Interesting article re: obsessiveness/LOTR

[Peg Kerr]

Found this article and have been thinking about it:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n22/turn2322.htm

I certainly don't agree with all of it (ignore the HP dig, for example),
but otherwise, it's quite interesting.  The key quotation that makes me
throw it out to this list is:

"I don't want to defend Tolkien or to attack him, but to describe how
the strange power of his book casts a spell over readers, as children,
as pubescents, as adolescents, as adults, a spell some of them grow out
of and others don't. Except that 'spell' is far too neat and
unembarrassing a metaphor, really, for a process as alarming as the
locking-on of the hungry imagination."

I have been thinking about the obsessive nature of my imagination, as
demonstrated by my HP fixation as well as my (earlier) Tolkien
fixation.  The movie has definitely re-awakened my Tolkien obsession
(I've seen that movie 5x now).  My family finds me utterly perplexing,
nay, dancing at the edge of madness, yet the fact that I get totally
obsessed with stories seems to be a very important part of my makeup,
not to mention a large part of the reason I became a writer.  C.S.
Lewis, I believe, thought and wrote about this phenomenon (getting
obsessed with story, esp. myth).

Anyway, I throw it out for your interest.  I found this article, btw, at
one of my very favorite sites, Arts & Letters Daily at

http://www.aldaily.com/

Bookmark it--lots of thought-provoking stuff can be found there.

Another interesting article about LOTR can be found at Salon:

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2001/06/04/tolkien/print.html

Cheers,

Peg