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White Tower Musings

~ This blog will be an attempt to explain the significance of various works of great writing, the authors that create them, and some effort to understand correlations between great writing and contemporary events.

White Tower Musings

Category Archives: mythology

Dreams of Venice Repeated in Sacred Rituals…and No Cheat Codes: Edward Muir’s Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice

19 Sunday May 2019

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Academic Books, History, mythology

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Tags

Academic Book, Assassin's Creed 2, Carnival, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice, Doge, Edward Muir, European History, history, Marco Babarigo, Marriage of the Sea, Overly Sarcastic Productions, Renaissance, Renaissance History, Republic of Venice, Rituals, Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia, St. Mark, The Most Serene Republic of Venice, The Sensa, Venice, Venice History

Assassins-Creed-in-Venice

I promise it’s not because of Blue this time, or at least not entirely.  It was because I got to shoot the Doge, during Carnival, on his own boat, while he was giving a speech, while wearing a gold mask.  Assassin’s Creed II was the shit dude.overly sarcastic productions

My regular reader may have observed (assuming they actually care about my intellectual movements, or at least enough to give the first few paragraphs a glance) that lately I’ve been reading more and more history.  Part of this largely because, as ever, I’ve been watching more and more of Overly Sarcastic Productions as well as Shadiversity and Suibhne.  These channels have been not just a joy to discover, they’ve been a great personal solace as I think more and more about my future and what I want to do with my life and my time.  This is, namely, that I want to spend what time I’ve got enjoying my actual passions and one of my unending passions has been history.  That…and the Assassin’s Creed franchise.  I was about eighteen or nineteen when the series came out, and oddly enough I wasn’t even that interested when the trailers for it first appeared.  I was far more interested in, and I admit this to my great shame, Modern Warfare 3.

Mistakes were made.  I see that now.

My sister received Assassin’s Creed II for Christmas that year and started playing the game once I was done fighting Uber-nationalists in a Russian Gulag or some shit.   Assassin's Creed 2In no time I started to notice that killing Brazilians with automatic rifles wasn’t anywhere near as cool as scaling the Santa Maria del Fiore, meeting Lorenzo de Medici and Leonardo da Vinci, killing people with hidden blades and brooms, collecting every Renaissance painting ever made, hunting down the Pazzi one by one and murdering the shit out of them, fighting the goddamn pope Alexander VI (Roderigo Borgia, a.k.a. the Spaniard) in an underground bunker beneath the Sistine Chapel that was built by gods, and then, of course, there was Venice.

I could spend hours talking about Assassin’s Creed II (and Brotherhood, and Revelations, and Odyssey which I got from Christmas this year care of my wife who I will love until the day I die) and trying to explain why the game left such a philosophical and intellectual impact upon my life, but honestly the only reason that mattered was that it was just a damn good game.  And in between the assassination contracts I managed to ingest a great amount of actual history.  It was in Venice though that most of the game took place, and after watching OSP’s four-part series on the Republic of Venice(for the tenth time I think), and rekindling my love of history, and reflecting on the Assassin’s Creed game which helped further solidify my love of history, it made sense that my sister gave me one of the books she read in graduate school which just happened to be about img_5340Venice.

Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice by Edward Muir is a book that, honestly, I didn’t think I was going to review while I was reading it.  The book is academic to a level that is almost painful, and there are numerous instances throughout where almost half of a page is dedicated to footnotes alone.  If the reader is not fluent in English, French, Italian, and Latin they’re sure to be stumped by the neat constant use of all of these languages with, conveniently, no footnotes to explain what words or expressions he’s attempting to communicate.  And finally, if the reader has absolutely no knowledge of the history of La Serenissima de Republica de Venetzia, or, The Most Serene Republic of Venice then the near constant references to doges, oligarchs, merchants, and notable individuals is sure to leave you either annoyed or stumped.Venice Flag

With all that said, this book was a fucking blast and I enjoyed it till the end.

Part of what makes Muir’s book so enjoyable to read is his observation of the Ritual in Venetian society and how rituals helped create a sense of identity.  In his Introduction as he sets up his argument he lays out the seven parts of his book and explores each of the aims:

In numerous medieval and Renaissance examples, legal and “constitutional” precepts and precedents found expression in ceremony long before they were written down in formal codes; and Venice, it seems, was indeed no stranger to the habit of ceremonial law.  Sixth, the historian of civic ritual investigates how NOT PUBLIC DOMAIN_1920px-Piazza_dei_Signori_(Vicenza)_-_Statue_of_the_Lion_of_Saint_Markceremonies may reveal the citizen’s own sense of their city’s relations with the outside world, relations that the Venetians saw by and large in imperial terms. […]. In Venice, one finds that the legally defined social classes, the patrimonial family, age groups, and women all shared varying degrees of ritual recognition that marked their place in the political and social organization of the city.  (6-7).

Yeah, just a forewarning, most of these quotes are going to be painfully academic.  This quote alone demonstrates Muir to be concerned more with the construction of an argument than a narrative and that in itself implies that he’s writing mostly for a handful of academics.  And while I will admit freely that I’ve grown to despise academic writing, especially after finishing graduate school, Muir’s book was still enjoyable to read because of the way he made Rituals seem like something important and relevant.

Being a citizen of the United States I recognize this.  Growing up in East Texas the Fourth of July was always an obligatory event, rather than a passive one.  It was required that Pietro_Longhi_010you go out and blow shit up or watch people blowing shit up regardless if you suffered from allergies like I did.  Watching fireworks, listening to people singing the Star Spangled Banner, or watching War movies on TV were events which were supposed to create a sense of American identity, or else national Pride.  And while I found far more patriotism in the act of living my life the way I wanted to , as well as my freedom of expression (David Bowie Electric Tiger pimp surprises) for a great number of people the ritual is the means of finding a sense of one’s self politically, emotionally, and for some, religiously.

Muir’s book then tackles some of the rituals of Venice such as the Marriage the Sea, The Feast of Mary’s, and the Coronation of the Doge in order to understand how politics and religion helped establish the notion of La Serrenissima, or the “serenty” of the Republic Venice Dogeof Venice.  Venice as a city, and as a government, still stands as the longest running single government in human history spanning from 697 CE to 1797 CE, a time of almost 1100 years surpassing any civilization in human history.  What’s inspiring, or at least fascinating is that part of this lasting success was the merging of religious and political ritual to create this sense of identity as the “serene” republic.”

Muir notes:

According to fifteenth-century Venice humanist, Giovanni Caldiera, the cardinal virtues—Faith, Hope, and Charity—underlay the republican virtues; so obedience to the state was metaphorically obedience to the will of God.  Thus, in Venice patriotism equaled piety.  The Venetians conception of themselves as a chosen people in consequence, was always revealed in their attachment to certain sacred institutions. (16).

He continued this point later down the page noting:

Belief in Venice-as-the-chosen-city and adherence to the historical institutions of the republic enabled the Venetians to withstand the tremendous forces for changes, including the temptations of millenarian enthusiasm, that ravaged the rest of Italy during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.  (16).San Marco Venice

And finally he adds more more point on the following page:

For the Venetians, “liberty” was a matter not of personal freedom, but rather of political independence from other powers.  (17).

The history of Italy during the Renaissance, is quite possibly one of the most fascinating topics to cover in history because there was simply so much chaos, warfare, political manipulations, and internal strife coupled with an explosion of academic, technological, and cultural innovation.  Legions of mercenaries were scattered across the peninsula hired and fired freely as they for or against any city state that might hire them, and while the blood flowed men like Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo da Vinci created paintings that would infer in society’s collected consciousness for centuries.  And in the midst of all this turmoil, Venice somehow managed to stay above the fray, or at least, managed to maintain some level of, wait for it, serenity that the rest of the country could only aspire to.  Gentile Bellini ProcessionMuir tries to show then that it was because of the rituals, and their underlying rhetoric that Venetians were somehow ordained by divine grace that they were able to channel their efforts and psychology into maintaining a republic.

The Marriage of the Sea best represents this idea.  Without taking too much time, the ceremony would involve the Doge of Venice, the political and spiritual leader of the Republic, sailing out to the opening of the Adriatic on a massive and ornate sailing lion-of-venice-1900barge.  There would be music and prayers and pomp and circumstance, but the main event would involve the Doge reaching the spot where the lagoon of Venice met the Adriatic and, after uttering psalms and prayers, the Doge would drop a gold ring into the sea signifying that Venice was “married” to the seas.  This ritual, which for the record still continues to this day almost three centuries after the republic ended (meanwhile I can’t even find ten minutes to do a few push-ups), was supposed to imply Venice’s “mastery” of the sea, which in turn would explain their economic and political prosperity.

Muir dedicates a significant portion of his book to this ritual, largely because it was so psychologically significant to the Venetians.  He says in one passage:

The marriage of the sea was a Venetian version of a spring fertility festival.  The usual goals of agrarian fertility rites—safegaurding the fecundity of women and crops—were transformed by the Venetian rites to serve maritime and Mercantile needs: the rites ensured the safety of sailors at sea, expressed political and commercial hegemony, established fair trade for the crowds, and invoked through Venice Marriagea mystical marriage, continued prosperity.  At the moment of their occurrence such fertility rites characteristically contribute to social cohesion and unanimity within the community.  (131).

By “marrying” the sea Venice in effect created a narrative where they were effectively in control of it, and therefore if they had any sort of success it was because of this ritual.  Though on the note of control the feminist in me immediately demands I provide the next quote which Muir provides on the next page:

The Sensa also deprived the sea of its frightening demeanor by feminizing it.  The men who said abroad could most easily imagine the sea as a female archetype: unpredictable, fickle, sometimes violent, other times passive; but assuredly sheVenice Carnival could mastered by the resolute male.  (132-33).

Muir completes this charming metaphor by providing the following analysis:

The Sensa revealed two profound psychological habits of belief: that natural forces could be comprehended by personifying them, and that through understanding these forces one could better control them, or at least predict their influences.  And in symbolizing sexual conquest the processional movement took full advantage the female metaphor.  Through the marriage each year at the beginning of the sailing season and through the subsequent voyages that consummated the union the sea was deprived of her mystery; men now “knew” her.  (133).

Misogyny is always fascinating to read about largely because one gets a sense to what limits men were, and still are, willing to go to in order to perpetuate bullshit.  The implied misogyny of this ritual aside however, Muir is able to demonstrate that this ritual helped complete a sense of Venetian identity.  For centuries Venice was a maritime power-house and no-one could actually dispute that fact.  Using a thalassocracy, a system of government and rule mostly executed through naval power rather than territorial Venice Carnival 3claims, Venice was able to establish a powerful military and economic system which kept them rich and prosperous.  Whatever opinion the reader might have about Venice they have to acknowledge that this ritual helped the citizens of the Republic believe that they were exceptional which in turn helped them execute this vision.

But at this point my contester feels compelled to speak up.  So what?  So what about Muir’s book?  It’s a long, dry, academic book about a bunch of rituals that are irrelevant.  Venice isn’t a republic anymore, in fact they’ve become nothing but a tourist attraction.  What relevance does a bunch of old rituals have to my life.

Well, if I may correct my contester, the book isn’t long, it’s only 305 pages.  To put it in perspective, while I’m writing this review I’m also reading Grant by Ron Chernow, a book which is 940 pages, and 48 hours long in terms of the audiobook.Francesco_Guardi_034

As for the relevance this is a fair point.  Like I said before, Muir is writing Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice for academics.  He’s writing for people who study Venice, and study the time period of the Renaissance.  This book is clearly designed for a small audience, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t relevant.  While the topic may seem specific to a set of conditions, Muir’s book is largely about a larger theme: the practice of rituals in human history.  While he centers his study in Venice he’s able to demonstrate that rituals are just a part of human behavior and then tries to show how these rituals translated into political, religious, and civic success.

Human beings like symbols, and we craft rhetoric and narratives from those symbols.  Whether it’s the various religions human beings practice, the modes of politics that we participate in, Battle_of_Zonchio_1499or simply the millions of stories that we create and read and watch every year, human beings like stories that make us feel connected to one another because the can inform us about what the purpose of meaning of our existence is.  Muir’s book tries top understand the narratives the Venetians of La Serrenissima told themselves through these religious and political rituals, and how that translated into a success that lasted for, literally, a thousand years.

It’s an incredible testament to the fact that human beings like rituals, because even if they may seem ridiculous or offensive in hindsight, their power over those who participated in them allowed said individuals to feel connected to a larger idea.  Venice as a government, as an idea, and as an institution are due entirely because of the Map of Venicenarratives Venetians crafted for themselves, and so as I look to Muir’s book I do recognize that, while it may not be entirely approachable as a book, as a history it’s incredibly relevant.  Good history should be about observing trends in behavior, and so the history of Venice is about recognizing the potential of the self, and the capacity for human beings to work together and create something incredible.

It’s nowhere near as enjoyable as shooting the Doge on his own boat during Carnival, but it is its own joy to read a book, find the name Marco Babarigo, and remark to yourself, “Hey I killed that guy.” 

Though I might recommend you say that internally as you co-workers are likely to look up from their lunches at you and begin to wonder if it was such a good idea to invite you out for a drink later after work.

Venice Doge 2

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes from Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice were cited from the paperback Princeton University Press edition.

 

**Writer’s Note**

I’m gonna leave the soundtrack to Assassin’s Creed II here, because, well, because you just deserve it.  I really haven’t experienced a game with such an incredible soundtrack before.  Hope you enjoy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iriiZOeInDg

 

***Writer’s Note***

I’m going to leave a few links to articles and encyclopedia entires and videos about La Serenissima in case the reader is interested.  Enjoy:venetian-carnival-mask-1467204600tcu

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Venice

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Republic_of_Venice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ktq3iK2r_Ek

And, because I’m a man obsessed, I’ve included links to all the videos Blue of Overly Sarcastic Productions has done over the Republic of Venice.  If you decide to watch, maybe you’ll understand or appreciate them as much as I do…Appreciate them I said!  Ahem.  Please enjoy.

Part 1:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86PybilU7k0

Part 2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byMleAJ5kRs

Part 3:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4da1S6moF2Q

Part 4:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph9bM56g_a0

Operation Odysseus video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cHK4xzAhzE

 

****Writer’s Note****

I’m going to remind my reader that, since this writing I’ve begun a podcast series entitled “Jammer Talks About” and Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice just happened to be the fourth book I discussed.  You can find a link to the podcast in the “Jammer’s Podcasts” link at the top of the page, or you can follow the link below.  Hope you enjoy:

 

*****Writer’s Note*****

Finally I want to give a little bit more street crew to Dr. Edward Muir, who’s the real focus of this essay anyway.  I’ve found his Professor page for Northeastern University and I’ve posted it below.  It includes his credentials, awards, publication history, Circulum Vitae, etc.  Definitely look him up because the man is a great writer, a wonderful scholar, and, if it hasn’t been made apperent, his book is definitely worth your time.

https://www.history.northwestern.edu/people/faculty/core-faculty/edward-muir.html

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Spartans, What is your Profession?  And Don’t say Dance Instructor Again!: Thermopylae, Bradford, and Recent Historical Developments on YouTube

17 Sunday Mar 2019

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in History, mythology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

300 Spartans, Ancient Greece, Assassin's Creed, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Churchillian, Ernle Bradford, Fallout 4, Greece, Herodotus, history, Hot Gates, Leonidas, Michael Fassbender, myth, Overly Sarcastic Productions, Persia, Persian Wars, Plataea, Salamis, Thermopylae, Thermopylae: The Battle for the West, Xerxes

herodotus

It probably has something to do with Assassin’s Creed, though in fact, it might actually have something to do with YouTube.

Part of my job is working regularly in the Local History room at the public library I work library-books-wallpaperat, and this entails a lot of time that is, simply put isolation.  The room very rarely receives visitors, and if it does many of them rarely require much assistance.  In fact, many people simply enter the room, grab some books off the shelf, and spend a few minutes or a few hours doing their research in relative quiet.  This is fine for me as I usually have somewhere around eight or ten tasks to perform that usually involve excel spreadsheets or the electronic card catalog.  And if I’m not doing that then I’m typically re-shelving books and microfilm boxes.  What this amounts to is long periods of isolation that would be ungodly boring were it not for YouTube.

I resisted as long as I could, but I’ve observed as of late that most of my internet time is watching videos on YouTube, but because I’m a nerd I don’t YouTube (is that a verb? Fuck it, I’m making it one, someone call OED) like most people probably do, so I wind up finding channels and videos about ancient Greeks, the Ottoman Empire, Medieval Weaponry, or TED overly sarcastic productionsTalks.  While this has lead me to some excellent books that I’ll hopefully have time one day to review, it’s also lead me to arguably my favorite channel on the internet, which has, in turn, rekindled a deep passion for history: Overly Sarcastic Productions.  

It’s a young man  and woman (everybody is starting to feel young to me, or at least younger than me) named Red and Blue who in turn make video “lectures” about history, the classics of literature, the various tropes of narrative arcs, and every now and then historical accuracy reviews of video games (I’m still waiting for Assassin’s Creed II, one day, one day).  It’s fair to say I’ve become fairly obsessed with this channel, having watched several of the videos multiple times, and I don’t apologize for this because it has, in turn, lead me to pick up books and at the end of the day as long as reading is taking place is that really so thermopylaebad?

