Tolkien Studies 14: an announcement

On behalf of myself and my co-editors, Michael D.C. Drout and Verlyn Flieger, here are the expected contents of volume 14 of the journal Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review. All of the works are now in the hands of our publisher, West Virginia University Press, and the volume is scheduled to be published in softcover and on Project MUSE later this year. - David Bratman, co-editor

Tolkien Studies 14 (2017)

• H.L. Spencer, "The Mystical Philosophy of J.R.R. Tolkien and Sir Israel Gollancz: Monsters and Critics"
  
  
• Christopher Gilson, "His Breath Was Taken Away: Tolkien, Barfield, and Elvish Diction"
  
  
• Kathy Cawsey, "Could Gollum Be Singing a Sonnet? The Poetic Project of The Lord of the Rings"
  
  
• Eleanor R. Simpson, "The Evolution of J.R.R. Tolkien's Portrayal of Nature: Foreshadowing Anti-speciesism"
  
  
• Leonard Neidorf, "J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fall of Arthur: Creation from Literary Criticism"
  
  
• Jeffrey J. MacLeod and Anna Smol, "Visualizing the Word: Tolkien as Artist and Writer"
  

**Notes and Documents

• Paul Tankard, "'Akin to my own inspiration': Mary Fairburn and the Art of Middle-earth"
  
  
• J. Silk, "A Note on the Sindarin Translation of the Name Daisy"
  
  
• Giovanni Costabile, "Stolen Pears, Unripe Apples: The Misuse of Fruits as a Symbol of Original Sin in Tolkien's The New Shadow and Augustine of Hippo's Confessions"
  

**Book Reviews

• A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages, by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Dimitra Fimi and Andrew Higgins, reviewed by Arden R. Smith
  
  
• The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun, by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Verlyn Flieger; and The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun, by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Aleksandar Mikić with the assistance of Elizabeth Currie, reviewed by Dimitra Fimi
  
  
• The Feanorian Alphabet, Part 1; Quenya Verb Structure, by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Gilson and Arden R. Smith, reviewed by Nelson Goering
  
  
• Approaches to Teaching Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Other Works, edited by Leslie A. Donovan, reviewed by Diana Pavlac Glyer
  
  
• Laughter in Middle-earth: Humour in and around the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Thomas Honegger and Maureen F. Mann, reviewed by David Bratman
  

**

• David Bratman, Edith L. Crowe, Jason Fisher, John Wm. Houghton, John Magoun, Robin Anne Reid, "The Year's Work in Tolkien Studies 2014"
  
  
• David Bratman, "Bibliography (In English) for 2015"

and then it turned out ...

... that installing the Bluetooth software disabled Outlook.

Outlook is an important program for me. I maintain all my e-mails on it.

Amazingly, however, repeatedly insisting to Windows that I wanted to start Outlook anyway eventually reversed the polarity and caused Outlook to disable Bluetooth instead.

However, since I was done with Bluetooth and hope never to have to use it again until the next time I buy a new cell phone and have to upload a ringtone when there's no other way to do it, that satisfies me.

I refuse to use wireless accessories on my computer, and this gives me another reason why.

nightmare in blue

One nuisance of getting a new cell phone is that if you want your own choice of ringtone you have to upload it from scratch again. There's no way to pass it over.

In previous iterations, I think I was able to send the ringtone directly from the site I got it from to my phone. But this time, I was told on the website to save the file and upload it to my phone. Also, the tutorials on the phone's website say that the only way to get files on or off the phone is via Bluetooth, using the phone to connect with the other device which also has Bluetooth.

Bluetooth. Great. I didn't have Bluetooth on my computer. Neither did B. As of yesterday morning, I knew exactly two things about Bluetooth:

1. It's some sort of wireless communication protocol.
2. It's named for an ancient king of Denmark.

Now I know a lot more, including why it's named for an ancient king of Denmark, but first I had to learn it. I read the Wikipedia article, which amazingly was helpful. Then I set out to find some Bluetooth.

I didn't have Bluetooth.
B. didn't have Bluetooth.
The phone repair store didn't have Bluetooth.
The AT&T store didn't have Bluetooth.
Nobody had Bluetooth. Why does the phone require it, then?

