On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 10:46 AM, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> It's true about Baum. He was a populist (favoring a bimetallic
> monetary system) and 19th & 20th century populism had major baggage,
> such as so-called "nativism," which involved racist attitudes toward
> the real natives. But you can see that in lefty icons such as Woody
> Guthrie ("this land is our land") and even Leo Huberman (if I remember
> correctly). Each of us is a product of our times. It's best to judge
> old folks like these not only with the benefit of modern hindsight but
> also from their own perspective. Even Marx said some stuff that could
> be interpreted as racist or anti-Jewish from today's perspective.
>
> On the other hand, I have no apologies for Tolkien. The fact that his
> books have become icons with almost religious content attached to them
> is scary.
i admit i don't understand this. and i confess to having loved those books
as a kid, and i was frankly growing up in a kind of dysfunctional shire i
was desperate to get out of. but even if accept moorcock's understanding
(and my third confession is to not having read the essay in question),
doesn't it just go to show that stories take on lives of their own?
especially when they are such sweeping works. they become about whatever the
people reading them want them to be, and that is to my mind less a question
of misreading than of the malleability of the material.
j
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