Sunt Lacrimae Rerum

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A few years ago I researched literature (no non-fiction) to try to find samples of Grade 12 text. (I used Gutenberg for my samples.) The only author I could find who was as high as Grade 12 was Walter Scott.

I was hearing on the CBC today about people graduating from high school.  Uh-uh.  To graduate means to be admitted to a degree (== a status: one "is a bachelor of arts", not "has a bachelor of arts"), i.e a gradus (thus: "Admitto te ad gradum".)  A high school confers no degree.  One matriculates from high school, since what one receives is a diploma, not a degree. (When I was young we did not have "high school graduation"; we had "commencement exercises".)

Kate Nepveu has a review up at tor.com of the FOTR movie coming out of her re-read project, which reminded me of my reactions to the movie when it first came out.  So I've unearthed them from a posting on the Bujold list and updated them somewhat.  This deals with only the first film: I found the second and third films unwatchable.

I had expected, before seeing the film, to react along the lines of Bentley's remark to Pope regarding his translation of the Iliad : "A very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer."  This expectation proved unexpectedly close: a movie with a number of virtues, but not The Lord of the Rings and definitely not Tolkienian.  But this spurred a number of thoughts about the differences between modern fantasy and LOTR and the expectations which many (especially younger) readers seem to bring.

Some of the things the movie cut were clearly in the interest of time (however well or ill-judged that was). But many other adjustments were clearly not driven by the time factor, and many of the changes which involve additions seemed to me to be ill-conceived -- that is, they achieved some telescoping but in ways which were unnecessary and untrue to the thematic nature of the book.

1) History

Middle-Earth is historically deep.  The Fellowship starts out in the Shire (which has very little history) but as soon as one leaves the Shire, various reminders of a much deeper past come out, usually in a casual manner: Tom's references to the Dunedain of the North with regard to the swords from the barrow, Aragorn's linking of Weathertop with the Last Alliance, the narratorial introduction of Bree.  And the landscape bears the marks of civilization.  The road from Bree to Rivendell goes back to Elendil and probably to at least the founding of Rivendell in the Second Age; the way through Hollin follows an old highway whose marks are still visible. Dimrill Dale has its pillar and its greensward.

There are references which have no clear referents.  To those of us who read LOTR before The Silmarillion came out, many of the references in the text were almost completely mysterious, having to stand on their own (especially those to the Valar and the First Age), illuminated only by their own light.  All we knew of Gil-galad was a few lines dropped here and there -- by Gandalf, Aragorn and Sam.  Gildor's description of his band as "Exiles" had little if any resonance because the nature and time of the exile wasn't laid out for us.

Not in the movie.  There is no reference at all to the East Road and to Weathertop's location on it, no Last Bridge, no road through Hollin. Gil-galad, Elbereth, Earendil and Luthien are never mentioned.  Where Tolkien's world is built on top of multiple layers of history, the movie's world consists of isolated and unrelated spots -- Bree,
Rivendell, Moria, Lorien -- with no connections between them.  (Arwen is Galadriel's granddaughter; Arwen may have greater prominence, but the reference by Aragorn which (along with a number of other references) helps tie Rivendell and Lothlorien together just drops out of the picture.)  There is no reference at all to the Kingdom of Arnor, since it looks like they've decided to grossly simplify the history of the heirs of Elendil by referring only to Gondor.

2) Meals

This may sound minor by comparison, but much of the action of the book centres around food as a social occasion of one form or another: the Party, the meal with Gildor in the Shire, the feast at Rivendell, the al fresco meal on departing Lothlorien.  Of these, only the Party remains (and even there, the characteristic hobbit-pleasing line "That is the signal for dinner." following the dragon vanishes as the result of changes to the plot there).

This is not as minor as it sounds: in Tolkien's world (as in many others) civilization is closely tied to eating and drinking on company as focal occasions.  The nature of the societies is shown up in their differing attitudes towards meals (contrast the pure Anglo-Saxon hospitality of Theoden with the disciplined tone of Denethor's
situation, for example.)

