Category: Captain’s Log

What to Do?

I’ve been out of work, mostly, since July. I worked just a bit in August, and could have continued for a little bit after that, but the payout from accrued vacation at my old job was more than I would earn regularly for a while, so I resigned and took the payout.

Now it’s October, and I am still unemployed. I had one interview, and a second, for a job that seemed promising, then I was passed over in favor of someone else. Then I had an interview that I never heard back from. Then, last week, I had another interview that seems promising, and will be a good job, but it may not be filled with me, or someone else, until the end of the year. I don’t know that I can wait that long. The second interview for that job is a panel interview, which I have never done before. That intimidates me. But I am also not there yet.

So what do I do? Do I wait on this job, which could be very good in various respects, or do I keep looking? The answer seems obvious: as the proverb goes “never count yer chickens before they hatch” and no job is a job until a contract is signed so I will keep filling out applications and looking for employment.

It is quite disheartening, looking for jobs and hearing nothing, or being given an interview and still not hearing anything. And this has been going on for months now. It depresses me, this job hunting. I’ll have a day ahead of me, and first thing pull out my laptop to scour the web for an opportunity. I spend an hour or two searching, and if I am lucky, I find one job that I am qualified to apply for. So I drop my resume and an application, and wait to hear nothing back. If I am very fortunate, after another hour I’ll find another job and apply to that one as well. Regardless, I don’t stop searching until I find something that I can apply to.

I have lost track of how many jobs I have applied to at this point.

And then, I feel ruined for the rest of the day. I am so emotionally down after applying for work, that I can’t get back up again. I have plenty to do, between chores some days, or working on projects for The Workshop I have over on Patreon, or reading, but I can’t seem to find motivation to do any of these things. The effort required to put myself out into the wide world of work takes all the energy I have.

So what to do? I obviously can’t stop looking for a job until I have one, but I can’t do anything else as a result, or not without extraordinary motivation most days. I am about at my wit’s end. I feel so much Frodo and Sam tramping towards Mount Doom. Can’t go back, nothing left to sustain, and only endless steps upon steps towards an unachievable (seeming) goal. I don’t even have the impetus to sit down and cry, which is what I feel like doing (even assuming I could cry, which is a whole ‘nother thing).

I made the decision long ago on this weblog to not apologize for the content of what I post, and this is no different, though I feel the impulse. This is my life right now, that I didn’t choose, and seeming can’t get out of. This is my reality. Quite honestly, I don’t want another hourly job. I want to be an artist, working on beautiful things, and researching the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien and put what I find into the world. But that doesn’t pay. This upside-down world of runaway capitalism that I was born into won’t allow for people making beautiful things. It crushes such souls beneath the iron feet of commerce. It creates “artificial intelligence” to do these things so that artists can toil in the black coal mines beneath the earth (if they had their way).

Wow. That got dark, none the more so for being fairly true.

So what do do? I wish I knew. For now, I’ll keep trudging. If you want to buy me a sandwich along the way, or help pay bills while I am out of work, please feel free to drop a donation into my PayPal account. I promise to pay it forward if I am afforded the chance, and in the meantime, you will help my wife and I avoid accumulating more debt as we afford essentials with her salary.

I really wish I wasn’t in this position, but I suppose this is what it means to be an adult in this current day and time when one isn’t in a higher position of privilege. Thanks for hanging in with me, and I will try to get back to more upbeat postings when I am able.

Like Elijah

I thought I had written about Rich Mullins before on my blog. I can’t find where, except for one post that is more about a song he covered than about the man himself. I reference him in my book Whiskey Poetry, heavily influenced by his thought and philosophy.

Rich Mullins was a recording artist in the Contemporary Christian Music world in the late 80’s and throughout the 90’s until his death September 19, 1997. He was a complicated man, who frequently went against the evangelical Christian sub-culture that embraced his music and used his songs for their worship services. His death was a sudden automobile accident, an ignoble end for such an authentic person.

