15000 word dash…
The whole of my family is sports mad. I realised this some years ago, when at a family get together, and during the eternal recurring conversation of training schedules, recurring injuries (they’ve all got one), my fairy godmother asked quite innocently “but what do you do with a bench press” and a table full of people made the appropriate gesture (no, not the finger, they actually all and in perfect unison mimed being on a bench press). Of course I do understand that some exercise is necessary in order to prevent bingo wings and as I have recurring nightmares about these, I fling my weights about whenever the triceps are looking a bit flobby, but I treat this activity the same way I treat doing my bikini line – quite painful and not something that you mention in public.
Of course, because I’m human, a member of this (over) extended family and at least as competitive as they are I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I have a deep desire to, just once, run the Blaydon race (they all do the Blaydon race) and beat everyone. Just to rub their noses in it. This is not an idle boast. I couldn’t sprint to save my life (well probably I could to save my life) but I’ve got the right body for longer distances, long legs, good lungs and will power that I inherited from the Russian “I-will-burn-my-crops-slaughter-the-livestock-poison-the-well-shoot-my-family-
because-if-I’m-going-down-then-I’m-taking-all-you-fuckers-with-me-as-well-before-I-bite-it”, side of the family. Just tell me that something is impossible and I’ll move heaven and earth to prove you wrong. Unfortunately mum’s absolutely vetoed this dream because she thinks that it would be taking the piss to run it in pink stilettos’ while chain-smoking a packet of Marlboros (that was the major part of the desire). I did point out that I’d be going so fast that no-one would suffer any effects of passive smoking but she remained adamant – spoilsport.
So instead I shop. This is not the soft option. You need speed, focus, a strong right hook, a sharp elbow and nerves of steel. Anyone who’s braved a shoe sale will agree with me on this one. I’m not choosy about where I shop, I’m as happy in Oxfam as I am in Harvey Nicks (happier actually because the shop assistants are so much nicer and lets face it most of the stuff, unless you’re going for the haute couture designers, looks like the sort of bri-nylon you’d find in a charity shop anyway and I refuse to pay a grand for something that looks retro when you can spend £20 on something that’s really retro and do your good deed for the day). It doesn’t even have to be stuff to wear. I’ll shop for anything, food, music stuff (much to F’s eternal delight I’m happy to spend hours in guitar shops), computer stuff, garden stuff, tools (I love buying tools – even though I know rationally that any job in the house be it maintenance or artistic can be accomplished using a bread knife, a roll of gaffer tape, a tape measure with the end missing, a really big hammer and an unlimited supply of expletives), household stuff. You name it – I’ll buy it.
At this point I should add that I’m not one of these people who racks up huge credit card bills in order to satisfy their retail addiction. For a start, I don’t have a credit card (well I do but I rarely use it and if I do I pay it off in full) because I’ve always been of the opinion that if – for example- one morning you woke up and decided that you’d had quite enough of your job then your monthly outgoings should be of the absolute minimum necessary to sustain your roof, your food and your utilities. Second and most importantly, I never but never pay full price for anything. Most clothes – once you have one good suit, two good pairs of shoes, a pair of jeans and a floaty skirt – are extraneous and so there’s no point.
So I sale shop and I eBay. I ebay a lot. I started eBaying because I collect vintage costume jewellery. I have done ever since I was eight years old (first purchase a Whitby jet necklace bought in Diss market for the princely sum of £6.) I tend to buy from the States because not only was that where the major designers were, the exchange rate makes it cheaper and the sellers offer a better service but because Edinburgh calls anything over 3 years old, antique and prices it accordingly.
Obviously from the jewellery it was but a short hop to the clothes and make-up - I’m a sucker for Guerlain makeup – I know that the product is the same as something a third of the price but really the thrill of the decadence of a mascara that’s not only packaged in a beaten gold tube but smells of violets too more than makes up for the extra price.
Now of course I have so many clothes that I tend to treat them as lending library and for all but the most fabulous of pieces that I will keep and wear until they fall apart, I wear things couple of times and sell them on so what could be a dangerous habit practically pays for itself.
But recently I’ve been getting bored with eBay. Not with the jewellery (or the art deco prints or the Depression glass – all of which I also collect) but I’ve really got enough clothes even allowing for the ones that I resell. So I started hunting around in other categories. I suppose it should have struck me sooner that the one thing I could buy there were books – but somehow the notion that people actually got rid of their books (other than the trashy ones you buy at airports or the ones you get from a book club that you forgot to send back and therefore languish forever on a hidden shelf). But on a search for Kay Neilsen (who’s work I also collect) I stumbled across the antique books bit.