3) Age and character development

There were distortions in the ages of the characters which were tightly related to changes in character development.  To take them one by one:

Merry is 39, and should look older than Frodo, as a result of Frodo's possessing the Ring. (Pippin, by contrast, was about 12 years old at the time of the Party, and should look just younger than Frodo -- Merry was about 20 at the same time.)  He's a responsible character who deals with the "conspiracy", handles the gate at Bree, and spends his time in Rivendell researching maps.  Instead, he and Pippin are showed as Tweedledum and Tweedledumber.  Similarly, Sam is a practical and responsible, almost certainly overconscientious hobbit. I grant that the requirements to shorten the film required some simplification of the plot, but the changes which were made, including insertions like the totally unnecessary fire scene at Weathertop, which make the hobbits (except Frodo) all look like a somewhat sillier version of Pippin are gratuitous and unnecessary.  (Thirty seconds exposition regarding Weathertop's location near the Road would have provided enough of a background for the subsequent attack, and remained true to the characterization in the book.)

The hobbits in general suffered from a decision to make Frodo more prominent and the others less so (e.g. Frodo replacing Merry as the one who has the right idea about the doors of Moria).  Oh, and eliminating the master and servant relationship between Frodo and Sam causes a whole chunk of motivation just to fall out, even for the actions which remain.

Aragorn turns 88 during the War of the Ring.  He's not in the process of growing up.  (For that matter, Arwen is 2,778, but that's less relevant here.)  He knows what he is destined to do (or at least attempt), and this goes back to his mother's naming of him as "Estel".  He's a representative -- the pre-eminent representative -- of classical heroism at its highest form -- warrior, healer, loremaster -- which gets contrasted both with the more modern, "Christian" heroism of Frodo and Sam as humility, and with less high, rougher heroism of the men of the Mark (and Boromir, who is more like them than the older Men of the West).

4) Elves and Elegiac

The Tolkienian elves are gradually becoming less important in the world.  The elder days are passing.  They have a long history of exile and struggle behind them; they are returning to Aman gradually; they are always looking westward.  Such power as they still have is principally in preservation, and in their affinities for the natural world (strictly speaking, they are natural, bound to the world, and humans are supernatural, seeking beyond the world), and for language in poetry and song (they are "quendi", the speakers).

The elves who have been in Aman -- and we meet only a few of these, since most are gone: Glorfindel, Gildor, possibly some other Rivendell elves, Galadriel, possibly (in some versions of the backstory) Celeborn -- have additional abilities which do come into play from time to time.  (The only elves to show a real "aura" of power in the book are Glorfindel, at the Ford, and Galadriel, at the Mirror.)  But most "elven-magic" is very close to "blessing" objects: imbuing them with enhanced virtues according to their nature (Lembas, the elven-cloaks, miruvor) or capturing light and its associated virtues (the Silmarils, the Elessar, the Phial of Galadriel). In some cases the power associated with the object is different in type, as with the Rings of Power and the Palantiri.

But as Children of Eru they are, overall, very much like men otherwise: biologically "the same species" (or else they could not interbreed in a fertile manner), with the differences being in the soul infused into the body (hroar and frear, in the Elvish terminology).

There is always, by the time of the War of the Ring, an elegiac mode associated with the elves in Tolkien's presentation: they know that they will have to depart, and that the power of the Three will fade, or be overwhelmed, regardless of the outcome of the war.

None of this is there, per se, in the movie.  (Elrond makes a reference to the elves as departing, but free of all context).  There is no song shown in either Rivendell or Lothlorien, and little exceptional fairness about their voices or features.  Lothlorien suffers the most, but the essential character of both places as the book presents them -- Rivendell preserving the memory of the Elder Days, and Lothlorien its essence -- is just not there.  The substitution of Arwen for Glorfindel, and the reduction of the role before the Ford of "I'm the faster rider" blurs to the point of obliterating the distinction between Calaquendi and Moriquendi, and Arwen's invocation of the flood rather than Elrond's (which would have made use of the power of Vilya) equally obscures the nature of "elven-magic". The whole elegiac theme regarding the whole passing of the world, in the way in which the world is changing from one kind of place to a very different kind of place with the coming of the Fourth Age, has not been prepared (Part of this lies with point 1, above, and the absence of the history of which this state of affairs is a remnant.)

