h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Yes, you should read Idoru as well. It's the second volume in his second "Virtual Light" trilogy which is still sci-fi, but in a period a bit closer to ours in technology and society (eg, there aren't implants, governments still exist, etc.) It essentially centers around a virtual celebrity (the Idoru of the title) and all sorts of chaos when a real rockstar declares his intention to marry her. Fun stuff. If you haven't read them, you would probably enjoy Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (essentially a parody and earnest depiction of a similar Neuromancer world. Main character is called "Hiro Protagonist") or "The Diamond Age" (more serious story with nanotech and a primer for rich girls falling into a poor girl's hands). Hell, you might even like "The Difference Engine", originator of the Steampunk novel, which explores what it might have been like if Babbage succeeded. Throw in Gibson's short stories ("Burning Chrome") and you'll be quite the elite cyberpunk dude (or should I say "3133T CYB3RPUNK D3WD?). And with that, I make a computer joke to show my old-school nerdy side (like Willow, I never can quite hide the nerdy side). I can loan you just about all the books listed above sometime.

Black Black is a Japanese chewing gum I adore, but not quite to the point of fetishizing it. It's a "triple-combination high-tech" chewing gum with strong flavors of menthol, anise, and something else that wallop the tastebuds. It also is black and beloved of cabbies apparently. I personally prefer the small tablet form, packs more of a punch than Altoids, although not quite as strong as Smints.

I can relate to some aspects of industrial music, although I am a bit tired of the whole rage thing. It's not so much an aspect of me relating to the music often though (to be honest, most of the vocals are crap), but I just adore the mingling of harmony with utter noise and chaos. It's shocking and disruptive, and music to my ears. When I get morbid, it's more like "Wings of Desire" morbid, wandering around the city, looking at the people, and feeling very different from all of them. Luckily, I don't get into those moods as often anymore.

Latest pretentious listening: Disk Orchestra, "[k]". Not so much an album as a collection of 99 samples composed on the road over the course of a few months. It skitters and chirps and screeches all over the place, but I somehow find myself liking it, for those moments when it emerges into interludes among the chaos. I like this german band called Beefcake for the same reason. They're noisy and chaotic, but when they hit those beautiful moments, it's amazing, and I don't think it would work without the noise and chaos around it. I read that Bjork made her last album entirely on the road as well with a Powerbook. Very interesting indeed. I find myself wondering about taking the plunge myself one day. From there, it's just a hop, skip, and a jump to appearing on the shelf at Other Music one day.

Aha. You are now the second person to recommend "The Diamond Age" to me within a two-week period. That's pretty good. If Neal Stephenson shows up again, then I am obliged to read it for sure. The last author who kept popping up on me until I finally read him was William Gaddis, after all, and he really worked out for me. There's this used book store right across the street from my school, actually, that has a hardcover of his last novel for twelve dollars. I want to buy it, but part of me is waiting until he puts it in the front of the store in the dollar book box. It has at this point become more like a fishing expedition, where I am determined to get that book for a dollar. Now that Gaddis has joined the Dead White Males (only a few years ago, actually), he doesn't care whether I buy one of his books retail or not; in fact, there would be a part of him that would like me to stick it to the publisher. For all his erudition and stodginess, there's a sort of punk side to Gaddis that turns him into a sort of 20th-century Swift. Or Cassandra.

Is there a particular food that you *do* fetishize? I have to admit that I've developed quite a fondness for Altoids cinnamint flavor, even though they're not really mints. In fact, they're a lot like eating Tom's of Maine cinnamint toothpaste. They're almost too much like candy to be mints: you can just keep popping them into your mouth one after the other, until your mouth literally explodes with cinnaminty freshness. And I do mean literally; I have had to get reconstructive surgery several times this week.

