John D. Rateliff's Blog, page 155

The Shippey Festschrift

So, last night I discovered that a book I've been looking forward to a long time has now gotten near enough to publication that there's a pre-order page on the publisher's website.

I refer to the T. A. Shippey festschrift TOLKIEN IN THE NEW CENTURY: ESSAYS IN HONOR OF TOM SHIPPEY, due out from McFarland early next year.

This isn't the first Shippey festschrift, having been preceded by CONSTRUCTING NATIONS, RECONSTRUCTING MYTH: ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF T. A. SHIPPEY, ed. Andrew Wawn et al [2007], quite an interesting volume in itself. But that focused on Shippey's career as an academic, with the contributions coming from his fellow medievalists (as is traditional for a festschrift). This second volume comes from the Tolkien community, with the contributors being his fellow Tolkienists --esp. those who have taken part in the ongoing Tolkien Track at the Kalamazoo Medieval Congress, which Shippey played a large part in up to his retirement.

Here's the link:

http://www.mcfarlandbooks.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-7438-7

Disclaimer: I'm both an editor and contributor here, my own essay being "Inside Literature: Tolkien's Exploration of Medieval Genres". As we get closer to publication date, I'll see about posting a Table of Contents. But for now, wanted to share the good news that this volume, which has been a long time in the works, is finally near to seeing the light of day.

In the meantime, I did a quick check and see that this will make the seventh of McFarland's collections of essays on Tolkien, and the third to which I've contributed. Quite a nice little line they've built up:

http://www.mcfarlandbooks.com/searches/advanced_search2.php?advanced=tolkien&-Find=Start+Search

--JDR

Give-Peter-Jackson-Money Day

So, Tuesday saw the release of the EXTENDED EDITION of the first HOBBIT movie. And of course that means I had to run an errand to Best Buy to pick it up that same day. Except that they didn't make it easy. When the first film came out on dvd earlier this year, it had its own display stand. This time it was tucked away among the other new releases. Last time they had a stack of copies; this time only a few. Disappointingly for me, they only had two options: blue ray and three-d, and they were out of the blue-ray, having apparently only stocked about four or five copies of each. What I wanted was the dvd: while we have a blue-ray player, I wanted the option to watch this on my computer when travelling. But I certainly didn't want anything in three-d; not only do we not have the right kind of screen for viewing it, but I don't like three-d effects (hard on the eyes).

Which means that, while I want to support our failing megamarts as much as the next guy, I had to pass and made my way up from Tukwila to Renton to the Frye's there, where I found they'd re-arranged all their dvd section since the last time I was there (late August/early September). Once again I was unable to locate where they had the dvd I was looking for, but a helpful employee showed me the spot, and their (modest) display on an end-cap which had all three options: dvd, blue-ray, and three-d. I got the dvd and over lunch did a quick skim through the new/extended scenes, watching the whole thing through that night. Now I'm working my way through the extras, which take up three whole disks by themselves ("Appendix Seven" and "Appendix Eight", respectively).

I know some will be looking at all the new material on this extended edition carefully; thought I'd just quickly list the ones I noticed. All are Spoilers, so avoid if you're planning to watch the extended edition for yourself and haven't yet.


--the Thror/Thranduil scene is slightly longer, showing how the quarrel arose between the elves and dwarves.
--we're shown in a few glimpses how the Men of Dale attempted the defense of their city
--Old Took's party is briefly shown, fireworks and Belladonna and (very) young Bilbo and all. The whole thing only lasts a minute or so.
--we see more of Hobbiton on the day of the Unexpected Party, including Bilbo buying the fish he never gets to eat for his supper that night.
--Bofur's wound and disability are briefly explained
--we get just a little bit more set-up coming into Rivendell.
--the banquet scene at Rivendell continues longer, at first along the same lines as before, with the dwarves very much out of water, but eventually they cross the line to boorish and crass. Who knew they'd been on their best behavior at Bilbo's? We do get to hear another dwarf-song (The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon), not as good as either of the ones we've heard before. later we get glimpses of dwarves bathing in fountains (a scene that in Tolkien's book appears at the Carrock).
--we see Bilbo wandering Rivendell, delighting in the place, and a pleasant little conversation between Elrond and Bilbo. This is by far the best part of all the new material.
--we're told explicitly that there's hereditary madness in Thorin's line, to which his grandfather and then his father both succumbed. I found this interesting, since I made the argument in HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT that Thorin's behavior once he sees the hoard is best explained as a kind of madness. There's also mention made of the Ring of Thrain, the last of the Seven dwarf-rings, and its unknown fate (a clear set-up for events to come in, I assume, the next movie).
--the Great Goblin has another song, but this is one of those cases where less would have been more.
--we see onscreen something we've been told in the ancillary material: that Nori is a thief. We see him nick a salt-cellar at Rivendell, and the goblins who capture him empty out a bag of elven candlesticks and the like.