This was heaven. I loathe and abominate brand new books and here were pages upon pages of glorious second hand books –with tipped in colour plates and embossed covers and foxing and the names of the people who’d owned them before on the titles page and bits a bit ripped. Sheer bliss. So I started to collect the books that I remember from home – childrens books, and poetry books and ancient recipe books and good old fashioned story books and every day the postman knocks at the door bearing yet another couple of parcels for me and I’m able to wallow in all these old friends that I hadn’t seen for years.
But this week things got a bit silly. I was just trawling through these pages when I came upon a job lot of sci-fi. Proper sci-fi, written in those halcyon days when sci-fi wasn’t a joke genre – Moorcock and Arthur C Clarke, Wells, Anderson, Aldiss, LeGuin, Vonnegut and a million more. I think that there were about 50 books in this lot and I’ve been gobbling up a couple a day.
And here is the problem. I can quite happily go on buying all the books that I remember reading and enjoying and I will – its actually surprising me how well I’m remembering and tracking down authors that I read 15 or 20 years ago, quite obscure not famous authors at that. But I also need some new books to read otherwise I’ll spend my life rereading stuff until I know it off by heart and that’s a bit pointless.
So. I’d like you to recommend books to me. Not books that you think are great intellectual masterpieces, or books that “everyone” should read or books the titles of which will make you look superior in the comments box (herebe) or books that you think I’ll like from the way I write or authors I’ve mentioned but the books that you read and read and read again. The ones that, when it’s rainy afternoon, when the world is a miserable place, when you have an early night, when you’re having “me” time that you pull down from the shelves and still love.
I won’t promise faithfully that I’ll post a review of them when I read them. But I do promise faithfully that I’ll add the titles to my searches and should they turn up I’ll bid for them.
Please help. I need something new to read.
May 12th, 2006 at 8:22 am
hell i’ll do you one better- i did a whole post about just this subject. its archived Monday, February 20 and titled ‘Books’ mysteriously enough.
Also- ‘The Strange Case of the Dog in the Night’
‘ZigZag’ author? american, anyway, and recent.
‘Cruddy’, Lynda Barry. actually anything at all by Lynda Barry.
‘American Splendour’ 1 and 2, Harvey Pekar
bathroom graffitti. anything.
old cookbooks are the shiznit!!!
May 12th, 2006 at 8:22 am
whoop, transposed a couple sentances there. I blame france.
May 12th, 2006 at 8:23 am
why not? F does all the time!
thanks for the list FN. I’d forgotton about your books post. Will go there now and copy and paste the list into word and then start looking for them!
May 12th, 2006 at 8:25 am
Just realised that I’d inadvertantly managed to post the same thing 3 times and of course I managed to delete the one which had FN’s comments! Hence me looking like I’m having a conversation with myself!
May 12th, 2006 at 10:58 am
Yeah. Muppet.
Books you should have:
The entire Asterix collection.
The entire (individual not anthologised) Calvin and Hobbes.
The defence rests.
(That’s not a book. It’s me signing off. Those are the only books you’ll ever need. And incidentally, I don’t put down books to make myself look good (no, I put down people to do that). I’m not some arsy sixth form angst merchant who thinks that reading Camus makes you cool. Camus is wank squared. Nor am I a certain family member who ostentatiously reads James Joyce. Big deal. Been there done it, paraphrased the t-shirt. Most intellectual books are arse. I’m old fashioned. I like stories. I like stories with beginnings, middles and ends. I always have, I always will. I read enough poncy wank for work to turn my stomach. Intellectual this, theoretical that, metaphysical metaphorical the other. I mean, Literature and the Right to Death (Blanchot) is a cracking title and interesting but it is such arse when you get down to it. All literature represents the desire for and inability to reach oblivion? Does it? I’m sure the famous five weren’t thinking that when they were having lashings of ginger beer just the same as I’m sure that the relationship between tomboy George and Timmy the dogs hot pink tongue was about as sexual as my sex life right now (ie - not very). Stories. Stories are where its at. Tell stories, read stories. Don’t hide your bastard meaning behind a load of effete intellectual posing. For fucks sake. That’s why Kipling is a better writer than Pound, Ransome a better storyteller than Amis (either of the fuckers) and Tolkien is still being read more than Eliot.
