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Teasing “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey”

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Update: One day after I published the post below about “The Hobbit,” the NY Times published this interesting piece today about the Tolkien archive, which is housed in the US, at Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI. Also, please note an earlier blog post of mine, J.R.R. Tolkien Renounced Racial Politics in 1938 Letter to a German Publisher.
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Some readers of this blog may recall that I happen to share a birthday with J.R.R. Tolkien’s hobbit protagonists Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, having written about that literary link in a piece on this site labeled Personal History. Since my teens I’ve been a fan of Tolkien’s work and then enjoyed Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” film trilogy. My wife and son and I already have tickets to see “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” when it opens late next week. I’ve seen a trailer or two for the film but have steered clear of reading much about it, not wanting to have the element of surprise hijacked by reading details I don’t need to know yet.  Still, I crossed paths today with a very encouraging Hobbit teaser on Nerdist.com, the website of Chris Hardwick, ebullient host of “The Talking Dead” fan show that is boradcast on AMC TV after the zombie-apocalypse program “The Walking Dead.”

What’s good for the book is also good for the film–a sense of humor. Though some of LOTR‘s self-importance is being retroactively returned to the tale, Bilbo is simply a much more fun reluctant-hero than Frodo, whose dewy-eyed earnestness was way too goody-goody at times. Martin Freeman [cast as Bilbo] also played Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and that character–quite correctly–shares spiritual DNA with this Hobbit, who wants to live out the simplest pleasures of the countryside, but gets whisked into something bigger, and complains all the time. It also feels like the themes here are more tangible for kids to relate to than abstract ultimate-good versus ultimate-evil, such as the benefits of going outside and making friends instead of sitting around the house (granted, LOTR had a team of friends too, but it broke up rather quickly. This group stays together).

I greatly enjoyed the 2005 film version of Douglas Adams’ modern SF classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, directed by Garth Jennings, which featured not only the aforementioned Martin Freeman, but also Mos Def, Zooey Deschanel, Sam Rockwell, and the voice of Alan Rickman. So, if Peter Jackson’s new Hobbit film can conjure up some of that cinematic pleasure, then we’re in for a treat.

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Don’t Panic*, Continue Doing What We’ve Been Doing

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Two key data points and a message for worried DEMs and other Obama supporters:

1) In today’s Gallup poll President Obama’s job approval rating is 54%, the highest he’s ever had in that poll.

2) Also, in CBS’s snap poll overnight, while it did show improved numbers for Romney on the question of who you think can most help the country (from 30% to 63%), for the president the same figure went from 53% to 69%, still a 6-point edge.

The president’s got most of the country with him. I believe he can keep the people with him. Even though he didn’t do as well in the debate as we hoped he would–I think he was befuddled, unfortunately caught off guard by Romney’s ambidextrous shape-shifting and unabashed dissembling, as TPM’s Brian Beutler’s written–but I would add the president has no small reservoir of goodwill, the truth, and a skillful campaign, all on his side. My message is don’t panic, keep doing what we’ve been doing, especially all the truthtelling and fact-checking that the campaign has done all day–with the blogger community, including this one, pushing out that information–and things will be okay. And we get another crack at Romney/Ryan next week. It’s still a race, but the president remains in a strong position.

*Thanks to the late Douglas Adams for his book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its valuable nostrum, “Don’t Panic.”

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Remembering Nick Webb, a Bright Light in British Publishing

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Via the Guardian comes a lovely memorial by longtime British publisher Ion Trewin bearing the sad news that the sparkling, smart Nick Webb–who as science fiction editor of Pan Books commissioned Douglas Adams to turn his BBC radio drama “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” into an international bestselling book–has died at age 63. According to Trewin’s obit, the first book of what would become the multi-volume science fiction series sold 250,000 copies within three months of publication in 1979 and a million copies by 1984, in the U.K. alone. Meantime, in the U.S., where I was then running Undercover Books, my bookstore in Cleveland, we stacked up and sold the well-priced little hardcover from Crown Publishers, reordering it repeatedly for months.

Trewin, who now works as literary director of the Man Booker Prize, clearly knew and liked Webb, the voluble son of an Irish pop and a Jewish mom. “He had a vivid sense of humour, often word-based, and delighted in mixed metaphors, once relating hearing someone say: ‘I smelled a rat and nipped it in the bud.’ Many years later the memory would still make him chortle. In conversation he used words and phrases that were inimitably his own. The acquisition of the first Hitchhiker novel was hardly considered a big deal, he recalled, or as he put it: ‘I was not proposing that we spend serious sponduliks.'” I met Nick Webb once, at a Frankfurt Book Fair when I was with Kodansha America, and enjoyed telling him I’d sold Adams’ novels in my bookstores. I liked him instantly.

Sadly, Douglas Adams also died, in 2001 at fifty-one. Happily, he and Webb left a remarkable legacy–one of the funniest, most brilliant pieces of science fiction published in the second half of the twentieth century.

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