Monthly Archives: February 2014

Why I Won’t See the Hobbit Movies

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People who have known me since I was a teenager would be shocked to hear me say that. I was/have been/still am one of the most devoted Tolkien fans ever – since back in the 1970s when the first wave of Hobbit hysteria hit.

I loved the Lord of the Rings movies. I sat in the theater reciting my favorite lines along with the actors. I curled up in my seat in a fetal position and sobbed when the characters left to sail West. These were my friends and they were leaving.

I knew that Peter Jackson had to make some choices in order to film three books. He could not possibly put in everything. Indeed, some fans were upset that favorite scenes didn’t make it in (Tom Bombadil, for example). I was upset by what they put in that wasn’t in the books (the whole Arwen-is-dying nonsense).

Which brings me back to The Hobbit. At first I fully expected to see it. Then I started hearing things that made me doubtful.

It was going to another trilogy. You make a trilogy of films from a trilogy of books; that’s fine. You make a trilogy of films out of a single book and a short one at that, no good can come of it. You will have to add and pad and then Gad! Stuff that Tolkien never wrote – lots of stuff.

It was another dramatic epic struggle between Supreme Good and Primal Evil. The Hobbit was a children’s story, for crying out loud, that Tolkien wrote for his young son. A simple quest story – There and Back Again.  The Lord of the Rings came later, featured more complex and grown-up themes, including sweeping battle scenes with thousands of extras. The Hobbit was not a “prequel.” It was a stand-alone book. But The Lord of the Rings, which was and needed to be a sweeping dramatic epic struggle between powerful, apocalyptic forces, made money and lots of it. So let’s do it again, whether that’s what the first book was about or not.

The characterizations and tone had been changed to make the films more dramatic and serious. My husband was watching it in another room, and I asked him what was up with all the screaming and yelling and battles. He said, “I was watching The Hobbit.” My jaw dropped.

Conflict, sure. Danger, sure. But so much yelling and screaming that I thought it had to be a war film (or Robocop without the guns)? Much of the book was sweetly comic, with just enough threat, suspense, and fighting to keep its intended readers – children – interested. Millions of us as teens and young adults loved the book as it was. We recognized the value of children’s literature, and still do. The Harry Potter books and films had a massive following that included me and my friends in our 40s and 50s and beyond. We don’t need the works revised for “mature audiences.”

The last straw for me, though, was Radagast the Brown, a brother wizard of Gandalf’s. He was mentioned ONE TIME in The Hobbit and had only a tiny role in The Lord of the Rings. He was essential to no plot, subplot, or theme. He was, as they say in opera, a spear-carrier. Or in this case a staff-carrier.

At first I shrugged. More padding. So what? Then I heard what they did with the character.

They PUT A BIRD’S NEST ON HIS HEAD and had him drive a SLEIGH PULLED BY BUNNIES.

There is no excuse for that sort of thing and I am not paying money to see it. I’ll stay home and re-re-re-re-re-re-re-read the book.

Sleigh-bunnies. Feh.

Cats, Etc: Conversation With Louise

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I understand this is Throwback Thursday, which means that bloggers can recycle old posts. I haven’t been blogging long enough to have many old posts, but this is a contribution from Louise, one of my cats, pictured above.

Me: Louise, honey, I’m glad you love your mama, but please don’t sit/stand/lie on my throat.
Louise: Meow (translation: But I’m the Queen of Everything.)

Me: Honeycat, it’s lovely floof, but please don’t eat it. It looks much better outside you than inside.
Louise: Meow (translation: But I’m Her Royal Floofiness.)

Me: Louise, darling, you have cat food breath.
Louise: Meow (translation: Yeah, well, you have human food breath. What’s your point?)

Valentine’s Day. Bleah.

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I have very few happy memories associated with Valentine’s Day. The only one I can think of offhand is the one when my long-distance boyfriend actually sent me flowers. I took a Polaroid picture of them and married him. (Not directly because of that, but it sure helped.)

I would post the picture of the flowers, but scanning a Polaroid from a hundred or so years ago seldom produces anything but a colorful blob. I suppose I could pass it off as a scanned Polaroid of an Impressionist painting.

But I digress. (I do that a lot.)

Valentine’s Day came to my attention, as it does to most of us, in grade school, where it was shown to be a meaningless exercise. I do not think that making “mailboxes” out of brown paper lunch bags had any actual educational value. And, after the teachers figured out that letting the kids decide whom to give valentines to was a way of separating winners from losers, valentines for every classmate became mandatory. The only technique left to express your true feelings was to decide which valentines you thought were the crappiest and give them to the people you liked least. So perhaps it was an exercise in passive-aggressive behavior, which is an important thing to know and recognize.