And sci-fi has never been a cool genre. It’s always been considered nerdy. Always. It isn’t. But it always is.
May 12th, 2006 at 11:47 am
The Lord Peter Wimsey books by Dorothy Sayers, starting with Strong Poison and ending with Busman’s Honeymoon.
Stranger in a Strange Land, Methusaleh’s Children and Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein.
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card.
Vanuk Vanuk by Guido Sperandio and Piero Ventura. (If you google the title the first hit you get is M.E!)
The Giant Jam Sandwich by John Vernon Lord.
Dooley and the Snortsnoot by Jack Kent.
And (I’m embarassed to admit this) Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, and The Last Command by Timothy Zahn. HttE is the only book I’ve ever actually had to replace because I wore it out until it fell completely apart. So sad.
May 12th, 2006 at 12:41 pm
Brillliant! Keep them coming - the list I’ve got so far will see me through about a month (not kidding, I tend to read a book a day)
CB I’ve added these to the list and I will buy them and if you send me the link again I won’t buy them from eBay, I’ll get all the books from Amazons second hand book section and I’ll go via your rowing club.
And by the way - don’t ever be embarassed about admitting you like a book. Hell, one of my all time favourite books is Winnie the Pooh.
Bro. It was a joke - you’re the only one I can tease about having intellectual tendencies!
Asterix is a given - they still make me laugh (and apparently the English translations are funnier than the original french!) as is Calvin and Hobbes, Molesworth (thank you best present ever!) all the ransome books and kipling (I actually really found the books section of ebay cos mum was looking for some first ed kipling for you’re birthday present (but don’t tell her I’ve told you) and a host of other “childrens” books - I’ve put that in inverted commas because one thing I’ve noticed about the kids books written pre 1970 is that the language is more grown up than most of the “grown up” books written today.
I completely agree with your critique (although I quite like Camus I must admit)but I’m a bit surprised that sci-fi has never been considered cool. What about Moorcock? Asimov and Anderson? I’m rereading Moorcock (all of them) at the moment and some of the concepts are quite out there.
May 12th, 2006 at 1:46 pm
Sci - fi was never cool. First generation fantasy was. Think of The Water Babies, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan… They’re expressions of social unease and social commentary. I’m not just saying it because my thesis will analyse him in this context but fantasy really ends with Tolkien. LOTR’s constitutes the consolidation of the epic fantasy form while also acknowledging its roots in the gothic, the romance and the realist genres. It’s the acme of secondary world fantasy writing. All of its elements were subsequently done to death in the sixties and seventies by others.
Sci - fi is different but can contain the same elements as fantasy.
Point her in the direction of Stalky & Co and Soldiers Three. Mind you, I’ve got an early edition of Soldiers Three. Stalky would be good. As would Puck of Pooks Hill.
May 12th, 2006 at 5:44 pm
Ubik-phillip k. dick
Clockwork Orange-anthony burgess
so much for scifi never being cool.
Take it back a step further…when has READING ever been cool? which is just fine with me…keeps the dipshit element out of my face while i’m trying to concentrate.
hey, its a comment/forum!!
May 15th, 2006 at 1:53 am
ok.
you’ve all listed non-intellectual books that are somehow obscure enough to still make me feel like an iliterut idjit.
so to compound that feeling i’d like to proudly confess that the book i read just about every other year and have worn down to its spine is The Stand by Stephen King.
I can also second Herebe’s Calvin and Hobbes recommendation.
As far as sci-fi/heroic fantasy with a twist, the discworld novels were great (cf. in particular “Eric” and “Mort”).
When i was really little there was this great book called Forest Hotel, part of the Little Golden Book collection, that i had someone read to me every night before sleep. But it’s only five or six pages long, so it might be on the lighter side of your daily reading regimen.
May 15th, 2006 at 2:32 am
I feel compelled by something greater than myself (blood alcohol level, probably) to defend Phillip K. Dicks’ ‘UBIK’ as an intellectual *GEM*.
Montaillou: The Paradise of Error
Civilization and Disease
The Medieval Machine
The Ancient City
Quintillian ‘On Education’
The Inferno-The Purgatorio-The Paradisio-La Nuova Vita…Dante (Ciardi translation)
The White Goddess
The Red Book of Hergest
The Canterbury Tales (XO, CB!)
