Sméagol-ing.

From "The Best Relationship Advice We’ve Heard So Far This Year/These expert tips on how to argue, communicate and grow closer with the people you love could make for stronger bonds" (NYT):

James Cordova, a professor of psychology at Clark University, has noticed an unhelpful relationship habit among his clients that he has termed “Sméagol-ing,” based on a character in the film “The Lord of the Rings” who changes “from aggressive Gollum into sniveling Sméagol.”

During a conflict, one person will air a grievance, Dr. Cordova said, “and the other person will respond with: ‘I know, I’m the worst. I’m a terrible partner. I don’t even know why you’re with me.’” Rather than dealing with the problem, Dr. Cordova said, “they just fold, like Sméagol.”...

If you find yourself transforming into Sméagol, practice resisting the urge to cower, take the focus off yourself and address your partner’s concern directly, Dr. Cordova said.

"Zukovskis’s faith, known as Dievturiba, was pieced together from ancient rituals, songs and symbols and is now seeking official recognition from [Latvia]."

"Inside the shrine, Zukovskis, 61, begins with a ritual of gratitude. 'We can feel safe because of support from Britain, the United States,' he says, before listing several other nations. 'Regardless of what Mordor [Russia] does, Ukraine is safeguarded. We’re on their side, and they’re on ours.'... The rebirth of the Baltic countries’ pre-Christian faiths has been intimately bound up with geopolitics ever since they were reconstructed by Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians under Russian rule before the First World War. After the region was recaptured by the USSR in 1944, neopaganism was banned.... [This] faith is the product of decades of efforts to reconstruct the nature-rooted spirituality that prevailed in the Baltic before the Teutonic knights swept in and imposed Christianity at swordpoint. 'The main gods that we respect are basically connected to what is earth, what is fire; the most basic things for living that we cherish,' says Laimutis Vasilevicius, 68, a Romuva priest in Panevezys. So, for example, the shiver you might feel when something significant happens is identified as the work of Perkunas, the thunder deity."

From "The rituals of Paganism are making a comeback deep in the Baltic states/Today the old religions — or a modern approximation — are being revived after being suppressed by missionaries and then the USSR" (London Times).

I was interested in that stray "Mordor [Russia]." Googling, I found this BBC article from January 2016:

Google has fixed a bug in an online tool after it began translating "Russian Federation" to "Mordor". Mordor is the name of a fictional region nicknamed "Land of Shadow" in JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings books. In addition, "Russians" was translated to "occupiers" and the surname of Sergey Lavrov, the country's Foreign Minister, to "sad little horse". The errors had been introduced to Google Translate's Ukrainian to Russian service automatically, Google said.

Google claimed that these translations were not introduced by human manipulation but somehow happened through its automatic process of looking for "patterns in hundreds of millions of documents"! Ha ha. Alternatively, maybe Perkunas did it.

A doctor in Turkey, on trial for the crime of insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan by comparing him to Gollum in "Lord of the Rings"...

... mounts a defense based on the argument that Gollum is, if you understand the whole story, not a bad guy but good. The Turkish court has summoned literary experts to help with the analysis. If you don't know how "Lord of the Rings" ends, I must alert you to a huge spoiler in the 5th paragraph at the link.

The group [of experts] will comprise two academics, two behavioral scientists or psychologists and an expert on cinema and television productions...  Speaking to DHA Tuesday, [Bilgin Çiftçi’s lawyer Hicran] Danışman said the trial has turned into “a case of saving the pride of Gollum.”...

The president and his government “don’t have a sense of humor,” cartoonist Selcuk Erdem, whose magazine has been prosecuted for insulting Erdogan, told the BBC. “They don’t want — or like — freedom of speech or criticism.”

Here's what Çiftçi shared on Facebook that led to this prosecution:

Bu fotoğrafları paylaştığı için memuriyetten atılan Dr. Bilgin Çiftçi yalnız değildir! İlle bir işlem yapmak istiyorsanı...
Posted by Ateist Forum on Thursday, October 15, 2015

I'm torn. I'd like to help Çiftçi by saying, aw, that's cute. That's making Erdogan's slightly funny looks seem rather adorable. But I also want to say the repression of speech quite properly bites Erdogan in the ass, because it's propagating the very speech that annoys him.

