The good ship MEBC I has been having a torrid time of it so far in the Town Bumps. There’s a chart illustrating our descent to the top of the 2nd Division on the Rob Roy boat-club site. The same site also includes a nice explanation of how Bumps rowing works, if my previous explanation didn’t make sense. We just have to make sure that we row over at the top of the division to get to row again as the sandwich boat.
To continue last time’s theme, another LotR link (Julian Dibbel, writing in The Village Voice). It’s interesting, particularly the claim that the the book’s influence on the world’s geeks has surely been important, because those same geeks built many aspects of the the modern wired world:
But maybe you could indulge me and imagine, just for a moment, that the fact that we live in a world increasingly made by geeks actually makes their collective imagination worth understanding. Think about computers, their evolution shaped by a hacker culture that insisted some of the earliest dot-matrix printers be programmed to produce the elvish Fëanorian script. Think about the Internet, whose founding architects included the D&D fanatic who created the Adventure, the very first, very Tolkienized online role-playing game.
On the other hand, I’d take issue with this:
Tolkien’s theory of evil? Well, orcs are, our heroes aren’t, and that about sums it up.
Tolkien is obsessed with evil, and human corruption. Sauron is the archetypal fallen angel (more accurately, the henchman of a fallen angel, perhaps), and the nasty Ringwraiths are all human kings of yester-year that Sauron corrupted. Similarly, the character of Boromir, Frodo's final crisis at Mt. Doom, and the whole story of Gollum, are all about evil, redemption, and human frailties.
On the other hand, I'd certainly agree that the book is not strong on presenting psychological complexity, which is Dibbel's next point. So, it’s not the greatest book of the 20th century, but it ain’t bad either.
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