Glaring at the world, and saying ''Arf!''

 
A Long Expected Party.

I must write this down before everything that happened fades from memory; that will happen soon, I think. I’m writing this down for my own sake, since no one would believe me. I don’t want to forget.

Perhaps I had seen one too many adaptations over during the holiday season. By the end of the season I was ready to tell anyone that even the very best adaptation of a very good novel could project only a shadow of the original work; not only ready, but I did, especially at an otherwise quiet New Year’s Eve party. I don’t think I had much to drink; a couple of glasses of champagne . . .Then, a hazy fog.

The haze cleared slowly. I seemed to be in a pub, rather a good one. The room was dark but not murky; the sun shore merrily through mullioned windows. Red and yellow nasturtiums crept onto the window sills. Beyond the windows, a greensward tipped down to a wide green valley. Beyond the valley mountains rose, grey and blue and white. Inside, the tables and chairs were dark oak; the walls, roughly plastered.

“Have a drop of the ale, boy,” said a friendly voice behind me. I did have a mug of ale before me, wonderful ale too, dark in look and flavor, with foam so thick it seemed more like frosting. I shook my head, and behind me men laughed.

I turned in my chair. The room was long and wide. The bar was behind me, a long slab of walnut that seemed to have been hewn from a single tree. The floor was stone. A dozen or so men sat there, all with mugs to hand. Some smoked pipes. They beamed at me; the atmosphere was mischievous. “The lad’s flummoxed,” said one beefy man in shabby tweeds.

“Of course he is, Jack,” said another, said another, a strangely dressed man with long hair falling from an improbably large head. He had a neat little beard and moustache. “Look around you. Figure it out,” he said to me.

It took a while; as I said, I seemed to be in a state of hazed perception. The room and the people in it became clearer as I sipped at the ale; I recognized some of the people, if people they were. Off in a corner an ugly little man was talking animatedly with a much larger, heavier woman; a man with a long, pale face and trim moustaches argued with a darker, bearded man, elegantly dressed.

“I know I am not dead,” I ventured, not at all sure. “Were I dead, I think I’d be in another place. Not here.”

“Go on.”

“It looks like a party. The beginning of a party; a party waiting to happen. People sit around like this then.”

“Good! We wanted a living man for his birthday, a privileged guest, if you will. You are the rabbit from the hat.”

“A birthday party? Whose?”

“Think some more, boy. You’ll get it.”

The big woman had heaved herself out of her chair. She was graceful for her size, and her eyes were very sharp.

“It was your rant about adaptations, you know,” she told me. “Some of us have had that happen, mostly after we were long gone, and had not a chance of influencing what happened to our creations. I’ve had a few good ones, more bad; man over there has had his stories completely changed. A few others have had some studio’s name attached to their work. Milne used to get livid about that.”

The beefy man snorted. “And those leeches want to have someone write more books set in ‘my’ world. What nonsense. Why can’t they get someone to write something new? That Rowling woman’s shown it can be done.”

I said, timidly (for he had been a man noted for ferocious argumentation), “I think publishers want sure things.”

His glare was itself a curse, but he said, “I suppose. I feel sorry for readers. They make a movie, and it is less than half the book. And many don’t go on to the book. Or they go on to the book, and are disappointed because it’s not just like the movie. It’s different for you,” he said, jabbing his pipe at the man with long hair. “You wrote plays. You have to expect adaptation.”

The other smiled. “Did I? Some doubt it. Though some productions make me wish Oxford had written ‘em, or even Kit.” He looked at me. “We fight about that a lot. Is it worse to be badly adapted, or badly produced? How to compare a sow’s ear with an ass’s? Pox ‘em all.”

I couldn’t wait any longer. “Is he here?”

The big woman said, “He may yet come. Bide a while.”

So for what seemed an endless day I sat listening, absorbing as best I could stories and lore that would have made me the toast of an M.L.A. convention, until I had learned more than Charlie Mears had ever remembered from his past lives. At last the evening seemed to be drawing in; the air was filled with long blue shadows that stretched from the far mountains. The sky took on the look of velvet between black and blue. The occupants of the room drifted over to the windows, pretending not to look.