Why does Marquette University offer a course on J.R.R. Tolkien?

Because he's popular, of course, but also because they have the manuscripts:

Marquette is one of the main repositories of Tolkien's drafts, drawings and other writings _ more than 11,000 pages. It has the manuscripts for "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Hobbit," as well as his lesser-known "Farmer Giles of Ham" and his children's book "Mr. Bliss."...

... Marquette students [study] Tolkien's revisions, notes, detailed calendars, maps and watercolors on site at the school's archive....

"One of the things we wanted to impress upon the students was the fact that Tolkien was a fanatical reviser," said [the school's archivist Bill Fliss]. "He never really did anything once and was finished with it."

Why does Marquette have the manuscripts?

Marquette was the first institution to ask Tolkien for the manuscripts in 1956 and paid him about $5,000.

The man who published all those dirty books... and turned down "Lord of the Rings" because he "couldn’t understand a word."

Barney Rosset, of Grove Press and Evergreen Review, dead now at 89.

Besides publishing [Samuel] Beckett, he brought early exposure to European writers like Eugène Ionesco and Jean Genet and gave intellectual ammunition to the New Left by publishing Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.”...

He defied censors in the 1960s by publishing D. H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer," ultimately winning legal victories that opened the door to sexually provocative language and subject matter in literature published in the United States. He did the same thing on movie screens by importing the sexually frank Swedish film “I Am Curious (Yellow).”

Grove Press also published "Naked Lunch" and "The Story of O." And Evergreen Review published Allen Ginsberg's "Howl."

What a great free speech hero! Thanks, Barney! RIP.

"If you have freedom of speech, you have freedom of speech," he said.

McCain won't apologize for calling Tea Partiers "hobbits" — "Why should I if it was a fact?"

It's a fact that Tea Partiers are hobbits?

Constituent: "Are you saying you're not apologizing?"

McCain: "I don't know what to apologize for."

Heard in the back: "For calling tea partiers hobbits!"

McCain: "What I said was true."

It's true that Tea Partiers are hobbits? You know, that's a real taunt. Let's say I call you a prick, and you say I should apologize, and I say, "Why should I apologize? It's true! You are a prick!" That's doubling down — a deliberate attempt to piss you off. And if you think that sounds as though I'm insinuating that McCain is a prick, I will not apologize. You know why?

Now, some people like to say hobbits were the good guys, so it wasn't even an insult in the first place. (Which makes me think of another answer to anyone who complains about my "prick" insult, above.) Anyway, yesterday, some guy called in to Rush Limbaugh's show to make the hobbits-are-good argument:

... I think conservatives should embrace being called hobbits by the establishment because in the movie the Lord of the Rings the hobbits are the heroes who succeed where the elites have failed in defeating a tyranny.  The movie is about power.  There's a ring of power, and all these elites are unable to give up the power.  Whenever they get the ring, they're corrupted, but the hobbits are the only characters in the entire movie who resist the power and are willing to relinquish the power and defeat the tyranny.  So, I mean it's... I mean, that's not what McCain was intending. He was intending to insult us, but actually hobbits are the heroes.

Rush was not buying this own-the-insult gambit:

That's a long thought process to trying to feel positive.  The bottom line is, people don't want to be insulted by losers!  McCain is a loser!

Rush said "Look, if you want to be called a hobbit, I mean, I'll be glad to call you a hobbit."

Frankly, sir, as a giant in the industry and in humanity, I could never be a hobbit and I could not be happy being a hobbit, but if you want to be one, and if you draw strength from it, have at it!  I myself will remain a giant, happily so, and they know it.  Don't call me a hobbit.

Who had the better argument? Rush or the caller? Remember the attempt by Tea Partiers to get the upper hand by embracing the insult "tea bagger"?

"What if the people who hate government are good at it and the people who love government are bad at it?"

