To avoid being serious for a moment...

[desperance]

In other newses, twice already today a casual comment has (at)tempted to lead me into deeper thinkings, but I am having none of it. Lord knows, I'm not letting this blog turn into a thoughtful consideration of literary issues. I have actual clever people reading this, and they would see through me in a moment. (Is it sad, I wonder, that I am intimidated by my own readership...?)

But in a response to a post made by shewhomust, musing on the inlandiness, the resolutely uncoastal nature of Tolkien's better-known fiction, I found myself saying "something in me wants to embark on a whole thesis that he has no sense of the liminal, that everything in Tolkien sits at the heart of what it is" - and I've been kind of defending that to myself half the day now. I still don't want to write the essay, but I think it might be true.

And just now, in a comment on m'friend Juliette Wade's blog, I went all epigrammatical and said "Character is worldbuilding, and worldbuilding is character" - which is indeed shockingly glib, but I think I stand by that too. And it's the kind of thing I really don't write posts about, so let's just let it go, shall we? I have to go and do bizarre things to a chicken...