I was born and raised in the evangelical Christian sub-culture that embraced Rich Mullins, and his albums were on constant play on my boombox, along with others. I have long been enamored with the poetical and metaphorical content of his lyrics, and the realness of his soul, both of which were impossible to ignore as I sung along. I was touched deeply when I heard news of his death. I was ten years old.

Since that time, my own personal journey with faith has been long and varied. Today I more, or less, have no spiritual aspect to my life, in terms of organized religion. I disbelieve that there is any sort of “god” or even “gods” in existence, given an overall lack of evidence for any sort of extraterrestrial being that cares at all about this planet and the sentient beings thereon. It would seem to me that some sort of not-from-Earth sentient beings must exist, given the incredibly vast nature of the observable universe, but I don’t think any of them are “god” as described by most religious people on this planet.

Rich Mullins was certainly more religious than me, but in contrast to those in my younger world, he was certainly on the fringe. He was completely honest about his struggles with faith, his lack of concrete answers, and his opposition to the status quo of the sub-culture. All my life, I had similar questions, struggles, and opposition, but I was not able to articulate it, nor would I have been comfortable doing so. Christianity has always been core to my family, and it was part of who we were (and who most still are). To go against that as I grew up would have been anathema to our central identity. So I kept my vacillations hidden, with various degrees of success until I arrived in college.

As I disassociated and deconstructed from my religious education and upbringing, I continued to appreciate Rich Mullins’ life and music. It spoke to me, even as I rejected the trappings and teachings that surrounded Mullins’ career. I came to appreciate his honesty more than anything, and like a work of art that depicts things I don’t understand or don’t associate with, but that I nevertheless recognize as supremely artistic, I admire his art. Certainly his poetical lyrics influence my own poetry still today.

Next year will be 30 years since Rich Mullins died. If there were to be a heaven, I am sure it is for people like him, ragamuffins of the world, people that don’t fit into a social construct and who are completely honest about their place in life. I aspire to be as honest and as real as Mullins was. I miss his influence, and his way of being, that radiated outward from his heart to those that he touched through his music. I wish more who claim the same Christianity that Mullins did acted more like him.

One of my favorite of Rich Mullins’ songs, Elijah, speaks of dying and “go[ing] out like Elijah/ With a whirlwind to fuel my chariot of fire” alluding to the biblical prophet and his rapture into heaven. He also speaks of seeing “candlelight in Central Park”, a reference to the vigils held around John Lennon’s death, and one that Mullins should have earned (and did, to an extent, in the Christian sub-culture). This song is inspiring to me. It captures the essence of how I hope to leave this existence when I do, and also resembles how I live, and how Mullins’ lived: “lonely” “bent to the ground””aging” and yet “free”.

Rich Mullins wasn’t a great man, at least how the world traditionally calls men great, but he was among the best I have ever been aware of. I miss him.

Always Free

There was a time when I was thinking about putting exclusive blog posts up on my Patreon, The Workshop by PhilRedbeard, but that never sat right with me. Those of you who are and have been reading my blog consistently should never have to pay for access to what I write, unless it’s a book or something, but chances are you will read at least some part of what ends up in a book here first anyway.

Therefore, I have retired the Dear Readers tier over there on Patreon and replaced it with a Shutterbug tier that will include my toy photography instead. If anything of that intrigues you, feel free to head over to Patreon and give me a free follow, or sign up for a support tier.

Anyway, this is my promise that whatever I write will be here on philredbeard.com, and will always remain free.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for your support. It means everything to me.

Patreon Launch Day

Hello, friends.

I have launched a Patreon, The Workshop by RedBeard: https://www.patreon.com/cw/theredbeardworkshop

This is a place to get exclusive access to anything I create, and that is also a place where exclusive blog posts will live (via the Dear Reader membership tier).

I am going to begin a series called “RedBeard Reviews Old Stuff” which is exactly what it sounds like, a place for me review things (movies/music/tech/anything) which isn’t brand new, that may have even been available for decades or longer.

I am also going to revisit my series I posted on this blog, Star Wars: Deconstructed, in which I break down the prequel trilogy from a literary perspective. This series has been begging for a revisit for a long time.

