Here’s the rules.

1. At the top of the post, make a list of the books you’ve read all or part of, in print, over the course of the past week, at least as far as you can remember them. (These should be books that you’ve actually read as a part of your normal life, and not just something that you picked up to read a page of just in order to be able to post your favorite quote.)

2. Pick one of those books from the list, and pick out a quote of one or more paragraphs, to post underneath the list.

3. Avoid commentary above and beyond a couple sentences, which should be more a matter of context-setting or a sort of caption for the text than they are a matter of discussing the material.

4. Quoting a passage does not entail endorsement of what’s said in it. You may agree or you may not. Whether you do isn’t really the point of the exercise anyway.

Here’s the books:

• Richard Kostelanetz (2008), Toward Secession: 156 More Political Essays From a Fairly Orthodox Anarchist-Libertarian. (New York: Autonomedia. I picked up my copy last month at May Day Books in Minneapolis.)
• Sonia Johnson (1989). Wildfire: Igniting the She/Volution. (Albuquerque: Wildfire Books. I picked it up some time ago through BookMooch.)
• J.R.R. Tolkien (1993). Morgoth’s Ring: The Later Silmarillion Part One: The History of Middle Earth, Volume X. (New York: Houghton Mifflin. I got this a while back over at Amazon.)

And here’s the quote. This is from a section of profiles in Richard Kostelanetz’s Toward Secession: 156 More Political Essays From a Fairly Orthodox Anarchist-Libertarian. This was home reading from earlier this week.

A radical from his professional beginnings to his premature end (on December 4, 1993, at the age of 52), Zappa won the respect of some, but not all, of his colleagues in both pop and highbrow composition. Indeed, his popular music had as many enemies as ans, but because of the loyalty of the latter he survived. Admirers of his extended serious compositions included the French music mogul Pierre Boulez. Zappa was once invited to give the keynote address to the American Society of University Composers; the 1995 meeting of the American Musicological Society included an extended paper on Zappa’s work. My own opinion (as someone who has written more about classical music than pop) is that the best of his music appeared before 1973, as many of his later concerts and records disintegrated into extended vamping jams in the tradition of pointless jazz.

Though Zappa was often a vulgar pop musician, he could be courageously critical of pop music vulgarity, at times functioning as an acerbic critic of the music business and eventually of world politics. It was not for nothing that his dissonant records were particularly treasured by Eastern European dissidents. Having influenced the man who became president of a new Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel, he thought about running for the American presidency, and might have done so, had he not been hit with terminal cancer.

He was present in some form or another for a quarter-century, if not as a performer, then as a record producer, sometimes as a cultural commentator. In contrast to other pop stars, he did not lapse into silence or absence; he did not, for instance, let putatively savvy managers ration the release of long-awaited albums. Indeed, in a courageous twist, he took several bootleg recordings of his own music, improved them technically, and released them under his own label. Nobody else involved in rock music, very much a business for the short-lived, could produce so much and such richly continuous cultural resonance.

Printed on the cover to his first album, Freak Out (1966), is an extraordinary list of These People Have Contributed Materially in Many Ways to Make Our Music What It Is. Please Do Not Hold It Against Them. With 162 names, the list reflects Zappa’s precious intelligence, polyartistic literacy, intellectual integrity, and various ambitions. Among the names are the writers James Joyce, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bram Stoker, and Theodore Sturgeon; the highbrow composers Arnold Schoenberg [by then dead only fifteen years], Edgard Varèse, Igor Stravinsky, Leo Ornstein, Alois Haba, Charles Ives, Anton Webern, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Roger Huntington Sessions, Vincent Persichetti, Mauricio Kagel; the music historian John Tasker Howard; the blues singers Howling Wolf, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, Little Walter, and Willie Mae Thornton; the record producers Tom Wilson and Phil Spector; the jazz improvisers Cecil Taylor, Roland Kirk, Eric Dolphy, and Charles Mingus; the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein [but not the Beatles], the off-shore disk-jockey Wolfman Jack, the perverse painters Salvador Dalí and Yves Tinguy; the pop singers Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Tiny Tim; the sexologist Eberhard Kronhausen; the earlier rock singers Elvis Presley and Johnny Otis; the Italian-American martyrs Sacco and Vanzetti; the comedian Lenny Bruce; he oversized actors Sonny Tufts and John Wayne, all of whom indicate not only that Zappa knew what he was doing professionally but that he also could credit the sources of his learning. Though Zappa could be an ironist, all of these acknowledgments were apparently serious (even Wayne and Tufts, whom I take to represent strong performers who could stand out from any group). While Zappa’s formal education ended at a local junior college, mine included college and then graduate school. Nonetheless, as a self-conscious intellectual born in the same year as Zappa (1940), I would have identified many of the same names on my short list at the time.

