Tolkien, technology, philosophy, landscape and whatnot

Watching / listening to this very interesting documentary on JRR Tolkien I had a few thoughts.

1) Tolkien's distrust of technology, bordering on the Luddite, seems to me to be in harmony with Heidegger's ideas in the same area - and also to be in tune with views of high modernists such as TS Eliot. Usually equated with being almost reactionary, the quote Cristopher Tolkien reads from a letter on Tolkien's analysis of how the 'Machine' (remember the Pink Floyd song? ) supposedly saving labour would actually make the work more disgusting and invisible, by locking it inside the factories (and now sending it to distant lands!) is interesting - providing a more nuanced and interesting intellectual image of Tolkien, to me at least.

2) Landscapes - the idea that Tolkien preferred green and cozy English landscapes is countered strongly here, in another quote from a letter - where he confesses to a strong preference for the barren - but first and foremost for space. It seems that he would have felt very much at home in the Icelandic highlands....


3) The story about the way he wrote letters from Father Christmas to his children, keeping their fantasy world alive for years made me feel more at peace with the shoe business in my native land's customs and my enthusiastic participation in those rites (oblique on purpose).

4) The English spoken by Tolkien's children, and indeed all those is involved in this documentary is beautiful.

5) Last but not least I must around to reading Leaf by Niggle.

6) Thank you.

A messy speculation on art, fantasy and Hugo

I watched the movie Hugo last night and I enjoyed it. I especially liked the magician / film maker who was at the centre of the plot, and it got me thinking about the past, my grandmother, art, fantasy and games. Recently the cultural program Víðsjá on RÚV in Iceland had a special program dedicated to the memory of John Cage in celebration of the fact that he would have become one hundred years old sometime around now. I love Cage, not so much for his music, but for his methods and character and the attitude towards art expressed in his use of coincidence ..... and 4.33 has to be the weirdest piece of music ever.... It seems to me a very interesting fact that JRR Tolkien and Cage were more or less contemporaries, and this odd train of thought here leads me to my point, if a point it be... That the connection between speculative fiction and avant garde art seems to me to have been weak - to the point that each cultural sphere might be ignorant of the other and possibly even hostile.

Finally, I would like to mention how it seems that the art world has ignored the culture of gaming to a large extent. An exception I have come across is Nordic art LARP which seems to me to be a very interesting phenomenon that I will be exploring further in the future.... a nice presentation of this is to be found in Johanna MacDonald's interesting talk.... 

Fantasy 1

I love fantasy and SF literature, especially literature, but also films and graphic novels. To me the works of le Guin, Banks, Miéville, Stephenson, Moorcock.... I find that fantasy is the best vehicle for researching consciousness, language, ethics and politics. I love the quote from Miéville that he's only in it for the monsters, which is a lie of course. Oddly it seems that Tolkien and Harry Potter are the only fantasies beknownst to a large number of readers, and even more oddly it seems that while many people accept Tolkien and Rowling as cool, all other fantasy is dismissed as silly, childish and superficial. Of course, in many ways the case is that while Tolkien is amazing in many ways, he is a stuffy old reactionary Catholic, and Harry Potter, well.... more on that later.