I finished 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West, having pretty much devoured the book in under a week.  And in my mania to hop into another classic book I observed the stack of history books in my office and found one that has a bit of an embarrassing history for me.  Thermopylae: The Battle for the West by Ernle Bradford, is a book I had literally started and stopped five different times.  I don’t like stopping books, it feels like a cop-out to me, but I have embraced the philosophy that if you’re not enjoying something you should stop doing it.  When it comes to a book I’ve started and stopped multiple times, however, there’s a bit of ego there.  The book was beating me, and damn it I wanted to win this time, and I wanted to learn about a battle I’d seen and read so much about, but only ever in quasi-mythic terms.

I grabbed my paperback copy with the Hoplite flanked on both sides by spears and set to work, finishing it in about a week and a half.  I beat the damn book, and the satisfaction was only slightly better than the book itself.ernle bradford

Bradford’s book is pretty dated having been published in the year 1980.  The writing style itself is not terrible, in fact, often Bradford demonstrates his ability as a historian and author by being able to craft a functional and interesting narrative as he lays out the facts of the Greco-Persian war while trying to steadily establish the larger cultural lesson of such a conflict.  There were beautiful sentences in this book that actually left me laughing, smiling, and reaching for my mechanical pencil so that I could underline them later either for this inevitable review or else so that I could simply go back later and read them.  Bradford is a great writer, but he’s not always a great historian in this book.

For starters, his book has no real list of sources apart from a very simple bibliography in the back filled with a few “up-to-date” sources and many works of classical antiquity.  There’s also the issue that Bradford only has a few actual chapters dedicated to the Battle of Thermopylae, and I know I sound whiny and pedantic as I write this but titles really do matter.  A title is a way to communicate goals, themes, and purpose behind the text and I expected going into this book a focus on the Battle itself.  Instead, Bradford attempts to cover the entire war covering Thermopylae, but also the battles of Salamis, Artemisium, and Platea.  This isn’t bad, but when I finished Thermopylae and discovered I had another 100 pages to read I was confused and slightly annoyed.  Granted, Bradford does say at the start in Preface that he wanted to balance the text with a larger narrative of the Persians as well Greeks but it just worked on me. leonidas-56aac6875f9b58b7d008f463

And finally, two more things needs be said.  The first is that Bradford uses the adjective “Churchillian” twice in this book and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing he also employs the deplorable adjective “oriental” to describe the Persians and other Asian society and peoples.  I understand that the man was living in a different time with a different set of cultural mores, and it’s a bad policy to judge someone with a contemporary hindsight and set of values, but it just became a bit galling when the man is using the word to describe the quality of an unashamed imperialist and then using a now racially insensitive term to describe Middle Easterners. 

It just, it just started to make me groan.

Though I suppose at this point my reader is probably wondering what the ultimate significance of this book actually is or why I’m bothering with it.

Like I said before in the 1453 review I want to just start reviewing history books period, but also to see whether or not they still have a lasting cultural value, which, if my regular helloreader has been paying attention, has ultimately been the goal of this blog since day one.  Thermopylae is a book which attempts to narrate one of the most mythic battles in all of human history, and that estimation is not too bold.  Even if a person knows nothing of ancient Greece or classical history, they probably at least know the general story of the “300 Spartans.”  Much like a fairy tale, the origins of Superman, or the plot line of Footloose, Western civilization has digested the story of King Leonidas and his men and it has become the kind of mass knowledge that “everybody just knows.”  Bradford then tries in his book to balance the story then, by narrating not just about King Leonidas and his men, but also about King Xerxes, Themistocles, and the alliance of Greek city-states that eventually repelled the Persians and brought about a kind of national consciousness to the cities of Greece.

Looking at one passage, Bradford is able to demonstrate Xerxes ability as a strategist as well as describe the powerful players of this conflictxerxes-i-2

Xerxes and his advisors knew that, if it was intolerable to send heralds to Sparta, it was equally pointless to send them to Athens.  The essential core of Greece which had to be destroyed was composed of these two small, even so dissimilar, city-states.  The one was the military muscle of Greece and the other provided by far the greater part of its Naval Arm.  Many of the other Greeks had already “medised’, as the term was: they had, that is to say, shown their willingness to co-operate with the Persians.  This was hardly surprising, since to many an intelligent citizen, whether of an Aegean island, or of a city on the mainland, it must have seemed more than clear that, even if all the Greeks were united(which was far from true), they would stand no chance against the massive army and navy that was coming against them out of the East.  (32).

Bradford’s writing can be a bit clunky in this passage, but it’s important to see how he is setting up his final assessment of what the lasting significance of this war would be.  The end-results of the conflict with Persia created a lasting sense of identity among the assassin's creed odyssyGreeks.  It might be difficult for a contemporary reader to understand this conflict since we are so used to the concept of nationalism and national identity, but ancient Greece was largely a collection of city-states: independent towns that acted, in essence, as their own county and nation.  Because of this, conflict between cities such as Thebes, Athens, Sparta, and Corinth wasn’t entirely unheard of, and was, actually, pretty damn common-place.  To a citizen of the United States, this probably is not that unheard of.  Being from Texas I tend to recognize that there really isn’t anything like a Texan.  The manners and customs of my state wouldn’t hold water in New York, nor would they hold in Oregan, Hawaii, or Delaware.  Each of these states tends to, whether they realize it or not, have their own sort of regional identity which is eventually assumed by the larger national collective.

But now I’m starting to sound painfully academic so let me shoot straight.leonidas

Bradford is attempting to demonstrate to his reader how the threat from Persia was not just a threat to a collection of individual city-states, it ultimately threatened the entire Greek identity which thus allowed for the recognition by these cities that they might just be one people after all.

He says in a later passage, noting the difficulty faced by the leader of the Greek defense Themistocles:

Part of Themistocles strategy was inevitably dictated by the very natural Athenian suspicion that the Spartans might let them down, might rely on the defense of the Isthmus, might (for whatever given reason) procrastinate and turn up late—as they had done at Marathon.  If the worst came to the worst, the Spartans might come to the conclusion that they could stay secure in the Peloponnese.  They and the other allies had to be convinced that, on this occasion, it was all or nothing for every state which had declared to hold their ground against the might of the invader.  For the greecepersianwarmapfirst time in their history, the Greeks had to co-operate with one another.  In only one respect did the Athenians have an advantage over the Spartans.  If Attica fell and Athens was overrun, they would—even if worsted in a sea battle—still have some ships left.  The survivors could ‘do a Dunkirk’ and (after collecting women and children from Troezen), they could abandon Greece, sail south and then west across the Ionian Sea, and plant a new colony in Sicily or Italy.  The Spartans, with their small fleet, were condemned to fight on the land—with no escape.  (90).

Alright, I’ll admit it, I only included the latter part of that quote to point out that Bradford was clearly once again falling back upon his English conservatism (or perhaps romanticism?) but in my defense that “Dunkirk” reference was too easy to pass up, and Dunkirk was, for the record a really amazing movie.

At this point though my reader is probably ready to object.  So what?  So what if the ancient Greeks hated each other and it took a potential invader from Asia to unite them?  I work a crappy retail gig at Target and I only get so many hours in the day to play video games and watch Game of Thrones.  What relevance does this war, or this old and possibly outdated book have to my life?10-facts-battle-of-thermopylae_5-min

This is a fair point, and as usual, I don’t have an immediate rebuttal to it.  Reading a book about the 5th century Persian Wars is something you really, really have to want to do and the sad fact is many people simply don’t.  They’d rather do their jobs and then enjoy their free time watching arguably great fantasy series on HBO and/or playing Fallout 4 (seriously how great is Liberty Prime? #advictorium, #fucktheinstitute). This decision is not something I’m faulting anyone for.  I work a full-time gig and by the end of the day, I don’t always feel like writing, in fact often I putter away my time watching YouTube and straightening books in my office before it’s time for bed.

What I would say to my reader, is that while this book may not have any sort of immediate relevance, great history is about observing the trends of humanity in the past and finding some sort of lesson from it.  While Bradford’s book has become dated, he is enormously successful in demonstrating to his reader the significance of Xerxes effort to expand his borders into Europe and the effect this had on the Greek population who had, up to that time,  seen each other as separate peoples rather than an ethnic or political50i people overall.

As Bradford points out in an early passage in the book:

The invasion of Greece made the turbulent, brilliant people of this mountainous and largely inhospitable land aware that they shared one thing in common: a believe in the individual human being’s right to dissent, to think his own way, and not to acknowledge any man as a ‘monarch of all I survey’. (23).

There is a great wealth of information in Thermopylae: The Battle for the West that I haven’t, and like any great history book Bradford packs his pages with small anecdotes and facts that will hopefully encourage his reader to continue reading.  Whether it’s the implication that King Leonidas might have arranged for the murder of a relative who could have inherited the throne, the one Spartan who returned to his home city to be cast as a coward, or the burning and destruction of the Acropolis in Athens, this book contains a wealth of fascinating historical information, but listing them all out would only be pedantic and I’m sure my reader would like me to wrap up so they can get back to playing Fallout (fun fact the Science Bobblehead is located in Vault 75, which is also the place where you help Cait complete part of her character arc, which is great, but then she judges you if you ever take Jet in front of her again).spartans-michael-welply

Bradford’s book is very much of its time (again the “Churchillian” adjective just makes me laugh every time) but I still believe there is a great amount of relevance to it, and not just because I spent a week and a half reading it and I want to make sure it wasn’t wasted time.  History is about finding and creating narratives from the events of the past, and so even the most poorly constructed histories are efforts to find meaning.  Bradford found a tremendous meaning in the Battle of Thermopylae, and the rest of the Persian Wars.  

It was a conflict in which a group of disjointed people found a collective whole in themselves that hadn’t existed before.  This isn’t to say that there was thereafter no more conflict in Greece, in fact, it’s fair and accurate to say that the history of Greece pretty much is just conflict among themselves until Roman occupation and even after that.  But for a moment the Greeks found an advantage in unity and overcoming their idiosyncrasies for the greater good of their society and way of life, and damn it, I think that’s inspiring.  The best examples of humanity are when people work together to create something great and find inspiration in their ideas and exchanges.  Thermopylae was a chance for a band of Greeks to work together to help the larger armies of the country fight the future battles that would inevitably lead to the defeat of Xerxes and his army.

And Bradford has a quote in his preface that really says it best:300 miller

The last stand of King Leonidas and the Spartans was told as a golden story in my youth.  Since then it would seem to have been downgraded, perhaps because their military outlook and stubborn courage have made them unattractive to a hedonistic society.  Without courage, Man is nothing.  Without the Battle of Thermopylae, that pass held against all odds, there would never have followed Artemisium, Salamis, and Platea.  Distasteful though it may have been to later historians, preoccupied with Athens, it was very largely the generalship of the Spartan Pausanias that made victory of Platea possible.  (14).

Bradford’s sentiments here, at least in my estimation, haven’t changed all that much.  spartan-hoplite-02-andrea-mazzocchettiThe 300 Spartans is a story that is told regularly in schools now almost as a kind of myth/fact.  It’s a story that has become increasingly relevant to contemporary society because it’s become a sort of fairy-tale about the might of individual courage and integrity.  People see in the story of the Hot Gates a life-lesson about holding true to one’s principles and not allowing “outside” influence to sway one from your original stance.  This in itself demonstrates the lasting importance of books like Thermopylae: The Battle for the West because it allows us to ask the question how we see the conflicts of the past and how we construct meaning from them.

The only point I’ll say about this is that I feel Bradford was definitely not a soothsayer because he believes the Spartans have been “downgraded” because the Spartan warriors were “unattractive.”  Clearly, the man never saw Zack Snyder coming down the pike because those leather panties have inspired legions of memes and erections that aren’t going away any-time soon.

Athens might have had an incredible tactician leading them at the battle of Salamis, but they didn’t have Michael Fassbender wearing just a leather speedo and a smile.

fassbender300

 

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes cited from Thermopylae: The Battle for the West were quoted from the paperback Da Capo edition.

 

**Writer’s Note**

In case you haven’t noticed I used one or two images from the new Assassin’s Creed Odyssey in this review.  My wife bought it for me for Christmas and I don’t think I’m anywhere near finishing my golden idol of her.  This game is the fucking SHIT dude.  I’ve met Euripedes, Perikles, Alcibades, Sokrates.  I’ve scaled the Parthenon, statues of Zeus, Temples of Apollo.  I’ve played as motherfucking, god-damn Leonidas and…Well, I am a happy man.

herodotus

Oh yeah, I forgot, YOU GET TO MEET GODDAMN HERODOTUS!!!!

 

***Writer’s Note***

I wrote something similar in the description section of my YouTube-Podcast for this book, but I thought I would repeat it here.  I know that I write a spirited defense of Bradford here, but, honestly, I really don’t think that this book is good history and that’s largely because Bradford only has a bibliography and not a very substantial one at that.  This book, while a pretty approachable and enjoyable read, just doesn’t use enough sources and doesn’t cite the sources that are used properly enough to be considered a “good” history.  Bradford’s book is sentiment and mythologization, and while these are not necessarily weaknesses as a narrative, they do hurt it as a functional historial text.

The man wrote a good book, but he needed at least two or three flipping footnotes.

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Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice

30 Sunday Dec 2018

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Academic Books, Art, History, mythology, Still Life

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Academic Book, Art, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice, coffee, Edward Muir, glasses, history, Joshua Jammer Smith, La Republica de la Serrenissima de Venetzia, mythology, original photograph, still life, Venice

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Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice by Edward Muir

14 December 2018

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Costs of Dreams and Fairy Queens-Sandman, Shakespeare, Lamps & Llamas

06 Saturday Oct 2018

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Comics/Graphic Novels, Literature, mythology, Neil Gaiman, Play, Writing

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"If these shadows have offended", A Midsummer Night's Dream, Alan Cumming, Comics, Dream, Dream Country, Dreams, Faeries, graphic novel, Hamnet Shakespeare, Harold Bloom, King Auberon, Llamas are Awesome, myth, mythology, Neil Gaiman, Play, Puck, Robin Goodfellow, Sandman, Shakespeare: Invention of the Human, The Doll's House, The Sandman, trickster, When the time comes...you'll recieve a llama, William Shakespeare

03-neil-gaiman-w750-h560-2x

I never foresaw that llamas would become so ingratiated into my daily existence.  I honestly only ever thought about llamas when I was watching the Emperor’s New Groove and that was the extent of it.  I now own a llama that wears a bow-tie, talks in the voice of Project Runway Model host Tim Gunn, and have been challenged by one to read every play written by William Shakespeare.  Life is a strange oddity, but I’ll take it over the alternative any day of the week.

Working at a Public Library has its own advantages and disadvantages, the former being greater than the latter.  Yes there are frustrating patrons, yes there are long periods of tedium interrupted by bursts of endless tasks to perform, and yes there are literally thousands of books I’m not allowed to read while I’m on the clock.  But with each of these negative realities there are many more advantages that make this gig not just worthwhile, but a real passion.  I love helping a child find the exact book they wereLLama diagram looking for (usually something by Rick Riordan, though Diary of a Wimpy Kid makes a close fucking second place).  I love working with the 3D Printer and explaining it to children, parents, and even regular adults that are just fascinated with it.  I love making displays for authors like Truman Capote, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, and of course William Shakespeare.  But best of all I love my job because my co-workers are like a family to me and everyday I’m working for the library I feel like I’m home.

Which of course leads me back to the llamas and then eventually Shakespeare…and then eventually Neil Gaiman. 

One of my coworkers, a woman named Brenda Choy, is absolutely obsessed with llamas.  Whether it’s Sid the Llama, who has an actual online following, Bernice Llama, who has her own facebook page, or else the dozens of llamas stacked around her computer monitor, anyone and everyone who works at the Public Library at some point encounters the “llama department.”  And while some co-workers roll their eyes and/or sigh at all this silliness, I’ve welcomed it to the point that I now own my own llama.  His Pride 2018 4name is Xavier, he wears a bow-tie, and he’s fabulous.  This llama material isn’t just a lead-in however, because along with communicating regularly with the llama department, I’m also occasionally collaborating with them, and during one of the many numerous conversations I had with Brenda it eventually came out that I’ve never read all of Shakespeare’s plays, but I’ve always wanted to.

It’s come about now that I’ll be, starting in the month of May, reading every play by William Shakespeare and filming myself in a pseudo-Masterpiece Classic homage to each play starring llamas.

Beat that Alan Cumming.


Alan Cumming Grumpy

This has led to a bit of over-preparation on my part, because while most employees would simply say they’ve read the play and then do a quick video, I can’t be that person.  I’ve already begun purchasing every play Shakespeare ever wrote, I’ve begun listening to nonfiction Shakespeare audiobooks, and I’ve started collecting actual books about the life and work of William Shakespeare.  And while I may get around to writing about all of it, I thought about one reference to Shakespeare that has assumed a significant meaning in my life.The Sandman - Dream Country v3-081

Dream Country is the third of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman Series, and it holds a special place in the entirety of the run because it is most famous for the story about the cats.  I’ll probably get around to writing about that one later on, but for the time being Dream Country is important because the third chapter of the book is about Shakespeare and his company performing the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  This performance is important largely because the audience is the actual host of Fairy Folk observing a human’s interpretation of their race before they retreat from the world of men.  It’s also important because, like so many of the humans who encounter the Lord of Dreams, the story of Shakespeare is about personal sacrifice at the expense of dreams, and Shakespeare, it’s revealed, has made such a dream for himself.