Even at a time when record albums (not to mention performing groups) began to have outrageous names, Zappa should still be credited with some of the most inventive coinages, beginning with the name of his group, but also including Freak Out, Absolutely Free, The Grand Wazoo, One Size Fits All, Joe’s Garbage Acts, Baby Snakes, Jazz from Hell, Freaks & Motherfu*%!!@#, ’Tis the Season To Be Jelly, Piquantique, Electric Aunt Jemima, Our Man in Nirvana, The Yellow Shark, etc. If inventive titling isn’t a measure of literary talent, I don’t know what is.

It seems curious in retrospect that a man who apparently had no loyal friends outside his family, who surrounded himself with paid retainers, who terminated most of his professional relationships with firings and law suits, hould still have an audience. Unlike most culture heroes who create the impression, however artificial, of someone you’d like beside you, Zappa was someone that most of us would sooner watch than know (or want to know). It is common to attribute his continuing success to his appeal to different audiences, some appreciative of his musical inventions, others of his taste for obscenity.

My sense is that his advanced pop has continuously attracted sophisticated teenagers who, even as they move beyond him, retain an affection for his work. Immediately after his death, the Columbia University radio station, WKCR, presented a marathon of his work, its regular disk-jockeys for jazz and avant-garde music speaking knowledgeably about his work. Many announcers at many other university radio stations elsewhere must have done likewise in December 1993. In this respect of influencing bright youth who grow up (e.g., the sort who become public radio disk-jockeys), he reminds me of the writer-philosopher Ayn Rand, whose commercial potential was likewise surprising. Just as her eccentric work has survived her death, so will Zappa’s.

What should not be forgotten is that Zappa lived dangerously, doing professionally what had not been done before and others would not do after him, at a time and in a country where such adventurousness was possible, even as he was continually warning that such possibility should never be taken for granted. For all the continuing admiration of his example, there has been no one like him since.

—Richard Kostelanetz (1997/2008), Frank Zappa (and Ayn Rand), Toward Secession: 156 More Political Essays From a Fairly Orthodox Anarchist-Libertarian. 300-302.

I’ve been putting in some tweaks to the page layout, as you may have noticed, and, while I was at it, the appearance of one too many animated ads for the Fighting Uruk-Hai of Arizona in my sidebar finally inspired me to revise and expand my ad disclaimer. As you can see, if you scan over to the right, it now reads: Views inscribed in the Rad Geek People’s Daily are mine, and may not be those of sponsors. Google ads are served algorithmically, without individual review, so contrariwise, an ad’s appearance does not imply my endorsement of the sponsor.

To be fair, the Adsense management interface does have a provision for screening out future appearances of particular ads, after-the-fact, if you catch one that you don’t want them to appear on your page. On the other hand, I should hope that most of my readership is not about to vote for Gothmog. And if I let the ads appear, then, should anyone happen to click on a McCain ad, that means a little more money is taken away from the McCain 2008 Presidential campaign, and given to me instead. Which seems like a particularly sweet sort of revenge.

What is it that unnerves me so much about the media’s duly-appointed Presumptive Republican Front-Runner, Senator John McCain? Is it the rampaging militarism? The austerely fascist aesthetic of his campaign materials? The newsmedia’s idiotic enthusiasm for any politician who can, in some sense or another, be packaged as a straight talker, without consideration for what the content of the straight talk might be? (So he says, with some conviction, that we ought to bomb the world. Great.)

