Time Out, Part II

"I'm going to do a lot of nothing this weekend," I told my coworkers on the way out the door Friday afternoon. And God, in His wisdom, must have agreed; less than an hour ago, I bent to give the dog a forkful of catfood for her breakfast, and felt the familiar dagger in my spine of my back going out.

Since then, I have tried moving to work the kinks out, but a quick walk up the road got me no further than the neighbor's house. I followed that with a return to the middle of my living room floor, where I intend to pass the morning, at least, before trying additional physical therapy.

I'm not terribly worried about this; although I've been pain-free for some time, my back was in no wise cured, and will likely be an ongoing condition until I have no other option available but surgery. I was told when I got my last round of shots that they could last as long as a year and a half; it has been, by my reckoning, about three months shy of that. I will see what a regimen of rest and low activity does for me this weekend. But if all else fails, all I need do is make an appointment for another round of shots with my surgeon in Nashville.

I must admit, though, the entire process would be a lot more palatable if I wasn't also fighting my way through a sinus headache.

On to other matters; I had intended to touch base this morning in any case, if for nothing else than to say hello. Life has been good lately, and I have much to be thankful to God for. For starters, I am writing again. The outline of a particularly troublesome chapter in my long-neglected novel fell into place as I was commuting to work two days ago, and so I have had a reason to break into my freshly-updated version of my Apple Pages word processor.

I'm also putting a toe in the water when it comes to some old friends. I have been so inspired by the news that "The Hobbit" movie has been greenlit that I have returned to my abandoned promise to re-read the whole "Lord of the Rings" series. This time, my goal is to finish reading the trilogy by the time filming begins in February. I am still a bit anxious about whether or not the movies will, in fact, be filmed in New Zealand, but I am enormously cheered by the news that Martin Freeman will be our Bilbo. He doesn't look as close to the Bilbo in my head as Elisha Wood looked like my Frodo, but it's still a very near thing, and I am greatly cheered.

By the way; I fully expect Peter Jackson to take some of the new footage from "The Hobbit" — particularly Bilbo's finding of the ring — and insert it into the flashbacks in "Lord of the Rings" where he used Ian Holm in a curly wig as a much younger Bilbo. Personally, I think this is an altogether sensible idea, but some of you may be a little squeamish about it (despisers of Hayden Christianson's disembodied head, I'm looking at you). Either way, you've been warned — it's going to happen.

On the music front, I have returned to my track-by-track comparisons of The Beatles stereo and mono recordings. I just finished Sgt. Pepper last night, and will no doubt find some time today to make some headway into Magical Mystery Tour. My sonic forays have been accompanied by readings in a couple of Fab Four-related birthday presents; The Complete Beatles Chronicle by noted Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn, which is a day-by-day account of The Beatles' entire professional lives; and The Beatles: Anthology book; an impressively-detailed first-person history of The Beatles, by The Beatles, and the last piece of the Anthology project I had yet to own. There's also Beatle Gear, a well-researched book examining all aspects of The Beatles' instruments — probably boring as watching paint dry to many folks, but irresistibly fascinating to an old guitar slinger like me.

On the Star Wars front, I am very close to a long-overdue viewing of the Original Trilogy. I have two yet-to-be-achieved goals in my DVD-watching life; watching all three Lord of the Rings movies back-to-back, and an uninterrupted viewing of all six Star Wars films. I may try the former sometime before the first "Hobbit" movie is released (or immediately after seeing the second one), but have no firm timetable for Star Wars. I only know that I want to remember what I liked about the Saga. In order to do that, I have to begin at the beginning, which is the original three movies, without the special edition treatment, thank you kindly. I still intend to sit down and watch all six movies, in numerical sequence, as George intends them to be seen. At the moment, though, I'm not in a place where I can watch The Phantom Menace without wishing I was watching Empire instead.