The Decameron
The 1001 Nights
………
May 15th, 2006 at 12:00 pm
Bering. You aren’t the only one (feeling like an iliterut idjit). And I love the discworld series, although the ones with the witches are my particular favourites! I’m slowly building up my collection of them - everytime I go back to newcastle I steal another out of my bros bedroom
FN. Reading has never been cool - that’s why we do it!. Haven’t read that part Philip K Dick but will check it out (actually its years since I read any PKD so maybe I should go back and revisit them). Fantastic other suggestions too - I’d been meaning to get a copy of the White Goddess for ages, the 1001 nights is one of my staple bedtime books. The only one I’m not going to check out is the canterbury tales (sorry!) cos I did them for A level and was put off them for life (however I love Beowulf and Audens translations of the norse legends so does that mean I can still be in ye olde english club?
May 15th, 2006 at 4:43 pm
A Clockwork Orange isn’t sci-fi. It’s dystopian fiction a la Orwell and Huxley.
May 15th, 2006 at 6:40 pm
good point. still, its not as firmly on that side as is, say, 1984.
i feel like it falls more on the scifi side of things because ‘the machine’ looms so large as a symbol on so many different levels, and technology moves the plot. its firmly astride the fence, anyway.
so yeah, definitely read A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, hendrix…its a doozy!
May 15th, 2006 at 9:45 pm
sarah says you need to read ‘we need to talk about kevin’. apparently it is good.
i think you should read the princess bride. hey, i’ve got a copy. come down, get pissed and take it away. (because aaron keeps forgetting to)
May 16th, 2006 at 8:28 am
FN and ZB - you’re probably both going to kill me with slow scorn for this, but I’ve read a Clockwork Orange (twice - I read it the second time to see if I liked it any better) and it just didn’t engage me…er sorry. Don’t know why but Burgess just doesn’t do it for me, I mean I can see that he’s a brilliant writer, that his work is profound and well thought out but there’s just something missing in it for me.
JD. We’ve been down to Newcastle twice in the past three weeks and each time we’ve come down you bastards have buggered off somewhere else. Not that we take it personally or anything. We’ll be down again soon so will take you up on the offer of drink (we may well have some news that deserves a celebration) and book. In any case A should be too busy studying to read anything other than books directly related to his course so do not lend it to him until I’ve read it first.
May 16th, 2006 at 2:33 pm
can highly recommend Dorothy L Sayers… but DO NOT READ that book all about Kevin. The author with a stupid name wears those ridiculous lacy mittens on the late review she should be punished not encouraged by more readers. Down with fugly fashion sense!
May 16th, 2006 at 2:57 pm
hey its as good a reason as any to put it on the index
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May 18th, 2006 at 8:37 am
Bering - you can? Why didn’t you tell me sooner? Wouldn’t have wasted three years that way and could have had more time to have fun.
Do you do PhDs too. I need one before my bro gets his? I’d even consider a 2 week course.
May 19th, 2006 at 4:54 am
Vee hev ze means ov making PhD een no time.
Pleez to send money first.
May 19th, 2006 at 8:59 am
I’ve just turned out my pockets and I’ve got 23&1/2 pence, a piece of string and a boiled sweet. Admittedly the sweets a bit fluffy from being in my pocket but it’ll wash off. Do you reckon that’ll get me an ology? or at the very least something in humanities?
May 21st, 2006 at 3:01 pm
how about a 300 page doctoral thesis titled “A child’s pockets, birthplace of antimatter. A critical approach to the received idea that nothing is lost, nothing is created” ?
May 21st, 2006 at 4:26 pm
that’ll do me. As long as it’s not too critical - i don’t take it well.
btw…will you please update your blog. (this always works when FN does it to me)
May 22nd, 2006 at 1:09 pm
Burgess “Earthly Powers” is worth reading - the rest is nish. It’s his oh so obvious attempt to write a great novel. Despite that, it’s quite good.
On a personal note, I don’t think I’ve ever read a better extended sequence than Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey - Maturin series. The first three are as close to perfection as I’ve ever read. The following seventeen written over thirty years are as near as makes no odds.
Dickens: A tale of two cities.
Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential.
P.G. Wodehouse’s Psmith Series.
But you’ve already got those. You thieving magpie.
May 22nd, 2006 at 1:31 pm
Read Earthly Powers and actually quite liked it - was that one that started “I was in bed with my catamite”? but wouldn’t revist if that makes sense.