Finally, my poetry and short stories will move to Patreon. Want to keep reading my written art? Join up.

But, BUT, but…this blog will continue!! My random thoughts, posts about mental health, baseball, other topics, will still be here and will always be free.

Thanks for reading, and please consider becoming Dear Readers over on Patreon.

Hiatus

Hello, friends.

I’ve not written since the end of May, and here it is mid-August. What started as a brief break between posts has stretched into an unintentional hiatus, for which there are several reasons.

I found out shortly after that final May posting that I would be losing my primary employment. That existential, though quite real blow sidelined me mentally for a while. Then, I was using most of my free time to search for new employment. Sadly, until today, there hasn’t been much luck in that search. Between the psychological despair and the physical searching, I haven’t had much bandwidth remaining for writing. I remain in suspended animation, as it were, despite some recent developments, which I will now explain.

I have a job interview this afternoon. The firm is a tax firm; the job is analogous to what I have already been doing the past four plus years. I would jump from part time to full time, with a boost in pay and benefits, albeit with a boost in commute as well. I would hope that the interview goes well, in that I would be offered the job. But that doesn’t immediately alleviate the suspense: I don’t know how much the new job would require, mentally, nor for how long it would require it.

I would love to say that I will soon be able to jump back into regular writing, certainly, I have plenty of things to write about, but I don’t know if that is realistic at this point. I will know more after the interview this afternoon, hopefully, but an offer could be days away if, indeed, it is to be offered at all.

This leads to the second reason that I am on hiatus: depression and general malaise. I haven’t felt very well recently, partly due to the job loss, and partly due to circumstances, and partly due to my mental health. So many fun things to contend with! All it really means is that I haven’t felt up to writing lately. I do now, probably buoyed by the pending interview, and also due to a bit of unexpected free time this morning (as I write).

I thought I would pop in to let you know what is up, that I am not gone, and that I will be back, but I can’t say when. I have plenty of exciting ideas in mind, both for the blog and for other ventures, so please do stick around. I’ll be back!

The Heart of AI

It seems like everyone wants to talk about AI in recent times, and, well, I am no exception. In my current job, I have been tasked to come up with some guidelines and rules related to the use of Large Language Models and Generative Algorithms, or what is collectively being called Artificial Intelligence.

This AI is far from what I was promised as I read the science fiction and speculative fiction of the Golden Age of such genres. Robots, smart technology, and computers were promised that could alleviate much of the drudgery of everyday work and management, leaving humanity free to focus on other pursuits: art, society, and the betterment of all mankind.

In practice the tech bros, that are celebrating what they call Artificial Intelligence, are using their slurry-bots to unemploy large segments of certain populations, while consuming more than their fair share of energy and water. In fact, what they have done is not to give us true AI, in that while certainly artificial, these LLMs and generative platforms are more akin to kitchen blenders for human-generated thoughts than anything else. Whatever this technology is, it certainly isn’t intelligent: it is prone to massive hallucinations and errors and flat out fantastical results (in that the results are disconnected from any reality we know and share).

Anyone who knows me knows I am as early an adopter of new tech as I can be. I love getting new and improved gadgets, and figuring out how they fit into my life and workflow. But with this “AI” I haven’t been. I have only used ChatGPT in very brief, and have eschewed the entire industry as best as I can. Why? Why am I a hater of “AI”? Mostly because it is a sham, and a façade, of what intelligence is all about. The robots of my stories could reason, could function independently, and could learn. They could grow beyond their base programming, and become something more than the sum of their parts. That is what intelligent beings do, after all. They imbibe experience and churn out new things.

This “AI” though? All it does is take exactly what you give it, parse it into tiny bits, and recombine it. Ask anyone who knows about this tech, and if they are honest, they will tell you that is all it can do. An image generator is taking millions of photos of sunsets that it was given, usually through theft of intellectual property, and gives back an amalgamation of them all in a single image. What it can’t do is generate a completely new image of a completely new sunset. The former is a kitchen blender making you a shake, the latter is intelligently understanding what a sunset is, and making one from scratch. Rinse and repeat for text, or video, or anything else these platforms promise to “create”.