Morpheus says as much to Lady Oberon during the performance of the play:

“We came to an…arrangement, four years back.  I’d give him what he thinks he most desires—and in return he’d write two plays for me. The Sandman - Dream Country v3-063

This is the first of them.  (11).

The reader does not really need an explanation past this, for if they bother to only read this one lone comic book in The Sandman Epic they receive all the real explanation that is needed.  The Immortal Bard William Shakespeare has entered into an arrangement with a real immortal being, The Lord of Dreams, in order to become a successful writer, in fact a brilliant author.  What the reader misses is in fact that this is a small reference to an earlier book in The Sandman series titled Men of Good Fortune.

In the previous volume it’s a single chapter that, like many of the small independent works of The Sandman run, appears to be completely random.  But, as with so much of this comics series, it sows a narrative seed that will eventually grow into it’s own independent story while also feeding the main body of the larger narrative.  Dream meets a man he has entered into a contest with, once every 100 years.  While he is meeting this man, named Hob, he overhears a young playwright named William Shakespeare speaking with Kit Marlowe, the most famous and talented playwright of his age.  Dream listens to Hob’s bragging, but his ears catch wind of the conversation and one quote by Shakespeare strikes the reader:

God’s Wounds!  If only I could write like you!  In Faustus where you wrote—“To God!  He loves thee not!  The God Thou serves is thine own appetite, wherein is fixed the love of Beelzebub.

The Sandman - Dream Country v3-085To him I’ll build an altar and a church, and offer lukewarm blood of new-born babes.” 

It chills the blood.

He follows this with a revealing statement to Marlowe:

I would give anything to have your gifts.  Or more than anything to give men dreams that would live on long after I am dead.  I’d bargain like your Faustus for that boon.

It seems lately that whenever I appear around my friends and coworkers an expression is uttered over and over again.  “Speak of the devil,” to which I am compelled to reply, “and he will appear.”  I try my best not to speak in my pathetic attempt at a Bane impression when I do this, but I am an attention whore at heart and so anything to make me look foolish is just too good to pass up.  Still this social interaction is a chance to reflect on the nature of cliches and their nasty habit of being cliches for a reason.  Will Shakespeare is revealed to be painfully mortal in this passage, just another aspiring artist who observes the success of others and covets it rather than dedicate themselves to their craft.  And Gaiman, to his credit, does an incredible job of humanizing Shakespeare, while also using his particular set of genius, to turn Shakespeare back into some sort of myth.The Sandman - Dream Country v3-066

The story of individuals offering up something to the great trickster/temptor is one as old as time.  Whether it’s Satan, Loki, Odysseus, Puck, Mbeku, Genies, Maui, or even Coyote, human beings have always created narratives in which there is some supernatural being who manages to prey and manipulate weaker minded people to perform deeds against their own self-interests.  This has tended sometimes to be appropriated by religion to justify pushing morality onto it’s subjects, but if one looks a bit deeper at this frequently occurring trope the reader is able to see that the pattern is it’s own explanation.

At some point everyone is tempted by their dreams to become, and at some point everyone gets had.

Gaiman’s Shakespeare becomes a human being, but also a mythic soul because he becomes a man who has achieved immortality, but at the expense of his own life.  At the very end of A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, once Robin Goodfellow has given his now iconic speech and thus fufilled Gaiman’s contractual obligation to remind you that dreams are something of a theme in The Sandman universe, the reader is told plainlyThe Sandman - Dream Country v3-065 that Hamnet Shakespeare, the only son of William Shakespeare, died in 1596 at the age of eleven years old.  This is not creative re-writing of history as most of the comic is.  Gaiman is in fact steeping his characters in the real history of their place and time, and Hamnet Shakespeare did in fact perish leaving Shakespeare as the sole male relative in his family.  Many have speculated how this death ultimately impacted Shakespeare, and some have hinted that his play Hamlet is a poorly veiled effort to explain his grief.

But Shakespeare the man isn’t my concern for this essay because Shakespeare the myth is something far more interesting.  And so I have to return briefly to the llamas.

I recognize that it may be foolishness to become so emotionally invested in what is ultimately a lifeless toy.  Yet my own llama, which was a gift from Brenda not long after my friend Savannah killed herself, has become something of an icon to me.  It’s a physical, material object, but in it’s own form and shape it’s a reminder that I’ve found a space and place that gives me purpose and drive.  I strive, everyday, to make the Library a better place for having me in it, and though I don’t always succeed, this passion fosters itself in a desire for personal self-improvement as well.  I’ve always wanted to read the collected works of William Shakespeare, often for the selfish reason: simply to say I had. The Sandman - Dream Country v3-083But now it feels like it’s serving a larger purpose.

Shakespeare is a figure and an idea in the culture, a symbol of intellectualism, or too often pseudo-intellectuals who wish to appear smart.  Every intelligent wannabe hipster can cite at least one Shakespeare quote that they think is appropriate, which often times it isn’t.  And the ability to cite Shakespeare is so often equated with intelligence that it becomes galling to those  of us who don’t understand the reference.  This is getting into the idea of intelligence as a form of commodity and I would love write further on this, but that would be getting even more off topic.  The connection here is, while I am beginning my reading into Shakespeare, his work, his life, and the commentary that surrounds him, I managed to find one book which seems to say it best. 

Harold Bloom is many things, most of them obnoxious, but his book Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human does have many incredible things to say about the life and work of Shakespeare, and considering The Sandman and Midsummer Night’s Dream there was one quote that seemed to say it best, or at least offer up a unique perspective I had never considered before. The Sandman - Dream Country v3-075

In his introduction to the book Bloom muses about the cultural and social impact of Shakespeare’s work and he observes the man’s unique place:

Shakespeare’s works have been termed the secular Scripture, or more simply the fixed center of the Western Canon.  What the Bible and Shakespeare have in common actually is rather less than most people suppose, and I myself suspect that the common element is only a certain universalism, global and multicultural.  […]. Yet I hardly see how one can begin to consider Shakespeare without finding some way to account for his pervasive presence in the most unlikely contexts: here, there, and everywhere at once.  (3)

Whether one likes or outright despises the plays of William Shakespeare, what cannot be taken away from the man is that his visions and dreams have lingered after him, becoming the sort of cultural foundations for so many great works of art.  What is The Lion King without Hamlet?  What is Dead Poet’s Society without Midsummer Night’s Dream?  What is Kiss Me Kate without Taming of the Shrew?  And what is Harold and Kumar go to White Castle without…

Harold and Kumar

Okay that last one is actually The Odyssey, but the point is Shakespeare matters because he’s lasted and become a fixture in the society and culture.  “To be or not to be” can be quoted by almost anyone, and the “beast with two backs” was a line in the opening scenes of Othello.

Shakespeare has become, in his own beautiful fashion, a sort of myth.  And the entire career of Neil Gaiman is itself one long love-song to myth.  Which brings me back to Sandman because while the character of Dream has become itself a beautiful myth for the modern age, and Morpheus himself a kind of trickster in the vein of Satan or Puck, Gaiman allows him often to speak in riddles and philosophy that make the Sandman series into the sublime art it is.  In the closing pages of MidsummerThe Sandman - Dream Country v3-073Night’s Dream King Oberon and Queen Titania are speaking with Dream, asking him why he commissioned the place from Shakespeare in the first place.  His response is almost Shakespearean:

You have asked me why I asked you back to this plane, to see this entertainment.  I…During your stay on this earth the faerie have afforded me much diversion, and entertainment.  Now you have left your own haunts.  And I would repay you for all the amusement.  And more: They shall not forget you.  That was important to me: that King Auberon and Queen Titania will be remembered by mortals, until this age is gone.

King Auberon thanks Dream, but reminds him that the narrative is not based on actual facts.  Dream responds:

Oh, but it IS true.  Things need not have happened to be true.  Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot. The Sandman - Dream Country v3-082

There are many facts about William Shakespeare that, because of the fault of record keeping and the chaotic nature of life itself, have been lost and so many of the facts of William Shakespeare have been lost to writers and historians.  There is a great sadness in knowing that we will never know as much about the actual life of the man William Shakespeare, but there is still the art.  The plays, the dreams, live on.  And in the course of human events Shakespeare has become, as Harold Bloom said, a kind of secular magnet.  Shakespeare is a myth for the modern age in the way he continues to inspire the language, the visions, and the characters that are fostered and created.

Dream Country, and Midsummer Night’s Dream are just another example of how the Immortal Bard has inspired the latter generation of artists.  Gaiman’s comic is a love letter to William Shakespeare, because rather than simply borrow he creates from the mythic quality of the man, reminding his reader that while Shakespeare was a mortal man, he was a man who laid the dreams that lived after him.  He makes this mythic, almost unapproachable figure into someone flawed and human.

Dreams have a price.  And the men and women who pursue them must needs know this if they begin their journeys.  I’ve lost myself so much time, typing away at my keyboard, aspiring, doubting, and dreaming.  And while the dream in my head is to achieve the title of writer, Gaiman is brilliant in reminding me that the dream is the reality.  Writing like this, everyday, every weekend, getting in my 300 words is the dream.  It costs me my time, it costs me the pleasures of spending time with others, and often times it costs me most of my happiness and satisfaction.  But I chug another cup of coffee, content in my dreams, knowing that I’ll get another paragraph in before bed, and at least one scene read in Twelfth Night.

Such dreams are made by little decisions, and little actions that live on long past the moment that I was.

The Sandman - Dream Country v3-080

 

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes cited from Dream Country were cited from the Vertigo paperback edition.  All quotes cited from The Doll’s House were taken from the Vertigo Paperback Edition.  All quotes cited from Shakespeare:Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom were taken from the {} paperback edition.

 

**Writer’s Note**

If it hasn’t been made explicitly clear, I LOVE The Sandman Series just as I LOVE the collected works of Neil Gaiman.  The man really hasn’t disappointed me yet and when I recently sat down to read A Midsummer Night’s Dream again I was forced to make pause as the final recitation of Puck’s monologue.  It’s a scene that has been borrowed, repeated, stolen, and re-imagined numerous times, and I admit freely I used it to make an end in my own first novel.  There’s just something to the lines.

But reading the book again I was struck by this small moment and I actually felt tears form in my eyes.  The only real word was sublime.  I don’t know how the man does it, but damn, there just isn’t anything like Neil Gaiman.

The Sandman - Dream Country v3-084

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Older and Fouler [Empty] Things in the Dark (Plus Demons with Whips)—The Fellowship of the Ring Part 2

18 Sunday Feb 2018

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Book Review, fantasy, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literature, mythology, Novels, Philosophy

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A Tolkien Bestiary, Balrog, Book Review, David Day, deep time, Durin's Bane, Evil, Evil is abscence, fantasy, Fire Demons, Gandalf, Good and Evil, J.R.R. Tolkien, light, Light vs Dark, Literature, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings, Maiar, Melkor, Morgoth, Moria, mythology, Novel, Philosophy, Sean Bean is a Fucking BadAss, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Lord of the Rings, The Nature of Evil, Valaraukar

LOTRbalrog

Sean Bean once sewed a hole in his flesh with his bare hands after a female friend of his was harassed by some random douche in a dive bar where they were drinking.  Bean apparently didn’t like it, told the man to shut the fuck up, and a fight ensued in which he was stabbed in the chest.  After the police arrived, and the man who had started the fight was taken away, Bean asked the bartender if he had a needle and thread, and apparently he sewed up his chest wound right then and there before returning to drinking.  For obvious reasons then, I consider this story Sean Bean’s contribution to the zeitgeist 2304greater than his “One does not simply…” meme.  It’s also for this reason that I decided to go against my original impulse when approaching my review of Book II of The Lord of the Rings.

The Council of Elrond is a fascinating chapter in the entire saga of the Lord of the Rings, simply for the fact that, while it is diplomacy, the language of each party reveals a wonderful deliberation on Tolkien’s part.  Each character manages to enhance the history of the world of Middle Earth, and each character manages to reveal something about the complicated diplomacy that exists within this fantasy realm.  Tolkien also manages to further explore his idea of the ring, and the terrible influence it has upon the people of his universe.

The only problem I really had with writing about the Council of Elrond was that my heart wasn’t in it.  My heart was in the Balrog because, ever since I was a teenager sitting in the movie theater watching Gandalf fall through Khazad Dum and fighting the Balrog I’ve been obsessed with the creature and it’s role in the Tolkien Universe.  It also doesn’twallhaven-47768 exactly help that my best friend Kevin and I spent literally an entire year arguing with a friend of ours about the proper way to pronounce Balrog (he was obsessed with calling it Balronko).  Now obviously the fight scene I’m describing was in the second film The Two Towers, but even when I had watched The Fellowship of the Ring with my Dad on that rented VHS tape I had never seen anything like the Balrog in any movie.  It was a creature that seemed like it should have been in a medieval passion play rather than a feature film, but I became enthralled.Fellowship

My obsession with the Balrog was probably because I was a teenager.  Young men typically, if I can quote a friend, gravitate towards power icons when they’re younger because they tend to live a life where most of their decisions are not entirely their own.  Because they aren’t in control in their life, and because testosterone tends to leave one aggressive, it’s common for boys to gravitate to, or if you were like me, draw images such as guns, planes, swords, and of course monsters.

I anticipate an early reaction from my reader.  In the entire second half of The Fellowship of the Ring, the Balrog is the only thing you can focus on?  Why not tackle the realm of Lothlorien?  Why not analyze the behavior of Boromir?  Why not even try to tackle the early instances of Gollum and see how his character is beginning to manifest?  There’s so many deep and inspiring elements to The Fellowship, the Balrog is just a monster and its appearance is so brief.tolkien_photo_h-m

As usual my reader has great points, and also as usual I completely agree with several of them.  There is so much to The Fellowship that I could tackle in these pages.  However looking at the appearance of the Balrog in Book II, I nevertheless am still fascinated because, much like Gandalf’s brief supernatural reveal in the first book, the existence of the Balrog is a chance to see how Tolkien is building the history and mythos of Middle Earth, and always creating this feeling in the text that something more is ever-present in this universe than what the reader is allowed, or even able to see.

Before I go to the passage in the Fellowship however, it’s important to understand what a Balrog actually is because, if the reader only has the films to base their judgement on, they’re sure to be confused or else ill-informed of the actual content of the monster.  When I was checking out every book by or about Tolkien from the library, I managed to find one large tome by David Day entitled A Tolkien Bestiary.  The book is nothing but an encyclopedia about every beast, race, creature, and organism that appears in the Lord of the Rings, and taking up two pages along with a hauntingly epic illustration, Day The_balrogs_of_morgoth_by_thylacinee-d5pl60xprovides the reader with an explanation:

Balrogs, the most terrible if the Maiar spirits who became the servants of Melkor, the Dark Enemy, were those who were transformed into demons.  In the High Elven Tongue they were named the Valaraukar, but in Middle-Earth were called Balrogs, the “demons of might.”

Of all Melkor’s creatures, only Dragons were greater in power.  Huge and hulking, the Balrogs were Man-like demons with streaming manes of fire and nostrils that breathed flame.  They seemed to move within the clouds of black shadows and their limbs had the coiling powers of serpents.  The chief weapon of the Balrog was the many-thronged whip of fire, and, though as well they carried the mace, the axe and the flaming sword, it was the whip of fire that their enemies feared most.  This weapon was so terrible that the vast evil of Ungoliant, the Great Spider that even the Valar could not destroy, was driven from Melkor’s realm by the fiery lashes of the Balrog demons.81+F-D9huqL._SY500_

[…]

In each of Melkor’s risings and in each of his battles, the Balrogs were among his foremost champions, and so, when the holocaust of the War of Wrath ended Melkor’s reign for ever, it largely ended the Balrogs as a race.

It is said that some fled that last battle and buried themselves deep in the roots of the mountains, but after many thousands of years nothing more was heard of these evil beings and most people believed the demons had gone from the Earth for ever.  (26-7)15743926121

I’m tempted by the teenager in my brain, to add a “Cool Whip” reference here, but for once I’ll defer and keep to the topic on hand.

A Balrog then is more-or-less a giant demon that at one time constituted a supreme race of beings that pre-dated mankind and possessed powers and abilities that border on a Lovecraftian tentacle monster level.  This kind of power would at first not seem to have much literary relevance since most literary scholars or even common people don’t give a shit about fictional monsters.  And in fact if the Balrog were nothing but a monster in a fantasy universe there really wouldn’t be much point in taking time to write about it, but as I’ve noted Tolkien’s ability as a writer is to create a wondrous sense of place and time that has yet to be replicated or matched.  It’s his ability to write a moment into existence when people who are living in their present time become caught up in the supernatural events of an incredible past that they cannot possibly comprehend that leaves the reader khazad-dumspellbound, or else that they are witnessing something incredible.

The entrance of the Balrog is something incredible because of it’s subtlety.