There are a few other bits, but that's most of it. Some are great, like Bilbo's solitary ramble delighting in Rivendell. Some are bad, like the dwarves acting like members of the Drones Club, or the extra bits of the Great Goblin. Most of the rest are nice little bits, helpful (like the bit about Bofur) but not essential.

All in all, I'm glad to have this.  And of course it whets my appetite for the second film, now only a little over a month away.

More as I work my way through the film-Appendices.

--John R.

NPR Does HPL

So, somewhat to my surprise, the next-to-last story on NPR's Morning Edition on Friday was a report from Necronomicon. As usual with any news piece on a meeting with a fantasy/sci-fi theme, the reporter has included the cliche of talking about people in costume (one of those little boxes you have to check when doing a story of this kind, I guess) and also made fun of the name (whereas I'd say "Necronomicon" is a great in-joke instantly recognizable to the people who'd be interested in attending).

But it was interesting to learn, through the piece, that Providence seems to be accepting HPL as a native son, with a bust of him now in the Athenaeum and the CALL OF CTHULHU silent movie from a few years back being shown there as part of some special exhibit. That's a level of local fame I don't think HPL himself ever seriously dreamed of.  Hope they do put together that walking tour of Lovecraft-associated Providence spots that gets mentioned. And I do have to give them credit that in links from the online version of the story they provide links to pieces that raise some serious issues about HPL and his work, but keep them out of the main story. Bemused by the comments, esp. the one by "Pugmire", who I assume is the Lovecraft scholar of the same name, attacking anyone who criticizes Lovecraft's worst novel as being "illiterate". More interestingly, Pugmire asserts that the Lovecraft volume from Library of America is their best-selling title of all time. That would be surprising, but don't really know where to go to confirm something like that. If true, it wd be deeply ironic, since Edmund Wilson, who was a big supporter of a Library-of-America type project, was a notorious detractor of Lovecraft.

In any case, here's the link:

http://www.npr.org/2013/10/31/241655366/providence-kindles-love-of-horror-writer-h-p-lovecraft

--John R.
current book: GODS AND FIGHTING MEN by Lady Gregory [1904]
current audiobook: Boswell's LIFE OF JOHNSON [1791]

On Deadline / Noble Smith's HOBBIT quiz

So, I've been on deadline -- first with one small project that ran long because of multiple interruptions and disruption in the schedule, then with a second small project that got a late start because of overruns on the first.

Now that they're both done (yay, the dance of doneness), I can return to my two ongoing projects, one of which is nearing completion (the one without a firm deadline) and the other of which still has a long way to go.

Which is just a roundabout way of saying: more posts on the way soon, after a bit of an unintended hiatus.

In the meantime, here's a link to a 'ten things you didn't know about THE HOBBIT' piece that showed up on Huffington: Books a few days ago.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/noble-smith/the-hidden-hobbit-10-secr_b_4174846.html

I like the phrase about Gandalf's "little pipe-smoking vacation" but don't see the point in mentioning Rankin-Bass's stop-motion work when the work in question (the animated HOBBIT) wasn't stop-motion. Dubious about the comments re 'halfling' and 'bag-end', but the only real error that struck me is the statement that the Tolkien Estate sued TSR; pretty sure it was not the Tolkiens but Saul Zaentz (a.k.a. "Tolkien Enterprsies"), the movie people, who brought the hammer down.

In any case, we're now entering the countdown for the release of the expanded edition of the first HOBBIT movie (Tuesday the 5th), accompanied by a slew of film tie-in books. And soon too the second film (December 13th). Not much longer to wait now . . .

