John D. Rateliff's Blog, page 204

Fairleigh-Dickinson

Continuing the current trend of what's turning out to be a string of posts about some newly arrived or just-announced Tolkien books and their contents, here's the Table of Contents for what I think will be a really interesting collection, THE RING AND THE CROSS: CHRISTIANITY AND THE WRITINGS OF J. R. R. TOLKIEN, ed. Paul E. Kerry; the first book (so far as I know) on JRRT from Fairleigh-Dickinson Press.

Introduction: A Historiography of Christian Approaches to Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings by Paul E. Kerry
Part I: The RingThe Pagan Tolkien by Ronald HuttonThe Christian Tolkien: A Response to Ronald Hutton by Nils Ivar AgoyCan We Still Have a Pagan Tolkien? A Reply to Nils Ivar Agoy by Ronald HuttonThe Entwives: Investigating the Spiritual Core of The Lord of the Rings by Stephen Morillo'Like Heathen Kings': Religion as Palimpsest in Tolkien's Fiction by John R. HolmesConfronting the World's Weirdness: J. R. R. Tolkien's The Children of Hurin by Ralph C. WoodEru Erased: The Minimalist Cosmology of The Lord of the Rings by Catherine MadsenThe Ring and the Cross: How J. R. R. Tolkien Became a Christian Writer by Chris Mooney
Part II: The Cross Redeeming Sub-Creation by Carson L. HollowayCatholic Scholar, Catholic Sub-Creator by Jason Boffetti'An Age Comes On': J. R. R. Tolkien and the English Catholic Sense of History by Michael TomkoThe Lord of the Rings and the Catholic Understanding of Community by Joseph PearceTracking Catholic Influence in The Lord of the Rings by Paul E. KerrySaintly and Distant Mothers by Marjorie BurnsThe 'Last Battle' as a Johannine Ragnarok: Tolkien and the Universal by Bradley J. Birzer
When faced with the vexing question of whether Tolkien was a Catholic (or Xian) Writer or a writer who happened to be Catholic (or Xian), most books on Tolkien & religion simply assert the former; the essays here actually delve into the question from several different points of view. Based on my skimming so far I think the highlights for me may turn out to be the exchange between Hutton and Agoy and the Madsen essay.
Hutton points out that, for an author who was supposed to be strictly doctrinaire, Tolkien showed an awful lot of interest in pagan myth and incorporated a lot of it into his work. Agoy does his best to refute this, but Hutton remains unconvinced. As for the Madsen, she wrote what's probably one of the ten best essays on Tolkien years ago,* and this one looks to be a worthy follow-up: she essentially asks how, if Tolkien is so self-evidently Xian, do so many readers fail to notice that fact? Kerry's introduction is also impressive, attempting to survey all the previous studies of Tolkien from a religious perspective.
So, my feeling is that this book will be a major collection. I'm looking forward to reading through and thinking about all the essays.
--John R.

*though I preferred the original version, which she delivered at the 1987 Marquette Tolkien Conference, to the published one.

The New Arrival: another book about Tolkien

So, yesterday's post brought yet another new book about Tolkien, this time another collection of essays published by Cambridge Scholars Press (also home to TRUTHS BREATHED THROUGH SILVER, ed. by Jonathan B. Himes et al [2008],* and THE MIRROR CRACK'D, ed. Lynn Forest-Hill [also 2008]).**
Having just shared the table of contents from the forthcoming volume I contributed to, it only seems fair to let folks who might be interested know what's in this one as well. I've numbered the chapters in the list below for ease of reference, but they're not so numbered in the book itself.
MIDDLE-EARTH AND BEYOND: ESSAYS ON THE WORLD OF J. R. R. TOLKIEN, ed. Kathleen Dubs and Janka Kascakova (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010)
Introduction, by Kathleen Dubs
1. Sourcing Tolkien's 'Circles of the World': Speculations on the Heimskringla, the Latin Vulgate Bible, and the Hereford Mappa Mundi, by Jason Fisher
2. Staying Home and Travelling: Stasis versus Movement in Tolkien's Mythology, by Sue Bridgewater
3. The Enigmatic Mr. Bombadil: Tom Bombadil's Role as a Representation of Nature in LotR, by Liam Campbell
4. Tom Bombadil -- Man of Mystery, by Kinga Jenike
5. Grotesque Characters in Tolkien's Novels H & LotR, by Silvia Pokrivcakova & Anton Pokrivcak
6. 'It Snowed Food & Rained Drink' in LotR, by Janka Kascakova
7. 'No Laughing Matter', by Kathleen Dubs
8, 'Lit', 'Lang', 'Ling' & the Company They Keep: The Case of The Lay of the Children of Hurin Seen from a Gricean Perspective, by Roberto Di Scala.
no index, alas.