[Legolas] gave a cry of dismay and fear.  Two great tools appeared; they bore great slabs of of stone, and flung them down the serve as gangways over the fire.  But it was not the trolls which had filled the Elf with terror.  The ranks of the orcs had opened, and they crowded away, as if they themselves were afraid.  Something was coming behind them.  What it was could not be seen: it was like a great shadow, in the middle of which was a dark form, of man-shape maybe, yet greater; and a power and terror seemed to be in it and to go before it.Balrogs_animated

It came to the edge of the fire and the light faded as if a cloud had bent over it.  Then with a rush it leaped across the fissure.  The flames roared up to greet it, and wreathed about it; and black smoke smirked in the air.  Its steaming man kindled, and blazed behind it.  In its right hand was a blade like a stabbing tongue of fire; in its left hand it held a whip of many thongs.

‘Ai! Ai!’ Wailed Legolas.  ‘A Balrog!  A Balrog has come!’

Gimli stared with wide eyes.  ‘Durin’s Bane!  He cried, and letting his axe fall he covered his face.tumblr_opxtci9mHA1siv1sto7_r1_400

‘A Balrog,’ muttered Gandalf.  ‘Now I understand.” He faltered and leaned heavily on his staff.  ‘What an evil fortune!  And I am already weary.’  (321).

I will admit that I find the reactions to the Balrog a little corny.  Throughout my reading of The Lord of the Rings I find myself regularly twisting a little in discomfort because Tolkien’s dialogue can, to a postmodern reader’s sensibilities, come across as a little drama-qeenesque.  Or else it feels like the bad ad-libbing of half-assed LARPing.  It’s not that it doesn’t feel real to the characters, but the language of the characters can at times feel like something that should have been left in the attic.  It feels like it’s of a different time, which is not a weakness persay, but it can get a little tiring.

Yet despite this initial reaction to the dialogue, the words of each character are important because the 250px-Thomas_Rouillard_-_Valaraukarappearance of this creature has it’s own implications for each character.  For Legolas, being an Elf, the appearance of the Balrog would something of a nightmare because the elves would surely remember through records and oral tradition what kind of a monster the Balrog would be.  Gimli being a dwarf who has just observed the desecration of his race’s hall and temple by orcs is already emotional, but the appearance of the Balrog is proof that his people’s greed brought about the reawakening of this creature.  If the dwarves had not been greedy and dug so deep into the earth his cousin Balin might still be alive along with the rest of the people of Moria.  Gandalf’s reaction is unique because it has been steadily established that Gandalf’s role in Middle Earth is something beyond most people’s comprehension and that he is being guided by some supernatural entity, order, or compulsion.

Reading over this passage again I was struck by these reactions to this monster, not just because of what it’s appearance meant for the plot, but because this reaction 3412689-vs_gandalf_balrogshowed that these characters are participating with a history and a culture.  And this reaction reveals a depth in the universe.

It’s common in fantasy for characters to encounter a creature of incredible power and to experience fear, rage, confusion, or terror.  And while there are surely some notable examples where these emotions feel real and powerful and relevant to the reader, The Lord of the Rings being the text that it is it the reactions of Gimli, Legolas, and Gandalf isn’t just an empty reaction that precede a passage in which the heroes are able to overcome.  The appearance of the Balrog is the sign of a real defeat because this is a being which is beyond them, something Gandalf remarks immediately as Aragorn and Boromir try to stand their ground.

Even after Gandfal makes his stand the reader is left with a sense of the impending power of the Balrog, and just how old its power derives.  After Gandalf makes his now iconic “You cannot pass!” Tolkien manages to convey the power of the creature and the seaming futility of Gandalf:f011b11d79fa4422fde0eacc5edf5839--digital-illustration-digital-art

The Balrog made no answer.  The fire in it seemed to die, but the darkness grew.  It stepped forward slowly on the bridge, and suddenly it drew itself up to a great height, and its wings were spread from wall to wall; but still Gandalf could be seen, glimmering in the gloom; he seemed small, and altogether alone: grey and bent, like a wizened tree before the onset of a storm.  (322).

It’s not unfair to note that Tolkien tends to gravitate to trees as the predominant aesthetic of The Lord of the Rings, but in it’s own way this passage seems one of the most powerful moments in the entire trilogy not simply because Gandalf is a powerful wizard and the Balrog is a just fire monster.  There’s something lasting in this image, and it has to do with negative versus positive power.Witch King

A previous quote reveals something important, not only about the Balrog, but also about the way that Tolkien is creating his ideas about evil and good.  Darkness in The Lord of the Rings is not just a physical attribute of wickedness and wicked creatures, in fact it is their defining quality.  This actually has some relevance when one considers the actual color spectrum because black is not in fact a color; black is the absence of color.  Virtually every character in The Lord of the Rings which embodies wickedness or evil is often defined by their darkness, either physical or symbolic, and this darkness ultimately becomes an indication of absence.  If a being or character in Middle Earth is wicked it is because there is something empty xdSL9QWor absent in them, and I’ll hopefully get into this more when I get to the character Gollum, but for now it’s important to observe Gandalf standing against the Balrog because it becomes more than just a wizard fighting a fire-demon.  For Tolkien this small moment is a summation of his entire creative philosophy about the nature of good and evil.

Evil is absence incarnate and will always try to destroy the light because the light stands opposed to darkness.  Light will always try to fill up the darkness with creation, with living things that create more, and so the only thing darkness can do to survive is to destroy.  To burn and kill and erase what is alive in the light.

Tolkien provides on clear demonstration of this after the monster appears:

The dark figure streaming with fire raced towards them.  The orcs yelled and poured over the stone gangway.  Then Boromir raised his horn and blew.  Loud the challenge rang and bellowed, like the shout of many throats under the cavernous roof.  For a moment the orcs quailed and the fiery shadow halted.  855640-balrog6Then the echoes died as suddenly as a flame blown out by a dark wind, and the enemy advanced again.  (321).

This passage seems to be everything then in further demonstrating the idea that Tolkien is using the Balrog to really hone his idea of evil.  Throughout the Lord of the Rings Tolkien equates evil with an absence of self, will, power, or personal agency.  When Boromir blows his horn it is n essence a strong demonstration of the self.  Music is one of the purest means of expressing the self, and the Balrog being a creature who’s very existence is based upon destruction is actually taken aback by it.  It may not be a Sonata by Beethoven or Shostakovich, but the horn is a form of creation and therefore a form of light, and therefore a form of goodness.

The Balrog remains my favorite element of the Lord of the Rings, largely because its a big awesome fire monster that uses a whip as a primary weapon and it provided me plenty of chances in high school to draw something cool instead of paying attention in Algebra.  But my adolescence aside, the Balrog remains truly fascinating to be because it affords Tolkien to create a figure that has entered the popular consciousness, and beneath all of the fire and horns and weapons there is a real meditation about what evil actually is.1502673715-david-lynch-head-2

The true monsters in this life are not the colorful characters that are crafted in television shows and gritty thrillers; they’re real people who have a severe absence of something.  Whether it’s an absence of love, personal ambition, or even something as real as chemical imbalance, it’s these weakness of absence that eventually contribute to the evil that exists in this world.

A terrorist or a serial murderer might not have horns or a mane made of fire, but much like the Balrog, his existence is almost certainly founded on some kind of emptiness.

the_balrog_by_adorindil

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes taken from Book II of the Lord of the Rings, found within the Mariner paperback edition of  The Fellowship of the Ring.

Fellowship

**Writer’s Note**

Allright fine, I just have to.  Please forgive me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mnAC5KWvJc

 

***Writer’s Note***

While I was writing this essay I managed to find an actual video of the fight scene between Gandalf and the Balrog in The Fellowship of the Ring.  There’s been plenty of films which have come out since then which have utilized Computer Graphic Imaging however this scene, unlike many of these latter instances, still manages to have a power I haven’t completely forgotten.  It might just be nostalgia on my part, but I also think it has as much to do with the fact that Peter Jackson directed (in the original trilogy) a damn fine film, and managed to just capture Middle Earth.  Please enjoy what is still one of the most epic fantasy moments of all time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJZZNHekEQw

 

****Writer’s Note****

I’ve included below several links to websites which provide overviews of the Balrog, what they are, what are their powers, whether a Balrog would win in a fight against Smaug (I think it would personally but I’m biased), and then just some general Lord of the Rings facts and information.  Hope this helps.

http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Balrog

http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Balrogs

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/12448/why-was-gandalf-afraid-of-the-balrog-of-morgoth

https://www.tor.com/2017/05/09/smaug-vs-durins-bane-who-would-win-in-the-ultimate-dragonbalrog-showdown/

http://tolkien.cro.net/balrogs/ddueck.html

 

*****Writer’s Note*****

Stephen Colbert discussing Lord of the Rings…nuff said.

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/krcfjp/the-colbert-report-balrog

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Decent Sorts In an Ancient World: The Fellowship of the Ring Book 1

27 Saturday Jan 2018

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in fantasy, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literature, mythology, Novels, Writing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Bag End, Beowulf, Bilbo, Bilbo Baggins, fantasy, Gandalf, Gilgamesh, Hobbits, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literature, Maiar, Michael D.C. Drout, Middle Earth, mythology, mythos, Nazgul, Novel, Of Sorcerer’s and Men, Peter Jackson, Silmarillion, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Lord of the Rings, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Nature of Hobbits, The Shire, Writing

Big_oops

Peregin Took may indeed have been a fool when he twisted the arrow on the dead dwarf, thus alerting the orcs of Moria to the Fellowship’s presence, but honestly sitting down to writing this essay I feel like I am the greater fool.  It’s no secret that the fan base of the Lord of the Rings are a power unto themselves, some of whom have brought about changes in society that stirred revolutions and altered the world as we know it.  FellowshipComputer programmers, hardware specialists, table-top game developers, video game designers, and even authors themselves have been inspired by the “Old Professor” and have taken this inspiration and created products and arts that have inspired the next generation of innovators.  While Tolkien himself tended to be harsh to this fan base during his lifetime, going so far as to call them the “deplorable cultus,” the generation of stoners and dreamers took a great work and made it something important to the culture and zeitgeist, and thus I return to my foolishness.

I didn’t warm up to The Lord of the Rings at first.  In fact to be perfectly honest I actually thought the whole book series were a real bore.  With the exception of The Hobbit, reading the The Lord of the Rings as a teenager seemed the equivalent of an attending insurance seminar or else sitting through an “abstinence-only” based rap battle.  This is hyperbole, but only so much.  The only reason I had actually begun reading the books, specifically my dad’s original paperback copies from the seventies which made Gandalf look like a pimp and Legolas as the protagonist in Logan’s Run, was the fact that Peter Jackson’s films had just been released and those Ring Wraiths looked bad ass.Ringwraiths-733735
The films came and went, and while I never completely abandoned Tolkien, I do admit that I moved on to Stephen King and Christopher Hitchens leaving my copies of The Lord of the Rings to the dust that always seems to gravitate to books.  It’s not that the Lord of the Rings ever disappeared, it’s just that, much like my early fascination with Playboy magazine and my LEGO blocks, I looked at them as something that I had outgrown or, and maybe this is more fair, something I had left behind.  But much like Playboy and 9780760785232_p0_v2_s1200x630LEGOs I did eventually return to it.  My regular reader may dimly remember that I began an audio-lecture series sponsored by Barnes & Noble titled Of Sorcerer’s and Men.  This series, which was masterfully delivered by the professor Michael D.C. Drout, was incredible and reminded me of everything that I originally loved about The Lord of the Rings.

I dusted off my old copies and hopped back into the series, dedicated this time to actually finish the entire works.

But as for reviewing this series I hit a block, because after all, according to the will (not legal will, just individual sense of self) of J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings was one entire book unto itself putting into such magnificent tomes as Ulysses, Moby Dick, Anna Karena, Doom Patrol, Don Quixote, Infinite Jest, and David Copperfield.  While it’s unola-compagnia-dellanello-disegnata-dai-f-lli-hildebrandtpossible to write about those book in parts, tackling an entire 1000 page novel with one review is like trying to eat The Old 96er from The Great Outdoors.  Those who try will wind up crying like John Candy before wrenching the whole thing back up.  Fortunately for me Tolkien broke his series into six “books” letting each larger book contained of two small books themselves.  The Fellowship then consists of Books 1 and 2 and it seems far healthier to tackle the series that way than attempting one large reflection.MV5BMGMxMmRkNzctMWQzYy00MTY3LWEzMDAtMzEzMDhkZWI4MjZlXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNDUzOTQ5MjY@._V1_UY317_CR4,0,214,317_AL_

This also provides me a wonderful opportunity to explore Book 1 as an independent work because, while the remainder of the series pushes into the mythic realm that is Middle Earth, it’s in this first volume that Tolkien is able to play with his own natural world.

Book One starts with a “Long Expected Party” allowing Tolkien to play with his previous work, The Hobbit.  Some critics and scholars have noted that while this is Tolkien building the world of Middle Earth, many have observed that the territory of The Shire, as well as the people who live comfortably within it’s borders, resemble greatly the England that Tolkien lived in and loved so well.  Just looking at the first paragraphs one gets a sense of this:

When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag-End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much 0aae4a6c83ea2e8af7104e6d6697bd16talk and excitement in Hobbiton.

Bilbo was very rich and very peculiar, and had been the wonder of the Shire for sixty years, ever since his remarkable disappearance and unexpected return.  The riches he had brought back from his travels had now become a local legend, and it was popularly believed, whatever the old folk might say, that the Hill at Bag End, was full of tunnels stuffed with treasure.  And it that was not enough for fame, there was also his prolonged vigor to marvel at.  Time wore on, but it seemed to have little effect on Mr. Baggins.  […]. There was some that shook their heads and thought this was too much of a good thing; it seemed unfair that anyone should possess (apparently) perpetual youth as well as (reputedly) inexhaustible wealth.

“It will have to be paid for,’ they said.  ‘It isn’t natural, and trouble will come of it!’  (21).

While it isn’t Frodo being chased by Nazgul to the ford that marks the entrance to Rivendel, this opening is still, to my mind, one of the best means of opening the great epic that is The Lord of the Rings.  While Listening to Drout’s lectures, what was NewDroutCoverPhotofrequently noted was how the strength of the series was not so much because the hobbits were symbolic of any religious or spiritual significance, but because they were decent common folk.

This is a point that I believe is often missed in public discussions of The Lord of the Rings, because often the person speaking is far more concerned with pushing allegory.  I’ve written before as to why I feel that’s a woefully inadequate means of interpreting these books, so I won’t delve too deep into that angle.  Looking at the Hobbits of Middle Earth, along with the four hobbits of the Fellowship (Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin), their role in the story is often to be the reader.  Hobbits, because they scorn the world of the “Big Folk” and their “queer” habits, give the reader something to identify with.  On an average day most people do not worry about raids from Orcs, the ancient evils of creatures like Balrogs, they are concerned with the meddling of wizards, and they have nothing to do with the problems of the Great Kings and their complicated diplomacy.  Many “normal” people, tend to be art-magician-lord-of-the-rings-bilbo-rivendell-town-gandalf-lord-of-the-rings-valley-hobbies-gandalf-waterfalls-mountain-unexpected-journey-unexpected-journey-rockconcerned far more with their families, whether their neighbors are a decent sort of people, whether they have enough to eat, and whether or not they are attending parties.

The Great celebration of Bilbo’s birthday is an event of “Special magnificence,” and in the same paragraph that establishes this, Tolkien notes Bilbo’s social standing as if that matters to the reader.  It matters a great deal to Hobbits and so reading this book it becomes clear that The Lord of the Rings, from beginning to end, is centered in this idea that hobbits are not only important to this great world and it’s history, they are vital to it.

Hobbits are not great warriors such as Beowulf or Gilgamesh but that’s by design.

Before the book opens Tolkien provides a prologue in which he offers some basic facts and history of Hobbits:the-lord-of-the-rings-original-animated-classic-remastered-deluxe-edition-20100406040315385_640w1

As for the Hobbits of the Shire, with whom these tales are concerned, in the days of their peace and prosperity they were a merry folk.  They dressed in bright colours, being notably fond of yellow and green; but they seldom wore shoes, since their feet had tough leathery soles and were clad in a thick curling hair, much like the hair of their heads, which was commonly brown.  Thus, the only craft little practiced among them was shoe-making; but they had long and skillful fingers and could make many other useful and comely things.  Their faces were as a rule good-natured rather than beautiful, broad, bright-eye, red-cheeked, with mouths apt to laughter, and to eating and drinking.  And laugh they did, and eat, and drink, often and heartily, being fond of simple jests at all times, and of six meals a day (when131e5fd85348e9e2be29a25d9bc11685 they could get them).  They were hospitable and delighted in parties, and in presents, which they gave away freely and eagerly accepted.  (2).

At this point I need address my regular contester who is surely incredibly annoyed with me.  What do I care about the sensibilities of Hobbits?  It’s The Lord of the Rings, I came here for Aragorn and Gandalf and Sauron and Orcs.  Where’s the exciting stuff?  Or at least the fantastic elements that make The Lord the Rings so cool?