--John R.
just finished: ZEALOT by Reza Aslan
re-started: Lady Gregory's tales of the Tuatha de Danaan
also re-started: Boswell's LIFE OF JOHNSON (audiobook), with disk ten (out of thirty-six)

Gary Gygax and the Chili Festival

So, one of the odder things to turn up in the preliminary sorting of old TSR stuff was a clipping from a local news paper of TSR founder and DandD co-creator Gary Gygax judging a local chili contest. I've attached a scan below, but being low-res newsprint the image doesn't reproduce all that well. Gygax is the second from the left.

I have no memory of this clipping at all, or any idea how it found its way into those papers. The date was sometime between February 5th (the date of the contest) and 14th (since, as Jeff Grubb pointed out, there's an add for Valentine's Day on the back), but I don't know the year; probably '95, '96, or '97. Nor do I know where it appeared, other than some local area paper (the classified ads on the back include return addresses for Delavan, where we were living at the time, as well as Elkhorn, where Jim Ward lived, and Whitewater, a little further off). The event was probably held at the Grand Geneva resort (since the contest's name is given as the "Grand Geneva Winter Carnival"), right there in Lake Geneva. I don't know what year this first such event was, but according to their website they're still having it as recently as this past February.*

It's kind of nice, though, to see Gygax in a non-gaming context, and to know he achieved some status as a local figure in his own hometown.

Here's the link:






--John R.
current audiobook: CATCHING FIRE (resumed)
current book: THE PRYDAIN COMPANION (MIchael O' Tunnell), tales of the Tuatha de Danaan (Lady Gregory)






*http://blog.grandgeneva.com/2012/01/grand-geneva-hosts-annual-winter-carnival/

Colin McComb of the Clan McComb

So, I've finally started to tackle the huge job of sorting through all the old boxes of TSR stuff -- not games but all sorts of paper: memos, meeting notes, schedules, galleys, and the like. One of the first things I found were color print-outs of prototype covers for the RAVENLOFT line, which help me more or less date this box to 1995/96, the five products being SERVANTS OF DARKNESS, CHAMPIONS OF THE MIST, the DOMAINS OF DREAD hardcover, THE SHADOW RIFT (which I wound up contributing to), and THE FORGOTTEN TERROR. Also here was a newspaper clipping of Gary Gygax helping to judge a cooking contest, a bunch of old business cards, a departmental survey (more on this in a separate post), two memos from our department's boss chiding the designers and editors for not meeting deadlines, and a sign-up sheet for Colin McComb's going away party. I took this last item and showed it to several fellow ex-TSR/ex-WotC folks, who thought it probably dates from August 1996 (though August 1995 is also a possibility).  Since it records a moment in time like a sort of time capsule, I thought I'd post an image and a transcription here, for those who might be curious about the group of people who produced so much good material back in what is now nearly twenty years ago.

First, here's a picture of me holding up the page in question. This was taken Wednesday night by JD Wiker at Steve Brown's birthday dinner -- just to show that we're still doing the same kind of thing all these years later (three of us on that sheet were actually at this week's dinner).






Next, here's the actual sign up sheet





Finally, here's my transcription of the name, since not all of them come through on the image. I've added some descriptors, but these may not be entirely accurate, since people moved around between jobs (such as Bill Connors and Steve Miller, hired as editors but then moved over to design, or Skip Williams, long a stalwart of the RPGA later moved over to RandD as a designer) and I don't know for certain the exact date of this event (probably 1996, but possibly 1995).  
First column:Tony Szczudlo [artist]Skip Williams [RPGA/designer]Carrie Bebris [editor]Thomas Reid [editor/creative director]Monte Cook [designer]Dori Watry [editor/creative director]Dan Wenger [marketing, some (freelance?) design]Lester Smith [designer]Michelle Vuckovich [editor, periodicals]David Eckelberry [editor]Ray Valese [editor]Val Valese [editor]Jon Pickens [longtime editor]Sean (Reynolds, I assume) [computer guy]John D. Rateliff [editor]
Second column:Mary Fleming [?]Miranda Horner [editor]Steven Schend [editor]Sue Cook [editor]Stan! (i.e., Steve Brown) [editor, designer]Cindi Rice [editor]William W. Connors [designer]Shawn Costa [?]Anne Brown [editor]Duane Maxwell [designer/editor]Bruce Heard [scheduling director and freelance coordinator]Steve Winter [creative director]Phil Athans [book department[Doug Stewart [editor]
Third column:Steve Miller [editor > designer]Diezel [artist and mapper]Rich Baker [designer]David Wise [editor > creative director > department head]Jeff Easley [artist]Alan Pollack [artist]

Colin himself, of course, was a designer, and a very good one: one of those overlooked figures like Rich Baker or Bruce Nesmith (or, as editors, Andria Martin and Miranda Horner) who never got nearly enough recognition for just how good they were.  

