Two Wonderful Websites! And a New Feature.

     Here are the links to two websites that have given me much pleasure. 

Beowulf on Steorarume

The Story of Mac Dathó's Pig

     I love both of these works (Beowulf is almost meat and drink for me), and it was such a delight to find these sites, kindly put up by some well-read and public-spirited individuals.  There are a few others floating around cyberspace, and I'll post links to them as I find them.

     I've also decided to add a new feature to this blog.  Once a week, I shall post a poem I've come across, along with a few words of my own.  Since I am clever and inventive, I shall name this feature "Poem of the Week."  The only requirement is that the poem be new, that I have not read it before today.  I hope that will keep me reading during the intervals between each poem.

     This week's poem is by Archilochus of Paros, a poet of the 7th Century BC.  The Greeks considered him in the same class as Homer and Hesiod, and he was, as far as we know, one of the first Greeks to be both poet and soldier, the two vocations having been kept ritually separate theretofore.

          My ash spear is my barley bread,
          My ash spear is my Ismarian wine.
          I lean on my spear and drink. 

     I came across these lines while flipping through a textbook one of my friends recently acquired, and I was struck by their simplicity and directness.  One can picture Archilochus resting against his spear, his hide shield slung over his back, and quenching his thirst under the unrelenting Mediterranean sun.  There's something tantalizing, I think, about short poems. They're almost like photographs.  Every word carries such impact, and perhaps it's that, the force of each syllable, that brings the subject of the poem into our minds so vividly.  Or at least into my mind.  I don't mean to speak for anyone else!

Remiss Already!

     Over the past few days I have been fiddling with all the unimportant parts of the blog - templates, backgrounds, trying to re-size the masthead photograph - instead of doing what I am supposed to, which is writing.  It's startling how difficult it can be to think of something to write, really.  Often something will occur to me during the day, but when I sit down to write the ideas seem to flutter away.  The answer, I imagine, is to write more and write more often, so that any errant thoughts are likely to be caught at one point.
     I really enjoy writing.  As I put up my review up the other day, I was reminded of how much I miss writing.  The work in which I am currently involved doesn't require any real writing, but in previous years of study I wrote constantly, and I am sorry that I no longer make much use of my word processor.  I have been told a few times that I am quite critical. Too critical, even.  But I think that I criticize none so harshly as I do myself.  One might almost say that I make an effort to do so, not only from self-castigation but from the fear of being laxer with myself than with someone else.  In consequence I tend to be retrospectively dissatisfied with my work and sometimes cringe at the errors time and distance permit me to detect.  All the same, I take occasional pleasure in rereading some of what I have written in past years.  And even if I didn't, there is value in writing, or in whatever else, if it pleases me at the moment of action.
     I am seated at my IKEA desk.  To my right are an old jar with a few dessicated dahlias, cut near the end of last fall's bountiful crop, a sprig of pine with two small cones my mother gave me before I returned to school this semester, and two jars, one Colman's Mustard and the other an old spice jar, that hold earth from the two places in which I grew up.  Behind them, attached with small magnets to a steel wire, are postcards.  A king from the Lewis Chess Set stares at me, sword across his knees and eyes bulging from his head; below him, the siege of Jerusalem from the Franks Casket; at the bottom, Richard III in miniature, with his axe and crowned sallet, and Percival Thirwall behind him, bearing aloft the White Boar of Gloucester.  To my left, a banker's lamp, papers, medication, and an orange.  From the computer comes the Chanson de Guillaume.  With the blinds closed, I am severed from the world.  I could be on a spaceship, traversing the immeasurable, frigid void, my housemate's music the repetitive grumbling of the FTL engine.  I suppose that this is one of my retreats; certainly, intrusion is unwelcome, and permission to enter rarely given.  I can do little, really, to keep it sequestered when the world is determined to enter: I can fence myself in, but I cannot forever fence it out.  But few indeed are those whom I have been happy to allow in or whom I have wished were present.  Sadly, I cannot rely on it, or on any of the few other retreats I have.  I suppose the only retreat one has is the castle of one's own mind.  Music, weather, landscape, light, and the many other things people use to help themselves think or relax on their own can prepare the mind, they can soothe it and make it receptive, but in the end they are only trappings.  If the castle's gates are barred, no suppliant may enter, howsoever eloquent or desperate his pleading.  I hope, though, that with effort I can make the door-ward less reluctant to lift the portcullis.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

     A few days ago I posted this review of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey on a forum devoted to Middle-Earth.  I was quite pleased with it, so I thought I'd repost it here.

I guess it’s a bit late to wade into this discussion, especially since the movie has been pretty well chewed over by now. But I figure I might as well add my two cents.

I don’t think I need to quibble over the many things Jackson changed, however bothersome or irritating they may be. As Abraham Lincoln said, there are always some fleas a dog can't scratch, and no matter what Jackson changed or omitted (or left in), he was bound to upset somebody. I needn't discuss the particulars, which have already have been endlessly debated in this thread. The subject I intend to address is more general, and though some of the alterations dismayed me greatly as a purist, the real flaws with the movie lie not with Jackson's misapprehension of the vanquishing of the Witch-king or how quickly wargs can traverse the Misty Mountains but with the kind of story Jackson decided to tell. The change in the point, in what one is tempted to call the message, of Bilbo's adventure perturbs me more than whether the spiders of Mirkwood served themselves or the Necromancer.

