Too Much To Dream

I think you're wasting energy on this one. I adore Harlan Ellison, but that doesn't mean I agree with his politics. However, I see why he and Moorcock are such great buddies.

However, he's dead right about Tolkien and snobbery, although I would label it "classism" in LOTR. I don't buy the racist accusation, however. Not in modern terms, anyway. Although one of my favorite moments from "Bored of the Rings" was when the Rohirrim parodies met the Fellowship and said to Gimlet, son of Groin, "Funny. You don't look dwarvish."

I've got to dig that up and reread it.

Drat you, woman, for making me read that. So far I have not been able to advance past the first question.

Let us gaze deep, deep into the sweet, wrinkled space-time manifold that is our own navels, for who knows what wonders we might see. Why, it might be a parallel, equally valid universe where we are brilliant and fascinating and chicks dig us. Urp.

The interviewer drools all over himself in order to ask Moorcock about the parallel universes "which I believe you first conceived of in the early '60s".

I'm writing a post on the world since 9/11, and how we seem to have several parallel universes coexisting with the one we knew. It takes off from a Murray Leinster story written in 1934.

Meryl: I don't believe in the "snobbishness" either. Classicism? Certainly he was writing out of the milieu he knew, not some futuristic socialistic world -- we've all seen the results of enforced egalitarianism on society. In any case, I am fine with the idea that some of the class system markers in the book certainly should not apply to the meat world, and I am aware of how Jackson and the screenwriters of the film have subtly altered that just a tad so as to make the relationships in LOTR a little more palatable to modern audiences (long review of the film vs the book still pending, I may wait until Xmas '03 after the last part of the film has come out), but I think that Moorcock sees Tolkien advocating where he was merely relating. No doubt Tolkien would have felt much more comfortable in the Shire-like England of his youth, but he was quite aware that that was not an option anymore; and he was no political activist. But I don't think classicism can be called "snobbishness" -- at no time does he look down on any one of his creations, and even the Orcs get a kind of backhanded sympathy, though it's hard to detect (they were in the service of evil, after all). As for racism... I have no idea Tolkien's personal attitudes towards different human cultures IRL. I say he was not at all racist in his book, but it is safe to say his characters were xenophobic, towards certain other races at least -- but they had good reason to be. Actually, modern attitudes such as "racism" are meaningless in the archetypal fantasy world Tolkien created.

Last note: I adore Harlan Ellison too, but I prefer his essays and reviews to his fiction. "Bright Eyes" was a minor masterpiece, though, and then there is Spider's Kiss, which should cure every Elvis fan of their crush should they read it, which they won't.

Oh -- and it's my energy to waste. If I worried about "what is worth posting about" I would not write anything. In fact, that attitude kept me from writing for years. I do this for practice as much as anything. That is why I set up categories; so people could go to those things they liked, and skip the rest. Some day I will figure out how to move the category to the top of the blog post instead of the bottom next to the date...

Moorcock is still ALIVE? Damn. He's so irrelevant I THOUGHT he was dead then.:)

Apparently he has not escaped this mortal coil.

I agree that Moorcock doesn't wear well.

I haven't read Sayers Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club in years, but I remember how hard her description of the various wounds, injuries, mutilations, that these men carried around with them from World War I. I was a kid when I read it, 13 or 14, Viet Nam was ahead of us. Sayers description was shocking.

it's easy for buildings to "disappear" and "appear" when you shut your eyes for five years.

just a thought.

Michael Moorcock is a bitter old hippy who, like Harlan Ellison, is really pissed off no one cares about him or his work anymore, except fans of stuff he wrote 30 years ago. Neither of them have done nothing interesting in the last several decades, or that was even readable.

I was a fan of Moorcock's fantasy fiction until I came across his Jerry Cornilious and other hate-filled books filled with the racist ideas left wing cranks often espouse while unintentionally declaring their intellectual impotence.