So, best wishes to Colin here and now, with good memories of there and then.
--John R.
P.S.: By the way, this isn't by any means a complete list of everyone who was in the department at the time -- I can think of a dozen or so more designers and editors whose names aren't on the sign-up sheet -- probably because they had some other commitment that day: Slade and Bill S. and Michele C and Bill O. and Dale and Julia and Bruce C. and Keith and Andria and Karen and Harold and Ed and Roger. And I'm probably still forgetting a name or two even then. It was a big department. --JDR

Ursula K. Le Guin and the Comfy Chair

So, as long as I'm wrapping up some belated posting re. the Puyallup book fair of three weeks ago, I'd be remiss not to mention Ursula K. Le Guin's presentation on Saturday Sept. 24th, the day after Susan Cooper's speech.

The first thing that impressed me is that, rather than having her stand at the traditional podium, they v. sensibly gave her a comfy chair on a small raised platform, so she could sit in comfort and see (and be seen by) the audience at the same time. A nice bit of planning on somebody's part.

I had suspected that, Le Guin having introduced Cooper on Friday night, Cooper wd return the favor by introducing Le Guin on Saturday, but such proved not to be the case (though Cooper was present for Le Guin's event -- Janice spotted her sitting two rows ahead of us.

Unlike Cooper, who gave a talk, Le Guin's was a reading -- primarily of poetry, but ending with some prose as well, followed by a question and answer session.

I'm not as eager a reader of poetry as of prose, though I have been to some wonderful poetry readings in my time (most memorably one by Merwin years ago at Fayetteville). This one was a bit unusual in that I enjoyed the introductions she did framing each individual poem and explaining the circumstances which led to its being written more than I did the poems themselves.* Many, she said, were written in response to challenges posed by a local writing group she's part of, which meets monthly. Most such challenges involve writing in a specific verse form, such as a palindrome (poem #1), sapphics (poem #5), or a villanelle (poem #6), et al.  I assume all six poems she read are in the new Selected/Collected Poems volume they had on sale outside the event (from local bookstore King Books, wh. I'll have to get to one of these days). She ended by reading the first section from one of the TALES FROM EARTHSEA (the first, I think): "Dragonfly" -- which was good, but really didn't grab me. Though it did make me wish Le Guin would record more of her work: she does a really good job of reading it aloud, and the only published examples I know of it are the old Caedmon record vinyl album with "Gwilan's Harp" and "Intracom" on it. It'd be nice, too, to have some of her incisive essays available in her own voice.**

A v. interesting question and answer session following, in which Le Guin several times was asked specific details about the early Earthsea books or THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS and rather surprised her audience, I think, by explaining that those were all written a long time ago and the details of the writing process were now hazy decades later. It was honest and unexpected, since so many authors have little stories they like to tell about how they did this or where that came from.*** Le Guin, by contrast, is v. much in the present, focused on the work she's doing now. She's proud of the earlier work, I think (she certainly shd be), but seems content to let it speak for itself.

A few snippets I did jot down (since I devoted less than a page to notes on the reading and three pages to the Q-and-A that followed):

--asked about THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS in the most vague and general of terms ("can you discuss that book?"), she replied "I wrote it a long time ago" and wistfully noted that "everybody always wants to talk about the old stuff". In contrast to the gender issues, which seem v. modern, she noted that the political situation, which owed a lot to the cold war, must seem v. foreign to today's readers, a generation after the Berlin Wall came down.

--asked about film adaptations of her work, she praised the 1980 LATHE for having got things right despite its "incredibly low budget". "Since then, it's been down hill all the way". She did praise a stage play version of LEFT HAND staged in Portland this spring but on the whole had to say "I've been bitten a little bit too often".