5) Pacing

The book starts out slow-paced, but even when the pace speeds up (after the departure from Rivendell) the effect of the narrative is one of relatively long periods of experiencing the surroundings between crises: the Shire, Arnor, Eregion, Moria (most of which is simply empty, an echo of its former greatness, rather than threatening -- others have declined as well as the elves), Lorien, Anduin.  There are usually threats, but they're over the horizon and not immediate for most of the book.

The movie moves from crisis to crisis -- and this is not merely a matter of having to edit for length: it creates crises, or heightens the threats in other situations.  The Prancing Pony is a homey pub with warmth and light rather than the dive it is presented as; the confrontation with the Watcher in the water is grossly expanded; the transferral of the gap-leaping episode from the earlier part of the trip through the mines (where it merely heightens the sense of decay and abandonment) to the invented issue on the staircase, gives it a totally different sense of urgency; the heightening of the conflict in the chamber of Mazarbul and the later confrontation in the hall play up the aspects of continuing physical threat.  The initial meeting with the Elves of Lorien changes from one of startlement only -- Legolas' surprise when he leaps into the tree -- to direct threat, especially as it has not been prepared for by Aragorn's previous talk about the Golden Wood.

Not all good cinema is related to action and high pacing: it's perfectly possible to enchant audiences with the opposite as many of the recent crop of films of earlier English novels do (or consider Babbette's feast or My Dinner With Andre).  The movie provides no major breaks; such breaks as it does provide (at Rivendell and Lorien) are made more menacing and the sense of their length is much telescoped.

As I have noted before, these differences -- which are more thematic than purely technical -- seem to me to reflect the sorts of differences between the Lord of the Rings and the modern fantasy novel in general.  (When I first posted this, I got a lot of reactions along the lines of "the media are different, you idiot!", especially from people in the film community.  So let mje make it clear: I do not think that any of the changes I am highlighting are intrinsically related to the difference between the media.  I think that they could have been avoided and still produced a film as good or better than the existing film.) LOTR has novelistic elements, but it is also grounded in a whole set of different narrative conventions of epic, edda, and mediaeval romance, in which characters develop only in the technical sense of "being revealed" and in which heroic nature is accepted as a postulate.  In addition, landscape plays a significant role, thematically, in the structure and thematic unity of the book.  Its theme is elegiac, tinged with regret for a world which is passing away. These are not aspects of the novel which have been taken up by its more recent successors.

1) Pure Novelization

Most more recent fantasies are very much novels rather than romances (in the old sense of romance) or epics.  A surprisingly large number of them are bildungsroman specimens: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, The Belgariad, The Wheel of Time, and most obviously Harry Potter: they start with a young, unformed character and follow him through his development in the fantasy world.  And whereas a mediaeval author who wanted to tell an Arthurian story would (usually) tell one with Arthur and his court as a fixed background and (frequently) a known figure with fixed character as the central agent, many if not most modern Arthurian stories are about character development (usually Arthur or Merlin).

Those which aren't are still, usually, very much novels.  The Curse of Chalion is a good example here: the central character, Cazaril, is already mature, but the narrative gains a great deal of its interest from the developing character-related conflicts and affinities between the characters.

There is character development in the Lord of the Rings -- Frodo, Eowyn, Merry and Pippin come to mind -- but it's not central to the story in the way that it is in a "pure" novel.  The film's changes -- highlighting Frodo at various points with relation to the other hobbits, and making all sorts of changes to Aragorn -- moves the conventions of the film more closely towards those of the novel and further away from the romance/epic.  And the entrelacement used as a technique in the book works against too much focus on any one character or plot line as being "the" plot of the book.

