Chestnuts, Chestnuts Friday, January 02, 2004

The keeper of the Last Homely House in Jersey City writes:

One of the things that struck me the last time I read the Trilogy was the sense of growing menace at the beginning of Fellowship. Yes, I know that Frodo hangs around the Shire for, like, 20 years or something before he gets up off his ass but still, Tolkien foreshadows the coming
of the Ring Wraiths pretty well. Jackson compressed the timeline (with good reason) but he managed to match the mood very well.

I have a pretty high tolerance for long first acts, if they're well told. I think my impatience with Fellowship now is a symptom of pop-culture brain death (get to the point NOW!) and familiarity with the material. I know the Shire's wonderful, but the bad stuff is more interesting and it's many pages away. In other words, it's my fault, I think, not the material. (Having a smartly structured movie for contrast doesn't help.)

Book/movie contrasts:

--I'm reminded that when I first saw the movie of Fellowship I thought Ian McKellan was too lovable. The Gandalf of the books is a lot grouchier, venal and mischievous (at the expense of the Hobbits and Dwarves).

--Merry is Frodo's closest friend, and he and Pippin are definitely not "paired up" at the start of the books. Sam, meanwhile, isn't exactly in the circle; he's clearly a servant, not a buddy.

General observation:

--There's a lot of grace at work in "The Hobbit." I wouldn't want to write a dissertation on the topic, but it seems that there are a number of cases where Bilbo is in a tight spot and makes a "Christian" decision over an expedient one--and is then saved by a bit of miraculous luck. He decides, for example, not to kill Gollum when he has the chance. Then he narrowly avoids dashing out his brains on the cavern ceiling when he leaps over Gollum, and makes a miraculous escape from the goblins. He soon after decides to go back into the caves to look for his friends, rather than escape--and then all of a sudden he hears them in a clearing nearby.

As David Brin once said of Luke Skywalker, "He's a good dude who remembers his friends."

@ 12:17:00 PM, ,

Yellow Eye in Blue Face

A leisurely New Year's Day, now a hectic year begins. Re-reading Tolkien, since I seem to forget everything besides Tom Bombadil after a year or two. The Hobbit is one hell of a book. In simple language that proceeds briskly, it prefigures the themes of the trilogy (maybe unconsciously) and much of the plot, too: Plenty of references to Moria, Numenoreans, Saruman and Sauron.

Interesting stuff:

--"The Shire" is never mentioned, nor is "Middle-Earth."

--The elves and goblins are near mirror-images of each other (elves being gay, ahem, and sing-songy; the elves delighting in their cruelty and mischief, taunting their captives with rhymes).

--The Battle of the Five Armies seems more like Tolkien's comment on the trenches of World War I than anything in the trilogy does. It starts in pride and misunderstanding and is ennobled only by the attack of the goblins (with the Eagles showing up to save the day. Woodrow Wilson & Co.?).

Fellowship, meanwhile, is disappointingly slow going. I always enjoyed that one best, but I'm nearly at page 200 and they still haven't gotten to Bree. Score one for Peter Jackson et al. The beginning is far too leisurely and, I think, off-putting if you're not committed to the story. Maybe things will improve when the guy from The Matrix shows up...

@ 8:57:00 AM, ,

Fever, Yea, I Burn Forsooth Wednesday, December 31, 2003

But is it art? I'm trying to decide if Miss Peggy has the same heft as the 1950s Sinatra. She has a hell of a voice but the Sinatra stuff seems to have all of the universe inside it. You know what I mean? You listen to one of the best records, and you get the feeling it includes the whole world, that you don't need to know anything outside that album--it doesn't exclude any nuance of feeling or history or society. Peggy's got a hell of a voice, and makes some wonderful pop songs, but I don't know if she has the same depth.

Mark Steyn, my commentating hero, on the late Miss Lee:

RIP, PEGGY LEE -- or "Miss Peggy Lee," as her stationery insisted. Some years back, I spent two days interviewing Miss Lee for a series about her songwriting that never got made. She was in her Marlon-Brando-in-drag phase then: huge puffy cheeks and big black eyelashes that rendered her eyes entirely invisible. What I could see was the mark on one side of her face, from the heavy metal-ended razor-strap her ugly stepmother beat her with during her grim North Dakota childhood. (Heavy makeup covered the scar in public.) But she still had a great voice. I'd heard that the first lyric she came up with, at the age of four, when her mother died, was something called Mama's Gone To Dreamland On The Train, and I was crass enough to ask her how the rest of it went. She dodged that one, but she did sing me Bella Notte from her score for Lady and the Tramp.

