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be prepared
May. 22nd, 2009 09:03 pmSpent much of today putting together handouts for my Tolkien Institute session on "The Structural Geography of Middle-earth." The Institute isn't until August, but the handouts from the visiting scholars, which are being printed and bound together, are due next week. I was assured that the participants - mostly high-school teachers who have or want to use Tolkien in their classrooms - want lots of handouts.
So I lugged a lot of heavy stuff to Kinko's and photocopied from it. Six maps - not including JRRT's and CT's own, which I'll just display in class - my compilations of structural geographic references from Tolkien's books and the appropriate entries from the Blackwelder Thesaurus, plus three entries from the Drout Encyclopedia, three articles of my own, and two by the late Bill Serjeant on geology and economic geography, for those who want the scientific end.
I still have the transparencies I made for when I gave this talk at Mythcon several years ago, and I'll have more time so I'm making more transparencies, having confirmed that Kinko's still does that. Yeah, I know I could put all this stuff on PowerPoint, but guess what? I don't want to. Hobbits do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom. As long as there's an overhead projector, and there is, low tech is fine. After that disaster with the non-functioning supertitles at that concert last weekend - all those people futilely hovering over a laptop - I'm not going to be the person naively poking around unable to understand why the computer program doesn't work, not if I can help it.
So I lugged a lot of heavy stuff to Kinko's and photocopied from it. Six maps - not including JRRT's and CT's own, which I'll just display in class - my compilations of structural geographic references from Tolkien's books and the appropriate entries from the Blackwelder Thesaurus, plus three entries from the Drout Encyclopedia, three articles of my own, and two by the late Bill Serjeant on geology and economic geography, for those who want the scientific end.
I still have the transparencies I made for when I gave this talk at Mythcon several years ago, and I'll have more time so I'm making more transparencies, having confirmed that Kinko's still does that. Yeah, I know I could put all this stuff on PowerPoint, but guess what? I don't want to. Hobbits do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom. As long as there's an overhead projector, and there is, low tech is fine. After that disaster with the non-functioning supertitles at that concert last weekend - all those people futilely hovering over a laptop - I'm not going to be the person naively poking around unable to understand why the computer program doesn't work, not if I can help it.
