John D. Rateliff's Blog, page 79

We're in New York City

So, we have a new rule for anytime Janice and I travel together. Henceforth we put one outfit of hers in my bag and one change of clothes for me in hers. That way it'll be easier to cope when one of our bags fails to arrive --that is, if the airline fails to put on the plane a dozen or so people's luggage. Mine among them. Luckily Janice's suitcase made it through fine, but we've had to make a quick run to a nearly store to get some kind of outfit to see me through the shortfall.

On the bright side, here we are in New York City, staying on Madison Avenue in The Library Hotel, which so far promises good things. It apparently gets its name from being right down the street from the NY Public Library, passing by which tonight gave me a chance to see the original great lion statues that are the model for the Mythopoeic Award I got for MR. BAGGINS. The hotel's lobby has lots of bookcases filled with actual, readable books, not faux-book panelling or shelves filled up with sets of lawbooks or agricultural reports or similar reference books of many decades ago nor random junk (I'm looking at you, old omnibus volumes of Reader's Digest). Our own room is assigned a Dewey Decimal relating to architecture and its shelves are well-stocked with books on Gaudi, Frank Lloyd Wright (lots of these), Art Deco, and the like. And, hidden in a cupboard, a book by Barbara Streisand.

I don't think the cats are enjoying their Cat Hotel nearly as much as this, but it seemed the best option for keeping two door-dashers from staging some kind of Great Escape every time the pet-sitter dropped by to check on them.

Tomorrow: Tolkien.

--John R.
--current reading A RUMOUR OF ADVENTURE: AN INKLINGS STORY by Kees M. Paling (2018)

The Day the Music Died

So, sixty years ago today Buddy Holly died, age twenty-two, an event commemorated more than a decade later by Don McLean in his classic piece of Americana, the 1971 song "American Pie":

Long, long time ago
I can still remember how that music
Used to make me smile . . .

But February made me shiver
With every paper I deliver.
Bad news on the doorstep
I couldn't take one more step.

I can't remember if I cried
When I read about his widow-bride
But something touched me deep inside
The day the music died . . . 

That said, I have to admit that I like the music of the 1950s far less than that of the 1960s or much of the 1970s. And of the stars of that era (officially Before My Time), the rock-n-roll star I like best wd be Fats Domino, followed by Presley, who at this best was phenomenal (but who often was far below this best). Holly wd I suppose come in third, mainly for "Everyday" and "That'll Be the Day", followed by a smattering of other people (e.g. Chuck Berry, the Everly Brothers) for this song or that. I suppose it's Holly's tragedy that he died so young while it's Presley's that he died at the nadir of his career, so we remember him at this worst and Holly at his best.

That said, I have to admit I like "American Pie" better than any song by Holly. And I think it holds up remarkably well, both as a song and as catchy cryptic.  Rather like "Garden Party", from about the same era, in that respect: the song is enhanced by catching the allusions but does not depend on  a listener's understanding it to enjoy it --rather like modernist (Eliot-era) poetry in that respect.

--John R.

A Lost Arthurian Manuscript

So, when I saw the news that scholars had found seven manuscript fragments* giving a previously unknown variant of the Prose Merlin from the French Vulgate cycle, I thought of my friend the late Jim Pietrusz, collector of all things Arthurian, who had read a vast number of accounts of the various iterations of the Arthurian legends, and how he wd have loved to have read this story about Merlin's exploits.

I suspect there will be discussions of this material at this summer's Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, and at the great medievalist conference at Leeds as well; have to keep an eye out for an eventual translation/edition.

Here's the link.

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/jan/30/undiscovered-merlin-tale-fragments-found-in-bristol-archives


--John R.

*equalling, they said, about twenty pages in a modern paperback

Finding that Lost Quote (TotS)

So, this week's work on my current project, the paper for Kalamazoo, ended on a high note when I finally found the quote I was looking for. I was sure it was in Clyde Kilby's little book, but re-reading the relevant sections and re-skimming the rest didn't turn it up. So I cast my net a little wider and, Eureka. There it is, not in Kilby's book as published but in the deleted chapter in which he synopsized the whole SILMARILLION (as it had existed in 1966, based on his notes).

