Eruvadhril

...you have to wonder, hey, if this civilization is so evil and only thinks about war and torture and kicking puppies, then where they get their food from? who builds their cities, or if they're (racist) savage nomads, their tools and who trains their animals? who raises their children and how? who keeps cultural practices of "being evil" alive? why hasn't their culture of backstabbing and rule of the strongest collapsed a thousand times already?

Basically, if you have beings that have a physical, natural existence, they need to eat, they need to have shelter, and to raise the next generation. And yes, even raising them communally or in hatcheries or whatever counts. You cannot have a whole civilization dedicated to being evil or even to war; for every soldier, there is someone carrying his supplies and making his weapons and a family at home. If we're talking about spiritual beings of pure evil, literal demons that don't need to eat or sleep or reproduce, that's another thing. But if we are talking about beings that live in the world, that are part of the physical world no matter whatever fantasy features or traits they have, that have societies and culture, then you have to wonder; where the food comes from, who raises the children, who makes the weapons, who trains the warriors yes but who trains the farmers, the toolmakers, who teaches the children to speak, who tells the stories.

Pronouns

An accent

i just had a professor read the first chapter of something and go on and on about how i must relate a lot to a character, because her disability resembles mine (i had not been injured at the time of writing it), and i get this dreadful feeling like people are going to make assumptions like that again and again.

I kind of hate it!

But it's very difficult to be like, "The author is dead! Do not pay attention to the author! Do not interpret the text into the author's life! But do follow the author on tumblr!"

Like, there is something fundamentally out of whack with the entire affair, which is kind of what my new book HOLLYWOOD, ENDING is about.

For a hot minute, a lot of people had opinions about me who did not actually know me, which was extremely disorienting and much less pleasant than I'd assumed famed would be. So I spent the last eight years writing about that.

Like it's bad when a "tattoo is undulating" (as opposed to... "drawn in a wave like pattern on the skin"?), or when hair is "wet wheat from a late Summer field" (as opposed to "sort of brownish light yellow that dries lighter, but is not actual wheat stalks growing on someone's head but kind of reminiscent of the color and texture"?), or when when ice cream tastes like midnight at the fair" (as opposed to "ice cream flavour bringing back memories of undefined ice cream flavours that are individually popular but always tied to a memory of late evening at the fair ground and probably smelling vaguely like popcorn and sugar"?).

"One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead."

So, for example, Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory of Christian salvation. It's sort of a novel? There are characters who do stuff? but also they are very one-dimensional. The main character is a guy named Christian--yes, really!--who is journeying from his hometown ("the city of destruction") to the Celestial City (heaven). There is not much subtlety to it. It is pretty much what it is. There is no slippage, no playing around with the theme, no places where the symbolism is ambiguous. John Bunyan, the author, is hitting you over the head every step of the way with the Meaning That You Are Supposed To Be Getting From The Story.

Not all allegories are that crude or simplistic; the Narnia books are also allegory for Christianity. They have a lot more subtlety to them and a lot more nuance, and there's a lot of stuff in there that isn't allegorical, but on the crucial matters there is still a 1:1 correspondence. Aslan is Jesus. He's not like Jesus, he's not a character that has some similarities to Jesus or takes themes from the stories of Jesus, he is Jesus.

Tolkien is not doing allegory. Tolkien is taking the material of his life--his faith, his experiences in WWI, his linguistic and historical knowledge, his favorite books--and using them as the building blocks of his story. The themes and imagery and symbols draw heavily from all of that, the characters and settings draw heavily from all of that, but they are too complex to be allegorical. There's a lot of symbolism! It's not allegory.

So, for example, let's take the Dead Marshes referenced above. Does the experience of walking through this muddy wasteland with corpses all around that are rotting but still look like people draw from Tolkien's WWI battlefield experience of dead bodies in the trenches? Of course it does! but there are also a lot of differences. These dead are not from the current war, they are from a previous one--they are a reminder of old conflicts, of the ways the systems and powers of the current war have not come out of nowhere, there is history here. There is meaning that is not drawn from the Somme. And they are also drawing from literary references Tolkien was familiar with--primarily William Morris. Modern readers don't get the references because we have generally not read The House of the Wolflings, but that doesn't mean that the references aren't there.