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Top Empowered Patient Tips for 2010
Being an empowered patient means doing more than the bare minimum. It means taking an active part in your own health care.
Over the past year, we've brought you the extraordinary stories of ordinary people who took health problems into their own hands — from a young girl who diagnosed her own condition in science class, to a wife whose memory of a disco tune saved her husband's life.
Your actions, however, don't have to be extraordinary: It's often the little, everyday things that mean the difference between a good health care experience and a bad one. Several common themes run through the stories of the people we've profiled. Here are the top lessons that emerged that can help you to become a more empowered patient in 2010.
Special coverage: Empowered Patient
1. Don't believe everything you hear (get a second opinion)
"Getting a second or even third opinion is critical, says Dr. Angelo Cuzalina, president-elect of the American Academy of Cosmetic Surgery (AACS). "The extra effort and additional consultations will undoubtedly educate you further… which is always self-empowering."
2. Ask a ton of questions
You've heard the phrase "there's no such thing as a stupid question," and experts couldn't agree more.
To make sure you get all of your questions answered:
- Take a list with you. Let's face it, doctors are often rushed these days, so it's up to the patient to be as prepared as possible. One good rule of thumb is to write down your questions beforehand, and take them with you. This can save both you and the doctor time.
- Schedule time for questions. When possible, try to schedule an appointment that gives you enough time to get all of your questions in. "Tell the receptionist you'd like an extended session," recommends Dr. Linda Reid Chassiakos of the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, adding that "many providers set up longer visits at day's end where you can have their uninterrupted attention." Once you're there, get the stuff that's really troubling you out of the way first. "If you save the questions about the burning pain in your groin for a 'by the way' at the end of the visit, there won't likely be time to address your real issue fully."
- Be prepared for answers. Asking the right questions is great, but it's equally important to be prepared for the response."When the visit concerns a potentially serious problem, anxiety, fear, disbelief and denial are omnipresent … the chance of you hearing exactly what the doctor says and remembering what you are supposed to do about it are slim," bioethicist Art Caplan says. He suggests bringing along someone you trust to be a second set of ears; if no one is available, bring a tape recorder and ask the doctor for permission to record what you are being told.
3. If you are going to use the Web, search smart
According to research from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, eight out of 10 Internet users have searched the Web specifically for health information.
The Web is a wonderful resource for any empowered patient, but it can also be a pit of misinformation. "Remember that anyone can create a Web site about 'health' or 'medical treatments,' " says Dr. Rhonda Medows, commissioner of the Georgia Department of Community Health.
On the other hand, a proper search can render information that is useful, even cutting-edge. "Read medical literature to learn the documented facts about your procedure of interest," advises Cuzalina of the AACS. "It's worth it when you get facts that are supported by empirical evidence."
Here are some tips for surfing for health information on the Web:
- Check your URL. Dr. Jennifer Shu, a pediatrician and Living Well expert for CNNHealth.com, says it's best to narrow your search to specific URLs. "Look for sites that end in .gov, .org or .edu, which generally provide credible information." But don't just stop there. Shu says that if your Internet research turns up something interesting or useful, share it with your doctor. "When patients do this in my office, I can confirm the information they have is medically sound, or suggest other sites that may be either more accurate or easier to understand."
- Protect your privacy. "Health insurance is a very personal transaction, so don't give out personal information," says Sande Drew, a patient advocate and consultant for Ehealthinsurance. She says to look for sites that allow you to initially search anonymously, prompting you to enter only your ZIP code, date of birth and gender.
- Compare and contrast. In many instances, you can check prices, hospital ratings and what services are offered online before your visit. "When a serious medical condition or emergency occurs, customers typically rush to the closest hospital, which may not be the best hospital," says Dr. Archelle Georgiou, president of a health care strategy firm in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Web sites such as Hospital Compare, My Health Compare, Health Grades and Ucompare Health Care allow you to compare hospital quality and patient satisfaction. Knowing your preferences in advance can help you decide quickly how to proceed if you ever need to rush to the emergency room.
4. Free and discounted care is out there
"In today's tough economic times, everybody is bargain hunting, trying to save pennies here and there," says UCLA's Chassiakos. But beware of scams, she warns. "If a bargain is too good to pass up, be prepared that there may be a catch."
Here are some ways to find dependable help:
- Pay what you can. The Department of Health and Human Services provides assistance through federally funded health centers. You pay what you can afford based on your income level. The services include everything from preventive care to dental work. Click here for more information.
- Find an advocate. When you get laid off and lose your health insurance, you may need someone in your corner. Several groups specialize in helping people find affordable insurance and free care, including: Coverage for All, Ehealthinsurance, Healthcare Advocacy, Patient Advocate Foundation and Patient Services Incorporated.
- Get prescription drug help. If you can't afford health insurance, or if your insurance doesn't include good prescription drug benefits, look for $4 generic drugs at many major supermarkets and drug store chains. Also, your state may offer a discount drug program. You can also check these private groups that offer prescription assistance: Chronic Disease Fund, FamilyWize discount drug card, HealthWell Foundation, Needy Meds, Partnership for Prescription Assistance, Rx Assist and Rx Hope.
- COBRA. If you're voluntarily or involuntarily laid off from your job, or if you experience a large reduction in work hours, you may be eligible for COBRA, a program that allows you to keep your employer's insurance. But there's one big catch: You have to pay the premium in its entirety, which can sometimes be upwards of $1,000 per month. As part of the congressional stimulus package passed earlier this year, people who involuntarily lost their jobs can have the government pay 65 percent of their COBRA premiums. Several rules apply. For more information, go the Department of Labor's Web site.
5. Paying attention can save your life
You know your body better than anyone else. If your gut tells you something just isn't right, then listen to it.
Read more on how important it is to listen to your instincts
Here are some other ways paying attention can make a difference:
- Know your medications. Keeping track of what medications you're taking is crucial. Medows, from the Georgia Department of Community Health, recommends writing a word or two on the bottle to remind you of what the medication is for. "Life can get too complicated to depend on memory alone to keep track of everything," Medows says.
- Track your progress. If your treatment involves a prescription, change of diet or physical therapy, make sure you understand what you have to do each step of the way before you leave the doctor's office. "Clear communication is always a challenge. It's even harder when the stakes are your health," says Caplan, the ethicist. Write down the steps and keep track of how long before you should see improvement and when you should schedule a follow-up appointment.


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The Defense Department has kept up its immense purchases of aviation fuel and other petroleum products from BP even as the oil company comes under scrutiny for potential violations of federal and state laws related to Gulf of Mexico well explosion, according to U.S. and company officials.
President Obama said last month that the company's "recklessness" in the gulf contributed to the disaster, and he promised that BP will "pay for the damage." Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said on June 2 that Justice Department lawyers were looking into possible violations of civil and criminal statutes. "If we find evidence of illegal behavior, we will be forceful in our response," he said.
