Letters to the Editor
Dragon Day
Published Letters: 4 Editor's Choice: 1
-
Chase Him Until He Catches You
[Read the article: Skirt-chasing as sport]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Well, you're right at least to admit it's all pretty harmless, and as far as being "immature," most outdoor fun is "immature" in some way or other. And, yeah, they are trying to promote a product, namely a skirt or "sport skirt," and so giving the event a name with "Skirt" in it only makes sense.
It seems like the concept is a good way to get (in particular) young male runners who might otherwise not bother to enter a race promoting a feminine garment to sign up and take part in the fun.
"Girls vs. Boys" as an angle has worked for Survivor, Top Chef, Hell's Kitchen, and The Apprentice, not to mention I Love Lucy, so why not milk it to sell clothes; the battle of the sexes is just an eternal enticement.
For the last couple of years the famous 7.6 mile Bay-to-Breakers race in San Francisco has done the same thing in racing terms, starting off the elite women runners several minutes ahead of the elite males (it's called "the equalizer"), in order to give the women a chance to finish first--and in 2007 an African woman did just that, hanging on to finish the course a minute or so ahead of the elite male racers who were pounding after her.
The main use of this article for me, paradoxically, has been to alert me to the existence of this company and its Sport Skirt; I am already thinking of buying some.
-
Lewis is Good
[Read the article: I've got a bow and arrow, and I intend to use them]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I think some posters who are fortunate enough to have been born in our so-enlightened times are being wicked hard on a decent man whose view of gender relations was essentially formed for life by his culture between 1900-1920. Of course he saw things differently when it came to women than Salon readers do in 2008. He also suffered from growing up essentially motherless and then in one all-male environment after another: boarding schools that were almost indescribably awful and brutal, the army, his Oxford college. No surprise, he never had much idea of how to relate to women and tended to view them in the idealistic ways of an Edwardian English (strictly speaking, Northern Irish) cultural product. But he was a well-meaning soul, and his intellectual relations with the rare female academics who figured in his Oxbridge world of the 1920s-60s were always impeccable and fair-minded.
I do think that people who cavil at the relative absence of womanly blood-letting in the Narnia books shouldn't talk until they've read "Till We Have Faces," with its sword-wielding, war-fighting, warrior princess. And then there's the Narnia book "The Horse and His Boy," with its clever, tough, and self-reliant young woman, Aravis, although she doesn't fight in battle any more than most women ever have.
-
Lewis and Tolkien
[Read the article: I've got a bow and arrow, and I intend to use them]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What I would like to know is whether the apocryphal story that once, when their Oxford writers' club was meeting one night and J.R.R. Tolkien began reading again from his interminable work-in-progress about Middle Earth, C.S. Lewis leaned over to a friend and said in mock-despair "MORE F--KING ELVES!" is true or not. I've seen it more than once, and it represents Lewis' send-up style of humor pretty well.
-
Tolkien vs. Lewis
[Read the article: I've got a bow and arrow, and I intend to use them]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The way I learned it, Tolkien's frustration with the Narnia books was due to the small-c catholicity of Lewis's approach, his way of blithely throwing in the kitchen sink. It drove him wild, for example, that at the end of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, Lewis introduced Greek nymphs and naiads and even Father Christmas.
I see it as a comical juxtaposition of the two main branches in an English department--the linguists and the literati. Tolkien made his bones, academically, doing the tedious, precise, mind-boggling technical work of composing entries for the Oxford English Dictionary, authoring a dictionary of Anglo-Saxon, and mastering the philology of Old English, Old Norse, Middle English, Old Welsh. He was a technician, a man for structure and exactitude, and so he spent decades holed up in his garage in Oxford constructing this entire world of Middle Earth where everything fit precisely and logically together.
Enter Lewis, from the "literary" side of the department, a much more freewheeling fantasist who specialized in the gorgeous Technicolor world of medieval poetic allegory. Philology bored him, and so did consistency. He loved being eclectic, at least in fantasy.
Their relationship always had a touchy side that now would be unbelievable in Oxford or almost anywhere else: Tolkien was a ferociously devout Roman Catholic who despised the Church of England, and Lewis, after his conversion from atheism, became a member of that freewheeling and inconsistent faith whose only real organizing principal is rejection of papal authority, the C of E. Tolkien, I think, also hated Lewis's American Jewish (converted to Christianity) wife, who was a divorcee to make matters even worse, and wanted nothing to do with her after Lewis had his late-life marriage. So it was a fraught relationship, but they always respected each other and Tolkien took it hard when Lewis predeceased him.