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LotR and Potter: some notes

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As I said above, I came reluctantly and very late to the Harry Potter saga, as a Tolkien fan prepared to be dismissive. And I was thoroughly won over. Rowling’s work may fall short of Tolkien’s in sheer mythological scope, grandeur and sublimity; yet it also exceeds its predecessor in other areas –Rowling, for instance, is far better at building, and managing, suspense.

Here are some of the many parallels and echoes — and some central differences — between the two works that I noticed as I raced through the Potter books these past weeks. These notes are offered as a comparison between two masterworks, with no particular agenda and no desire to rank them. (Spoiler alert: if you’re in the dwindling portion of the populace that has not yet read the Potter cycle, you’ll probably want to skip the rest.)

In Tolkien’s work, as in its mythic models, good and evil are pre-existing poles to which characters, and whole races, simply align. There are complex characters in Lord of the Rings whose nature is ambiguous — Boromir, in his way, or Gollum, in his — but they are rarities. We do not particularly know or care how or why Sauron became the Dark Lord; that is simply what he is. Rowling’s Dark Lord has a personal history that explains, though hardly excuses, his evildoing: indeed, Harry’s gradual discovery of that history — and how it in part parallels his own — forms one of the central arcs of Rowling’s books.

Frodo and Harry are both “little” people who have greatness thrust upon them, but Frodo is more truly a nobody; Harry, though Rowling makes a little fun of his status as “the Chosen One,” is born to specialness — it’s just that he’s still a kid when we meet him, and he needs to grow into his power.

Both Frodo and Harry are orphans raised by uncles — but for Harry, this fact is formative, where for Frodo it seems almost incidental. The Potter books are all about families and Family: the bad guys believe in an aristocracy based on bloodline; the good folks understand family as a bond of love. The evil regimes of both worlds bear resemblance to the Third Reich, but in Rowling’s books the racial-purity parallel is explicit. The Potter series makes a case for tolerance, diversity, and the cherishing of misfits that is more thoroughly modern than Tolkien’s. The redemption of house elves like Dobby and Kreacher recalls the partial redemption of Gollum, but Tolkien would never frame this as a matter of “liberation.” (Of course, when Rowling does so, it’s with a healthy dose of humorous irony.)

The tale of The Lord of the Rings unfolds across the long majestic arc of a single quest, where the Potter books are more episodic: each new book brings a whole new set of Maguffin-like objects and new information. On the other hand, Rowling’s work proceeds across its own grand trajectory — that of Harry’s bildungsroman, his coming of age, worked out year by Hogwarts year, mystery by solved mystery.

The similarity of the Ring and the Horcruxes is obvious — objects that each Dark Lord has endowed with a portion of his power and that must be destroyed. As Frodo’s quest nears its conclusion, the Ring grows heavy and painful and begins to have a mind of its own; the Horcrux that Harry and his companions haul around through much of their final book is particularly Ring-like in this way. Frodo gradually spends more and more time in the darkness of Sauron’s dimension; Harry, similarly, finds his scar aching and his mind tracking Voldemort’s. The long passages in The Deathly Hallows in which Harry, Ron and Hermione hole up in a tent on the run from Voldemort’s Ministry share the narrative shape and emotional desolation of the chapters in The Two Towers and The Return of the King that follow Frodo and Sam on their lonely journey into Mordor.

There’s probably a zillion other interesting points of overlap or contrast. That Potter provides fodder for this sort of comparison is, I think, a tribute to Rowling’s achievement. Now I’d better go back and re-read His Dark Materials — I’m afraid that I read Pullman’s books on such thin sleep (we had babies then) that I remember little of them, other than my delight.

[tags]Harry Potter, Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, J.K. Rowling[/tags]

No obligation to be famous

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My exposure to the strange music and story of Jandek, the reclusive Texan singer-songwriter, has been limited to occasional enthusiastic mentions by John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats. But NPR did a story about Jandek last night that concluded with this observation by critic Douglas Wolk. It bears repetition:

“There’s not an obligation to be famous,” Wolk says. “We live in a culture that has impressed on us the idea that everybody not only can be famous, but should or must be famous, and if you’re not famous, you’ve failed, and if you’re making art and the world doesn’t cheer you, then it’s a failure, and that’s just a lie. And it’s a lie that Jandek realizes is a lie, and he’s gotten around it his own way.”