BP, meanwhile, remains a heavy supplier of military fuel under contracts worth at least $980 million in the current fiscal year, according to the Defense Logistics Agency. In fiscal 2009, BP was the Pentagon's largest single supplier of fuel, providing 11.7 percent of the total purchased, and in 2010, its contracts amount to roughly the same percentage, according to DLA spokeswoman Mimi Schirmacher.
"BP is an active participant in multiple ongoing Defense Logistics Agency acquisition programs," Schirmacher said, without providing details. BP spokesman Robert Wine said he was aware of at least one "big contract" signed by the U.S. military after the oil rig explosion on April 20, involving the supply of multiple fuels for its operations in Europe.
So far, members of Congress have discussed barring BP from any new oil and gas drilling leases, not from fuel sales to the government. Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), who co-chairs the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, said last week that he would introduce legislation to shut BP out of such leases for the next seven years, as punishment for what he described as "serial" legal violations. But Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's subcommittee on oversight and investigations, said in a statement that "the U.S. government needs to look at all possible options when it comes to showing BP, or any corporate bad actor, that a continued culture of cost cutting and increased risk taking will absolutely not be tolerated."
Even before the gulf debacle, the Environmental Protection Agency had begun to explore cutting off BP from all federal contracts — including those with the Defense Energy Support Center (DESC), which buys all fuel for the military services. The EPA plays the lead role in debarment proceedings related to the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, and its probe was sparked by BP's 2006 oil spill in Alaska and a 2005 explosion at a refinery in Texas.
The EPA's deliberations, however, are suspended until the gulf spill investigations conclude, according to an EPA spokeswoman. The agency may decide to shut off federal contracts with specific divisions within BP, or with the whole company "if it is in the public interest to do so," it said in May. Any such action would be meant to punish "environmental noncompliance or other misconduct," it said.
Jeanne Pascal, a former EPA lawyer who until recently oversaw the review of BP's possible debarment, has said she initially supported taking such action but held off after an official at the Defense Department warned her that the Pentagon depended heavily on BP fuel for its operations in the Middle East. "My contact at DESC, another attorney, told me that BP was supplying approximately 80 percent of the fuel being used to move U.S. forces" in the region, Pascal said. She added that "BP was very fortunate in that there is an exception when the U.S. is involved in a military action or a war."
Pascal then sought a settlement to allow contracting with BP while forcing the company to elevate an internal office dealing with health, safety and environmental issues within its corporate structure. She also demanded that the company keep an ombudsman, retired federal judge Stanley Sporkin, whom BP first hired after the Alaska spill but had sought to let go. BP resisted both demands, and the talks were stalemated when the Deepwater Horizon rig sank, Pascal said.
"At some point, debarment attorneys throughout the government need to look at BP's record," she said. "This is one of the wealthiest corporations in the world. . . . Do we want to do business with this foreign corporation, which has a horrendous record of chronically violating U.S. law? You have to look at the overall behavior pattern."
A spokeswoman for the Defense Department, Wendy L. Snyder, gave a different account of the internal debarment discussions. She said the Defense Logistics Agency "informed the EPA that there are adequate procedures and processes to protect the U.S. military missions should EPA determine that BP should be debarred." That claim was reinforced by Schirmacher, who said that "none of BP's current energy contracts are in direct support of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan" and that the department could meet its requirements without BP fuel. But she indicated that the Pentagon had no intention of taking such action in the absence of an EPA decision.
Wine, the BP spokesman, said that although he is not familiar with details of the company's negotiations with EPA, Sporkin's tenure was extended earlier this year until the middle of 2011. He did not challenge Pascal's claim that BP's health, safety and environmental unit had been moved lower on the corporate structure before the gulf spill, reporting to the head of a business unit instead of directly to the top executive. But, Wine said, "what difference does that make?"
"Safety comes through the organization through every root," he said, and remains "paramount in every part of the business."
Several federal agencies have continuing contracts with BP, although none worth as much as the Pentagon's. Since 2008, the Federal Aviation Administration has contracted to spend at least $2.26 million to station weather, communications and aerial surveillance devices on several BP platforms in the gulf, including the Atlantis oil production platform roughly 100 miles from Deepwater Horizon's former location. Critics, including a former BP contractor, have alleged that the Atlantis was built without proper safety controls, which BP denies.
FAA spokeswoman Laura J. Brown said that BP's environmental and legal record was not a consideration in her agency's contracts. The Atlantis platform was selected "based purely on how it would support air traffic," she said.

subset: commoncrawl


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Clean Pro Frederick
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You don't have to worry about cleaning your clogged gutters and downspouts any longer! Frederick Gutter Cleaning is the preferred choice for professional gutter cleaning. Frederick homeowners consistently turn to the property maintenance and cleaning experts at Frederick Gutter Cleaning to provide the highest quality gutter and downspout cleaning services. Our trained specialists thoroughly examine your downspouts and gutter systems to determine how to most effectively clean your gutters. Let our Frederick Gutter Cleaning professionals take care of your clogged-up gutters! We are the best choice for gutter cleaning in Frederick, Maryland and surrounding areas.
Frederick is a city in and the county seat of Frederick County, Maryland, United States. It is part of the Washington–Baltimore combined statistical area. It is located at an important crossroads at the intersection of a major north–south Native American trail and east–west routes to the Chesapeake Bay, both at Baltimore and what became Washington, D.C. and across the Appalachian mountains to the Ohio River watershed. It is a part of the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV Metropolitan Statistical Area, which is part of a greater Washington-Baltimore-Arlington, DC-MD-VA-WV-PA Combined Statistical Area. Frederick's population was 78,171 people as of the 2020 U.S. census, making it the second-largest incorporated city in Maryland behind Baltimore.
Baker Park, Ballenger Creek, Ballenger Creek Park, Bartonsville, Buckeystown, Buckingham Hills, Burning Tree Estates, Butchers Hill, Carroll Creek Park, Carroll Park Manor, Carrollton, Carrollton Ridge, Central Park Heights, Cheswolde, Clover Ridge


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I had arranged to meet up with Salvo Foti. "No problem, no problem, just let us know when you get to the church at Passopisciaro." Passopisciaro is a small town clinging to the north side of the Mt. Etna. Salvo was going to show me around. When I got there he had Maurizio Pagano meet me and bring me in to his property where he lives with his family. There are many things written about and by Salvo and I recommend you to find them and read them(starting with Michael Housewrights wonderful posts) . I went off the grid and wanted to approach meeting the man without prejudice. Is he a god? I don't want to know. Is he a devil? Again, I am not interested. One thing for sure, he is committed to Etna. I am interested in that.
We met at the house in the afternoon, lunch was in full swing. A handful of friends from the north of Italy were in town and they were eating and drinking wine. Salvo pointed to a seat at the table and poured me a glass of white wine, Vignujancu, made from Carricante, Riesling, Grecanico and Minella. The wine struck me like a match, filled me with an intense feeling, the acidity was bracing and it was sharp and delicious. The sirocco was blowing from Africa.
