Scholarship for dummies

Currently I'm in Naperville, Ill., home of my aunt and uncle, perusing their bookshelves and playing their pianos (as my uncle is a professional piano teacher, he has several). I am in between trying to finish Gravity's Rainbow and doing some Wikipedia editing (Paul Krugman, in case you were wondering). Honestly I'm not really enjoying it here right now, and I'm looking forward to going back. I decided a long time ago that I just hated any sort of trip with my family, especially long car rides. My reasons are many and varied, but let's just concentrate on one right now.

As my iPod has been dead for several months, and I am too poor/lazy/angry at Steve Jobs to seek a replacement, I was basically forced to sit in the family van and listen to whatever my parents felt like for six hours. Now that isn't necessarily bad, you think. Surely they could play some decent, non-Christmas music. Unfortunately, everyone in my family except me and my father hate listening to music. I know the very notion sounds preposterous. How can one hate music? Let's not even go there for now.

My family likes to listen to books on tape. I hate books on tape. They take forever to listen to, they're often read by horrible actors, and more often than not they are filled with stupid sound effects. Plus, I'm not really much of an auditory learner so I don't get much from them anyway. This time, however, it wasn't a book on tape I was forced to listen to but something called Rings, Swords, and Monsters: Exploring Fantasy Literature, which isn't a book but rather an audio college course. The CDs are divided into lectures and posited as just a professor talking about a subject. This actually seems like an interesting idea if you've ever felt like learning about something but didn't want to do all that pesky reading and research.

My two younger brothers really like science-fiction and fantasy, to the point where they have absolutely no interest in the real world around them. I don't know if they'd be interested in someone talking about the fantasy book canon (which from what I was listening to, is an abysmally small one), though. Maybe they do. They seemed to not complain, and quite honestly the lectures about Tolkien were much more interesting than anything I've ever actually read from the man, but I'll get to that later.

The professor in charge of this lecture series was Michael D.C. Drout, apparently the biggest Tolkien nerd in the world as well as a professor at Wheaton College (the one in Massachusetts, not the one that just recently lifted its ban on dancing). In his first lecture, he argued that preeminent literary scholars and book critics of our day tend to ignore fantasy books or at least ghettoize them as mere "genre fiction," which I agree is unfair. However, Drout fails to come up with much in the way of fantasy books that should be considered mandatory reading, other than The Lord of the Rings, Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books, and maybe the Harry Potter books. That immediately poses a problem: of the 12 individual lectures present, seven are exclusively about Tolkien. If he wants more respect for the fantasy genre, he needs to come up with a better list than that.

I guess it's sort of unavoidable to talk about Tolkien, though. I read the entirety of The Lord of the Rings when I was very young, and I wasn't a very big fan, despite being enamored with that sort of thing at the time. It just seemed like it was chock-full of useless languages and characters. I only saw the first movie in the series, and it was so long and boring I didn't bother seeing any of the others. It just really isn't my thing. I did gain a greater appreciation of Tolkien learning about his commitment to ancient languages and linguistics, and while I'm a bit skeptical about Drout's theory that The Hobbit is even tangentially based on Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt (how?), it still makes Bilbo Baggins more interesting of a character knowing that he isn't just this fantastic character devoid of human emotion or political feeling. Too much fantasy writing is like that.

In fact, I was just trying to think of any so-called fantasy novel that I think is any good at all. The closest examples I can think of are some of the more out-there novels of Salman Rushdie, Italo Calvino, and Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, all of whom I think fall under the tag "magical realism," which simply isn't the same thing. Fantasy is just too fundamentally limiting of an idea, I think. I prefer my wild ideas to have a grounding in real lives and real people. But then I guess that's the exact opposite of what fantasy's normal readership would want.