[tags]jandek, fame, celebrity[/tags]

Returning, Pensievely

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Apologies for the extended bout of blog hooky. My excuses are not all that profound. Mostly, I’ve been finishing up the new book proposal. Also, riding herd on a long-drawn-out basement remodeling project which should allow us, belatedly, to provide each of our now-eight-year-old boys with their own bedroom turf. (I think the term defensible turf is relevant here.)

And also, finally, I have been catching up with the rest of the known universe and plowing my way through the Harry Potter cycle. As a Tolkien cultist from youth, I’d long resisted, but the time finally came, and — while I remain a Tolkien man through-and-through — I freely admit to the addictive nature of J.K. Rowling’s books: she has created a worthier world than I’d expected from the Oxbridgian mimicry and the iconic images (impossibly cute round-spectacled kid face with robes and wand, etc.) that represent it on and beyond the covers of the books themselves.

This passage (from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) describing Dumbledore’s Pensieve caught my blog-enchanted eye. (Of course many others had previously noticed the same parallel.)

“What is it?” Harry asked shakily.

“This? It is called a Pensieve,” said Dumbledore. “I sometimes find, and I am sure you know the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind.”

“Er,” said Harry, who couldn’t truthfully say that he had ever felt anything of the sort.

“At these times,” said Dumbledore, indicating the stone basin, “I use the Pensieve. One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one’s mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one’s leisure. It becomes easier to spot patterns and links, you understand, when they are in this form.”

Easier to spot patterns and links, indeed!

[tags]harry potter, pensieve[/tags]

Norman Mailer, 1923-2007

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I got my start in journalism-for-pay writing book reviews for the Village Voice and the Boston Phoenix. My editor at the Phoenix in those days (the early ’80s), Kit Rachlis, believed in giving young writers challenges — bless him. So one day I found myself staring at the forbidding 700-page mass of a new book by Norman Mailer titled Ancient Evenings — the celebrated novelist’s self-declared bid for literary immortality.

Somebody had to review it, and it really helped if that somebody didn’t have a day job.

The novel, set in ancient Egypt, is widely considered unreadable today — typically, by people who have not read it. And, to be honest, I don’t know if I’d have finished it had I not been paid to do so. But I was glad I did. The book, for all its mad excess, constituted a remarkable act of imaginative ambition — and even if Mailer only made good on a fraction of his self-dare, to see if he could get inside the world-view of a distant age, that was…something.

So — after immersing myself in Mailer’s voluminous body of work, reading his best, from The Naked and the Dead to Advertisements for Myself to Armies of the Night to The Executioner’s Song, along with a smattering of his not-best, of which there was plenty — I gave the book one of its few mixed reviews. And one day, in my infrequently-visited freelance writer’s mailbox, I found a little note from the author — thanking me, graciously, not for whatever praise I might have offered, but for what must have been my evident effort to approach the book on its own terms.

Now, on the one hand, for Mailer to have sent such a note violated what I, in my morally prescriptive youth, thought of as the impenetrable barricade that must always separate Artist from Critic. On the other hand, I was an aspiring little nobody just out of college, and he was Norman Mailer. I let pride win out over any sense of impropriety, and took the note as a rare sign of encouragement from the universe that my decision to set forth on the road of a writing career had not been entirely foolhardy.

At the moment of Mailer’s passing it’s worth remembering how much of his work centered on the moment of death. Ancient Evenings begins at the moment immediately following its narrator’s death, and its story is told from the perspective of this post-mortem residue, a “Ka” in the Egyptian nomenclature. “In the disorienting lightning flash of the book’s first page,” I wrote back in 1983, “the reader has no idea who the narrator is, but the narrator’s worse off — he has no idea what he is.”

