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Lord of the Geeks
An anonymous reader sent in links to two LOTR pieces in the Village Voice - a short bit about the LOTR excerpt shown at the Cannes film festival, and a longer piece about Tolkien and geekdom written by the guy who wrote A Rape in Cyberspace. I don't think I really agree with him, but it's an interesting read nonetheless.
The long article is interesting, but several things bugged me a lot:
"he was a straitlaced, archconservative Catholic himself"
Bullshit - compared to who ? Tolkein was an Oxford don:
"How many Oxford dons does it take to change a lightbulb ?"
"CHANGE ?? !!"
Calling him a straightlaced conservative is disingenuous at best. My grandmother knew Tolkein, he was a regular visitor to her antiques shop in central Oxford (where I actually met him a couple of times, but can't pretend to remember the experience since I was being babysat at the time). My grandmother mentioned him as being charming, with a mischeivous air.
As for the critical disclaim from the likes of a young Germain Greer (she was a militant feminist back then, and most likely rankled by Tolkein's chivalrous attitude) or some pompous, self-satisfied Private Eye hack, it doesn't deserve repetition without ridicule.
But, the central point about Tolkein's significance to geeks is valid, and I've never heard computer games referred to as culture before, let alone as "culture's center of gravity". Hmmmm...
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
"But maybe you could indulge me and imagine, just for a moment, that the fact that we live in a world increasingly made by geeks actually makes their collective imagination worth understanding."
Ha ha ha...
This guy reminds me of the high school sports stars that are still living in my home town flipping burgers, saying "Those damn nerds are taking over the world. What a bunch of losers!"
Look who the losers are now, guys...
Just because Tolkien dispenses with allegory, does not mean he disavows metaphor. LOTR has strong, undeniable themes, which if they match real life, do so by accident. In fact, all great art is like this: themes are important for the most basic reasons, abstracting the metaphysics of man and his creations, having nothing to do with concretes directly. Tokien skillfully (and artfully) creates his own universe, but one we can relate to, then is off to the races as a storyteller.
The author, Julian Dibbell, must take a naturalistic view of art, where the world recreated must be a "slice of life" rather than an original creation. How stultifying, and sad. Tolkien eschews this arrested development to embrace fantasy Romanticism, and did an amazing job of it.
This is not to say, of course, that I like everything about Tolkien. His prose doesn't flow like and F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ralph Ellison, but that's but a quibble.
*** Proven iconoclast, aspiring epicurean ***
All these outraged reactions to Julian Dibbel crack me up. The guy is pretentious, too sure of himself, capable of overwriting anything. But just from the couple of samples of his writing that I've seen, he's also unarguably a Geek himself. He celebrates the culture via critique, because he's a full-fledged member of it himself. Dibbel is a geek.
Let's not forget that after Dibbel wrote the Rape in Cyberspace article, he spent a large amount of time on LambdaMOO, eventually writing My Tiny Life... Anyone who thinks Dibbel is anti-geek should read that book. You'd realize that if he were anti-geek, he'd be self-destructive.
"Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer."
Tolkien didn't write his books as allegory, or to give obsessive people something to obsess over, or any of the usual reasons people write books. Professor Tolkien was a linguist, and liked to invent languages. Being a linguist, he realized that languages are nothing without a cultural context to place them in. Hence, he created a world, based it on some legends he had grown up with, populated it with cultures and races such as Elves and Dwarves, and gave them each unique languages. And he wrote a story about one of the events that happened in that world. Nothing more, nothing less. That's actually one of the reasons I like LOTR so much, it's just a good story, you don't have to work at reading it. You can just spend time reading and re-reading each paragraph, so rich are the descriptions and scenery. Tolkien's work is "fractal"...every person in it has a darned good reason for being there and good motivations for taking the actions they do. From the green hills of Hobbiton to the cracked plains of Gorgoroth, the story just gets better and better as it goes on, and takes on bigger and bigger events. Damn...what a story it is. I have to read it again before the movie release forever changes the way I think about LOTR.
What about Gollum? What about the concept, pervasive in the book, of good to be found in the innermost of even the most evil of creatures? What about the parallel concept of all the "good ones", being corruptable? And about that being true specially of the highest of them, being the lower ones (read the hobbits), less prone to corruption as they are not so worried about power and riches, because they enjoy thouroughly their lives? And about the many paths that corruption may take, masquerading itself at first as "neccesary steps against a bigger evil" (read censorship, martial laws...)?
Has he read the books? Has he understood them?
You do not need to look up the word "literary snob" in the dictionary now, you have been presented with a (presumably) living exemplar. A literary snob, after all is said and done is, sadly, really only a troll. I mean in the geek sense of the term, not the Tolkien sense. He will always seek the new slant about something, not caring if it's remotely consistent or interesting, but only that is provoking. He will never consider they own feelings about something, only how is that going to look from the outside. Nothing popular can be good. If Shakespeare were to prove now too popular, he would say that no book in which characters say things like "Out, you mad-headed ape!" (Henry IV) can be more than a lightweight work. Well, I've ranted enough. I must remember... not to feed the trolls.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.