--how many books has she written so far? "I honestly don't know", but she does know she's written twenty-two novels. "A lot of stuff".

--someone who wants to be a writer but has trouble getting up in the morning got the advice "write at night". LeGuin herself was kindly to this questioner, whom some authors might have scoffed at, and ended with talking about how much she loves what she does: "I'm happier writing [than] anything else"

--do you know the story before you write it? "A good and big question. With a short story, yes. you have to know what you're doing, what's going on. With a novel . . . "  her advice: "Find your own way: they're all right."

--re having once been remarkable that she, along with Silverberg, were unique in winning both the Hugo and the Nebula: "we were a small, dogged band"

--"I do hear what I write. The sound of it is v. important to me. The cadence and the rhythm."

--re. names: "Ursula" is Latin, for "little bear woman"

--any beloved author, who . . . author and books? "Too many to name!" did single out when she was 26 or 27 "when I heard about this guy Tolkien". Beautiful books. Checked out Volume I. Was back when the library opened in the morning for Volume II. "I don't suppose any book had so much effect on me -- how cd you ever get away from Tolkien?"

--did she know Ishii? No: Ishii died in 1913 and she was born in 1929. Her father felt great sadness about how Ishii's life had turned out and never talked about him. She only learned that amazing story years afterwards by reading her mother's book on it. She did know other native american friends of her father's.

--asked about "Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons" from THE LANGUAGE OF THE NIGHT, she protested that this was written decades ago and she "can't really reconstruct the argument" but still agreed with its basic premise. "a writer like Tolkien is for kids? give me a break!" strongly believes in the "absolute necessity to the human race" of imagination

--she does worry a bit about [video] games, where people seem to be "getting it, not doing it", whereas with reading "you do the book". "reading is an exercise of the imagintion" in a way that playing games isn't. "THE LORD OF THE RINGS your mind does. It's enlarging."

--she "always wanted to be a writer. Told and read to and sung to from the cradle on."


This was followed by the book-signing session. I've already mentioned Le Guin's new poetry collection: she also has out a new, two-volume collection of short stories (wh. shd be pretty good, given that she's a master of the science fiction/fantasy short story -- my two favorite EarthSea pieces are the short tales "The Word of Unbinding" and "The Rule of Names"). The night before, for Cooper, you had to buy the book before you could get it signed (or at least buy A book; I think you cd get up to two signed). For Le Guin they relaxed that restriction, fortunately, perhaps because the bookstore's table was more or less sold out by the time the signing started. So the only rules here were to stand politely in line, to have no more than two books signed, and to write out the name of whoever you wanted them signed to on a sticky note so she wdn't have to stop and ask how names were spelled.

Two other people from Mithlond had made it to the reading, Jason Fisher and Gyda, and we had an enjoyable conversation (about Alan Garner, among other things) that made the standing in line time pass quickly. When it came my turn, I'd brought two books to ask her to sign. Years before in Madison at WisCon 1996 I'd gotten her to sign THE LANGUAGE OF THE NIGHT, which I consider her masterpiece, as well as a little handmade book of hers that I think's my favorite: THE ART OF BUNDJITSU. This time I brought a copy of the individual printing of "From Elfland to Pooghkeepsie" I got a few years back (she commented that she didn't see that one often) and asked her to sign THE ART OF BUNDJITSU again, except this time to Rigby, Hastur, and Feanor. She noted the names, guessed correctly that these were my cats, and took pains to spell all three names correctly. She even asked, of Rigby, "as in Eleanor Rigby" and I said yes.

So there it is: how neat is it that Ursula Le Guin signed a book to my cat? I wasn't the only one who thought it was neat and was glad we came: Janice opted out of the line and just waited for me near the end, not too far from Le Guin's signing table. She told me afterwards that Le Guin is the opposite of Jimmy Carter. Carter, when we saw him at the Univ. bookstore a few years back, is a signing machine, who's worked out a system in which he signs books as quickly as possible, with as little contact with the signee as possible.**** Le Guin, by contrast, Janice said took the time to talk at least briefly with everybody who came through the line. That's a memory a lot of us will keep with us for a long time to come.


