Bookish miscellany

My chief amusing anecdote from this week, once again, came as I was jellying my morning toast. One of the programmers demanded to know why all the jam was concentrated in the top of the jar, with a lovely air-bubble beneath.

"I think it's because I stored it upside-down," I said.
"That's not a good reason! You should come up with a better story than that! Just make one up!" (This programmer is like that.)

So I meditated, and Zahn came to my rescue. "I think it's because of the Van der Waal's forces, attracting the jelly to the top..." This was apparently a good answer, as one of the other tech guys started ribbing him about having to Google Van der Waal's forces. :-) It amuses me that The Green and the Gray can make someone sound scientifically literate.

~

In other news, Jonathan and I tracked down another library branch and raided it. I found a collection of essays by A.A. Milne and Meditations on Middle-Earth, by a rather impressive line-up of fantasy authors.

The essays by Milne were, for the most part, airy and readable, often hilarious, but not brilliant. Come to find out he wrote for Punch. No wonder his Pooh books have such a charming style! These essays are more like longish blog posts than anything else. Quite a lot of them have to do with a funny incident with him and his wife Celia.

Possibly the best of the collection was a satire purporting to be an account of a Poetry Reading. He set it at the perfect cusp of British poetic awfulness, that era when earnest fluttering women wrote embarrassing rhymes about Life, and gentlemen of vast proportions wrote galumphing verses about places in England (a send-up of Chesterton, possibly?), and very ugly young men wrote vers libre about ugly modern subjects. The hostess's husband was present in the story, making sardonic comments throughout. It was quite something, especially because, well, I've read a lot of that poetry. Unfortunately.

The Middle-Earth book, as might be expected, was rather a mixed bag. Its worst crime was its truly lousy editing: they let through such howlers as "Sargon" instead of Sauron, and "Owyn" instead of Eowyn. Gah. I suspect "tribute" books usually are mixed, but they should have at least let a fan proofread it.

A lot of the chapters are of the "I discovered Tolkien in the spring of 1967, read the entire trilogy in one sitting, and that's why I'm a fantasy author today" variety; which is of some interest, especially if you know the author and can say, "Ah! So that's why he does such-and-so in his books." Most of these authors do Tolkien the courtesy of not allegorizing him into the dust, and just loving his books for themselves. I can appreciate that.

A couple of the essays, on the other hand, have been quite intelligent discussion, the sort where you can say "Wow, I'd never noticed that, and that's very true." The chapter from Ursula K. Le Guin was like that. She sat down and analyzed how Tolkien used meter in his prose and rhythm in his plot and wound up with his particular special effects.

Orson Scott Card talked about why, perhaps, "serious" literature critics dislike Tolkien. He argued that it was because Tolkien wrote the story to be a story, and not merely a vehicle for interpretable symbols. The Lord of the Rings is something to get emotionally involved in rather than a literary crossword puzzle. He made the distinction between wild story and domesticated stories, i.e. Literature. It's an interesting argument.

And then there was Lisa Goldstein, whom I've never heard of, but she made the intelligent observation that Lord of the Rings is powerful "because we need myth. Not just because myths are entertaining stories, or because some of them come attached with a moral. We need them, the way we need vitamins or sunlight." I think Tolkien would agree with that. Goldstein has obviously been reading Tolkien's other works, On Fairy Stories and maybe "Mythopoeia." And referring to some of the derivative fantasy that tried to follow him: "Some of these books were so bad they wouldn't even make decent landfill."