Vegetables, dear, dear vegetables. I was craving them and then Salvo's wife served me a plate of fresh, green, wonderful vegetables. With the local olive oil. Bliss.
A rosé that Maurizio loves was opened, the Vinudilice, a field blend of Alicante, Grecanico, Minella and other minor varieties from the 100+ year old Bosco vineyard. Maurizio talks rapid-fire fast and shifts often in to Sicilian dialect. It's like trying to keep up with Fernando Alonso on a Formula 1 course when you're driving a Fiat Panda. But the wine was the interpreter. Good thing, I loved the rosé.
We tried several reds old and new but I was really soaking in the music, the sun, the conversation, the kids at the table, trying to get a feeling for what kind of person he (and they) are. I'm sure they were sizing me up too.
We ran over to the I Vigneri apartment where we tasted a sparkling Fiano before the friends parted. I stayed behind where I would sleep. Salvo tells me, "We will come to pick you up at 8 for more wine and dinner."
Around 8:45 Maurizio comes around. His wife and daughter were at the pizzeria and he fetched me. Maurizio, I could tell he had something on his mind. He was talking very loud, very fast, very animated and he wanted me to know a little about himself and his passion.
Maurizio is 180 degrees from Salvo is his delivery. He's animated and old-school. But he and Salvo share the same passion.
I liked Maurizio, he showed me his hands. "You cannot make wine by sitting at a desk and punching a button. You need these!" I could tell he was intent on delivering the creed of I Vigneri and I was filled with his passion, his energy. Who needs Etna, when there is Maurizio?
Sunday night – pizza night in Italy. Wine left from lunch, still bright, still fresh. No sulfur, no inoculated yeast. Just grapes.
When I taste wine like this I remember a wine I made when I was 14. Seriously. It was for a science project. Not to belittle anyone making wine with as little as possible manipulation. They just remind me of my first time.
A few years ago I remember trying an Asprinio at Terroir wine bar in NYC. That wine was a better, much better, version of my science project, but I noted the texture, the flavor and the sensation of that wine. And from there on when I tasted a wine, whether it was Gravner or Maule or any number of wines made in that style there was this thread of remembrance.
At the table, Maurizio shifting into 6th gear and deep Sicilian dialect (thinking I can almost follow him) I went into the ditch of my mind and thought a little about this.
I recalled what Dick Peterson told me at the California State Fair Wine Competition, talking about yeast. His point of view was essentially, why not have yeast that you can develop to insure a consistent, predictable and wholesome wine? And while I understand his point and share it often, I wasn't in that territory. I was on the dark side of Sicily, with the lava all around us, and the mountain booming out regularly. In this almost surreal surrounding and this expression of natural wine, I looked at the people and started to think they were from another world. Indeed they are but that doesn't make them weird or ugly or scary. Just different. There's a little Mozart mixed in, a little latent hippie and a lot of connection to the land. Sure these wines are different, but so what? They are delicious, and really that is all that matters to me. But if I may peel off the layer of brain that was working this thought up.
I'm sitting there thinking, "What if they (the natural winemakers) are right and the rest of them (the rest of them being from the boutique to the industrial) are full of phooey?" What if our preconceptions about wine all these years have really been a dead end? Now, mind you, I'm just thinking about this, I'm not having an existential crisis. The mast on my ship will always sail me to the land of delicious wine. I'm very simple (and clear) about that.
Anyway, I riffed on that for a while and then watched Salvo's little white poodle-wookie dog jump after a strip of leather, playing and going nuts over it. Just like that I jumped out of my mind and then back in, because of a dog.
So, the next day we go out to the vineyards. The old one on the high part ( maybe one of the highest vineyards in Europe) planted with all manner of grapes, Grenache, Alicante, Minella, Grecanico, all mixed up like a love in, a grapevine orgy. Old and new, 100 years old with new baby plants, just like life. Not those neat rows (not this vineyard) but life buzzing all around, the neighbor next door hands us some fresh strawberries. They are like drugs, the flavors pop and explode, whirl and whizz all around the palate. Strawberries grown in volcanic soil. I will never be able to enjoy a Driscoll ever again (not that hard to give up, by the way).
On the drive down to the Santo Spirito vineyard, we come around a corner and Etna appears. Instantly Salvo's wife and one of his son's shoot a glance at the top. The mountain's got a hold over them. Me too. "You know Robert Camuto?" Salvo asks me. "Yes," I answer. "He saw the Palmento here at Santo Spirito and loved it. I suggested he call his book Palmento." Good call.
The vineyard is being replanted in sections. Etna behind is growling and fussing today. It's a beautiful sunny day on the dark side of Sicily.
Inside the Palmento with the three lagars and the gravity fed fermentation area, this place is cool and dark and sexy. It's old (1820's) but it is very attractive in an odd sensual kind of way. Still working. I don't know; it just struck me that wine made in here would be interesting. "Come here in October and crush with us. We have a band in the corner, a friscalettu playing the tarantella, and we stomp the grapes. It's a great time. You're welcome to join us." Dear Salvo, music to my drooping ears.
Etna, it's dark, yes. Dark with the stains of blood shed from centuries of grueling toil to fashion a life on this mountain. The wines, how can you not love them? They push all the right buttons inside me (sorry Maurizio) - they strike a chord inside of me (is that better?). I am in love with them. Red, white, rosé, the whole bunch.
Darn you, Salvo and Maurizio.
written and photographed by Alfonso Cevola limited rights reserved On the Wine Trail in Italy
wine blog + Italian wine blog + Italy W


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8 Tips for Safe Testing with Instron® Universal Testing Machines
The following are sometimes overlooked safety features of your Instron test system. Following these procedures can quickly add real safety improvements to your lab. Please read your Manual and Operator's Guide for a full list of all safety precautions and instructions.
1) Set Crosshead Travel Limits
Adjust the upper and lower travel limits on your system every time you change the grips and adjust the crosshead. Bring the crosshead down to the lowest position that you ever want it to go and set the limit at that point. This will ensure the crosshead never goes lower than this position reducing the potential for a crush or pinch hazard, or damages your grips or fixtures.
2) Keep Clear of Small Gaps
Small test specimens often require small gaps between grips and compression platens. Avoid putting your fingers or hands in small gaps when loading specimens. Use tongs, forceps, or a hemostat to load your specimens instead.
3) Slow the Closing Rate of Pneumatic Grips
Instron 2712 Series pneumatic grips have a screw located at the air hose connection that adjusts the speed of air flow to the grip. You can tighten this screw to reduce the speed of closing. Adjust the screw until you find a comfortable closing speed.