Then there were homemade valentines, usually reserved for relatives. These did teach me an important lesson. I would make my paper heart, ask my mother how to spell “valentine,” sign my name, seal the envelope, and continue on to the next. (Lather. Rinse. Repeat.) After about the fifth round of this game, my mother suggested that I write all my cards before I sealed them up, thus having a model for the spelling of “valentine.” It seemed to work.

But again, I digress.

The funny thing (to me) about Valentine’s Day, other than the commercials that equate romantic love with nearly anything you can purchase, is that it reverses the usual ways holidays come to be.

For many (or most) holidays, pagan peoples had a series of holidays celebrating natural events – planting, harvest, astronomical events – and important concepts – fertility, remembering ancestors – throughout the year. The Christian churches did not like to encourage pagan celebrations, but they couldn’t actually say, “Don’t celebrate.” Back then that was about the only fun to be had.

So the various churches took the various pagan holidays and grafted Christian meanings onto them, the most notable being Christmas. I’m not knocking Christmas or saying you shouldn’t believe in it or shouldn’t spend gobs of money on presents. But certain related pagan customs have survived. The Christmas tree was a Druid practice, for example.

(Other graftings did not take as well, so now we have fertility symbols including bunnies and eggs somehow associated with the birth of the Savior.)

However, Valentine’s Day is exactly the opposite sort of holiday. It started out religious and has been so altered that the connection is nearly invisible. St. Valentine was a Christian. He never gave flowers or chocolates or diamonds to anyone. This post that’s been floating around the Internet puts it nicely:

Valentine

(Image from Ethika Politika)

No, what Valentine did was send encouraging notes to other Christians and sign them “Your Valentine” while awaiting execution.

Kind of sucks the romance out of the whole thing, doesn’t it?

I do, however, celebrate Feb. 15, Discount Chocolate Day.

P.S. Don’t get me started on what happens when the government tries to mess with holidays.

 

 

A Book Is a Book Is a Book

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One would think that, considering my life-long status as an ardent bibliophile, I would have been one of the first to get my knickers in a twist at the rise of the (shudder) e-book.

But no.

I do admit that books are a wonderful, magical invention and that the solidity and heft of a printed book are a comfort. And the smell of them! When I was a kid I used to haunt Dennis Used Books and the moment I walked in, I was overwhelmed with the scent of paper, dust, ink, spices, pipe smoke, and the warm space heater.

I used to go to the library and come home with glorious stacks of books, each awaiting my avid reading. And rereading. And rereading. My mother would insist that I get at least one book I hadn’t read before.

Even as I write this (on a computer, not with a quill pen and a pot of ink), I am surrounded by shelves of books, stacks of books, piles of books, toppling towers of books, bags of books, autographed books, even a couple of first editions.

I wanted a book within reach everywhere. I had a bedside book, a purse book, a bathroom book, a car book, lest I be stranded somewhere with only a ketchup bottle for company. Hell, I used to buy purses based on how many paperbacks they would hold.  (I would try to make each book a different genre so that I could switch back and forth among them without losing track.)

The thing is, many of my bibliophile friends complain of the insubstantiality of electronic editions. And admittedly, they do not offer the same sensory delights as “dead-tree” editions.

But.

The content of a book is still the same content, no matter how it’s delivered. If each new technology had been rejected for its difference and novelty, I would be sitting here surrounded by scrolls of papyrus and creating these words with a pointed stick and a slab of clay.

Printed books were easier to make and distribute than hand-copied ones. Saint Gutenberg brought inexpensive, widely available reading to the masses. Anyone could own a Bible, a biography, a newspaper, a novel. And bibliophiles were born and said, “It is good.”

E-books have made the written word even more accessible. You don’t even have to go out in the snow. Just press a few buttons and you have a new book – or even a very old one – instantly available.

The e-book functions very much like a printed book. It may not replicate the heft or scent, but it remembers where you stopped reading and goes there promptly. It allows you to look up an unfamiliar word without first hunting down a dictionary. It lets you read in bed without disturbing anyone who is sharing that space.

There are some types of content that are not suited to e-books – picture- or photo-heavy texts, for example. (Though I read National Geographic quite happily on my tablet.) But otherwise, the content of a book is still the content of that book, whether it’s ink on a page or pixels on a screen.

And for me, the e-book holds one overwhelming advantage – the very insubstantiality that others dislike. I now can carry with me, wherever I go, 300+ books. Even 3000, if I want to. To a person with a bad back, this is a godsend.