Here’s an example of the kind of story selling in the market I’m interested in. If I tried to commend it to you the usual way I’d give it away. Instead, if you’re interested, notice how quickly it goes and yet how slowly the discoveries emerge. I think that the writing of our time is like driving a fast car: you want to go fast but you don’t want the road to slow you down. You want to go quickly so you want the road to be gradual.
RIA Novosti regularly includes propaganda slide shows. I like them and I find the captions can be interesting. In this one, an unusually long one, the caption writer becomes increasingly hyperbolic. Eventually the captions become less coherent and then they abruptly cease. It is funny. In fact, whoever has to put the watermarks on the pictures gave up before the photographer did. The pictures are worthwhile too.
Down with urban designers. What a rabble of fad-following marketeers.
When I think about the achievement of Tolkien it strikes me that what began with a good and enthralling children’s story took on a great deal of dignity.
I have been reading the latest book that Christopher Tolkien has released, a bit more of the Silmarillion’s majestic tale: The Children of Hurin. When one enters Tolkien’s worlds again one is reminded of the proliferation of names. His love and understanding and skill is bright in the names. They are remote and strange names, names that would otherwise have been unheard. But they’re not laughable, they’re not cliches. The names Tolkien creates have an intrinsic dignity; they have the context of a whole world, a world Tolkien makes us desire and which is further explained by the names.
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