4) Use Pneumatic Grip Jaw Face Shields
Jaw face shields attach to your 2712 Series pneumatic grips and cover the gap between the jaw faces to reduce the possibility of a finger pinch. Instron 2712 Series pneumatic grips include jaw face shields for the most common jaw face sizes. Jaw face shields have center marks to assist with specimen alignment in the grips. Check HERE for additional sizes.
5) Reduce the Jaw Face Gap
2712 Series pneumatic grips in 1kN, 2kN, 5kN, and 10kN capacity have thumb screw knobs on the sides of the grip. Use these knobs to bring the jaw faces close to the thickness of your specimen. This reduces the possibility of a finger pinch. See how it's done HERE.
6) Don't Forget the Clevis Pin Clip
Most Instron grips and fixtures attach to the system with a simple clevis pin. In very rare cases, perhaps during cyclic testing, the clevis pin could slide out, risking a grip or fixture becoming unsecured to the system. To prevent this, use the clevis pin clip supplied with your system to make sure this does not happen. It is also important to make sure the check nut supplied with the pin and clevis connection is tightened against the load cell and the base of the machine to prevent unnecessary movement of the grips during testing.
7) Use a Debris Shield
If your testing requires a debris shield, you probably already have one in your lab. However, not everyone uses a shield who should. Composites, plastic flex samples, and cargo straps are a few examples of materials that can explode, shoot out of the grips, or become projectiles upon specimen failure. Personal protective equipment (PPE) should be used in these cases as well as a debris shield. Instron offers optional debris shields for all systems.
8) Use Specimen Protect
Specimen Protect is a standard feature on all current 5900 Series systems, and 5500 systems. Specimen Protect limits the maximum force applied to the test specimen when not running a test. When enabled, the crosshead moves up and down automatically, usually in small amounts, to ensure the force reading on the load cell remains within the pre-set force bounds. It is often used to protect specimens or components once they are gripped during set-up, so as not to apply an accidental tensile or compressive force to them before testing.
Have Questions?
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Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz PC will present an emerging companies boot camp Tuesday, July 16, from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. at the firm's office, 165 Madison Ave., suite 2000. Entrepreneurs, investors, and legal and accounting professionals will share insights on issues facing emerging companies. Registration and breakfast start at 8:30 a.m. Cost is free. Visit bakerdonelson.com.
Cannon Wright Blount will present "Getting Started With QuickBooks: Learn From the Experts" Wednesday, July 17, from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. at the firm's office, 756 Ridge Lake Blvd., suite 100. Cost is $75. Email email@example.com or call 685-7500.
Methodist South Hospital will host a free lunch and learn on stroke warning signs Wednesday, July 17, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. in meeting rooms A and B, basement floor level, 1300 Wesley Drive. R.S.V.P. at 888-777-5959.
Sales and Marketing Society of the Mid-South will meet Wednesday, July 17, from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at The Racquet Club of Memphis, 5111 Sanderlin Ave. Steve Phipps, vice president of LunaWeb, will present "How to Use Your Website to Get More Leads." Cost in advance is free for members and $25 for nonmembers; cost at the door is $30. Visit sms-midsouth.org.
Memphis Mayor A C Wharton Jr. and The University of Memphis will host the Business Growth and Procurement Summit Thursday, July 18, from 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at the FedEx Institute of Technology, 365 Innovation Drive. Attendees will learn about upcoming business opportunities with Memphis governmental agencies. Cost is free; space is limited. Visit http://bit.ly/18dUmkK to register.
The Memphis Bar Association will host a continuing legal education seminar on Veterans Affairs aid and attendance improved pension benefits Thursday, July 18, from noon to 1 p.m. at Evans & Petree, 1000 Ridgeway Loop Road. Visit memphisbar.org.
Memphis Light, Gas & Water Division will hold a board meeting Thursday, July 18, at 1:30 p.m. in the MLGW board room, 220 S. Main St. Visit mlgw.com.
United Way of the Mid-South, the Tennessee Health Care Campaign and Meritan will host "It Takes a Community: Understanding the Affordable Care Act" Friday, July 19, from 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. at Meritan, 4700 Poplar ave. Attendees will learn how to assist people during open enrollment, which begins Oct. 1. R.S.V.P. to email@example.com or 433-4331.


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Think about the world around you. Practically everything, everywhere that is not found in nature is the product of engineering. There are plenty of rewarding opportunities for you to study engineering and start a career as an engineer. NACME lets you explore everything you need to know about engineering. You can learn what kinds of engineers there are, what courses to take to become an engineer, how to apply to engineering colleges, and even how to pay for college. As you go through school, remember that NACME is here to back you on your journey toward becoming an engineering professional.
Middle School Students
If you ever wanted to build a mobile phone, design your own high-tech car, or if you want to work for Google or Apple, then engineering may be the right career for you! High school may seem far away but now is the time to start on your education path. Before you know it, you'll be a junior in high school and it will be time for you to make decisions about your next step after graduation, including which college to attend. NACME's Middle School Programs can open the door to engineering for you.
High School Students
Your future is coming faster than you think. Soon it will be time to think about what career you want to pursue and what college you want to attend. If you ever wanted to build a mobile phone, design your own cool car, or even create a spacecraft to travel to Mars, engineering may be the right career for you. Let NACME's High School Programs guide you as you make your decisions about the careers you want to explore and how to get there. Discover the different types of engineering careers. Find out about four- year engineering programs and scholarships available to help you pay for them.
Community College Students
Community college students represent a large and often overlooked pool who have the potential to work in engineering careers. More attention must be focused on the community college pathway to engineering careers for underrepresented minority students. NACME's 2010 Community College Transfer Study showed that 21 percent of NACME Scholars have transferred from a two-year community college to a NACME Partner University and that NACME transfer students have a higher grade point average (GPA) than traditional four-year NACME Scholars.


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I'm using the particles sample from create.msdn.com/en-US/education/catalog/sample/particle_3d which by default, has all the particles look straight at the camera. I'm trying to modify it so that the particles will still look at the camera but won't rotate up and down. I think these are called billboard particles but I'm not really sure.
This is what I have in the shader now. It seems like its working but the particles are really tiny. What did I do wrong?
float4x4 billboardRotation = CreateConstrainedBillboard(output.Position, CameraPosition, float3(0, 1, 0));
output.Position.xy += mul(input.Corner, rotation);
output.Position = mul(output.Position, billboardRotation);
output.Position = mul(mul(output.Position, View), Projection);
output.Position.xy += size * ViewportScale;


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I am that crazy lady with the screaming kids at the grocery store.
Yes, that shrieking horn-like sound you hear blaring down the aisles? It's all coming from my shopping cart. I love my boys dearly, but we're like a clown car. And for sanity's sake, I will do whatever it takes to get out of there alive fast, even if it means letting my 2 year old eat raw cranberries out of the bag! Don't judge, OK? Tantrums suck.
As predicted, my little guy chewed (and spewed) the berries all over the floor, and while I was cleaning it up I couldn't help but wonder…
Would raw cranberries taste good in a smoothie?
