIT and most of THE LORD OF THE RINGS; the house on Sandfield Road, where he was living during the years when he became a world-famous author; and the apartment provided by Merton college where he spent the last two years of his life, when he had already become something of a legendary figure. The house on Sandfield Road, near that of his friend and fellow Inkling Humphrey Havard, is where Tolkien lived in retirement. And it's the background against which many of us imagine him, largely because that's where he was living when visited by Clyde Kilby, Arne Zettersten, W. H. Auden,** and others who who later set down accounts of their visit: one such visit famously forms the opening chapter of Humphrey Carpenter's authorized biography.

This is also where the Pam Chandler suite of photos were taken, showing Tolkien in his office and also out in his garden. I've only seen it once myself, during my first visit/research trip to Oxford in 1981, when I borrowed a bicycle from the people who ran the b&b I was staying at*** and made my way out first to Sandfield Road and then on to see the Kilns (both of which I cd only see from outside at the side of the road, both at that time being private homes). In the part to the left in the picture on the real estate agent's website (see the link above) is the converted garage that served as Tolkien's study. Over the arched doorway can be seen the fieldstone plaque identifying this as Tolkien's house -- not one of the official blue historical markers (one of which I think is on the Northmoor Road house) but an attractive carving of of Tolkien's long sinuous dragons, The Hill, and the words 'J. R. R. Tolkien lived here 1953-1968'.  There's also a floorplan, thoughI get the impression the house has been built onto and gentrified; certainly the garage-office seems to have now been fully integrated into the house as a whole.

The most surprising change is that the front yard has been paved over with bricks (or, in English parlance, the garden has been turned into a yard) and there are no trees, only two or three shrubs -- though the floorplans show both a conservatory and a garden at the back of the house. To get some idea what it looked like when the Tolkiens lived there, see the photos of Tolkien in his garden that appeared on the cover of the Zettersten and Dickerson-Evans books:

Zettersten:
http://www.palgrave.com/cn/book/97802...

Dickerson-Evans
http://www.kentuckypress.com/live/tit...


It'll be interesting to see if this gets bought by someone who turns it into A Tolkien House, in the way that The Kilns now provide housing for people dedicated to CSL's life and work, or if it remains a house like any other on its street aside from the plaque marking it as having once been the home of someone extraordinary.

--John R.






*there are stories of people coming up to the windows and taking pictures of him inside eating breakfast -- which is pretty much exactly what you don't want in a retirement home.

**Auden afterwards described it in public as 'hideous', which rather hurt Tolkien's feelings; Auden is said to have later apologized.


***the O'Shea's Cotswold House, which became the standard against which I've measured all other B&Bs henceforth

Did Harper Goff invent Steampunk?

So, at the tail end of my little stint of reading up on Verne (including his biography, one of his lesser-known works,* and one of his most famous**), which wrapped up about a month ago, Janice and I decided to watch the famous James Mason-Kirk Douglas-Peter Lorre film of TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA, which neither of us had seen for many years. Long story short: it has not aged well -- you know you're in trouble when Peter Lorre comes across as the voice of common sense, the everyman of the story. At least the late great James Mason makes a fine mad scientist, though Kurt Douglas's harpoonist is just a bully and The Professor, who ought to be the point-of-view character, a mere nonentity.

Luckily, the extras that came on the disk had a little more going for them, even if the relentless laudatory tone of Disney's documentarians praising themselves did wear thin -- e.g. when they described at length how one fake-looking crew-vs-giant-squid fight was replaced by a quite different (but also fake-looking) crew-vs-giant-squid scene. The most interesting thing was a bit featuring an frail-looking old man named Harper Goff, whom neither of us had heard of before: he'd been art director on the project decades before. The more we found out about him, the more it seems likely that Harper Goff invented Steampunk, decades before it had a name. Or, to be more precise, he created its aesthetic.

Case in point: Goff's design for the Nautilus. Verne, who knew something about aerodynamics (or 'hydronamics' in this case), described Nemo's vessel as a cylinder -- i.e., more or less torpedo-shaped. Goff was having none of that: he added all kinds of interesting bits to the sub's exterior -- decorative prow with some interesting windows/lights, elaborate coning tower, finlike tail -- creating not an authentic mid-Victorian look but a mid-twentieth century projection backwards. And that's a key element of Steampunk: the idea is not to recreate the real nineteenth century but to present a skewed, somewhat more interesting version thereof.