Mum had a bet as to when you’d mention the Patrick oBrien series…you’re later than she thought you would be.
Psmith is a god among men. If he were real F would have a run for his money…
A tale of two cities is the only Dickens that I liked. Read it on the bus as was going to and from work and ended up sitting on Princes street crying my eyes out when I got the the end. But, it isn’t as good as Les Miserables which everyone should read and adore.
Anyway. Just to let you know that I did take all your suggestions seriously, even as we speak the Decameron, The White Goddess and Strong Poison are winging their way to wards me. (I also bought the Kalevala because I didn’t know that was what Tolkien had based LOTR on and the Golden Bough (cos I couldn’t remember which of them that FN had recommended and thought I might as well get both). After that point I started to feel fat so I also bought a juicer, Leslie Kentons Raw Foods, the liver Detox plan, the 10 day detox plan, Juicing for health and Crazy from the Heat (because someone nicked the copy that I had) so I reckon that’s taken care of mind body and spirit so far this month
Anyway. I’m not a thieving magpie - your books like living with me. They have proper shelves and I don’t make the humourous ones sit next to the highbrow ones. Besides which you still have my copy of the Good Solider Scvek which is one of the funniest books ever written (well it appealed to me)
May 22nd, 2006 at 3:50 pm
books books books!
right, i have time now.
• anything by Zelazny, but especially “Lord of Light” — pantheon viewed as high-tech political struggle. also “eye of cat” etc.
• anything by Jack Vance, but especially “Rhialto the Marvellous” and “Cugel’s Saga” (”At Gundar we conceive ‘innocence’ as a positive quality, not merely an insipid absence of guilt,” stated the Nolde.”)
• everything by John Sladek
• everything by Thomas Disch & Sladek
• “Tono-Bungay” by HGWells
• everything by Cordwainer Smith (IRL a psychologist/anthropologist who spoke a zillian languages and joined the army briefly in order to shorten the korean war, and did so, by an estimated half a decade or more; and whose “Psychological Warfare” remains a standard textbook even today), but especially “Norstrilia” and “The Rediscovery of Man” predicting in the 50s what prince charles is being vilified for suggesting now
• Joe Haldeman’s “The Forever War”
• thingummy’s “Ender’s Game”
• Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers” or is it the lazarus long books i’m thinking of? hmm. anyway he was the first person i read who pointed out the risks for society inherent in the weird hyper-religiousness of mid-america.
• “Freakonomics” by levy & thingy
• Gordon Macdonald Fraser’s “Flashman” series
• “Lost in a Good Book” by Jasper Fforde
• everything by Terry Pratchett. 1&2 “Colour of Magic” and “Light Fantastic” are satires of fantasy cliches, next “Sourceror” is semi-autobiographical in theme if not in fact, and then the subsequent Ringworld books place pratchett as the most keen-eyed observer of human nature writing today. but read them in order as there are a LOT of running jokes which you won’t fully appreciate otherwise. (”Small Gods” is rapiery re academia etc.)
• “Vernon God Little” by thingy
• “He died with a falafel in his hand” by John Birmingham
• anything by Jerome K. Jerome, especially his short stories.
• Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Red..Green..Blue Mars” trilogy is an awesome blend of character-driven literary cream and hard-SF — never read anything like it
• “Fast Food Nation” by Eric Schlosser
• all of Spike Milligan’s wartime memoirs
• “Inside the Third Reich” by Albert Speer
• all Alfred Bester’s novels: “the demolished man” “golem 100″ (’ahh, le pauvre petit’) “tyger tyger”
• the Nero Wolfe books are good fun
• “Vanity Fair”
• and everyone in the whole world should read this book:
“The Situation Is Hopeless But Not Serious
(The Pursuit of Unhappiness)”
Paul Watzlawick
(amazon)
May 22nd, 2006 at 4:32 pm
” The Kalevala because I didn’t know that was what Tolkien had based LOTR on ”
Or as we say in English, Snorri Snorrulson’s Prose Edda.
Muppet.
Say Yes to:
Milligan’s War Memoirs. The finest ever written by anyone, ever about war and what it’s like to live through it and nearly die in it.
Jerome K. Jerome - 3 men in a boat and on the Bummel. Genius. On a stick. In a bun.
Pratchett up until about Pyramids I’ll go along with. After that he’s sporadic. The first two definitely. Then Equal Rites and Wyrd Sisters. Guards, Guards and Men at Arms. And Sourcery. And Mort. And Pyramids.
