news of the weird

1. First off, I want to alert readers to this conference. The topic is "knowledge preservation and dissemination" mostly from a Christian theological perspective. I mentioned to the organizers that library science's principles of preservation and access would be relevant here, and now I find that I'm a presenter at the conference. It's going to be in San Francisco, at the Internet Archive hq, on Jan. 31-Feb. 1, that's less than four weeks away.

2. All right, this one's weird. If you can't access the link, or didn't see it recounted in an unidentified "social media" from which this story appears to be taken, two shoplifters took - apparently at a single gulp - "About $1,200 worth of ribeye, other prime beef cuts and more goods" from a supermarket. It interests me because the market was the one around the block where we do most of our shopping. The story doesn't say how the shoplifters managed it. It does say they were arrested and the goods recovered, and there's a photo of the goods spread over the hood of a police car. I hope the store isn't putting the meat back out on the shelves; who knows how long it's been sitting out there unrefrigerated?

3. Justin Trudeau is resigning. Like Jonah, he's casting himself off the sinking ship in hopes that it will be saved without him. (I realize that Jonah didn't do it voluntarily.) It won't work, i.e. his party will not win the forthcoming election. Canadian prime ministers have done this in similar circumstances before. It didn't work for Trudeau's father in 1984, and it certainly didn't work for the opposition party in 1993, which in the ensuing election won only two seats. All it resulted in was a couple of prime ministers with derisorily short terms (2 1/2 months, 4 months and a week). We're in for another one.

4. Political lesson from the US. When Democrats lose, they accept the result peacefully. When Republicans lose, they riot. Heck, even when Republicans win they sometimes riot. ("Brooks Brothers" riot, Florida, November 2000.)

and where was he born?

John D. Rateliff, an excellent scholar who doesn't usually trip up like this, has again trotted out his favorite bugaboo: objecting to statements in books about Tolkien that say his birth in 1892 was in South Africa. What he was born in, John explains, was Bloemfontein, capital of the Orange Free State, one of the Boer Republics.

This last sentence is true, but the argument is likely to confuse the casual reader. What Tolkien wasn't born in was the Republic of South Africa, which (as the Union of South Africa) wasn't established as a governmental entity until 1910. Before 1900-02, when it was captured by the British, the Orange Free State was indeed an independent republic. After 1910, Bloemfontein was in both the country of South Africa and the Orange Free State, now a province thereof, until the latter was dissolved in 1994.

Saying that Tolkien wasn't born in the Republic of South Africa is like saying that George Washington wasn't born in the United States: both true and misleading, but more misleading than true.

Emphasizing Tolkien's birth as being in a Boer Republic is even more misleading, because Tolkien wasn't a Boer, nor even of long-resident British stock. His parents were both very recent immigrants from Birmingham in central England, and they'd moved to Bloemfontein in pursuance of his father's banking career.

But regardless of whether it is useful to deny that Tolkien was born in the Republic of South Africa, it is not true to deny that Tolkien was born in South Africa. "South Africa," as a geographical expression with a capital S, was in common use long before Tolkien was born. (Example: Compendium of the History and Geography of South Africa (spelled that way in the text) by George McCall Theal, 3rd ed., 1878.)

What anybody hardly ever writes is "south Africa" with a small s, which is John's suggestion. Somewhat more common today is "southern Africa," which more neatly distinguishes the geographic region from the nation, but even that is more often seen with a capital S. People write "West Africa," with a capital W, all the time, even though there's never been a country by that name (unless you count the colonial federations of French West Africa and British West Africa). Hardly anyone writes "west Africa" with a small w.

All this can easily be verified by the Google Ngram Viewer, which is case-sensitive unless you turn that function off.

Tolkien was born in South Africa. It is legitimate and accurate to say that.

This has been another lesson in, Don't correct people if you're not correct yourself.

when to toast Tolkien

Friday was the anniversary of JRR Tolkien's birthday. He was born 1892, so that makes him 133.