The use of verse in the book pushes it away from the novel as well, although it doesn't have the strict structural role that is true of many classical and mediaeval works (e.g. Boethius).  Few later fantasy novels have followed this, just as the use of many linguistic styles which is important in Tolkien has been dropped by most recent authors, since one needs a great deal of skill to do this properly, and even the older standard use of high, middle and low styles (which Tolkien follows and uses) has fallen out of favour.  (Many of the film's composed scenes violate these principles, with the most egregious violation being on the staircase in Moria, but equally in just about all the made-up dialogue for Elrond and the entire Council.

2) Action

Tolkien holds together two different styles of narrative.  At times -- in dealing with the battle scenes in the second and third volumes, especially -- he provides a great deal of combat and "action scenes".  It is this aspect of the books which has frequently led to them being grouped with "Sword and Sorcery" novels (by those who make no distinction between this and "high fantasy".  He also uses heavily descriptive prose which is not dominated by action at all, but rather by observation and conveys no very great sense of urgency at all (although things may happen, they aren't matters involving physical conflict).

Modern fantasy tends to have diverged into two streams.  On one hand, much of the modern EFP is very much action-oriented: it is organized along the lines of a narrative linking combat crises together.  On the other, writers like Guy Kay and Bujold in her Chalionverse may have some very isolated incidents of martial or magical conflict but these are isolated within their narratives, where the focus is almost entirely elsewhere. 

3) Other races.

Lots of post-Tolkien novels have Elves, Dwarves and/or trolls/goblins of one sort or another: consider The Deed of Paksennarion, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, Oath of Swords, and the Riftwar books, for example.  In many cases the elves and dwarves are directly or indirectly derivative of Tolkien; in virtually all of them, though, the history of the other races is quite different (if any is given at all), and in most if not all of them the elves are more alien as regards men than Tolkien's elves are (and frequently the Dwarves are more like men, but that is a more minor point).  In many (although not all) of them the story ends with the same status quo as regards relations between the races as held at the outset.

But the stream of novels, once again, has bifurcated.  Most novels which do have multiple types of rational beings presuppose at least some points of relatively full interaction between them and tend to locate the story in a thorough mix of races.  (The extreme would be the Vlad Taltos books, which have a human focal point in the middle of a society of "elves".) And most novels which are about human interaction are about humans only, usually set in worlds where humanity is the only type of rational being (other, perhaps, than the Gods).  It was Tolkien's focus on the elegiac aspect -- "an end was come of the Elder Days in story and song" -- which allows him to have the elves as important but nevertheless marginal at once.  (Note that this is specifically true of LOTR.  In The Silmarillion the focus is entirely on elves, with a  few men at the edges and at pivotal points -- Beren, Turin, Tuor -- and in the Akallabeth it is almost entirely on men until after the Fall of Numenor).

On the Evolution of SF and Fantasy

In the beginning of "modern fantasy", aside from the Sword and Sorcery writers and the writers of Unknown, there were various other clear influences on the field, of which Tolkien is the most obvious, who embodied rather different skills and virtues: Tolkien, with his knowledge of language and the northern theory of courage; Cabell, with his ironic attitude, his complex references to classical culture and his generational themes which also tended towards writing about writing; Eddison, with his heavily archaic style and mystical interests.

Science fiction, whatever may be said about remote forerunners such as Swift, Voltaire and even Verne, or outliers such as Lewis, Huxley and Orwell, really begins as fiction by engineers and scientists for engineers and scientists: Smith, Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, et al.  It basically stays at that level (high idea content, typically weak characterisations, usually optimistic in general outlook) until the New Wave in the 1960's and then the gradual development of a set of writers whose concerns with purely writerly craft has raised the overall average standard of the SF novel very considerably: think of Willis, Stephenson, Bujold.

It's probably fair to say that there was no single fantasy genre until about the 1970's.  (When LOTR was published, there were no obvious slots into which to put it.  Many of the slots into which reviewers put it for comparison purposes -- Wagner, Ariosto, etc. -- were types of literature which Tolkien actively disliked.)  And it has become a "genre" by shedding all sorts of outlying territories which are now seldom visited until it met science fiction.  From some point in the late 70's or early 80's the two have grown together: SF by attaching (as it were) new writing territories to address, and Fantasy reflecting these accessions.