Surprisingly, Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled is brilliant. I now understand the mechanics of poetry. It’s v. interesting.
All of Jeeves and Wooster and most of his short golf stories but most importantly THE BLANDINGS CASTLE series. Anything involving Uncle Dynamite is worth the price on the book.
May 22nd, 2006 at 4:57 pm
(now having read thru the zillionandone comments)
• calvin and hobbes– tick tick tick! i have the lot.
• Dickens– if you have any interest in history or sociology, or people, i unreservedly recommend his non-dickens-genre collection of snippets: “Tales by Boz”. similar to the scintillatingly powerful Ambrose Bierce’s “Devil’s Dictionary” (”Year: a period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments”) in that these are the snippets that dickens wrote to pad out the blank pages in the magazine he was running. they are not stories; they are blog-entries describing a moment or evening or morning in london. and they are a tremendous and tremendously pungent insight into the day-to-day dailiness of 19th century london’s real people (especially the poorer).
• on top of PG Wodehouse, if you haven’t already, you MUST read “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde. an absolute confection of prickling delight.
• Wodehouse wodehouse wodehouse. he only has a handful of characters so you tend to love most whichever you hit first. for me it was bertie and jeeves, and i was hooked halfway down page 1. here’s the opening lines:
I shall always remember the morning he came. It so happened that the night before I had been present at a rather cheery little supper, and I was feeling pretty rocky. On top of this I was trying to read a book Florence Craye had given me. She had been one of the house-party at Easeby, and two or three days before I left we had got engaged. I was due back at the end of the week, and I knew she would expect me to have finished the book by then. You see, she was particularly keen on boosting me up a bit nearer her own plane of intellect. She was a girl with a wonderful profile, but steeped to the gills in serious purpose. I can’t give you a better idea of the way things stood than by telling you that the book she’d given me to read was called “Types of Ethical Theory,” and that when I opened it at random I struck a page beginning:–
_The postulate or common understanding involved in speech is certainly co-extensive, in the obligation it carries, with the social organism of which language is the instrument, and the ends of which it is an effort to subserve._
All perfectly true, no doubt; but not the sort of thing to spring on a lad with a morning head.
May 22nd, 2006 at 5:37 pm
This post has been removed by the author.
May 22nd, 2006 at 5:41 pm
oh crap, herebe snuck in while i was typing.
hey hb: i am uncomfortable with your statement above: that fantasy ends with LOTR. jrr deliberately wrote lotr as an agglomeration of gothic/celtic fantasy in a victorian-reconstructed-celtic-fantasy milieu, as part of and accompanying his teaching of same to uni students. he was unusual for his dedication to back-story and to language, and he salted his creations quite nicely with out-of-milieu words to keep it from bogging down while remaining familiar (the romantic “Smaug” for example).
but, could you say he did anything new? could you say he did anything different in nature (NOT scale) from what was written before or since?
i’d argue quite the opposite. he deliberately rewrote previous fantasies (and myths — e.g. shebol’s stabbing/thingummy’s poison-spitting dragon slaying). he just added a rich backdrop. (and some literary ability
i would definitely agree that, by its sheer depth and sheer scale, subsequent fantasy fiction has very often been measured against it, and hence held to conform to its elements. that is: it has become a benchmark. like the bible versus all the other books written 2000+ years ago.
but lotr was itself conforming to those same pre-existing ur-elements.
lotr was unusual re its richness of backstory and meta-unusual in that it deliberately played on existing memes.
but i regard it as only a landmark on pretty flat timeline.