The Tolkien Society suggests that everyone raise a glass and make the toast "The Professor" at 9 pm local time. But that doesn't stop them from holding an online gathering with the toast at 9 pm UK time and inviting members worldwide to attend. That makes it 1 pm my time, and I've attended it in the past. The Society chair reads a passage, the toast is made, and then the very large attendance is sorted into breakout groups to chat.

But this year I did something different. I'm on the mailing list for a US-based Inklings discussion group which meets online Fridays, also at 1 pm my time, and which took advantage of the coincidence to celebrate Tolkien's birthday by holding the toast at 2 pm and, it being a much smaller group, giving everybody in it a chance to read a favorite passage of Tolkien. Some prose passages mostly from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - one person's choice of Bilbo and the spiders inspired someone else to pick Shelob's Lair, despite someone else confessing to finding all the spider passages horribly creepy - and a lot of poems, including "Mythopoeia," part of "The Fall of Arthur," and my choice, an obscure 1920s poem called "The Nameless Land," my favorite Tolkien poem. It's in the collection The Lost Road as well as the new Collected Poems.

Marcel Bülles aka The Tolkienist, a friend of mine in these circles, wants people honoring Tolkien's birthday to promote his e-mail newsletter, "The Roving Ranger." I'm not sure how to get this other than to pay for a subscription to his blog at Steady, which is another service like Substack, because that seems to be why I'm getting it, but there it is. Marcel also has a website where it appears the material from his newsletter will eventually end up. Anyway, it has lots of material interesting and enticing to other Tolkienists, which is why I signed up.

end of the holidays

Thursday was the end of the holiday season in our house. I dug out the last congealed fragments of wax from the Hanukkah menorah and put it away. B. took down the ornaments from our artificial Christmas tree, and I took the tree apart and packed it away. Then I moved the old rocking chair back into its position in the living room, and spread out the sheepskin and other pieces of fabric that Maia likes to sit on to their accustomed places, which should make for a slightly less disgruntled cat.

The first business day of the year is also when I traditionally take my car in for its annual servicing, which costs much money and takes several hours (spent reading and checking email on my ipad) but revealed nothing urgently bad. It also made it easy to stop in on the way home at the supermarket nearby which has the best fresh crab cakes, so that was dinner along with some sauteed asparagus.

what the Heinlein?

Suddenly, on this first day of 2025, I am finding allusions in my reading to Robert A. Heinlein.

One is this anecdote from Mark Evanier, in which Mark tells of the time in 1984 that he found himself assigned at a comics convention to moderate a panel on Heinlein. Only problem was that Mark had never read any Heinlein, and then, it turned out, neither had any of the panelists, who'd been assigned as blithely as he had, nor any of the audience, who were there mostly out of curiosity as to who this Heinlein was.
And that, I guess, shows a difference between comics conventions and science-fiction conventions. Today would be different, but in 1984 you could have staffed a pretty good and discursive, probably even contentious, panel on Heinlein at an SF con by just grabbing half a dozen random people from the hallway. Because even if they didn't know his work well, they'd have had opinions.

The other is Kevin Drum's 20 favorite books of all time, which includes Time Enough for Love (or, as I like to call it, Time for Enough Love). Oh, is it really? Not just your favorite Heinlein - personally I'd only feel easy about anyone's choice for that honor if it was published before about 1960 - but one of your favorite books of all time? Many of the other choices left me equally gobsmacked - Stephen R. Donaldson, oh god - and all I can say is, people sure are different.

the annual year-end post

I'm not sure how to count my publications for this year. Last year's issue of Tolkien Studies didn't actually appear until this year, and this year's isn't going to appear until next year. Sigh. In the one that actually appeared, I wrote the bibliography, part of the "Year's Work," and one book review. I also had one book review, of two books, in Mythlore.

That was it for that side of writing this year. I also published 24 concert reviews, not as many as last year, but except that five of them were in July, not too taxing a pace.