I also read recently about the whole laptop music thing. Was it in the New York Times Magazine this week? I never buy the thing, but Steph's dad did and left it at our apartment, and I peruse it now and again because it's interesting. I am definitely ready to get one of those setups--though I suspect that you need more than just a laptop to really get things moving. Even though I'm really an all-acoustic kind of guy, a part of me still very much misses the whole electronic music thing. Again, I may have told you this before, but if I ever got my act together and had about a month, I would dedicate it to making an album of 31 versions of the Mister Softee song--you know, the ice cream truck song that swings--that sounds more like a jingle (as opposed to the one that sounds like Bach or Mozart or something). The idea, of course, is to drift further and further away from the original, until you're somewhere else entirely, and then you somehow bring it back. My other idea for an album is to do these sort of cardboard lounge versions of Phil Spector songs: tremolo electric guitar, lots of restrained cheezy synth (think Leonard Cohen, except a bit more lush), and very hushed vocals, you know, with the mouth way up close to the mike. "Be My Baby" and "And Then He Kissed Me" would be especially successful, I think. Also "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)." Other Phil Spector songs would be more of a challenge--the ones that rely more on the bombast, like all those Righteous Brothers songs--but therein lies the challenge.

The last CD I got was the Al Green classic, Let's Stay Together. That's some sweet stuff. I tell you, those soul guys from the 60s and 70s were really onto something. I can see why they get sampled so much; there's just no real way to improve on the formula they devised. The Al Green CD is nice because it's a wonderful mix of emotion and restraint; there are always a couple conflicting emotions going on at once. And the musicians are so solid, so understated, that you have to listen closely to realize just how good they are; they're always doing something interesting, but they do it so sly and cool that you hardly notice. And the horn lines are great. Even better, Al goes so far as to cover a Bee Gees tune (!), and proceeds to take over and own the thing. Mr. Green is apparently now a preacher and gospel singer--I think there's a really sad story behind why he went religious--but if he had stayed secular, there's no doubt that he would be big like Marvin Gaye.

Speaking of Marvin Gaye, you know how some songs eventually are tied to a specific moment? Well, that happened big time to me with "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)." Now that's a fantastic song--d*mn near perfect--and at one point I was taking a cab back from some place on the Lower East Side back into Queens. It was really late, and I was drunk and tired, and the cab kept having to cruise really slow because of God knows what, and it was on the radio; and there was air coming in through the window, and men on the street shouting to each other and skulking in front of churches, because it was an uncommonly cold summer night and they were all shivering and drinking forties and thinking about fighting. It was such a perfect setting for that song that, every time I've heard it since, I am taken back to that night, and I remember it in great detail. When I am old and soft in the head, it's the song that will help me remember when I was young and stupid, and what New York was like then.

No, I like food, and I enjoy a good meal, but there isn't really anything much that I fetishize about it. So, I'm afraid you'll have to find another person to help you through your cinnamint addiction. I've heard there are 12-step groups out there.

The idea does remind of a delightful quote I read the other day about "gastro-porn", which comes from a 1977 article by Bruce Cockburn in the New York Review of Books:
"Now it cannot escape attention that there are curious parallels between manuals on sexual techniques and manuals on the preparation of food; the same studious emphasis on leisurely technique, the same apostrophes to the ultimate, heavenly delights. True gastro-porn heightens the excitement and also the sense of the unattainable by proffering colored photographs of various completed recipes. The gastro-pornhound can … moisten his lips over a color plate of fresh water crayfish au gratin à la Fernand Point. True, you cannot get fresh crayfish in the United States or indeed black truffles, three tablespoons of which, cut into julienne, are recommended by [one chef]. No matter. The delights offered in sexual pornography are equally unattainable."
Reminds me of some of the stuff I see in the NY Times food section sometimes (or on my plate at a fancy place).

I have music tied to memories, but more often to moods. I also tend to like music that sounds like it could be part of an imaginary soundtrack of sorts, and I actually created a few mix tapes back in the day as soundtracks to fictional cyberpunk movies, sorta like the Matrix but with better music (there are only two songs that I really like on the soundtrack, and one isn't even on the CD). I wonder if you can guess what they are. And no, Rob Zombie is not it.

Oops, that was Alexander Cockburn. Sorry about that.