May 23rd, 2006 at 11:19 am
“Smaug” from German for Worm and High Gothic for Smoke…
I don’t think that fantasy ends with LOTR. Not at all. But it does represent the first consolidation of the epic fantasy form. Look at the structure and the themes. Trilogic structure, good versus evil, a weapon of power, a quest, an unlikely band of brothers, reluctant hero versus all powerful nemesis etc etc…
And now spring forward to…
The Sword of Shangalangalangalanglang
(for example)
It’s no secret that Tolks used his academic resources and personal interests to shape and create the narrative. The philologist professor in him created the (working) languages he ascribes to various races, giving them a linguistic history and concomitant cultural history; the literature prof in him readily ransacked the literature he loved most for inspiration. The lonely mountain? Mirkwood? The Misty Mountains? They’re all geographical landscapes lifted straight from Norse literature of the dark ages/early medieval period. The dwarves names in The Hobbit? Lifted wholesale from the Dvergatal of the Prose Edda. Dvergatal? Dwarves List - List of names. His insistence (an insistence which cost his publisher a fortune as the first print of The Hobbit had to be scrapped when the proofers changed his spellings) on using the plural ‘Dwarves’ and ‘Elves’ was explicitly to align his races to those found in Sir Gawain and the Green Night and Beowulf rather than Spensers dwarfs and elfs. Old pre medieval literature and language rather than medieval/romantic. Old English rather than bastardised Norman Latinate English. His meshing of his academic and professional interests and passions with his personal vision makes it such a compelling work. The themes have been done before. He knew this. He used them, borrowed them, reworked them and welded them together. He always wanted to create his own mythology. That turned out to be The Silmarillion - which he couldn’t get a publisher interested in. So he wrote LOTR’s as a recovered fragment of the history of Middle Earth as a bridge to that mythology. His idea was that each would lend the other credence. He wasn’t a man of letters in the sense of being able to bang out a book about whatever was ‘in’. He was a man who had one great project in his life which he spent a lifetime working on. The result is what he left behind. Fantasy has moved on but it is most interesting in areas that have escaped his shadow. Moorcock, for example. Those who retread him are doing a disservice to the labour of love he undertook and the breadth of knowledge, learning and craft he brought to the task.
May 23rd, 2006 at 11:20 am
oh, two more specific books popped into my mind this morning:
• Joe Haldeman’s “All My Sins Remembered”
• John Sladek’s “Tik Tok” (which, among other satires, predicted in the 50s the precise behaviour of today’s HMOs in the US)
May 23rd, 2006 at 12:39 pm
ha! timing! crossed in the net!
“Smaug” is the Romanian (and its surrounds) word for “Dragon”
>But it does represent the first consolidation of the epic fantasy form.
ah ha, right, that makes better sense to me. yes, i agree completely with this.
the second landmark consolidation of epic fantasy form i’d suggest is Star Wars and the third Harry Potter, although HP was not deliberately constructed so.
remind me to post that hilarious .gif which converts the star wars script to harry potter…
back to LOTR musings:
i like the way it is 2 books: the first chapter, and all the rest. the first chapter is a pisstake satire of small village life. and if you want a surreal jolt, spend some time in west jutland: it IS the shire. same sleepy but indefinitely robust people, same landscape, same activities, same culture, even the same houses for gods sake. it was the houses that finally let me put my finger on what it was reminding me of. hobbit holes. for real.
i agree with your description of “not a writer…one project”. you could also say the same thing about moorcock, i’d suggest, although moorcock was actively seeking to be a writer. but all his books are just flavours/facets of the one book. go jc!
jrr’s other books/short stories are nice enough but not arresting. (farmer giles of ham etc)
i do find it amusing how LOTR has been canonised, such that certain core added memes of his are accepted as tropes and can be re-used without comment and without requiring explanation. orcs and [tolkien’s preferred flavour of] elves, mostly.
i would venture to suggest also that any genre-encompassing analysis of fantasy fiction is deficient if it doesn’t include the phenomenal impact on the world of fantasy-fiction-readers of Dungeons & Dragons. the interactivity (a core human ur-meme) built its own community (corollary: Web 2.0 swamping preWeb with only a tiny fraction of the preceding memes surviving but exponentially wider broadcast), and introduced far greater homogeneity as a result, as interactive communities tend to (need to) collapse to norms. (reduces interperson communication drag) since D&D most heavily drew on LOTR and Zelazny’s Lhankmar, those ideas developed their own self-reinforcing community and became memes/tropes.
i would argue also that i can see at least one clear post-LOTR addition to the fantasy genre, and that is the idea of Place subsuming/encompassing Characters/Events. altho i suppose it’s arguable that the Silmarillion was the place, LOTR&THobbit were the two riffs on the Place. but the counter-argument was that THobbit was only written as backstory, so lotr is THE story and silmarillion is just jrr’s own preparation for that one-off.
