Tuesday, 30 June 2009
Nothing but praise for you, my dear.
Sorry, people. For various reasons this post has been moved to somewhere where only friends can read it. Email me if you're heartbroken and want a copy!
Wednesday, 24 June 2009
Dear Marat Safin
Look at you. You're awesome.
Why, then, must you make supporting you so hard? Seriously, yesterday's match? What woundikins was that? (And Levine was brilliant, and I'm glad for him and all, but ffs)
Why, then, must you make supporting you so hard? Seriously, yesterday's match? What woundikins was that? (And Levine was brilliant, and I'm glad for him and all, but ffs)
Wednesday, 17 June 2009
Unnecessarily long and disjointed thoughts on Tolkien (part 1)
(I cannot guarantee that I will subscribe entirely to this post tomorrow)
China Mieville on Omnivoracious provides us with some Perhaps In Some Cases Somewhat Insufficiently Stressed Reasons We Should All Be Terribly Grateful To Tolkien:
A few months ago, Richard Morgan wrote this post about Tolkien's work (well. Lord of the Rings) and said some interesting things. And he's right up to a point - that line from Gorbag opens up a whole new set of possibilities. I want that story, I want to know what life is like in inner city Mordor, I want to know what it means to be an orc, and ugly, and evil (but not with free will, or presumably some orcs would choose not to be evil - and if you don't have free will can you be evil?). Tolkien chooses not to tell it.
There are other stories he chooses not to tell. The blue wizards, Alatar and Pallando - I could have done with a bit more about them. The East in general. What was happening to the less-Caucasian men while the Numenoreans were busy enacting the Atlantis myth. Haleth (who is kickass). Maybe some more actual soldiers in the war - that dead guy from Harad who Sam feels sorry for for a few minutes. He did actually start writing one story I wanted to read - "Tal-elmar", set in Middle-earth when the Numenoreans begin to return. It is quite possible that if he'd gone on with it he'd have screwed it up and been hopelessly racist (more than the story already is, I mean) and I'd be very annoyed. It's unfinished, though, and so certain possibilities are left open.
I actually subscribe to most criticisms of Tolkien. Including this one, also by Mieville. And bits of this one by Moorcock. And of course I did not know the man personally, have no real access to his mind, and cannot know what he was aiming for when he wrote what he wrote.
But more and more I find myself seeing him as a man who was really into structure. The Silmarillion is an obvious example of this. It's not the history of a race, it's a mythology. It is told in exactly the way such a mythology would be told. The minute you come to that conclusion, you're asking who the "teller" of the Silmarillion is. And it's no longer how Tolkien envisioned the history of the elves, it's how Tolkien thinks the elves would tell their own history. This is probably obvious to many of you, but it took me about 10 years to figure out.
The Lord of the Rings is, as Morgan says, about "the ponderous epic tones of Towering Archetypal Evil pitted against Irritatingly Radiant Good (oh - and guess who wins)" (and at the risk of being attracting his contempt I'm willing to admit that I find that stirring and often moving) because that's the sort of text it is. That's the structure it's modelling itself upon. Very rarely do I feel any deep interest in all these noble people, because it's not really about them. And things like realworld racial issues, realworld gender issues, realworld class issues; those things that affect so many actual people may have no place in this grand Good vs Evil narrative, and black and white as colours for your characters can be Archetypes if you're willing to not think about their implications for actual people of colour. So when he leaves out the stuff that's actually happening in the world he's living in, I'm not sure if it's because he's "in full, panic-stricken flight from it". You could criticise Tolkien's choice of this form - it's probably easier to choose a literary form that allows you to ignore this stuff if you're a white dude in Britain. But having chosen it, you would hardly expect the books to offer any deep insight into the human condition.
What interests me is actually how much he allows to slip through the cracks.
Take the battle in The Two Towers, between the Rohirrim and the Dunlendings. Saruman has fired up the Dunlendings by reminding them that the Rohirrim took their land centuries ago (The movie version shows this bit rather well, incidentally). Tolkien never addresses this or tries to prove that the Rohirrim were justified, or that Gondor had a perfect right to take land from one group of people and give it to another. Now you could assume that this is because it's self-evident within the text that Gondor and Rohan have a right to do whatever they like (also the Dunlendings are kind of swarthy). But it's open; an accusation has been made and not disproved, the Rohirrim are no longer unstained, and the Dunlendings might actually have a point.* That's pretty big.
And there's that bit Morgan points to, where the Orcs turn human, just for a moment. And (however much he may fail at women in general) Gandalf explaining to Eomer that Eowyn's life was actually not that much fun. And the deliberate use of Merry and Pippin who, when they're not being the comic relief, are the most human things about the text. It's not enough, but that it's there at all frequently fascinates me.
Which would probably be a good reason for me (an adult) to read "something like that" even if it didn't move me as much as it so often does.
