John D. Rateliff's Blog, page 52

The New Tolkien

So, it's now been officially announced that the next book by Tolkien (that is, the next book of new material by JRRT) will be out in June:

THE NATURE OF MIDDLE-EARTH, edited by Carl Hostetter (co-editor of TOLKIEN'S LEGENDARIUM).

 The write-up on Amazon doesn't have much information yet, other than that the book is 400 pages and the official release date June 1st.

I gather that this book draws from the period when Tolkien had largely abandoned  or set aside work on his various narratives and was shifting more and more into world-building.  Or to put it another way, rather than a grand narrative here we'll be seeing Tolkien's attempt to set down as much as he cd about Middle-earth. 

I suspect it'll feel rather like LETTERS, where he addressed so many queries from his readers. For those of us who came along too late to write to the Professor and pose questions ourselves, this book just might contain the answers to things we've always wanted to know. 

In short, not a book for the casual fan, but it promises to be full of good things for those of us who want to know all we can about Tolkien's subcreated world. Congratulations to Carl for bringing all this disparate material together. 

I've already pre-ordered my copy.

--John R.

P.S.: Here's the announcement of the news in THE GUARDIAN:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/19/jrr-tolkien-the-nature-of-middle-earth-published-june-2021

A Roomful of Kittens

 Every cat from last week having been adopted, we started over with a whole new set of cats again yesterday.

Twelve new cats were due to arrive, one of whom had a change of plans along the way to go get fixed. So eleven cats actually reached us, all kittens (most four months old, one litter only three monts old).
Three kittens got adopted already, Pepper and George and I think Saffron, meaning that eight cats (four pairs) were ready to greet me when I arrived at noon today.
All were reluctant to come out, so I petted the various kittens in their cages as much as they’d let me, starting with Poppy,  and left all the cage doors open.  I also let them sniff some catnip sachets and spritzed catnip spray on some of the toys. They didn’t react to catnip as strongly as adult cats usually do, but they were definitely interested. I’d  brought some catnip bubbles, only to realize I cdn’t use them through the mask.  I got various toys out, which attracted a lot of attention from eight sets of sharp eyes and alert ears.  After that they started coming out one by one. First was PAPRIKA (the orange cat in the big cage) and POPPY SEED (his grey & white partner). Then I lifted out the two adorable puffs of fluff OLIVE OYL and COOKIE DOUGH, the smallest of all our current kittens. They were reluctant at first but quickly got absorbed in all kinds of games, even joining in the bigger kittens’ pouncing games. It took longer, but eventually the all-black and the brown tabby pair (CHIA and SESAME, I think) came out in their own good time and started exploring, though they still avoided petting for the most part. The Presidents (Mr. LINCOLN and THOMAS), the two mostly black tuxedo cat, were the shyest of them all. I finally got Lincoln to let me pet him and got a string game going that drew in Thomas as well. It took most of the two hours checking on them every few minutes, but in the end they both let me pick them up and hold/pet them a little, welcoming petting by the end of the shift. 
It was hard to get Poppy back in the cage at the end of shift (he hid under the cat-stand and went all-limp when I reached in to drag him out. He seemed fine again once back in the cage. The kittens all curled up in pairs of twos and were all sleeping by the time I left.
Health note: one of the little fluff-puffs (Oyl I think) had a little crust in the corners of his eyes. Think I got most of it out, but he didn’t enjoy it.
Also: one of The Presidents (Thomas I think) has a distinctive kink in his tail, about a ninety degree angle. Doesn’t seem to bother him in the least.
Lots of people enjoyed watching the kittens through the windows. I wdn’t be surprised if some of them come back as potential adopters —because who can resist kittens? One woman asked about volunteering and took one of the flyers.
Here’s hoping the mooted adoptions in the works this weekend come through. It’d be nice for these little cats to be having their first smell and taste of turkey in new homes soon.
—John R.
UPDATE, Saturday night 10pm: just learned that five of the eight kittens have now been adopted. Only three to go. --JDR

The Lindsay Event (Glasgow)

So, today was the long-awaited Centenary Seminar in honor of David Lindsay's A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS (1920). The timing wasn't too bad for an overseas event eight time zones away: 6pm Greenwich time and 10 am out here in the Pacific Northwest.