What makes The Hobbit such an affecting book is that we as readers are so intimately acquainted with Bilbo that we cannot help but identify with him. When he sits outside his doorstep, we sit with him; when he suffers from his journey's discomforts, we share his misery; and when he is terrified or bold or clever, we feel a pulse of fear or a rush of excitement too. Bilbo is the heart of the story, and the adventure unfolds around him; it does what it must to change him as the author desires, but The Hobbit remains concentrated very much on Bilbo and only focuses on the Quest as it concerns him. It is therefore fitting that the real drama unfolds in the quiet moments when Bilbo makes small but important decisions and not during the battles and great exploits, from which Bilbo is largely absent.

Jackson's movie, on the other hand is about the Quest itself. It is about Thorin & Co., it is about the White Council and the Necromancer, and in consequence Bilbo is almost forgotten for much of the movie. In LotR, Jackson kept us close to the protagonists, and we suffered and triumphed with them because we were attached to them. Here, Jackson distracted us with fights, chases, and councils, and our hero, and by extension we ourselves, ceased to be involved in the movie's plot. The only parts of the movie met with almost universal acclaim are the Bag End sequence and the Riddle Game, and I believe they are so popular because they are the only times we really get caught up in the adventure alongside Bilbo. The rest of the movie is Bilbo-less, and lavish as it may be, it offers nobody with whom we can really empathize. To remedy this absence, Jackson invents a few twists (Bilbo's attempt to leave the company while in the cave, his defense of Thorin’s body, etc.) to draw our eyes back to Bilbo, but they are so sudden and contrived that they feel out of place.

Instead of identifying with Bilbo, we are expected to empathize with the many secondary characters whom Jackson has magnified into semi-protagonists. But most of the secondary characters in The Hobbit are intentionally flat and distant, in large part to emphasize how much Bilbo is out of his element. So Jackson has to invent, to cobble together the tiniest of references, and Jackson is no Tolkien. Many of Jackson's errors, both cinematic and "factual," are the result of his having to flesh out the barest mention of characters and character traits. I suppose the interactions between Thorin and Balin were fairly convincing, but apart from them the dwarves remained caricatures rather than characters.

As a result of all the new “dramatic” elements we are forced to endure a great deal of unnecessary dialog, some of which drags on so long that I was almost bored at times. The dwarves’ sending Bilbo to investigate the trolls’ fire, a simple idea conveyed by a sentence or two in the book, turns into five minutes of chit-chat (including a number of “jokes”), for example. This sort of elongation diminished the excitement and damaged the pacing. The same goes for the constant bickering between some of the characters, especially Thorin and Gandalf. To paraphrase Harry S. Plinkett, “people arguing is drama!”

I have come to find Jackson's work somewhat frustrating precisely because some portions of it are so well-wrought; consequently, the disappointing segments are all the more galling. The first twenty or so minutes, the dwarves' song about Smaug, the subtle references to little bits of lore, and some of Jackson's own artistic touches, like the dragon-shaped kite that flies over Dale, are wonderful; indeed, the dwarves' song is one of my favorite scenes from any movie. But these are offset by the all the flaws that other posters have mentioned. I did not dislike this movie, and I enjoyed some parts of it immensely. But I think that Jackson suffered a little bit from George Lucas syndrome. LotR was so well-received and so successful that Jackson, and everybody else, assumed that the Hobbit movies would be an automatic success, and consequently Jackson got carried away a bit. If the prolongations, digressions, and excesses had been reined in somewhat, it would have been a tighter, more effective movie, in no small part because we’d have stuck closer to Bilbo and been able to see the adventure through his eyes. In any case, I hope, as Bilbo says, that the worst part is behind us and that the next installment will be spared some of these flaws.

Once More Unto the Breach

     I've always been a poor diarist, and over the years I have been incapable of finding the presence of mind to write an entry for every week, let alone very day.  My efforts at blogs, plogs, notebooks, and all the rest have failed as well.  Something always managed to interfere with the routine I was trying to establish, which is of course another way of saying that I lacked the discipline and attention to write my entries in spite of the disruptions and distractions.  But I've always been impressed by people who've kept diaries.  It's not just the act of writing, which requires time and effort, nor need it be the style, or even the content.  It's that they managed to preserve, however busy or chaotic their lives were at the time, a few minutes in the day simply for themselves; that during these minutes they could calm their minds enough to reflect on the day's actions or thoughts, explore a subject that interested them, or simply to indulge in fantasy or speculation; and that they considered their own thoughts and comments, serious or idle, worth putting to paper, perhaps worth rereading and reevaluating. 

     It's this last point, as much as all the quotidian impediments, that has kept me from writing down what I think and think about.  My inner monologue has always seemed too unimportant or senseless to preserve; doing so would be almost presumptuous, regardless of what it actually contains.  In consequence,  I have no record of the evolution of my thoughts or imaginings other than my memory, which cannot preserve many of them for future consideration.  I sometimes find myself thinking in loops, revisiting the same ideas without carrying them further, and letting my interests and mental pursuits get stuck in the mire of under-use. 

     Apart from it being useful and helpful to write about what one thinks, I hope that by keeping a record of my thoughts, interests, and speculations I will be able to detect when they are stagnating and, by extension, when I myself stagnate mentally or fall into the patterns of thought that hold me back.  And the habit of consciously setting aside time for thought is one I'd like to acquire.  I flatter myself that anyone who reads this blog will find it diverting and worthwhile, though I can't imagine very many people will come across it; in any case I must and do write for myself and not for an audience.

     And so, in Gottes Namen, as my father sometimes says,  I begin.