It's interesting to see a strong Slovak connection here, shared among four of the contributors -- Taum, who was half-Slovak and half-Polish, wd have loved that. I'm rather surprised to see not one but two essays on Bombadil, but these will probably be the first I read among the volume's offerings, along with the one by Jason Fisher (since I know Jason). And it's unusual to see a piece on the alliterative TURIN poem -- the first such I've come across, though it seems the author has written another before. Exactly what a Gricean perspective might be, and how it might usefully be applied to provide insights into Tolkien, are alike a mystery to me -- all the more reason to read the essay, I suppose. I shd warn that like all the Cambridge Scholars Publishing releases I've seen so far this is a rather expensive volume: $52.99 for 145 pages.
In short, something I'm glad to have picked up, but it doesn't immediately bump its way to the top of my reading list, the way some new arrivals do.
--JDRcurrent reading: Verne (still)current audiobook: Kipling short stories (still)
........................................*which I reviewed -- for MYTHLORE, I think. The review seems to be available online athttp://www.thefreelibrary.com/Truths+Breathed+Through+Silver%3A+The+Inklings'+Moral+and+Mythopoeic...-a0211707046
**which I confess I've not yet read, despite importing a copy via amazon.co.uk

Forthcoming Publication: PICTURING TOLKIEN

So, I just got word that I can now share the good news about a forthcoming publication that includes a piece of mine. It's an essay called "Two Kinds of Absence", appearing in the collection PICTURING TOLKIEN, edited by Jan Bogstad and Phil Kaveny and due out from Macfarland half a year from now (official release date: July 31st 2011). Here are two links to descriptions of the book, the first at the Macfarland website
http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-4636-0 *
and the second at amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/Picturing-Tolkien-Essays-Jacksons-Trilogy/dp/0786446366/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1297226695&sr=8-1

My own contribution (the full title of which is "Two Kinds of Absence: Elision & Exclusion in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings") examines the claim of Jackson and his co-writers -- that scenes not appearing in the movie nevertheless took place in the film world -- by looking closely at the Bombadil material. In the process, I also take into account how seven previous adaptations (film, audio, and stage) dealt with the Bombadil chapters. It was an interesting mental exercise to distinguish between characters and events that could appear (say, in a hypothetical vastly extended cut) from those that could not, pre-empted when events in the film-world diverge from what happens in the book. It having been some years since I'd written anything about the films (in the extensive three-part review I did at the time the films were released), it was also a good chance to renew my acquaintance with the first film in particular on a v. detailed level.
What's more, I'm pleased to be in such good company: here's a table of contents listing.
Introduction: Jan Bogstad and Phil Kaveny1. "Gollum Talks to Himself" by Kristin Thompson2. "Sometimes One Word is Worth a Thousand Pictures" by Verlyn Flieger3. "Two Kinds of Absence" by John D. Rateliff4. "Tolkien's Resistance to Linearity" by Edward Risden5. "Filming Folklore" by Dimitra Fimi6. "Making the Connection on Page and Screen" by Yvette Kisor7. "It's Alive!" by Sharin Schroeder8. "The Matériel of Middle-earth" by Rbt Woosnam-Savage9. "Into the West" by Judy Ann Ford and Robin Reid10. "Frodo Lives but Gollum Redeems" by Phil Kaveny11. "The Grey Pilgrim" by Brian Walter12. "Jackson's Aragorn and the American Superhero Monomyth" by Janet Croft13. "Neither the Shadow nor the Twilight: the Love Story of Aragorn and Arwen in Literature and Film" by Richard West14. "Concerning Horses" by Jan Bogstad15. "The Rohirrim, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Problem of Appendix F" by Michael Drout16. "Filming the Numinous" by Joseph Ricke and Catherine Barnett
--congratulations and thanks to Jan and Phil for all their hard work assembling these essays and seeing the book through the editing process. I'm really looking forward to the chance to read the other contributions.
--John R.current audiobook: more Kipling (gah!)current book: Vernecurrent music: Bare Trees (Danny Kirwan/Fleetwood Mac)
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* for a convenient listing of all four of their books on Tolkien, see http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/searches/advanced_search2.php?advanced=tolkien&x=0&y=0

