An interview with Tolkien from 1966, originally published in New Worlds magazine, reprinted in 2001 at Fantastic Metropolis. Interesting for his opinions on Science Fiction – although I suspect that the interviewer, Daphne Castell, might perhaps have skewed the presentation of his views to make them more sympathetic, it does seems that Tolkien saw himself as part of the genre, and he contributes his “Hard Science Fiction” bit – talking about the science of linguisitics.
Oh, yeah, it’s also interesting for the bit about the cats of Queen Beruthiel, which reads like Tolkien demonstrating his myth-making process live to his interviewer.
The site also reprints Rani Graf’s interview with Ted Chiang (from Bli Panika!) And they have a two-part “Old Farts’ Fireside Chat” where Barrington J. Bayley and Michael Moorcock ramble and ruminate.
Month: August 2004
Ken Hite mercilessly summarizes the latest film’s take on king Arthur:
Its "Arthur" is the (imaginary) lineal descendant of Lucius Artorius Castus (fl. ca. 185 A.D.), himself the only Roman official in Britain known to have borne the name Artorius.
Its "knights" are Sarmatian cataphracti, an interesting (if ridiculously presented) take on a theory proposed first (AFAIK) in the 1920s, and elaborated well beyond all sanity in the terrifically interesting From Scythia to Camelot by Littleton and Malcor.
Its "Britain" is the Land of Silly Stupid Pretend.
For further reading, he recommends Tom Green’s Arthurian Resources (or N.J. Higham’s King Arthur: Myth-Making and History, but warns:
Do not come to either Green or Higham with a romantic spirit, however, or they shall crush you like Arthur may or may not have crushed the Saxons, possibly at Badon Hill, wherever that was, around 540 A.D. or thereabouts, if he existed at all, which there’s barely any scholarly reason to say that he did.
There. I’ve copy-pasted practically all of his entry, except for the bit about The number of Keira Knightley square-inch-seconds
being worth the price of the ticket.
Oops.
Categories
An Ode to Idleness
The Guardian prints an essay adapted from a book, How To Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson. Against Benjamin Franklin and the repressive protestant work ethic, the author rallies Descartes, Proust, and God himself.
Categories
Advanced Procrastination Techniques
Ijon’s post on how bursts of creative enthusiasm come up to distract him from the task at hand tied in with amazing synchronicity to this item that turned up in my feed reader, about the technique of Structured Procrastination. That article actually outlines a cunning strategy where, by cleverly structuring your task list, you can actually benefit from the natural tendency to avoid doing the urgent, important task by doing something (allegedly) less important. Oddly enough, I’ve actually done things like that, even at work. However, the synchronicity doesn’t stop here, because here’s a link describing the important idea of Yak Shaving, which is much more typical of how I actually go about my work:
You see, yak shaving is what you are doing when you’re doing some stupid, fiddly little task that bears no obvious relationship to what you’re supposed to be working on, but yet a chain of twelve causal relations links what you’re doing to the original meta-task.
Categories
Morrison and Moore (humor)
Jeff Lester has some of his Fanboy Rampage columns online, including Excerpts from “Grant Morrison in Conversation” (a parody that’s close enough to the truth to be hilarious) and Alan Moore’s turn on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (via the very-similarly-named-but unrelated blog Fanboy Rampage!! – note the double “!”).