Roger Zelazny’s Lhankmar stories and Howard’s Conan stories are quite similar in that the main characters are small fish in a much bigger and heavily developed world (LOTR’s background by comparison is quite a light or stagey or melodramatic context)(think soap opera versus hollywood blockbuster), and in that they are not heroes or even the main players in what’s going on (think soap opera versus hollywood blockbuster). (conan is interesting btw, as a meme: howard continually described him as a thief, but his surviving meme is that of all-conquering warrior. (my personal framework: the latter best fits some widespread aspirational ur-memes so that subset survived in the popular mind)) and both are similar to Judge Dredd. judge dredd is NOT the main character in his strips: he is just a principal supporting actor. the main character is Mega City One. zelazny’s Faffhyrd and Grey Mouser are actors on the stage of Lhankmar, and Conan is an actor on the stage of a conflated EurAfrica. Salinger writes similarly: repeatedly riffing on the same few characters in the same restricted context, but his “Place” is “current” society/the social framework of his characters.
an interesting deliberate extension of this was the fantasy series “Thieves’ World”, where instead of one author riffing repeatedly on a set of characters in A Place, a large number of authors each riffed ONCE on the same characters in the same Place (city).
interestingly, this arose from a particular roleplaying event which happened to include some fantasy authors. who were so taken by the depth and richness of the backstory that they wanted to add to it.
interestingly, this concept arose from another roleplaying game that was fundamentally different from any other: RuneQuest. (which also was the source of the name for Honda’s revolutionary lightweight mega sportsbike: the FireBlade). there, the backstory was vast and deep and was driven by fiction writers and mythology students. and the core contributor was a passionate student of meta-mythology : what DRIVES myths, how do they EVOLVE, what EFFECT does that have. and similar to tolkien, he wrote his own universe. differently, he then invited others in, rather than simply showing them the result.
you can get lost for hours in the explanations of the myths, in the rolling balances of power, in how the myths both create and are created by the societies and their conflicts. trolls are autistic humans: more honest, more brutal, less cruel; elves are vicious mobile plants, dwarves love clockwork, chaos is a tool, death is a power, gods are variable.
also interesting: that world’s progenitor moved on to create a sequel game that was essentially competitive story-telling. which i believe cuts at one key aspect of the very essence of which fantasies survive and propagate and which whither. religions, for example.
May 23rd, 2006 at 2:18 pm
“But the counter-argument was that THobbit was only written as backstory”
The Hobbit was rewritten as a back story once T realised that his sequel to it (TLOR) offered him a chance to develop his own personal mythology. Specifically, he rewrote Chapter seven to turn the ring from a standard issue magic ring found in all good old english tales and romance fairytales into something slightly more weighty and sinister. This was in about 1945 - 46 - around the same time that Tolks realised that he’d spent more time writing the sequel to TH than he had writing the original and that it was already twice as long. What he didn’t know was that it would be another decade before it was published. It was published unfinished in T’s eyes. He was revising it for the umpteenth time when his publisher, Unwin, after a seventeen year wait, got sick of waiting, drove to Oxford, stole the manuscript and had it typeset and printed. TH was a story he made up for his kids in the 30’s - one of the winter reads he jotted down. TLOTR’s was, in his words, ‘my lifes blood. Whether it runs thick or thin, I cannot tell. I only know this.’
May 23rd, 2006 at 2:54 pm
>i like the way it is 2 books: the first chapter, and all the rest.
same as Slaughterhouse 5
(notice the amusing insight you get into the day-to-day processes of libraries when you see that british libraries automatically put a sticker on copies of “Slaughterhouse 5″ tagging it as “Comedy/Humour”, and move it to a separate section for the simple-minded.)
May 24th, 2006 at 8:56 am
(hey, that comment by hb wasn’t inserted there yesterday — what fiendish game is blogger playing?)
ta hb, i always get it muddled as to whether TH’s actual writing-time predated or was interlaced with LOTR. be assured, i will have forgotten again in another couple of years.
May 24th, 2006 at 9:32 am
Bloody hell this is getting really interesting and I’m too snowed under with work to comment on any of it. I’ll post my own twopennorth worth later.
And I don’t know what bloggers doing at the moment. It’s been behaving really strangely recently.
One brief point though (which has nothing to do with the main argument)
be thankful your library stocks a copy of Slaughterhouse 5 - no matter what section they put it into. Mine seems to have the entire output of every chick lit writer ever published under one roof. (and there are only so many times you can read about a harum scaarum not conventionally attractive, has a passion for shoes, needs to find the right man after a failed relationship, seems to hold down a brilliant high flying career despite being singlarly inept at it heroine. And the number of times is….twice)