Well, yes, yes, and yes, but there’s something that runs deeper, too. Just something about him, a certain I-know-not-what about the way he holds himself, and the way he talks, and the way he rallies his troops, that I can’t quite put words to. Where have I seen this before? Oh, wait…

Yeah, that’s it.

Here’s a side note on Old is the New New’s interesting post on the origins of Superman (the origins of the fiction, that is, not Superman’s origin story within the fiction):

I’m also curious about the importance of Jewish identity to this story. Jones and Chabon remind us, if we need reminding, that most of the key figures in the origins of the superhero are Jewish. I sometimes wonder how much all of geek culture is a discourse on Jewishness in America. Not just the superhero thing, which is pretty obvious—nebbishy immigrants transforming into Nordic supermen to fight crooks and Nazis. I mean the whole cultural edifice of nerddom, from Amazing Stories to The Matrix. A man is not a man until he owns land, Duddy. The suspiciously Wagnerian epics of Tolkien and Lucas. Jewish-American Henry Winkler in Italian-American juvie-face as the Fonz. The insult that made a man out of Mac. The whole geek-jock just you wait until our 25th high school reunion baggage that so many skinny (and fat) bespectacled kids carry around in their psyches. Is it all a secularized, de-ethnicized mastication of Philip Roth?

It’s an interesting point, and one which certainly needs to bear in mind the tangled knot of connections between Jewish identity and gender — the baggage carried along from the cultural association of Jewishness with effeminacy and femininity. In any case, though, in the provinces points out in a comment:

J.R.R. Tolkien was neither American (an eminently English academic and Oxford don) nor Jewish—but an Englishmen of partially German (and eminently Christian German) descent. I’m not quite sure what he’s doing in an otherwise interesting commentary on Jews and geek culture in America.

Of course, how Tolkien’s work was received within the American geek culture being discussed is at least as interesting and relevant to the story as Tolkien himself. But, in any case, Rob replies in a comment:

Yes, you are right of course. And I knew writing it that Tolkien is quite the opposite of American or Jewish (he comes by his Wagnerian echoes much more honestly than George Lucas, you might say), so it was probably sloppy of me to toss him in there. He’s just so central to the geek mythos as I see it that any half-baked theory on geek culture has to find some way to accomodate him. I did try to keep that paragraph speculative, since my thinking on these subjects is very tentative.

Thanks for reading, though, and thanks for the comment.

And added the following in an update to the original post:

[Edit: I’ve been chastised, in comments below, for tossing J.R.R. Tolkien into that melting pot of American Jewish geekery, a fate he would have found more horrifying than Mount Doom. Obviously, Tolkien was neither American nor Jewish, and my half-baked theories about geek culture probably need some more baking before they can accomodate him. In the meantime, maybe I should revise that sentence to say the epics of Asimov and Lucas, though Asimov’s epics were really less Wagnerian than… what should I say… Thucidydean? Gibbonian?]

But while Tolkien certainly would have been alarmed to be confused with an American, mb points out in a later comment:

Speaking of Tolkien, in his collected letters there is a fine letter from the late 1930s, when the Hobbit was being translated into German. As I recall it, he was asked to certify for the German publisher that he was Aryan, ie non-Jewish, to which he replied that he had no idea what the term Aryan meant linguistically, and that he’d be quite proud to be Jewish, though he wasn’t. So Tolkien would probably be surprised to be lumped in with the folks discussed above, but not necessarily horrified.

The letter that mb is referring to is a letter to the Potsdam publishing house, Rütten & Loening Verlag, dated 25 July 1938. Tolkien’s English publisher, Allen & Unwin, had agreed for Rütten & Loening to publish a German translation of The Hobbit; soon after, Tolkien received a letter from Rütten & Loening asking if he was arisch (Aryan) descent. Tolkien sent a letter (Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, #29) to Allen & Unwin with two drafts of possible answers to Allen & Unwin enclosed:

… I must say that the enclosed letter from Rütten & Loening is a bit stiff. Do I suffer this impertinence because of the possession of a German name, or do their lunatic laws require a certificate of arisch origin from all persons of all countries?

