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Funny; I can't find it on the internet, but on my Getz/Gilberto Bossa Nova jacket, it explained that this was the last real music to win grammy for album of the year before accountants ruined pop music with Elvis Presley and the usual four beats to the measure tripe variously called...
I remember hee hee!ing when reading those liner notes.
I'll have to look and see, but there's this great footage of Dave Brubeck talking to SF jazz (and later psychedelic rock) critic Ralph Gleason in, like, 1959 when Elvis was in the army, Little Richard was in the church and Chuck Berry was in jail.
"The kids," he says "are already bored with rock'n'roll."
It made me snorkle into my bong.
That seems to pretty much echo some of the things Michael Moorcock has said in his criticism of Tolkien's work.The title of the essay would imply that, but reading it, I get the feeling that Moorcock's beef with Tolkien was political, not over age-appropriateness. I don't really care about Tolkien's politics (or Moorcock's, for that matter). I just don't find reading LotR as rewarding now as I did when I was a kid.
More data points for the record:
I first read The Hobbit in 2nd grade, I don't think I finished the LOTR until 3rd, I've read them each 3 or 4 times in the following 25ish years, throwing in The Silmarillion a couple of times. I've always thought he was great. I'm willing to hypothetically allow that nostalgia has tinted my appreciation of him, but this hasn't affected other books that I loved as a child that I have re-read, for example, [spoilered for trolling] and [spoilered for trolling]. Also, I like to read kid's books every now and then.
The Hunger Games was the bomb, yo!
I loved "The Hunger Games." Another very good children's fantasy book was the "Inkheart" series.
Can't believe we're talking about Tolkien and children's books without reference to the famous Rogers quote:
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I figured we wanted to avoid bringing that into this discussion.
Funny; I can't find it on the internet, but on my Getz/Gilberto Bossa Nova jacket, it explained that this was the last real music to win grammy for album of the year before accountants ruined pop music with Elvis Presley and the usual four beats to the measure tripe variously called...I remember hee hee!ing when reading those liner notes.
I'll have to look and see, but there's this great footage of Dave Brubeck talking to SF jazz (and later psychedelic rock) critic Ralph Gleason in, like, 1959 when Elvis was in the army, Little Richard was in the church and Chuck Berry was in jail.
"The kids," he says "are already bored with rock'n'roll."
It made me snorkle into my bong.
I have a "history of rock" type book written by a Swedish music-journalist which concludes with declaring that the genre has gone stale and will probably be commercially dead in a year or two.
...it was published in 1976.
IIRC, Calypso was supposed to be the Next Big Thing in the '50s, or possibly Bossa Nova, but in 1976? Jazz fusion? Disco? Serial composition?
That Wilson essay cheered me up ;)
I was mostly thinking how very different the conclusion would have been 6-12 months later when Punk and Disco had broken through.
Of course, that particular writer would probably have written off Punk as too nihilistic, and Disco as not political enough.
by the guy who should be blamed for inventing Emo (Which is short for Elric of Melnibone).I love that essay, and I love Moorcock, but I wonder if he really counts as a literary snob. Maybe, I could be argued either way, I guess.
But I don't think I've ever seen Edmund Wilson linked on here before, and he definitely was a snob.
I was ready to listen to Mr. Wilson all the way up until he said in LoTR the hero "faced no serious temptations...is lured by no insidious enchantments ... Perplexed by few problems..." Plus he says he can't even visualize Gandalf ...perhaps the most easily visualized iconic wizard in all of literature!
I think he had a personal issue or perhaps read a different Lord of the Rings than most of us.
Perhaps the Jerry Tolkien story about an unemployed circus performer ...
Funny; I can't find it on the internet, but on my Getz/Gilberto Bossa Nova jacket, it explained that this was the last real music to win grammy for album of the year before accountants ruined pop music with Elvis Presley and the usual four beats to the measure tripe variously called...I remember hee hee!ing when reading those liner notes.
I'll have to look and see, but there's this great footage of Dave Brubeck talking to SF jazz (and later psychedelic rock) critic Ralph Gleason in, like, 1959 when Elvis was in the army, Little Richard was in the church and Chuck Berry was in jail.
"The kids," he says "are already bored with rock'n'roll."
It made me snorkle into my bong.