The last told me I could buy a Bluetooth device at the computer store for maybe $10. If I hadn't already read on the Wikipedia article about the existence of Bluetooth transmitters that plug into computer USB ports, I wouldn't have had any idea what the guy was talking about, but I did, so I went.

After some trouble finding it, including sending a phalanx of employees around looking for the guy who ran that department, I bought a Bluetooth USB Dongle. I thought that was a slang word, but that's what they're actually called.

The guy said it was plug and play. It wasn't. It came with an installation disk. The disk was 3.25 inch instead of 4.75 inch, so I had to figure out how to get my computer's CD-ROM reader to take one of those without it falling through the hole in the middle.

The installation process gave me some cryptic error messages, but seemed to work. I had to correlate the Dongle's manual with the phone's online tutorials, and found that neither set of instructions bore more than the remotest resemblance to the actual processes, either of getting the phone and the Dongle to recognize each other, or of then designating the ringtone file on my computer and getting it transferred. Only years of experience trying various tricks on recalcitrant computers enabled me to get past the various error messages, failure messages, and lack of options where the instructions told me options should be, and complete the process.

All to put a ringtone on a phone. Good gravy.

some news

1. To my amazement, when my anti-virus program finally expired today, I was able to re-load and register it with the help of only one quick call to customer support. I'd thought my renewal had been canceled, but somehow I now have it for four years instead of the offered two.

2. On my trip to the wildflowers, my cell phone died. Not exactly: it was still on, I could still make calls on it, but the screen was totally dead. I took it to a repair shop and they said it could actually be fixed, for $90. I judged that, since I could buy a new one for $50 (I'm still sticking with clamshell dumb phones), I'd be willing to go through the hassle of learning a new model.

The one that the AT&T store is selling these days is from a company called LG, which they claim stands for "Life's Good." Yeah, well, it would be better if your cell phone weren't so irritating for its lack of options, like one to silence the on/off tone without also silencing the ringtone. And boy did I struggle to write my first text message on the thing, because instead of putting in what you type it changes it to what it thinks you mean, and it's always wrong. At one point it thought that "home" was "gooe" and asked me to add that to the dictionary, so I had to inform it that "home" is a word. Then I lost the whole message while trying to figure out how to put a period at the end of it.

3. Review later, but this will probably not go in it, so:
Dear parents, When you take your small son to the symphony, even if you dress him up for the occasion, if he spends the whole concert squirming, rattling his program, whispering in your ears, and so bugfck restless that he chews up the end of his tie, then he is bored and he is not appreciating the music. I don't blame him - I wouldn't have gotten much out of such advanced stuff as this when I was his age, either - but please put him, and yourselves, and me - the innocent bystander you chose to sit right in front of at this open-seating concert - out of our collective miseries and let him play outside or something.

wildflower alliance

I used a slight pause in my usual schedule of reading and computer-sitting to take advantage of the fact that I live in California. I spent yesterday on a wildflower-sighting expedition. After the heavy rains of last winter, this is becoming a spectacular spring for them, and I thought it about time I took something more than a desultory look.

The peak has been moving slowly northward with the sun, and this week it was reported to have reached Carrizo Plain, a place I'd long wanted to return to. Located high up in the coastal mountains some distance south of here (basically, you drive up the Salinas Valley and then turn left), in the deep countryside some 50 miles from any actual towns, Carrizo Plain is a rift valley generated by the San Andreas Fault (oh, relax: we're used to earthquake-related geology around here). It's a national monument (BLM variety, not NPS) with a small visitor center, which wasn't yet true when I was last there.

After an early lunch in Morro Bay, a small coastal town with a huge rock and lots of great seafood restaurants, I drove up into the mountains. At first I saw mostly little clusters of orange California poppies, the state flower, by the roadside; then these gave way to various yellow and blue flowers. Soon I could see that the green hills - themselves a temporary phenomenon; 9 months of the year the grass is brown - held splashes of yellow so intense as to be visible half a mile, then - as the vistas broadened - 3 or 4 miles, then even ten miles off.

In the plain itself, the wildflower carpets - mostly different species than I'd seen earlier on - were sometimes so thick as to eradicate the green. Flowers were even growing in the alkali flats. There were a fair number of people around, even on a weekday, taking photos or just looking.