Now, let's be clear- raw cranberries are very, very tart. But when combined with yogurt and banana, I find that the tartness mellows and the overall flavor becomes pleasantly crisp. Any additional tartness can be rounded out with a drizzle of honey. Cranberries are quite the super berry too; they're packed with an incredible amount of antioxidants and are most beneficial when consumed raw and unprocessed (no cranberry cocktail, please). Stock up and get them while they're fresh!
More importantly, the 2 year old palette approves.
If you have any leftover, you can make ice pops for the kids or freeze the liquid in silicone muffin cups (pictured above). Just add extra liquid to reconstitute, or keep it slushy for a healthy sweet treat. My friend Kelly taught me this trick, isn't it cool? It's great for busy mornings and saves on waste too!
You see, I can find inspiration in all things… even spewed cranberries bites only a mother could love ;)
- I like to buy fresh cranberries for this recipe. I freeze some for smoothies, and save the rest for jams, sauces, and these sparkling beauties. Frozen cranberries will also work too.
fresh cranberry yogurt drink
- Yield: 2
Think fresh cranberries are only for cranberry sauce? Think again! Try them in a delicious, creamy yogurt drink. Your tastebuds will be pleasantly surprised.
- ¼ c. frozen cranberries
- 1 frozen banana, sliced
- 1/2 cup plain yogurt
- 1/2 cup apple juice
- 1 tsp. chia or flax seeds (optional)
- 1 tsp. honey, agave or maple syrup + more to taste
Place all of the ingredients into a blender, and process until smooth and creamy. Run the machine for an extra minute or two to break up the seeds (if using). Add additional sweetener to taste. Serve cold.
Keywords: cranberries, smoothies, thanksgiving recipes, yogurt smoothies


text:
A new look at why officers often fire controversial "extra" shots after a threat has ended has been published by an independent shooting reconstructionist and certified Force Science analyst.
Researcher Alexander Jason reports that even under benign experimental conditions brain programming compels roughly 7 out of 10 officers to keep discharging rounds after being signaled to stop shooting. "In a real gunfight, under extraordinary stress and threat of death, an even much higher percentage would likely deliver extra shots," Jason asserts.
On average, additional findings show, officers may "reasonably" fire 6 rounds or more into suspects who initially are standing and then begin falling and who, in fact, may already be mortally wounded. And that's 6 rounds per officer involved in the confrontation.
"Understanding why this occurs can be critical in shooting investigations and in criminal proceedings and civil lawsuits that allege excessive force by officers for firing 'too many' shots," says Dr. Bill Lewinski, executive director of the Force Science Institute. "As Jason explains, so-called 'extra' shots are generally beyond an officer's control. They're more likely to be an involuntary reaction under stress than a conscious decision with malicious motivation."
About 7 years ago, Lewinski performed widely cited experiments in Tempe, AZ, that documented the tendency of officers to "over-shoot," that is to discharge 1 or more additional rounds after perceiving a stop stimulus during rapid-fire discharges. (Click here to read about the study.)
Jason's work, conducted in California, essentially confirms some of the Tempe factors and adds important new elements. His full report appears in the current issue of Investigative Sciences Journal, a peer-reviewed professional quarterly, and can be downloaded free of charge in pdf format at www.investigativesciencesjournal.org. Click on the paper, "Shooting Dynamics: Elements of Time & Movement in Shooting Incidents."
A crime scene analyst specializing in shooting analysis and reconstruction, Jason heads the Anite Group in Pinole, CA, and has been involved in a number of high-profile cases, including New York City's Sean Bell incident in which a prospective bridegroom was killed shortly before his wedding in a fusillade of 50 rounds fired by undercover and plainclothes officers.
Jason, formerly with the San Francisco PD, told Force Science News that he has sporadically conducted research tests related to officers and shooting dynamics across a number of years, but decided to compile and publish a summary of results only after graduating last year from a certification course in Force Science Analysis. He included his latest experiment, performed just a few months ago, on how long it takes a human body to fall from a standing position. This is a subject that the Force Science Research Center is also investigating.
Time to Stop
The core of Jason's paper is his research on how long it takes an officer in rapid-fire mode to stop shooting once he perceives that he should do so.
The test subjects were 32 officers (30 of them male), ranging in age from 23 to 56, with the median age 33. They averaged nearly 11 years' service, but ranged in experience from less than a year to more than 2 decades.
Using the semiautomatic pistols and leather gear they normally wear on duty, they one at a time faced a "hostile man" target at a distance of 5 ft. Hands at their side, they were told to draw and "start shooting at the buzzer. Shoot as fast as you can," and stop shooting when 2 100-watt spotlights pointed at them flash on. An electronic shot-timer provided the start signal and the "stop" lights came on at random intervals, after a minimum of 4 intended shots.
"Most of the officers were unable to immediately stop shooting at the stop signal," Jason reports. Indeed, 69% fired at least 1 "extra" shot, with 17% firing 2 extra and 8% firing 3. Fewer than 1/3 were able to stop fast enough to prevent discharging surplus rounds.
Although the shooters "reacted as quickly as they could," Jason writes, most continued to pull the trigger past the stop signal "because the brain-to-trigger finger impulse was still 'in motion.' " In other words, they could not perceive the light signal, transmit that perception to the brain, have the brain interpret it, and send back a "stop" command before the trigger finger was already proceeding with subsequent shots based on the mental program that had been put in action by the start buzzer.
Benchmark findings by other researchers, cited by Jason, suggest that as a rule of thumb the brain may need about 3/10 of a second to evaluate an incoming stimulus, and then at least 16/100 of a second minimum to "inhibit (cancel) an anticipated action (like firing the next shot)."
Such reaction times, of course, vary among individuals. And if an officer does not instantly see a stop signal because his visual attention is narrowed and intensely concentrated on his sights and/or the target, the delay in responding can be much longer, Jason explains.
Extra Shots on the Street
Jason writes: "It is important to compare and note the different effects on performance between the conditions facing a shooter in [the] safe and relatively stress-free [experiment] with an urgent, life-threatening and highly stress-inducing situation [of] a real-life shooting incident.
"The shooters in the test only had one, clearly defined stimulus to stop firing…. A shooter in a genuine shooting incident will [experience] both a higher level of physiological arousal (stress) and additional choices (Should I take cover? Is the target person no longer a threat? Should I look around for other threats? Are there others who may be exposed to my gunfire?, etc.).
"Human performance research has determined that as the number of choice alternatives increases, reaction time (including perception, decision, and action) will increase. The elevated arousal and multiple-alternatives effect will likely cause the shooter to fire additional 'extra' shots—more than [were] measured in this test study."
Lewinski found in the Tempe study that the more motivated a shooter was to shoot, the longer it took before he was able to stop shooting. "And an officer firing to save his life is about as 'motivated' as a human being can be," Lewinski says. "Once the human dynamics of ceasing shooting under stress are understood, the less sinister the connotation of 'extra' shots generally will seem."