And that’s my fault with the machine. It is all artificial and no intelligence at all.

Beyond that, these weapons (make no mistake: they are not tools) are destroying the next generation’s ability to learn, to think creatively, and to learn. I am well aware that this argument has been made about many technologies before, and to a certain degree, this argument is true and false. Consider this: I have no idea how to care for, ride, or utilize a horse for pleasure, transportation, or work. Zero equestrian skills at all do I hold. This “new” tech of the horseless carriage, or “car”, has completely destroyed, for me, horsemanship. Arguments can be made as to whether or not this is a good or bad thing, but owning a car means I know nothing about horses. Now, I can still learn about horses if want to, but I don’t need to. This argument is true in that the technology of cars has phased out the millennia old technology of horsepower (largely).

However, this argument is false in that horses are no longer necessary for transport or work (in most regards), so I don’t need to know about them. Thank the stars for mechanics, because a car would be useless to me the moment it broke down since I only know how to drive them, not repair them, but that is a lack of knowledge that I could rectify if I needed to. I could learn how to repair my vehicle’s engine and structure, but I chose not to. So far, that has only resulted in me spending a bit more money, and nothing else. Machines have done away with many older technologies. Again, the morality of this is not what I am addressing here.

Back to generative “AI” for a moment: what technology is this seeking to replace? Unfortunately, there isn’t an older, now outmoded tech that is superseded by AI. What is being made obsolete, in some circles and for some generations, is humanity itself. And no, I don’t think that is hyperbole. A friend of mine was celebrating that she wrote a song using AI this morning. The truth is, she didn’t. AI doesn’t know what a song, or music, really is. Only humanity, the progenitor of such things, knows what a song or music is. What my friend did was have an algorithm take an idea (that my friend thought of) and give her back a junk food shake of anything it had tagged as “song” or “lyrics” or “music” without actually knowing what those things are.

Another example: ask an image generator for a picture of an apple. Mostly you’ll get something red or green that looks vaguely apple-ish. (Assuming we are talking the fruit. We could be talking about the tech company…and you hopefully begin to see part of the problem already). Now, suppose I went into the code of the image generator and re-tagged everything related to fruit:apple to blue:sphere instead. Now, the generator would spit back images of vaguely apple looking things that would be blue. In very basic terms, this is all the generator can do. It only “knows” what it has been “told”. It cannot learn what an apple is in any real sense through experience either. I tell it blue spheres are apples, that is all it will ever know unless I tell it different. You could set up a web cam and a microphone in an apple orchard and plug it into a computer and leave it running for an eternity, but unless I tell that computer what an apple is, it will never know though it can “see” and “hear” all about the growing apples for itself.

Back to humanity. Students, professors, administrators, and many others are learning through what we have told them is the shortcut to their work: AI. They are replacing their own original and creative thought with this computer gobbledygook. It may be highly sophisticated, it may be greatly illusionistic, but at heart, in reality, it is a sham and a flim-flam. And really, pay no attention to the billionaire behind the curtain profiting through laying off half his workforce and making even more money by selling you an automaton that can only exist within very narrow parameters. What these students, and others, are doing is exchanging real learning for nothing. When they, students in particular, leave the bubble of school and are thrown into the real world, they will be largely left to flounder because they haven’t learned, they have thrown prompts into a computer and turned in the results. Nothing has gone into their minds, been understood, and come out the other side with their own imprint on it. If/when the AI bubble bursts, they will be left to learn for themselves, and most, I fear, will not be able to for a long while.

Heck, if all cars suddenly stopped working tomorrow, I couldn’t get to work because I don’t own a horse, have no idea how to ride it, and can’t care or feed one anyway. I’m stuck until I find a horse and learn those things. A person is stuck until they actually learn something that AI short-circuited for them previously.

