Reading and listening, mostly
This year has flashed past, and I've read hardly anything in the way of serious whole-book reading, and now I'm turning to in an attempt to better that poor record. The book in hand (ie on screen) is The Prime Minister spurred thereto by blueinkedpalm's comments on some preceding Trollope novels, most recently The Eustace Diamonds and Phineas Redux. I've enjoyed her thoughts so much! And the interesting scraps of side-knowledge she finds, as for example that Trollope's publishers jibbed at the title of Phineas Redux, thinking that the novel-buying public wouldn't understand it - which shot to ribbons my notion of how much Latin middle-class Victorians would know. (I thought lots, but evidently not.)
One of my plans for this year was to read all the Palliser novels right through in order - a plan which blew away like leaves before the wind, but which now I can at least part-meet, with this one book.) Trollope - he barely makes it into the Big Victorian Novelists list (Dickens! Thackeray! Eliot! and oh, okay, maybe Trollope if you insist). Maybe because he's too comfortable a read? Or maybe I just haven't read the tougher Trollopes - though the end of Sir Roger Scatcherd is pretty grim. And Sir Louis, too. :(
My reading has of late just been posts here and on DW - and thank you all very much - and in newspapers, which I check every morning to see if things have blown up yet. (That's probably a joke. Or might as well pass for one, anyway.) But excitingly, I found the other day this item of news, announcing that an examination of cicada wings has revealed that the wings' physical structure is an effective destroyer of bacteria, that the "wings represents the first example of a new class of biomaterials that can kill bacteria on contact based solely on its physical surface structure" - i.e. possibly all sorts of things, but in amongst others, a counter to antibiotic-resistant golden staph, which I think would be brilliant.
(I was never the alert, scientific Australian child they mention, who took different species of cicadas to school, though; I was the regrettable kind who found the wings and pretended they were fairies wings.)
So that's reading. I've been listening to things as well, though. Lots of Lord of the Rings, which has alerted me to:
a) how much I'd forgotten, though I read the three books obessively when I was about fourteen and fifteen, and
b) how dodgy some of the writing is. Some of it (honestly, Tolkien! Don't take offence!) could have done with another run-through and a bit of rewriting. Case in point: Gildor and the crowd he's with. They are such an unhelpful, giggling crowd - every time Frodo tries to speak in their language they laugh - it gets pretty tedious pretty quickly. And when he asks straightforwardly (he is already being pursued by the Nazgul) if he can travel in their company a little way, Tolkien reports their response:
"But we have no need of other company, and hobbits are so dull," they laughed. [yes, emphasis added. But still...]
And when they're not laughing or putting down Hobbits as an entire people, they tend to withdraw, ignore the Hobbits and talk among themselves in their own language. (Frodo has only a smattering of this. I gather he speaks with Gildor in the Common Tongue.) All in all, they are much more like the pretty unpleasant Elves in The Hobbit than grave, dignified Elrond's cohort. And their semi-claim to be keeping an eye on the Shire ("we have seen you often before") contradicts Gildor's claim that they have "little concern with the ways of hobbits, or of any other creature upon earth". Just what is the truth here?
The only suggestion I can make to reconcile this Low-Elf behaviour with the (supposed) High-Elven invocation of Elbereth, is that this is a band of recalcitrants being marched under compulsion (Gildor as Sheriff) to the docks for embarkation to the West, singing a penitential hymn as they go.
But I've very much enjoyed hearing the Old Forest section, with Tom Bombadil and Goldberry. There's so many things to wonder about in that section: River Withywindle being linked (by name) to the willows, and Goldberry as the daughter of that river being maybe a more shadowed character than the Ideal Domesticated Nymph I had accepted her as, and Tom Bombadil being a very uncomfortable fit in Tolkien's otherwise neatish Eru-Valar-undervalar (I forget their name)-Elves-mortals great chain of being.