The Most Depressing Book I've Ever Read

So, yesterday I finally finished the audiobook of HUMAN SMOKE by Nicholas Baker, a book I tried to read several months back and had to give up on; it was simply too depressing. A few weeks back I gave it another go, this time as an audiobook, which I've been finding a good way to get through long or difficult books. Even so I had to put it aside twice for weeks at a time.
Why so depressing? Essentially this is the story of the people who saw World War II coming years ahead of time and did everything they could to head it off -- unsuccessfully. Then, once the war starts, it documents the opposing viewpoints of those who want to protect civilian populations and bring the war to an early conclusion vs. those who target civilians for bombing campaigns and death camps and insist on an all-out unconditional-surrender total war. It concludes on December 31st, 1941, when the death camps were just getting started; Baker observes in his Afterword that "Most of the people who died in the Second World War were at that moment still alive."
There are plenty of surprises here, such as the phrase 'The Iron Curtain' being coined by Goebbels to describe English censorship of Britain's newspapers. Or that it was the British, not the Luftwaffe, that started the bombing of non-military targets early in the war. Or that a year and a half before Pearl Harbor FDR had already drawn up plans for the Chinese to firebomb Tokyo, using bombers bought from the Americans, flown by an American pilot, and with an American in charge of releasing the payload.
One thing I wd never have suspected is that Herbert Hoover, of all people, comes across favorably (something I never thought I'd hear myself say): essentially the famine-relief work Truman appointed him to lead in 1945/46 was something he'd been trying to do since the fall of France and the Low Countries in 1940: send food to prevent starvation, especially of children, especially of civilian populations in occupied territories. Churchill had prevented the aid from getting through the Naval Blockade he'd instigated early in the war, on the theory that (a) it might be diverted to feed Germans and (b) the more desperate people became, the more likely they were to rise up and drive out the Germans.
By the same logic, Churchill claimed* that the bombing of civilians in Germany itself would eventually lead to a coup or revolution that wd topple the Nazi regime. Perhaps one of the most heartbreaking bits was the conclusion by the British, about two years into the war, that saturation bombing of German cities wd have no appreciable contribution towards winning the war (since on average they only killed .75 people and wounded 1.25 more per bomber per raid) but decided to keep it up anyway, since they thought it was good for morale. It was particularly disheartening how some people who said they were opposed to the war suddenly reversed themselves -- e.g. Dashiell Hammett after Russia entered the war and Charles Lindberg after Pearl Harbor -- while the Quakers and a few others (e.g. Jeanette Rankin) carried on both opposing the war and trying to mitigate the damage.

What makes this book interesting stylistically is that Baker didn't write it: he assembled and edited it. Its text is made up entirely of quotes or summaries from letters, diaries, newspaper articles, memos, memoirs, speeches, propaganda leaflets, and the like, all arranged in chronological order. He lets the people who caused the chaos and those who had to live through it speak for themselves.
I found his dedication in the Afterword at the very back of the book particularly eloquent:
"I dedicate this book to the memory of Clarence Pickett & other American & British pacifists. They've never really gotten their due. They tried to save Jewish refugees, feed Europe, reconcile the United States & Japan, & stop the war from happening. They failed, but they were right." [emphasis mine]
--and now, on to some lighter, or at least less grueling, fare.--JDR
current reading: JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH by Vernecurrent audiobook: THE MAN WHO WD BE KING by Kipling.