Actually, the starw that broke the camel's back with me was an interview back in the 70s where Moorcock dissed Tolkien. He doesn't have the slightest grasp about what makes Tolkien's work good. His latest interview reads like unmasked envy dripping with bile. Yuck.

By the way, if you haven't seen it, Jonah Goldberg really shows how the "Tolkien is a racist" crowd is really talking about themselves.

http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg010303.asp

I never liked Moorcock. I can't say why, because I usually don't spend a lot of time analyzing why I dislike some particular writer or other.

Tolkein resonated with something in me. Moorcock didn't. All the wizard, sword and sorcery books whose whole point seemed S&S for its own sake (sans purpose) just left me wanting a lot more. I guess if I had been an English major I probably would have needed to suffer through at least three of Moorcock's books to form an opinion; as it was I only needed about half a chapter.

This might be a round through the foot as far as my credibility as a literature critic goes, but I'm not too fond of Lovecraft, either. Although From Beyond was a pretty cool B-movie.

Funny - I just re-read the Elric books this week. Insomnia. Moorcock was on my mind because he signed some anti-war petition or other, and my jaw hit the floor when I heard about it. Didn't know the old codger had slid so far. Re-reading these childhood favorites as an aging politics junkie, I find the author is terribly confused, and Elric embodies that confusion.

It would be one thing if, say, Elric's character was a battlefield of opposing principles. The explicit evil of his sentient sword, which so often defies him, suggests something along these lines. But Elric has no principles; his personality has no defining characteristics. He's vicious, valiant, cruel, loving, sardonic, remorseful, psychopathic, maudlin...you never know what's coming next. Other characters suffer the same lack of personality, and their motivations vary by the minute from the most ordinary and practical to the patently ridiculous. They fight to the death for a prostitute's honor, then grumble when somebody burns down their city.

The books are Very Poorly Written. Such regrettable turns of phrase as "they spurred their horses with abandoned savagery" are in just about every paragraph. I think Moorcock blasted away at his typewriter in a drunken stupor, and submitted the drafts for publication with barely a proofreading.

The Hawkmoon books are Very, Very Poorly Written. I was never able to finish them. The Corum books are a little better.

I'll always have a place in my heart for Moorcock's stuff. Sure the writing is horrible, and the characters are indecipherable, and it's dumb. Always with the tormented hero and the mean old crazy gods and the deus ex machina endings. I like it anyway. The imagery is great.

Moorcock shines when the hero goes on some psychedelic excursion outside his native universe. Read "The Sailor on the Seas of Fate" and any title ending in "of Swords" from the Corum series, to see Moorcock at his best and most original.

If you enjoyed Sharon McCrumb's "Bimbos of the Death Sun", she wrote a sequel "Zombies of the Gene Pool" that is also good.

I read that too.

I can't find it now, but I read a long time ago that Moorcock didn't like his swords & sorcery work much either, but it paid the bills. The statement was something like that it was basically pornography with the obvious symbolism and also in the sense of being easy to crank out while selling well.

In any event, I did find this interview with Andrea Dworkin, where MM asks gushing fan-boy style questions.

Where did my link go?!? I'll try it without the HTML.

http://www.multiverse.org/tanelorn/interview/iviewdworkin.html

::Shiver:: Michael Moorcock and Andrea Dworking? Run for the hills!

Just skimmed it. Best line (of Dworkin's): "I find compromise not impossible but incomprehensible." The rest of the paragraph indicates that yes, she does. (What she uses as an example, "bill-padding" or whatever they call that thing politicians do to get some measure passed by squeezing it into a bill with a bunch of other, often unrelated, measures, is not exactly the book definition of "compromise." And even I understand what it is, even though I am a political retard.)

The term is "logrolling." A bill that has actually had a bunch of (arguably) non-germane amendments attached at the last minute by logrolling is known, at least to us peons in the service of the Florida Legislature, as a "train." And generally such things have more do with getting stuff passed that there otherwise isn't time to bring to the floor than with hashing out actual policy compromises, since most of the time no one knows what ALL the "riders" on the train are.