Dimitra Fimi was host and moderator and did a good job setting things up and then moderating the Q&A at the end. 

Of the three speakers, independent scholar Doug Anderson gave a fact-filled overview of Lindsay's life and writing career --a good thing to have if you're new to Lindsay and for those who know some  helpful for clearing up various mistakes in previous accounts. My favorite new fact I learned: J. R. R. Tolkien owned three copies of A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS: one of the 1920 original, one of the 1946 reprint just after Lindsay's death, and one from the 1963 edition that more or less marked  the point at which Lindsay's work came to be more widely known.

Novelist Nina Allan, whose THE RIFT contains some Arcturan echoes, discussed Lindsay's legacy to his fellow science fiction writers. I think my major takeaways from this was inherent in the realization of this being the centenary, that VtA came out at a mid-point between the early days of Verne/Wells and the classic era of science fiction in the 1930s.

Finally Professor Rbt Davis compared Lindsay's work with various theological thinkers and schools of thought, particularly Gnosticism. He quoted a v. interesting passage from a letter he'd received from Philip Pullman regarding both what Pullman sees as Gnostic affinities in his work (the evil imposter-god) and his greatest departure therefrom (Pullman's celebration of the natural world as good, not evil).

Quite a lot of interesting material within a short space, well worth watching.

For those who cdn't make the live event, they've put footage of the presentations up on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6HpKWSLuBM

--John R.

 

Unfinished Books

So, being a Tolkien scholar, I'm professionally interested in unfinished books. THE SILMARILLION is not the end-all and be-all of Tolkien's literary achievement, and Tolkien wd still have, and deserve, a major literary reputation even had the SILMARILLION never been published, or indeed failed to survive. But we're fortunate to have it.

Even more fortunately we have both THE SILMARILLION as editorially assembled by Christopher Tolkien (1977) as well as the many constitute parts he presented in chronological sequence between 1980 and 2018. And this enables us to witness Tolkien's struggle to find the right form and format to present his mythology, and to compare it to the similar woes of other authors immeshed in parallel difficulties.

Here's I'm thinking not of the kind of unfinished book like Dicken's THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD or Austen's SANDITON, where the author knew where he or she was going and simply had the misfortune to die before reaching the end. Pound's THE CANTOS may fit in this category: the poet certainly failed to provide the grand synthesis at the end that he'd promised at the beginning of the project, but it's impossible to tell whether this was due to a flaw in Pound's schema or failure due to his encroaching mental illness (or both).

I wd also set aside Poe's THE NARRATIVE OF A. GORDON PYM or Coleridge's KUBLA KHAN, where I take the 'incompleteness' as a narrative guise assumed by the author.

Closer is Hawthorne's DOCTOR GRIMSHAWE'S SECRET, where the author flailed around, uncertain of characterization or plot, having a setting and a whiff of an idea he can never come to grips with, no matter how many times he returns to the beginning and tries again (i.e. he knew Dr. Grimshaw had a secret but had no idea what it was). By contrast  Twain's THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER shows an author who knows what he wants to say but can't find the right presentation, struggling between three radically different versions that were editorially assembled after his death, rather like Christopher's SILMARILLION. To give another example, I'm currently reading David Lindsay's THE WITCH, which its author reluctantly put aside, having written himself into a tangle he cd not get out of, that of attempting to present the ineffable in words. It's hard not to feel for an author who desperately wants to finish a work but just can't find the way.

And then there's the work which is not so much unfinished as unbegun: a sort of phantom text that exists mainly in the mind of the writer, with v. little if any of it actually set down on paper (or extant in electronic files). The most notorious example is probably Truman Capote's ANSWERED PRAYERS, excerpts from which he described in detail, consistently, over a long period, yet precious little was found among his papers at his death. To pick another example recently in the news, Harlan Ellison's THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS anthology was frequently announced as 'forthcoming' for the last forty-five years of the editor's life; promises of a posthumous edition are being met with a certain skepticism.