Personally I should be inclined to refuse to give any Bestätigung (although it happens that I can), and let a German translation go hang. In any case I should object strongly to any such declaration appearing in print. I do not regard the (probable) absence of all Jewish blood as necessarily honourable; and I have many Jewish friends, and should regret giving any colour to the notion that I subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine.

You are primarily concerned, and I cannot jeopardize the chance of a German publication without your approval. So I submit two drafts of possible answers.

In one of the drafts, Tolkien refused to make any answer to the question (that’s the one which was probably sent to Germany); the other one is the only one preserved in Allen & Unwin’s files. Here’s the excerpt published in Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (letter #30):

Dear Sirs,

Thank you for your letter …. I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject — which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to wear my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.

Your enquiry is doubtless made in order to comply with the laws of your own country, but that this should be held to apply to the subjects of another state would be improper, even if it had (as it has not) any bearing whatsoever on the merits of my work or its suitability for publication, of which you appear to have satisfied yourselves without reference to my Abstammung.

I trust you will find this reply satisfactory, and
remain yours faithfully,
J. R. R. Tolkien

Tolkien, of course, would have been far more horrified to see how he has been appropriated, quite against his will, by illiterate fascist revivalists such as the National Vanguard and Prussian Blue; for those folks, here’s another one (to his son Michael; Letters #45), for them to chew on:

I have spent most of my life, since I was your age, studying Germanic matters (in the general sense that includes England and Scandinavia). There is a great deal more force (and truth) than ignorant people imagine in the Germanic ideal. I was much attracted by it as an undergraduate (when Hitler was, I suppose, dabbling in paint, and had not heard of it), in reaction against the Classics. You have to understand the good in things, to detect the real evil. But no one ever calls on me to broadcast, or do a postscript! Yet I suppose I know better than most what is the truth about this Nordic nonsense. Anyway, I have in this War a burning private grudge — which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will). Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.

—J. R. R. Tolkien to his son Michael, 9 June 1941

Further reading:

• GT 2004-10-12: Humor for Hawks
• GT 2004-10-17: Anarcho-dorkery

J.R.R. Tolkien had a lingering suspicion that The Lord of the Rings was fundamentally an un-filmable story; he expressed the opinion that it was peculiarly unsuitable to dramatization and found himself disappointed (and a bit bewildered) at several attempts that were made at radio and film versions of his work. A couple of days ago, L. and I received Peter Jackson’s extended edition DVD of The Return of the King in a package on our doorstep. Tolkien was certainly right to worry—just look at the god-awful mess Ralph Bakshi made in The Lord of the Rings Part One (or better yet, don’t). But Jackson’s recut film (which we watched, of course, the first night that we had it) is just the last of a series of reminders that what is long hoped for can be fulfilled against all odds, that magnificient things really are possible in film, and that there is real beauty in this world, that there are things worth caring and raving about not because of anything that they are good for, but just because of what they are.

(Minor spoiler alert: don’t read the next four paragraphs if you don’t want to know what was added to the Extended Edition yet.)

The Extended Edition of ROTK is, much like the other two extended editions, a notably better version of a film that was already fantastic; whatever Jackson’s (misguided, I think) worries about the constraints on film being shown in a cinema, the DVD format gives him the leisure that he needs to draw out the tale and the characters as they deserve to be.

One of the chief beneficiaries is Denethor, whose increased screen time leaves him still noticeably more brutal and less fiercely-noble-but-despairing than you find him in the books, but who still has the time now to fully work out his pride, his heartrending grief, his despair, and his fall into madness. There is a moment, in both the cinematic release and in the Extended Edition, in which Faramir suggests that his father wishes that he had gone to Rivendell instead, and died in Boromir’s place—and Denethor clenches his jaw as he sips his wine, and quietly says that yes, he does wish that. I thought at the time that the scene was masterfully acted by John Noble, who showed both how brutal Denethor’s honesty was, but also how it cost him to say it at last; but when I saw Return of the King at the cinema, a lot of the audience just couldn’t seem to believe it. But the more chance we have to see Denethor, his despair in the war, and his mourning for Boromir, the more (I think) that moment resonates—to the point of being almost drawing tears. (As for Faramir’s suicidal charge on Osgiliath and Denethor’s descent into madness, there was no “almost” about it.)

