ten miscellanies make a blog post

[calimac]

1. Huge book sale going on in Berkeley this month. You might want to know.
   
2. Nine things I already knew about The Hobbit, and one thing I didn't care about because it's actually about the movies (via JDR)
   
3. In the 1920s, C.S. Lewis was a silent partner in a secret gang with a diabolical plot to -- buy up properties for the National Trust. (via magscanner) This revelation sent me into research mode. It's known that Lewis knew Margaret Pollard (née Gladstone: she wasn't W.E. Gladstone's niece, btw, but something like his great-great-grand-niece); Lewis's Collected Letters has casual friendly missives he sent her in the 1940s and 50s. But their earlier history was new to me. She isn't mentioned in the diary he kept then, but he didn't mention lots of things in his diary. What most intrigues me is her secret gang pseudonym, "Bill Stickers." For at just about that time, Lewis's friend J.R.R. Tolkien began telling his children tales about a crafty villain named Bill Stickers. (You knew he was bad because of the signs around that said, "Bill Stickers Will Be Prosecuted." And who would prosecute him? That righteous military man, Major Road Ahead.) Coincidence ... or something else?
   
4. PNH is mildly irked when people don't get his name right, but he figures it's because he's not that well-known outside of SFnal circles. Yeah, but it happens inside those circles too, like at a WFC. Alas, fame will not save you. What about all the people who can't spell Tolkien?
   
5. Gay Talese annotates his famous anecdote about Frank Sinatra and Harlan Ellison.
   
6. Photos and more photos of the Crissy Broadcast.
   
7. The lousiest opera singer that people think is good. Includes video link so you can hear it for yourself. (via Lisa Irontongue, who would rather you didn't) She's terrible, but she's nine years old. As Dr. Johnson put it (never mind what he was comparing this to), it "is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."
   
8. So which eleven counties in northern Colorado are voting today on whether to secede? Most news stories are surprisingly reticent. Here's a map. (And the news story it comes from.) That's Weld north of Denver; Logan, Sedgwick, and Phillips, in the northeast; Washington, Yuma, Elbert, Lincoln, Kit Carson, and Cheyenne in the east; and Moffat all by itself in the northwest. I've been in eight of them, though not recently.
   
9. A while ago I wondered why the once-ubiquitous Douglas R. Hofstadter had vanished from public discourse. I wasn't imagining it; he really has and this is why.
   
10. The Worst Person in the World. What should you do if your friend has a tacky character trait that really bugs the heck out of you? A: Steam in silence for years, then wait for him to be off-guard - like when he invites you to accompany him to the opera, so he obviously has no clue he's annoying you - and lash out and storm off. Then write a self-righteous blog post about how it was his responsibility to read your mind and know your preferences. All right, the friend may be crass and tasteless. But that's no excuse for responding by being evil.

Comments

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

Re: Hofstadter -- it wasn't that long ago that his book I Am A Strange Loop came out. (2007.)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

And it never came up in conversation. When his first two books came out, everybody, it seemed, was talking about them. Constantly. I didn't say he'd fallen silent, but that he'd vanished from public discourse.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

The blogger and his friend are both pieces of work. The friend shouldn't have been behaving that way, if the report is accurate, and the blogger should, as you note, have discussed how he was being treated long before he accepted the opera invitation.

Both of your links to that blog make me never, ever, want to read another word of his.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

Okay, I lied: I read the last few entries, going back to the complaints about opera. But I won't be reading him again.

1. All he does is complain.
2. He doesn't name names. He goes on and on with what is wrong with contemporary music without naming the composers he finds so boring. This makes it impossible to evaluate what he is saying or calibrate his taste.
3. He has comments turned off, so he is truly not interested in what others might think. I'm curious about his blog stats.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

He used to write on LJ, and allowed comments there. Rarely got any, though.

Considering that he's a professional, it appears he won't, rather than can't, say what he doesn't like. But it's frustrating to converse even with people who can't. Several times I've encountered complaints about Philip Glass in terms of strict minimalism, the kind that he gave up writing forty years ago. When I ask the complainers what works of his they've heard that struck them this way, they can never remember.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

I have heard a lot of Glass from the 70s until very recently, and I am curious about your distinction of "strict minimalism" versus what he does these days. There's a lot of stylistic continuity; I have liked some of his recent work greatly (Songs & Poems for Cello is a great piece) and felt other works were not very interesting (the latest symphony, whatever the number is).

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Of course there's a continuity. Glass always sounds like Glass. But, within that, there's been a big change. Beethoven's Op. 18 and his Op. 13n all sound like Beethoven, but there's been a big change between those too.

What happened forty years ago is that Glass decided he'd wrung all the changes he could out of strict minimalist process music, and it was time to re-introduce traditionalist concepts like conventional melodic lines and harmonic progressions. So to describe his music in terms like "whichever pieces I hear sound interesting for a couple of seconds, and then it sets in that this is all they have, except to repeat it with small variations that sound like transmission errors; variations that make no difference" (an actual quote from one of my complainants), or this piece of rubbish (which you responded to at the time, and so did I), they sound forty years out of date.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The difference is, one is a sin of ignorance or lack of empathy, the other, a sin of conscious commission in an assurance of righteousness.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

That is a good distinction.

[(Anonymous)]

Concerning your interesting comments about the villain 'Bill Stickers': I noticed that you described him as being "crafty", and Austin Olney (Tolkien’s editor at Houghton Mifflin) has written that Bill Stickers appeared as "a huge hulk of a man who always got away with everything". As far as I can see neither Carpenter's Biography nor Scull & Hammond's Companion and Guide mention anything about these "extra" details. Are there other sources available for these stories (I'm particularly thinking of published memories by Tolkien's children)?

/Morgan Thomsen