(Part 2 will follow, containing my own list of things to love Tolkien for and insightful insights into the trouble with literary criticism about the man! Eventually.)
* I'm not going to talk about Tolkien and colonialism here. Mainly because I recently wrote a 7000 word paper on it, and anything less than 7000 words would seem simplistic and not really what I want to say. But I do recommend that you read (if you can) Elizabeth Massa Hoiem's "World Creation as Colonization: British Imperialism in "Aldarion and Erendis"" in Tolkien Studies Vol.2. It's rather excellent.
China Mieville on Omnivoracious provides us with some Perhaps In Some Cases Somewhat Insufficiently Stressed Reasons We Should All Be Terribly Grateful To Tolkien:
For some of us, there's always been something about this tradition--and it's hard to put your finger on--vaguely flattened out, somehow; too clean, maybe; overburdened with precision. Alan Garner, perhaps the most brilliant sufferer from this disaffection, once put it thus: to him, the Greek and Roman myths were 'as cold as their marble'.(Unrelated: Mieville is a Garner fan. *squee*)
Compare the knotty, autumnal, blooded contingency of the Norse tales, with their anti-moralistic evasive intricacies, their pointlessly and fascinatingly various tiers of Godhead, their heart-meltingly bizarre nomenclature: Ginnungagap; Yggdrasil; Ratatosk. This is the tradition that Tolkien mines and glorifies--Middle Earth, after all, being not-so-subtly a translation of Midgard.
A few months ago, Richard Morgan wrote this post about Tolkien's work (well. Lord of the Rings) and said some interesting things. And he's right up to a point - that line from Gorbag opens up a whole new set of possibilities. I want that story, I want to know what life is like in inner city Mordor, I want to know what it means to be an orc, and ugly, and evil (but not with free will, or presumably some orcs would choose not to be evil - and if you don't have free will can you be evil?). Tolkien chooses not to tell it.
There are other stories he chooses not to tell. The blue wizards, Alatar and Pallando - I could have done with a bit more about them. The East in general. What was happening to the less-Caucasian men while the Numenoreans were busy enacting the Atlantis myth. Haleth (who is kickass). Maybe some more actual soldiers in the war - that dead guy from Harad who Sam feels sorry for for a few minutes. He did actually start writing one story I wanted to read - "Tal-elmar", set in Middle-earth when the Numenoreans begin to return. It is quite possible that if he'd gone on with it he'd have screwed it up and been hopelessly racist (more than the story already is, I mean) and I'd be very annoyed. It's unfinished, though, and so certain possibilities are left open.
I actually subscribe to most criticisms of Tolkien. Including this one, also by Mieville. And bits of this one by Moorcock. And of course I did not know the man personally, have no real access to his mind, and cannot know what he was aiming for when he wrote what he wrote.
But more and more I find myself seeing him as a man who was really into structure. The Silmarillion is an obvious example of this. It's not the history of a race, it's a mythology. It is told in exactly the way such a mythology would be told. The minute you come to that conclusion, you're asking who the "teller" of the Silmarillion is. And it's no longer how Tolkien envisioned the history of the elves, it's how Tolkien thinks the elves would tell their own history. This is probably obvious to many of you, but it took me about 10 years to figure out.
The Lord of the Rings is, as Morgan says, about "the ponderous epic tones of Towering Archetypal Evil pitted against Irritatingly Radiant Good (oh - and guess who wins)" (and at the risk of being attracting his contempt I'm willing to admit that I find that stirring and often moving) because that's the sort of text it is. That's the structure it's modelling itself upon. Very rarely do I feel any deep interest in all these noble people, because it's not really about them. And things like realworld racial issues, realworld gender issues, realworld class issues; those things that affect so many actual people may have no place in this grand Good vs Evil narrative, and black and white as colours for your characters can be Archetypes if you're willing to not think about their implications for actual people of colour. So when he leaves out the stuff that's actually happening in the world he's living in, I'm not sure if it's because he's "in full, panic-stricken flight from it". You could criticise Tolkien's choice of this form - it's probably easier to choose a literary form that allows you to ignore this stuff if you're a white dude in Britain. But having chosen it, you would hardly expect the books to offer any deep insight into the human condition.
What interests me is actually how much he allows to slip through the cracks.
Take the battle in The Two Towers, between the Rohirrim and the Dunlendings. Saruman has fired up the Dunlendings by reminding them that the Rohirrim took their land centuries ago (The movie version shows this bit rather well, incidentally). Tolkien never addresses this or tries to prove that the Rohirrim were justified, or that Gondor had a perfect right to take land from one group of people and give it to another. Now you could assume that this is because it's self-evident within the text that Gondor and Rohan have a right to do whatever they like (also the Dunlendings are kind of swarthy). But it's open; an accusation has been made and not disproved, the Rohirrim are no longer unstained, and the Dunlendings might actually have a point.* That's pretty big.