As for the rest of the second day of the big Puyallup book fair event, we made a brief visit to the 'mini-Comicon' on the other side o the building, where we chatted with friend Stan (Steve Brown) and bought a pair of HEREVILLE graphic novels by Barry Deutsch ("Yet Another Troll-Fighting 11-Year-Old Orthodox Jewish Girl"); he drew a quick sketch inside of the heroine in the first book, HOW MIRKA GOT HER SWORD, for Janice, and of the troll (wearing my hat), in the second book, HOW MIRKA MET A METEORITE, for me. Here's the link to his website for those who want to find out more about, and perhaps support, a local artist: www.hereville.com

Finally, there's The Revels, whom we got to hear more of while waiting for Le Guin's reading to start. I decided the best way to describe their music was not madrigals -- what's too early and fa-la-lally in style -- nor barber shop quartets (that's too modern a style). Ballad is not right either (esp. given the multiple-singer approach they favor). There's a slight resemblance to chantys, but not much, and hymns are quite different. Instead, what they do is very like secular caroling. That is, they use the voices and effects you often find in Christmas carols, except that these songs have nothing to do with Christmas.

That's when I had a mini-epiphany. Al of the sudden it hit me: this is what Tom Bombadil is supposed to sound like. Not the village idiot but Fr. Xmas. If you substitute a mental image (or, more accurately, imagine a sound), Tom Bomb. fits much better with someone humming carols to himself than to the kind of singing tried out in previous (audio) adaptations. I'll have to play with this idea some more, but I think I may be on to something. We'll see.

So, short version: If you get a chance to go see Susan Cooper and/or Ursula K. Le Guin, do so. Likewise, Puyallup is nince.

--John R.

current reading: THE HIGH KING by Lloyd Alexander [1968]

*a good example is "The Clydesdale Mare", where the phrase "here in the empty pasture" is good, but more memorable was her mentioning what led her to write the piece: how she and a number of other people who drove by enjoyed seeing a small herd of Clydesdales, somewhere just west of Portland I think she said it was, and then recounting their sadness at the herd's being broken up when its owner died, focusing it through the now-solitary mare left behind when her colts were sold off and entire family scattered.  By contrast, I've heard recordings of Larkin in which the intros and the poems beautifully complement each other, and used to have a tape by Frost in which the intros disastrously undercut the poetry.

**given that some essays were given as lectures, there might well be recordings of these out there I'm just not aware of.

***like someone on a 'classic rock' tour telling stories about how he or she came to write or record this or that famous song

****to be fair, Carter wasn't like that at all when signing books at the Harry Schwartz in the Iron Block Building in Milwaukee back in the early nineties, where he was gracious enough to chat briefly with each person getting a book signed. I suppose he's streamlined his process in the years since. Though even now he does still make a minimum of contact: looking up and locking eyes with the person whose book he's signing.

Janice's Favorite Susan Cooper Story

So, I'd hoped to write up a report about Susan Cooper's talk at the Puyallup book fair
(back on Friday, Sept 24th) but with one thing or another haven't been able to get to it. Now that my memory of the event's starting to fade a bit, thought that instead I'd just share a few of her more memorable remarks I'd jotted down at the time.

--"Demanding, discerning, and intelligent" [I think this was Le Guin's description of Cooper in her opening remarks]

Janice's favorite story, by far, was Cooper's recounting having once taken her kids for a walk in the park when her son, aged about three, stopped and said of his year and a half old sister  "I think it's time [sister] met my friend." When Cooper, puzzled, asked "What friend?", he replied "The Lady with the Books". It turned out he meant the children's librarian at the nearby local library or, as Cooper put it, the treasure house and it's (friendly) keeper.

--why, when there's so much good in us, we human beings do so much evil?

--"I never know what I've written until the publisher tells me what it is" [on writing for 'young adults']

--"[I] discovered . . . the thing I was put here to do" [by writing, she discovered she was meant to be a writer]

-- "when you grow up in the awareness that somebody is trying to kill you" [on personal experience of evil during wartime]

Her most recent book is set against the backdrop of King Philip's War, seeking to answer "the question that won't let me alone": "how could this possibly have happened?" -- that in just a generation or two the friendly relations between native Americans and the Massachusetts bay colonists had degenerated into a disastrous war. The key, she felt, came "when people forsake human doubt for . . . absolute certainty." She later re-iterated "the perils of absolute certainty"

-- "a book is a voyage of discovery, for the writer as much as the reader(s)"

--"I don't write for children. I write for myself."

