7.27.2013

REPOST: Something Wicked This Way Comers

The story goes Tolkien read Macbeth as a boy, (as an English boy, at the turn of the century, they all did I would guess), and he was taken with it: his imagination sparked by the Weyard Sisters' prediction that until Birnam Wood comes up high Dunsinane Hill, Macbeth is safe.  Tolkien was sorely disappointed at it's fruition: ten thousand camouflaged men moving through the forest and up the hill to the castle appeared, to Macbeth's servants, as a moving forest.  It's a killer visual, a showman's move; I'm not sure Brian DePalma meant consciously to use it in Scarface, but there they are, on Tony Montana's security feeds, the boys come to finally do in a thug climbed too high, (Macbeth could have been subtitled, The World Is Yours).  The greatest swipe version is Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, a perfect film climax, (and I mean one of possibly five perfect film climaxes I have ever seen); only the man who made Rashomon could have swayed the forest this way, (and Mifune's Macbeth, the best).  It is, again, so beautiful a set-up, one can get sick fantasizing about Shakespeare as a filmmaker.  
So why would Tolkien carry a lifelong bitterness over Macbeth?  Because he wanted the trees to walk on the castle, to come to life.  Weren't those witches after all?  Even a floundering appearance by Hecate the dark goddess!  There were ghosts, (and not the first time!), in the play.  So why not pay off, and bring a great and angry forest alive, at the witching hour, to revenge a villain for his crimes?  
-- Of course Tolkien did his rewrite some forty years later, when Treebeard and the Ents march on Orthanc to capture and punish Saruman.  Saruman gets away where Macbeth does not, and suffers his punishment later.  This is not the only part of Macbeth Tolkien weaves into The Lord of the Rings; Galadriel's mirror predicts the future much like those Weyard Sisters, it is tricksy, it gives partial story: Macbeth is told no man of woman born can slay him, MacDuff was untimely ripped from his mother's womb; whereas in the case of the Lord of of Nazgul, who is himself considered unkillable by man, a woman and a hobbit cashier him.
-- Tolkien in letters seems snobbish about William Shakespeare.  His own creative work betrays the truth.  Tolkien was not just a professor of ancient languages, but considered at the time an elite linguist; he knew better than we what Shakespeare was, and maybe it depressed him; it clearly pissed him off.  I read somewhere, a theory by a younger professor who knew Tolkien, that Tolkien's bitterness over Shakespeare came out of that childhood disappointment of Birnam Wood not being Ents; in his honest moments Tolkien would speak of the stories and histories, those that later in life would become his great fantasy books, that were born in trenches, France 1914, World War I,  and made there for the purpose of righting a wrong: meant as a mythology for his own country, a true British mythology, rather than the emigrated French stories of King Arthur.  He never meant these stories to be The Lord of the Rings.  He meant only to fulfill his own emptiness.  And to get through some bad nights. 
-- So then. Shakespeare. Tolkien considered Shakespeare running off to London, writing plays, putting asses in seats, a waste of such talent.  Tolkien wished William Shakespeare to have stayed in the shire of Stratford.  Had Shakespeare even known what a novel was, (before likely coming across Don Quixote, already into his own career by then), and had he attempted just such a thing as staying in the country among the shirefolk,, writing, building, deepening a thousand page epic; had Shakespeare created one great universe, a Middle Earth peopled with Hamlets, Falstaffs, Rosalinds, Iagos, and Macbeths; had A Midsummer Nights Dream existed in the same world as Macbeth the way the Shire exists alongside Mordor, what kind of literature would we have now?  Tolkien took it upon himself to do what he felt Shakespeare should have.  But, alas, Tolkien was not Shakespeare.  Still, Lord of the Rings: not bad.


(originally posted july 2011)

7.05.2013

WORK: Lines With No Home

1. the double-wide trailer of my heart
2. an emulsifier of spirit
3. free spirited chicks trading with them some proper man

LIST: Dog Day Pod Set

Been awhile.  Trying to finish some writing.  Here's the playlist to finish it:
Tossin and Turnin -- Bobby Lewis
Wildwood Flower -- The Carter Family
Doin the Best I Can -- Elvis
Why Baby Why -- George Jones
Cocaine Blues -- Johnny Cash
Partyman -- Prince
Release Me -- Ray Price
Be My Baby -- The Ronettes
Carmelita -- Warren Zevon
When the Levee Breaks -- Led Zepelin
Keep a Knockin -- Little Richard
Sympathy for the Devil -- Stones

ON: The Book I Wrote 2.0 Wrasslin Book


(A version of this was posted in May of 2011)