Nice quote there--I know exactly what he means. Do you sense a slightly antiquated flavor in Mr. Cockburn's writing? It feels much older than 1977; I would have put it at, oh, I don't know, somewhere between 1880 and 1920: the Henry Adams-Henry James school. Well, okay, not as elaborate as Henry James, but somewhere around then anyway.

Also, lest you get the wrong impression, I am not exactly a Rob Zombie fan. I don't own anything by him, would not listen to him all the time. I also find something very blunt about his music. On occasion, it works--as I said, I really like maybe one or two White Zombie things; often, though, it just seems sort of facile.

This brings up something that has mystified me for some time. Why do you think, when a certain style of music becomes popular, people don't then try to seek out the roots of that music? You brought up the Zombie-Fear Factory connection: Zombie sells lots of albums, but few people have even heard Fear Factory's music. Way back in the last century when people liked grunge, Nirvana was huge, but record sales of the Meat Puppets and the Pixies did not go through the roof. Today, much of what you hear on the radio is heavily influenced by (if not directly lifted from) 70s funk and soul, yet Macy Gray still sells more records than Aretha; Outkast sells more records than Parliament. I am not passing judgment on the relative quality of old vs. new acts--I like them all, actually--but I find it curious that more people don't do the five minutes or so of research required to find more music that they know they would like. If consumers are just responding to marketing, why would a record company *not* want to cash in further on its back catalog by advertising the 70s funk and soul people on their roster? I've never quite understood that.

Well, must get back to studying.

Well, the absolute nadir for me was when I was in a record store in Boston around the time the Crow came out (with its NIN cover of Joy Division's "Dead Souls") and the original was playing and a patron said, "Wow, I can't believe somebody has covered the NIN song already") That and hearing Moby's slavishly similar cover of Mission of Burma's "That's When I Reach for my Revolver" and realizing it would sell tons more copies than the original ever did.

I know why people don't seek out the roots, becuase it involves work, and many Americans are taught to associate music with idle pleasure and ease at an early age. And it remains fundamentally nonintuitive to shop at record stores with their sealed CDs (I always find it strange that I have to judge what CDs to buy largely by looking for them and not listening to them). So, it's easy to just get the latest Macy Gray, since at least you can see her on MTV to know what she sounds like. If you could create a musical browsing/shopping system that intuitively allows people to follow musical style and sound then you might make it happen (and make a lot of money in the process too). Even without that, some sort of tracing of musical geneology might be an interesting little project.

Actually, the allmusic guide [URL removed by moderator] has the closest thing I have seen to the musical geneaology you describe. For almost any artist you can imagine--including Charlie Shaw, our guitarist, thanks to his years spent drumming with a band called Five Chinese Brothers--there are fairly extensive lists of both people they were influenced by and people they have influenced. It's quite comprehensive, and leaps handily across genres and distances. They rightly point out, for example, that Parliament is heavily influenced by Sun Ra, and that Fela Kuti had a big fat dose of James Brown in him. The allmusic people are boys who have done a little more than their share of homework. Many are the hours I have wasted on this site--that, in conjunction with the 30-second to a minute-long music samples on CDNow have allowed me to seek out and peruse all kinds of people, creating a want-list of CDs that is so gosh-dern long at this point that I'll be dead and gone by the time I finish buying them. That's right: I intend to make several posthumous CD purchases.

But nailing down a selection program that allows people to intuitively discover music they like would be a real feat. The initial problem, I think, comes with the parameters: how do you get people to accurately describe the music style that they like? Anyone who has even mildly eclectic taste, I think, would befuddle most programs. Let's take my musical taste, if only because I know it pretty well and you've heard me blather on enough about it to know it pretty well too. What questions can the program ask me so that it knows that I like Beethoven's late string quartets, happy 80s synth-pop, creepy old-time gospel, Radiohead, and Curtis Mayfield? In short, how do you quantify vibe? The slipshod method that, say, CDNow uses to make recommendations is clearly all wrong--it has recommended albums to me that I know I don't like.

