"Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceased": Tolkien as Wagner's shadow.

Wednesday afternoon links 1!

* More bad news for Barack Obama as Stephen Colbert signs on to the birther movement.

* Meanwhile, Jon Stewart fights for our shared glorious homeland in a new Daily Show segment, "Hey, C'Mon That's Not ... Why Would You ...Whoa!"

* Kottke on flarf.

* New Line, fresh from screwing over Peter Jackson, is still trying to screw Tolkien's heirs. More at School Library Journal.

* The Big Picture presents: lightning!

* And Offworld has your post-apocalyptic Disneyland.

Bruce is coming to Greensboro tonight, and I've got tickets, so all is right with the world. It's my first Springsteen concert since Summer 2000, which is much too long to take the sacrament.

* The New York Times goes inside the world's last pinball factory.

* The British science fiction series I've always wanted to see, Blake's 7, is going to be remade a la Battlestar Galactica.

* Who is Tom Bombadil?

* Elizabeth Edwards takes on the media for its shoddy coverage of the presidential primaries thus far.

* Few people are writing more cogently about George Romero's zombie movies than this post at The Pinocchio Theory.

* And I'm trying hard to think of a movie I've seen this year that was more fun than Air Guitar Nation.

"I was never into heroic fantasy. At all. I don't like little guys and dragons, hairy feet, hobbits—I've never been into that at all. I don't like sword and sorcery, I hate all that stuff." Those are the words of Guillermo del Toro, who has now been officially tapped to direct of the upcoming Peter-Jackson-produced Hobbit duology. Sounds promising! I'm very nervous.

The news is all over the Internet: Peter Jackson and New Line have reached a deal for two more Lord of the Rings films—though right now Jackson is slated only to produce, not direct, and they're going forward with the absolutely terrible idea of a filler movie based on original, non-Tolkien material.

I am looking skeptically askance.

moreintelligentlife.com has a mildly slavish interview with fantasist-of-the-moment (and notorious atheist!) Philip Pullman that's worth reading if you're interested in either children's literature or religious controversy. Here's a bit where he rags on Lewis and Tolkien:

Several times Pullman reminds me that a work of fiction is not an argument. Perhaps it's safest to say that in "His Dark Materials" he has constructed his own imaginative world so as not to submit to anyone else's. He likes to quote William Blake's line: "I must create a system, or be enslav'd by another man's." His story is a rival to the narratives put forward by two earlier Oxford writers, J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" and C.S. Lewis's "The Chronicles of Narnia". Pullman loathes the way the children in Narnia are killed in a car-crash. "I dislike his Narnia books because of the solution he offers to the great questions of human life: is there a God, what is the purpose, all that stuff, which he really does engage with pretty deeply, unlike Tolkien who doesn't touch it at all. ‘The Lord of the Rings' is essentially trivial. Narnia is essentially serious, though I don't like the answer Lewis comes up with. If I was doing it at all, I was arguing with Narnia. Tolkien is not worth arguing with."

1) It's a train wreck, not a car crash, though this was probably the interviewer's error and not Pullman's. (The Problem of Susan is worth footnoting here as well.)

2) This is a strange thing that seems to happen to a lot of atheists and agnostics, and I say that certainly having recognized the impulse in myself at times as well. Rather than exiling religious and metaphysical questions to the margins, as you might expect, the recognition of the non-existence of God has the exact opposite effect: the question of God becomes the only one worth asking and the only thing worth talking about. Hence the ludicrous claim that Tolkien is "essentially trivial" because Lord of the Rings is neither a theistic nor atheistic polemic.

I don't quite know what to make of this, but it's very interesting. Clearly, Pullmanistic atheism has mastered the negation, but just as clearly it needs to find some way to move forward into the negation of the negation. I think that's what actually existing atheism would have to be, rather than the cancerous anti-theism that so thoroughly dominates the category today.

Gary Kamiya has a nice comparative look at the film adaptations of Beowulf and Lord of the Rings, including some interesting words from the man himself:

In a famous allegory, Tolkien compared the author of "Beowulf" to a man who, inheriting a field full of ancient stones, used them to build a tower. His friends, recognizing that the stones had belonged to a more ancient building, tore down the tower "in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions." What they did not realize, Tolkien ends, was that "from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea."

Tolkien's point is that the fantastic elements in "Beowulf" are ancient archetypes that have deep roots in human beliefs, fears and wishes -- myths, in other words. And in "Beowulf," he argues, these myths are an essential part of a tragic tale whose theme is "man at war with the hostile world, and his inevitable overthrow in Time." The greatness of Beowulf derives from the fact that it is a poem created in "a pregnant moment of poise": It is balanced between a Christian worldview, in which death and defeat are ultimately themselves defeated by Christ, and a Germanic, pagan one, in which fate rules all and man's courage alone confers nobility. It is, Tolkien writes, not a primitive poem, but a late one. The pagan world is already past, but the poet still celebrates its vanished power. The fact that a poem written more than a thousand years ago was itself looking back at a lost world gives the poem an uncanny double resonance to the modern reader: "If the funeral of Beowulf moved once like the echo of an ancient dirge, far-off and hopeless, it is to us as a memory brought over the hills, an echo of an echo."

Meanwhile, elsewhere at Salon, Andrew Leonard is concerned about inconsistency and arbitrariness in wizarding law.

Even when it's good news it's bad news: Entertainment Weekly reports that New Line Cinema and Peter Jackson may have begun to reconcile (fantastic news) and that Jackson hopes to make two movies (no worries there), one The Hobbit in its entirety (wait, what?) and the other "filling in the story arc between the end of The Hobbit and the beginning of Rings" (WTFJackson?).

This is pretty close to sacrilege. If Jackson wants to retroactively ruin his first three movies, why not film a sequel with the original cast—Return of the Return of the King—and be done with it?

Has no one learned what George Lucas has to teach us? Via Slashdot.

Strange Maps is just about exactly what it sounds like, but it's also the most fun specialty blog I've visited in a good while. Where else are you going to find the the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World, which proves Sweden's status as secular paradise in graph form, plus a mapping of Middle-Earth onto Regular-Europe, a mapping of how evolution is taught in the U.S., the world as seen from 9th Avenue, Tatooine, and the most generic country ever? At right: Inside the Hollow Earth.

Via Cynical-C, which this morning also brings us "Smells Like Teen Spirit" as performed by choir.