Singing Until the Midnight Hour

"His dreadful counsel then they took

and their own gracious forms forsook;

in werewolf fell and batlike wing

prepared to robe them, shuddering.

With elvish magic Luthien wrought,

lest raiment foul with evil fraught

to dreadful madness drive their hearts;

and there she wrought with elvish arts

a strong defence, a binding power,

singing until the midnight hour.

 

Swift as the wolvish coat he wore,

Beren lay slavering on the floor,

redtoungued and hungry; but there lies

a pain and longing in his eyes,

a look of horror as he sees

a batlike form crawl to its knees

and drag its creased and creaking wings.

Then howling undermoon he springs

fourfooted, swift, from stone to stone,

from hill to plain - but not alone;

a dark shape down the slope doth skim,

and wheeling flitters over him."

 

J.R.R. Tolkien - The Lay of Leithian, Canto XI? XII?

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"Lenny: 'at the moment, I'd rather have a cup of coffee than self-enlightenment. In fact, if I had it, I would not even know what to do with it'

Bruno: 'Might you try drinking it?'"

Christopher Baldwin back in 1997

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"I said I want to be alone.

I know but I -

Alone means alone

If you need anything, just -

Hellllooooo?!! Allloooone! 

How's he doing?

He said "I want to be alone. Alone means alone. Hellllooooo! Allloooone!""

 

Christopher Baldwin's apparently shriveling speech center in 2021

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Tolkien's mid-stage draft for Beren and Luthien's story from the Silmarillion shows some improvement over his earlier attempts, but concedes much too much function to form - and I mean that literally, as in there is much too much padding, line by line, straining to meter 'n' rhyme an often tedious play-by-play of the various banquets and battles. Still, a few passages of The Lay of Leithian manage to evoke the Silmarillion's drama more vividly than even the eventual prose version.

Admitting my own bias toward skin-changing and the redundancy of that second "batlike" and the "dreadful" madness beat-filler, etc., still, "creased and creaking wings" or "skim and wheeling flitters" illustrate the scene better than a thousand pictures. The pain and longing in Beren's eyes at seeing the realm's most beautiful creature vampirically metamorphosed, by inserting us briefly in his lovestruck viewpoint concisely prompts a figurative indrawn breath, a narrative cusp before the Orphic climax. Such density of imagery in an otherwise overly-verbose epic poem brings to mind the old issue of padding. How wordy is too wordy?

To be honest, I'm more driven to write this having attempted to watch the first few installments of The 4400, one of the many, many attempts by various studios and networks to cash in on the post-X-Men movie superhero craze fifteen years ago. Four episodes into things, while I won't deny it had some potential, it's rapidly degenerating into an incoherent soap opera. In addition to the formulaic politically correct plots, the gratuitous police procedural gloss (sans procedures) and the characters straight out of after-school specials, everyone from directors to actors to editors were obviously ordered to pace the show for the dull-witted masses. You're eased into each and every scene by anxious/sappy/heroic/sad musical cues. Characters telegraph every single gesture and vocal inflection. Just to triple-seal your correct emotional reactions, every plot point gets reiterated verbally at least twice after you've seen it play out. After witnessing what a show like Dark did with a time travel plot a decade later, standard idiot-friendly TV fare like The 4400 feels among other faults excruciatingly slow and ironically enough... repetitive.

 

However, such distinctions are clearer among an individual creator's works. Twenty years ago, Christopher Baldwin's Bruno was an archetypically "talky" webcomic: one panel at a time in which literate, urbane, contemplative talking heads vied for speech bubble space. While he's improved a bit over time at distinguishing his characters' voices (Lenny as I remember was supposed to be a working class small-towner, not that ya'd notice) this has mostly meant relying on dumber characters with a more restricted vocabulary. That newer passage from the recent Spacetrawler re-iteration struck me as portraying the same interaction as Bruno did two decades earlier... except saying less with more words, replacing grudging verbal sparring with sitcom "attitude" the louder and more redundant the better to gratify the audience for noticing an obvious pattern. While I've already acknowledged he's just milking his most profitable intellectual property, there are less insulting ways to do so.

 

Where one cartoonist declines with age, another improves. Michael Terracciano's Dominic Deegan: Oracle for Hire was never exactly the pinnacle of the webcomic field back in the day: indulgent high drah-mah with low humor... yet somehow both ingenuous and energetic enough, dedicated enough to building on its formula to make it work. I've praised the recent sequel's protagonist for avoiding some obvious pitfalls the author had previously been prone to tripping into. Granted it's not all brilliant. He's abusing "artistic" nudity much too desperately to the point of detracting from his work's more legitimate appeal and yes, we get it, the mystery dimension is "a cenotaph" - the only mystery being whether it's dedicated to the demon knight or the alien with the breather. Still, look at this. In a commentary on the merits of tracing (a.k.a. lazy cheating) Mookie states one of his goals with the sequel was to avoid having characters exposit against a blank canvas (a valid self-critique)  by presenting the story through a deaf-mute's viewpoint.

 

Among other issues, his old world-building leaned too hard on generic Dungeons and Dragons gimmicks, with all the incoherence implied. One was never quite sure whether Callan and its neighbouring kingdoms' social structure was that of feudal monarchies or some kind of Renaissance trade network of city states or steampunk magocracy or modern investment economy, from chapter to chapter. Now look at that image with the books again, specifically the covers. He has learned how to do more with less. Stylized, eye-catching covers imply a mature printing industry complete with marketing, which in turn imply a large enough middle class to demand such appeal, as opposed to commissions to aristocrats and churches. An elegant point conveyed without a single word.

 

Do characters sound more realistic when speaking in smaller words, as opposed to sophomoric erudition or archaic bombast? That depends on the information conveyed. If word choice tells you something about their personalities, fine, but monosyllabic babbling for its own sake can't help but feel like filler. And as for painting with words, I find it odd in retrospect that the posthumous prose Silmarillion did not insert more illustrative stanzas here and there from earlier drafts, where their emotive impact would have obviously improved upon the infamously off-putting epic walls of exposition.