Maybe the first thing would be to compile data on lots and lots of albums, in the vein of the allmusic guide (it occurs to me that that guide is a trove of information for anyone who wanted to start such a recommending service), which has several parameters that seem exceedingly helpful. Once you've got this data, then the thing might be to ask not merely what style of music you like, but what albums were a sort of revelation to you; what albums changed the direction of your musical taste, what albums do you find yourself coming back to again and again and again? This would narrow most people's collection, even the most eclectic, to maybe ten or fifteen albums, right? The ones that opened doors? I mean, I own quite a few CDs, yet a vast minority of those are turning-point albums: reaching back to that point in sixth grade when I first started getting into music, the career of my musical taste can be summed up in a few albums: The Clash, "The Clash" (yep, the first album I ever really, really liked), Talking Heads, "Stop Making Sense," The Smiths, "The Queen is Dead," Tom Waits, "Rain Dogs," Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited, a live show that blew my mind at the end of high school and can be represented by the album "Hondo (War)," The Monroe Brothers, anything from the 40s or early 50s, Beethoven's late string quartets, Charles Ives' "The Unanswered Question," and last but not least, Parliament, "Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome." Of course, there are tons of albums I like just as well as this very short list--and all that minimalist/atonal/electronic music that I like doesn't quite make it in there--but extrapolating from this very short list can get you a long way into things I like--provided that your data on these albums is coherent and well-connected (e.g. Talking Heads + The Clash = Elvis Costello; Parliament + The Smiths = in the direction of old New Order; Thomas Mapfumo + Charles Ives = in the direction of gamelan, which then puts you straight toward Philip Glass; Tom Waits + the Monroe Brothers = old-time, and also early Elvis; Talking Heads + The Clash + gamelan = the side of Radiohead I like best). At least that's what I'm coming up with at this hour.

The closet armchair cultural studies person keeps meaning to bring up the argument that Talking Heads are the 80s as Radiohead is to the 90s--and not just because Radiohead got their name from Talking Heads. But I'm too tired to do that now.

Must study economics. G'night.

I played with the allmusic stuff for a bit. Interesting. I like though the idea of using revelatory albums as a jumping off point like you propose, and perhaps doing recommendations not by specific genres, but rather a combination of characteristics based on these "desert island discs." I have been doing a bit of research lately into link analysis, which is what Google and other search engines now do. In essence, by crunching through some linear algebra, they determine pages that are authorities and hubs. Authorities are pages that are linked to by many hubs. Hubs are pages that link to many authorities. What's interesting is that this is an iterative process and a page's score changes until the entire system stabilizes. In any event, I wonder how a similar thing would work for music.

Incidentally, I would have to list the following albums in my list of revelatory items: (no album but various hardcore songs on a ratty tape), Gary Numan "Replicas", Front 242 "Front by Front", Skinny Puppy "Rabies", Einsturzende Neubauten "Strategies Against Architecture", Haujobb "Freeze Frame Reality", Lassigue Bendthaus "Render", Orbital "In Sides", V/A "Clicks and Cuts", Portishead "Dummy", Photek "The Hidden Camera"

Otherwise, we're both off to DC for the holiday and will be back on Wednesday. I hope you have yourself a merry little Christmas time. I'm just hoping this is the year I finally get a pony.

Well, another Christmas is done and we are back in New York. No pony for me, but I did get some nice items. Most amusing for me has been a pillow my mother found with a rendition of Da Vinci's Last Supper on the front and a music box inside that inexplicably plays "Hey Jude" perhaps out of a confusion between Jude and Judas. Equally amusing was the Fortnum & Mason New York Tea, which contained a special blend of black teas "designed for New York water." Also, the salesperson in London seemed to think that giving tea to New York was like shipping coals to Newcastle, which is funnily absurd considering how much more tea they consume there. And of course, I also got some sweaters, books, etc. How was your Xmas day anyway?