When I reported to B., she was more interested in the fauna. I saw a wild turkey, lots of crows, and a couple lizards darting into the underbrush: larger, darker-colored, and more broadly built than the tiny brown fence lizards we have at home. Many visitors brought their dogs to see the flowers, including one giant black poodle the size of a Great Dane.

The plain is actually closer to the Central Valley than to the coast highways, so when I left at 4:30 I just headed east, down the precipitous slopes into the low valley, and for dinner sought out the rather good Indian restaurant that improbably sprouted up at the I-5 Buttonwillow exit some years back. From there, a straight marathon run back home.

Photos, we have a few: just of the flowers, mostly. The colors, though, were ever so much more vivid in person.


This one shows the ground carpet effect, a little of the alkali, and a distant view of yellow splashes on the hillside.


A closer view of a hillside splash.


What the splash flowers look like close up.


This was the most common flower on the plain. From a distance, they look yellow and black, but close up it appears that the black is an illusion.


But it's not a monoculture.


A typical human sight: people taking photos of family members sitting in the flower beds. From their ages when I saw them closer up, this seems to have been a teenage boy taking a photo of his mother, with Dad looking on. (Yes, that's an actual lake - another seasonal rarity in the desert - in the background.)


A different mix of flowers in a field some 30 miles to the west. (At Shell Creek, for anyone who cares about the geography.)

additional items

1. As a Honda owner, I got an e-mail a while back inviting me to test-drive their hydrogen fuel-cell car, the Clarity. I went to this a few weeks ago. Fuel-cell technology is old; the trick was making one small enough and reliable enough to use in a car. They seem to have done this, and the car is fun to drive. It's also surprisingly inexpensive to lease (no outright sales), as they're trying to build up the numbers so as to encourage the building of infrastructure, i.e. fueling stations. So far there are stations around California from Sacramento and Truckee to San Diego, which with a 350-mile range is enough to get you around most of the state except the far north and the eastern deserts. I went to this out of curiosity, but if I were looking for a new car, I'd consider this, except for one thing: they only have a luxury model, which I don't want.

2. Hugo finalists came out yesterday. There are still a few Puppies disfiguring the ballot, but not many, and the Puppy-inspired drop in female finalists has been entirely reversed: out of 24 fiction candidates, 17 are by women: 71%, the highest ever. Looks like we won the war on this front.

items

1. Much talk of Mike Pence's rule of never being alone with a woman not his wife. Assorted thoughts: 1) does that apply to his daughters? his mother? (I don't know if she's still alive, but according to Wikipedia she lived at least long enough to witness his conversion to evangelicalism, of which as a Catholic she did not approve.) 2) At least it's better than Trump's rule of grabbing them by the ... 3) I thought conservative Christians disapproved of Sharia law, but whatever. 4) Is the purpose to avoid the appearance of impropriety, or fear of Glenn Close's character in Fatal Attraction, or - most likely - the self-loathing of men who (like the protagonist of Melanie Jeschke's Christian romance novel Inklings) fear female sexuality because they're men and they can't help themselves?

2. I'm saving this link to a recipe for creamy lemon pasta.

3. Yevgeny Yevtushenko died. Aside from Shostakovich's fabulously creepy setting of his poem "Babi Yar", I think of him mostly from Kingsley Amis's account of meeting him in Cambridge in 1962, at which Yevtushenko confessed his admiration of Kipling ("Isn't he an imperialist?" He gave a brief shout of laughter. "Oh yes. But ... good.") and recited from a Russian translation of same which, according to Amis, sounded like this:

Boots, boots, boots, boots, koussevitsky borodin
Boots, boots, boots, boots, dostoievsky gospodin

4. I'm really going to have to go to the library so I can finish reading this article.

5. Popped down to Lyric Theatre to catch their production of Gilbert and Sullivan's Princess Ida. This was marketed as a feminist show and used to promote a fund-raiser for girls' education; did they not see the third act? Regardless of the deflating ending, this was a good production with an especially fine turn by Elana Cowen as the imperious Lady Blanche.

6. I like the anti-virus program that the shop installed in my new computer a year ago, but I strongly and emphatically dislike the protocol for renewing my subscription, which caught me in a hellhole of endless loops and disputable charges which not even a friendly human in customer service, when I finally found a phone number for one, could get me out of. It keeps warning me I need to renew, and when I click on the link, keeps telling me I already have (which I did, or I think I did). It expires in 3 more days, and if it turns out it hasn't renewed, I'm taking it back to the shop, having the program removed, and replaced with the different one they're selling this year.