But fantasy has now become weighted down by several factors:

1) Much more almost purely formulaic work which floods the market.  Much of this may be put down to role-playing games, which haven't had nearly the same scale of effect on science fiction.

2) A few very out-of-the-usual blockbuster sellers in Eddings and Jordan, who were definitely not the best writers in the field but who managed to become heavily popular and have distorted the economic model of publishing fantasy.  (By contrast, even SF's bestsellers by and large are an order of magnitude smaller in their difference from the rest of the field.)

3) Where science fiction tends to get new ideas flowing in from the pace of technological change, fantasy has to be driven by its own internal mechanisms.  Thus the most promising fantasy novels tend to show cross-pollination with genres outside fantasy: many with techniques and concerns drawn from the mainstream novel (note that a number of  "mainstream" novels also draw on fantasy elements: true dreams, ghosts, etc.).

And the things which are the most "characteristic" of Tolkien have dropped out of modern fantasy almost entirely.  I see this not only in the film (which manages to preserve the outline and order of events while driving them with most un-Tolkienian themes, timing, and motivations) but in the reactions of many (e.g. in the rec.arts.books.tolkien newsgroup) to the films, which is overall remarkably positive given the great liberties taken with the books which are not simply a matter of screen adaptation.

In Dorothy Heydt's A Point of Honor there is a fantasy novel (The Golden Road) inside the story which provides some important content (as well as one direct quote of about a page).  It sounds fascinating and very Tolkienian (down to its inspiration in a story which is buried in the few remnants of germanic poetry of the late classical period, that of the captivity of Theodoric).  But I suspect, more and more, that Golden Roads are less and less likely to turn up.  The trend of the genre is away from the epic and towards the novel, or towards the gross simplification of the epic which is sword and sorcery.  The new good fantasies are, more and more, the books which dispense with the inherited trappings which drove Tolkien and which make use of narrative techniques of the novel and conceptual ideas whose virtue lies in being "new" (at least to the genre) rather than "old".

I went to see this at the COC last night.  A few scattered thoughts, as opposed to a full review:

The way in which Britten restructures the play for the opera removes the Athenian frame from the forest; so that instead of the "green world" being a departure from the norm, it is an implicit norm with the Athenian bit - reduced to the play and the fairies' blessing - as a coda.  There's odd references to the Athenian laws and one reference by Theseus to the father, but basically the opera depends on the viewer knowing the play to make sense of the plot involving the couples.

Similarly, the parallels between the actors and the fairies (shadows both) is downplayed. In many ways MSD is an extended meditation in a comic mode on Romeo and Juliet as a play - an expansion of the Queen Mab speech, a parody play of Pyramus and Thisbe, a different sort of family feud, made up more amicably, a continual framing of actions as acted or staged; an arbitrary reversibility of falling in love.  This aspect is largely lost in the opera, except in the play-within-a-play which does meta-parody of Italian opera.

As a rule my tastes in opera are nonstandard - baroque opera, and Mozart, with a jump over the 19th century and then various bits of 20th century opera (Dialogues des Carmelites, Ricard Strauss, Vaughan Williams' Sir John in Love). I liked the Britten, with its resolute avoidance of show-stopping arias and its use of music to provide a continuous texture for the action.

It is also interesting to note how Britten's use of Puck as an acrobat -- inspired, I gather, by some Swedish acrobats -- anticipates the Peter Brook staging of the play.

(No, I haven't read the book.)

Without expressing a direct opinion on the racefail-allied aspects of the premises and the ensuing discussion --

I just finished rereading 1491 and I noted the emphasis on the degree to which the "wilderness" which the setllers found was actually a heavily human-formed landscape -- with the obvious implications that a genuinely "virgin forest" landscape would be rather different.

Accordingly -- how could one possibly imagine that a European settlement pattern in such an alternate timeline would resemble that of our timeline in any particular?

Just wondering.

I have to disagree with this line in slacktivist's ongoing takedown of the Left Behind series: "Comedy is essentially revolutionary. This scene is counter-revolutionary. That's never funny."