We saw Lord of the Rings on Saturday at the Uptown in DC. Amazing old theater with a single huge screen (a wonderful break in the age of the multiplex), and I must admit to a few annoyances. I'm assuming you've seen it at this point, and probably have read the books even (something I never did), but if not, just stop reading now, and reply to me later. Anyhow, the sound was just too loud and when the evil nine wraiths would screech my fillings would hurt (it really bothers me how loud movies have become lately). Also, it became absurd just how many monsters would keep coming at them (especially since most evil seems to come only in the "horde" quantity for some reason), and it was not clear why some were really necessary (again, I haven't read the books). A few characters served strangely brief roles. And I honestly don't understand why Elrond (the magnificent Hugo Weaving and his amazing eyebrows) tells the king to throw the ring into the fire and when the king refuses, basically just drops the issue at that, or why they couldn't just hop a ride on the big bird to Mordor and make their life easier. Nevertheless, it did have some cool parts in there, and it was breathtaking to see some of the New Zealand scenery.

Hey there.

So, I'm leaving tomorrow, but email access is pretty available down there, so you may get things from me on the same semi-regular basis as usual. At any rate.

That hub-authority thing is great. As I understand the concept (I took exactly one computer science course in college), it seems that the iterative approach regarding references would quickly categorize albums as hubs and authorities--or at least grade them nicely on their hubness and authority. This would then be really useful for making album recommendations, both for someone interested in a particular genre and for someone interested in certain qualities in his music. Though you'd have to be careful to allow many acts to be both hubs and authorities in equal measure. Let's take Tom Waits. On one hand, he would be an authority--many, many artists from many genres cite him as an influence. On the other hand, he would be a hub: in any interview with Waits, he talks very openly about the music he likes (and good God is his taste eclectic). This dichotomy could confound the system and may break down the process of good recommendation. And Tom Waits is not alone in this at all, obviously; many highly influential artists whose fans see them as unique, when asked about their own music, see it clearly as derivative of a number of different sources. Even someone like Hank Williams. If you asked Hank what it is he played, he'd probably just tell you that it's a bunch of white boy blues and gospel he went and gussied up a bit. The thousands of bands that have followed in his footsteps would disagree. But whose opinion would the system favor? What biases do you think would make more effective recommendations? It's a lot to think about.

On to the Lord of the Rings, now that I've gotten over the shock all over again that you haven't read them (not that you should--you just seem like the kind of guy that would have at some point). About the sound in the theater, I agree completely that the sound in theaters has gotten way too loud. It's absurd. I predict, in fact, that eventually the sound in theaters will get so loud that people will start bringing earplugs, and then movie theaters will join the trend of clubs and music shows in getting louder and louder, while the number of earplugs races to catch up.

About the movie itself. First off, I should say that the books were a pivotal part of my development as a child, so I am heavily biased toward the story, very willing to overlook its shortcomings in favor of the things I still very much admire about the whole thing. That said, don't blame Peter Jackson for the things you disliked about the story: you can blame Tolkien himself. Tolkien is never really all that interested in individual characters. Jackson, in fact, made many of the characters and the tensions between them more interesting than Tolkien does. It's not the tensions aren't there in the book--they are--but Jackson brings them out a LOT more than Tolkien ever did, and this, to me, is all around a good thing.

Tolkien, to me, is much more interested in groups of people, the movements of cultures even. Consider that he invented the languages first, and then the people that spoke them and their history. The entire trilogy--and the lengthy history that precedes it, hundreds and hundreds of pages of writing, all those characters and places and songs and such--can be seen as a byproduct of his attempt to breath life into the languages he created, which shows you where his priorities are. Your comment about monsters coming in horde variety is only going to increase as the trilogy rolls on and the war between men and orcs really gets started. The Fellowship of the Ring (my favorite of the books, incidentally, even when I was a kid) is the only book where the individual characters are given any kind of serious attention; the Two Towers and the Return of the King are much more about battles between armies and political intrigue and that sort of thing, and if I were Peter Jackson, I would be really worried that my first movie was going to be spectacular, while the other two were more like watching the last scenes in Spartacus for two hours at a stretch. I think Jackson can pull it off--the things he did with Aragorn's character were excellent--but he's going to have to work even harder in the next two movies than he did in this one. And about the logic of the story, I see where you're coming from. The only thing I can think of, in the context of the story, is that the ring must be brought to Mordor as secretly as possible because the stakes are so incredibly high. Keep in mind that it's bad enough that Sauron even knows it exists, and assuming Sauron has Unending Unholy Power to Wreak Incredible Havoc on All the World or something like that, even a bird is deemed too conspicuous. But that's a weak excuse. My impression is that Tolkien was thinking more along the lines of Epic Logic, the same thing that makes Odysseus shout his boast to the ocean, which puts him on Poseidon's sh*t list for ten years. It doesn't make any sense, but it does make for a pretty good story. All the same, as devoted as I was to those books as a kid, I'm really surprised (and really pleased) that the Fellowship of the Ring turned out to be as good a movie as it is, and I'm almost afraid to see the other ones (see above Spartacus comment).

