Feels like it was a workday

[altivo]

Morning meeting, afternoon shopping and chores, tired as if I'd been at work all day.

Indulgence: bought myself a new e-book reader, the Sharper Image Literati. Off EBay, half price for new unopened box. My old eBookwise has served faithfully for years, but it doesn't read the new standard formats and is obviously doomed to oblivion. I don't want to be bound to Amazon and their proprietary formats. This one will do, it's a version of Kobo I believe, and reads epub, html, pdf. Has wifi and a backlit screen. I don't like e-paper. Anyway, for the price it was worth a try.

Cool and gloomy weather, threatening to rain all day but never did. Gary cut a large part of the grass that was getting rank from rain and neglect.

He's watching all of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, one disc per night. Not sure quite why, but I'm sitting through them and being reminded of how badly I think Jackson treated Tolkien. He made a fine dramatic epic but it's not the story I have read again and again. It's another tale entirely.

Comments

[hrrunka]

Finally got my lawn mown for the first time this year. Should really have mown it a second time almost immediately, as the wet weather looks like returning soon, but once was exhausting enough...

[altivo]

I really hate the sound (noise) of lawn mowers. When we first moved out here from the city, it was blessedly quiet in the summer, or so it seemed. Perhaps that was just by contrast to the constant din of the city, though, because now I feel just as oppressed by unnecessary noise as I did in Chicago in 1997. Motorcycles, trucks, lawn mowers, teenagers with hyperactive megasound systems, and even neighbors who bray at each other so loudly that they drown out the donkeys across the road.

When the lawn mower noise starts within an hour after sunrise and continues all day without a break from three or four directions, I am just about ready for a strait jacket.

[hrrunka]

Usually it takes about half an hour for me to mow my lawn, and there are maybe a dozen lawns I can hear a busy lawn mower in, and none of them are any much bigger than mine, so it's not generally too bad here.

[lhexa]

He made a fine dramatic epic but it's not the story I have read again and again. It's another tale entirely.

*coughs* Which is the point. If it's a well-crafted epic, then it can be told over and over again in many different forms. As someone who has read the epic three times, every single time being caught totally off-guard by the Balrog scene (I kept forgetting it happened), I think that the movie captured the emotion of that moment well. Similarly: it may have cut out loads of crucial detail (as did Tolkien himself in the final stages of writing, nota bene), but it consistently expressed the emotion of critical scenes with superb skill. My favorite such moment is the actual destruction of the Ring: Gollum dies, looking wistful rather than agonized, and the Ring just sits there. It's so badass that the hottest flames in existence don't seem to affect it at all until minutes have passed, when it melts in an instant.

Also, some scholarly details you're missing. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is a direct attack against Wagner's Ring Cycle. Wagner, one of the two foundational authors of modern Germany (the other being Goethe), claimed that the cycle of great heroes struggling against the gods repeated endlessly throughout history, with the heroes always failing. Tolkien replied: Fuck you Germany, if enough heroes band together, and they show sufficient strength and virtue, they can succeed in breaking the cycle. Nietzsche believed the same. (He didn't actually believe in the Eternal Recurrence: instead, what he kept saying, over and over again, was that in order to be a great hero, you must face the idea of the endless cycle and not be destroyed or defeated by it. Or turned into a monster by your struggle.) I'm with Tolkien and Nietzsche, on that issue.