*in general, Churchill comes across quite poorly; it's hard not to conclude that he did everything he cd to bring about the war, then everything he could to expand the war, and finally everything he cd to extend the war as long as possible. Quite a legacy!

Mr. Alspaugh

About a month ago I heard the sad news that Mr. Alspaugh, my old scoutmaster, had died. I had not seen him for a long time.
I was one of those who was really into scouting, going to the camporees every spring and fall, summer camp for a week every year at Camp De Soto over near El Dorado, most of the weekend hikes/camping out the Burnt Bridge Road, even one Survival. And of course there were the occasional bigger trips: up to Little Rock for the Quapaw Line Trail [?1970], over to Vicksburg [1971], and even once to Shiloh [1972]. And of course all the way up to the Jamboree in Moraine State Park in Pennsylvania [1973]. I made it all the way to Eagle Scout, plus a sashful of merit badges (from Public Safety to Indian Lore), two palms, and the God and Country Award.
When I first joined Troop 32 -- which must have been around the end of 1969, when I wd have left Webelos, where the scoutmaster had been Mr. Jean* -- it was a large troop, but its numbers dwindled over the years --largely I think because the Powers That Be within Scouting tried to reconfigure and reinvent the Boy Scouts during that era to shift the emphasis from camping and hiking in the countryside (which we enjoyed doing) to doing good works in large cities. I think I joined Troop 32, over at the Methodist Church, rather than the troop over at my own Presbyterian Church because I'd already been in Webelos (the Methodists being the only group which had a Webelos program). I think Mr. Alspaugh's older son, Bill, had already left the troop by that time, but I certainly knew his younger son, Wally (whose nickname, for reasons never made apparent, was Worm).
Too many memories for one post: the Monday night meetings at the scout hut, where we might be called on to recite out our daily Good Deeds for the week. Getting to meet Danny Thomas and, what impressed me much more, Col. Sanders at the Jamboree (Nixon didn't show up, the first time a president had blown off the Scouts' big once-in-four-years-event since FDR). Doing the Mile Swim at camp, and discovering wild huckleberries. Biking around a good deal of Columbia County with Mason Cozart and Jim Polk.** Working on Astronomy and Space Exploration merit badges with Mr. McGee at the college, one of my favorite absent-minded professors. Discovering genealogy through work on another merit badge (for a time I was the youngest member of the So-We-Ar, or Southern Arkansas Genealogical society, of which Mrs. Alspaugh was a member). Carrying along a copy of THE HOBBIT to re-read at summer camp.
Mr. Alspaugh himself remains one of my chief icons for stern-but-fair. I think we often exasperated him, but he never yelled and I only once saw him lose his temper (when some people were horsing around during a flag-lowering ceremony). In daily life he worked at the post office; I remember learning quite by chance once that he was a World War II vet, having served in the Pacific. He was also a man of many talents: years later, when I'd found my grandfather's old Seth Thomas clock and was trying to get it running again, I discovered that he'd once been a clockmaker and he volunteered to undertake the task of cleaning it up (it turned out it'd just wound down when Dr. Smith died nearly thirty years earlier).
One particular memory involved the Order of the Arrow. I got inducted into this, and later reached the middle rank of Brotherhood. Mr A. (as we called him) went all the way to Vigil, and to commemorate the occasion I gave him an Eisenhower silver dollar. Twenty years later, when I saw him for the last time after having been out-of-touch for years (having moved away to graduate school and he having retired from the post office), he pulled out of his pocket a large silvery disk, worn almost smooth, which I cd just recognize as the same 1971 silver dollar; apparently he'd carried it as a good-luck piece ever since (just as I carry a 100-mon coin with me every day).
I'm sorry to hear he's gone, but glad that at 87 years he had a good long life. I wish I'd kept in touch more, but I'm glad I got to see him that last time. I'm glad to have known him, and hope he knew that he meant a lot to a lot of us.
Rest in peace, Mr. A.