Three counterexamples:

1) Aristophanes

2) Swift

3) Waugh

Reactionaries all.

You can finesse this observation by trying to claim that they're all statirists, and that satire isn't really comedy, but I don't think that flies.

The problem with Jenkins and La Haye is that they are (1) bad writers working with (2) really poor theology.  But I don't think that their problem is, as such, that they're reactionary rather than revolutionary, or that because they're reactionary they shouldn't try comedy.

Asked on the Bujold list: "Given all his faults, why had Ekaterin put up with Tien for ten years?" (Which is connected, in my mind with a couple of posts at Obsidian Wings by Hilzoy about why abused spouses don't leave).

Note that by the standards of the abusive relationships Hilzoy talks about, Tien was pretty small-time: "at least he never hit me", I think Ekaterin thinks to herself at one point.  My memory is that he did more direct threats to himself than to her.  Of course, Bujold designed him as a classic Borderline type: abuse by psychological manipulation.

The obvious answer has been repeated many times: because she had a vow and a sense of honor.  But there's more behind that.

I think a better answer to the question is: because the ties of responsibility are very hard indeed to break, once they're taken on.  Again, people cite Nikki, but he's a specific aspect of that concern.

People like Tien are, especially once one has taken on some responsibility for them, almost more pitiable than people at whom one gets angry.  They can't see what they do wrong, and they are dreadfully reliant on others.  (When they can see that they've done something wrong, they ask for forgiveness and then think that the whol account is cleared, just like that...)

And there's a real undertow, if you have an adult sense of responsibility (which is also what underlies that sense about one's word) where doing something for somebody is better than doing it for yourself.  There's a purpose there, and positive feedback from the real or anticipated response of the person for whom you do it.  (Trivially, cooking dinner for somebody else is more fun than just cooking for yourself.)

And as long as the really crappy behaviour is localized -- an irrational rant here, another off-the-wall declaring somebody hostile there, but well separated by gaps of time, and as long as it's clear what techniques to use, conversationally and operationally, to minimize the wonky behaviour -- it's possible to focus on the better parts of life and convince yourself that this is all normal enough, "every marriage has its disagreements".

The subtler risk -- to which there are certainly suggestions that Ekaterin succumbed -- is to start seeing the other's worldview as normal; or, if not as the only possible normal (which is Tien's view, of course) at least as a reasonable variant of normal. (Whence the reaction Miles identifies in ACC: "Am I crazy? Am I crazy?")  Once the measuring stick itself has ceased to be useful, one can accept a good deal more.

And Tien was "helped" by having a real problem to deal with, the Vorzohn's Dystrophy (for all that his reaction to it was both irrational and self-destructive).  Without some very real problem to hang the rest of the behaviour on, Tien would have been far more transparent from early on.

That's (part of ) my take on Ekaterin.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this may have involved second-order data analysis.

That is, nobody went and explicitly selected a set of metadata categories as "adult" with the aim of delisting them.

My guess is more along the following lines:

If you analyze all the individual works which have been manually flagged as "adult" in the past -- possibly with no effect, merely at the outset as an internal marker -- you can run a high-level analysis which looks at categories grouping the works.  You'd put in extra requirements -- for example, that there be a minimum number of "adult" works in a category, and possibly might require more than one category once matched to tag a new work.

The actual human inputs into this would be the seed data -- which would be works, not categories -- plus the numeric thresholds used as parameters to the program.

The problem with this approach, which might not be visible to a programmer trying to implement an automatic labelling scheme, is that  category metadata, which is basically CIP information, is set by the publisher, is wildly inconsistent, and can't really be used in this way in the first place.  In addition, trying to cross-check by using multiple categories won't work because the labels aren't orthogonal.

The next problem (probably not on the developer's side, since they'd probably set this up to be tweakable) is that if you set the thresholds for this kind of analysis too low you get very unexpected results.