-- "to shine a small light on [life] . . . "

-- "the unread story's not a story: it's little black marks on wood pulp" [this was Cooper quoting Le Guin, but not sure when U.K.LeG originally said this].


We didn't stay for the book signing, but it was a memorable event, and we were glad we made it.

--John R.
current reading: TARAN WANDERER
current audiobook: CATCHING FIRE

Imagined Conversations (Le Guin and Cooper)

So, I admit that during the Puyallup book fair event, I found myself wondering if at any point Susan Cooper and Ursula K. Le Guin got together over a cup of strong tea between their two presentations and commiserated with each other over their rotten luck with film adaptations of their books.

On the one hand, Cooper's fantasy THE DARK IS RISING (or THE SEEKER, as it was ineptly renamed by Hollywood) has only been adapted once, not twice. So there Le Guin' gotten twice the pain off the same series. On the other hand, one of the two Le Guin adaptations (TALES OF EARTHSEA) isn't that bad, judged purely as an anime film. It was terrible as an adaptation of Le Guin, but at least it more of less held together as a movie (having been made by Studio Ghibli, the world's greatest animation studio, probably helped). By contrast, the Sy-fi channel EARTHSEA miniseries was (a) terrible, in the sense that it was badly scripted, badly acted, and badly directed: a mess from beginning to end. But on top of this, and even worse, it was also (b) a complete reversal of Le Guin's original, so that the people who serve the forces of Darkness were, bizarrely, recast as the heroic defenders keeping the darkness at bay. Kind of like making Sauron and his Nazgul the good guys, it just didn't make any kind of sense; a real betrayal of the original.

Against this, Cooper had a good book turned into a bad movie, the fate of many writers. More galling, the story was ineptly updated, and Hollywoodized, and (worse) Americanized, so that instead of events playing themselves out in rural England over Christmastide a major scene played out in, of all places, a shopping mall. Even casting the great Christopher Eccleston (best known for having saved DOCTOR WHO) couldn't save this turkey; he's reduced to bombast and cliche villain rants. But what got released bore so little resemblance to her original (they even renamed it) that the resultant film's not likely to cast any shadow over the original book; I suspect people are already forgetting there ever was an adaptation. And in this case, ignorance is bliss.

Then too, Le Guin did mention that she'd seen one good film adaption of her works: the original LATHE OF HEAVEN (which I've never seen myself, but have heard good things about), and also praised some stage adaptations of one or two of her works (LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, I think, and one other). So at least her experience hasn't been all bad -- though it's certainly been bad enough; far more than a writer of her stature shd have had to put up with.

I did imagine the two ladies being joined at some point by the ghost of  Lloyd Alexander, whose CHRONICLES OF PRYDAIN were adapted into what was, for a long time, considered the worst animated movie Disney ever made: THE BLACK CAULDRON* (whether it's since been superseded by something even worse, I don't know. I hope not).  A mish-mash of elements from the first two Prydain books (THE BOOK OF THREE and THE BLACK CAULDRON) thrown together with some random fantasy cliches, it's a real mess. There are a few moments where the animation's not bad (e.g. the collapsing castle),** but the character designs are frightful (e.g. the Horned King's minions, who remind me of 101 DALMATIONS' Horace and Jasper gone to seed, or, worse, Gurgi as a shaggy dog rather than a hairy Gollum), the dialogue is banal in the extreme, the plot slipshod, and all the characters either nonentities (Fflewddur) or actively annoying (Taran, the witches, the Horned King's sidekick). Annoyingly enough, the film's provided with not one but two comic sidekicks: the Dark Lord's little goblin herald/lackey and the companions' Gurgi. The only bright spot is Eilonwy: it'd have been a far better movie if they'd ditched Taran and made her the main character (but then, the same's true of the original books as well).