--John R.*whose son, Lane Jean, was with me in scouts and more recently has been Magnolia's mayor.**now Rev. Polk

And All the Seas with Oysters

So, yesterday I came across a new phrase for the first time: "functionally extinct".
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/04/oysters-are-functionally-_n_818870.html
This is not to say there are no more oysters left in the world, but that precipitous decline means they've lost their ecological niche. In many regions, they're dropped to less than 1% of their former numbers; now 75% of all oysters come from just five remaining oyster beds.
This is all the more ironic, since oysters have often been used as an example of nature's fecundity; cf. Avram Davidson's story "Or All the Seas with Oysters", which in turn takes its title from Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Dying Detective". As Holmes lies on his apparent deathbed, he rants ". . . I can't think why the whole bed of the ocean is not one solid mass of oysters, so prolific the creatures seem . . . Shall the world, then, be overrun by oysters? No, no; horrible!"
Horrible indeed -- not from an excess of life but from the vast emptiness left behind.
--John R.

Evangelion 2.0

So, Saturday night (the 22nd) three of our previous weekend's group of four (Monte, Stan, and myself)* headed back up to the U-district to see the second part of EVANGELION. As before, we went out to eat first -- this time at The Shawarma King. It's been a good while -- more than ten years, I'd say -- since I had shawarma, and I was a bit afraid it'd be too much like the gyros sans pita I'd had the day before, but although it looked similiar the spice mix and taste were quite different, and much better.I also liked the Egyptian nick-nacks scattered all throughout the shop.

Then, after a mostly pleasant walk (we got harassed by a belligerent drunk at one point) and a cup of tea (since the Grand Illusion, being a v. civil place, allows you to buy a cup of tea and take it into the theatre itself with you), it was time for the show. We sat up in the next-to-the-front row, which seemed a good choice at the time but proved to be not quite as good as we thought, given that some folks came in just before the show started and sat in front of us, with the end result that Monte and I both had only partial view of the subtitles as viewed around head-shaped silhouettes, though Stan got lucky (the person in front of him slouched down a lot). This wasn't too bad for me, since I knew enough of the story from the tv series to be able to mostly follow along, but it was a real challenge for Monte, who was coming fresh to the films with no prior knowledge of EVANGELION.

So, how was the second film, EVANGELION 2.0: YOU CAN (NOT) ADVANCE**? Pretty good, but not as coherent as the first one. Things are thrown at you at a faster clip, with few transitions. This is also where the story starts to diverge in major ways from the original. If their goal was to retell the series in punchier, more compact form, they've certainly succeeded. If, as I've read, they wanted to make a stand-alone set of films that you could enjoy and understand without knowing its earlier incarnations, then here's where the train leaves the tracks. There's simply not enough exposition to tell you what's going on; you have to guess who various people are and why they're doing what they're doing to whom. On the plus side, it's good to see the third Evangelion pilot, Asuka, arrive and liven things up. And the new character they introduce who wasn't in the original -- a fourth pilot, Mari, who's even more gung-ho than Asuka -- is fun, though she really only shows up for three scenes.

All in all, it's enjoyable enough that I'm still looking forward to the third installment (which apparently has been delayed -- typical of this director -- with no official release date as yet). The plan seems to be that the third film will cover the events in the rest of the series, then the final film will tell what happens after that -- so the story will be not just apocalyptic but post-apocalyptic, as it were, if they keep to that. We'll see.

Oh, and seeing this solved one puzzle from last week. Why had they been playing music from a different series, HIS & HER CIRCUMSTANCES, in the theatre before the film started? Because they've included pieces from that earlier soundtrack into the second EVANGELION movie. For those who knew both series, like myself and Stan, this was v. disorienting -- like watching a Star Trek movie and suddenly hearing the Star Wars theme in one scene. Still, it's good music, and it's being recycled from an entirely different show won't matter to most viewers of this.