Turns out that the idea that Harper Goff was the fore-father of Steampunk has been around for a long time: no less a figure than Greg Bear put it forward, and once I knew to look for it I found a nice discussion of Goff's contribution.

http://steampunkscholar.blogspot.com/2012/05/harper-goffs-nautilus-as-genesis-of.html 

I haven't read that much Steampunk myself, enjoying the look and feel more than the stories associated with it. Most of what little Steampunk I've read I thought pretty bad (always excepting Jonathan Howard's Johannes Cabal books --assuming those are Steampunk, which I rather doubt).
Rather than novels I've been much more impressed by its adoption into other media, like the rpg setting Castle Falkenstein or the online comic/ongoing graphic novel GIRL GENIUS or comic book series THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN or the Brian Kisinger WALKING YOUR OCTOPUS/TRAVELING WITH YOUR OCTOPUS picture books. Maybe it works better in visual mediums than as a subgenre of fiction.


--John R.
current project: editing the festschrift
current reading: re-reading the entire Peter Grant/Rivers of London series after having read Aaronovitch's latest book in the series


*THE GOLD VOLCANO (my advice: don't bother, unless you're a completist)

** TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA (reread for the first time in many years, and reading the unabridged text for the first time ever. I conclude that (a) Verne was what we wd call today a Young Adult author, (2) Verne was a diligent author rather than one who only wrote when inspired, and (3) Verne's 'science fiction' bonafides rely less on his purported extrapolation and more on his off-the-grid episodes, such as Nemo's visit to Atlantis).


THE WIFE SAYS:
Can it really be Young Adult when there's no young point-of-view character?

an end to presidential dollars

So, I've been collecting the presidential dollars ever since the series debued ten years ago, picking up each new coin as it appeared and carrying it in my back pocket* until the next one came out, whereupon I retired the old president and replaced it with the new. The series has now come to an end --not because they've run out of presidents but because it's illegal in the U. S. to put a living person on a coin. Thus the Reagan dollar is the last of the series, and there are no coins for Carter, Bush, Clinton, W. Bush, or Obama (and of course no Trump).

As both a history buff and former coin collector, I really liked what they did with these coins, but their failure to get into circulation shows that there's really no point in trying to have a US dollar coin. I've seen four such attempts in my time. The Eisenhower dollar failed (too large, picked a no-longer-that-popular president to honor, ugly design**). The Susan B. Anthony dollar failed (looked too much like a quarter, picked a figure who didn't have much mythic resonance at the time, ugly design***). The Sacagawea dollar did everything right (popular figure, good design, distinctive color to distinguish it from any other coin) and still failed. And the presidential dollar coins, despite getting a fair amount of attention early on, failed so badly the mint stopped mass-producing them for circulation mid-way through. Part of the problem might be that our presidents are a mixed bag, and most of us have mixed feelings about them (at least, those of us who know much about them). I know I didn't much like carrying around a Hoover or a Nixon dollar, and I'll be glad not to have the Reagan one in my pocket anymore.

And so ends another attempt to introduce something new (a dollar coin) without taking away something old (the dollar bill).  The English succeeded with their pound coin (and now additionally with their two-pound coin) by taking the pound-note out of circulation at the time they launched the coin, and by making the coin distinctive is size, color (colour), and shape (it was much thicker than their other coins).

I wonder what we'll try next time.

--John R.


*(along with  the Sacagawea I've been carrying since 2000 and a 1907 indian head penny)

**except for the back, which was superb

***again, except for its back -- which was the exact same back as the Eisenhower

SPOILERS: The Faceless Man.