Ancient Evenings also turns out to be a sequel to Mailer’s last big book. Another death-haunted story, full of musings about reincarnation, The Executioner’s Song built up slowly to full volume at Gary Gilmore’s execution, then dropped into silence. Ancient Evenings picks up at the very next moment. Although the two books’ material couldn’t be more different (one is a collation of the mundane, the other a heap of the spectacular), they’re both written in blunt, hard monosyllables that show the author off more humbly and impressively than the assertive baroque extravagance he used to employ. The sentences of Ancient Evenings are like blocks of stone heaved laboriously into place, and if the strain occasionally shows, the sight almost always elicits awe.

Here’s to Mailer’s Ka, wherever it may be.
[tags]norman mailer, criticism, ancient evenings, obituaries[/tags]

Marshall McLuhan and the Web: Hot, cold, or ?

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Today Nick Carr — whose new book, The Big Switch, comes out in January — has an interesting piece about McLuhan and today’s Web. Although Wired hoisted the Canadian media theorist into the digital era as its “patron saint” (the company’s book imprint even republished a couple of his collaborations with Quentin Fiore), it’s always been difficult to figure out how, exactly, to apply McLuhan’s theories to the Web. I took a stab at it in 1995 (an effort to which Carr kindly links), suggesting that the Web was neither a “hot” medium nor a “cold” one but rather some weird new lukewarm hybrid:

It remains almost exclusively a medium that transmits and reproduces vast quantities of text at high speeds. McLuhan interpreted the evolution of writing from ideograms and stone tablets to alphabetic characters and print reproduction as a “hotting up” “to repeatable print intensity.” By that standard, the Net is boiling.

On the other hand, its functional characteristics match those McLuhan identified as cool. There’s no question that the Internet is among the most participatory media ever invented, like the cool telephone. And its cultural patterns — with its oral-tradition-style transmission of myth and its collective anarchy — match those of McLuhan’s tribal global village.

…McLuhan said that all media are tranquilizers, but these hot-and-cold media have an especially potent numbing effect: They seduce us into lengthy engagement, offer us a feeling of empowerment and then glut our senses till we become indifferent.

My view of the Web has probably grown more positive since then; my own experience over the past 12 years has been one of growing engagement rather than creeping indifference. I think I was too pessimistic about the downside of glut.

But I think McLuhan would probably have shared that pessimism. He’s usually remembered in his high-priest-of-the-’60s mode, as a critic all too willing to dance on the grave of print. What I found when I dug deeper into McLuhan’s writings in the course of reviewing his biography for the Washington Post in 1997 (that piece is no longer available online so I’ve posted it here) was considerably more complex. He was, it turned out, most decidedly a lover of print himself.

In a 1959 letter, decades before the popularization of the Internet, he predicted: “When the globe becomes a single electronic computer, with all its languages and cultures recorded on a single tribal drum, the fixed point of view of print culture becomes irrelevant and impossible, no matter how precious.”

Ultimately, McLuhan’s perspective remains valuable more as a provocation to critical thought than as a fully worked out critical framework. He overloaded so many meanings on terms like “hot” and “cold” media that they could come to mean whatever you wanted them to mean. But there remains lasting value in McLuhan’s grand challenge to us — that we step out of the media bath in order to understand its effects on our organisms. What we most remember is his descriptive writing that mapped the impact of new media forms. We forget his prescriptive goal, of “immunizing” us from the worst influences of those media.

Carr reminds us of this in recalling McLuhan’s prophetic warning about the manipulative power of corporate media: “Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit by taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.”
[tags]marshall mcluhan, media studies, nicholas carr[/tags]

Ecco on Mac, Gibson on books

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I’ve been laying low this week completing a draft of a new book proposal. More on that as we get closer to the finish line. This is the first year I’ve not attended the Web 2.0 conference, but, you know, I need to focus — and I think I wasn’t that eager to hear Rupert Murdoch, anyway.

In the meantime, I’m happy to report that I have successfully managed to get Ecco Pro running on a Mac via Parallels. I actually achieved this goal a decade ago using Virtual PC, but boy was it slow! The Parallels set up, by contrast, is snappy and, so far, foolproof. Thanks to all of you who advised me on this dilemma. Very exciting. (The “coherence” mode of Parallels is remarkable — its puts the Windows taskbar and WinXP program windows on an equal footing on the Mac screen with the OSX stuff, turning your display into a sort of operating-system hermaphrodite.)