In contrast to works obstructed by writer's block, some works remained unfinished because the author had too much to say and cdn't apply an internal editor, like the main character in the film WONDER BOYS. I understand this was the case with Thomas Wolfe, whose novels were extracted from a wordy matrix by his editor, Max Perkins, but have not looked into that case myself. Certainly Ellison's JUNETEENTH (aka THREE DAYS BEFORE THE SHOOTING) and Foster Wallace's THE PALE KING seems to fit this pattern.

In the end I'd say we're lucky: to borrow Tolkien's analogy not only do we have the soup that is the 1977 SILMARILLION but Christopher Tolkien gave us guided tours of his kitchen for a behind-the-scenes look at how it was all put together (the History of Middle-earth et al).

And we can be grateful that JRRT didn't meet the fate of the writer's-blocked author in Clark Ashton Smith's unsettling story "The Nemesis of the Unfinished".

--John R.

--current reading: Scott Berg's LINDBERGH

P.S. On a personal note, I shd add that the eventual release of the Beach Boy's famous unrecorded album SMILE made my friend Franklin Chestnut very happy.

The At Last Dangerous Visions

So, forty-five years or so ago science fiction's enfant terrible, Harlin Ellison, announced as forthcoming the third and final book in his DANGEROUS VISION series (circa 1973), a follow up on DANGEROUS VISIONS (1967) and AGAIN, DANGEROUS VISIONS (1972), which wd sum up and encapsulate the New Wave. And then the book didn't appear. Year after year Ellison wd report on progress of the book, listing stories and authors who wd be included, and announcing a publication date (or, as it turned out, dates, one after another). 

Time passed, authors died, others withdrew their contributions, new ones were added in. So notorious did the unreleased book become that one disgruntled former contributor, Christopher Priest, wrote a chapbook THE BOOK ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER chronicling the history of the project (1987, revised & expanded 1994). Ellison kept promising the book's immanent release and offered no explanation for a delay that stretched from years to decades and ultimately for the remainder of Ellison's life, and then some.

I always assumed that Ellison had given himself a bad case of writer's block by promising that he wd write definitive essays on the contributors and include these in the book, which wd be a comprehensive state-of-the-art presentation of Science Fiction as it ought to be (i.e. New Wave). My guess when I first learned of the interminable delay was that the book wd never be published in H.E.'s lifetime but wd appear, sans essays, some six months or so after his death.

Turns out I was partly right. This last week the Ellison estate (in the unlikely avatar of J. Michael Straczynski, of BABYLON FIVE fame) announced the book will be ready next April (i.e., April of 2021, about half a year from now), or about three years since H.E.'s death. Though note that this is a start-looking-for-a-publisher date, not an actual see-it-in-print publication.

Oddly enough Stracznski reveals plans that will complicate the task of trying to finish up the book. For one thing, a number of works by authors who died in the meantime will be returned to their estates. Some stories are being dropped as too dated. Some new stories are being solicited, presumably to make the collection seem more up to date. And one new story by a new, never before published author will be included, apparently as a publicity stunt. All these changes suggest it'll be a sort of hybrid: some old, some new, ultimately representing neither the New Wave of the 1970s nor the field as it is today. For a critique of difficulties inherent in the project, see David Brat's comments in his blog:

https://calimac.dreamwidth.org/1005151.html

And for information about the official announcement, see Mike Glyer's ever-trusty and ever-informative FILE 770:

http://file770.com/last-dangerous-visions-will-be-submitted-to-publishers-in-2021/

On a personal note, I was glad to hear that Tim Kirk art, apparently commissioned circa 1973-74, wd be included: for those not aware of his work, Kirk illustrated one of the first Tolkien Calendars, setting a high bar that many who followed (e.g. the Hildebrant Brothers) failed to meet.

So, we'll see whether this iteration of this long-promised book sees the light of day.

--John R.

current reading: David Lindsay's THE WITCH (an unfinished book even longer in the tooth than anything by Ellison).

The Cat Report (Friday Nov. 13th)

Poor MAESTRO having gone back up to Arlington over concerns about his not eating (and throwing up much of what he did eat), with five new cats arriving at the same time, once again we had a whole new roomful of cats. 
Of these, two (CINNAMON BUN and ELLIOT) have already been adopted. Sorry not to have met them, but good for them finding new homes so quickly.
That just left three cats by mid-today, with some potential adopters already in the works.