SPOILERS: The Faceless Man.
So, I've just finished reading THE HANGING TREE, the latest (sixth) book in Ben Aaronovitch's THE RIVERS OF LONDON series. And one scene in it blew me away.
The high point of this book comes when Peter Grant, the hero, suddenly realizes that the person he's chatting with about classic cars is The Faceless Man, the sociopath villain of the series, whose path has crossed with the heroes' repeatedly without their being able to capture or even identify him.
Much mayhew ensues, during which the hero is barely able to make his escape.
After the villain has absconded (in the best series villain manner), now that his cover is blown they search his house.
Turns out he's not only a psychopathic killer, he's a Tolkien fan.
On his shelves they find such works as
. . . the Old Straight Track by Alfred Watkins andThe Real Middle Earth: Magic and Mysteryin the Dark Ages which confirmed that [TheFaceless Man] was an enormous Tolkien nerd.As if the five or six different editions of The Lord of the Rings and the signed first editionof The Hobbit wasn't enough proof. Hehadn't neglected the other Inklings, though-- C. S. Lewis had a shelf. And he didn'thave any objections to YA either, judgingby the collection of Susan Cooper's TheDark Is Rising sequence, again first editions,but these ones far too well read to be worthmuch, beside similarly worn copies of TheOwl Service and the rest of Alan Garner's books
It wasn't exactly screaming 'power madpsychopath', although it was possible thathe was modern enough to keep all hisvices on a USB stick.*

The thing I haven't been able to decide is how much of this is window dressing (Aaronovitch is great at filling his stories with references which firmly ground them in the present day) and how much of it is significant to the character. It's as if Dr. Petrie discovered that Fu Manchu was an admirer of the Sherlock Holmes stories and had in his lair a full set of the original issues of THE STRAND in which they first appeared. The author's saying something here, but what?
The only hints I've picked up on so far to help us decide what to make of all this are that The Faceless Man elsewhere named the Dark Ages as his favorite period of English history, and seems to favor an image of Merrie Olde England, unlike the modern multi-cultural multi-ethnic London Peter Grant inhabits. Doubtless we'll find out more about the Faceless Man's plans and motivations in later books.
So, it may be significant that all the authors mentioned in the preceding passage are English**
One other clue might be the single book about Tolkien specifically identified by name: THE REAL MIDDLE EARTH: MAGIC AND MYSTERY IN THE DARK AGES by Brian Bates (hc 2002, tp 2004). At first I was puzzled as to why, out of all the many, many books about Tolkien, Aaronovitch chose out Bates' for special mention. I'm inclined to think that we're to conclude it's the real world/Dark Age Britain element that drew The Faceless Man's attention. But I'm certainly open to suggestion as to why this book rather than one of the more well-known books on Tolkien's work.
In the meantime, I'll be processing the idea of someone using 'Tolkien fan' as a characterization point for an arch-villain in what's clearly not a Tolkien-bashing sort of way. A down side of his cultural ubiquity, I'd say. We'll see if subsequent revelations circle back to this detail at some point.
--John R.current (re) reading: MIDNIGHT RIOT (Rivers of London, Book One)



*elsewhere they examine his daughter's books: "an interesting collection of books. Lots of YAin the American "drown the sister" school ofsocial realism, plus various Malorie Blackmans,Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in theCastle and Land of Laughsby Jonathan Howard.--I hadn't heard of Blackmans before (but then I am somewhat outside her target audience), but it's noticeable that all these authors are Americans.
**(though Lewis self-identified as Irish, he usually 'passes' as English in the eyes of his readers and those who write about his work)

Three Things I Learned about Octopuses

So, from recently reading Peter Godfrey-Smith's OTHER MINDS: THE OCTOPUS, THE SEA, AND THE DEEP ORIGINS OF CONSCIOUSNESS (?2016), combined with my subsequently dipping into the much lighter Mather-Anderson-Wood volume OCTOPUS: THE OCEAN'S INTELLIGENT INVERTEBRATE (2010), I've learned several things I didn't know.

#1. the plural of 'octopus' is 'octopuses', not 'octopi'. The latter is a hypercorrection put forth in the eighteenth century by someone who cdn't tell his Latin from his Greek.

#2. octopuses are wicked smart -- by one measure, about as smart as a dog, or half as smart as a cat. They also have individual personalities. Oddly enough though, they are v. short-lived (a year or so for most species, no more than three or four for the longest-lived).

#3. there are at least seventy-two octopuses in Puget Sound, according to a count-the-optopuses survey done by divers at the same time each year.

There was also quite a lot about intelligence and the emergence of consciousness in the Godfrey-Smith book. I wish Mr. Barfield was still around: I'd be fascinated to see what he wd think of it.

Finally, I learned about a geological era I hadn't known about before: the Ediacaran Age. It's part of the PreCambrian, the time just before the Cambrian Explosion. Remarkably enough, none of the animals whose fossils they've found from that period had means to attack other animals or defend themselves from attacks: no horns, armor, pinchers,  &c. They seem to have gone about their lives, pretty much ignoring each other.* The Cambrian introduced something new: predation, after which animals had to play careful attention to each other to either catch prey or avoid becoming prey. Which, by a long and eventful route, led to creatures like us.

