Dilly Dalley > Recent Status Updates

Tolkien is in his late 60s, has retired, still concerned about money, trying to prepare The Silmarillion for publication. He is answering lots of letters clarifying LoTR issues - some of them incredibly detailed. He is insistent that the novel is about Death and Immortality - not about Power.

We are up to late 1957, three years after the publication of The Fellowship, and 12 months after the final vol 3 - Return of the King. Tolkien is already responding to letters indicating he is someone's research thesis topic (can only assume a graduate thesis), numerous letters of clarification of the meaning of various themes, and two film proposals, plus the BBC radio dramatisation. Also big royalty payment.

Australia in this period has a highly literate popn - 90% of 5-14 y in 1911 can read & write. There are lots of libraries, and children’s pages in all major newspapers - originally written for children, eventually by children (letters, essays, jokes, limericks, stories & drawings). Playing editor of children’s mags booms. Hobby printing presses become common from the 1890s on - these children pursue “the Inky way”.

Playtime is a history of Australian Childhood covering the period 1890-1945. An era picked because it pre-dates the arrival of television, mass ownership of cars and the concept of a ’teenager’. There has been a long boom in Australia - the Gold Rush of 1850s produced a society of high living standards & high prop'n of children (1870s child <15 make up 42% of the population & by 1901 it is 35% - so lots of children).

It is 1956 and Tolkien is beginning what I assume will be a long line of letters from readers. One of whom is Sam Gamgee! He writes to his son, Christopher "I have had a letter from a real Sam Gamgee, from Tooting! He could not have chosen a more Hobbit-sounding place, could he? though un-Shirelike, I fear, in reality.

It is 1955 and finally all three volumes of LoTR have been published. Allen & Unwin have published it but not without a number of peevish and testy letters of frustration from Tolkien, due to production hiccups. Along the way, there has been quite a bit of exposition about the themes of the novel, and about Tolkien's personality. I must admit he is level of self-awareness kind of surprises me.

The Laredo Times interviews Arriaga, one of the rebels, and this brings their presence in the USA to the attention of Diaz’s government. Lomeli, the Mexican consul in Texas wires Diaz in Mexico ‘Send the Secret Police’. There is a long history of Mexican resistance organised from the USA (Juarez fought the Conservatives, Diaz plotted coups, the Yaqui fought Diaz, and many others). Diaz was right to be concerned.

This is a niche book about two publishing companies in Western Australia. Their origin stories are interspersed in the first part of the book (1975 and 2019). Then the book moves into descriptions of parts of the publishing process - Editing, Design and Typesetting - and I am up to the Marketing and Distribution chapter.

The Magon brothers settle in America’s Brown Belt - Laredo - where Mexicans and Mexican Americans comprised (and still comprise) the majority population. When they arrive in 1904, they find a place ready for justice for Mexicans. After years of persecution (lynchings, economic inequality - lower wages for Mexicans, Juan Crow, “no Mexicans allowed”), they are ready for revolutionary ideas.

After 2 more attempts at dissenting newspaper production, the presses were seized & the brothers jailed twice in 1903, they decide that it is too dangerous in Mexico. Protest against Diaz is on the rise, but the army is shooting & killing protestors. Congress passes laws outlawing dissent. The Magon’s & Arriaga, Mendoza, Sarabia & Acuna travel north to Texas to regroup and plan to bring down the Diaz regime.

The Magon brother’s newspaper becomes increasingly critical and attacking of the dictatorship. They are both arrested, and jailed for two years. Their printing press is seized by the state. The other members of the Liberal resistance - Arriaga and his Marxist conference are also eventually arrested and jailed for one year. While in jail the men communicate and for some, their resolve is strengthened.

Ricardo Magon has been radicalised through part personal greivances towards Diaz because his family has been destroyed by Diaz's actions, and part exposure to the group of radicals reading Marxist and Anarchist texts. Magon is most influenced by Russian anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin - total abolishment of private property, church and state. Magon's fellow agitators against Diaz want reform not revolution.