1961, around the 9:00 mark, still awesome footage. When the drummer pushes up his glasses in the middle of a drum solo, I die.
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In other news, in terms of snobbiness, I once found a formula that I liked and have tried to live by ever since: Classics and trash and nothing in-between!
Of course, I found it in a book of film reviews by a guy who writes for The New Yorker, so...
Yeah, every snob tends to have a guilty pleasure. I might qualify as a literary connoisseur according to some people's definitions, I certainly appreciate the classics and can even admit to having an appreciation of James Joyce and JD Salinger...
But I loves me some Louis L'Amour and Robert Heinlein... I've quite literally read every single published word written by those two authors, many of them more than once. Sure Louis L'Amour only wrote one story, but man he writes it well!
I've even read a good bit of Zane Gray and Luke Short... Not to mention a whole lot of fantasy and sci fi that would not qualify as great literature.
I loved Last of the Breed. I've read all of Heinlein's stuff, but he always gives me that "creepy old uncle" vibe, so I can't get into it as much -- except for Glory Road, which I've read umpteen-gazillion times. For for trashy reading, my new fave is Lee Child; his Jack Reacher novels span the gamut from "lousy, unreadable trash" to "absorbing, delightful, addictive trash."
So...for fun:
What was the latest, recentist (i.e., written recently) fantasy novel that you've read and was it Tolkienesque?
Mine was Death's Heretic by Paizo's own James L. Sutter and I didn't find it very Tolkienesque at all. More film noir and Humphrey Bogartesque.
You know, I'm not really sure what the necessary ingredients are for "(highly) derivative Tolkienian fantasy". Other than it's bad.
Me neither, really. I figured everybody who responded could use their own criteria and, this being the internet, people could duke it out if they disagreed.
For example: Out of all the members of the Fellowship, only Sam qualifies as a peasant.
Down with Middle-Earth!
Vive le Galt!
Hmmm, recent fantasy. It's been mostly older stuff for me lately. I have been reading Donaldson's latest Covenant series. As mentioned above, superficially Tolkienesque, but more a deconstruction.
Before that, Elizabeth Bear's Eternal Sky trilogy. Probably the closest to Tolkienesque she's done. But with Mongols. And though there does seem to be a dark god, the main villain is more his head priest/mage type. The main characters are a ousted prince and a wizard. Hardly the requisite simple fated peasants.
You know, I'm not really sure what the necessary ingredients are for "(highly) derivative Tolkienian fantasy". Other than it's bad.
Also, it's got a horse that makes Shadowfax look like a bog-standard pony. ;)
(Reading a few reviews, I was delighted to notice almost all of them made note of that.)
Latest fantasy for me would be the one I'm reading now - The Swordsman's Oath by Juliet E McKenna. Definitely not Tolkienesque - more in the vein of the non-RSE Forgotten Realms novels, like Elaine Cunningham's, but with a smallr number of witty one-liners.
You know, I'm not really sure what the necessary ingredients are for "(highly) derivative Tolkienian fantasy". Other than it's bad.
Me neither, really. I figured everybody who responded could use their own criteria and, this being the internet, people could duke it out if they disagreed.
For example: Out of all the members of the Fellowship, only Sam qualifies as a peasant.
Down with Middle-Earth!
Vive le Galt!
For a broad definition of peasant. He's a gardener, so more of an outdoorsy servant. :p
(Not that there's anything wrong with being a servant. Although my grandmother, who went into service as a house maid when she was fourteen, has been known to state good riddance to that job-description.)
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Likewise.
Grapes of Wrath was... okay. Had to read it for a summer reading in high school; don't recall being bored or hating it. However we were also assigned My Side of the Mountain in that same summer, and I fell in utter love with that book, so I read it multiple times, while Grapes I read once, then reread during the school year as necessary for homework.
Was re-reading through the thread (wow, there was a lot I missed the first time) and I hee hee!ed with glee, as I always do, at the mention of My Side of the Mountain. I read that when I was little...and promptly ran away!
I was found, hiding in the woods, a couple hours after my parents came home. Apprarently, it was pretty easy to follow the trail of granola bar wrappers. (Yeah, prepubescent Doodlebug littered. Deal with it!)
Back on that whole classics tip...
Current issue apparently also has articles on Proust and Kafka, but I haven't read them yet.