No one spoke, or pointed. But they all looked at the bright light hung above the mountains, so bright that its beam drove shadows before it. A wind came, scented with green grass and the salt sea, and bearing with it the screaming of gulls.

The light itself was now very bright, a blending of gold and silver; in a moment, I was able to pierce the glare to see the ship that sailed upon the wind. Its timbers were white, its oars of beaten gold, and the dust of diamonds glittered in the sails. At the helm stood a tall man, his long dark hair streaming behind him. I could not see his face; the light shone from his brow. There was singing in the air, more musical than any human voice.

The ship hove to outside, next to the pub. A gangplank came down, and a small man moved awkwardly down it. Behind him others crowded, fair and terrible, the children of his mind.

Of the feast that followed, I remember bread white as lilies, sweet as honey; a blackberry tart that was summer remembered; drink that seemed water, but carried a scent of every forest I have walked in; more, fading, as I knew it would. And now … my memory fades, as those who summoned me knew it would. Were it not for writing this down, maybe I would at last lose even that; and maybe in a year, I will think that this is not a written memory, but a trifling fantasy of my own, a wish, a dream. But now, for a moment, I know that I knew.

Today is J.R.R. Tolkien's 111 birthday: he is eleventy one today. From a reader for 37 years, thank you.

posted by Jack at 3:05 AM

 
Pretty Sharp Spear

My hometown paper, The Chicago Tribune, continues its odd coverage of troop deployments and reserve activations. This story is pretty short on details, which the NYT does provide here; the Baltimore Sun provides still more, here(watch out. It's an agressive sort of link). The Third Infantry, the 101st Air Assault, and the 1st Cav? That's a lot. And it's news. And I wouldn't know if I didn't have the Internet. I don't get it, Trib.
posted by Jack at 12:29 PM

 
Doctors' Hours

In my role as family archivist, I was organizing small materials into scrapbooks last night. I found my grandfather's business card (not the bearded gent, below, but his son). Like his father, Grandad was a physician. The card lists his office hours: 11:00 to noon, 2:00 to 4:00, and (on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays) 7:00 to 8:00 PM. 18 hours a week. Whew. Of course, this was the heyday of the house call, and he practiced out of his bag in ways unheard of today. He was also Chief of Staff of the local hospital, President of the county medical society, and Superintendent of the county TB Sanitarium, all of which took a certain amount of time. He did a fair amount of surgery, which wouldn't show in the office hours, and quite a few of his patients were farmers; he probably spent a lot of time in his car. He also had time for longish fishing vacations in summer, and duck hunting in the fall. Until the house (below) was sold, two of his trophies hung over the dining room doors: an immense muskie over one, a slightly smaller bass over the other. My impression is that, although he may have been busy, things were less intense for him than they are today.

Speaking of housecalls, newspaper clippings tell about his father's (yes, the bearded guy) troubles with housecalls. In 1903, his barn burned down, burning a carriage and killing a horse. In 1907, his car malfunctioned. When he got out to crank it up, the crank cranked back, breaking his wrist.

Tidbits like this are snapshots of vanished times.
posted by Jack at 7:18 AM

 
As mentioned over on the left, I am reading Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men, and it is fascinating. She looks at the interactions of men who helped create industrialization in England, however you may feel about that. There are all sorts of tidbits; she mentions a German scientist, exploring the properties of formic acid, who "distilled" 24 ounces of ants to get enough of the stuff to work with. That is a lot of ants. What would PETA think? There is Thomas Day, an improbably gentle man of large fortune who took Rousseau far too seriously, and his quest for a wife. Josiah Wedgwood turns out to be one of nature's optimists, cheerfully domestic, a relentless tinkerer. The chemist Joseph Priestley had remarkably prescient ideas about the role of electromagnetic repulsion. And I am only a quarter of the way through it.
posted by Jack at 12:37 PM

 
A Happy 137th Birthday to Rudyard Kipling!
posted by Jack at 6:57 AM