tolkien epitome of incomprehensibility J.R.R. Tolkien's last living child died on Monday. Her name was Priscilla. "This is sad," my brother was muttering as he perused news on his computer, and I braced for war info. Not so sad as lives cut short, but still. His son Christopher died just last year. I did laugh when he went, "Why are they dying so young?" "Y., they were both in their nineties." He noted that a friend of our parents lived longer. And this is true, but we can't all live to almost a hundred, even if we're descended from the person who invented Ents, the slow tree-creatures. 220304 ... raze i love this. only you could eulogize someone in such a wonderfully unique way. 220305 ... raze for me, j.r.r. tolkien will always be "the author i wasn't allowed to read as a child." i had a beautiful edition of "the hobbit" that my mother and stepfather took away from me before i could start digging into it. "you don't need to read a book about a dirty, smelly cave," they said. and that was the end of the discussion. i never saw the book again. it was whisked away to the mysterious island of banned books, where it joined a biography of michael douglas (pilfered because the writer commented on michael's sex life) and an illustrated book about cats (deemed inappropriate because ... uh ... cats?). the very first page of "the hobbit" ripped their reasoning to shreds: "in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort." reading comprehension: it isn't always what's for breakfast. or lunch. or dinner. or a late-night snack. 220305 ... e_o_i Does this count as four or five degrees removed? ...me, David, his landlady, her sometimes-housekeeper who cleaned Priscilla Tolkien's place as well. I think that counts as four, if it's three from me to Ezra Pound, Deadmau5, and Justin Bieber (the last two through my old Ontario land-couple, as opposed to the countless air-couples of bird angels that watched over me, their feathers indescribable colours). Five degrees from me to J.R.R. He also has a great-grandson who's my brother's age and wrote a play. 220306 ... e_o_i raze, that sounds so callous and arbitrary! Parents with their suspect reasoning. My mom wouldn't let me read Animorphs when I was a kid because the covers looked scary. I thought those covers were the coolest things around. Goosebumps - also "too scary". First time I read a Goosebumps book was when I was 16, and then I sniffed in imagined superiority, deeming the first part a blatant ripoff of Kafka's Metamorphosis. If I'd read it when I was the target age, maybe I'd have gotten some genuine chills. But Tolkien's writing was never deemed "too scary," although my parents did wonder whether Y. at 11 was too young to see the first movie (he was fine; I flinched at the Mines of Moria scene where the bridge crumples and falls because it reminded me of the World Trade Centre). Anyway, yeah, Dad read the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to us. We were on the second book of the trilogy when the first movie came out in December 2021. 220306 what's it to you? who go blather from