Month: March 2014

The political views of an author don’t matter very much. You pick up a book to be entertained, and the plain fact is that the ability to write something worth reading is pretty evenly distributed across the political spectrum. Nonetheless we like to think that authors we admire hold roughly the same views that we do. Sadly for the many fans of J.R.R.Tolkien his views are not ones that many people currently hold. But before we get into that lets have a look at the character of Tolkien as it emerges from these letters.

The Dilbert Future is Scott Adams predictions of what the future holds, made at the dawn of the Internet era.  It is a dystopian prediction.  Advances in technology simply give rise to new opportunities for stupidity.  Voice operated computers allow evil coworkers to delete your files over your shoulder.   New software to run air traffic control runs on the same system as the payroll.  Don’t fly on payday!  The security scanner at the front door is so efficient it detects not only what computer Dilbert has in his bag, but that the hard disc is in need of defragmenting and holds him back for an hour while it sorts it out.

With some things you just need to read the label.  As its name suggests, this is a book about monarchs presented in the form of heroic rhyming couplets.  Specifically it is about the kings of England.  I don’t make a habit of reviewing books when I haven’t completely read them, but I have to confess I have only managed about a third of this one.  Poetry of any kind is a bit of a minority interest nowadays.  I have to say that my poetry consumption is not at all high, and what I do read is primarily classics rather than new writers.  Rhyming couplets are probably the least favoured form of verse.  So it was courageous of Linda to tackle such an ambitious project.

The launch of one of my videos on YouTube is always accompanied by a flurry of PR activity.  Well actually, I just tweet it a couple of times in the hope that somebody somewhere will notice.   From time to time I even get some responses.  My most recent one on the death of Alaric elicited a gem of a response from @sciamannata who drew my attention to a poem on the subject by the German romantic poet August Graf von Platen.  I don’t know anything about this guy apart from his dates – early nineteenth century.  But reading the poem you can get a big sense of what Alaric meant to pre-unification Germans.

Alaric died suddenly after a short fever.  He was somewhere around forty years old. For all his urbane sophistication and his desire to become a Roman, he was given a truly barbarian funeral.  The course of the river Busento was diverted and his body buried under its bed.  Then the river was restored to its normal course and the captives who had worked on it were killed.  The location of his body has remained a secret ever since.  The secret of what exactly he was doing in southern Italy has remained just as obscure.  Gibbon assumes that his interest in Sicily was as a stepping stone to Africa.  Africa fed Rome, so if he wanted to control one he had to control the other.   Maybe this marks his ambition to become in effect the ruler of the Roman world.  Or maybe his reasoning was that Africa represented a defendable home for his people with the resources that they needed.

I get a steady stream of offers of books to review, most of which I turn down.  I don’t have enough time to read the books I already have on my list without adding more to them.  But this one looked interesting.  It is Sibyls by Jorge Guillermo of whom I haven’t heard before.   I imagine that the reason it was offered to me was that I have done some blogs that are sympathetic to paganism.  They had quite rightly guessed that I would be interested in the subject matter. I should point out though, that I am not actually a pagan.  

I woke up this morning to the news that Tony Benn had died. I am in my mid-Fifties now and I suspect I will never again have the feeling of witnessing history I had one day in 1981 when I listened to the result of the deputy leadership election between Benn and Denis Healey. My memory is that I heard it live outside on portable radio while working on a building site. I think my memory must be playing tricks because I can’t imagine that in those days the Labour Party conference would have been broadcast live even on radio. But whatever, I certainly heard it and like a lot of other people didn’t immediately realise that his impressive share of the vote – he got over 49% – still meant that he hadn’t won. The mathematically obvious fact that to win a two horse race requires over 50% didn’t register until after the second figure was read out.