7. An occasional visit to File 770 (down at the moment, so no links) showed a piece on a huge and expensive library-market reprint volume of Tolkien studies from Routledge, with comments by Tolkien scholars Douglas A. Anderson that they hadn't sought permission, either from him or his publishers, for his contributions, and from Robin Anne Reid that she hadn't even heard of this set.

Well, that may be their experiences, but mine is that I was contacted by editor Stuart Lee (whose existing reputation in Tolkien studies is very good) a couple years ago to offer my comments on a prospective list of contents, and then again by him for permission to include two of my own essays. This was followed not two months ago by an e-mail from an in-house editor at Routledge to confirm formal permission for my pieces, adding that they'd already contacted the publishers of same.

Maybe I received this favor because I was a contributor to Stuart's previous Tolkien collection (original rather than reprint material, different publisher, expensive but more widely distributed), while Doug and Robin were not. But I should also add that news about the Routledge volume has made it into the grapevine.

As Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull say therein, and Robin observes as well, this is a rather unnecessary set as any libraries that can afford or would want it probably already have everything in it in their original publications, and is mostly intended to cadge money out of unwary collection development librarians. No doubt true, but I see no reason to attempt to disfigure the project by refusing my passive participation.

8. Speaking of Tolkien publications, the very last piece for this year's edition of Tolkien Studies has just come in formatted from my co-editor for my final review before it goes off to the publisher, so I'd best get on that now.

photographic proof

Before the funeral: the family (me, my brothers, my father's relatives by marriage).

I'm seated at right. Next to me is my stepmother, then my younger brother, then my stepmother's sister. Standing behind are the sister's family (ex-husband, daughter, son-in-law, son [also married, with a small child, but they're at home in Australia]), and at the far right my middle brother.

Me and a bunch of rocks.

concert review: Danish National Symphony Orchestra

Usually a visiting foreign orchestra brings out the expatriate/immigrant community in force, literally waving flags. I've been to concert halls full of Venezuelans, even Kazakhs. But apparently there are no Danes around here, because only about half an audience, and that an everyday one, turned up at Davies for this largely blonde orchestra and its Italian conductor, Fabio Luisi.

Too bad, because it was a good show. No Danish classical concert would be complete without a piece by national icon Carl Nielsen, and here it was his curtain-raising show-stopper, the Helios Overture, in which the sun rises, crosses the sky in a blaze of glory (Nielsen wrote this on a vacation in Greece, and couldn't get over how sunny it was down there), and sets, all in 12 minutes.

Wagner's Wesendonk Songs. Local favorite Deborah Voigt has a regal soprano, but even in quiet music Wagner's orchestra does his singers no favors, and as far as the lyrics were concerned it came out like this:

mumblemumblemumbleLOUDmumblemumble

And a bounding, eager, excited Beethoven Eroica, an outstandingly dynamic performance.

Judging from the conversations I heard on the way out, everybody in the audience recognized the schmaltzy encore, but nobody knew what it was. "Was that de Falla?" No, it wasn't de Falla. "Was it The Merry Widow?" It wasn't The Merry Widow. It was, in fact, that hoary pops favorite Jalousie "Tango Tzigane", and the reason the Danish National Orchestra chose such an unlikely-seeming piece for its encore is because, in fact, its composer was Danish. Yes, he was.

As the last ovation died away, something happened that I'd never seen before. Virtually all the members of the orchestra hugged their stand partner.

concert review: Oakland Symphony

Gabriela Lena Frank, Concertino Cusqueño. Her orchestral works are even more colorful than her string quartets.

Anton Bruckner, Te Deum. This devout Catholic composer for some reason nearly gave up writing large-scale sacred music in his maturity; this is one of the few. Typical Bruckner orchestral noodling overlaid with vocal lines. Great chorus work, and outstanding principal soloists in powerful soprano Hope Briggs and well-textured tenor Amitai Pati.

Antonín Dvořák, Symphony from the New World. Closest existing work to the Platonic ideal of a symphony, this unsurprisingly had won an audience poll for what to play. Impressively deliberate performance of the introduction and slow movement, broad and stately in the finale.

Very good show. Glad that B. could accompany me to this, as it was a special occasion for me.