As I close in on my next book-project goal, I would also like to draw your attention to this quotation from William Gibson (in a Washington Post interview from last month), musing on the persistence of the book:

It’s the oldest and the first mass medium. And it’s the one that requires the most training to access. Novels, particularly, require serious cultural training. But it’s still the same thing — I make black marks on a white surface and someone else in another location looks at them and interprets them and sees a spaceship or whatever. It’s magic. It’s a magical thing. It’s very old magic, but it’s very thorough. The book is very well worked out, somewhat in the way that the wheel is very well worked out.

[tags]books, william gibson, ecco, ecco pro, parallels[/tags]

Good music: Mekons, TMBG, Black Francis

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Some new music I’ve been enjoying from three artists/bands whose work I’ve been following since the mid or late ’80s:

The Mekons, “Natural”: Their last collection of new material, “OOOH,” was an exploration of religion and ritual; this new batch takes a turn to the pastoral. Rough-hewn even in this laid-back mode; mysteriously allusive as always; and worth heavy rotation as ever.

They Might Be Giants, “The Else”: I never fully warmed to their previous outing, “The Spine,” but “The Else” strikes me as a return to form. I’m enjoying it and — even though this is ostensibly a “grownup” album and not one of the band’s “children’s music” works — so are my seven-year-olds. Standout tracks: the patter-song “Bee of the Bird of the Moth” (is it an ode about genetic engineering? I don’t know, but I’ll remember the “Sleep of Reason Corporation”!) and “Contre Coup” (a song about phrenology, concussions and love), which introduced me to the obscure word “limerent.”

Black Francis, “Bluefinger”: Frank Black reverts to his old Pixies moniker for this new album, inspired (as the folks in the FrankBlack.net forum figured out and the official site confirms) by the life saga of Dutch glam rocker Herman Brood. Hard for me to see how all 11 tracks fit that template. But it’s easy for me to love the entire album, which marks a return to energetic form after Black’s previous duo of interesting but somewhat enervated discs recorded in Nashville. Standout songs: Beastie-Boys-style rave up “Threshold Apprehension,” in which Black shrieks and yowls like he hasn’t since Pixie days; “Lolita,” which sounds like one of the great numbers from the days of Frank Black and the Catholics (reminiscent of the Jonathan Richman tribute “The Man Who Was Too Loud”); the singalong “She Took All of the Money”; and “Angels Come to Comfort You,” which rises to the catchiest, sunniest chorus of death you can imagine.

I missed TMBG on their current tour — they swung through the Bay Area while I was out of town last week — but it seems that both the Mekons and Frank Black/Black Francis are performing over the next week at the Cafe du Nord. I expect to be there.

Berkeley talk, Chandler, Barcamp, Citizen Josh

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I have been hunkered down getting my life (and a mountain of notes and research) in order. Here’s a grab-bag of items:

  • On Wednesday I spent the afternoon at UC/Berkeley at the kind invitation of Bill Allison, and talked with a thoughtful, interested group of faculty, administrators and IT people about Dreaming in Code and the wider topic of software’s innate difficulties. Berkeley, along with a number of other institutions, is about to kick off an ambitious project to build a new platform for much of its underlying digital infrastructure. Chandler, whose slow progress Dreaming in Code chronicled, has a university tie-in as well, and these folks are smart and foresightful enough to want to try to understand what pitfalls they might be facing.

    Too often, groups embark on big new software ventures as if they are the first pioneers ever to walk down their particular path, when in fact most of the field is full of well-worn roads (and the roads usually lead into one or another ditch). So hats off to my Berkeley neighbors for wanting to study an at least partial map of the terrain.

  • Speaking of Chandler, the folks at OSAF are closing in on a major release, called Preview, later this month. I’ll be writing more about it here as it unfolds.
  • Barcamp Block: This marks the second anniversary of Barcamp, a self-organizing conference for geeks, startup companies and related phenomena. It’s down in Palo Alto this coming weekend, it looks like great fun and interesting people, and I’m planning to be there, at least for the first day.