Time to Fall
In his most recent study, Jason measured the amount of time required for a person to fall to the ground from a standing position and explored the implications of shots fired by officers at the falling figure, whether those shots are deliberate or involuntary because of reaction time.
During a confrontation with a standing armed offender, "the most commonly understood and accepted indication that the [suspect] is no longer a threat is when that person either releases the gun from his hand(s) and/or drops to the ground" from being shot, Jason states.
He asked 5 volunteers (4 males, 1 female) to stand "erect with hands out in front, as if holding a gun" and, upon verbal command, to drop to a padded mat "as quickly as possible." This, he concedes, was an imperfect attempt to mimic a rapid collapse ("dropping like a sack of potatoes") such as would occur from "a significant disruption of the central nervous system or sudden loss of consciousness." Genuine collapses from such causes, of course, cannot be tested in an experimental environment.
Thirty-five drops were recorded with a digital video camera and later analyzed on a computer. Timing began "at the first detectable motion initiating the movement of the body" toward the ground and ended when the upper torso was on the mat and "horizontal to the ground."
On average, the subjects took 1.1 seconds to fall down. During this amount of time, Lewinski's research has shown that "4 shots could be fired by an 'average' police officer," Jason writes. "A crumple fall [going to the knees first, then down] will take more time and could result in several more shots fired during the movement. Additional shots could also be fired until the shooter perceives that the person is no longer a threat and is able to interrupt his shooting sequence."
In all, Jason writes, "the total number of [rapid-sequence] shots fired at a person standing then going to the ground could reasonably be a minimum of 6 shots: 1 or more before the [suspect] begins to fall; 4 shots during the fall; 1 or more as the body contacts the floor" during the time required for the brain to recognize and process that the threat has ceased.
"In situations with more than one shooter firing, the total number of reasonable shots could be 6 x Number of Shooters; i.e., if 3 officers were firing simultaneously, then 18 shots (6 x 3) would be expected….etc."
Depending on a suspect's positioning through the fall, at least some of these shots may end up entering through his back, Jason points out, deepening the illusion that the shooting was an unjustified "execution." In his paper, he includes graphics showing how "posterior entries" can innocently occur under these circumstances.
Further Considerations
Apart from the reaction-time phenomenon, a falling assailant may invite continued gunfire because a collapse or crumple can be an ambiguous movement. Falling from incapacitating wounds cannot always be "distinguished from a deliberate tactical maneuver of someone who has decided to go to ground to avoid being shot or to assume a less exposed position while returning or preparing to return gunfire," Jason writes. "Even a mortally wounded person can fall to the ground and fire one or more shots before becoming incapacitated and/or unconscious."
Moreover, because of the nature of bullet wounds an officer may not know whether his rounds are hitting his assailant—another motivation to keep shooting. Jason explains:
"There is no significant momentum or 'push' from a bullet strike. This means that there would be no significant…motion effect of a bullet striking a standing or falling person…. Also…unlike the shootings seen in dramatic films and TV shows, it is most often not possible to visually determine if a shot has actually struck a target person. Bullet entry holes do not project large amounts of blood and the defect in the skin—always smaller than the bullet diameter—may not be visible at all if the shot was fired through clothing, particularly loose or layered clothing."
In short, Jason concludes, police shootings can be complex occurrences. For persons untrained in forensics and the science of human behavior to jump to conclusions in judging an officer's actions can lead to grave misinterpretations and injustices.
"Jason is to be congratulated on his work," Lewinski says. "More research is starting to be focused on street-level law enforcement issues, and with every effort our understanding of the dynamic interplay between officers and their assailants becomes that much clearer."
[Alexander Jason can be contacted at firstname.lastname@example.com or through his website: www.alexanderjason.com]
On a global sidenote…
First attendee from China graduates with Force Science certification
Andy McGrenra has set a Force Science record! A chief inspector with the Hong Kong Police Force, situated on China's south coast, he recently traveled from the most distant point so far to attend a certification class in Force Science Analysis.
McGrenra was one of 52 students who graduated in February from the class hosted for the Force Science Institute by the San Jose (CA) PD, nearly 7,000 miles from his home base. Other students represented 33 agencies from 14 states and Canada. Sixteen departments sent multiple trainees.
Since 1994 McGrenra, originally from the United Kingdom, has been with the Hong Kong police, an agency with more than 27,000 sworn personnel serving a population of 7.2 million. He currently is second in command in the Weapons Training Division, overseeing some 160 full-time use-of-force instructors and 40 civilian staff.
Among his responsibilities is to give expert-witness testimony regarding use-of-force incidents under investigation. The knowledge gained from his new certification, he told Force Science News, is "invaluable. With officers' lives and careers on the line, I feel duty-bound to provide as much information regarding force encounters as I can. There is no excuse for information like this being available and not being gathered and applied."
He hopes also to share his Force Science insights with the independent Police Complaints Council, a civilian group mandated by law to review public grievances against Hong Kong officers.
Police in Hong Kong are involved in 4-6 shootings a year, on average, McGrenra says. In preparing to survive them, the force fires more than 14,000,000 rounds per year in training.


text:
Operation Variation Bodice
February 6, 2012
15 {comments}:
- Rhinestic said...
This seems very useful!
- February 6, 2012 at 10:52 AM
- Lani said...
I have this book at home. It is such a big help to understanding fit of clothes. One of the best books I have found yet!
- February 6, 2012 at 11:16 AM
- Tasara said...
This is awesome! I've been needing something like this for a long time. What book is it from?
- February 6, 2012 at 12:17 PM
- Tasara said...
This is awesome! I've been needing something like this for a long time. What book is it from?
- February 6, 2012 at 12:17 PM
- Unknown said...
So cool ideas here! Thank you very much for sharing :)
http://alicecloset-sewing.blogspot.com/ - February 6, 2012 at 12:45 PM
- Unknown said...
A must for every good seamstress!Great!
- February 6, 2012 at 12:50 PM
- Michelle C said...
I have a book that does this for skirts (and everything else)! It was the best garage sale find ever. "Sewing Made Easy" (new revised edition)by Mary Lynch and Dorothy Sara. The original printing says 1950, but they did four editions throughout that decade. My copy is the 1960 edition - an entire decade of sewing wisdom and fashion documented in one place. It has always been one of my favorite treasures.
- February 6, 2012 at 3:11 PM
- Amber Bockman said...
I was looking at this earlier today, Definitely gives you that AHA! moment.
- February 6, 2012 at 10:05 PM
- Lani said...
This particular page is from Clothing for Moderns by Mabel D. Erwin and Lila A. Kinchen. I have the Third Edition and I think it's actually a textbook. If you find it scoop it up! It has wonderful appendices for sewing notions and patterns. I also have the Sewing Made Easy book. That's a wonderful book as well! - February 6, 2012 at 11:54 PM
- Hannah Jean said...
