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brilliance at every grade level
Feb. 10th, 2008 10:10 pmSo if you take Prof. Tom Shippey, famed Tolkien scholar, place him in front of a class of college lit students in the frying pan east of L.A., and tell him that they're reading All Hallows' Eve by Charles Williams, he'll begin his guest lecture: "It's one of the rules of the novel, that your characters have to be alive from the start. No; let's have them dead: it's different."
And he just went on like that for an hour, throwing off one insightful quip after another, some of them of only tangential relevance. On Aleister Crowley: "He was called 'the wickedest man in the world,' but he wasn't that wicked. Or if he was, he wasn't that good at it." On the Renaissance: "In school, I learned that everything gets invented in the Renaissance: gunpowder, America, stuff like that. As I got older, I realized this was complete nonsense." Those are just the ones I wrote down.
When he talked to me, it wasn't about Tolkien at all, but mostly on obscure science fiction novels and the death of Peter Weston's computer, probably because I was one of the few people on a Christian college campus with whom he could discuss such things.
When I learned that famous story-writing girl had just turned six but that nobody had bought her the one book every six-year-old should have, I hastened out and rectified the omission. Plus the matching volume. And so I had the great honor of sitting by and lending an occasional verbal helping hand as this beginning reader, who can figure out a lot of words so long as they're no more than five letters long, slowly but determinedly worked all the way through "The King's Breakfast" (The King asked / The Queen and / The Queen asked / The Dairymaid: / "Could we have some butter for the Royal slice of bread?") It was a notable achievement, I think her first of its kind.
And he just went on like that for an hour, throwing off one insightful quip after another, some of them of only tangential relevance. On Aleister Crowley: "He was called 'the wickedest man in the world,' but he wasn't that wicked. Or if he was, he wasn't that good at it." On the Renaissance: "In school, I learned that everything gets invented in the Renaissance: gunpowder, America, stuff like that. As I got older, I realized this was complete nonsense." Those are just the ones I wrote down.
When he talked to me, it wasn't about Tolkien at all, but mostly on obscure science fiction novels and the death of Peter Weston's computer, probably because I was one of the few people on a Christian college campus with whom he could discuss such things.
When I learned that famous story-writing girl had just turned six but that nobody had bought her the one book every six-year-old should have, I hastened out and rectified the omission. Plus the matching volume. And so I had the great honor of sitting by and lending an occasional verbal helping hand as this beginning reader, who can figure out a lot of words so long as they're no more than five letters long, slowly but determinedly worked all the way through "The King's Breakfast" (The King asked / The Queen and / The Queen asked / The Dairymaid: / "Could we have some butter for the Royal slice of bread?") It was a notable achievement, I think her first of its kind.