I understand my readers frustration because I feel the same way approaching this essay.  I would 5384849-animation+246love to sit and discuss some of the fantastic elements that make this book so impressive, and I do intend to.  The conflict is that fantastic elements by themselves don’t provide much opportunity for reflection.  One of the consistent charges against the Triology is that the books have no relevance to average people.    Part of this is the unfortunate, lingering elitism that plagues the fantasy genres which is absolute bullshit.  But the other charge, that it’s style doesn’t fit the age in which it was written feels a little more fair.  Most of the non-hobbit characters speak like they were taken from epics of
the ancient world making it impossible to identify with them.

It’s in Hobbits that the world assumes the power that it does, because when Hobbits are pitted against the antiquity and supernatural elements of Middle Earth the reader is able to find the “realness” of the place.  This is best demonstrated after the party.a206

The first takes place in Bag End, not long after Bilbo has disappeared from the party using the ring.  Gandalf has crept back to the manor house on the hill to confront Bilbo about his antics, but also to see the man off as the two have an arrangement.  Gandalf is to help Bilbo settle his affairs so that the man can go back onto the road, and while the scene progresses as if nothing is wrong, when the topic of the ring comes up Bilbo at once becomes possessive bordering on violent.  There is a confrontation, and all at once Tolkien allows his reader to see past, if I can borrow Shakepeare for a moment without sounding overly-pompous, “this mortal veil.”

‘Well if you want my ring yourself, say so!” Cried Bilbo.  ‘But you won’t get it.  I won’t give my precious away, I tell you.’  His hand strayed to the hilt of his small sword.e7dc8b16e1260144332e08709a804379

Gandalf’s eyes flashed.  ‘It will be my turn to get angry soon,’ he said.  ‘If you say that again, I shall.  Then you will see Gandalf the Grey uncloaked.’ He took a step towards the hobbit, and he seemed to grow tall and menacing; his shadow fill the room.  

Bilbo backed away to the wall, breathing hard, his hand clutching at his pocket.  They stood for a while facing one another, and the air of the room tingled.  Gandalf’s eyes remained bent on the hobbit.  Slowly his hands relaxed, and he began to tremble.

2304‘I don’t know what has come over you, Gandalf,” he said.  ‘You have never been like this before.  What is it all about?  It is mine isn’t it?  I found it, and Gollum would have killed me, if I hadn’t kept it.  I’m not a thief, whatever he said.’

‘I have never called you one,’ Gandalf answered.  ‘And I am not one either.  I am not trying to rob you, but to help you.  I wish you would trust me, as you used.’  He turned away, and the shadow passed.  He seemed to dwindle again to an old grey man, bent and untroubled.  (33-4).

Now obviously, this scene takes me back to Peter Jackson’s film, when Sir Ian McKellan began to fill the room, the world became dark, and the voice that usually inspires envy turned a teenage boy to panic.  Whatever the reader’s opinions about the film, it’s tumblr_opxtci9mHA1siv1sto7_r1_400important to recognize that Jackson did this scene right and because he did this passage stood out to me.  But looking past the film, this scene in one in a long series of moments that Gandalf offers that hint at his true “nature” or “form.”  Gandalf is, if I can move into the neck-beard nerd territory, something called a Maiar, a being who precede most of the “time” of Middle Earth, and actually proceeded the making of the world.  I won’t bore the reader with the complex mythos of Tolkien’s world (that’s for when I review the Silmarillion) but this background info provides the context of what makes Gandalf important in the first book.

Gandalf is an old being, one who is existing on a plane of reality that even old Bilbo could not appreciate because his mortality is nothing compared to Gandalf.  While this doesn’t at first appear to have much relevance to people in the “real world” there’s actually a ecb8d63148b23250693e37ffa1d08bc7real relevance for the reader.  The concept of “deep time” was one that began during the Victorian era when geologists began to argue that the world is actually older than we once thought.  Where before the world was only a few thousand years old (according to sources like The Bible), by looking at the actual layers of sediment in the earth, and discovering fossils or organisms long exitinct, human beings were able to determine that our time on this earth was only relatively recent and that we were merely one example in a long lifetime of the planet.

The reader may by now though be getting frustrated and wanting to know when I’ll make my case, or else they’re waiting for me to talk about cool stuff like Ring Wraiths.  I’m terribly sorry to disappoint my reader, but I won’t be doing that.  At least not in this essay.

The Fellowship of the Ring, as far as Book 1 is concerned, is an important read because it begins the Trilogy, but more importantly it establishes the foundation of the world.  The hobbiton-movie-set-toursworld of Hobbiton is one that the reader can certainly recognize because it’s a world that directly mirrors our own.  There’s neighborhoods of people who worry about parties and gardens and harvests.  There’s sheriffs and mail-men and pubs where people gather to
drink and gossip.  Hobbiton is the world as far as most reader’s would recognize it, and as such when “queer” folks like Gandalf appear, and bits and pieces of their true form begin to manifest, the reader is left feeling, much like Bilbo, that the world is actually deeper and far more complex than they’ve been lead to believe.d7f3a84000d935abcc56e1bdf2a064d5

I was tempted when I started this essay, to explore every facet of the strange and weird and wonderful, but the conflict with that is there’s mountains of books about The Lord of the Rings that do just that.  Looking at Book 1, what feels most important, or at least what I initially came away with is how the Hobbits of this book begin to react to the size and depth and complexity of the world.  That reaction feels important because often it’s easy to forget how complex the world actually is.

Book 1 of The Fellowship of the Ring isn’t just about getting Frodo of Rivendell, it’s Tolkien’s chance to build his mythos while also reminding his reader even the real world is old and full of people and creatures and landscapes that are an important reminder about mortality and ego.  A man may be 111 years old, and he might be a fine and respectable hobbit, but even he too will die, and his existence is not only not significant, it’s just one small part in a narrative that has been going on for centuries.

the_argonath___lord_of_the_rings_tcg_by_jcbarquet-d84gqh8

 

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes taken from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings were taken from the Mariner paperback edition.

Fellowship

**Writer’s Note**

On one side note, I have a point earlier about the Nazgul being “badass.”  This remains true, however their badassery is somewhat lessened when you try to find a sick-as-hell image of them and you get a behind the scenes picture of the lot of them holding umbrellas before shooting.  The only thing missing is a plate of tea and cookies over a discussion of how Asia’s economy is heading.  THAT, or else the whole lot of them are going to do an AMAZING rendition of Gene Kelly’s Singing in the rain.  I don’t know.  Look at those parasols.  What do YOU think?

rxslzn09b6dz

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Concerning Tolkien…& his Critics

10 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Academic Books, Book Review, Essay, fantasy, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literature, mythology, Novels, Writing

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

"Deplorable Cultus", "The Old Professor", Academic Book, Allegory, Amon Hen, Book Review, Edmund Wilson, Elves, Essay, Harold Bloom, Hastings, Hobbits, J.R.R. Tolkien, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, Language of Lord of the Rings, Libraries, Literary Criticism, literary education, Literary Theory, Literature, myth, Nazgul, Novel, Oo Those Awful Orcs, Orcs, T.A. Shippey, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The QPB Companion to The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King, The Staring Eye, The Two Towers, Ursula K. Le Guin, Writers

0aae4a6c83ea2e8af7104e6d6697bd16

I have a friend at the library who enjoys checking me out.  She loves it largely because it affords her an opportunity to make fun of me, while also envying the amount of reading I get done.

tolkien_photo_h-mIt’s not secret to the reader that I have started working at the Tyler Public Library, and in fact it’s getting close on being one year in total working there.  Already the staff have welcomed me into the odd little family and some have even noted that it wouldn’t be any fun at the library if I ever left.  I honestly don’t believe that at all, but it’s nice feeling like you belong somewhere.  Apart from the wonderful social environment that’s steadily building up my sense-of-self day-by-day, working at the library is also a chance to check out enormous stacks of books.  There isn’t a day I’ve worked where I haven’t come home with at least one book, and even on days when I return three or four I’m sure to leave with five more.  Sometimes these books are ones I’ve simply checked out, other times it’s one that I have bought in the ongoing library sale.

Whatever the case this constant bibliophilia has exposed me to many wonderful books that I never would have found on my own, which is the reason why it’s so surprising that the most recent development has been my rediscovery of Tolkien.

Witch KingLike many people of my generation I was coming into puberty about the time the Harry Potter series were being published, but in 2001 my world changed when The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was released.  Hastings was still around at the time, and so video rentals, a.k.a. VHS rentals were still a viable means of seeing films.  My dad checked the movie out and actually had to convince me that the movie was worth my time.  I remember groaning and sighing, and in fact while watching the film I bemoaned the time length of the movie right before the battle at Amon Hen.

The credits rolled and I was done.  I knew that I had to learn more about this universe.

RingstrilogyposterI’d like to say that this meant reading the trilogy, The Hobbit again, and then the numerous companion mythologies and etymologies that Tolkien had spent a lifetime working on, but in fact I largely just consumed the movies and met my best friend Kevin who did nothing but talk about the films which was fine with me.

I did get around to reading Tolkien’s books, but in fact I only got as far as Book III, which is the end of the first half of the second book The Two Towers.  I had expected the books to be like the films which were beautiful character studies balanced by great action sequences.  What I got instead were long passages of scenery, references to a history and mythology I had no reference for, and an extensive study of linguistics as characters observed words, spoke in different tongues, and related the origin of such language.  Obviously I was disappointed, but I still loved this world and began to memorize the territories even starting a fantasy universe of my own with my friend Kevin that went nowhere.  xdSL9QWMaps and charts were constructed, characters were created, and an evil villain was established.  Kevin and I had created an entire universe which was obviously nothing more than a Tolkien reboot.

I don’t regret the time that was spent creating this world, I only wish I had actually written some of it down.  There might be a multi-million-dollar fantasy franchise stuffed in a cardboard box in my parent’s attic and I need to find it before Kevin realizes the same thing and screws me out of my share.

Tolkien has returned to me lately because I began an audio-lecture series after finishing Douglas Brinkley’s Cronkite, and my world has shifted dramatically.  Michael D.C. Drout’s lecture Of Sorcerer’s and Men: The Roots of Modern Fantasy Literature was a revelation to me because it not only altered my perception of the Lord of the Rings, but much like Poe is the previous year, I was reminded why I loved the man’s work in the first place.  Drout explored every facet of The Lord of the Rings and showed me that there was real literary art-magician-lord-of-the-rings-bilbo-rivendell-town-gandalf-lord-of-the-rings-valley-hobbies-gandalf-waterfalls-mountain-unexpected-journey-unexpected-journey-rockmerit to the series and the universe.  He argued that rather than just an allegory about war and industry and World War II, The Lord of the Rings was a book about language and the decency of common people.

This brings me back to my original point which is that my co-worker at the library, a lovely woman named Tinkerbelle, enjoys checking me out.  After I finished Drout’s lecture series and moved onto Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, I was a man possessed.  In-between the various patron needs and printing out another in a long line of classic art statues with the library’s 3-D Printer, I looked up every book available that was either about the life of Tolkien or else written about the man directly.  This led me, as soon as my shift ended, into an hour-long search as I scoured the library clean of every book.  I lumbered to the circulation desk with a stack that reached my chin and my friend Tink simply laughed before she oohed and awed at the long list of books.91khFawSYCL

Before I could even get to this stack however, the next day she found in the book sale a small paperback tome entitled The QPB Companion to The Lord of the Rings.  With yet another in a long line of giggles she handed me the book and let me disappear into the collection.

What’s fascinating about this book is the fact that so many of the authors who contributed to it seemed to have very little clue about what was the best way to critically approach The Lord of the Rings.  Whether it was Ursula LeGuin, Issac Asimov, Harold Bloom, Janet Smith, or Edmund Wilson none of the critics in this small book could ever come to a firm conclusion about what Tolkien was actually trying to accomplish.  Many are left puzzled to the man’s lack of modernity in his prose, and some are even more baffled still by the final conclusions of The Lord of the Rings.

I should clarify though before I continue because not everyone is so perplexed.  In fact Edmund Wilson in his famous essay Oo, Those Awful Orcs makes his critical assessment of the books quite clear:tumblr_mgb28c2sn01r39i1to1_500

It is indeed the tale of a quest, but, to the reviewer, an extremely unrewarding one.  The hero has no serious temptations; is lured by no insidious enchantments, perplexed by few problems.  What we get is a simple confrontation—in more or less the traditional terms of British melodrama—of the Forces of Evil with the Forces of Good, the remote alien villain with the plucky little home-grown hero.  There are streaks of imagination: the ancient tree-spirits, the Ents, wth their deep eyes, twiggy beards, rumbly voices; the Elves, whose nobility and beauty is elusive and not quite human.  But even these are rather clumsily handled.  There is never much development in the episodes; you simply go on getting more of the same thing.  Dr. Tolkien has little skill at narrative and no instinct for literary form.  (40).333e0b1a0abf77b3bdae369318532e69844e3282_hq

Wilson finally cuts the bull and lays out his honest opinion in the final paragraphs saying:

The answer is, I believe, that certain people—especially, perhaps, in Britain, have a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash.  (42).

Besides these words in my little paperback book are written in pencil, “Thems fightin’ words bub!”  Perhaps I grew up with too much Loony Tunes, but had anyone spoken so contemptuously about Tolkien or Lord of the Rings when I was a teenager I probably would have screamed at them with the same implication.  Still despite the tone Edmund Wilson’s essay does have a point.  And I begrudgingly acknowledge most of the criticism.tumblr_opxtci9mHA1siv1sto7_r1_400

The Lord of the Rings is many things, but complex in the way a novel by Nabakov is complex is most certainly not the case.  Half the time I can’t tell the difference between Merry and Pippin, and in fact Sam and Frodo are at times near indistinguishable.  There are long passages about the beauty of Middle Earth but it never feels like the characters are becoming deeper as individuals.  They simply are and react to their world, never pausing much for introspection.

Wilson’s critique is severe, perhaps legendary in Tolkien criticism, but I found that Harold Bloom offered much the same sentiment, though in softened tones.harold-bloom

[Roger] Sale accurately observes that the trilogy purports to be a quest but actually is a descent into hell.  Whether a visionary descent into hell can be rendered persuasively in language that is acutely self-conscious, even arch, seems to me a hard question.  I am fond of The Hobbit, which is rarely pretentious, but The Lord of the Rings seems to me inflated, over-written, tendentious, and moralistic in the extreme.  Is it not a giant Period Piece?  (53).

I didn’t expect Bloom to respect the novel series given his reputation.  Shakespeare is god in the Bloom universe, and despite near ravenous appreciation of Tolkien even I have to admit that compared to the Bard the “Old Professor” (Tolkien Fans charming nick-name for the author) simply doesn’t match up.  At least, dear reader, in terms of prose.  What facts-one-ring-lord-of-the-rings-780x438_rev1I’ll hold against Bloom is that he doesn’t even try to critique Tolkien in any kind of meaningful way and even he acknowledges it citing a passage “pretty much at random” (54).  The small two page critique that Bloom offers reveals a great apathy  on the man’s part and so the conviction of his criticism is weak.

Then again he’s Harold Bloom and I’m some dude with a blog and a self-published book so perhaps the scales will tip in his favor.

The tone of contempt for Tolkien almost made me drop The QPB Companion for fear that the book would be nothing but people offering fault, and at first Ursula K. LeGuin leguin_ursula_kseemed to offer the same.  Anyone who has never heard of this author has cheated themselves for Le Guin, much like George R.R. Martin, manages to be a kind of successor to Tolkien in terms of building the Fantasy and Science fiction genre into the power house that it is.  For my own part I prefer LeGuin as an essayist and in her contribution to the collection, The Staring Eye, she manages to convey the lasting importance of Tolkien’s work.

She begins by describing how the books came into her life and why she initially distrusted them.  She notes later after remarking that reading the books aloud to her children is her third time with the series that she’s recognized the power of the Eye that was staring at her on the cover.

Yet I believe that my hesitation, my instructive distrust of those three volumes in the university Library, was well founded.  To put it in the book’s own terms: something of great inherent power, even if wholly good in itself, may work the-lord-of-the-rings-original-animated-classic-remastered-deluxe-edition-20100406040315385_640w1destruction if used in ignorance, or at the wrong time time.  One must be ready; one must be strong enough.  (44).

This is most certainly the case and most likely why I didn’t finish the trilogy and had to bear, as Hamlet put it, the “whips and scorns” of my friends who actually had.  It’s not that the Trilogy is impossible to read, in fact compared to books like Ulysses and Absalom, Absalom the book is practically Curious George.  What I suspect LeGuin is trying to communicate to her reader is that the enormity of Tolkien’s works can be daunting to one individual reader and some may not have the courage or strength of will to complete it.the_argonath___lord_of_the_rings_tcg_by_jcbarquet-d84gqh8

This has become largely apparent to me as I’ve begun to dig deeper into the meat of The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien himself because what is constantly being reminded to me is that Tolkien was a linguist and a philologist.  Unfortunately the nature of this beautiful profession has changed and so it’s important to realize that by Philologist I mean someone who studies the history and nature of language.  Absolutely everything in The Lord of the Rings goes back to language, and while I plan to write about this at length at a later date, I think it’s important for the reader to understand just how layered everything in The Lord of the Rings is in terms of Linguistics.f011b11d79fa4422fde0eacc5edf5839--digital-illustration-digital-art

In the aforementioned stack of books that I checked out from the library is a book entitled J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century by T.A. Shippey.  This book is one of the many canonical books concerning Tolkien and his universe, so much so that even people like Harold Bloom have to acknowledge it’s critical significance to Tolkien Studies.  While reading through it, and waiting for an order of tacos at Fuzzys, I happened upon one passage that demonstrates clearly the amount of philology going into just the word Baggins:

Later on, in The Lord of the Rings, it will be disclosed that the road Bilbo’s hole is on is called Bag-End: very appropriate for someone called Baggins, perhaps, but an odd name for a road.  And yet in a sense a very familiar one.  As part of the ongoing and French-oriented snobbery of English society in Tolkien’s day (and later), municipal councils were (and still are) in the habit of indicating a street with an outlet such as ‘cul-de-sac’.  This is French of course, for ‘bag end’, though the French actually callunola-compagnia-dellanello-disegnata-dai-f-lli-hildebrandt such a thing an impasse, while the native English is ‘dead-end’.  ‘Cul-de-sac’ is a silly phrase and it is the Baggin’s Family credit that they will not use it.  (10).