[tags]uc berkeley, chandler, barcamp, josh kornbluth[/tags]

Meerkats inspire Wikipedia fracas

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MeerkatI watch precious little TV, but I had a long flight home late at night last Friday, and was brain-dead after too many hours awake but too wired to go to sleep. So I flipped the channels on Jetblue until I found myself staring at a group of a half-dozen or so of what looked like hybrid squirrel-rats, with raccoon eyes, who stood on their hind legs like begging dogs, only with an attentive, thousand-yard stare.

Meerkats. How little I knew! The show, Meerkat Manor — apparently, a big hit over on Animal Planet — follows a meerkat tribe or clan or whatever the term is. There’s a dominant female — she’s the only one allowed to breed — and a dominant male and a bunch of offspring. They hide from Kalahari predators in elaborate burrows — the title’s “manor” — but also engage in fierce territorial strife with other meerkat gangs.

Maybe it was my sleep deprivation, but I found these meerkats intensely dramatic: family tragedy, clan warfare, survival vs. the elements, all enacted by cute critters with sharp claws. The show anthropomorphizes its subjects to a degree that probably makes serious wildlife students cringe; each animal gets a name (like “Zaphod” and “Mozart” and “Flower”) and the gangs are “Whiskers” and “Lazuli” and such. In each show’s intro the meerkats are even given hushed voice-overs. But then the rest of the show proceeds in a less ridiculous, hyper-documentary mode. And fiber-optic cameras show you the action down in the burrows themselves! In this view, the meerkats all look like shoplifters caught on some dim subterranean security camera.

It was over to Wikipedia for me, to learn more. There I discovered that the show’s Wikipedia entry was under lock-down. There’d been an edit war over the meerkats! But why? Apparently some contributors posted information about some major deaths among the Whiskers in the latest season of the show. But that season hasn’t been aired yet in many places, so other contributors view the information as spoilers. And that has led to a fight. If you visit the discussion page you can follow an impassioned debate over whether it is possible to have a spoiler for a work of non-fiction.

If only the meerkats knew what mischief they were making for this strange species that’s filming them.
[tags]meerkat manor, documentaries, wikipedia[/tags]

A rat’s apprenticeship

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I loved Ratatouille, the new Pixar film from Brad Bird, as much as so many of the critics did. But there’s one little aspect of it that struck me as, not exactly wrong, but off.

Remy the rat is plainly born with the gift of taste; he apprehends flavors in a way his rat relatives simply can’t, and he is passionate about food from the start.

In the course of the film (I do not believe the following is a significant spoiler) he develops into an extraordinarily talented chef able to please demanding customers and wow the haute-est critics.

In my view, great creators are born and made. To arrive at the top of any field, you have to start with some kind of gift, some genetic bounty. But most stories of achievement — in any field that is both craft and art, which means virtually any field — also involve a phase of learning, of apprenticeship, of buckling down and arriving at mastery through repetition. Shakespeare acted and wrote forgettable stuff like the three parts of Henry VI; The Beatles did their time in the cellars of Hamburg.

But there is something of a lacuna in Ratatouille when it comes to this phase of Remy’s chefly evolution. It’s true that the rat finds a mentor in a deceased chef named Gusteau — and his bestselling tome, Anyone Can Cook. The book seems to serve as Remy’s teacher, and the chef himself becomes a sort of tutelary spirit. But we really don’t see Remy learn or make mistakes. He transforms in a blink from the rat equivalent of a foodie into a world-class chef.

Ratatouille is wonderful. But its shape as an artistic biography (portrait of the culinary artist as a young rat) would have been more graceful had it included episodes showing Remy the journeyman, in transition from gifted amateur to seasoned pro. Instead, Remy’s relationship to his talent is the same as the one the heroes of Bird’s previous movie, The Incredibles, had with their superpowers: The gift is simply a given. There’s no sign of the perspiration behind the inspiration.
[tags]movies, ratatouille[/tags]