Salmon and Tolkien

I know it's the wine and the excellent food, making me heady. I made some amazing salmon with a flax-sesame-dill-ginger crust made crispy with corn meal. Brown rice and tomato sauce poured over everything completed with Reisling (which I was drinking all through the process of course). As I ate I read the "Siege of Gondor" chapter of RotK. Just as I took the last bite of my meal, Grond, the fell ram forged in the Black Land, was bashing the Gate. Then the Lord of the Nazgul strode past the walls that had never been breached but Gandalf was there to withstand him. A cock crowed from the city and was answered by the horns of the Rohirrim. I think the author became enraptured by his academic experience here because the pace and diction is so much like Anglo-Saxon oral epic. It grabs the reader as well; it is a heavy moment and then it releases you to let cry a cheer for the coming of the horsemen. Dinner is one of the most looked-forward-to times of day for me.

I have a lot of reading to catch up on. I spent four years prostrate to the higher mind and it did not leave opportunity for fanciful literary advancement. From Clanchy and Davies, Geoffrey of Monmouth and St. Augustine, Foucault and Carr I now turn to Cornwell, Ondaatje, Allende, Whyte, Rice, Atwood, Kafka, Coehlo, et cetera ad infinitum. I scanned half a dozen "100 best novels" lists from the twentieth century, from Science Fiction, from Fantasy, and those deemed the best ever. I made myself a very short (comparatively!) list to get me going. Many of these I'll take with me to Korea, but I hope to get through a few before then. I managed to devour three or four books over xmas.

I usually avoid re-reading books at this stage because I've felt my time has been too precious to spend other than on new material. But as many of you will concur, LotR is different. I hadn't read it since before the movies came out and I've so saturated myself in the movies and video appendices, and indeed in medieval literature, that it was far passed the time to get back to my roots, as it were. You see I credit Tolkien for my medievalism. You can credit Tolkien for the silly lofty speech I'm using right now as well. I'll sound more hip and edgy when I swallow another Ondaatje.

Back to the wine.