Maureen Dowd observes that "Obama and John Boehner have been completely outplayed by the 'hobbits'":

Consider what the towel-snapping Tea Party crazies have already accomplished. They’ve changed the entire discussion. They’ve neutralized the White House. They’ve whipped their leadership into submission. They’ve taken taxes and revenues off the table. They’ve withered the stock and bond markets. They’ve made journalists speak to them as though they’re John Calhoun and Alexander Hamilton.

That term, "hobbits" (for tea partiers), comes from the Wall Street Journal and John McCain. I'm not sure what hobbits — the actual literary characters — have to do with "towel-snappin" and "whipping" anybody "into submission."

Dowd is not kind to President Obama:

As one Democratic senator complained: “The president veers between talking like a peevish professor and a scolding parent.” (Not to mention a jilted lover.) Another moaned: “We are watching him turn into Jimmy Carter right before our eyes.”

Obama’s “We must lift ourselves to a higher place” trope doesn’t work on this rough crowd. If somebody at dinner is about to kill you, you don’t worry about his table manners.

Kill you?! The hobbits?

From that Wall Street Journal article:

The idea seems to be that if the House GOP refuses to raise the debt ceiling, a default crisis or gradual government shutdown will ensue, and the public will turn en masse against . . . Barack Obama. The Republican House that failed to raise the debt ceiling would somehow escape all blame. Then Democrats would have no choice but to pass a balanced-budget amendment and reform entitlements, and the tea-party Hobbits could return to Middle Earth having defeated Mordor.

Sorry, but I don't remember all that "Lord of the Rings" stuff enough to understand that. Mordor is a place, right? Yes. "Mordor was the realm of the Dark Lord Sauron. It was a terrible land of darkness and fear, inhabited by Orcs and other evil creatures." Does that make Obama the "Dark Lord"? I understand the Journal's hope that the Tea Party will go back to their modest home towns after they do whatever they think is their mission in Washington, that "terrible land of darkness and fear."

About that suggestion of mine that reading classes should use nonfiction books.

This post has really stirred people up.

Look, my main point is efficiency. Kids need to learn to read, and they should also be learning science and history too, so why not combine the two tasks? Reading would still be taught and, in the early years, would be the central focus of the lesson, but the texts would have an added benefit of getting started learning other academic subjects.

I'm not saying fiction isn't worth reading. I'm saying that it can be held for after hours pleasure reading. Frankly, I think this would increase the love of fiction. Here's this shelf of books that you can read when you finish your other work. You can take them home if you like. I think this would give them an aura of excitement. There are lots of people who have fiction forced on them and avoid it once they're out of school. My father would get passionate about his hatred of "The Return of the Native," which he was forced to read. Me, I read "The Return of the Native" and all of Thomas Hardy's novels on my own and loved them. Look at how kids read the Harry Potter books on their own. Put them outside of the classroom and let kids see them as a leisure treat.

In saying that, I don't mean to say they are just for fun and that there's nothing deep. I'm saying that reading fiction books is or should be intrinsically rewarding and that intrinsic reward is best felt when you are exercising free choice. And I also think that the depths in fiction are best absorbed in a free environment without an authority figure trying to lead you or tell you how to think. Much good fiction is about challenging authority, and I worry that authority figures will choose fiction that they approve of because it teaches the values they like. That's not my idea of how good fiction works.

Another thing I'm not saying is that we shouldn't have literature classes. I've been talking about reading classes, those learn-to-read sessions very young students have. Those students aren't delving into the subtleties of themes and language and so forth. I have no problem with literature classes that teach students how to analyze texts in some fairly deep way, as long as they don't destroy the pleasure and love of art. So perhaps literature classes should be elective.

I'm also not opposed to teaching history and science through the kinds of novels and storybooks that present the information accurately. And I think a history class could very well have students read novels that had an effect on history or how people think about history, like "Uncle Tom's Cabin" or "1984." I've taught a couple "Women in Law and Literature" seminars myself. (We'd read a court case and a novel that dealt with the same subject as the case.)