Finally, you would have to do extensive hardcoding tweaking for (1) categories which are too broad, and therefore useless at actually capturing useful metadata for this purpose and (2) categories which are so small that, although they are what you want to target, never get enough input to push them over the trigger limits: you would really need to do an iterative application without generating anything other than internal lists (generate tagging; check with human judgement; tweak; run again; tweak...) with knowledgeable people assessing the results each time. (One problem with this is that it's iterative -- even assuming it would work in the first place, every run produces more inputs for the next one, which generates horrendous positive feedback unless something keeps it strictly in check.)  What you would really have to do is always have any new additions to the adult category found by this sort of iterative "search" vetted by human eyes: but Amazon's whole model (As far as I can tell) is to have as much done as automatically as possible (e.g. many of their recommendations, which are based on purchasing patterns rather than CIP data, are wide of the mark, but enough are close to the mark that there's a better cost/benefit point in just generating them than to have them vetted by anyone (except the end user, who can provide tuning feedback).

That's assuming that it was a good idea in the first place -- or at least, a good idea as an automatic filter rather than one which could be turned on optionally by the user.  The presence of multiple communities coexisting on the net basically renders it unlikely to impossible that you'd ever get any consensus on what was a "proper" result.

"Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacle of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetish because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonisation of S. Joan of Arc-one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei-the holy common people of God".

-- Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy

This Geoffrey Simpson article notes that a family possessing a dictionary (or not) is a better indicator of whether children will go to University than income level.  Wouldn't possessing a copy of Fowler be a better indicator still?

(Disclaimer: I have both The King's English and (the second edition of) Modern English Usage, as well as the original Fowler-edited Concise Oxford Dictionary.)

Re this XKCD link: http://xkcd.com/557/: I actually never had that dream while I was in university.  I only started to have it after my (last) degree was finished.  (And since I never even handed a paper in late, let alone missed one, it's not grounded in any sort of experience.)

I find it interesting that Silverlock is basically broadly isomorphic to The Phantom Tollbooth. Are there any other books with essentially the same structure? (I say this despite the fact that TPT is clearly inspired by the general model of The Pilgrim's Progress, which forms no major part of the DNA of Silverlock.)

It is unease about precisiely how valid any other forms of depiction of this ultimate Other are (beyond those explicitly symbolic ones provided by the sacraments and authorised by tradition) which led to the Iconoclast controversy in the East.  At another pole, the tension between the sense of usefulness (indeed, necessity) of predication per analogiam and the complete inability of it to capture what it expresses drives the tension between the Positive and Negative Ways of Christian mysticism.  (To cite Charles Williams, the see-sawing of "This also is Thou; neither is this Thou".)

This is enough to make me at least interested in Chauvert's sacramental theology from the small bits of it to which I've been exposed.  I'll try to get a copy of his basic introduction (The Sacraments: The Word of God at the Mercy of the Body) as Lenten reading. (I gather, from what I've been able to glean via the web, that there's some significant tension between his phenomenological approach and the more traditional Thomistic and generally scholastic sacramental theologies, which should be of interest as well -- where I see a touching point may be a more considerable gap).

I was looking into looking into (as it were) Catherynne Valente's Palimpsest and found that it was in stock at no Chaptigo -- basically, the local monopoly for most intents and purposes -- store in the entire Toronto area. (Happily, it is something that Bakka has, so there is a local store where I can pick up the book if I don't order it from Amazon without evaluation).

Now,  Palimpsest is not exactly performing poorly: its amazon.com sales rank is at present 3,559, which is pretty respectable (by comparison Escape from Hell, which they have in stock at the local Coles  -- not even a full-fledged Indigo -- is at 4,831).

This suggests that something is deeply broken in the distribution system (as if I didn't know that already).  Its all very well for somebody like myself to know about a book (via Whatever, in this case) and decide to look for it.  But many sales are made via browsing, and not carrying a book which other indicators would suggest will sell relatively well is just a way of arbitrarily dragging an author's possible sales down.

I nicked this from fajrdrako :

Entries read entirely: bolded; entries started but not completed: italicized.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupéry
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

There have been posts at Charlie Stross's weblog and (independently) on the Bujold list on this topic, so why not just join in?