The pacing of the Battle of Pelennor Fields is also less harshly abbreviated; the arrival of the Black Ships is still lamely anticlimactic, but Jackson does take the chance to draw out the siege of Minas Tirith in all its intolerable tension, to finally make some real reference to the day without dawn, and to place Gandalf in his confrontation with the Witch-King moments before the arrival of the Rohirrim at an unexpected sunrise. That moment, which had been little more than a transition to the next scene (albeit a fantastic next scene) in the cinematic version is now feels heighted to a genuine eucatastrophe in the depth of the darkest hour (just as Tolkien had intended it). Roger Ebert pointed out (in a review that I fear mostly missed the point) how Jackson has the will to show marvellous things on film and to use the entire screen doing it that has not really been seen since the great silent directors (Fritz Lang, in particular). What the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings have also shown is that he has the will—unlike almost any other filmmaker today—to take what he is doing absolutely seriously, and to slowly build (over the course of a good twelve hours or so of film!) to moments of real intensity, of terrible sadness and exuberant joy, without either smirking at the camera or indulging in Spielbergian sentimentality. Very few people working in film today, and almost certainly no-one who has worked on big-budget Hollywood productions in many a year, come anywhere near to making anything that is either so gloriously cinematic or so earnestly dramatic.

There are flaws of course—I might mention Jackson’s obsession with people falling unnecessarily from very high places, or the scriptwriters apparently complete misunderstanding of Valinor (all the evidence points to their having confused it with Heaven)—but these are rarely anything new and they don’t come anywhere near disrupting four hours of brilliant, emotionally exhausting, and simply beautiful film work. I don’t care what anyone says; the multiple endings and their real sense for the joy, beauty, and sadness of Tolkien’s denouement are one of the best things about this film, and although I think that the extended Fellowship remains clearly Jackson’s best work, Return is as nearly perfect a climax and farewell to the journey as you could hope for.

If I’m indulging in a bit of stridor for Strider and the rest of the gang, forgive me. I don’t, really, know how to write criticism without either making snarky remarks about lame moments in a film or else coming off as a raving fanboy (which I do, sometimes, and which I certainly am, in some cases). But what I want to say is this: the films that Jackson has given us really are some of the great works of film in our time, and if we take film seriously as art—and if we take art, and beauty, seriously as part of the good life—then it should be a delight to see something so sincere and so genuinely good available to us. We live in a media rich age, and all too much of what that means is that a lot of crap is now easily available 24/7. But it does also mean that Peter Jackson was able to make something that is genuinely and unabashedly great and beautiful, and to do so with a remarkable amount of thought and sensitivity to the text that Tolkien wrote and the intent behind it. That’s something remarkable, and if we are going to talk about human life in civilization, the usual bullshit that we dish about and get bunched up over is really only the dark and empty shadow cast over what is really meaningful. If Tolkien has only one thing to say to us about our times and his, it’s this: it is the builders, not the destroyers, who are worth remembering in history, and the reason that it’s sometimes worth the fight and struggle is the hope that it can free us—that we can live our lives together free to make things fit for everlasting memory, to seek, with wisdom and humility, the truth, and to behold, with love, the beauty that is in and the beauty that is beyond this world. Or, as Tolkien put it (in a scene that Jackson has delightfully restored to the Extended Edition):

Frodo sighed and was asleep almost before the words were spoken. Sam struggled with his own weariness, and he took Frodo’s hand; and there he sat silent till deep night fell. Then at last, to keep himself awake, he crawled from the hiding-place and looked out. The land seemed full of creaking and cracking and sly noises, but there was no sound of voice or of foot. Far above the Ephel Dúath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he lookd up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master’s, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo’s side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep and untroubled sleep. (199)

Goodnight.