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Thursday, January 9, 2003 |
Dark Satanic Mills, II
Slate has yet another annoying article, calling J. R. R. Tolkien a Luddite.Disliking dark satanic mills doesn't make you a Luddite. The culture identified with high-technology in this country is also one strongly identified with support for the environment. Technology is more than just vast, polluting furnaces and the devastation of everything living.
And in that sense, it's Tolkien's Luddism that defines The Lord of the Rings as not allegorical but escapist, since it's an attempt to imagine England without the very things that made England possible. It may be comforting to think that bravery and a good heart are enough to repel the Dark Lord. But having guns that fire 4,000 rounds a minute makes a difference, too.
England: Runnymeade. Shakespeare. English Common Law. The Lunar Club. John Maynard Keynes. The Who. Terry Pratchett. So many things mean "England" to me: for Surowiecki, it's "we have got/the Gatling gun/and they have not."
let the music play
Odd ways we interact with technology: every four or five weeks I put together a new playlist in iTunes. I usually grab whatever's in the auto-generated "Top 25 Most Played", and then sort the main list by "last time played" and grab a bunch of entries that are at the bottom. Play this list on randomize, and it's like listening to a DJ who's picked a mix of new and old, just for me. Things that, for one reason or another, I don't listen to, get picked up again the next month, as I select a batch of things I haven't listened to in a while.