And I've also been listening to Paradise Lost. I was hoping that a long Miltonic poem would be just the thing to lull me to sleep, but the Youtube version I found has dramatic growly demonic voices, punctuated as appropriate by bursts of high wordless heavenly song, not at all the mildly interesting drone that was needed for my purpose. Even so, I did manage to fall asleep, or asleep enough to think I was hearing bits of "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan..."; I thought I heard "sinuous rills" and "fertile ground" and more, but it was just a semi-dream. "Fertile ground" is there, actually, but nothing else - though there is mention of: "the destined walls/ Of Cambalu, seat of Cathaian Can", which I was pleased to find.
One of my plans for this year was to read all the Palliser novels right through in order - a plan which blew away like leaves before the wind, but which now I can at least part-meet, with this one book.) Trollope - he barely makes it into the Big Victorian Novelists list (Dickens! Thackeray! Eliot! and oh, okay, maybe Trollope if you insist). Maybe because he's too comfortable a read? Or maybe I just haven't read the tougher Trollopes - though the end of Sir Roger Scatcherd is pretty grim. And Sir Louis, too. :(
My reading has of late just been posts here and on DW - and thank you all very much - and in newspapers, which I check every morning to see if things have blown up yet. (That's probably a joke. Or might as well pass for one, anyway.) But excitingly, I found the other day this item of news, announcing that an examination of cicada wings has revealed that the wings' physical structure is an effective destroyer of bacteria, that the "wings represents the first example of a new class of biomaterials that can kill bacteria on contact based solely on its physical surface structure" - i.e. possibly all sorts of things, but in amongst others, a counter to antibiotic-resistant golden staph, which I think would be brilliant.
(I was never the alert, scientific Australian child they mention, who took different species of cicadas to school, though; I was the regrettable kind who found the wings and pretended they were fairies wings.)
So that's reading. I've been listening to things as well, though. Lots of Lord of the Rings, which has alerted me to:
a) how much I'd forgotten, though I read the three books obessively when I was about fourteen and fifteen, and
b) how dodgy some of the writing is. Some of it (honestly, Tolkien! Don't take offence!) could have done with another run-through and a bit of rewriting. Case in point: Gildor and the crowd he's with. They are such an unhelpful, giggling crowd - every time Frodo tries to speak in their language they laugh - it gets pretty tedious pretty quickly. And when he asks straightforwardly (he is already being pursued by the Nazgul) if he can travel in their company a little way, Tolkien reports their response:
"But we have no need of other company, and hobbits are so dull," they laughed. [yes, emphasis added. But still...]
And when they're not laughing or putting down Hobbits as an entire people, they tend to withdraw, ignore the Hobbits and talk among themselves in their own language. (Frodo has only a smattering of this. I gather he speaks with Gildor in the Common Tongue.) All in all, they are much more like the pretty unpleasant Elves in The Hobbit than grave, dignified Elrond's cohort. And their semi-claim to be keeping an eye on the Shire ("we have seen you often before") contradicts Gildor's claim that they have "little concern with the ways of hobbits, or of any other creature upon earth". Just what is the truth here?
The only suggestion I can make to reconcile this Low-Elf behaviour with the (supposed) High-Elven invocation of Elbereth, is that this is a band of recalcitrants being marched under compulsion (Gildor as Sheriff) to the docks for embarkation to the West, singing a penitential hymn as they go.
But I've very much enjoyed hearing the Old Forest section, with Tom Bombadil and Goldberry. There's so many things to wonder about in that section: River Withywindle being linked (by name) to the willows, and Goldberry as the daughter of that river being maybe a more shadowed character than the Ideal Domesticated Nymph I had accepted her as, and Tom Bombadil being a very uncomfortable fit in Tolkien's otherwise neatish Eru-Valar-undervalar (I forget their name)-Elves-mortals great chain of being.
And I've also been listening to Paradise Lost. I was hoping that a long Miltonic poem would be just the thing to lull me to sleep, but the Youtube version I found has dramatic growly demonic voices, punctuated as appropriate by bursts of high wordless heavenly song, not at all the mildly interesting drone that was needed for my purpose. Even so, I did manage to fall asleep, or asleep enough to think I was hearing bits of "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan..."; I thought I heard "sinuous rills" and "fertile ground" and more, but it was just a semi-dream. "Fertile ground" is there, actually, but nothing else - though there is mention of: "the destined walls/ Of Cambalu, seat of Cathaian Can", which I was pleased to find.