Andrea, I didn't mean you shouldn't post about it. Just that working yourself up over crap like the Moorcock interview is a waste of energy.

Regarding class in LOTR, no, I wouldn't say that Tolkien advocates it, but the English class system is completely ingrained in each of the societies of LOTR.

Sam is the only major hobbit character in the trilogy who actually works for a living, and he's solidly in the servant class. Essays have been written about his relationship with Frodo--the faithful servant doting on the wiser, older master, yadda yadda yadda.

The stratification is most clear among hobbits. Farmer Maggot and Farmer Cotton both defer to Frodo, Merry, and Pippin. In the Shire, the Tooks and Brandybucks are the hereditary "masters" of the hobbits--the Thain and the Took rose up against Lotho Sackville-Baggins' attempt to take control of the Shire because they were the "rightful" masters, not he.

But there's plenty of the class system to go 'round. In Rohan, in Minas Tirith, among the elves and dwarves--everything is class-based, caste-based, and hereditary.

The closest Tolkien comes to having a common touch among the royals is Aragorn's Ranger persona, which he loses as the book wears on, no longer using the vernacular and speaking instead in the "high tongue." Even Merry and Pippin learn to drop their hobbit familiarity and take on their semi-royal roles in Rohan and Minas Tirith.

Does this mean that Tolkien advocated the class system, or is making a statement on it? No. It just means that it is there, it permeates the novel, and it is neither apologizing for nor explaining itself. As such, the class system is snobbishness, e.g., the working class works, and the elites are served by the working class. Merry and Pippin went on to inherit their family fortunes and not work for the rest of their lives. Sam entered the middle class by becoming mayor. Hm. Now we're heading into George Bernard Shaw territory. I'd better stop.

I'm not going to argue over it, because the class system, such as is portrayed in the book, means nothing to me personally; it's just part of the world portrayed. I'm American, and I have no yearnings for monarchy or anything like that. But I do have issue with words like "snobbishness" -- it's not a critical term, it's an emotional term only, and people are snobs for a lot of reasons besides class.

As concerns telling me what to waste my energy on, I really hate that, and always have. I suppose I am extra-sensitive on this point. I guess you have never had to hear people all your life tell you that you were wasting your time on this or that -- "Why are you reading, watching, doing that when you should be doing this!" Or maybe when they did it dodn't bug the hell out of you. I have always felt that other peoples' attempts to "help" me in such a manner were an unwarranted intrusion on my personal space. It's like people telling you to "Smile!" because your pensive expression bothers them. I'll be forty this year, and I think that gives me the privilege at least of being allowed to waste my time on whatever I please. Also, writing a diatribe on some unpleasant writer's silly views keeps me from throwing things and cursing, which would scare my cat and irritate my neighbors. Also, like I said before, it's practice. I supposed I could just not read stuff and not confront what I see as idiocy, but then I wouldn't be me, I'd be someone else. Maybe I should add something to the FAQ.

Hm, this came off as ExtraGrumpy™. I don't mean to spew all over you; I guess you've just poked a sensitive spot. Oh well, I didn't call this site "Spleenville" because I was Little Mary Sunshine.

Tolkien certainly was 'classist', & if you told him that like it was a bad thing, he would have taken his pipe out of his mouth, stared at you awhile, & walked away slowly, shaking his head & muttering to himself in Old English.

But he did not believe in the superiority of one class to another, or that the right people necessarily were born into each class; he wrote feelingly of his sense of inferiority to the working-class Tommies he commanded as an infantry subaltern in WWI. In one of his letters he puts an odd Christian slant on the issue: 'Touching your cap to the Squire may be dam' bad for the Squire but it's dam' good for you.'

That said, the tremendous class stratification of LOTR is simply a reflection of virtually every preindustrial civilization. George Orwell once said of Charles Dickens: 'Without a high level of mechanical development, human equality is not practically possible. Dickens goes to show that it is not imaginable either.' Tolkien had the sense not to imagine a social structure in Middle-earth that could only have arisen from the industrialism he hated so.