However, I did a lot more traveling this year than in most recent years. When toting it up, I was startled to realize that I took one (or in one case two) trips, all at least two nights' stay, in each month between June and November. Only one of those trips was by plane, however. Another was a road trip sufficiently rambling to require five separate overnight locations. But my first stay away from home was for an entirely different reason. Here's the cities where I stayed away from home this year:

Santa Clara CA
Ashland OR
Monterey CA
St. Louis Park MN
Glendora CA
Roseburg OR
Renton WA
Kennewick WA
Sherwood OR
Klamath Falls OR
Medford OR
Glendora CA (again: same motel room, even)

The other jurisdiction I set foot in this year was Idaho. But what was I doing staying in Santa Clara, the city next to my own, and at a location only two miles from here? That's when I was in the hospital for a week. Oh, my. Let's not do that again.

former president humor

I saw this on one of the tribute posts:

Carter said that his favorite cartoon from The New Yorker magazine was of a child saying “Daddy, I want to be a former President.”

That kind of reminds me:

Chief Justice William H. Taft was walking along the street one day when a little girl came up to him and said, "I know who you are!" Taft genially replied, "Who am I, then?" and the girl said, "You're the Chief Justice! But you used to be President Coolidge!"

Asked in his last years how he managed to deal with the obloquy against him, Herbert Hoover said, "I outlived the bastards."

Jimmy Carter

What more can I say about the centennial man who passed away this afternoon? Mostly this:

We've had four US presidents who made major public service after they left the presidency: John Quincy Adams, who served some 17 years in the House and fought fiercely to preserve the right of the people to petition against slavery; William H. Taft, who served as Chief Justice for some 8 years, and whatever the antiquity of his judicial opinions, was the greatest administrator of the judiciary that the Supreme Court ever had; Herbert Hoover, who was tasked by Truman to resume his post-WW1 work alleviating hunger in Europe and then headed two commissions to reorganize the executive branch; and, surely greatest of all, Jimmy Carter, who oversaw the integrity of elections, brokered peace settlements, eradicated diseases in Africa, and personally built houses for the under-housed, among much else.

All these presidents had something in common. They each served only one term as president. They were each defeated for re-election. And in each case it was for much the same reason. Each came into office with definite plans for what they wanted to do in office, but each lacked either the ability or the inclination to be a politician about it, to negotiate with Congress and others, to grease the wheels. As a result there's a lot that didn't get done and the president lost traction with the public. And the way they behaved, they shouldn't have been surprised that they lost public support.

(Though they did get some things done. Among the many things Carter got done were settling the Panama Canal on the country it's in, and establishing the Department of Education: both of which DT wants to undo, but I expect he's going to have a little trouble with them.)

But put those presidents in post-presidential positions where high-level political smooching isn't so important, and they can bring their administrative strengths and visions to bear with less impediment, and accomplish good things. In Adams's case, a tendency towards being an obnoxious gadfly was actually an advantage for someone fighting a nearly-lone battle against the sense of the House. Taft and Hoover found administrative positions where they could actually be in charge instead of being largely exhorting as a president must. And the same for Carter: a man of enormous energy and vision but also of great humility, a moral pulpit didn't suit him (remember the "malaise" speech? Nobody ever showed Carter wrong on the facts, but he was utterly uninspiring) as well as did more limited, but still important, practical problems he could solve.

So let us honor the memory of this man. Protocol says that on the death of a president or ex-president, flags are flown at half-mast for 30 days. That will include the inauguration. Heh.

why did I go to Berkeley?

The latest issue of the UC Berkeley alumni magazine has an interview with the new chancellor, Rich Lyons, the first campus head to be an alumnus himself in over 60 years. I see he was three years behind me, and he came from the same town I did. It's right by Stanford, so they asked him, in that case "why did you come to Cal?" (Cal is what sports fans call it. Nerds call it Berkeley.)

He said, "An older brother came here, so it was familiar. And I got to come to football games when I was 12 and 13. That was a big part of it."