--John R.
current reading: Ben Aaronovitch's THE HANGING TREE (the latest in the Rivers of London series)


*although there's one inferred piece of evidence that challenges that: the Cnidarians (jellyfish and anemones) have toxic stingers and are thought on genetic grounds to date back before the Cambrian era.

Tolkien's Cobbler

So, thanks to Jeff G. for this one, a link to the story about a famous Oxford cobbler shutting down shop after many decades and selling off their ledger books, which include orders from famous Oxfordians, such as J. R. R. Tolkien:  boots for playing rugby when an undergraduate, nice (really nice) shoes for when he was a distinguished professor. We've always been told that JRRT was dapper and always took care to dress well;* this helps to bear that out.

http://www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-02-01-these-boots-were-made-tolkien-ledgers-iconic-oxford-shoe-shop-duckers-go-under
Being an inveterate Tolkienist myself, I'm delighted to see this story, and bemused that it was Tolkien's name that made the headline, rather than other famous customers of the same shop listed in the piece: Evelyn Waugh (I guess BRIDESHEAD REVISITED is much less popular than THE LORD OF THE RINGS these days), or Oxford legend Basil Blackwell, or Baron von Richtofen (who was the same age as Tolkien after all), or Rowan Atkinson, or Jeremy Clarkson.

And it was nice to see that Tolkien sometimes signed his name as "John R. R. Tolkien". We've been told by his biographer that he usually went by his middle name (or first middle name at any rate), Ronald, yet had evidence from a letter written late in life that he preferred "John". Another little piece of evidence to put in the pile.

Much as I enjoy seeing this piece, it reminds me of a passage I read in a biography of A. E. Housman that I've alway thought a good encapsulation of the value of not losing a sense of perspective. The biography is one I picked up on a remainder table during one of my research trips to Oxford, in 1987.** I was won over at once by a brief passage in the foreword in which the biographer spent a paragraph describing Houseman's shoes. He then stated that every word of that paragraph was true, but none of it was worth knowing. I'm more a 'load every rift with ore' type of writer myself, but it's good to be reminded of the need to have a little perspective now and then.

--John R.
current reading: the new Aaronovitch, Mather-Anderson-Wood on Octopuses.





*as opposed to his friend C. S. Lewis, who just wore whatever was handy. His clothing is sometimes described as shabby -- not because he cdn't afford better, but because that wd be giving in to vanity.

**this was the same visit from which I brought back Mari Pritchard's*** excellent little book GUESTS & HOSTS

***a.k.a. Mrs. Humphrey Carpenter

Tolkien Spotting (Aaronovitch)

So, I've just started reading the latest in Ben Aaronovitch's THE RIVERS OF LONDON books, and was amused to find a Tolkien reference in the first chapter. The main character is speaking, giving his opinion about various prominent London buildings:

"Now, I have . . . views about architecture. But there's modern stuff I like. The Gherkin, the Lloyd's building, even the Shard -- despite the nagging feeling I get that Nazgul should be roosting at the top"
This is pretty straightforward and unambiguous; another good example of Tolkien's ubiquity in our culture.

Oddly enough, I'd come across another possible but much less certain example earlier the same day. In a Talking Points Memo post about Trump aid Mike Flynn, TPM founder Josh Marshall wrote


"Flynn already appears to be in the process of getting wraithed"*
This struck me as an odd usage, not just Tolkienesque but positively Shippeyian. I'm curious: has anyone else come across this word lately so applied (i.e. as Tolkien used it)?
--John R.just finished: OTHER MINDS: THE OCTOPUS THE SEA, AND THE DEEP ORIGINS OF CONSCIOUSNESS by Peter Godfrey-Smith (?2016).
*http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/d...


UPDATE: Thanks to the comment by Clive Shergold I've corrected the author's name, which I'd gotten wrong in the initial post.  Thanks Clive.
--John R., 2/2-17.

Three Trillion Trees

So, a while back I saw the announcement that scientist have tried to arrival at some kind of comprehensive estimate of just how many trees there are in the world. The result: three trillion trees.*

That's the good news.

