7 ms·
The Call of the Weird
- treetalker 3y agohttps://archive.is/seaoF https://archive.is/seaoF
- throwanem 3y agoAs ever with the London Review, one may apprehend the occasional glimmering of a possible point among the masses of discursive digression, but may never accrue enough evidence to be confident of its actual presence.
- zemvpferreira 3y agoI've been reading the LRB since I was a kid (30 years ago) and I'm not sure what happened: Did I grow up or has it taken a nosedive? Seems like the reviews have become meandering, and increasingly political. I used to learn so much from each article and now I can't bring myself to finish a whole paper.
- throwanem 3y agoWhat I said isn't a pure criticism. A meander can be quite pleasant, but it needs at least to visit somewhere interesting, preferably though not necessarily outside its author's head.
- jurimasa 3y agoAs ever with HN comments, one may encounter the occasional glimmering of a convoluted verbosity from one that thinks himself so cultured he may as well be a yogurt.
- marnett 3y agoIts satire.
- Animats 3y agoMandatory XKCD reference.[1] [1] https://xkcd.com/1235/ https://xkcd.com/1235/
- ranprieur 3y agoThis has similar ideas to this review that was posted here a few weeks ago: https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/marshall-sahlins-new-science-enchanted-universe/ https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/marshall-sahlins-n...
- devindotcom 3y agoLang's Fairy Books are interesting though obviously very "of the time," as we say. But in those and his work editing the Folk-Lore Journal (of which I have a few volumes) he was taking on or nurturing some really serious anthropological literary work. Check out up Sidney Hartland's The Forbidden Chamber, which establishes Bluebeard tales as a "type" seen across multiple cultures and times. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Folk-Lore_Journal/Volume_3/The_Forbidden_Chamber https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Folk-Lore_Journal/Volume_... Really interesting stuff. His translations with Leaf and Myers are nice but not exactly poetry, I wouldn't recommend them to anyone as a first read of the Iliad.
- nuc1e0n 3y agoWhen times are tough our fantasies become more vivid. They are a tool to help us analyse our difficulties from a novel perspective and thus to overcome them.
- wolverine876 3y agoI would have said the same but it strikes me that, in these highly stressful times, people are less interested in fantasy and art. That said, I agree about their value. The Lord of the Rings, written in a similar time, with fascism on the march behind a tide of propaganda and the resulting chaos and despair, is to me now uncovered as a gift from Tolkien for the future crisis. It is the perfect book, the perfect myth, for today. (Not the movies, the book.)
- bloomingeek 3y agoYou couldn't have said it better. Today it's, "think like I do or screw you!" Seeking middle ground or simply moving on is a lost art.
- wolverine876 3y agoHow does that relate to the GP?
- sameoldtune 3y agoIt’s funny you say that considering LOTR is one of the most black/white good/bad stories I can think of.
- wolverine876 3y agoThat isn't in the books, the way I read them (I don't recall the movies): Sauron is obviously pretty clear (but I think even Sauron is a fallen angel of sorts?), but the rest of the story is about how everyone can be corrupted by power and defeated by despair. Even Gandalf, another 'angel' of sorts, could be corrupted. Sauruman, another being like Gandalf and the latter's superior, was corrupted. In the end, the difference between the heroes and villians is whether they are wise enough to avoid exposing themselves to the corruption of power, and some cross that line. Finally, the ring is destroyed by someone who was thoroughly corrupted but, kept away from power and treated with love and mercy, was able to heal somewhat for a time.
- wolverine876 3y agoJRR Tolkien knew Lang's work very well and Tolkien's essay On Fairy-stories was originally presented, in an earlier version, as the (annual?) Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of Saint Andrews in 1939. The essay is not only an incredible work itself, but has quite a bit to say about Lang, and remember Tolkien was a leading scholar as a day job. Tolkien writes, regarding the study of myth, "Philology has been dethroned from the high place it once had in this court of inquiry." My edition's editors, Verlyn Flieger and Douglas Anderson, flesh out that story: "And Andrew Lang, as Tolkien well knew, was the man who pushed philology off its throne. Lang found and ruthlessly exposed the logical fallacies in using philological evidence to support the solar theory, turning for his own answers to another new discipline, anthropology. Lang and his supporters (like Muller he was not alone in the fight) proposed that rather than the degraded remnants of natural forces the problematic elements in the tales were the survivals of animal-worship and animistic magic. Lang's Darwinian assumption that fairy-stories were leftovers from the childhood of human development led to the corollary assumption that the tales were therefore leftover fare for human children, who would in the course of time, like the human race in general, mature into adulthood and put away childish things." Another tidbit: Lang's Green Fairy Book was published the year Tolkien was born and it contains the story, "The Enchanted Ring". In it, the young protagonist is given a ring that makes them invisible but also very powerful, if they never make bad use of it ... But such treasures of knowledge can lead us to trick ourselves: Tolkien probably didn't read the book that year (how precocious was the young JRR?) and Richard Wagner wrote Der Ring des Nibelungen - featuring a similar corrupting magic ring - before the Green Fairy Book came out. Tolkien despised Wagner, and likely all got their myths from somewhere prior.