Anyhoo, this post has gotten way, way too long. We should get together when I get back. I'll be tan. Either that or melanomic. Is that a word?

Well, the Google approach only uses authorities and that might be better for music. Of course, the scores in Google are calculated globally. A better approach might be like that used in Teoma where the scores are calculated for a matching subset to your query so if I did a search for Front 242, the scores would be relative for industrial music and not as a whole.

Most people at MIT were pretty shocked I had never read Tolkein either, or that I had never seen an episode of original Star Trek or that I had never seen "Real Genius." Sorry, I've never been much of a fantasy person (although I have read some Pratchett and watch Buffy of course). I also like Sandman for how he dips into all the myths. But I have read science fiction. And I think it's because of a few reasons (bear in mind that most of these are complaints about the genre's cliches, and I am fully aware the LOTR actually originated a lot of what are now cliches and should not be criticized for that):

1. I'm not much into geneologies and in the effort to create a world I feel a lot of personal characterization is deemphasized in order to present all these nifty little diagrams of who is related to whom. But it gets a little bit too twee sometimes.
2. As a red blooded 'Merkan, I find it a little disconcerting that the only ones destined to greatness are invariably those born to it. It's one thing to have a destiny, but too often it's because one is secretly a king or a lost heir to the throne. They're noble and brave because they're in the nobility, not the other way around (I know, I know, at least Frodo wasn't a hobbit king). I hate the whole inter-relation thing in Star Wars too.
3. I always find the conflation between species and race a bit odd. That elves and dwarves and humans can intermarry is a bit strange to me. I've recently been reading a book "Strange Creations" about kooky human origin myths. And it's a bit distressing the similarity between some fantasy monsters (orcs are misbred elves) and the eugenics spin on lesser races. I know this isn't really intended and I'm being silly here, but it was weird for me at the time of the movie.
4. Finally, this is the old fuddie-duddie in me that wonders why it's always the celtic-saxon-angle angle spun into these things. Why not other myths? Again, it's not really Tolkein to blame, but his crass imitators. It's the old man part of me that hats that more people speak Klingon and Elvish at this point than Navajo or Welsh.

I guess it would be interesting to contrast The Lord of the Rings with the sci-fi mainstay - Asimov's Foundation Series. Same story arcing over the centuries, and even an aberration that throws off the whole destiny-like predictions of the Foundation founder. Ah well. I'm watching a DVD of Akira at this point, so I guess I can't complain about weird plots.

It was explained to me by a friend that they could not take the big bird to Mordor because only Gandalf was bad*ss enough to be able to use the big birds as a taxi service. And that Elrond (isn't Hugo Weaving great?) did not kill the king and throw the ring into the fires of Mt. Doom himslf because elves are naturally too good to do such things or more crassly, the elves are able to stay in power over their lands only because of their rings which are tied into the main ring.

Ah well, have fun on your trip. Try not to get too much sun if you want to not be melanomic.

Hey there. I had some time to kill around here, so I decided to respond, just to keep the ball rolling.

I am with you on all of these things (I am not going to use contractions because I cannot find the apostrophe on this keyboard) that you complain about re the Lord of the Rings. Like I said, my critical guard is down because I read them as an impressionable child, and if I was encountering the trilogy for the first time as a hoary old man, I would most likely have a different reaction. The destiny/good breeding stuff you reacted to also particularly rankles my sensibilities these days. Back in college, I read a great article at one point that traced the phonemes of the languages Tolkien made up to actual languages that exist on this earth. The result uncovered a decidedly British imperialist slant on the world that bordered on racism. Rather nicely argued, too, and probably something best discussed in person, when a little drunk.