The bad news is that this represents about half the trees we had 12,000 years ago, at the start of the Holocene. So since the end of the last Ice Age we've lost some 46% of the planet's tree cover. This is almost certainly the result of human activity, just as was probably also the case with the mass extinctions of that era -- the mammoth and mastodon and saber toothed tiger and the rest. But even if it weren't, it would be sobering, esp. since by all accounts it's currently accelerating.

Here's the link:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/02/scientists-reveal-there-are-3tn-trees-in-world-new-count


Reading this piece takes me back to Marquette days, when one of the essays I had to teach as part of freshman comp.  was a piece by Otto Friedrich called "There are 00 Trees in Russia". Friedrich's point was that journalists often write pieces calling for specific knowledge they don't actually know, which is filled in by editors and fact-checkers. He gave the specific example of how many trees there were in Russia as an example of an unknowable fact. I guess extrapolation has come of age in the interim, thanks to better statistical sampling (e.g., satellites) and vastly increased computational skills

--John R.


*with a current world population of about seven billion, that's about 500 trees per person. Which is a lot, but possibly not enough.

Gygax Graphic Novel

So, while poking around looking at this and that, I found out that there's a biography of Gary Gygax in graphic novel form due out in a few months (May 9th, to be specific). It's called RISE OF THE DUNGEON MASTER: GARY GYGAX AND THE CREATION OF D&D by David Kushner (text) and Koren Shadmi (art).
I've already put in a pre-order on this item.
Here's a link with a little more information. 
https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Dungeon-Master-Gygax-Creation/dp/1568585594/ref=pd_sim_14_1?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1568585594&pd_rd_r=FSREFTJHP601PBS9T6AF&pd_rd_w=oNJyR&pd_rd_wg=IxxIm&psc=1&refRID=FSREFTJHP601PBS9T6AF


--John R. 

The Yawning Portal

So, I'm so far out of the loop these days that I only just learned last week about the forthcoming new D&D release, a septet of classic adventures adapted to Fifth Edition rules, called The Yawning Portal. According to WotC,* the seven adventures are




Against the GiantsDead in ThayForge of FuryHidden Shrine of TamoachanSunless CitadelTomb of HorrorsWhite Plume Mountain

Of these, four are classics: G1-3. Against the Giants (Gygax), C1. Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan (Harold Johnson), S2. White Plume Mountain (Laurence Schick), and S1. Tome of Horrors (Gygax again).

Two more come from the Third Edition Adventure Path: Bruce Cordell's Sunless Citadel and Rich Baker's Forge of Fury (the first and second in that series, respectively).

The seventh wasn't familiar to me, and a little checking revealed the reason why; it's a new piece they've thrown into the mix (presumably like 'greatest hits' albums tend to have a new song added in the hopes it'll become a hit by being on the album**).

It's probably no coincidence that all four of those classics ranked high in DUNGEON magazine's polling of "The 30 Greatest Adventures of All Time" (DUNGEON #116, November 2004), coming in at #1 (Giants), #3 (Tome), #9 (White Plume), and #18 (Tamoachan), respectively, albeit with Against the Giants there included in its mashup form as GDQ1-7.

Personally I never cared much for the Drow series (D1, D2, D3) or its Llothian conclusion (Q1), probably I've only read them and never actually played through the adventures. Same goes for S2: I've heard it praised by enough folks whose opinion I respect (e.g., Bruce Cordell) to conclude I'd like it more if I'd played through it at some point. I did play through G1-G2-G3, which I do have a high regard for.

Two surprising absences from this greatest-hits update/recap, at first glance, would be I6. Ravenloft (which came in at #3 on the DUNGEON list) and T1-4. Temple of Elemental Evil (#5 ibid.), but one of these has already had its stand-along fifth edition treatment: CURSE OF STRAHD, which came out about a year ago.

Here's hoping TEMPLE OF ELEMENTAL EVIL gets a reprint as well.

--John R.


just finished: MacArthur vs. Truman by H. L. Brand (2016)
currently reading: a book on octopus intelligence
just finished: THE STORY OF SAIUNKOKU , second season
currently watching (w. disappointment) RWBY season four.



*
http://dnd.wizards.com/products/tabletop-games/rpg-products/tales-yawning-portal

see also

http://www.forbes.com/sites/toddkenreck/2017/01/05/dds-tales-from-the-yawning-portal-is-games-greatest-hits/#737ae20c7c26


**a trend started by Paul Simon, with "Slip Sliding Away"