Finally, we come to Disney. I am pleased to report we just obtained the BluRay/DVD combo pack of Beauty and the Beast. Since we don't own a BluRay player yet, I can only report on the DVD content, which is bare-bones compared to the BluRay stuff. As someone who decided, back in the day, that they needed Beauty and the Beast on DVD a couple weeks after the company put it "back in the vault" (a forced-scarcity policy on Disney's part that I heartily loathe), though, it was nice just to have it again. Happily, the new DVD contains everything that was on disc 1 of the original release — namely the original theatrical release, special edition version and "work in progress" version. The budding Disney animation geek in me loves this last version, since it gives a peek behind the curtain at the animation process in real time. The polished, final animation periodically drops out, to be replaced by rough-outs, storyboards, pencil sketches and other steps in the hand-drawn animation process. It can be a little jarring if all you want is to get caught up in the story. But if you're a fan of the movie-making process, as I am, it's great fun.

A little later, my daughter and I are going to do a little theme-park planning. This isn't the logistics and pricing exercises I spoke of in my last post. Instead, it will be a simple comparison of what attractions we want to see in what park; a little 'let's pretend' exercise that may help us narrow down what we want to do when we finally do arrive at the parks. All in all, fodder for a good, relaxing afternoon at home.

So that's life this week. I may be sidelined, but at least I'm not bored. And, God willing, I'll be back in the line up sooner rather than later.

Time out

Sorry it's been so long since my last post. Ain't it funny how time slips away?

I have been taken out of the race by a ruptured disc. By doctor's orders, I am laying on my living room floor, surrounded by books, DVDs and iPods, and watching a DVD of 101 Dalmatians.

Okay, so the doctor just told me to lay on the floor. He didn't say anything about the DVDs, or any of that other stuff. Oh, yeah, and he gave me drugs to take, and told me to stay here for two weeks.

Since I have been put in the penalty box for 14 days, I am going to try to catch up on my reading. This means studying my Bible, but it also means returning to my place in The Lord of the Rings. I had just arrived at "A Shortcut to Mushrooms" when I lost the track. My wife also wants me to follow her into the Twilight series. I am loath to pick up another series when I'm trying to make my way through Tolkien, and I've never been much for vampires. Still, I may humor her, just so she'll have someone to talk to about the series.

One of the blogs I follow, 2719 Hyperion, has a fascinating post on the myth that Walt Disney once owned the rights to make a movie of The Lord of the Rings. Of course, Disney never actually even approached the professor for the rights, after his story department (I think, correctly), told him that the story was too unwieldy for a feature film. Then there's the not-too-surprising revelation that Tolkien had a "heartfelt loathing" for Disney's treatment of fairy tales and faerie creatures.

As a lover of both Disney's and the Professor's works, I thought the post was fascinating food for thought. What would Disney's artists and storytellers have managed to create with the wealth of imaginative imagery present in the Professor's masterpiece?

A disaster, I am quite sure. Disney would have stripped Tolkien's story down to its barest bones, and slapped on the carcass his own unique artistic vision, leaving something that resembled Tolkien only superficially. P.L. Travers, who Walt wooed for years in an attempt to get his hands on her Mary Poppins stories, was, according to many accounts, heartbroken by the treatment of her story. The friction between Disney and Travers was well-documented, and somewhat nasty. The clash of ego and artistic vision that would have surely happened betwen Walt and the Professor during the creation of Walt Disney's The Lord of the Rings would been an epic battle the like of which the world has never seen.

In the end, I think we can all be grateful that such a battle never had cause to come to pass. Jackson's films, despite their flaws, are head and shoulders above anything that the Disney studios could have produced. The Tolkien books have too much detail, and too intricate a plot, for the Disney treatment. Nearly all of the classic Disney films that I can recall at the present were adapted from shorter fare — short stories and fairy tales. I don't think even a longer story, such as The Hobbit, would have fared well at all as a Disney film.

That's all for this week, campers. If you need me, I'll be here on the floor. Mind your feet, please.

The road goes ever on...

I was going to call this "Queer Lodgings," since I was reading that chapter in The Hobbit when I was staying in my daughter's hospital room. Happily, she has since been discharged, and I have since moved on all the way to "Concerning Hobbits" in The Fellowship of the Ring.

I have made several false starts on The Trilogy (note the allcaps) in the past decade or so, but I really believe I'm going to manage it this time. For a time, I believe I lost the ability to read. That's a bit of an exaggeration, but it really was quite hard for me to finish anything for a while there. It was demoralizing and depressing.