The book starts in 1910 with the spark (lynching of a Mexican in Texas) that will result in the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917). Then in the first two chapters the narrative reverses in time to provide the historical context of that event. Diaz is in power in Mexico and has ruled with an iron fist for 27 years - Mexico has achieved some measure of stability and prosperity but at the cost of US imperialism.

What a nice read. Loving it so far - making me want to join a choir

I am up to 1950 - We are getting close to the publication of Lord of the Rings and there's a bit of back and forth about whether Tolkien wishes to change publishers. He's also acknowledging that it has taken him 12 years to write the requested follow up to the Hobbit. There is much discussion about how big it is - a million words - and he is still keen to publish the Silmarillion.

So far we have walked from Derry > Lifford > Strabane > Castlederg > Lough Derg > car ride to > Enniskillen. It is 1986, the summer after the Anglo-Irish Accord (signed by Maggie Thatcher and Garrett Fitzgerald) and Colm Toibin is writing about towns bombed out, people leaving for America/London, the Hiring Fair (structural poverty meted out to the Catholic population), and a weekend pilgrimage of self-mortification

The happily married couple (Linden & Oak) are fracturing under the pressure of infertility, the psychologist Adam (Maple) is going to research what personality traits people who swim against the tide have (activists) versus the prevailing wisdom that it is ok to kill trees. The tree scientist, (no single tree because she speaks for all trees) after shaming for her research, is back, wrote a book & made lots of money.

Well, we are moving west into Redwood country and some of our trees/characters (Doug/Banyan, Mimi/Mulberry, Olivia/Maidenhead-Gingko, and Nick/Chestnut) have arrived to defend the trees. Why is the whole story suffused in melancholy? Rhetorical - we know why.

Nearly finished the Second World War letters. At this stage the letters cover Tolkien's everyday life, reading like a diary, his concern for his children in the war (one set covers Michael's war experiences) but the great bulk are letters to Christopher who is the RAF. In the diary like format, you get a sense of Tolkien's academic life during the war. Then towards the end of the war, his novel writing picks up.

I have now been introduced to all the trees, and their people, and the themes and social conditions that they represent. This part of the book is like a collection of beautifully rendered short stories. I have enjoyed it so far and am curious to see what comes next.

Chestnut, Mulberry and Maple have been introduced. The loss of Chestnut trees across the East coast disturbs me everytime I hear about it. Millions of trees dead. Staggering.

I knew I would love this book. That's a bold statement, I know. Its just that it is set at the Widener library in Harvard and it is now 40 years since I was at the Widener library and I really want to go back.

I am enjoying the Asian American aspects of the story but as a person who has grown vegetables for over twenty years, I find the gardening mistakes kind of frustrating to read.

I am about a third of the way in and have not met Harriet yet. I have met the other 4 members of the Nocturnals - Hunter and Nina who live next door to each other, and Cosmo and Beatrice. I am not quite sure what to make of it. It is readable and engaging but I cannot resolve if I am moved by anything. They are teenagers in the final years of school (Y11 and Y12).

Themes of Jeff Chu's Asian family not accepting his homosexuality and marriage to a man, other aspects of Asian culture - superstition. Also the immigrant experience of haphazard application of their Asian cultural practices.

It is the 1980s, the women are not in contact with each other, both are in relationships that are imperfect at best. I suspect the one with dreams and ambitions Is about to be derailed by her current love affair, and the romantic who descended into full blown alcoholism has a reprieve from her behaviour brought about by the relationship she subsequently has to flee from.

In the audiobook, I have finished Autumn and am ready to start Winter. I have adjusted to the non-linear narrative and am interested to see which themes will stick in my memory without a plot. So far, his inexperience in all things gardening is apparent. Clearly though he is spiritual, questing some kind of healing, living with integrity but some familial rejection.

The two girls have met, and had the summer love experience in Paris, the city of romance and squalor and threat. At the end of the summer, the one with plans, a bus ticket, and a home to return to - does just that. The hard bitten but romantic local, falls into a heap of self-destructive misery. Loving it so far.