Now that's taken care of it's on to Shippey.  At least here I know where to look (ROAD TO MIDDLE-EARTH, third edition, Chapter 7), thanks to preliminary work on this a few months ago. Here it's more a matter of rereading his discussion of THE SILMARILLION and extracting some memorable Shippey-esque comment from it -- or so I thought. But as sometimes happens with Shippey, reading a passage for one reason made me think of something else that sent me off on a whole new line of thought. We'll see whether it circles back around and turns out to be part of the original topic or insists on becoming the core of a new section.

--John R.
current reading: a Japanese light novel (in translation) and a collection of Charles Addams' cartoons depicting what came to be known as 'The Addams Family'

The New Supervisors

So, as THE WIFE SAYS, the position of supervising the scholar has now been filled.

We're happy to have Lady Tyburn and Tarkus onboard Team Sacnoth.




--JDR

Read-Aloud texts

So, over the past year or so my voice has gotten increasingly soft and whispy. Which is something of a problem, since part of what I do is to occasionally present papers on Tolkien at places like Kalamazoo* and symposiums, and I need to be able to speak loudly enough to be heard. I'm also occasionally asked to appear on podcasts. Not to mention that it's a great inconvenience for the barista at friendly neighborhood StarBucks not to be able to hear what I'm ordering (though here the fact that it's almost always exactly the same thing helps).

The solution? Speech therapy. This is mostly a home-exercise course in that the speech therapist takes readings, assigns specific exercises, and suggests equipment that might help (ranging from a decibel meter to I-pad apps), and has me check back in on a regular basis to see what progress I'm making.  At first this involved me counting (typically up to a hundred and back down again), saying the names of days of the week** and months of the year, saying the alphabet (sometimes backwards for the sake of variety, which is harder than you'd think), and the like, all while trying to speak at a specific decibel level. My current exercise involves reading aloud ten minutes once a day, with a borrowed I-pad (Janice's) to measure my average decibel level.

At first I tried something from Tolkien, naturally: a section from the BOOK OF LOST TALES' version of the creation of the Sun and the Moon. That turned out to be a bad choice: too many unfamiliar names, syntax a little baroque for my purposes, and in general finding the content distracting me from the exercise.

Next I tried Henry James, an author I've feel I shd read more of, choosing a book of his I've never read. Luckily I have an old copy of THE AMBASSADORS*** that I set aside as a cat-walking book several years ago and never got back to after a few pages. My renewed effort was no more successful. I found that in this book James indulges in long sentences and long paragraphs with no subordination at all.****

So, casting about for something that was actually written to be read aloud, I settled on THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK. Next came Edgar Poe: a sequence of five or six of his best poems, which improves with repetition. For the past week or so I've been working my way through another Edgar's work: Edgar Lee Masters' SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY.***** I must have read a poem or two from this back in school but came away thinking of him as a second-tier Edward Arlington Robinson with Spoon River as another Tilbury Town. I was wrong about that: it's much more like the graveyard scene in OUR TOWN, except that here each poem is what shd be on his or her tombstone. Some are self-deceptive, some perceptive, some poignant, some deeply ironic, with many offering different perspectives on the same event. And the poems are conversational in tone and shortish, which makes them well-suited to my purpose -- though at this point, approaching the book's mid-point, I'd continue reading it aloud even if it were no longer part of the therapy.

I'm now starting to think ahead and am considering other poetry collections I have that are in slim easy to handle volumes and might make good read-alouds: Lovecraft's Mythos sonnet sequenceTHE FUNGI FROM YUGGOTH, Blake's SONGS OF EXPERIENCE , TSE's OLD POSSUM, and a collection of Browning's best known dramatic dialogues. We'll see what works out and what for whatever reason just doesn't.