Another side of this is that what is being replaced is not just term papers and reports and briefs. It is art, and music, and literature: the very things that make humanity worth living. Why do I connect so strongly with Emily Dickinson’s poetry? Because she was a human who lived and experienced life, and no matter how removed we two are, there is an understanding between us because I, too, am a human who lives and experiences life. A computer, no matter how advanced the algorithm, does not live and does not experience. We have, as Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, recently said “Actual Intelligence”, and what a profound and deceptively simple insight that is. Tell a computer the dictionary definition of “insight” and never in eternity will it give back what Woz gave the world in an instant (or however long it took him to cogitate his speech).

Maybe I should learn to ride a horse. At least then I would have a relationship with another living creature, instead of a steel and fiberglass cage that takes me places.

Actual intelligence is the ability to generate a poem from feeling, a song from beauty, a book from insight, or a painting from imagination, or dare I say, a report about how work is going that actually has insight. No computer can do those things at all. Blenders in data centers is all we have right now. Please, put down the blender and experience the world and then communicate to me, however you can, in your own way, what you have experienced. Don’t put artificial intelligence between us.

Not What I Thought

I am in the middle of taking a week off. I had a few days of vacation time saved up, and decided to take it at the end of the semester, just for me. I have been scattered, distracted, and not feeling like myself. My focus has been nonexistent, my will power has been weak, and I needed a break to come back from the brink.

One thing that has preoccupied my thoughts recently is how things ended with my ex. She cut me off entirely since we parted and won’t talk to me, and not being able to talk to her as I am now, and acknowledge who I was then, has weighed on me more than I would like. I actually don’t need anything from her; I guess she doesn’t need anything from me, either. But I’m a decent enough person to want to apologize.

I opened Instagram before powering up my MacBook to write, and immediately saw a post from Wil Wheaton, former Star Trek: The Next Generation star, and current author and audiobook narrator. He’s someone who I admire greatly, who has been through the worst that life can offer and come out on top. I view him as an older brother in terms of wisdom and who I aspire to be. Wil was talking about a time when he screwed up really badly, and wasn’t able to make it right. The only thing he could do was decide to never do that thing again, and forgive himself. Boy, did that strike a chord with me.

My muse and erstwhile father-figure of sorts, Adam Savage, says something similar in his book Every Tool’s a Hammer, in which he relates a story about when he was hired to build a set for a friend’s student film. Adam totally and royally mis-managed the budget and build, and lost that friend forever. When Adam asked his dad about it, he was told something along the lines of what Wil Wheaton just said: you can’t make it right, but you can determine to never do that again.

I hear what they are saying. I can’t make things right with my ex, but I can determine to never be that person to anyone in the future. And that realization is as if a weight has rolled off my shoulders. Who knows? Maybe someday when we are old and far removed she and I will encounter each other again and have words, but I don’t need that anymore. For the first time in thirteen-ish years, I am at peace about that situation. She can go her way, and I can go mine. I feel light.

This week has been good for a reboot in other ways, too, while not going exactly as planned. I thought I would wake peacefully, maybe read for a while, work on creative projects, and relax with a movie or baseball game in the evening. What I have actually done is attend to a bunch of things that have needed doing. I have also gotten some writing in; I have read a little bit; and I’ve been totally relaxed along the way. This week has allowed me to come back to the core of who I am, which is a lifestyle and a centering, not a set of activities.

Perhaps that is what I have had wrong, and been missing the past few months: a realization that who I am is more important than what I do (in terms of personal activities). I need to be calm, careful, and cognizant each and every moment. That is where my centering and my focus originates from. I can’t control other people and how they feel about me, even if I am being the gentlest and kindest person I know how to be. My will power comes from being mindful, each and every moment. Being able to take a few days from work has helped me to find my calm again, and remember my mindfulness routines.

I do have another two days of break before the weekend and then a return to work, but already I feel that I have “accomplished” what I needed: physical rest and a mental reset. This week wasn’t what I thought, but it’s been exactly what it should have been. I am content.

The Trouble with CV

I played a few games of Scrabble last night, and in one of them I drew both Cs and both Vs. I really don’t like drawing C or V.