First there’s AUTUMN SPICE , a beautiful, gentle, and lovable Tortoiseshell with lots of long soft fur, orange and black swirled together, more orange than black. She doesn’t like to be picked up and is not a fan of being held but she loves, loves, loves to be petted.  I sat down on the bench and she joined me, even climbing in my lap for part of the time. She let me comb her fur, so that’s what we spent most of her time out of her cage doing.  Decided not to walk her, since I didn’t think I’d be able to pick her up and get her back into the cat room if something upset her.
Finally, she’s a talker. She mews in greeting, when she wants to get your attention, when she wants you to do something, and the like. It’s not chatter so much as conversation. It’s hard for a senior cat to find a new home at age fourteen; here’s hoping she’s soon sharing a couch with her new people.
P.S.: She likes catnip but wasn’t much interested in games, preferring being groomed instead.

ATLAS & MARLY, the bonded pair, and six-month-old former strays, subsequently prison cats. Atlas is the lynx point tabby and much the shyer of the two. Neither of them likes to be picked up or held, but Atlas has a harder time of it.
Marly is the yellow tabby — shy but willing to sneak out several times and explore the place. He loves games, though he’s currently too shy to throw himself into them whole-heartedly. He likes to purr, and his purr helps calm down his partner, Atlas. 
I can’t get Atlas to come out at all, so I petted him in their cage and set up a blanket where he cd get some privacy yet it was easy to see him from outside the cat-room looking in. It took a while, but eventually he joined into a game (the stick game) and showed he’s still kittenish when not overwhelmed by a strange new place.
—John R. 

Prison Cats

 So, some of the cats who come to the cat room come from prison -- specifically, the detention center at Monroe, Washington, about thirty-five miles from the cat room.  Here's a recent article describing the program:

https://komonews.com/news/local/monroes-convicted-killers-save-lives-of-abandoned-kittens

Basically these are feral cats, most of them from hoarders and cat colonies. Many have never had an owner so they tend to panic when picked up or touched. The prisoners socialize the animals, holding and interacting with them until they come to associate humans with more than just food.

And since it never rains but it pours (as they say in Bree),* here's another recent story about a joint effort by a number of animal-rescue groups to help offset the lack of community resources to take care of the cat local population in Hilo, Hawaii (on the Big Island). I wdn't be at all surprised if some of these abandoned strays and feral cat-colony cats wind up at Purrfect Pals.

https://www.king5.com/article/news/hundreds-of-dogs-cats-coming-from-hawaii-need-homes/281-2de9d032-b983-4166-b66a-030faf08c233

--John R.

--current reading: THE RIFT

*the weather report suggests we'll be able to test this maxim ourselves soon

APPENDIX N, The Anthology

 So, thanks to Doug A. for pointing out the announcement of the forthcoming book APPENDIX N: THE ELDRITCH ROOTS OF DUNGEONS & DRAGONS by Peter Bebergal (Strange Attractor Press, 2021). This seems to be an anthology gathering together a selection of titles from the 1st edition AD&D Recommended Reading list --not a discussion of the stories, such as Jeffro Johnson's APPENDIX N: THE LITERARY HISTORY OF DUNGEONS & DRAGONS (2017), which I believe began life as a series of blogposts. Instead Bebergal is reprinting works by sixteen of the authors so named by Gygax back in 1979.

https://boingboing.net/2020/11/10/read-the-authors-that-inspired-gary-gygax-and-the-origins-of-dd-in-appendix-n.html

This "selection of short fiction and resonant fragments" are taken from sixteen authors, of whom eight are named in the article linked to above: 

Lin Carter

Poul Anderson

Fritz Leiber

Jack Vance

Tanith Lee

H. P. Lovecraft

Michael Moorcock

Lord Dunsany.

The write-up also promises that the book will be accompanied by a chapbook novella of A. Merritt's PEOPLE OF THE PIT.

That seems to me a pretty good list, though the scholar in me cannot forbear to point out that Tanith Lee, while worthy of being included on her literary merits alone, did not in fact appear in Gygax's list. This suggests a certain slipperiness for criteria.* And I find myself curious as to the other eight authors might be.