And there's that bit Morgan points to, where the Orcs turn human, just for a moment. And (however much he may fail at women in general) Gandalf explaining to Eomer that Eowyn's life was actually not that much fun. And the deliberate use of Merry and Pippin who, when they're not being the comic relief, are the most human things about the text. It's not enough, but that it's there at all frequently fascinates me.
Which would probably be a good reason for me (an adult) to read "something like that" even if it didn't move me as much as it so often does.
(Part 2 will follow, containing my own list of things to love Tolkien for and insightful insights into the trouble with literary criticism about the man! Eventually.)
* I'm not going to talk about Tolkien and colonialism here. Mainly because I recently wrote a 7000 word paper on it, and anything less than 7000 words would seem simplistic and not really what I want to say. But I do recommend that you read (if you can) Elizabeth Massa Hoiem's "World Creation as Colonization: British Imperialism in "Aldarion and Erendis"" in Tolkien Studies Vol.2. It's rather excellent.
Monday, 15 June 2009
It's a beret, not a tea cosy.
At the beginning of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry visits the Ministry of Magic, where he sees a fountain that's symbolic of the hierarchical nature of the wizard worldview.
A group of golden statues, larger than life-size, stood in the middle of a circular pool. Tallest of them all was a noble-looking wizard with his wand pointing straight up in the air. Grouped around him were a beautiful witch, a centaur, a goblin and a house-elf. The last three were all looking adoringly up at the witch and wizard. Glittering jets of water were flying from the ends of their wands, the point of the centaur's arrow, the tip of the goblins hat and each of the house-elf's ears.The fountain is only a very obvious marker for a theme that reoccurs a number of times during the series - the dodgy foundations of the wizarding world and the failure of the community to interact with other magical races on equal terms. The Malfoys mistreat their house elf, Umbridge refers to the centaurs as "filthy half-breeds", and the historical failure to treat with the giants means that they all end up on Voldemort's side. Hermione is made to sound silly for saying it, but Hogwarts functions on unpaid labour. Mrs Weasley (we're told in the second book) really wants a house-elf. Sirius Black's death is partly due to his consistently treating Kreacher the house-elf like shit. In the last book Harry himself attempts to double cross Griphook the Goblin. It's not just the bad guys - the wizarding world has functioned this way for centuries and every wizard is implicated.
Enter Dobby.
When Dobby arrives in the Dursley home in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, he really appears to have revolutionary potential. He speaks for house elves as a class, rather than from the perspective of one discontented elf and we learn a few pages later that it must have required a tremendous act of will for him to come there against the wishes of the Malfoys at all. To make a decision like this one, to muster up the strength to carry it out, and to develop this sort of sense of class-consciousness is all pretty impressive. Dobby is genuinely heroic.
But Harry is the Hero. Dobby's working conditions improve drastically, he is given wages (tiny ones, but he won't accept more and he really likes work, no really), but it's all a gift from Harry. Dobby now become's Harry's willing servant. “'Dobby is a free house-elf and he can obey anyone he likes and Dobby will do whatever Harry Potter wants him to do!' said Dobby”.
Rowling's house-elves are given a weird kind of false consciousness that makes them impervious to Dobby's propoganda. There isn't likely to be any sort of house-elf uprising in the near future. Liberation can be forced upon the elves (Hermione) or gifted (Harry) but it's not likely to be taken.
In CoS, Dobby's decision to support Harry is shown to be in part strategic - the house-elves had a miserable time of it when Voldemort was in power and have a reasonable stake in trying to stop this from happening again. This is why CoS Dobby is interesting - he has his own agenda and while he may want to protect Harry he's also capable of being a genuine obstacle when their agendas don't match. Once he's freed he's turned into a goofy but faithful retainer who wears silly clothes and talks funny. From this point on, his investment in the fight against Voldemort appears to be entirely about Harry and the wizards. Eventually he dies rescuing Harry. Which is great on the one hand, because it means Harry can stay alive to defeat Voldemort and thus save the other house-elves from an increased crapness of existence (I wonder if this was part of his motive?). But it also means that the house-elves have lost the one prominent revolutionary figure they seem to have had in quite a while.
(Much love to Pradipta and Shreyas for silly photoshoppage)
Friday, 12 June 2009
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland
See here.
Valente's an amazing writer, and this sounds like it's going to be a wonderful book. For those of you who haven't discovered her yet, this is a great opportunity to do so. I'll be reading and donating what I can, and I hope (once you've discovered how awesome she is) some of you will as well.
Valente's an amazing writer, and this sounds like it's going to be a wonderful book. For those of you who haven't discovered her yet, this is a great opportunity to do so. I'll be reading and donating what I can, and I hope (once you've discovered how awesome she is) some of you will as well.
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