Singing Praise for Tolkien

I've defended Tolkien before.

I, too, walked away from him during my jean-jacketed, moppy-haired, vampire-houred grad school days, when I thought I had outgrown his work. Tolkien's stuff was a cute memory and all -- I looked fondly back at the grandfatherly old pipe-smoker who had opened the door to literature for the music-obsessed teenager that I had once been. Now I had moved on to better things. Raymond Carver. Updike. Steinbeck. That sort of thing.

Truth is, I still love the academically-accepted literature very much. I still think Raymond Carver taught me more about writing than anyone, ever. I still find that Steinbeck (and now, Ursula LeGuin -- that's a post to come) brings me closer to the human heart than anyone ever has. But, dammit, Tolkien was a genius and his work was great on many levels.

I'm currently listening to The Silmarillion on CD (thanks to a loan from my brother-in-law). I have read it before, but it is dense. It's very much like reading the Bible -- which makes sense, because it is the bible of Tolkien's world. It can be hard to stick with. But, in listening to it in the car to and from work, I'm really tuning in to its beauty.

Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Excellent Movie for Those Who Really Know Tolkien

I saw Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey last night.  (We saw it in "IMAX" -- I'm not sure what people think that adds to the movie-watching experience, but...there it is.) I thought the movie was wonderful.

I know. I'm supposed to be disappointed that it wasn't exactly like the book. That's how we lit. nerds and those "fan-boys" are supposed to, as my brother-in-law recently pointed out in conversation, assert our ownership of the material. It is also very (nauseatingly) fashionable to be hard on "prequels" or follow-ups to beloved movies. George Lucas knows this all too well.

Well, I was not disappointed that the movie was different than the book. Jackson and his team did what they needed to do. Remember, please, that this is a statement made by a guy who credits Tolkien and his work with changing his life. Tolkien's works set me on a path I walk until this day.

The Hobbit and the Fruit Bowl

Peter Jackson, director of The Lord of the Rings movies, is not one to let the grass grow under his technological feet. (Hair on top, I'm not sure about.) We already know this, based on the extraordinarily impressive effects in his trilogy. But now, it seems, he has screened parts of the upcoming movie The Hobbit at 48 frames-per-second, twice the speed of the traditional 24 frames-per-second and the reactions were mixed. It seems some people thought the movie just looked too real.

Isn't that interesting? What is even more interesting is that we seem to be sort of alluding to an old debate about art. Is this the new objection to "representational art"? Is Jackson giving us echoes of the perfectly and photographically-rendered bowl of fruit? (As you probably know, many fine artists think photographic-looking art is not art -- that the art comes out of the interpretation of the image. For one example, you might think of the impressionists.) We'll have to see.

The Problem with Tradition

Today, a video game got me thinking about tradition.

My wife bought me "Aragorn's Quest" for Christmas, so I have been playing that for the past few days. My little son -- six -- got interested. Now he's playing it.

He got interested, similarly, in "The Hobbit" video game that I played about a year ago. Today, he started asking me about The Lord of the Rings on which, of course, the "Aragorn's Quest" game is based. Before he played "The Hobbit," we had read the book together, so I had no problem. But we haven't ventured into The Lord of the Rings, yet, so I started having that English teacher feeling -- that "you-should-read-the-book-first" feeling. I felt guilty. After all, the traditional way is to read the book first. Right? Not necessarily. I had to remind myself of this.