It’s no small wonder that if this level of attention was paid simply to a name then of course it would take at least 17 years for Tolkien to finally release The Lord of the Rings.  The book series is constantly introducing new characters and territories that each have their own unique names which are born from the mythology which is born in the Philological studies that Tolkien worked on, both creatively and professionally.

Words are the basis of this universe and so critics looking for anything akin to Freudianism and Marxism were doomed to failure.  And thus the critics turned to allegory.614690

Le Guin acknowledges this and notes that this avenue of critics is perhaps most responsible for the revulsion of Tolkien.  She writes:

It is no small wonder that so many people are bored by, or detest The Lord of the Rings.  For one thing, there was the faddism of a few years ago—Go, Go, Gandalf—enough to turn anybody against it.  Judged by any of the Seven Types of Ambiguity that haunt the groves of Academe, it is totally inadequate.  For those who seek allegory it must be maddening.  (It must be an allegory!  Of course Frodo is Christ!—Or is Gollum Christ?)  (45).81+F-D9huqL._SY500_

This last portion is unbearable to read, not because I’m an atheist, but because I grew up in the church and attended a private Christian school.  I remember the teachers, priests, coaches, principles, and at times even my own English teachers of whom I had absolute trust, shoveling at me that The Lord of the Rings was one big metaphor for Jesus.  I’m not arguing that the material isn’t there.  Tolkien was a lifelong Catholic, so much so that he was offended when the church dropped the Latin mass.  There’s stories of the Old Professor standing up during the English mass and calling out the original Latin much to the pain and embarrassment of his family who had to bear his philological and religious devotion.  This old narrative interpretation is painful though because of its predictability.  Whenever and wherever there is a sacrifice made Christians attack the body of the work, performing surgery to cut out that ounce of Christian sentiment or interpretation to ensure that they “have always been around.”lord-of-the-rings-greatest-moments

The allegory is a great means of criticism, but LeGuin clearly isn’t satisfied by this interpretation and neither am I.  The problem with allegory is that it’s simple.  A stands for [Symbol 1] and B stands for [Reference 13], and in such a dynamic the critics is not so much a thinker and philosopher, but instead a child connecting dots to the right cultural reference.

Le Guin offers the reader something far more profound at the end of The Staring Eye, as she notes that Tolkien is elusive to critics and that in itself is a kind of artistic legacy:

Those who fault Tolkien on the Problem of Evil are usually those who have an answer to the Problem of Evil—which he did not.  What kind of answer, after all, is it to drop a magic ring into an imaginary volcano?  No ideologues, not even religious ones, are going to be happy with Tolkien, unless they manage albert-edwards-the-fed-has-allowed-an-orc-like-monster-to-incubate-hatch-and-emerge-into-the-sunlight-snarling-and-ready-to-do-battle.jpgit by misreading him.  For, like all great artists, he escapes ideology by being too quick for its nets, too complex for its grand simplicities, too fantastic for its rationality, too real for its generalizations.  They will no more keep Tolkien labeled and pickled in a bottle than they will Beowulf, or the Elder Edda, or The Odyssey.  (46).

Despite my training in graduate school, this final absence of solid critical foundation leaves me with some hope.  I’ve struggled since I started The Fellowship of the Ring to find any kind of solid critical lens from which to understand Tolkien’s aesthetic.  And as I read deeper into the man and his work this absence is not becoming distressing, in fact it’s encouraging.  This sense of opportunity is what informs my reading of Tolkien and I see a new range of possibility for the reader of Tolkien.

The QPB Companion is not going to be a book that lasts into the future, but this was never in fact about one single volume.  Rather this is about the critics of Tolkien who have, as I’ve read them, misunderstood or simply missed Tolkien’s creative goals.  d7f3a84000d935abcc56e1bdf2a064d5The critics continue to this day to dismiss Tolkien, and while there is some artistic elitism in this behavior, my assessment is that most of the critics of Tolkien are simply caught up in the tradition of theoretical framework.

In literary criticism there is a mode which pushes analysis, and by extension the critic, to write their assessment of a work based upon their training.  The problem with Tolkien then is that much of his work escapes most contemporary critics because far too many of them are looking for Post-Modern explanations or else allegory.

Tolkien requires something more.  The critics who have mattered then tend to be writers themselves.  Tolkien as a writer, and The Lord of the Rings as a series, is an exploration of language and myth, and it is run by rules of behavior that contemporary literature simply doesn’t.the_eye_of_sauron_by_stirzocular-d86f0oo

This is not a critical manifesto, nor do I make a grand declaration for a new mode of critical theory.  I simply speak as a writer and as a reader.  Tolkien’s work attempts to explore a different territory of literature, where word and deed are ends unto themselves, and the depth of character comes from action rather than introspection.  This won’t suit many sensibilities, but the continued success of Tolkien has demonstrated that, even if critics snap harshly at Tolkien’s “deplorable cultus,” most of them won’t care anyway.

Hobbit Holes and Nazgul promise endless opportunities for adventure and analysis, and at least one second breakfast with bacon and tomatoes.

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Hive of Endless Inspiration and Oh S*** there’s a Bee in My Coke: Bee Wilson’s The Hive

05 Thursday Oct 2017

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Academic Books, Book Review, History, Literature, mythology, Philosophy, Science

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Academic Book, Arthropods, Audubon Society Book of Insects and Arachnids, Bee, Bee Documentaries, Bee Hives, Bee Keepers, Bee Wilson, Bees, Book Review, Bugonia, history, honey, Human Beings Perception of Reality, Human Narcissim, Individual Will, Insects, Leo Tolstoy, Literature, Medieval Philosophy, mythology, Ovid, Philosophy, Science, Sexuality, The Hive, The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us, Virgil

 

Bee anatomy

I am unashamed whenever I confess that I am a nerd for bees.

My father’s a Pest Management Professional, which is the actual name for Exterminators just FYI, and so growing up I always had access to books about bugs, actual bug collections, and even slides (yes slides I am that old) that showed different types of arthropods and various facts about their anatomy.  There was a brief period where my father worked for a small retail outlet and I remember the coolest part was spending hours just staring at the Mexican Red tarantula and the Emperor Scorpion.  If it wasn’t these educational treats that made insects and arachnids so cool it was being the only kid in school who could identify different types of ants, spiders, and sometimes cockroaches that would stumble into the class rooms.  I could tell the difference between a wolf spider and a brown recluse better than anyone and never understood why my classmates, who would often screech at the sight of a wolf spider the size of a dime, never took the time to learn the difference.  There’s at least one book about insects and arthropods on every one of my bookshelves, and every night before bed I read a little bit from a DK book simply entitled Insects.  This is just a long way of saying that there’s 7146QICIGrLsomething about arthropods that I’ve always found fascinating.

Several months ago I went in for an official job interview at the library.  I was technically interviewing for a job that I had been working as a temp for at least five months by then, and during the interview one of the questions was: “if you had to recommend a book to someone what would it be and how would you do it?”  This was a bit of a joke since all of the supervisors knew me and knew that I was always reading something, or several
somethings, and I had actually brought two books with me to the interview.  One of them, and I swear this isn’t me trying to be cute or clever, I’m never cute, was the Simon & Schustwer book of Insects, and the other was Bee Wilson’s The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us.  I had picked the book up earlier in the week because one of my jobs in closing the place up is going around the second floor and looking over the shelves to find books people have left about.  It’s far more common than the reader would think.  People will often remove a book they have a passing interest in, and then rather than leaving it in designated places that are marked with signs they’ll just leave a book sitting on the shelf.  I was looking through the hard sciences when I spotted a book I had seen in the card catalog before, and so being the bug-nut I decided to give it a try.  I could honestly say to my bosses then, looking at the book, that I would recommend The Hive because I had never read a cultural history that was so well-written, so approachable, and a book that managed to pack every sentence and paragraphs with facts and never lose my interest.12-0272-03D.feature

I got the job and a week later I bought The Hive.

Wilson’s book is a cultural history which means rather than a chronological order or events, her method is to understand how the idea of bees has changed over time.  Rather than just look at the methods ancient and modern peoples have used to raise and control bees her aim is deeper.  Bees have evolved alongside human beings in a mutualistic relationship, and given the fact that human beings are meaning-making animals Wilson is able to show that bees have provided human beings with more than Bee Wilsonwax and honey.  In fact, bees have inspired almost every level of society from politics, architecture, sexuality, food, agriculture, and economics.  The bee has always been with mankind as a source of inspiration and so The Hive is an attempt to understand how that inspiration has worked and what ideas have developed from that inspiration.

And what better way to observe this than by looking at bugonia.  Wilson explains this odd origin story for bees:

Perhaps the oldest of all the various theories about the origins of bees is the belief that, instead of generating themselves, bees were spontaneously fashioned out of the dead body of an ox.  As the Latin poet Ovid (43 BC—AD 18) put it, ‘Swarms rush from the rotten ox; and one extinguished life produces a thousand.’  To us the theory that a dead ox could give birth to living bees seems frankly nuts.  Yet this oddity did not prevent it from being an accepted explanation for existence of bees for more than 2,000 years.  This was part of a reflection of the yearning of men to control these miraculous creatures, and thereby to control death itself.  (71).

There’s obviously more to this, we’ll call it a notion because “bat-crap-crazy-idea” may be too harsh, but this paragraph is enough for me to demonstrate the appeal and strength of The Hive.  This is one paragraph of the book and yet Bee Hive insideWilson is able to name a concept, explain what it is, offer a quote which provides an examination of the idea, place it in contemporary perspective, and then offer the significance of the idea to humanity all while managing to write a paragraph that isn’t boring.  Almost every paragraph of The Hive manages this same feat.  And if it isn’t clear at this point that leaves me insanely jealous as a writer, but extraordinarily satisfied as a reader.

My regular reader may object, so what?  Why should I bother reading a book that sounds like nothing but a lot of empty trivia about bees?  I don’t even like bees, in fact I fuckin hate bees.  They get in my soda and sting me.  What’s relevant or useful about a pest?Bee Hive

It’s tempting then to suggest that the pure appeal of The Hive is the fact that the book is just an opportunity to collect lots of trivia about bees.  For the record even if it was I would still recommend reading the book because as my opening suggests bees are fucking awesome.  But more than just the empty trivia The Hive is a fascinating observation to observe how human beings have tried to understand their reality, and how knowledge develops.

One early passage in the book examines this as Wilson discusses early scholarship of bees:

The Roman poet Virgil (70-19 BC) was the main source for more or less everything written about bees until Renaissance times.  In his pastoral poem the Georgics he realized the charms of beekeeping and bees.  Virgil noticed that, on a blossom-scented spring day, different bees spent their days in different ways—some ‘busy in the fields’ and others ‘indoors’ gluing up combs.  His theme was taken up again in the Middle Ages, when bee writers really developed the theme of how bees ivied up their labor.  If we were to attach a reason to this we oldbeekeeper1might say that the hive echoed in the feudal structure of medieval Europe, in which there were those who worked, those who fought, and those who prayed—all of them sinners with an allotted role in God’s order which must not be questioned.  In addition, medieval writers about animals were more unselfconsciously fanciful than their ancient counterparts.  They were apt to see animals as hieroglyphs sent by God with moral lessons inside them for men.  The whole world was composed of hidden messages, and everything held together as part of a single Creation.  […]  Everything meant something.  (24).

I’ve observed in my writing lately that I keep repeating the same phrase over and over: humans are symbol making creatures.  It’s becoming a theme, or maybe a Bee sciencerunning gag.  Rather than worry about my developing mantra though I look at the quote I just provided and this statement feels perfectly relevant.  If there is a message of The Hive it’s almost certainly that human beings are always looking around at their reality and trying to find some kind of self-reflective meaning in it.  Whether it was the trees, lightning, flowers, mountains, or even something as minuscule as bees, humans observe their reality as something separate but at the same time as something that can inform them about their personal self and place in the universe.

Virgil was looking for the role of man in the universe as he pondered in the fields, and he found bees.

This passage says as much about human beings tendency to self-create as much as it does about scholarship though because as Wilson notes, the writers and scholars of the world were quite content to follow Virgil’s ponderings rather than try to observe new data.  Now part of this has to be attributed to the incorrectly named “Dark Ages.”  On one small tangent the only reason the Medieval period is referred to as the “dark ages” was because historians writing during the Bee Keeperlate renaissance and early Reformation period looked to the lack of political center and named it as such largely out of elitism.  You can thank Petrarch mostly because he thought the period was not as “pretty” or “bright” as the classical ages.  It’s important to note that because the Roman empire was crumbling internally at the time, and let’s be honest crumbling is a polite word for the steady festering that the empire suffered from, it became difficult for scholars to establish knowledge that could be widely, or as easily distributed.

It’s hard to get your new knowledge of bees out and about to the world when there is an absence of solid political authority and people are more concerned about the Vandals and the Goths.

Wilson’s brief observation here is a chance to observe however the way human beings tend to arrange and rely on data and information.  Virgil’s original Beekiping_on_Stamp_of_Ukraine_2001observations represent a real scientific method, and while his findings were off by several crucial details, the man was working with the best means he had available.  There was nothing wrong in Virgil’s conclusions ultimately because he did begin the study, and much like Charles Darwin his writings would be, not abandoned completely, just corrected over time.  Humans beings need original observations in order to build real knowledge and establish actual facts about the world around them.  What’s important about Virgil’s observations is that they became accepted partly because of his direct observations, but more importantly because they reaffirmed the political and social philosophy of his world and the world beyond it.

Humans beings looked to the bees as a validation that they were living their lives according to the will of nature and the will of god.  Science, and ideas period, are received positively when the culture that supports it are ready for it or willing to accept it.scott-hive-honey-bees

I realize that I’m waxing philosophic and not really digging into bees in general but that’s largely because The Hive has provided me with so much material and so many opportunities to reflect on what I have actually learned.  Great books are supposed to leave the reader with more questions and aspirations and ideas to consider and even though it’s been somewhere around several months since I finished the book I’m still finding myself stopping and considering elements of the text.  I’m still considering the image of the beekeeper and what role that figure plays in the culture.

It’s not too much to say that beekeepers are not revered in contemporary society, and in fact observing the animosity towards bees it’s a wonder that beekeeping still retains Beewhatever grace and dignity as a profession that it does.  The beekeeper is not a man in my eyes, but a timeless being who is aiding the community by collecting the honey.  And it’s important to note that this image is not unique for even a man like Lev Tolstoy thought as much.

The last chapter of The Hive discusses beekeepers, examining their history as well as their contemporary place in society and between these two ends of the arrow Wilson manages to discuss Tolstoy and his penchant for beekeeping.  She writes:

During Tolstoy’s youth, beekeeping was just one estate activity among many, and he himself was wedded more to the manly pursuit of hunting than to the slow ways of the bee-men.  But, as time went on and he became more and more attached to the peasant ways, his hives came to have a special place in his life.  (268).

Wilson continues this later by noting:beeswarm5148

He accumulated followers—the Tolstoyans—many of whom kept bees.  Tolstoy also turned to the bees of Yasnaya Polyana, both for honey and for wisdom.  Hunting was now out of the question for him—it was too violent—whereas beekeeping seemed more natural.  In his main religious work The Kingdom of God is Within You(1893), Tolstoy used the bees to attempt to bring men to God.  Men in their current state, he claimed, were “like a swarm of bees hanging in a cluster on a branch’.  But this was only a temporary state: men, like the bees, must find a new place to live—the place of God.  The bees are able to escape their position on the branch because each of them is honey_comb_fb‘a living, separate creature endowed with wings of its own’.  Similarly, men should be able to escape their current toils because each is ‘a living being endowed with the faculty of entering into the Christian conception of life’.  (269-70).

Now my regular reader will hopefully remember that I’m an atheist and therefore conclude that I cannot agree with Tolstoy’s final vision.  They’re correct in this matter, but even if I disagree with the final conclusion I am willing to admit that Tolstoy’s philosophy of the bees is still a beautiful idea.  Even if this passage is riddled with Christian sentiment, at its core Tolstoy is offering up some kind of hope for the individual human mind to find its own path.  The path still leads to god, but it does at least offer some hope for the individual to overcome the chaotic mass of civilization.

Tolstoy’s assessment is just one of the many philosophies contained in Wilson’s The Hive and it reveals the overall thesis of the book which Wilson concludes beautifully, and because I lack her ability with prose I’ll just provide her final quote here:Bee skull

However much human beings have projected themselves on to the hive, identifying themselves with drones, workers, and the queen, and idealizing the morals of the waxen community, there will always remain mysteries about the life of bees which men can never discover.  And it is for this very reason that humans will continue to search for truths about themselves in the gold of the honeycomb.  (271).

There were never any bees in my father’s bug collections, but they were found within his Audubon Society Book of Insects and Arachnids and I remember looking through the pages studying the differences between the sweet honeybees and the bulbous gluttons that were the bumble bees.  I remember being stung as a child by honeybees and hating them for it, and being stung again just a year ago and hating myself for having to pull the bee off me knowing that it would die.  In the last year I’ve helped my father set up new walls in his beehive, and found myself feeling a sensation that almost borders on the sublime as I look between the panels and see the live body that is the hive.  Those little arthropods sometimes look like they’re made of soft gold and their buzzing, collected together, is almost a discernable song.o-HONEY-facebook

The Hive did not jumpstart my love and intellectual curiosity of arthropods, but it has rekindled my love of them.  A book like The Hive is a real boon for the culture because it is a chance for real self-reflection and metacognition.  After reading the book I’ve rediscovered again that human beings are always looking for something, some quality, some force, some outside body or organism to provide them inspiration for the way they are to live their life.  While there is most certainly a narcissism in this task, there’s also a real chance for intellectual beauty.Bee Hive Insurance

Humans have written poems, constructed buildings, crafted structures and machines, and drafted philosophy just by watching the ways bees live and behave, and this is an encouraging thought.  Insects are often seen as grotesque “others,” beasts that offer nothing but corruption and profit from death.  The Hive takes another look at this attitude and shows the reader that insects are far more noble in fact.  They can offer inspiration and even substance both physical and spiritual.

Humans will always look to the bees and while they’re sure to suffer a few stings, that discomfort will almost surely lead to the next great discovery.

bee-hero

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes taken from The Hive were from the hardback First U.S. Edition, by Thomas Dunne Books.

 

**Writer’s Note**

I’ve provided links to two book reviews originally published in The Gaurdian if the reader is at all interested:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/sep/17/featuresreviews.guardianreview18

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/sep/18/featuresreviews.guardianreview3

 

***Writer’s Note***

Because I am a huge fucking nerd for bees, while I researching and writing this essay I found numerous documentaries on YouTube about bees.  If the reader would like to learn more about the insect or at least try to find some kind of appreciation for the little bugs, they can follow the links below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaRF17lMVbE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBmlwx_6A8Q

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU0oNncWhwA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9boqHQrtpbA

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Satan’s Finest Hour, And Nowhere to be Found: Season of Mists, No. 44, and Personal Responsibility

10 Sunday Sep 2017

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Comics/Graphic Novels, Literature, mythology, Neil Gaiman, Novels

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Albert Bigelow Paine, Animal House, Dream, Evil, graphic novel, Hell, I'm almost positive the song Tribute is the song they couldn't remember but I realize that's a controversial position, Individual Will, Jennings, John Milton, Literature, Loki, Mark Twain, Morpheus, myth, mythology, Neil Gaiman, No.44 The Mysterious Stranger, Norse Mythology, Novel, Paradise Lost, Personal Development, Personal Responsibility, Sandman, Sandman Vol 4. Season of Mist, Satan, Scapegoat, Scarface, Season of Mist, Sin, Tenacious D, Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny, The Endless, The Mysterious Stranger, time, Tony Montana, trickster

 03-neil-gaiman-w750-h560-2x

Antonius Block: They say you have consorted with the devil?

Witch: Why do you ask that?

Antonius Block: It’s not out of curiosity, but because of utterly personal reasons. I would also like to meet him.

Witch: Why?

Antonius Block: I want to ask him about God. He must know. He, if anyone.

–The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman

 

7da5985f55d2979ee953558fa57a9e5d--gustave-dore-demons

Satan is my favorite fictional character.  This creates some obvious problems for me, because for the most part Satan is poorly represented in most fiction.  Many writers and artists who attempt to convey Satan in contemporary art usually devolve the character down into a handsome, charming man in a suit who can do magic tricks or else turn him into cheap, con-man who always loses.  The other alternative is actually sitting down and reading Milton’s Paradise Lost where the character not only plays a primary role but is the hero of the book.  Hopefully the reader observes a conflict here as well: reading Milton.  There are some pains that best expressed by characters in film, specifically Donald Sutherland’s character in Animal House:Jennings

Jennings: Don’t write this down, but I find Milton probably as boring as you find Milton. Mrs. Milton found him boring too. He’s a little bit long-winded, he doesn’t translate very well into our generation, and his jokes are terrible.

With one possible exception, apart from the one I’m dedicating this entire essay to, the only satisfying Satan I’ve ever seen in a film was the one played by Foo Fighters lead singer Dave Grohl in Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny.  His “Rock Masterpeice” which includes reference to buttfucking Kyle Gass, is still one of the best moments in all of Rock history and shall remain so until those guys remember the original song that Tribute was based on.pod06

My memorized history of heavy metal aside though, I’m not being cute or coy when I write that Satan is my favorite character in fiction.  I’m being honest.  The reason for this adoration isn’t my atheism, nor is loyalty or admiration to the church of Satanism (they lost me at the word church), it’s largely because of Dr. Karen Sloan.  While I was still attending UT Tyler and working on my masters I started talking more and more with my professor because my classes were online and I’m the kind of person who prefers to talk with someone face to face.  Each person is different, but for my own intellectual needs I have to talk with someone and hear my thoughts bounce off of theirs 8c5a946bb977d48a8f4ff89b1bb40238for something to actually happen.  Dr. Sloan was always happy to talk and one of our favorite topics was Mark Twain.  She had a TIME magazine tacked to her wall with Twain’s face on the cover (a copy that I actually now own thanks to her) and we’d often point back to Twain and talk about his writing, his life, or his odd eccentricities.  At some point during the talk the idea of Twain as an atheist came out and we both agreed Twain probably wasn’t one.

But, somewhere in the conversation Dr. Sloan made a statement that stuck with me.  It went along the lines that Satan was Twain’s favorite character because there was a man who had had his story written for him before he could write his own.  Because god is omnipotent he had written Satan’s narrative before Satan could decide his own fate.  Satan is in fact a tragic character because the man never got a chance to make his own fate.a94afa181fb0495eaa62abb205690cbab00109ad_hq

This idea fascinated me, partly because I grew up in the Christian church and therefore had received a pre-established figure of Satan.  Satan was the boogeyman, Satan was Charles Mansion, Satan was often Democrats for some reason, Satan was the urge to masturbate, Satan was the urge to drink and gamble, Satan was the reason men beat their wives or women drowned their children, Satan was the reason women cheated on their husbands, Satan was the voice in your head that brought you to doom, Satan was the reason you hated yourself, Satan was sin, Satan was just, overall, a bad dude.  And looking at this portrait I began to reflect more 51XsdLa6ZlL._SX323_BO1,204,203,200_and more on a graphic novel I had read about that time which included, of all things, a sympathetic figure of Satan.

Season of Mist is the fourth volume in The Sandman series by Neil Gaiman and is, I would argue, the finest book in the entire series.  The story involves the protagonist Dream being summoned to a family meeting by his Brother Destiny.  The Endless, as they are called, are physical manifestions of the ideas and feelings which govern human reality: death, dream, destiny, desire, despair, destruction, and delirium (formerly delight).  Dream during the meeting reflects on a woman he fell in love with and then damned to hell when she didn’t reflect her love back.  Dream decides to go to Hell only to find it empty.  There Dream encounters Satan who has emptied Hell because, as he says, he’s grown tired of running the place as he has also grown tired of being an excuse for the weaknesses of mankind.

During one exchange the man reflects on the way human beings think of him and his argument may strike a familiar ear:

Why do they blame me for all their failings?  They use my name as if I spend my entire day sitting on their shoulders, forcing them to commit acts they would otherwise find repulsive.

“The devil made me do it.”  I have never made any of them do anything.  Never.  They live their own lives.  I do not live their lives for them.  And then they die, and they come here(having transgressed against what they believed to be right), and expect us to fufill their desire for pain and retribution.  I don’t make them come here.f9cbbf461a8a815d52d5147134a38f46

They talk of me going around and buying souls, like a fishwife come market day, never stopping to ask themselves why.  I need no souls.  And how can anyone own a soul?

No.  They belong to themselves…they just hate to have to face up to it.

Yes I rebelled.  It was a long time ago.  How long was I meant to pay for action? 

This passage struck me not just for the visual of Watching Satan walking through the various rooms and valleys of Hell with dream and locking the gates, tumblr_m745jpQLuJ1r9wm7dbut because it was the kind of passage one reads and then immediately feels a kind of reawakening.  I’m not trying to be dramatic as I write that out, this passage really stunned me because it was like seeing someone completely new for the first time while also recognizing that what they were saying is completely true.  Humanity has, since the infancy of the species, looked for a way to outsource responsibility for errors and sins while at the same time looking constantly inward for signs of weakness.  In ancient times it was customary for villages to send goats out into the wildness after performing a ceremony that would contain the “sins and offenses against the gods” into the animal before sending it out into the wild.  This, for the record, is how the term “scape-goat” came enter the lexicon, and it also eventually explains the character of Satan.

As a figure Satan is a trickster, a figure of mischief, and an agent of chaos who relishes in corrupting human beings and causing them to destroy and distrust one another.  Just about every religion, theology, and mythos has such a figure the most prominent being Loki from the Norse Mythology.  Before Tom Hiddleston made the marvel incarnation a household name, and the bane of parents who couldn’t find the costume for their child and didn’t feel like making their own, Loki managed to be often associated 2712995-5with Satan allowing early church fathers the appropriation of the god for their own purposes.  Reflecting on this connection, and re-reading Season of Mists I thought back to Gaiman’s Norse Mythology and looked up the brief character intro:

Loki is very handsome.  He is plausible, convincing, likeable, and far and away the most wily, subtle, and shrewed of all the inhabitants of Asgard.  It is a pity, then, that there is so much darkness inside him: so much anger, so much envy, so much lust.  (24).

Anger, envy, and lust are all qualities that were assigned to the devil-horned costume character that was the devil.  Yet looking at these qualities it’s become more and more obvious as I’ve aged that the people pasting these qualities _84584050_3494754156_9273aff2f3_bonto Satan himself really ought to look in a mirror.  What missing, or most troubling, about the image of Satan is the fact that the man is having his story told by others, rather than having his own opportunity to speak, and this cartoonization, this caricature reveals the larger issue which is that human beings need someone else to be held accountable for their actions.  Rather assume personal responsibility for fucking up, human beings created this supernatural being which would explain horrors and atrocities.  Why would a man gamble away his money and then beat his wife half to death?  It could be that he suffers from some inner self-loathing due to an addiction and so he strikes his wife, or it could be a demon who wears red suits and tricks him into gambling.  Why would anyone follow a dictator who eventually leads a massive genocide against a denomination of a reigion.  It could bep4_73 copy simple fear, or desire for there to be stability in government so they can return to real life, or else it could be a demon with long horns.  Why would a woman cheat on her husband with multiple men rather than remaining faithful to him?  It could be that she’s looking for something sexually that he is unable or unwilling to provide her, or perhaps she’s looking for some kind of emotional comfort that she’s not getting at home.  Or, it could be a strange imp that plays fiddle against subpar country music singers.

My reader may object at this point and argue that I’m sugarcoating this issue.  Satan is not a nice person, he’s not a lovely character, he’s a selfish prick who tried to become god and failed miserably and now his punishment is to rule hell for eternity.  What’s redeemable in that?

This is a fair objection, but I note that my reader has made the same mistaker as previous storytellers.  They’re relying on the religious imagery of Satan, the same cartoon character that belays any kind of real analysis of the character.  Again, the problem with this I that it distracts the reader from digging into other versions and other narratives where Satan is not the cartoon villain bent on destroying humanity, he’s simply a man who’s been consigned to a role that he doesn’t identify with.ea3607c17ef68cef3f293f536a996cf7--medieval-life-medieval-art

Looking at the best analysis of everything I’ve said so far I think back to Scarface when Tony Montana is high and drunk and yelling at the patrons of the resturaunt:

Tony Montana: What you lookin’ at? You all a bunch of fuckin’ assholes. You know why? You don’t have the guts to be what you wanna be? You need people like me. You need people like me so you can point your fuckin’ fingers and say, “That’s the bad guy.” So… what that make you? Good? You’re not good. You just know how to hide, how to lie. Me, I don’t have that problem. Me, I always tell the truth. Even when I lie. So say good night to the bad guy! Come on. The last time you gonna see a bad guy like this again, let me tell you. Come on. Make way for the bad guy. There’s a bad guy comin’ through! Better get outta his way!Sandman 23-13

The need for a villain is timeless, but in the rush to create such a villain it comes at the expense of the story.  The reason why characters like Hannibal Lecter and Loki and Joker are the successful villains that they are is because their characters are complex.  They have backgrounds and causes which led them on the path to being the repulsive people that they are.  This complexity doesn’t redeem them, but it reminds the reader that the real monsters in society aren’t cartoon characters, they’re real people who fucked up or were fucked up by others.  It’s easy to dismiss a figure like Satan as having any kind of redeemable qualities, but that impulse is dangerous because it creates a mindset where one doesn’t have to assume responsibility for one’s actions.  It becomes somebody else’s fault.

Part of growing up is learning how to assume responsibility for one’s actions, and it’s the sign of an immature person who tries to hide behind excuses or outside influence.

Satan continues to interest me as a character because the man has, for too long, been a figure wrapped up in his caricature and given little opportunity to find out who he is, what he wants, and what his true character shall be.  Though if I can offer one last image, there is hope for this character.  In graduate school I had to take a Research & Methods course; it was a class designed to teach graduate students how to research material for papers that they would write as graduate students and how to find real, relevant information.  The class was taught by Dr. Sloan, which was the reasons we began having discussions,  and centered around one novel: No. 44, The Mysterious MTLibraryMS-2011Stranger.

I could get into the textual conflict of this novel and it’s fascinating backstory, but I’m sure my reader is getting sick of me so I’ll cut to the chase.  The novel tells the story of a young man named August who is a printer in Medieval Austria and when the book was originally published August met a strange man named Satan who, in this later edition, is named No. 44 and can perform all manner of tricks.  No.44 is an agent of chaos who enjoys making fools of everyone but who forms a close bond with August.  At the very end of the novel however No. 44 lifts the veil of reality and August is able to see that the world isn’t what it is, and alone in an empty space with No. 44 he discovers the truth, no-one is real but him, and 44 offers him a final counsel:

“It is true, that which I have revealed to you: there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, ho heaven, no hell.  It is all a Dream, a grotesque and foolish dream.  Nothing exists but You.  And You are but a Thought—a vagrant Thought, a useless Thought, a homeless Thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!”Gustave-Dore-illustration-of-Miltons-Satan-falling

He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all he had said was true.  (187).

Satan’s name is technically Lucifer which roughly translates to “bearer or light” or “morning star” this last of which is sometimes attached as a kind of last name.  Because of this Satan’s ultimate crime against humanity has been his revealing of knowledge to mankind.  No. 44 reveals to August the knowledge of his own existence, and once he has become aware he is disgusted to find it’s absolutely true.

So looking back to Season of Mists, and it’s presentation of Satan as a man who has absolutely nothing to do with the sins of humanity, I’m sure there were many like me who were left appalled because what he had said was true.  Though I wonder how many have actually taken it to heart.

f7cfc26294f9bb5155f02b9c0bef1def

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes from No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger were taken from the University of California Press authoritative edition care of the Mark Twain Library.  All quotes from Season of Mist were taken from the VERTIGO paperback edition.  All quotes taken from Animal House and Scarface were provided care of IMBD.

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Django Don’t Rhyme With Siegfried: Tarantino’s American-German Fairy Tale

25 Sunday Jun 2017

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Academic Books, Film Review, History, mythology, Politics, Race, Satire/Humor

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"D'Artagnan Motherfucker!", "I like the way you die boy", Academic Book, Alexander Dumas, Broomhilda, Calvin Candie, Candy Land, D'Artagnan, dehumanization, Django Unchained, Dr. King Schultz, Fairy Tale, Film, film review, German Legend, Henry Louis Gates Jr, Historical Accuracy, history, Human Body, humanity, Humor, Jaimee Fox, Jane Tompkins, John Wayne, Leonardo DiCaprio, Mandingo Fighting, myth, mythology, N-Word, Nigger, Politics, Quentin Tarantino, race, Race relations, racial slurs, racism, Revenge Story, Satire, Siegfried, slavery, The Gaurdian, West of Everything-The Inner Life of Westerns, Westerns

splash_780-1352

I’m pretty sure John Wayne would hate Django Unchained, but only because Jaimee Fox looks fine-as-hell in those glasses.  John Wayne could rock jeans and a bandanna…and that’s pretty much it.  Sorry John.