Welcome to the next installment of my Scrabble series. Search for the “Gaming” category to read through the other posts. I am offering my tips and tricks for playing the game of Scrabble, a game I enjoy quite a bit.

The trouble with C and V is that there are no two letter words in the Official Scrabble Dictionary (in the entire English language?) that involve either C or V. Since in the game of Scrabble one must connect each new play to a previous word played, this is most easily achieved by way of a two letter word. When C or V are involved, this is impossible.

Perhaps this is why C and V carry a higher point value, with C carrying 3 points and V worth 4. However, that value seems like it should be higher considering the difficulty in playing these letters. Consider X and Q, or J for instance. Q is 10 points; X is 8; and J is 8. Even K is 5. And all four of those letters connect easily to at last one vowel, some more than one, to form two letter words, and yet X Q K J are all worth more than the pesky V and C. I wonder why that is?

As the “big” letters (and we will throw in Zed here) Z Q X J K have surfaced, let’s take a moment to consider them. Not only are they the highest point-value letters, but they, in contrast, play very well with two letters: Za, Qi, Xi/Xu/oX/aX/eX, Jo, oK/Ka. In fact, these letters are a dream to play! Perhaps their high point value comes not from the fact that they are difficult to utilize, but that there are only one of each of them. That certainly is plausible, but also a bit of an unfair advantage, given their ease of play over C and V. Were I to design Scrabble, I might rank K and J a little lower in point value and C and V a little higher. I don’t know. Given that Scrabble has been around a long time, and stands the test of that time, maybe it is fairly well balanced after all.

What do I do, then, when I draw C or V? I stop all other strategies and try to play them as quickly as possible, in any way possible. Rarely do I exchange a rack of letters to avoid V or C (after all, they could easily come back next draw!). They are playable and do yield a few points, so what I tend to do overall is to take a hit in points and play a simple 3- (but often 4-) letter word to get rid of the offending C or V in a productive way, even if a small one.

When I can manage it, “vice” is a great way to play both letters at once and be done with them. The word “cove” is a bit better as it can become “coven” but “vocation” is almost impossible to play (due to the 8 letters required). Best to stick with shorter words and move on to better letters that yield higher points and easier plays.

Maybe you’ve got a few sneaky C or V words you can share that I haven’t come across that are great for scoring more points, or playing both letters at once. I’d love to hear about them! Drop a comment and let me know. For myself, I breathe easier when I don’t draw V or C, and can move right to clever plays and scoring higher points.

The Soul of an Octopus

Book Review: The Soul of an Octopus (2016), Sy Montgomery

Though ten years published at this point, this book is new-to-me. It was recommended either by Adam Savage or Wil Wheaton, I honestly can’t remember which (it might have been both, as both have a keen interest in octopuses). At any rate, I picked it up from Amazon, and it has been on my shelf for a while. A few weeks ago, I had opportunity to pick it up and read it.

I had a morning where I was going to be waiting for my Rav4 to get new brakes, and I decided to eschew my iPhone in favor of a book. Enter: The Soul of an Octopus. I have been fascinated by the octopus for a while, having known somewhat about them: their camouflaging ability, their eight limbs, their extraordinary intelligence, and so on. I wondered if they could be a species of stranded extraterrestrials caught in Earth’s oceans long ago, unable to leave again, instead of an evolved animal from home. I was excited to read Sy Montgomery’s book, which promises to look beyond the freakish exterior into the octopus’s inner being.

I was disappointed, not just in the florid prose, but in the subject matter. Maybe the gentle octopus is something more than they seem to be, but Montgomery’s characterization of them showed them to be little more than a great ape, or usually perceptive dog, or perhaps a corvid. Intelligent? no doubt. Strange? undoubtedly. Unique? certainly. Soul-having? I don’t know. Mostly the book, rather than a philosophical tome or deep exploration of psyche and psychology, was little more than Montgomery’s own narrative of visits to four particular octopuses at Boston’s New England Aquarium, as well as a recounting of her journey to become scuba certified in order to visit octopuses in their natural oceanic environment.