Dire as these examples are, I'm encouraged by the thought that others -- at least some -- have had better luck.   We have seen some good film adaptations of fantasy works -- Diana Wynne Jones' HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE (significantly changed from the book, but successful in its own right), more recent works like Collins' THE HUNGER GAMES and, less successfully, the first Percy Jackson book (THE LIGHTNING THIEF (not bad, but not as good as the book, and they changed so much it's sure to badly distort the sequels). I'd include Pullman's THE GOLDEN COMPASS in this category, though sadly it looks like we won't be getting the rest of that series.  And, of course, Peter Jackson's Tolkien.

But I suspect that's been little consolation to Cooper, Le Guin, and Alexander, who deserve better than they've gotten to date.

--John R.

current reading: TARAN WANDERER

*which I'd seen once, years after it came out, and just rewatched for the second and probably last time ever last night.

**Oddly enough, visually it rather resembles the Rankin-Bass RETURN OF THE KING in places and the Bakshi horror in others, probably because of heavy use of rotoscoping, particularly for the Horned King, who jars against the flat backgrounds. Aside from a few set pieces, the animation isn't up to what we'd expect from, say, the original Scooby Doo.

What We Saw at the FIsh Orgy

So, in a normal year we'd have gone to the Tea Festival this past weekend, down at the Seattle Center. But with furloughs and shutdowns and what not, we're on something of an austerity kick right now. So instead of going around various booths and trying (and buying) a lot of teas (plus entry fee, plus parking), we went down to Dash Point (no entry fee, thanks to our year-long pass) and had a picnic on the beach Saturday.* Then on Sunday went to see if we could see the salmon run on the Cedar River.

The salmon come up the river every year, of course, but this is the first time we had advance warning via a posting from Bruce Cordell (thanks, Bruce). The Renton Library, which is built as a bridge right over the river, offers a spectacular view of the river at any time; turns out it also serves as a good viewing platform for watching the salmon directly below. The Cedar River is wide and fast and shallow, having been artificially engineered to be that way back the better part of a century ago by the idiots who re-routed all the rivers in King County (destroying the Black River entirely, leaving behind only one small shallow lake). But it does make for a fine salmon-viewing stream. We walked upriver a bit to a second bridge, and then crossed I-405 (via a pedestrian underpass I'd never known was there) to discover that there's a weir on the river (never seen a weir before, though I've often read about them, most memorably in my favorite Dick Francis novel). Having a variety of places to choose from, we managed to see a lot of salmon over the course of the hour or so we were poking around.

This was all the easier because (most of) the salmon turn bright red when they're swimming upriver to spawn, making them look rather like koi; the rest turn grey, looking and acting for all the world like giant minnows (which, I guess, they are). One of the riverbank docents told us that in addition to the main (Sockeye?) salmon, a few King salmon come up the river too, and that all their nests are identified, marked, and protected. A little later Janice actually spotted what must have been a king salmon (bigger and much longer than the other ones, bright red with pale coloring at either end) making its way under some overhanging foliage, either making a nest or scoping out good spots for one.

I didn't keep any kind of count, but we did see a lot of fish, and thoroughly enjoyed our outing. And while seeing the fish-ladders at the Ballard Locks a few years ago was interesting too, seeing the actual fish, and in natural surroundings like this, was all the better. Plus we learned there's a walking path on the south side of the river extending quite a ways upstream (apparently there's a dog-park up that way) -- something to come back and check out another time -- and that there's a dam some twenty miles up river, at a place called Landsdown.

What struck me most was the sense of seeing something as primal and impressive as birds migrating. And a sense of hope that, no matter how much we mess things up, nature has a way of doing an end-run around us. These salmon, upon a time, used to swim up the Duwamish to where it spit into the Green River and the Black, then up the Black River into Lake Washington, then up the Cedar to their spawning grounds. Now there's no more Black River they swim past the Ballard Locks to Lake Union, then through another set of locks into Lake Washington, and then up the Cedar River from there. Quite a detour, but they manage to work it out. A good thing to see, and a good thing to be reminded of.  And, all in all, a good day.


--John R.


*it wd have been Salt Water State Park, but we missed the turn-off and decided to try Dash Point, where we'd not been in a long time, instead. Some beach crows turned out to be happy with that decision.


current reading: TARAN WANDERER by Lloyd Alexander
current viewing: DUSK MAIDEN OF AMNESIA, MAZES AND MONSTERS, DOCTOR WHO new series season five (next to last story).