An ancestor of mine, Henry Boyd, was one of the first translators of the works of Dante into English. There is a set of his work (Dante’s Divine Comedy) at the University of Hull. I haven’t read it in years - I will probably create an ebook version of it that suits my Nokia e61 phone (and I will make a note to blog on this) and read it in the wee small hours of the morning when I am free to think Deep Thoughts 
Archive for May, 2007
I’ve been a Tolkien fan for at least 30 years. I read my omnibus volume of Lord of the Rings until it quite literally fell to pieces. Like many Gen-X geeks I played Dungeons and Dragons and related RPGs. I read The Hobbit to my own children when they were little. I loved what Peter Jackson did with the movies, even though he changed some bits. I delighted in showing the extended versions of the movies to my partner Helen as her introduction to Tolkien.
So… the Tolkien legacy has produced another book, and I rushed out and bought it. I’ve owned The Children of Hurin for a couple of months now, and, well, I’ve tried three different times to get into it, and I find it boring. This is some kind of heresy I know, and I’ll probably burn for it, but I can’t understand how tedious it is. Maybe I’ve changed, and I suffer now from nerd ADD where there is a minimum necessary attention grab. I don’t know, perhaps {{shudder}} I have outgrown one of the greatest novelists of the last hundred years. So I re-read some of Tolkien’s other books, and even the obscure work like the Silmarillion was better than The Children of Hurin.
Perhaps, at the end of the day, The Children of Hurin was not published as a separate work because J.R.R. just didn’t think that it was good enough.
In Meta-thinking and the thinking information architect I wrote about Yaro Starak’s meta-thinking concept - thinking about the way people think. Wandering through a large shopping center at lunchtime today with Matthew Hodgson I thought for a minute and made the following observation: that to most people, deep thought is something that they only do at times of crisis - births, deaths, and marriages - and that in this, it was like Church for the average Australian. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with religion at all, and I have several deeply religious friends in different walks of life. But to the average Aussie (and indeed probably the bulk of people in the world), religion is something that they turn to at need rather than through a deep sense of commitment. Thinking is probably the same - in Australia we rarely tend to lift our thoughts beyond the end of the day - the next beer, the next intimate liaison.
Is this a bad thing? For most people, most of the time, probably not. The Thinking of Deep Thoughts can get in the way of the Doing of Great Deeds (and indeed, doing great deeds is a good way of being encouraged to do more of them). Thinking about life after life can get in the way of living itself. Thinking about the nature of good and evil can be self-destructive.
Someone needs to Think the Deep Thoughts. We need to think about this
I’ve stopped posting on most of my other blogs because of the impending facibus.com server move. Well, it is still impending, several days later, because my old hosting provider can’t make up my mind if they’re going to be helpful or not. Multiple DNS change requests, multiple emails over the last four days, live chat requests with their call center, and they are still refusing to say why they won’t help, let alone when they will. Apart from room to grow, this is the main reason I’m abandoning them. They are ineffective.
It’s prompted me to look for a better alternative in hosting providers - and I think I’ve found it. I won’t recommend them yet, because it is early days in the new “relationship”, but the first indications are good - a four hour or less turnaround on the three support emails I’ve sent so far. I’m not needy, there were just things that I wanted to know about how things worked, and their response has been encouraging.