where we stand now

So here's where we are at the moment. A few days ago I finished writing my part of the work writeups for the annual "Year's Work in Tolkien Studies": four books, 22 articles, total 5400 words. I read and wrote up two or three a day for most of the month; I find it challenging to concentrate on more than that at a time, but the work itself isn't difficult; in fact it's rather fun, especially this time being deadpan over the crashing errors in a couple articles on names. (If you're going to run statistics on a group of Tolkien character names, try not to filch a list off the web that has names that Tolkien never used.)

There's 6 other people also at work on this, and while some of them are quick, others find it slow and painstaking work. It's not capacity, for they're very good at it; I think it's a matter of native affinity for potting writings in a paragraph. Anyway, the ones that have submitted, I've formatted their citations according to our system and otherwise normalized the files (our paragraphing system, for instance).

This Year's Work is covering 2018; now I'm starting on the bibliography for 2018. First step, clearing out the cubbyhole that I kept all the 2018 books and journals in for handy availability for myself and in case I needed to copy anything for another contributor. Now, go into the other cubbyhole with the newer material. Put any 2020 and 2021 publications aside for reinsertion when I'm done, and take all the 2019 items and type up all their contents lists in the TS bibliography format, before putting them in the cubbyhole where they'll live the next year. Then go into my notes file. Oh man, should have done this earlier. The real killers are the ones that I don't have full bib refs for or can't tell from the titles if they're about Tolkien or not, which means I have to find them somewhere now (accumulating them for next year's Year's Work can come later). Hasty interlibrary loan requests and online book purchasing, and there's some I may only be able to find if and when the university libraries reopen. And that's not even beginning trawling the online databases. If the Year's Work was my February job, the bibliography will be my March one.

it WAS a dog

I first heard this song by the electric-folk band Steeleye Span in 1977 or so.

Watch on YouTube

Hear that vocal sound at 2.06 that sets the beat for speeding up the tempo of the instrumental section at the end of the song? Presumably it's a person setting the beat, but it sounds a lot like a dog, doesn't it?

As I recall, alone among my Steeleye-listening friends, I maintained that it was a dog. The rest thought it just sounded like one. We listened to it over and over, but never solved the mystery. Remember that this was a much-played worn LP over the kind of stereo system that college students could afford in the 1970s, not the crisp digital rendition of today.

And now, all these years later, I have the answer to this long-nagging mystery. It WAS a dog. The producer had brought his Yorkshire terrier to the studio that day, and the dog barked at just the right moment, so they left it in.

How do I know this? From reading All Around My Hat: The Steeleye Span Story by John Van der Kiste (Fonthill Media, 2019). And how did I find out about this book? From watching the live Q&A with the band over Zoom that came with the ticket I bought from their record label for a video of a concert. A couple newer members held it up and said they'd learned a lot from it. It has some terrible reviews on Amazon, but I thought it reasonably well-written and pretty informative, so I recommend it to Steeleye fans.

As for the concert, nothing in the publicity said when it was from, but the presence of a live audience suggested it was a bit back, and from some clues in the between-songs chatter I was able to research that it was from their spring 2019 UK tour. Nevertheless it was a terrific concert. The now-seven-member band's sound was big and powerful without being heavy or over-miked, as it had been the only previous time I'd heard this line-up, and they played with tremendous energy. The instrumental riffs in the older songs were preserved from the originals and even expanded. The big songs - "Tam Lin", "King Henry", and the best of the all-around good songs from their (then) new album, Est'd 1969, "Harvest" - were particularly sizzling. New guitarist Andrew Sinclair has taken over most of Bob Johnson's old vocals and his guitar solos, all of which he does very well, while older guitarist Julian Littman still sings "King Henry", which is always the one he was best at, and has taken over Maddy Prior's lead singing role on "Little Sir Hugh". Maddy still does most of the singing, of course, and is still the class lady of the biz.