I don't know if it's the fact that I'm re-reading something I already know quite well, or if it's because I'm re-reading my favorite book of all time, but so far, reading The Trilogy been a delight. I savored every page of The Hobbit, and intend to do the same with Fellowship. It was about this time 32 years ago that I read the book for the first time, and the memories of that first reading are with me still. In fact, I was giving serious consideration to giving full vent to my nostalgia by listening to the same music I did then, and using my mint condition copies of the same Ballentine paperback set I read back then. Money to buy saidsame music made me chicken out on the former, and my hopelessly OCD personality made me chicken out on the latter (Eeek! Is that a crease in the cover?), but I'm remembering that time just the same.

In fact, I've already made a pact with myself to re-read the trilogy at this same time of the year prior to the release of the film version of The Hobbit. It's not quite Christopher Lee's "every year" discipline, but it's a start.

Stay tuned for another post on a completely different topic within a few days time — I'm simply too tired to manage it right now, and my bed is calling...

"Riddles in the Dark"

  Since I only have, at most, five readers, and since all of those readers have read The Lord of the Rings, I am going to feel free to post about my current attempt to re-read my absolute favorite book. Stranger, you are welcome here, but if you are a Tolkien neophyte, you have been warned.

  I have just finished "Riddles in the Dark," which has much to do with Bilbo, Gollum and The Ring. Although it comes early in the book, it is the chapter that has most to do with the larger story of The Lord of the Rings. What I did not realize was how at home the "Riddles in the Dark" chapter fits with LoTR. I had always thought Tolkien had added nuances of meaning to this chapter when he refered to it in LoTR that were not really present in The Hobbit. In other words, he was describing things that weren't really there. 

  For example, let us take the famous line from Gandalf to Frodo: "Pity? It was pity that stayed his hand." I had always imagined Tolkien was using Gandalf to add a shade of color that Tolkien hadn't foreseen when he wrote the original draft of The Hobbit, but that didn't conflict with what was on the page overmuch.

  I now see that I was wrong. Bilbo indeed had a chance to kill Gollum, but was stayed by exactly what Gandalf said: a surge of pity for Gollum's condition, and a reluctance to kill without need. Tolkien clearly writes:

"A sudden understanding, a pity mixed with horror, welled up in Bilbo's heart: a glimpse of endless, unmarked days without light or hope of betterment, hard stone, cold fish, sneaking and whispering."

  In this single sentence, Tolkien reveals Bilbo to have a depth of empathy that is surprising in one so dedicated to his own creature comforts — surprising to all but Gandalf, perhaps. In a lesser authors hands, or in the hands of one of our more violent modern-day scribes, Bilbo would have plunged Sting into Gollum's vitals — out of fear or revenge, perhaps — then skipped nimbly over the cooling corpse on his way to freedom. In this day and age, I daresay few would notice.

  It's certainly what James Bond would do.

  Instead, we see a "silly hobbit," who, in a flash of insight, sees beyond his opponent's attempts to thwart him, and is instead able to see his opponent's suffering. It is a moment of pure compassion, in the best traditions of the world's great religions. It is also a rarity in fiction, and in real life.

The Professor

  One hundred and seventeen years ago this day, John Ronald Ruel Tolkien was born to us in South Africa. Since I noted the great man's death a few months back, it is only fitting that I celebrate his birth here as well. Now if I can only remember to do the same for Jack when the time comes...

  The title today comes from a custom the Tolkien Society has of toasting the memory of Tolkien on his birthday. It is done in the tradition of British ceremonial toasting — one raises a glass of his or her preferred memorial beverage and says "The Professor" before taking a sip. I performed the ritual myself last night when it was about 4 a.m. in Oxford, and I will leave my choice of beverage to your imagination. For more information on the tradition, look to the Tolkien Society's Website here.

  Fittingly, I have (as most of you know) returned to reading Tolkien's classic, The Lord of the Rings, beginning with The Hobbit prequel. I tried The Hobbit about a year ago and found it unsatisfying for some reason. Happily, this time, it is a delight, and I am enjoying it very much. I am, at this writing, deep beneath the Misty Mountains with our hero, who is about to embark on a riddle game with a most unsavory creature.

  And now, if you'll excuse me, I hear my last day's cup of expresso calling me.

  The Professor!