I just ordered both those books for a steal on Amazon, thanks for the tip!
- February 7, 2012 at 3:00 AM
- Unknown said...
Oh wow - this is really amazing! Thanks for sharing!
- February 7, 2012 at 3:32 AM
- Tasara said...
Thanks Lani, you're the best. - February 7, 2012 at 6:36 AM
Love this. thanks for posting it. I agree...wish there was one for skirts :)
- February 8, 2012 at 7:51 PM
- Vanessa said...
Wow, girl! You can SEW! I was just looking over your tutorials and I'm blown AWAY at your talent! How have I never heard of you before now!?
- March 15, 2012 at 8:56 AM
- Jema said...
We used something very similar in costuming when I was a theatre major in college. We had basically 4-5 bodice patterns, 4-5 sleeve patterns, 4-5 skirt patterns, and mixed-and-matched to get the style/time period we needed.
- April 19, 2012 at 3:58 PM


text:
quinta-feira, 18 de dezembro de 2008
The Two Rings by Edward Haymes
Professor of German and Comparative Literature
Joined the CSU Faculty in 1987 after 14 years at the University of Houston and 3 years at Virginia Commonwealth University. Served from 1987-1994 as chair of the Department of Modern Language. Received B.A. in English from Lynchburg College in Lynchburg, Virginia; the M.A. in English from the University of Virginia, and the Dr. Phil. in German from the Friedrich Alexander Universität in Erlangen, Germany.
Tolkien and Wagner (DC ==> Lecture by Edward R. Haymes, March 18, 2004: The Two Rings: J.R.R.Tolkien's and Richard Wagner's
Before I begin I would like to commend Peter Jackson on an amazing feat. He has managed to make a mass audience sit still longer than Richard Wagner did. If he were to film The Hobbit and add it to his trilogy, his cycle would probably run longer than Wagner's Ring cycle. As it stands, each of his films is about as long as an opera of the Ring and they don't have intermissions.
I'd like to begin by telling a little story.
A greedy, smaller-than-human creature finds a treasure in the depths of a river. He carries it to his underground retreat where he retains it until it is stolen by a visitor from the upper world. He swears eternal hate to the thief. The treasure is, of course, a ring of great power. The ring exerts strange influences on its owners including giving them the ability to disappear. The ring becomes the object of a fatal struggle between close friends or brothers, in fact it seems always to bring danger or death to its owners. A hero enters the fray armed with a reforged sword that had been broken. Various races of humanoid beings attempt to gain control of the ring by magic and by heroism until it is finally brought at great cost and sacrifice back to its origin where it is purified by fire. The last pursuer perishes along with the ring.
Is this the retelling of Richard Wagner's four-part cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen or is it a summary of Tolkien's prose epic The Lord of the Rings. Actually it's both. I have arranged things carefully so that they fit either work, but the similarities and connections between the two "Ring Cycles" go far beyond the superficial plot summarized above. There are also important differences, beyond the obvious one of artistic form: prose narrative versus music drama. Here I would like to look at some of the similarities and differences in hopes of understanding the relationship.
When I first offered this talk, it was designed to introduce Wagner to Tolkienians. My first reaction to the invitation from the Wagner Society was that I would have to turn that around and introduce Tolkien to Wagnerians. But now I am told that many Tolkienians have joined our audience tonight so I guess I am left with both tasks. The disadvantage to all this is that I will be telling most of you things you already know at least half of the time. Please bear with me as I rehearse facts that you already know in the knowledge that some in the audience may not know them.
Before we can discuss the two Ring Cycles, I need to introduce our two authors.
Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig in 1813, almost eighty years before Tolkien, and he died in Venice in 1883. As most of you know, he was a largely self-taught composer and conductor. He was also a passionate student of certain kinds of literature. Almost from the beginning he was interested in medieval myth and legend, fairy-tales and other such forms that were held to be close to the "people" the "Volk". He started reading Germanic mythology intensively in the early 1840s and began to form the idea of making an opera from medieval German and Icelandic sources sometime in the middle of that decade.
As an avid student of Germanic mythology and heroic legend Wagner read virtually all the primary and secondary texts in this area available at the mid-point of the nineteenth century but he lacked the academic discipline that would have allowed him to separate the wheat from the chaff, particularly in the secondary literature. He often accepted wildly speculative interpretations as the product of academic scholarship. Unlike Tolkien he lacked any real knowledge of the medieval languages in which his major primary sources were written. He was dependent on translations and these varied widely in quality. One advantage of this haphazard approach was that it frequently left his imagination free to invent connections where none can be found in the sources.
German nationalists of the early nineteenth century saw a Germanic equivalent of ancient Greek and Roman mythology in the so-called Nibelung legend. It was common at that time to refer to the Nibelungenlied as the "German Iliad." Mendelssohn and others were urged by nationalist thinkers to write an opera on the Nibelung subject. The goal was to establish a cultural past that was equal to, if not superior to the Greek and Roman literature they had all grown up on and to make it a part of the popular consciousness. Wagner hoped that his use of Germanic myth would somehow tap into this racial memory and speak directly to the soul of the German people.
Parenthetically I might mention that Tolkien envisioned a very similar goal for his work. In a letter to a prospective publisher of the Silmarillion he wrote: "I was from the early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me) but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff." Tolkien shared with Wagner the desire of providing a mythology for his own people. Where Wagner found medieval sources for his myths, Tolkien had to invent his.
Wagner saw many of his medieval sources, particularly the Middle High German epic Nibelungenlied, as products of a decadent and overly pious age. He found more congenial versions of the story in the Icelandic sources that seemed to him, and to most scholars of the nineteenth century, much closer to the more primitive, presumably pagan "originals." These sources, the Saga of the Völsungs, the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda, and the Norwegian Saga of Thidrek of Bern, were available to him in the romanticizing translations of men like Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen, Ludwig Ettmüller, and Karl Simrock. In addition he read the historical and mythological interpretations of Franz Josef Mone, Wilhelm Grimm, and the great Deutsche Mythologie (German Mythology) of Jakob Grimm. Even with all of this material, he often invented stories, connections and characters so that his versions generally make more sense to us than their medieval ancestors. He maintained that his retelling somehow broke through the time-bound sources to an earlier "truer" form of the myths he used. Those curious about this process are referred to his essay "Die Wibelungen: Weltgeschichte aus der Sage" which can be translated as "The Wibelungs: World history extracted from legend." In this essay he reconstructs millenia of lost history from his understanding of the original content of the Nibelung legend. I don't recommend it to the faint-hearted.