The composer and critic Alec Wilder put it best: He compared her voice to a streetwalker you'd pass by, but, if you ever stopped, you'd never leave. There were lots of great girl singers after the war -- Doris Day, Dinah Shore, Rosie Clooney -- but she chose better material and sang it like she'd lived it.

@ 4:42:00 PM, ,

I Enjoy Being a Girl

Or at fuddy-duddy, at least. In a fit of obiesance to my mother's opinion, I picked up Peggy Lee's "Beauty and the Beat" and am giving it a third listen in the office. ("She was the sexiest woman I ever saw," said Mama WTJ. "She could do more by just raising one eyebrow..." Not sure what Pappa WTJ thinks of her, although he has a well-documented fondness for both Brigette Bardot and Fran Drescher, so clearly he's got his guns pointed in the right direction.)

Back to Peggy: I was going to say the record blows me away, but it's just the opposite. It anchors me in place, in the best sense. It sounds like sanity: small joys and modestly wistful moments. A Faberge egg, a music box, tiny and precise.

This is a larger thought than I have time to explore, but the record is a reminder that humans have been working on their emotions for thousands and thousands of years, and that being "primal" (i.e. most of contemporary music) doesn't equate with being "true." A mud hut is true, but Versaille is truer. Chew on that. Happy new year.

@ 2:08:00 PM, ,

Bayonne, When the Walls Fell

Happy New Year, almost. No top tens or anything. The best books I read were by dead Brits, the best music was sung by a stiff from Hoboken. (Not forgetting Donald and Walter's latest, of course.) I don't remember any movies I saw, except one.

Anyhow, a dumb day ahead and a lousy year behind. Believe it or not, I have high hopes for the next. Love to all.

@ 8:29:00 AM, ,

Abiding in the Fields Sunday, December 28, 2003

What a weekend! Two days with six kids, who ran us ragged. (Particularly my new buddy, my wee nephew-in-law, who shot me dead several times and breathed fire on Mrs. WTJ. Before leaping on me to crush me, he said, "You should cover your penis." Kids today!) Aside from the company, the best present was time: I got to spend a few hours at my favorite out-of-the-way bookstore, a converted barn in the wilds of the Catskills, and got to chatting with the owner. He promsed to teach me how to be unemployable.

Saw the Progenitors today. My mother is an astonishingly generous gift-giver, and presented us with boatloads of wonderful things, including three (!) homemade (!) boutique-quality (!) sweaters for Mrs. WTJ. Out to a hearty meal at the local Italian, which I know from personal experience is a haunt of the Mayor of Bayonne. We run in high circles here.

I haven't had many other good thoughts for my friend, with whom I started a religious conversation a while ago, so I pawned him off onto G.K. Chesterton (who I'd be cribbing from anyway). But I found a great paragraph in an article from the Catholic magazine First Things that bears on the discussion:

[Iris Murdoch] is God-obsessed, although she again and again [in a book of interviews] says that she does not believe in God. At least not in the God of the Christianity that, she insists, she cherishes. One interviewer suggests that she is devoted to Christianity without God but has found that it doesn't work. Murdoch doesn't disagree. She cannot believe in a personal God, she says, because God cannot be "a thing among other things." That is disappointing. One learns in Christian Theology 101 that God is not a thing among things, an existent among existents, but the Absolute Being of all that is, was, or ever can be. But apparently Iris Murdoch did not learn that in her Anglo-Irish Protestant childhood. It is truly disconcerting how often this happens. One encounters people who say they do not believe in God only to discover, upon examination, that the God they do not believe in I do not believe in either.

The final point is an excellent one. I had strong faith when I was a kid, strong but shallow--and it vanished as soon as it was disturbed by historical analysis and contrary viewpoints. It took me a long time to realize that I had lost faith in a straw man version of religion, not the genuine article; and that I was rebelling against the poor teaching of hateful nuns and cunning Jesuits, not the core of Catholicism.

In short, I don't believe in a cruel, oppressive, guilt-dealing God either. That's a convenient picture for bad teachers to paint, but it does no justice whatsoever to the truth.

@ 6:28:00 PM, ,