And, speaking of music, I enjoyed the closing theme so much that I went on Itunes afterwards and tracked it down: "Beautiful World" (PLANiTB Acoustic version). Very nice!

--John R.


*sans Ben, who had a D&D game that ran long, but plus Anne and Sigfried, who joined us there.

**Janice quipped that the third film shd be called YOU CAN(NOT) PASS GO, YOU CAN(NOT) COLLECT $200, or something like that.

Le Guin's CHEEK BY JOWL (Todorov, Adams, Pullman)

So, earlier this month I got to run by the University Bookstore for the first time in quite a while, on my way to Suzzallo-Allen to return a v. bad book I'd borrowed (more on this one later) and check out some better ones. I didn't find the one I was looking for (a modern translation of Verne's JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH),* but I did come across a book of essays by Le Guin I hadn't heard of before, CHEEK AND JOWL, published by Seattle's own Aqueduct Press [2009].
It's an interesting collection, as one wd expect of Le Guin, who's one of the most eloquent and quirky authors writing science fiction and fantasy today -- the latest in a line of collected essays starting with the brilliant THE LANGUAGE OF THE NIGHT [1979] (which includes "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie", "A Citizen of Mondath", "The Staring Eye", &c) and continuing through the disappointing DANCING AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD [1989] and THE WAVE IN THE MIND [2004], which I have but have not read.
On the plus side, Le Guin is an intelligent and amusing writer. I enjoyed reading her various comments about Tolkien, her two brief references to Dunsany (an author we both greatly admire), her perceptive observation about Spenser. But I was distressed, at one point in her essay "The Critics, the Monsters, and the Fantasists" (which is obviously greatly indebted to Tolkien's "The Monsters & the Critics"), to read her dismissive remarks about Tzvetan Todorov (p. 31) and realize that she apparently hadn't actually read Todorov -- or, if she had, she utterly misunderstood, and misrepresents, his thesis.
That, I admit, shook me, but at least Le Guin was only repeating canards I've seen elsewhere about Todorov's work, which is more widely referenced than read. And I can see why she's a bit terse in her comments on the Harry Potter books being praised for inventing the idea of a school for wizards (though it wd have been generous for her to mention Terry Pratchett's Unseen University as well as her own School for wizards at Roke as honorable predecessors). What really pulled me up sharp was her attack on Richard Adams' WATERSHIP DOWN.
Now, I freely admit to being a great admirer of Adams' book, which makes my list of the ten best fantasy books of all time.** And I'm not at all bothered that an author I like (Le Guin) dislikes another author I like (Adams) -- after all, literary history is full of such examples. H. G. Wells mocked Henry James' style and Jules Verne disparaged Wells' science fiction. Twain disliked Austen, and Austen admitted that having learned Burns was a cad got in the way of her enjoying his work. Barfield never had much use for THE LORD OF THE RINGS, and so forth. But the bizarre thing here is that Le Guin attacks Adams for something that doesn't even occur in his book.
Essentially, Le Guin criticizes Adams because his rabbit-society is male-dominated, whereas wild rabbits are actually matriarchal. Fair enough; the first half of his book is certainly male-dominated, and I'm willing to accept her assertions about real-life rabbit behavior without going to read Lockley's Private Life of Rabbits for myself. But Le Guin goes much further, accusing Adams of "systematically misrepresenting" rabbit society (p. 80) and claiming that
"Doe rabbits, in [Adams'] book, are mindless breeding slaves. Their only function is to dig holes, provide sex, bear litters, and raise the kittens. The buck rabbits do all the thinking, planning, and acting and are in unquestioned control of the females at all times. The does are so far beneath notice, in fact, that a band of bucks fleeing the home warren to establish a new one doesn't even think to bring any does along; the guys go on for two hundred pages before it dawns on them that it may be hard to establish a new warren without females. So, in good militaristic fashion, they go and rape the Sabines: they carry off females from another warren. That the females might have any voice in the matter is not even considered."