I have nothing against reading e-books as such; I've read various non-DRM'd e-books (Gutenberg, Baen CDs from HC's I've bought, CC licensed texts, etc) over the years via a PC screen.  But I can't see adopting them as anything more than a minor option when in front of a computer (or a PDA) anyway.  This is for three reasons:

1) Availability/cost of e-book copies.  It's all very well if you just want to read recent novels, Gutenberg classics, and software reference works (which tend to be available in Acrobat format from the publishers, although the cost is steep, especially if all you were to be doing would be mainly mirroring your current dead-tree library).  But the availabilty of other books in my areas of interest isn't all that high (New Testament Criticism, anyone?) and the cost of mirroring my existing library (see my Library Thing account, for reference) would be hefty.

2) More importantly, I don't need to carry my entire library with me. I get along just fine by carrying a few books at a time with me.  It helps that I don't just carry novels: right now I have a light SF novel, a David Lodge omnibus, and Surprised by Sin with me; frequently I carry rather more slow-going books for general reading.  Paperbacks are convenient, and even hardcovers aren't bad (although I grant that the size of God's War in HC is one reason I've been slow reading it, I handled Anathem and the Baroque Cycle just fine).  The setup costs to do the same thing with existing books in my library (i.e. select two or three new books to carry with me) , assuming either purchase costs or trouble OCRing texts I already had, would be prohibitive, and the latter would be usually illegal except for older editions of older classics, for which Gutenberg is, thankfully, there.

(For that matter, I don't even use an MP3 player much, although I carry two devices (phone, Blackberry) which can play them -- when your main interests are pre-Classical music, downloading isn't much of an option, and ripping MP3's from one's entire CD library is a little daunting. (I am so Not The Target Market for MP3 players it isn't even funny.  It's like being very much Not The Target Market for the changes CBC has made to Radio 2, which leave me grumbling about lamposts and rope.))

3) Random access.  Digital copies are fine for sequential access, and exact word searches, but books are very nicely set up for physical implementations of a binary search, especially if you have a good memory of the text.

Reading or read (does not include rereads):

Thunderer, by Felix Gilman

Elantris, by Brandon Sanderson

Implementation Patterns, by Kent Beck

Six Easy Pieces and Six Not-So-Easy Pieces, by Richard Feynman

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch

To read:

Knots and Crosses by Ian Rankin (this was a freebie giveaway  with for Deuchars IPA tins).

God's War: A New History of the Crusades, by Christopher Tyerman

I watched the film of Iron Man the other night, with the DVD out and all, and one thing struck me: the basic plot of the second part of the film was a close match as far as its overall shape went for the plot of the latter part of Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy.  There are obviously significant differences -- the slave trade is swapped for the illegal arms trade, for example, and the blood relationship bits aren't there -- but the match-up between Rudbek and Stark seemed generally fairly good (with, of course the glaring exception that Thorby gets to be only a spy, whereas Stark (for all his involvement with S.H.I.E.L.D.) gets to be something more glamorous).

'TIS the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks ;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays ;
The world's whole sap is sunk ;
The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed's-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr'd ; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring ;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness ;
He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death—things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that's good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have ;
I, by Love's limbec, am the grave
Of all, that's nothing. Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so
Drown'd the whole world, us two ; oft did we grow,
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else ; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death—which word wrongs her—
Of the first nothing the elixir grown ;
Were I a man, that I were one
I needs must know ; I should prefer,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means ; yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love ; all, all some properties invest.
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.

But I am none ; nor will my sun renew.
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
At this time to the Goat is run
To fetch new lust, and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all,
Since she enjoys her long night's festival.
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year's and the day's deep midnight is.

-- John Donne

And yes, I know that St. Lucy's stopped having the distinction of the darkest evening when we adopted the Gregorian calendar.

This is not new news, of course, but:

Michael Ignatieff's father's (George Ignatieff, familiar to Torontonians via his Trinity and U of T connections) father's (Count Pavel Ignatieff) father was Count Nicholas Pavlovitch Ignatieff of the Flashman books.

This at least ought to get him extra name recognition outside Canada.