[HN Gopher] The Call of the Weird
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The Call of the Weird
Author : benbreen
Score : 39 points
Date : 2024-03-28 05:46 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lrb.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lrb.co.uk)
| treetalker wrote:
| https://archive.is/seaoF
| throwanem wrote:
| As ever with the London Review, one may apprehend the occasional
| glimmering of a possible point among the masses of discursive
| digression, but may never accrue enough evidence to be confident
| of its actual presence.
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| I've been reading the LRB since I was a kid (30 years ago) and
| I'm not sure what happened: Did I grow up or has it taken a
| nosedive? Seems like the reviews have become meandering, and
| increasingly political. I used to learn so much from each
| article and now I can't bring myself to finish a whole paper.
| throwanem wrote:
| What I said isn't a pure criticism. A meander can be quite
| pleasant, but it needs at least to visit somewhere
| interesting, preferably though not necessarily outside its
| author's head.
| jurimasa wrote:
| As ever with HN comments, one may encounter the occasional
| glimmering of a convoluted verbosity from one that thinks
| himself so cultured he may as well be a yogurt.
| marnett wrote:
| Its satire.
| Animats wrote:
| Mandatory XKCD reference.[1]
|
| [1] https://xkcd.com/1235/
| ranprieur wrote:
| This has similar ideas to this review that was posted here a few
| weeks ago:
|
| https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/marshall-sahlins-n...
| devindotcom wrote:
| Lang's Fairy Books are interesting though obviously very "of the
| time," as we say. But in those and his work editing the Folk-Lore
| Journal (of which I have a few volumes) he was taking on or
| nurturing some really serious anthropological literary work.
| Check out up Sidney Hartland's The Forbidden Chamber, which
| establishes Bluebeard tales as a "type" seen across multiple
| cultures and times.
|
| https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Folk-Lore_Journal/Volume_...
|
| Really interesting stuff. His translations with Leaf and Myers
| are nice but not exactly poetry, I wouldn't recommend them to
| anyone as a first read of the Iliad.
| nuc1e0n wrote:
| When times are tough our fantasies become more vivid. They are a
| tool to help us analyse our difficulties from a novel perspective
| and thus to overcome them.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I would have said the same but it strikes me that, in these
| highly stressful times, people are less interested in fantasy
| and art.
|
| That said, I agree about their value. _The Lord of the Rings_ ,
| written in a similar time, with fascism on the march behind a
| tide of propaganda and the resulting chaos and despair, is to
| me now uncovered as a gift from Tolkien for the future crisis.
| It is the perfect book, the perfect myth, for today. (Not the
| movies, the book.)
| bloomingeek wrote:
| You couldn't have said it better. Today it's, "think like I
| do or screw you!" Seeking middle ground or simply moving on
| is a lost art.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| How does that relate to the GP?
| sameoldtune wrote:
| It's funny you say that considering LOTR is one of the most
| black/white good/bad stories I can think of.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| That isn't in the books, the way I read them (I don't
| recall the movies):
|
| Sauron is obviously pretty clear (but I think even Sauron
| is a fallen angel of sorts?), but the rest of the story
| is about how everyone can be corrupted by power and
| defeated by despair. Even Gandalf, another 'angel' of
| sorts, could be corrupted. Sauruman, another being like
| Gandalf and the latter's superior, was corrupted.
|
| In the end, the difference between the heroes and
| villians is whether they are wise enough to avoid
| exposing themselves to the corruption of power, and some
| cross that line. Finally, the ring is destroyed by
| someone who was thoroughly corrupted but, kept away from
| power and treated with love and mercy, was able to heal
| somewhat for a time.
| nuc1e0n wrote:
| Delusions as described in the post are a form of fantasy. I'm
| not talking about the much more narrow sense of stories
| involving orcs and elves.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| That's very interesting: Delusions help us feel safe in the
| face of something terrifying, but unless the delusion maps
| well to reality, wouldn't they also tend to lead us astray?
|
| Arguably, the fantasy (and other art) I was talking about
| is more effective: By being a fiction in a very different
| place, it gives us distance. By being intentional, we can
| avoid misleading ourselves.
|
| For some reason, in the current crisis, people have
| abandoned art as a way to explore and express their
| problems. Probably that's because, IMHO, the people trying
| to create the trauma and chaos have told them so - 'art is
| fanciful entertainment for the wealthy' you'll hear, even
| on HN - and bizarrely, after at least tens of millennia of
| art, they abandon it like lemmings.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Or perhaps when times are tough, people are forced to use
| fantasies as a way to handle discontent which would be socially
| or politically dangerous to show too overtly.
| nuc1e0n wrote:
| Perhaps. If people's mindsets are constrained in one way
| their frustrations will be borne out in another. The more
| constraints, the more unusual the alternative will be.
| Somewhat like steam escaping from a pressure vessel.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| JRR Tolkien knew Lang's work very well and Tolkien's essay _On
| Fairy-stories_ was originally presented, in an earlier version,
| as the (annual?) Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of Saint
| Andrews in 1939.
|
| The essay is not only an incredible work itself, but has quite a
| bit to say about Lang, and remember Tolkien was a leading scholar
| as a day job. Tolkien writes, regarding the study of myth,
| "Philology has been dethroned from the high place it once had in
| this court of inquiry." My edition's editors, Verlyn Flieger and
| Douglas Anderson, flesh out that story:
|
| _" And Andrew Lang, as Tolkien well knew, was the man who pushed
| philology off its throne. Lang found and ruthlessly exposed the
| logical fallacies in using philological evidence to support the
| solar theory, turning for his own answers to another new
| discipline, anthropology. Lang and his supporters (like Muller he
| was not alone in the fight) proposed that rather than the
| degraded remnants of natural forces the problematic elements in
| the tales were the survivals of animal-worship and animistic
| magic. Lang's Darwinian assumption that fairy-stories were
| leftovers from the childhood of human development led to the
| corollary assumption that the tales were therefore leftover fare
| for human children, who would in the course of time, like the
| human race in general, mature into adulthood and put away
| childish things."_
|
| Another tidbit: Lang's _Green Fairy Book_ was published the year
| Tolkien was born and it contains the story, "The Enchanted
| Ring". In it, the young protagonist is given a ring that makes
| them invisible but also very powerful, if they never make bad use
| of it ...
|
| But such treasures of knowledge can lead us to trick ourselves:
| Tolkien probably didn't read the book that year (how precocious
| was the young JRR?) and Richard Wagner wrote _Der Ring des
| Nibelungen_ - featuring a similar corrupting magic ring - before
| the _Green Fairy Book_ came out. Tolkien despised Wagner, and
| likely all got their myths from somewhere prior.
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