Contrast this final sentence with what actually happens in the book: having learned of a neighboring warren, Efrafa, our heroes (who had fled nilly-willy from their old home to escape impending doom) first send an emissary asking if any rabbits from that overcrowded warren, especially does, would like to come join theirs. When this open approach is rebuffed, their embassy arrested and barely escaping, the heroes come up with a new plan: one of their members joins Efrafa undercover in order to contact does who want to leave and start a new, freer life elsewhere. Given that Efrafa is a police state where all does are subject to what amounts to state-enforced prostitution with officers, many are indeed willing:
Thlayli (Bigwig), a buck from Watership Down: "Don't you want to get out and come and live on the high downs with us? Think of it!"
Hyzenthlay, a doe from Efrafa: "Oh, Thlayli! Shall we mate with whom we choose and dig our own burrows and bear our litters alive? . . . I'll come! I'll run any risk. " (WATERSHIP DOWN, p. 296)
So, Le Guin's claim that Adams does not give his female rabbits "any voice in the matter" is simply wrong, an error in fact. Far from a rape of the Sabine Women, all the rabbits who leave Efrafa to throw in their lot with Hazel's group do so by their own choice, bravely escaping from an intolerable and dehumanizing life. Even in the earlier episode where Hazel and his friends free some tame rabbits from their hutch on a farm is preceded by their asking first if the domesticated rabbits want to join them:
"We've come to let you out. Will you come with us?"There was a pause and some movement in the hay and then Clover [a doe] replied, "Yes, let us out." (p. 191; cf. also 181-182 for the initial invitation)
Finally, Le Guin completely ignores TALES FROM WATERSHIP DOWN [1996], in which Hazel hears the story of a warren with a female Chief Rabbit (p. 155ff) and, after another such a warren is founded as a satellite-colony of Watership Down's rabbits, decides it'd be a good idea to share power with a female Chief Rabbit (p. 207) within Watership Down itself, offering the job to the same Hyzenthlay who was promised a freer life way back in Efrafa days.
Le Guin, however, sees no difference between Hazel's group and the Efrafan police state ("I see both as unrighteous, unrabbitlike, and inhuman") and claims Adams presents a dichotomy between romantic protective love and "a 'natural' use by males of females as owned objects, breeding stock -- thus justifying rape. No other possibility is imagined, such as a relationship of equality, or a relationship that the female initiates or controls some aspects of" (p. 82). That, of course, is simply, demonstrably, false. Her conclusion is equally harsh:
"Adams cheated. He wanted to write a fantasy of male superiority" but could only do so by misrepresenting what rabbits are really like. "That is cheating" (p. 82).
I don't know why Le Guin decided to go all Edmund Wilson on WATERSHIP DOWN, or portray Adams as a sort of latter-day John Norman of Gor, but Adams deserves better: to be judged for what his characters actually say and do in the novel, not for some projection that wildly distorts the facts.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Given how egregious her attack on Adams is, Le Guin's dismissal of Philip Pullman is relatively minor by comparison, though baffling in its own right. The context, like her assault on Adams, is as part of her long survey of "Animals in Children's Literature",*** in the course of which she makes the baffling statement that Pullman's work contains almost no animals, dismissing the daemons as merely "fragments or images of the human psyche given animal shape . . . having no independent being and therefore incapable of relationship. Lyra's much-emphasized love for her daemon is self-love. In Pullman's world humans are dreadfully alone . . ." (p.102-103).
If that were true, all Lyra's conversations with Pantalaimon are simply exercises in narcissism: she's just talking to herself out loud. But once again, as with Adams, that's not at all the experience a reader takes away from Pullman's book. Pantalaimon is presented with a vividly realized personality of his own, and his exchanges with Lyra are real conversations; the same is true of other human/daemon one-on-ones throughout the book. And, besides, Le Guin herself offered up a superb example of real exchange between different parts of a person's psyche in her short story "Intercom".****
So, while there are good things in this collection -- for example, the scorn she pours upon "[t]he notion that a story 'has a message' . . . that . . . can be reduced to a few abstract words", or that such a 'message' is any substitute for reading and experiencing the story itself (p.126) -- I hesitate to recommend it. It's like looking forward to eating a piece of pecan pie by a really good cook whose cooking you like, only to find pecan shells in it when you bite down. Ouch.

