Tolkien’s ring of power is a plain gold ring, of course, and embodies a series of quite complex valences to do with binding, with vows and marriage. But at the same time as being a blank surface, the ring is also paradoxically (which is to say, magically) lettered. The ring, in other words, is a book. To be sure it is a short book; its whole text is the one ring charm. But a short book is still a book. Looked at this way, Lord of the Rings becomes a strangely self-destructive fable—a book about the quest to destroy a book, a long string of carefully chosen words positing a world in which words have magical power to huge evil. How few books there are in Middle Earth! Indeed, I’ve written elsewhere about not just the paucity of written texts in Tolkien’s world, but the way they keep getting misread. Gandalf scratches his rune at Weathertop; the hobbits misread it. The elven door in Moria, beautifully lettered, commands ‘speak friend and enter!’ and nobody understands its simple instruction. The fellowship find a dwarfish book in the mines, as scorched and battered as poor old Beowulf; but as they read it aloud ('drums in the deep’, 'we cannot get out’) it becomes true to them, and they repeat the words as suddenly, horribly, appropriate to their own predicament. The repeated theme is the danger of words; their slipperiness but also the ease with which they can move us directly into the malign world of the text. One ring to bind us all. Books are bound, too.
[gallery] jonklassen:
Here’s a poster I did for the German Literature Prize, which is being presented at the Frankfurt Book Festival this week. They gave the award to my book “I Want My Hat Back” last year.
rebel technology
Electronic technologies are seeking to escape my control — and they are largely succeeding!
This must stop.
Take Ello, about which I have written. I fooled around for a bit, but it has no privacy controls of any kind: everything is public to everyone, nobody can be blocked, etc. I understand that the service is new and still under development, but I won’t be back until I can control my environment (if then).
And then there’s this: I subscribe to some magazines on iOS, because with my aging eyes — I’ve mentioned this before — I really like being able to adjust the type size. (Most print magazines are close to unreadable for me now, unless I take off my glasses and hold them inches from my face, which is not the most comfortable way to read.) But the iOS 8 update broke a number of magazines in Apple’s Newsstand, including Scientific American, and while some of them have been fixed, SciAm has been both inactive and silent. I have paid for their magazines, but I can’t read them; and so far they have not responded to my emails.
These are just reminders that, for all the convenience that online and digital life provides, and while we use a great deal, we own very little indeed. I admire Comixology’s recent move to enable PDF or CBZ downloads of comics I’ve purchased from them — “from participating publishers.” But Marvel and DC (among others) aren’t participating.
So I guess I’d better get used to reading magazines and comics a few inches from my de-spectacled face. And I should rededicate myself to owning my turf.
Once upon a time, a visiting scholar presented a lecture on the topic: ‘How many philosophical positions are there in principle?’ ‘In principle,’ he began, ‘there are exactly 12 philosophical positions.’ A voice called from the audience: ‘Thirteen.’ ‘There are,’ the lecturer repeated, ‘exactly 12 possible philosophical positions; not one less and not one more.’ ‘Thirteen,’ the voice from the audience called again. ‘Very well, then,’ said the lecturer, now perceptibly irked, ‘I shall proceed to enumerate the 12 possible philosophical positions. The first is sometimes called “naive realism”. It is the view according to which things are, by and large, very much the way that they seem to be.’ ‘Oh,’ said the voice from the audience. ‘Fourteen!’
Pope Francis … sent a subtle but powerful signal last month when he presided over the marriage in Rome of 20 couples of various ages, whose lives were somewhat unconventional by the standards of the church, although perfectly ordinary in most worldly terms. They included a bride who was already a mother, people who had been married before, and people who had been living together.
I have a feeling that if Pope Benedict had done exactly the same thing he would have been stridently denounced for forcing today’s flexible tolerant people into the Procrustean bed of a traditional and unitary Catholic model of matrimony.
Hollis said more than 13,000 students bought season tickets to this year’s home games. Their corner of the stadium never filled Saturday for one of the most anticipated Big Ten regular-season games of the season. By the fourth quarter, when Michigan State built a 27-3 lead on a wet night with temperatures in the 40s, more bleachers were visible than bodies.Michigan State coach Mark Dantonio and a few Spartans players said they noticed the evaporating crowd during the fourth quarter. The noise decreased, they said, during Nebraska’s late comeback bid.
“We needed it to be loud there, and it’s a big football game, and it got a little empty there at the end,” Dantonio said Saturday night. The coach didn’t mind a weaker student section in recent home wins over Eastern Michigan and Wyoming. He considered stopping himself short of commenting on Saturday’s crowd, but after a pause decided to say that he, too, was “disappointed” in those who didn’t stick around.
“I appreciate the fans that did stay. The fans that left, that’s just not right,” he said.
Michigan State AD embarrassed by student section - ESPN. Don’t you students get it? You have a moral obligation to buy tickets for college football games, and to stay for the entire game no matter how cold it is or how bored-out-of-your-skull you are.
I tell you, the ethical shambles that is today’s Young Person. Watching live college football — college football paid for by your tuition dollars, whether you like it or not — is not a right! It’s not even a privilege! It’s an obligation.
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thingsmagazine: Machine a Vapeur, Michel Clement, c 1857-1860
[gallery] architectural-review:
Hedvig Skjerdingstad, ‘Copenhagen City Museum – A Matter of Time’, 2014
It seems to me that this post on children at museums and this post on medical missionaries in Africa are effectively the same post, asking the same question: Why are there so many people in the world who aren’t exactly like me?