Finally, I'm not saying that young kids should be given badly written, boring text books as their early readers any more than my critics think they should be given badly written, boring storybooks. That assumption, at the core of many of the criticisms I've read, is so perverse that it makes your whole argument seem to be in bad faith. Or perhaps you have only read nonfiction when it was imposed on you by a teacher and you have never discovered its intrinsic rewards by reading it on your own free choice. I'll bet if you had a shelf of books for kids to choose for their free time and it had some nonfiction books like this one, lots of kids would pick them over fiction. And I think a lot of boys would be grateful and some girls might be inspired to go into careers that are more common for boys.

Writing this post, I discovered that I'd written on this topic before, inspired by a WaPo article called "Educators Differ on Why Boys Lag in Reading":

"A lot of teachers think of reading as reading stories," said Lee Galda, professor of children's literature at the University of Minnesota. "And in fact, a lot of boys, and not just boys, like nonfiction. But we keep concentrating on novels or short stories and sometimes don't think of reading nonfiction as reading. But in fact it is, and it is extremely important."

Teachers and parents have said boys generally prefer stories with adventure, suspense and fantasy and tend toward reading nonfiction stories and non-narrative informational books, as well as magazines and newspapers.

I wrote:

Maybe it would be easier to say that everyone wants to read what interests them and quite properly rebels at being told what to read. (Maybe boys just rebel more conspicuously than girls.)

It's one thing for the biology teacher to insist that you read a biology book, but if teachers are just trying to get kids to read, why shouldn't they provide a broad selection and give kids a chance to discover what they find interesting? It looks as though the biggest problem is that teachers are pushing too much literary fiction on kids. English teachers tend to be people who enjoy that sort of thing, but most people don't read it on their own. Why should we have an appetite for stories? And why should our appetite for stories be about elegantly described characters and their relationships (as opposed to adventure and fantasy)?

I used to take my sons to the bookstore and let them find whatever they were interested in. We used to hang out at Borders nearly every day, and I usually ended up buying a book or two. What did they want? Humor, especially in comic form (like "Life in Hell"). Collections of amazing science facts and other things that did not have to be read in linear fashion. (This was a big favorite.) Books about movies and music and other subjects they were interested in.

And here's another old post of mine, describing a group of 3 boys I saw at Borders, getting more excited about a book than I've ever seen kids get. But good luck getting your local teachers to include this one on their pleasure-reading shelf:



ADDED: Some email:

As a very young boy (7-11) I never bothered reading one book of fiction (Lord of the Rings changed that for me at the age of 16). All I read as a child were books on dinosaurs and books on the middle ages.

When I entered 7th grade and we began studying the 13th century, I knew more about early feudal crop rotation and the politics of southern France than my 8th grade teacher....honestly. I also knew the difference between the paleozoic and cretaceous periods. I also read books about lasers...college level books that I had no business reading (and despite not understanding any of it I enjoyed the reading.)

I had the pleasure of teaching English in South Korea for 3 odd years. I ditched the "learn English" type books in favor of beginning science and history books early on. I tell you, the boys AND girls had a fantastic time learning English while reading about how the early Greeks figured out the Earth was round, or how photosynthesis works.

I also made the poor kids memorize poetry, but that's neither here nor
there.

UPDATE: Among my many critics, I want to give the prize to this guy for writing "Althouse correctly notes that reading comprehension skills among high-school students are on the decline" -- not because he gave me credit for something but because I never said anything about reading comprehension skills among high school students! I hope he does an update, something like: Althouse correctly notes that reading comprehension skills among bloggers are on the decline.

Titanic and Lord of the Rings--another connection. I noted here that LOTR fans ought to have a special regard for the cast of Titanic because it starred Kate Winslet, who appeared in an early Peter Jackson film, Heavenly Creatures. (HC is one of my all-time favorite films, by the way.) A reader writes in to note another connection between the Titanic and LOTR casts: the captain of the Titanic and the King of Rohan in LOTR were played by the same actor, Bernard Hill.

Titanic vs. Lord of the Rings. Prof. Bainbridge is responding to my challenge about whether, if there were an ensemble acting Oscar, LOTR would have won it and neither Titanic nor Ben Hur would have, thus making LOTR the biggest Oscar-winning movie ever, with 12, not just 11.