--JDR............................*I found this later in the week up at Third Place Books; cf. my earlier post**see my entry on WATERSHIP DOWN in my Classics of Fantasy series (which also included a piece on Le Guin's A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA).***At over sixty pages in length, this is by far the lengthiest piece in the book, stretching for nearly half of the whole. Oddly enough, while she surveys a huge range of books, she omits any mention of Brer Rabbit.****which I know through multiple listenings of the old Caedmon Records recording, which I checked out many times from the Milwaukee Public Library (being then the poorest of poor grad students and unable to actually buy the thing for myself), rather than the print version appearing in THE COMPASS ROSE [1982]. Highly recommended (the audio version, that is)!

I Am The King of Footnotes!

So, one of the many small but pressing tasks I've been dealing with over the past few days has been the request from the editor of a volume I've contributed an essay to that I add a footnote to take into account two sources I didn't otherwise cite.* I've now worked out a satisfactory way to incorporate both into an existing footnote,** but the event caused my wife to observe that this is the first time anyone's ever asked me to add MORE footnotes to anything I've written.
It's true: I like footnotes (or, more accurately, endnotes). I like to include additional pieces of evidence, small clarifications, interesting tangently related bits, and the like. Sometimes a note is like a mini-article of its own, carefully researched and placed in a subordinate position to the main point of the essay.
This tendency reached its peak in my dissertation, which was about two hundred pages long (double-spaced), plus about another hundred pages of endnotes (single-spaced). One of my committee members, the late Dr. John McCabe, observed as he was congratulating me after the dissertation defense that I'd never get away with that again. Instead, I think over time it's become a hallmark of my work. As the editor of the volume I was talking about before just observed, I'm one of the few -- perhaps the only -- person he knows who has footnotes to my footnotes.***
That's when it occurred to me: I shd embrace my desire to 'load every rift with ore', as Keats put it. Or, to put it another way,
I am the King of Footnotes.
--JDR
.......................*since my citations weren't intended to cover everything ever written on the subject, but rather a sampling of representative pieces**unfortunately now including a criticism of a critic I'd hitherto silently omitted -- which is worse, I wonder: to be left out altogether, or to be included with your piece's shortcomings noted?***doesn't everybody?

The New Arrivals

So, things having been v. busy here of late; with a deadline three weeks away and a handful of do-this-right-away smaller projects having clustered round demanding immediate attention, posts have been light on the ground. I shd have a string of posts up starting tomorrow -- but in case I get delayed again, in lieu of waiting till I have time to complete a proper post, here's a quick list of the sudden onslaught of books and Tolkien-related journals that have arrived here within the past week.
(1) THE RING & THE CROSS: CHRISTIANITY & THE LORD OF THE RINGS, from Fairleigh-Dickinson Press, ed. Paul Kerry. [2011]
(2) CATALHOYUK by Ian Hodder [2006]
(3) BOOK GIRL & THE FAMISHED SPIRIT by Mizuki Nomura [2006; tr. 2011]
(4) PARMA ELDALAMBERON Vol. XIX: Quenya Philology [2010]
(5) FINGAL: AN ANCIENT EPIC POEM IN SIX BOOKS by "Ossian" (=James MacPherson) [facsimile of 1762 edition]
(6) THE TOLKIEN COLLECTOR, issue thirty-one. [December 2010]
(7) MIRKWOOD: A NOVEL by Steve Hillard [2010]
—some of these I've known about and had on order for a long time (e.g., the Fairleigh-Dickinson book) or made previously unsuccessful attempts to get (Catalhoyuk, Fingal), while others are recent orders (Mirkwood) and still others arrived unexpectedly though v. welcome (Tolkien Collector).
More later.
--John R.current song: "Beautiful World" from EVANGELION 2.0