The first image or memory I have of Django Unchained was seeing it opening day, which was Christmas.  Apart from the snowstorm that damn near killed me as I drove home in my piss-for-shit 95 Ford Truck that had no heater at the time, I distinctly remember being the only person in the theater, apart from a family of African Americans to my item2.rendition.slideshowHorizontal.ss03-foxx-django-costumesright, who were laughing.  I just remember that family laughing because most of the rest of the theater were white people who gave me nasty looks as I was walked out of the theater.  I just couldn’t help it.  There’s something about watching a group of white men complain about not being able to see through their hoods that’s just pathetic and hilarious.

And because I’m feeling indulgent, why not just quote the scene directly.  Big Daddy a plantation owner, and part-time Colonel Sanders impersonator, has tracked Django and Dr. King Schultz with a posse of men to lynch the pair of them.  Before they ride in to attack them they plan their attack and the conversation eventually takes place:

Big Daddy: [instructing raiding party] Now unless they start shooting first, nobody shoot ’em. That’s way too simple for these jokers. We’re gonna whoop that nigger lover to death! And I am personally gonna strip and clip that gaboon myself!

[puts on bag] dcc0bf3fea707aca4e49d1b2d926dfa8

Big Daddy: Damn! I can’t see fuckin’ shit outta this thing.

Unnamed Baghead: We ready or what?

Big Daddy: Naw, hold on, I’m fuckin’ with my eye holes.

[rips bag]

Big Daddy: Oh. Oh, shit.

[takes off bag]

Big Daddy: Ah, I just made it worse.

Unnamed Baghead: Who made this goddamn shit?

Other Unnamed Baghead: Willard’s wife.

Willard: Well, make your own goddamn mask!

Big Daddy: Look. Nobody’s sayin’ they don’t appreciate what Jenny did.

Unnamed Baghead: Well, if all I had to do was cut a hole in a bag, I coulda cut it better than this!

Other Unnamed Baghead: What about you, Robert? Can you see?

Robert: Not too good. I mean, if I don’t move my head I can see you pretty good, more or less. But when I start ridin’, the bag’s movin’ all over, and I – I’m ridin’ blind. 14697-MTdmODNkMTJlMg

Bag Head #2: [rips bag] Shit. I just made mine worse. Anybody bring any extra bags?

Unnamed Baghead: No! Nobody brought an extra bag!

Unnamed Baghead: [raiding party is discussing their bags] Do we have to wear ’em when we ride?

Big Daddy: Oh, well shitfire! If you don’t wear ’em as you ride up, that just defeats the purpose!

Unnamed Baghead: Well, I can’t see in this fuckin’ thing! [takes bag off] I can’t breathe in this fuckin’ thing, and I can’t ride in this fuckin’ thing!

Willard: Well fuck all y’all! I’m going home! You know, I watched my wife work all day gettin’ thirty bags together for you ungrateful sons of bitches! And all I can hear is criticize, criticize, criticize! From now on, don’t ask me or mine for nothin’!

Big Daddy: Now look. Let’s not forget why we’re here. We gotta kill a nigger over that hill there! And we gotta make a lesson out of him!

Bag Head #2: Okay, I’m confused. Are the bags on or off?

Robert: I think… we all think the bag was a nice idea. But – not pointin’ any fingers – they coulda been done better. So, how ’bout, no bags this time – but next time, we do the bags right, and then we go full regalia.

[all agree] django-unchained

Big Daddy: Wait a minute! I didn’t say ‘no bags’!

Bag Head #2: But nobody can see.

Big Daddy: So?

Bag Head #2: So, it’d be nice to see.

Big Daddy: Goddammit! This is a raid! I can’t see! You can’t see! So what? All that matters is can the fuckin’ horse see? That’s a raid!

These scene in particular drew the most laughs, and thinking on it later I wondered why the only people laughing was that family of black people and myself.  But reflecting on it django_unchained_ver9I suppose I understand.  There’s a lot of dialogue which surrounds the film Django Unchained and a lot of it has to do with history.

If the reader has never seen Django Unchained it’s a film about a former slave who is rescued by a mysterious German dentists named Dr. King Schultz who is in fact not a dentist but a bounty hunter.  Schultz saves Django because the man used to work on a plantation where three of his bounties used to work as well.  The pair of them track the men down, kill them, escape the afore quoted inept posse, and during a conversation they decide to save Django’s wife who’s been sold, as they discover, to one of the largest plantation owners in Mississippi Calvin Candy.  The two men draft an elaborate plan to rescue her, which ultimately fails, and costs Schultz his life.  Escaping chains once again Django fights through and slaughters everyone in his path and finally saves his wife from Candyland.

When the film was released Quentin Tarantino suffered all manner of bad press for the free and prolific use of the word nigger in the film.  Spike Lee made his usual Huckleberry-Finn_N-Wordappearance on the “Fuck Tarantino” program, and people on Facebook got into really nasty arguments about who’s allowed to use the word “nigger” and when and in what context and then someone said “reverse racism” and everybody who liked their brain left the room before that bullshit polluted their frontal lobes.  And when the issue of Slavery and historical accuracy was thrown down, I like most people tuned out.  Not because there wasn’t an argument to be made, but because I had already assured myself that this interpretation was the best reason to enjoy the film.  I enjoy Tarantino movies period and will regularly defend the man’s work.  But since I’ve seen the film around ten times since it came out I’ve realized more and more than this argument can only go so far.  Tarantino movies tend to be hyperbolic in terms of violence and persona and sometimes plot structure, and within the film there is another, and I’d argue far more interesting, analysis that few people really discussed.1138856 - Django Unchained

Django Unchained is a fairy tale about racism.

After Django and Schultz have defeated the Brittle Brothers and Big Daddy’s posse, the two men are having coffee and beans in a rocky valley, and while they talk Django mentions his wife Broomhilda and Schultz tells him the story of Siegfried:

Dr. King Schultz: Well, Broomhilda was a princess. She was a daughter of Wotan, god of all gods. Anyways, Her father is really mad at her.

Django: What she do? thumb5

Dr. King Schultz: I can’t exactly remember. She disobeys him in some way. So he puts her on top of the mountain.

Django: Broomhilda’s on a mountain?

Dr. King Schultz: It’s a German legend, there’s always going to be a mountain in there somewhere. And he puts a fire-breathing dragon there to guard the mountain. And he surrounds her in a circle of hellfire. And there, Broomhilda shall remain. Unless a hero arises brave enough to save her.

Django: Does a fella arise?

Dr. King Schultz: Yes, Django, as a matter of fact, he does. A fella named Siegfried.

Django: Does Siegfried save her?

Dr. King Schultz: [Nods] Quiet spectacularly so. He scales the mountain, because he’s not afraid of it. He slays the dragon, because he’s not afraid of him. And he walks through hellfire… because Broomhilda’s worth it. 7b8fa84698f80f0b7ea4ca074d0824d9

Django: I know how he feel.

Watching the movie for the first time I failed to see how Tarantino was using this scene.  I simply chocked it up to the man’s recent fascination with Christoph Waltz.  Inglorious Basterds for me was a bit of a let-down the first time I watched it, but that was only because I was a Tarantino Junkie and had heard his original idea for the film.  In place of a quad of black commandoes fighting across Europe I got a two-and-a-half-hour dialogue piece complete with film and lots of subtitles.  Still, the redeeming element of the film was Waltz and his performance of Hans Landa.  When Waltz returned in Django, it was just a continuation of the German aesthetic.tumblr_inline_nz1qe2riEW1qlr65v_500

But like I said before there’s more to this passage because it ultimately reveals the creative goal of Django Unchained,  which is to create an American fairy tale about slavery.

I think it’s a mistake to make the argument that Django is “historically accurate” as a film.  There are numerous elements which satisfy historical reality (such as the headwear slaves were sometimes manacled with and bullshit eugenist views which I’ll talk about later), however people in the past typically didn’t bleed explosive corn syrup.  The regular splash and sploosh of blood erupting in geyser like quality is Tarantino’s usual hyperbolic cinematic style and reveals his love of B-movies.  But the main reason I reject this argument as the sole interpretation or defense of the film is that it limits the plot by history which often can be anti-climactic to narrative structure.

The reason Django becomes the character he does is because Tarantino is making 51gxLM4ThAL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_
a Western, and as I’ve explored that genre before in numerous other essays, it’s important to understand how Westerns operate.  I’ve said it once before, several times, but Jane Tompkin’s book West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns is a wonderful book because it lays out the skeleton of the Western genre, how it operates, who established it, why it continues to appeal to audiences, and finally what is the creative goal of it.

In an early passage she explains the general outline of the western:

First of all, in Westerns (which are generally written by men), the main character is always a full-grown adult male, and either outdoors—on the prairie, on the main street—or in public places—the saloon, the sheriff’s office, the barber shop, the livery stable.  The action concerns physical struggles between the hero and a rival or rivals, and culminates in a fight to the death with guns. djangounchained In the course of these struggles the hero frequently forms a bond with another man—sometimes his rival, more often a comrade—a bond that is more important than any relationship he has with a woman and is frequently tinged with homoeroticism.  There is very little free expression of the emotions.  The hero is a man of few words who expresses himself through physical action—usually fighting.  And when death occurs it is never at home in bed but always sudden death, usually murder.  (38-9).

Now I can anticipate the reader’s reaction immediately:  Django doesn’t exhibit any of these last qualities.  In fact he doesn’t even die.  This is a fair point, however if you observe the quote in it’s entirety you’ll see that Tarantino’s movie matches this skeleton because ultimately Django is a physical creature who isn’t defined by his introspection.  Django Unchained seems to break this structure because he’s principally motivated to save his wife Broomhilda, however Tompkins notes that women typically receive this treatment in westerns when she notes:Django_Unchained_gun_broomhilda

Westerns either push women out of the picture completely or assign them roles in which they exist only to serve the needs of men (39-40).

Broomhilda never really manifests much of a personal character other than the fact that she’s Django’s wife.  And while this certainly means Django Unchained fails the Bechdel test, it simply follows that it is in fact a Western.  Django fights through the power structure and bodies of Candy Land in order to save his wife, literally spraying the white walls red with blood, until he’s overpowered and sent back, temporarily, into slavery.  All this death only further Tompkins arguments about westerns:BzOoI

For the Western is secular, materialist, and anti-feminist; it focuses on conflict in the public space, is obsessed by death, and worships the phallus.  Notably, this kind of explanation does not try to account for the most salient fact about the Western—that it is a narrative of male violence—for, having been formed by the Western, that is what such explanations already take for granted (28).

But that just leads me back to my original argument.

Tarantino movie is remaking the genre of the western by blending it with the fairyfile_571274_django-unchained-trailer-10232012-105713-tale, myth, of Siegfried.  Fairy-tales, much like myth, are stories that are purposefully hyperbolic in order to explain phenomena in the world.  Zeus and Thor are non-scientific means explain lightning, and likewise the story of Siegfried is designed to explain the absurd state of being in love.  One of the best examples of the fairy-tale is George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm which, when it first published, had the subtitle of “A Modern Fairy Tale.”  In Animal Farm Orwell was using the structure of the fairy tale to tell a modern story about the terrors of Stalinism, but also of political corruption in general.87afc1ebb0cf3a9aeab45356ba6fd402.jpg

In Django Unchained, the fairy tale is exploring the history of violence and race, but instead of simply reminding the viewer about the travesties of slavery, the story is told so that instead of remaining victims of oppression black people overcome the violence by becoming the hero of a traditionally white genre.

Django becomes a mythic, or fairy-tale hero, charging into the fire that is the Candy Land plantation, pretending to be a black slaver, watching a slave named D’Artagnan being ripped apart my dogs, listening to Calvin Candie’s long lecture about the mental feebleness of blacks, killing dozens of field hands in Candy Land being captured, killing his captors, and returning to kill every last living member of Candy Land before blowing it up.  While all of this is the usually Tarantinoesque hyperbole it follows point-by-point the struggles of Siegfried’s struggle.

The Dragon may be a slave owner with bad teeth who believes in eugenics and drinks rum from a coconut, but the hero faces it nonetheless because, as Dr. King Schultz noted before, Broomhilda’s worth it.

jamie-foxx-django-and-christoph-waltz-dr

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

And then just a final note about one crucial element of the film.  Consistently in Django Unchained, there are shots of white surfaces being sprayed with blood.  First it’s the cotton of Big Daddy’s farm being sprayed with Ellis Brittle’s blood, Big Daddy’s white horse being sprayed with blood, and finally the white walls of Candy Lands interior being sprayed with blood of the various field hands who die trying to kill Django.  As before I’ve heard arguments about how this is historic symbolism for how “white power” was “stained” by the blood of Africa Americans.  I like this argument, and I stand by the idea that in the humanities you can make any argument you want as long as you support it with evidence.  However, as I’ve noted before, Django Unchained is not historically accurate the way 12 Years a Slave was.  The Tarantino factor has to be accounted for.

django-unchained-bloody-cotton

There is certainly a gratuitous element to it, but I’d argue that this constant staining imagery is just another way of building the “fairy-tale.”  Often myths and fairy-tales pay attention to the body, blood, organs, etc.  And so blood being such a precious fluid that it is, it’s being used to demonstrate what the hero is willing to perform and sacrifice in order to get back to his wife.

 

 

 

**Writer’s Note**

I didn’t get a chance to use it in the review, but this small exchange between Dr. King Schultz and Calvin Candie remains one of my favorite dialogue pieces simply because it made me realize a fact about an author I’ve loved all my life and never knew:

Calvin Candie: White cake?000101

Dr. King Schultz: I don’t go in for sweets, thank you.

Calvin Candie: Are you brooding ’bout me getting the best of ya, huh?

Dr. King Schultz: Actually, I was thinking of that poor devil you fed to the dogs today, D’Artagnan. And I was wondering what Dumas would make of all this.

Calvin Candie: Come again?

Dr. King Schultz: Alexander Dumas. He wrote “The Three Musketeers.” I figured you must be an admirer. You named your slave after his novel’s lead character. If Alexander Dumas had been there today, I wonder what he would have made of it?

Calvin Candie: You doubt he’d approve?

Dr. King Schultz: Yes. His approval would be a dubious proposition at best.

Calvin Candie: Soft hearted Frenchy?

Dr. King Schultz: Alexander Dumas is black.

 

 

***Writer’s Note***

Maybe it’s indulgent on my part, or cathartic, but there’s something about watching Django burst into the house of the slave catcher’s shouting “D’Artagnan, motherfuckers!” And shooting them all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOZz_jNAjcI

Although I’ll also note there’s just something about watching a former slave whip the field hands that made him watch as they whipped his wife with their own whip before shooting them that is just…well it’s just fun to watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA1IXnXVmPI

 

****Writer’s Note****

While I was polishing this essay I found a review from The Gaurdian of the film.  Enjoy:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/jan/17/django-unchained-review

 

quentin-django-unchained-4-hours

****Writer’s Note****

Finally I just wanted to leave the reader with some extra material.  Here’s an interview with noted African American studies scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr and Quentin Tarantino shortly after Django Unchained was released.  Enjoy:

http://www.alternet.org/culture/quentin-tarantinos-fascinating-interview-henry-louis-gates-jr-racism-and-n-word-django

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I'm Tired I've Been Down That Road Before I, Claudius Icarian Games Icarus Ice Cream that ISN'T Ice Cream Ida Tarbell Idealism identification Identity Identity Crisis Idris Elba If a woman is upset it's not because she's on her period it's because you're being a dick If they ask if you want Pepsi throw over the table throat punch the shit out of them and then proceed to burn that motherf@#$er down If you're reading this pat yourself on the back because you can read and that's awesome ignorance I have Measured Out My Life in Coffee Spoons and K Cups I know too many Michaels I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings I Like It Like That I Like it Like That: True Stories of Gay Male Desire Illuminated Manuscripts illusion Illusion of choice I Love Lucy I Love Lucy Mug I Love Penis...Mug iMac Imaginary Time imagination Immanuel Kant immigrants imperialism Imposter Complex Impressionists In Bed with David amd Jonathan incest Incorporation of images in Pedagogy Independence Day Independent Comics Indie Fiction Individual Initiative Individual Will Industrial Nightmare industry infidelity Infinite Jest Infinite Jest Blogs Infinite Possibility Infinity Informed Democracy Inherit the Wind Injustice innocence vs ignorance In One Person Inquisition insanity Insects Inside Out inspiration integrity intellectual Intellectual Declaration of Independance Intellectual masculinity Intellectual Parent Inter Library Loan internet interracial relationships Interview Inu Yoshi invert Invisible Man Invitation to a Beheading Ion IOWA iPad Ipecac iPhone ipod IRA I Racist Iran-Contra Irish Breakfast Tea Irish history Irish Writers I Ruck, Therefore I Am Isaac Asmiov Isaac Deutscher Isabel Allende Isabella St. James Ishmael Islam isolation Israel Issa Rae It It's an Honor It's illegal in the state of Texas to own more than six "realistic" vibrators It's time to adopt the Metric System in America for crying out loud It's truly truly difficult to find good coffee and by good coffee I mean the type that leaves you feeling as if you've actually tasted something beyond human understanding close to the furnace of all Italy Ivory Tower of Academia ivy I wandered lonely as a cloud I Want a Wife I Was a Playboy Bunny I Will Fight No More Forever I work at a Public Library J.D. 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