Neither of those apply to me. I had no older siblings, and my interest in sports is zero. I'd gone through Berkeley on family outings, but had never been on campus until after I applied. Further, I had a personal connection with Stanford: my father had a post as adjunct professor at the medical school, so in high school I had a faculty family library card, which I made use of in writing term papers for history.

Reasons I went to Berkeley instead:

1. It was further away. Stanford was so close I'd feel obliged to come home every weekend. Berkeley, 50 miles away, was close enough that I could but wouldn't feel I had to.
2. It was urban. I'd spent my life out in the suburbs, and thought a period in a congested urban environment would be good for my emotional and practical education. It was, too.
3. It was larger and had a reputation as being more diverse. This meant I was more likely to find a social niche where I could fit in. That worked, too.
4. It had a reputation as being the most intellectually bristling public university in the country. Maybe in faculty, but outside of my niche I found the students to be the same unintellectual clods I'd detested in high school. That was a disappointment.
5. And speaking of being a public university, in those days that meant the tuition was much lower than Stanford's. I liked the idea of giving my parents their money's worth. The more so as I was a little nervous about going to a high-powered place. My high school teachers had warned us of how much more challenging university would be. I did not find it so; classes were never more than I could absorb.

Civil War reading

It's quieting down from Christmas. This morning I turned on the classical station and found the Brandenburg 3, instead of the nonstop Christmas carols we had yesterday. In the 45 minutes it took to drive to our nephew's house, they played "Riu, riu, chiu" twice. I can think of a lot of worse things to play twice, but you still need to keep track of your playlist.

This is the book on the US Civil War that I picked up a while back and have been poking through reading at mealtimes:

Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South by Elizabeth R. Varon (Simon & Schuster, 2023)

As the subtitle suggests, concentrates on the postwar period. Runs through his pre-war life (he was career Army) very briefly - apparently there's not much to be said; all of Longstreet's personal papers were destroyed in a postwar fire - is not too clogged on his wartime service, but really gets going on his varied postwar career, focused on his not quite unique attitude of accepting that since the South lost, they didn't get to have things their own way any more. The result of this is that Longstreet became a Republican. Huge detail on his decade plunged into the maelstrom of postwar Louisiana politics, culminating in his leading Black police troops in a street battle against a white supremacist mob. Things like this made him vastly popular among other ex-Confederates, you can be sure.

The book jump-cuts - because that's what his life was like - into Longstreet's periods doing other things like being a federal marshal in Georgia and, most bizarrely, his brief stint as the US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. You'd think this job in 1880 would be mostly focused on trade issues, and indeed the US had previously secured treaty rights for free passage of their trade ships through the Bosporus, something which the Russians also wanted and fought several wars with the Turks over, but it turns out his main concern was with American Protestant missionaries wandering around the back forties of the Empire. They'd annoy the natives, get into trouble, and the US Ambassador would have to bail them out.

But of course the main topic is Longstreet's reputation. He spent a lot of time defending himself against people who decided he'd been a bad general during the war because they disliked his activities after the war. Varon is diligent about summarizing the charges, Longstreet's writings, the crusading defenses by his second wife (a much younger journalist he married in his last, widowed years), and the opinions of previous biographers. Concludes with a discussion of Longstreet and the statues issue. There is exactly one statue of Longstreet. It's at Gettysburg, it's in an obscure corner, it was erected recently by a group which emphasized they were only honoring his generalship and not his postwar life, and it's small and makes him look like a dork (there's a photo). This book really gives a new view on the recent (and not so recent) controversies over the legacy of that still-contentious war.

I also started to read The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson (Crown, 2024) but gave up on it rather quickly. The period between Lincoln's election and the outbreak of war is searingly suspenseful, but Larson lets all the air out of it by chopping the story up into tiny vignettes, concentrating on personal walnettos instead of describing the issues, and insuring that no two consecutive vignettes have any connection, making the story even choppier. I know Larson is a wildly popular author, but I found this as boring as it was frustrating.