Interesting bit about the Anglo-Saxon thing. Before he was responsible for that fantasy trilogy of his, Tolkien was best known as an Anglo-Saxon scholar--perhaps the most important scholar of Anglo-Saxon of his time. It is Tolkien, in fact, who through his scholarship helped put Celtic mythology back on the map for people other than fanatic Welsh nationalists, Tolkien who made it worth studying (have you read the Mabinogion? If not, I think you would like it--you would see in it the ultimate source of many of the cliches you see in fantasy series, except that in the Mabinogion they are intentionally funny instead of taking themselves so seriously the way so many fantasy authors do). It is Tolkien who provided his generation with a good translation of one of the best little ditties ever written, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. And most important, it is Tolkien--one single essay by Tolkien, in fact, called The Monsters and the Critics--that resurrected Beowulf from the dustbin of literary anomalies and trivialities. That essay elevated Beowulf to the status it deserves, but before Tolkien, nobody really paid much attention to it. This is particularly heartbreaking to me because Beowulf is so incredible, and as if it is not enough that the only surviving copy was at one point ON FIRE when the antiquarian library of Mr. Cotton burned a few centuries ago, it also had to be constantly ridiculed and maligned by people who could not quite understand it mostly because they did not bother to learn the language it was written in. Tolkien changed that reputation, raised the bar for what is required of Anglo-Saxon scholars (namely learning the fricking language, for the sake of Pete), and for that, we owe him everything that we take from the works that he made important. For this, at this point in my life, I still really like Tolkien, but more for his scholarship (which is quite good even today--The Monsters and the Critics is particularly a nice little academic gem) then for that gigantic fantasy world he created.

Wow. I have not been that righteous about Old English literature in a really, really long time. I should get going before I get really pompous. Also, not being able to use apostrophes is starting to annoy me. Talk to you later.

Hello,

Yeah, I like a lot of that old stuff. It's rather cool there's a new edition of the Icelandic sagas out now even. While I admit there is some stuff in there that's quite dull (the naming of ancestors and lineages is much less exciting to people who don't really descend from them as the original audience did), it can be quite neat. Of course, I do like modern mythology as well, but I don't want to see the old stuff forgotten or left ON FIRE by accident. Between that and a few other literary disasters (the Library of Alexandria springs to mind), I'd rather not think about what we've lost. In a cool new development, researchers apparently have figured out a way to separate and read the texts on damaged scroll from Pompeii. It means we may see a whole ton of new works by ancient authors, and I'm sure this is the kind of thing that gets Classics professors all excited.

On a sad literary note, I must note the passing of one of my favoite authors. WG Sebald (whom I have raved about here in the past) was killed in a car crash on December 14th. It's been sad how many reviewers places his book "Austerlitz" on the top 10 lists for 2001 and have mourned the loss of future work.

Otherwise, I think the weather's nicer for you in Guatemala than it is here. I have a cold and Jessica's off in Paris for a week, so it's time to just bum around and feel miserable and rent films I've been meaning to see (Princess Mononoke was okay). I'll see you later.

Hey. This is going to be short, as I don't have too much time. Apologies.

I'd been meaning to pass along my condolences for Sebald. I saw his obituary in a magazine before I left and thought, oh no. He and his daughter, right? That's terrible.

Your thing about mythology, the burning of the Alexandria library, and the discovery of new literature in Pompeii put me in mind of a Tom Stoppard quote that I like very much. To be fair, the only reason I know about it is because it happens to be one of Steph's favorite quotes (she is a very huge fan of his play, Arcadia), but it's a beautifully phrased sentiment about, throughout human history, things are constantly lost and rediscovered, they are dropped and picked up again along the way. I'm writing this mostly to remind myself to send it to you, because I have thought to send it to you many times, but then forgotten. Very appropriate, incidentally, for the quote. You'll see when I finally remember to send it to you.

See you soon,
B