The story Sy Montgomery told was interesting enough to hold my attention, someone what more loosely than an octopus will hold hands with anyone brave enough to reach into their tank at the aquarium (apparently), but she failed to really delve into what it means to have a soul, or some affect more than the physical. She barely started to solve the puzzle of whether an octopus is en-souled or any more than just being a bizarre creature. At most she asked “is anyone in there?” while gazing into an octopus’s eyes, but beyond that surface she did not really delve.

I am impressed by an octopus’s ability to solve puzzles (but so can ravens), or to display (seeming) emotions (but so can dogs), or to use tools (but so can some apes), yet there was nothing more ethereal about them than that, at least from Montgomery’s descriptions. She certainly rhapsodized long on the individual octopuses she met, and gushed about them in a somewhat over-the-top lovingly way, but I couldn’t help but feel she was failing to communicate to me, her most recent reader, that there was anything more, well, special about an octopus than an admittedly extraordinary animal. I actually lost some wonder about the cephalopods, and no longer think of them as all that alien.

I really wanted to be dragged into the depths of intellectual debate with this book, but it didn’t happen. I was left bobbing on the surface of emotionality and meager description, rather than submerged into salient soul-pondering. The bonds we as humans form with fellow animals is appreciable, and I have no doubt that Montgomery formed bonds with the octopuses she visited. But did she have a soul connection with any of them? I remain skeptical. And that saddens me.

Does an octopus have a soul? I don’t know that I have a soul, really, though there seems to be something more than just physicality about me, but from this memoir, I am even more doubtful that an octopus has any more of a soul than does any creature. I wanted to believe, but her book didn’t create an environment to foster such belief. An octopus is a wondrous animal, but to really journey into who one is will take more than what Sy Montgomery’s Soul of an Octopus can provide me.

An Unexpected Song

I am working on an academic project at the moment: a paper which I hope to present at my school’s academic fora in the late Summer of 26.

Ever since I was 12, I have been fascinated by the stories of J.R.R. Tolkien, and a quick perusal of this blog will bear that out with allusions and posts about his works and derivations thereof. I even have two tattoos that are Tolkien related. It should, therefore, come as little surprise that my academic paper is about Tolkien’s first major work, The Hobbit.

What may be surprising is the fact that I am writing this paper for no credit whatsoever. While I may pursue publication at a later date, for now this is my own personal exploration. I would take classes related to Tolkien for credit, but at the university for which I work, and where I will be presenting, there is a dearth of literature courses, and as far as I can find, there is a wider dearth of Tolkien studies in academia in the States. It is treated as one-off subject matter on the Inklings, the famous writer’s group that contained Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, among others, or for a curiosity. Serious scholarship on Tolkien I haven’t been able to find outside of one unaccredited college. I may have to dig deeper, and if you know of any degrees centered on Tolkien, please, let me know. I would love to study formally.

In the meantime, I am taking what research and writing skills I have at about what is equivalent to a beginning Master’s level education in the US, and apply it to my own reading of Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

This first paper (yes, there are more planned!) will focus on the songs in The Hobbit. When I first read The Hobbit, my only exposure to songs in stories was through the few songs in Frank Herbert’s Dune, a specialty of character Gurney Halleck, or the songs in Brian Jacques’ Redwall series. Songs and music simply wasn’t a frequent thing in the literature I encountered. Therefore, it was somewhat surprising to me. Why would an author include music, or songs, in a medium that cannot convey sound? What do they add to the narrative? Why have so many of them? These are all questions I hope to answer in my research paper on The Hobbit.

So far, I haven’t actually written a word of my paper, though I am thinking quite a bit about it. I am also reading a wide variety of books, articles, and thought that I have found, little though there is, on songs and music in literature in general and Tolkien’s work specifically. I have quite a few ideas, and even a direction in which to go.

In all, I am excited to be on this unexpected journey with Bilbo Baggins, Tolkien, and to be exploring the world of music both inhabit. More to come, and I may even post excerpts (or the whole paper?) here as I go. Stay tuned!