--John R. current reading: new Edward Gorey biography (just finished: disappointing), short biography of Herbert Hoover (restarting)
current viewing: the third Peter Capaldi season of DOCTOR WHO. so far so good (two episodes in)



*my talk this May is on the role of Tolkien's invented cosmology in his failure to finish THE SILMARILLION, plus taking part in a presentation about Marquette's recataloguing of their LotR Mss currently in the works.
**shades of "The Diary of Horace Wimp", except I don't skip over a day
***with cover art by Edward Gorey, as it turns out --in fact, reading the description of it in the Gorey biography and realizing I own a copy is one of the reasons I thought of giving the James a try in this context
****I love to write long sentences myself, but I'm careful to mark the syntax by identifying all the subordinate elements (sometimes multiple ones in the same sentence, all differently marked) as such.
*****this was another cat-walking book (Hastur, 7/12/14), where what little I read made me decide I shd someday come back and read more, though it's taken me a while.

John D. Rateliff Sr

January 17th, 1969.
Fifty years ago today.






Miss you Papaw

--JDR Jr.

Tolkien in New York

So, the TOLKIEN: MAKER OF MIDDLE-EARTH exhibit that I saw in the Bodleian earlier this year is now opening at the Morgan Library in New York City and, rather to my surprise, we're able to go. So look for us in New York City for what is our first and v. probably only visit to the big city.

It's my understanding that this is a somewhat different selection of manuscripts than what was on display in Oxford, and it'll be interesting to compare the two presentations. Plus, of course, it'll be great to see so many of Tolkien's original pages of manuscript, maps, artwork, and memorabilia. As with the Oxford staging of the papers there are a series of events associated with the Morgan exhibit, most notably a presentation on the 31st by Wayne and Christina.

So, many good things. And it'll be great to have another chance to see again things I saw last time, this time with a new focus.

And of course if you see me go by, stop and say hello.

Here's the link

https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/tolkien

--John R.
current reading: Edward Gorey biography
current viewing: the new WATERSHIP DOWN (just finished)

The Name of Gandalf's Staff

So, last week I got asked a Tolkien question I don't know the answer to.  My physical therapist, while showing me an exercise with two walking sticks, one in each hand, described the motion intended as "you know, like Gandalf with his staffs".  Turns out he had no idea I'm a Tolkien scholar who constantly refers things back to Tolkien.*  Don't know whether he'd gotten the mental image from the book or movie, but in chatting with him briefly before getting back to our exercises he asked me, as a Tolkien expert, what the name of Gandalf's staff was. After all, Gandalf's sword has a name, and his horse: why not his staff?  All I cd say is that I'd never seen it. I may have just overlooked it, but I suspect this is one of those things where, had Tolkien been asked, he cd have produced a name on the spot (probably after a dozen or so trials as he felt his way to it. But in this one case, I think, no one ever asked.  Too bad.

By the way, he was definite about the plural, one in each hand, that being the point he wanted to make re. the movements he wanted me to reproduce. I wondered if somehow he'd seen or heard of the Boorman script, in which Strider carries around The Sword That Was Broken half in each hand (in one hand by the hilt and the other by wrapping cloths around the broken end). But that seems unlikely. Mulling it over, I think his mental image came from various dramatic shots in the film(s) whether Gandalf is using his staff in one hand and his sword (Glamdring) in the other.

Still, interesting to see just how widely Tolkien has spread in our culture. These are good times to be a Tolkien fan.

--John R.
current reading: a shortish biography of Herbert Hoover


*my wife once bet herself how long it'd take one day before I mentioned Tolkien. The answer was about an hour and a half


UPDATE:
THE WIFE SAYS IT WAS MY BIRTHDAY!

More Odd Lyrics (Similes)

So, sometimes a song makes a comparison that seems dubious.

Case in point: in "Searchin" by The Coasters, a song remembered nowadays mainly by the fact that The Beatles recorded it w. great gusto as part of the Decca Tapes (the 1962 audition where the record company executive told their manager that 'groups with guitars are on their way out'), it includes the rather odd line

Gonna walk right down the street
like a Bulldog Drummond

Even stranger is the line in "Soft-Hearted Hana" by George Harrison, the flip side of his hit single "Blow Away" (circa 1979)

There was someone there beside me
Swimming like Richard the Third

Now there's a mental image I have trouble getting my mind around.


--John R.

--current viewing: THE ROOSEVELTS, by Ken Burns
--current reading: HERBERT HOOVER, by Wm. E. Leuchtenburg (just starting)