Faulty Electrics

[poliphilo]

The thing that was wrong with the boiler was the same thing that was wrong with it in January- the electrics had been flooded with some sort of light, oily, slightly sticky, liquid stuff. The guy in January was mystified. The guy yesterday said it was caused by "the coating coming off the wires". He replaced a part- not the part the other guy replaced- and things are working again.

I watched bits of The Fellowship of the Rings yesterday evening. I don't like it any better than I ever did. Tolkien's book is about the industrialisation of the Midlands- with occasional flashbacks to the First World War- and is the product of a peculiarly English, conservative-romantic imagination.  Peter Jackson doesn't understand the first thing about it- and his film is a coarse, empty, dim-witted travesty. 

Comments

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

Tolkien didn't like industrialization, yes, but I don't think that's what Fellowship was "about." Fellowship and all the rest are byproducts of Tolkien's life-long linguistic quest to uncover/recreate an original English language and, by extrapolation, an original English creation narrative.

Another of your commenters was unhappy about the removal of the scouring of the Shire. I understood that this was because the money people were already restive about the long denouement. Many (but not all) of the Shire-scouring themes were touched on elsewhere -- the washing away of the industrialization of Isengard; the entire quest narrative wherein a pair of ordinary people did the extraordinary deed of defeating Sauron while the heroes and wizards could, at best, only provide a covering distration; and the fact that saving what means most to you may exact a terrible price.

I thought that Peter Jackson did an admirable job of transmuting a 50s novel to a 21st century film.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'm being deliberately provocative, of course.

I think Tolkien's intentions are one thing and what he actually wrote quite another. I see Lord of the Rings as a very late product of the Georgian romanticism that produced works like Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows.