Ok, I missed my Tuesday blog release. I was mired in so many unrelated things nothing stood out to me as the topic of the week.
I snapped the above photo this week of my old French notes. When moving to Hawaii in 2008, I was reading War and Peace. (that sucker is LONG) It had letters written in French with English translation. I wrote those in French and English in these notes. Finding that section again made me laugh. I’d forgotten that, and now I can use those to help with my French studies.
That is one of the million little things. Another is a fun topic… student loans. Yes, the student loan date of July 1 affects me too. It is a hot topic in the news right now. I changed my IDR (Income Driven Repayment) plan from SAVE to another (IBR.) I will be talking to a counselor via zoom later this week because his tools vastly exceed my own in understanding the subtleties of how to set the loan up from this point forward. It is one of the few ways the wars of modern American politics affected me directly. The SAVE plan which Biden created, and Trump outlawed was the one I was on. That is going away and is no longer legal, so I chose a different one.
Oh, and I’ve just paid my last payment on my car which feels great! I guess that payment will now be shifting to student debt. I’d been paying my student loan IDR payment amount the entire time even though on forbearance, but the payment will now increase with these new changes.
I’ve also been revising, re-revising, and re-re-revising my accounting and budget systems, trying to prepare since I do not know how these changes to student loans are going to affect my finances. $200 a month? Doable. $500 a month? I may be toast. Connecting with a counselor now helps me act in a more informed way. Like tax counselors, I hope these student loan counselors earn their fees back and then some by saving me from some ‘minor’ mistake which turns into a major deal later. I have a feeling they will. They understand the landscape.
Needless to say, with all this necessary but admittedly not exciting activity this week, I didn’t feel I had a compelling, interesting blog topic… at least not one I particularly wanted to spend even MORE brain space thinking about for this blog.
So, I thought I’d speak to another obsession I have had recently… (A little more interesting if you are a fan.)
The Lord of the Rings…
I’ve been binge reading the series, and watching the movies lately. Since I have been so engrossed in it, I thought I’d spend the rest of this blog on that topic.
I read The Hobbit in high school (around 1982), and Lord of the Rings for the first time in college (around 1987.) I was disappointed Bilbo wasn’t the main character again, but got over it quickly. I have re-read the Lord of the Rings series about 4 times since then, the last time about a year ago.
I watched the movie trilogy, and questions started coming to my mind. The movie doesn’t go into great detail about the history of the Dúnedain. I wondered if the book series would have more. It had a couple of legends of notable couples, and their tragedies. I still came away from the book series not understanding how the northerners and southerners were all ‘kin’ but the northern civilization biologically was so much different than the southern especially regarding the long life spans. I wonder now if there are other books written by Tolkien that explains the origin stories in ways Lord of the Rings did not.
Another curiosity I had was Tom Bombadil. He is in the book series toward the beginning, but is not in the movie series. A curiosity goal in re-reading the Lord of the Rings was to understand if he shows up later in the book series. Specifically, if he contributes to the saving of middle earth some how through the course of the story. He appeared briefly as a nurturing figure to the hobbits but was never mentioned again (that I caught) after the hobbits got to Bree in the Fellowship of the Ring.
I didn’t have an opinion of whether he should have been in the movie. Since his character was of short duration and he was never brought up again, I can see why he wasn’t, but my personal curiosity was how he took the ring from Frodo when Frodo showed it to him and played with it for a while then handed it back. The ring had no affect on him. That was never really explained and I wondered. Even the wizards were affected by and afraid of the ring, yet this minor character had no problem with it at all. I’d love to know THAT origin story.
I’ve just completed watching the movie trilogy yet again. It must make 10 times or so I’ve watched it. I see something I didn’t pick up on each time. Since I’d re-read the book series recently, it gave a new fresh perspective of differences between the two.
My overall comparison of the Lord of the Rings movie series vs. the book series, is the book series reads lighter. In the book series, Tolkien includes a cultural element which is very strong with the elfs but is true for all the groups, which is they make up poems and songs and sing to each other as a primary form of communication.. All groups do that and there are a lot of songs included in the book of that elf, or that dwarf, or that hobbit. It provides a lot of humor, insight and levity in the book. It would be hard to replicate it at the same level in the movie because of the quantity of songs in the book. It is in the movie: The elfs sing. Sam sings, Aragorn sings. However there are many other characters singing in the book. It is a very strong through-line of communication in the books.
The movies on the other hand have a Stephen King meets Rambo morbid vibe that is in the book but not as strongly. The ring wraiths are equally gruesome in both, but in the movie, the battles, the sound effects, the struggle feel much heavier in the movie, maybe because of the sensory overload that comes with watching a movie rather than engaging in imagination through a book. It works in the movies, especially since western culture movies tend to be that way, and it probably helped the popularity of the series. However, I wonder if an elf, or woman, or a person from a poetry/song based culture (like India or Bali) created the movies how they would have been different. Not better or worse, just how would they have been different. Probably not as interesting to our action adventure loving western culture, but maybe more subtlety about the histories, and groups and individual stories would be known.
Well, there is my short take on a very long book and movie series.
Thinking about that is much more entertaining than worrying about student loans, but I will get it all adjusted correctly and life will go on.