Bainbridge points out that LOTR won the SAG ensemble acting award, but Titanic didn't. The Full Monty did!

I realize now how complex this what-if question is. Bainbridge points out that the SAG ensemble award may be essentially its version of best picture: SAG only gives acting awards, so ensemble works as a way to recognize the whole picture. If that's so, and if the Oscar voters tracked the all-actor SAG voters, we could infer that the ensemble Oscar would have gone to Titanic. But it is a different group of voters, as we can tell from the way the Oscars didn't care at all about The Full Monty.

Bainbridge also theorizes that an ensemble award would be used to honor casts in movies that did not feature one or two dominant stars, that is "true ensembles." Voters might conceive of the ensemble award as a way to make up for the fact that films with large crowds of actors don't have a fair shot at the individual actor awards. Clearly, LOTR had many great actors in it, but they were in relatively small roles. But small roles can earn supporting actor awards, and it's notable that no one even had a nomination in a supporting category.

I can't speak for Ben Hur, because I've never seen it, but I'll accept that Charlton Heston was an overriding star there, and maybe the cast of thousands types would not seem to deserve any recognition.

But how about Titanic? Bainbridge says look at the posters: it's all about Kate Winslet (the sublime Kate Winslet, whom true Peter Jackson fans will love from Heavenly Creatures) and Leonardo diCaprio. But what about Kathy Bates (people love her), Victor Garber (the New Yorker thought he was the best thing in the film), Billy Zane (an acquired taste), David Warner (you want an English actor of long reputation, look at this), Francis Fisher, Jonathan Hyde (deliciously evil as Ismay), Bill Paxton, and the beloved old actress Gloria Stuart?

I say it would have won an ensemble award. What was the real competition? Not The Full Monty. Not Boogie Nights (because of the subject matter). Maybe L.A. Confidential. Considering the extreme love of the acting in Mystic River, I'd say that the ensemble award for Titanic would have been more likely than for LOTR.

UPDATE: Christopher Althouse, who's a devoted student of film, writes: "I think Titanic and Ben Hur would both have won ensemble awards, and to the extent that they could have not won, I don't think it's a given that LOTR would have won."

Would LOTR have broken the Oscar record if there were an ensemble acting award? I've written before that I love the ensemble acting SAG award. Today, Prof. Bainbridge writes that if only there were an Oscar for ensemble acting, Lord of the Rings would have not just tied the the record for most Oscars with 11, but beaten it with 12. But wouldn't the other two movies with 11--Titanic and Ben Hur--also have deserved the ensemble award?

In Titanic's year, 1997, the key competition for acting was As Good as It Gets (which won best actor and actress and had a nomination for supporting actor), and Good Will Hunting (which won best supporting actor and had a best actor nomination), as well as Boogie Nights, L.A.Confidential, Wings of the Dove, Wag the Dog, and Jackie Brown (each of which only had one nomination, but had an excellent cast). Titanic had two nominations, and a big and excellent cast. Who knows which film would have gotten the ensemble? Quite possibly Titanic. But, wow, was that a better year for movies than last year!

In Ben Hur's year, 1959, Ben Hur won best actor and best supporting actor. The key competition was Room at the Top (which won 1, and had 3 nominations), Anatomy of a Murder (with 3 nominations), and The Diary of Anne Frank (which won 1, with 2 nominations). There was also Suddenly, Last Summer (with 2 nominations), Pillow Talk (2 nominations), Imitation of Life (2 nominations), and, what appears to be the best movie of the year, and possibly the best movie ever made, Some Like It Hot (only 1 nomination--for Jack Lemmon). Good reason to think Ben Hur would have won. Again, a way better year than this one!

UPDATE: More discussion above. And I've deleted the links for 1997 and 1959, so you'll have to take my word for it that I got this info from the Academy Awards website, which didn't preserve the results of my searches and doesn't have any pages I could find that just lists the historical information. How annoyingly unuseful that site is! Don't go there. I couldn't find any site that listed the awards systematically by year. I guess AMPAS is hoarding the info. One more reason to be irked about the Oscars.

FURTHER UPDATE: I've got new links for the two years, at IMDB, so go ahead and check the years.