One curious feature of the book is its presentation as a D&D adventure, GG1. Descent into the Temple of Appendix N, clearly a homage to Gygax's D1. Descent Into the Depths of the Earth (1978). 

I think I'll pass on the deluxe 30 Pound version and hold out for the paperback edition to follow.

More on this one when I find out more. I'll certainly be on the look out for a more complete list of authors, and of what works are chosen to represent the authors already announced.

--John R

current reading: THE RIFT by Nina Allan

*Similarly, they speak of Virgil Finlay's having illustrated the chapbook, without mentioning that Finlay has been dead for almost fifty years

 

A WILDERNESS OF DRAGONS is a finalist for this year's Mythopoeic Award

So, last week I saw that the list of finalists for the 2020 Mythopoeic Awards has been announced. 

And I'm happy to see among them A WILDERNESS OF DRAGONS: ESSAYS IN HONOR OF VERLYN FLIEGER.  

Here are all five finalists for the award in Inklings Scholarship:

Amendt-Raduege, Amy. “The Sweet and the Bitter”: Death and Dying in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 2018.  

Fimi, Dimitri.  Sub-creating Arda: World-building in J.R.R. Tolkien's Work, its Precursors and its Legacies.  Walking Tree Publishers, 2019.  

Johnson, Kirstin Jeffrey, and Michael Partridge.  Informing the Inklings: George Macdonald and the Victorian Roots of Modern Fantasy. Winged Lion Press. 2018

 

McIlwaine, Catherine. Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford,  Great Britain; England; Oxford, 2018.  

Rateliff, John D. Ed. A Wilderness of Dragons: Essays in Honor of Verlyn Flieger. Gabbro Head, 2018. 

 I've read or skimmed all but one of these* and can say that we're in good company. 

Congratulations to all the contributors, and to all the nominees.

--John R.

*while I hear good things about the Johnson & Patridge book, MacDonald is a little outside my purview, so it's further down on my must-read list.

The Cat Report (Friday November 6th)

So, I didn't post a write-up two weeks ago because I never got my notes written up. And the following week I didn't go in to the cat room because the room was empty: all the cats had been adopted, leaving the room empty. This week the room was filled again on Wednesday the 4th, yet half those cats had already been adopted by the time I arrived yesterday at noon.

Here's a picture of ELLIE ruling the roost in her new home:

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Thanks to the quick adoptions of the FINN and POPPY pair (who if I got it right arrived Wednesday midday and were adopted out Friday morning) and of Mr. BEAN (likewise; sounds like a great cat), we were back at three cats by noon today: MAESTRO MISTROFFELEES and bonded pair WINNIE (the little mom, who’s all black) and WIZARD (the kitten, who’s mostly black).
I started by making Mr. Mistroffelees, our twelve year old tuxedo cat, come out. He was so distressed he wet himself while I was pulling him from his cage. Once out, however, he was delighted to have attention, sitting next to me on the bench while purring up a storm. He likes being petted, being held, and catnip, I think in that order. I took him out for a walk, which he liked well enough but seemed to puzzle him. He quickly discovered the row of cat-stands but didn’t understand why he cdn’t climb up and over and behind them. He then discovered the cat-beds and declared all was forgiven, only to give up on me when I wdn’t let him curl up in them either. Still he did fairly well on the leash and I’m glad I got him out for a while.
I petted Wizard and Winnie* a bit in their cage (they were inside the bag and under the blanket, sometimes both in the bag, with little Wizard sometimes up on a self). I left their door open, thinking they might come out on their own. They didn’t, so I eventually made them come out by simply picking out the sack, cat inside. I put the soft tube on a shelf of the cat-stand and little Wizard claimed that spot. I put Winnie-in-a-bag on my lap, then transitioned this into her on my lap with a cat-blanket over her while I petted her some and rubbed her ears some. She was in petrified mode but hope the contact did some good. Eventually she got down and spent the rest of my shift atop the bins, partly covered by her blanket.
So, shy cats to those they do not know or trust, but they show every sign that they’re likely to warm up as they get acquainted with their new surroundings. 
There were lots of people looking at the cats from outside. Hope they spread the word.
—John R.


*ages three months and two years, respectively