I confess...

I confess I'm bored of truing wheels that other people have built with no lube on the spoke/nipple interface so every spoke has to be freed by hand after the damn things have had a few years to seize in place. I also confess that I am prone to cursing under my breath.

Since my son was born less than one year ago, I've bought more bikes than I've done proper bike rides.

ha ha

The Hobbit is a great children's book. Almost everything else Tolkien wrote is pompous, overwrought and in some cases bloody awful.

The Lord of the Rings is a book for hormonal teenagers. If you think it's a literary classic and you've over 19 you're suffering a severe case of arrested development.

The Silmarillion has less literary merit than the Book of Mormon (a book it strongly resembles).

I work in software engineering and I can't say these things out loud or they'll kill me.

Well, I beg to differ ... and I don't work in software engineering. :)

The Hobbit is a charming little book with aspects of which Tolkien was unhappy until the end, although he had grown somewhat reconciled to its imperfections. When he came to conceive The Lord of the Rings, he changed a key aspect of the Hobbit quite radically and revised it multiple times, which greatly improved it, so you have the LotR to thank for that.

The LotR is a literary masterpiece, one of the best books of the 20th century. I have never met anyone who supposedly appreciated it as a 'hormonal teenager' who had understood it (and it's not obscure at all, but requires just that little more careful reading than some people are prepared to give it), so it may well be true that people persisting in their youthful views are in arrested development. The dreadful Peter Jackson films are a case in point. (I say 'films' even though I only managed the first one, as I read quite a lot about some of the other distortions and manglings, right down to messing up the book's pivotal scene.) Likewise for the broken reflections of it in pretty much anything from fantasy role-playing to science fiction.

The Silmarillion is an unfinished collection of fragments that Tolkien tried to shape into some halfway acceptable literary format, but his failing strength in his later years meant he was unable to. After doing a less-than-satisfactory editing job on it in the 1970s, Christopher Tolkien has more recently done a much better one, particularly on The Children of Húrin, which, while still unfinished, has more integrity than in the poorly sketched-out Silmarillion version and has a dramatic intensity almost on a par with the LotR. Despite all the problems with getting the Silmarillion together and with its style, the material of the stories is utterly superb, and of course the depth of Tolkien's mythology, and his development of it, goes much deeper than that--witness the History of Middle-earth series and his copious linguistic writings. There are many keys to understanding and appreciating his invention--the languages, the names, his work on fairy-tales, and his fervent striving for consistency in ideas that he first developed when reconvalescing from wartime injury--and I can completely understand why people give up and dismiss it, but it is extremely rewarding to persist.

Does it have one pivotal scene?

Now I'm curious what else I may have missed.

New thread? Oliver talks about Tolkien? I'd follow that.

I can completely understand why people give up and dismiss it,

I read the whole damn book and I want the time back. Naming? He's up there with J.K. Rowling on that score.

His more "serious" writing failed to hit the scale of the ancient epics he was trying to invoke, not helped by the unsubtle Christianised spin (oh, and we have him to blame for C.S. Lewis).

tl;dr

Much like the tedious meandering of LotR, and the bilge that is Silmarillion...

To be fair, Oliver didn't include any songs...Those bloody songs.

Yeah. I've read LotR eight times. Never once read all the songs.

I think the songs were my first experience of poetry.

Prose that doesn’t fill the lines is shit.

why read the book when you can just watch the movies? DUH.

#readingis4loosers

Yes.

I read the whole damn book and I want the time back. Naming? He's up there with J.K. Rowling on that score.

No. His names are linguistically consistent, inventive, memorable, and serve fantastically well to give his creations depth and interest. There is a deep gulf of difference between the rhapsodical, haphazard, and random 'naming' that authors like C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling do.

His more "serious" writing failed to hit the scale of the ancient epics he was trying to invoke

I'm not sure what you mean by 'his more "serious" writing. Do you mean things like 'The Monsters and the Critics' or his academic research (which, by his own admission, he neglected)? As for his own tales, Tolkien would probably have taken it as a compliment to be told that he had failed in invoking ancient epics by quite some margin but still got a little way there. His admiration for much of this literature, particularly Beowulf, was profound. However, whether that is true or not, invoking these sources later turned out to be (and, I would argue, never was, although initially not realised by him) by no means his only motivation for writing.

not helped by the unsubtle Christianised spin (oh, and we have him to blame for C.S. Lewis).

There is very, very little in all of Tolkien's work that is expressly, or even 'subtly', Christian. Some commentators, like Joseph Pearce, have constantly tried to overplay the Christian angle, but I'm afraid I consider that approach nonsensical. There's no doubt that for various reasons Tolkien was a committed Catholic, but another brand of Christian commentator has lamented precisely the lack of Christianity in his writings.

What there certainly is is an overlap with Christianity on some core themes, but certainly not ones exclusive to Christian thinking. For instance, I would argue that every single philosophical and theological theme found there is basically Neoplatonic (largely Augustinian, which is no surprise given the Catholic tradition in which he grew up), and that apart from his mother's fate, the fact that Catholicism is and was a minority faith in this country, and the fact that he greatly enjoyed the Latin mass, this core theology is really what attracted him to it. The one exception to 'Neoplatonic only' is his belief in the Fall (again Augustine), but I personally think that the figure of Melkor is a vast improvement on Lucifer and the story of Fëanor a vast improvement on Adam and Eve. Obviously, whole libraries have been written on every aspect of this by now.

As for Lewis, you may be aware that he and Tolkien fell out long before Lewis' early death precisely over the issue of his writings, which Tolkien disliked more and more as the Space Trilogy and then Narnia progressed, not to mention his Christian writings, with most of which Tolkien disagreed profoundly. It was one of his greatest disappointments that Lewis simply returned to Anglicanism instead of converting to Catholicism. While Tolkien initially did play a part in motivating Lewis to turn back to Christianity, he most certainly didn't cause the vast majority of what Lewis wrote from the 1940s onwards.

It would actually be more pertinent to blame Lewis for Tolkien, as his unswerving encouragement of Tolkien's writing, through the Inklings and outside of it, was probably the main push Tolkien needed, and his lack of productivity in his later years was undoubtedly in large part because Lewis no longer motivated him.

watch with the subs on.
2 birds one stone

2 birds one stone

Worst. Porno. Ever.

Have you seen the stone?

2 birds one stoner

Longest. Porno. Ever

Yesterday when I got home and unpacked my office clothes, there was a pair of underpants missing. Strange. This morning after my shower I got dressed as usual (re-using the jeans from Yesterday but clean everything else) and got on with my day.

Just now I changed out of my office slippers into trainers for a lunchtime walk, and found Yesterday's pants in the bottom of one leg of the jeans I'm wearing, where they've been happily coexisting with my shin for the last 4 hours.

lol.

also: office slippers?

office slippers?

1 Attachment

I bought myself the Lego Saturn V today and I regret nothing.

Been there, done that. Flew from Switzerland to the UK with a second pair of Rapha's finest merino undercrackers in my trousers from the day before. Thigh height in my case I think.