Re: CHAT: JRRT

In a message dated 2004:03:07 04:21:38 AM, cowan@CCIL.ORG writes:

>And Rosta scripsit:
>
>> That excuses the incompleteness of the languages, especially the gross
>> inadequacy of their documentation.
>
>We must also allow for T's personality:  "great but dilatory and
>unmethodical", as C.S. Lewis called him.  He was, in addition, a niggler
>of the kind that makes most of us ordinary perfectionists look like
>nothing.
    My personal pet theory (Down, boy! down...) is that Tolkien was afflicted
by OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder [and/or OCLD - Obsessive ConLang
Disorder]). And AFAIK he did not see himself as being just quite right (a viewpoint
which was also "religious"), but thought others were somehow more so.

>David Peterson scripsit:
>
>> And I still dislike that a Shakespeare class is a requirement at,
>> for example, UC Berkeley (and I'm sure the same is true of many other
>> institutions), but that he's the only *writer* that's a requirement.
>
>I think that Sh's importance in such contexts is not so much a result of
>his quality as of his influence on all post-Sh literature.  No other works
>in English save the King James Version are anywhere near as influential.
>If philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, English literature is
>a series of adaptations of Shakespeare.
    I read somewhere that Shakespeare was his times Quintin Tarantino (sp?).
Elsewhere someone else says that Shakespeare was his times Anthony Burgess...
but I would add Groucho Marx, too.

---  º°`°º ø,¸¸,ø º°`°º ø,¸¸,ø º°`°º ø,¸¸,ø º°`°º  º°`°º ø,¸~->

Hanuman "Mister Sinister" Zhang, Sloth-Style Gungfu Typist
- "the sloth is a chinese poet upsidedown" --- Jack Kerouac {1922-69}
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"We don't read & write poetry because it's cute. We read & write poetry
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"Chance is the inner rhythm of the world, & the soul of poetry." - Miguel de
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    "One thing foreigners, computers, & poets have in common
is that they make unexpected linguistic associations." --- Jasia Reichardt

    "There is no reason for the poet to be limited to words, & in fact the
poet is most poetic when inventing languages. Hence the concept of the poet as
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"La poésie date d' aujour d'hui."   (Poetry dates from today)
"La poésie est en jeu."             (Poetry is in play)
                --- Blaise Cendrars

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Hanuman "Stitch" Zhang, ManglaLanger (mangle + manga + lang)
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     Language[s] change[s]: vowels shift, phonologies crash-&-burn, grammars
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orthographies reform, typographies blip-&-beep, slang flashes, stylistics
warp... linguistic (R)evolutions mark each-&-every quantum leap...

...languages are "naturally evolved wild systems... So language does not
impose order on a chaotic universe, but reflects its own wildness back." - Gary
Snyder

"Some Languages Are Crushed to Powder but Rise Again as New Ones" -
a chapter on pidgins & creoles, John McWhorter,
_The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language_

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