I kiiiinda disagree with this? Tolkien is important, but as or often more important is the specific melange of D&D which is mostly Howard, Lieber, Vance seasoned with Moorcock and Poul Anderson.
It’s stark for me how unlike most other fantasy LotR actually is now, but filtered through the movies culturally it’s become more D&Dized in it’s cultural legacy.
I would posit that you’re so deep in nerd-level fantasy that you’re associating your experience as such with normie fantasy, and also that I was vague in my original post and probably should have specified Western fantasy as understood by, and interfaced with, the “general public” in the mass-market sense.
To draw an analogy, it would be like saying that the Velvet Underground was more influential than The Beatles, which might even be true if we’re talking about musicians and music producers, while not being true in a broader cultural context.
(Or to put it another way, it’s influential in very surface-level stuff, which leads to a situation where we have the LotR movies, which I feel fundamentally misunderstand the basic themes of the work, and then fukken everything has orcs and hobbits/halflings in it.)
This is fair but also I wouldn’t be who I am if I didn’t bring up the structural influences of modern nerd fantasy that function beneath the Tolkieney aesthetic layer.
(Although out of all his stuff, The Hobbit is definitely the D&D fantasy adventure Tolkien book and is very fun for it)
To contextualize this for me as a person: the last time I read LotR I cried when the elves went into west, and actually wish more fantasy was as perfect at capturing PTSD, grief, and genuine sense of history while at the same time inadvertently being one of the most nuanced depictions of masculinity I have seen by a guy who was sacred of all women except his wife.
aahhhhh that sounds wonderful. I am a bit pissed that I wont be able to read those books for probably a long time. I’m not even done with the hobbit and I’m hankerin for more more more.
It also sucks that there are three terrible films based off this one book, while I would have to (because I say so) read three hobbit sized books to just watch three actually good adventure movies. I’ve been really interested in seeing those films again, haven’t since I was much much younger, well before I cared about craft like I do now.
I can’t agree with this more, part of what I’m saying in that it was influential is the same way (to borrow from another thread) that Witcher 3 was influential on Horizon Zero Dawn, people just took the surface-level stuff without thinking about the “why” or “how” and have churned out a bunch of texts that are arguably worse for the influence.
Great news on hobbit movies:
Both are low budget, kinda cheesy, but compelling.
oh i didn’t know about these! I thought the Ralph Bakshi film was all there was (which seems cool). Guess I don’t know shit. Thought Ralph Bakshi made a Hobbit animated film, but it’s based on Return of the King instead? based on the Fellowship instead.
there’s nothing cheesy about the russian hobbit film, it is the best possible adaptation because gollum looks like old gregg
think you’re thinking of the Rankin/Bass films, animated by Topcraft (who did Nausicaä)
speaking of fantasy and d&d, i was really surprised how much stuff like clark ashton smith’s more high fantasy things published in the early 20th century read exactly like d&d inspired lit written in the 80s. like just little stories about thieves going on fucked up little quests and having various encounters
Three of my friends are starting a nonfiction book club and I joined it out of a desire to read modern writing and get into arguments. I’m looking for recommendations for interesting works. The book I’m reading now is Cynical Theories and I feel a kind of mental pain whenever I read it. It was chosen by my friend as a way of engaging with something he disagrees with. A swing in the opposite direction would be appreciated.
Yeah, you don’t actually grow by engaging with bad faith arguments. At best the interest is sociological. If your friends are interested in learning about reactionary thinking, I might recommend The Shipwrecked Mind, a book that engages with three idiosyncratic right-wingers from a liberal perspective.
Also, Adam Tooze is in the news lately as a trendy thinker so his books come to mind. I haven’t read Crashed yet because I’ve had my lifetime fill of reading about the 2008 recession, but that seems to be his most famous work now. I’ve read Deluge and Wages of Destruction. I would recommend especially the latter as a very engaging book that gave me a new way of thinking about the Third Reich and about foreign currency exchange in general (newly topical given the Ukraine war).
Rereading Book of the New Sun to keep up (ideally) with the Podside Picnic book club. Who knew Gene Wolfe knew so many archaic words? Who knew there were so many archaic words to know? The painting of the moon landing is a good bit
Mentioning Book of the New Sun just summons me. I like the way Wolfe uses archaic words because he has such a transparent, readable style that carries the reader through the more obscure vocabulary.
Honestly it’s really good. It’s like if Nabokov wrote science fiction. I can always appreciate a keen sense of irony
A small book by سمير ساسي (Samir Sassi), a friend of mine recommend this to me. Help me understanding how Islam gov get their power legitimacy, instead of media told us Islam ruled by fear. I can’t speak any Arabic, so I read it by google translate, luckily it works fine. The most interesting things in this book, is the Islam gov so few talking about freedom or liberty but almost mentioned ‘impartial’ in every page, in this logic, Khalifa or Majlis-ash-Shura (a Parliament system in Arabic) represent Islam impartial. They’re a part of Arab community’s moral and consensus, besides history and doctrine, the differences between Shiites and Sunnis are more about the concept of ‘impartial’ and how to build different systems to defend it. You can’t break it by personal rights or free market/trade from outside, and everything is not based on ability or effectiveness.
Munitions of the Mind by Philp M. Taylor is the flattest book I’ve read on propaganda. It aims at looking at ancient history through to 9/11 through the lens of propaganda and chooses too narrow a definition of propaganda and is extremely dismissive of particular cultures and global history.
It feels like a condensed Western military history reader that mainly looks at military strategy not to do with direct combat (right up until it gets to the 20th century and becomes a more straight ahead propaganda book).
Beginning with ancient history is always fraught with tons of assumptions but I kind of knew I wasn’t gonna read the whole book when ancient Egyptian culture is dismissed as a proper case study in a single paragraph since
‘their war propaganda was erratic and sporadic: there was no coherent pattern or organisation’.
Cool, that’s 5,000 years of history this author doesn’t wanna bother with. The final sentence of this paragraph justifies the next chapter, entirely on the wonderful genius ancient Greeks
‘it is only with the flowering of Greek civilisation that we can begin to see the introduction of both these factors [organisation and philosophy with regards to propaganda].’
It’s pretty sickening.
Whenever the subject of the book turns to the west (particularly the mediaeval or modern era), Taylor rubs his hands together and gets stuck in. Although it is critical of, say, Victorian England, it is also just constantly dismissing entire civilisations outright. Turkey? Shut up. China? Never heard of them. Assyria? Just mindless brutality.
The main issue is the definition of propaganda, and the book kind of focuses mainly on military propaganda but in a very broad way because of the need to include ancient history and other periods. The book considers propaganda’s primary function to rationalise war and instil courage in those fighting in a given conflict but I don’t really see how this is always a case of propaganda. For example, the rallying of troops before a battle because of the fairly practical concern that some of them might be scared shitless by the fact that they might die, even if they would otherwise be rationally motivated to defend themselves from an oncoming army, isn’t really propaganda in my understanding. This is not mass coercion using media to distil ideology. There’s no idea being propagated in this situation (say, a Macedonian general giving a speech to soldiers), no consent to really be given or manufactured in a comparable way to a modern democracy or enlightenment revolution. It plays it far too fast and loose. The book then gives up on this military focus in its conclusion where it talks about how propaganda is important in a civic context as well, by the way guys.
I skimmed through most of it since it was a better Western history primer than a book on propaganda as such. The section on the 20th and 21st-century is more on target but then why did we spend so long with other periods of history with this kind of analysis isn’t really comparable? It feels like a gimmick and I’ve run out of things to say, I don’t recommend it.
this is what i say every christmas when i want ham on paper plates
I am freaking obsessed with this book I am reading called Seven Minutes The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon by Norman M. Klein. If I had this on my comps list for the film essay I had to write in the Fall, which was about non-cinematic forms of narrative used intuitively by early filmmakers and deliberately wielded by surrealists before being harnessed by Disney, that essay would have been so so so easier to write. It’s eccentrically written at times but thorough with its analysis, citing lots of film, theatrical acts, ideas from artistic movements, and occasionally says something pretty funny. There is an early section called “Gag Dialectics” just to give you a taste. If you care about animation and can handle film analysis and sociology, this thing’s the shit.