Wagner originally set out to write a single Nibelung opera, which he called Siegfrieds Tod, (Siegfried's Death). Out of the numerous and often contradictory medieval sources Wagner constructed a prose scenario with a complicated pre-history for the events, even though he planned to use only the concluding part of the story on the stage. While his completed draft libretto included a large amount of exposition in the form of a massive prologue and extensive references in the dialogue throughout the opera, he felt – almost certainly correctly – that the audience would never grasp the complex "back story." For this reason he decided to expand the story backwards to include the youthful exploits of the dragon-slayer Siegfried and his winning of Brünnhilde. He called this drama Young Siegfried. When he finished writing this text, he was still plagued by the unwieldy mass of earlier events that needed to be known and – to make a long story a little less long – he added an additional full-length opera, Die Walküre, and finally a prelude in the form of the one-act, but complex Das Rheingold. He revised the Siegfried texts to fit with the new dramas, retitled them Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, and called the whole work Der Ring des Nibelungen, The Ring of the Nibelung. It is often claimed that Wagner wrote his Ring Cycle backwards. This is true, but it only applies to the text. The Nibelung of the title is, of course, Alberich, the original forger of the ring.
Siegfrieds Tod was sketched in 1848, while Wagner was still comfortably ensconced as music director at the royal opera house in Dresden. Between this sketch and the completion of the entire Ring text lay five of the most turbulent years in Wagner's life. He took part in the 1849 uprising in Dresden and fled into exile in Switzerland with a price on his head. He wrote a number of prose essays, but no music. He completed the verse text to the Ring in 1853 (which incidentally followed the prose scenario he had drafted in 1848 quite closely) and soon thereafter began composition of Das Rheingold. The composition of the music proceeded from that point on through Die Walküre until he interrupted his work on Siegfried in 1856 and only returned to the composition in the late 1860s. Listeners with a good ear for style can hear the sharp break between the second and third acts of Siegfried. The final note of Götterdämmerung was penned in 1874. The first performance of the entire cycle took place in the theater Wagner designed and had built for the purpose in Bayreuth, a small town in Franconia, in the summer of 1876. The work attracted enormous attention and people flocked from all over the world – including the Emperor of Brazil – to hear and see this new marvel. It was given a mixed reception and has remained controversial ever since, although it is certainly the largest work of stage art regularly performed today. Most performances of the Ring continue to be sold out wherever they are given in the world.
John Ronald Ruel Tolkien was born in 1892 in Bloemfontein, South Africa to English parents. He died in Bournemouth on the English south coast in 1973. He was a professional student of ancient Germanic languages and literatures, a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford and the author of a path-breaking essay on the Old English poem Beowulf. My first exposure to Tolkien came when I was a graduate student in English and read this essay. I had no idea that he was the author of what was to become one of the most popular books of the century.
Tolkien's love of language carried him through his education, through what the English still sometimes call the Great War, and through several minor academic posts including a stint working on the gigantic project we know as the Oxford English Dictionary. It brought him finally to a Professorship in Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University. There he was able to apply his linguistic passion to the study and teaching of Old and Middle English, Old Icelandic, and Gothic. At the same time – often after midnight - he developed his elvish languages and the stories they implied. He not only invented the languages, he invented a history for them so that his fictional languages would change over time the way English had in its progress from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. These languages work almost as well as natural languages and a friend of mine in Cleveland has actually compiled a huge dictionary/thesaurus of Tolkien's Elvish languages. It covers over seven hundred pages.
While both Wagner and Tolkien set out to mine the past for their message to the present and future, they had very different ways of doing it. Tolkien allowed his languages and his characters to generate their own "history" as he liked to call it. The reports from his workshop suggest that much of the work was done in the author's unconscious. We hear of long periods in which virtually nothing was written and of twists and turns in the plot that the author had not clearly foreseen. The final plot that emerged was complex and, although we can occasionally recognize an echo from a medieval source – mainly in the names – it is impossible to find a medieval model for The Lord of the Rings as a whole. In many ways the closest model for a long story involving a curse on a ring is Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung.
Wagner reported a vision that occurred to him while staying in the Italian town of La Spezia in the fall of 1853, soon after completing the poem for the Ring. During an abortive attempt at an afternoon nap he fell into a half-sleeping half-waking state in which he experienced the effect of rushing water and the sound of a chord in E-flat. Upon awakening he realized that the problem of the instrumental opening of Das Rheingold, which had eluded him up to that moment, was solved. The veracity of this account has been questioned, but the Rheingold prelude represents enough of a musical breakthrough to justify a good story. In a similar vein, Tolkien said that his first published book from Middle Earth began when – lost in the mind-numbing stupor engendered by marking exams – he jotted on an empty page "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." This became the first sentence of The Hobbit and the germ of his huge project as, in his words "I had to find out what hobbits were." Both artists had their seminal breakthrough moments in the half-waking state between thought and dreams. Wagner's inspiration was musical; Tolkien's was characteristically linguistic.
Although hobbits were new to Tolkien when he wrote that sentence in the early 1930s, the idea of a primeval world populated by elves, dwarves, orcs, dragons and men was not. He had begun writing verse and prose about a mythical pre-history, a process that included a complex process of language invention, already in the trenches of World War I. He later designed maps of this world, the most important continent of which was named Middle Earth in imitation of the Old English term for the known world, Middangeard. He often referred to his fictional products as "history" rather than use any of the standard terms for prose fiction.
The languages he invented implied speakers and their stories. Over the decades Tolkien wrote down these stories in a somewhat haphazard fashion. He was chronically unable to finish projects, whether they had to do with his profession of philology or his writing of fiction. He left behind dozens of unrealized stories in various stages of completion at his death. His son Christopher has made a life's work of collecting, editing and controlling the materials his father left behind. The best known of these works is the Silmarillion, but even it is bogged down by a mythology that requires an expert guide to get through.
The beginnings of Tolkien's career as a commercially viable writer came when a friend more or less forced him to submit The Hobbit for publication as a children's book. After a laudatory evaluation by the publisher's ten-year-old son the book appeared in 1937 and was successful enough that the publisher asked for a sequel. The sequel soon broke out of its children's story bounds and became a giant work aimed at an adult audience, The Lord of the Rings. It took more than seventeen years for this work to reach the shelves of bookstores in 1954 and 1955, but it soon attracted a loyal following and, with its publication in an unauthorized and later an authorized paperback edition in the United States, it became – as the saying goes – a runaway best-seller and it has never looked back.
Tolkien was hypersensitive to any suggestion that his ring might have something to do with Wagner's ring. When the writer of the foreword for the Swedish translation dared to suggest such a connection in his introduction, he fired back an angry letter to his publisher with the often-quoted sentence: "Both rings are round and there the resemblance ceases." In the following I would like to explore parallels that are too numerous to be coincidental and the possibility that the resemblance does not cease there. Since Tolkien's biographers have been complicit in covering up any real connection, I will be arguing a bit like a lawyer building up a circumstantial case.
I am going to hope that most of you have at least an Anna Russell knowledge of the story of Wagner's Ring Cycle and hang our discussion of Tolkien on that. (According to the Anna Russell shrine on the web she is doing fine and just celebrated her 91st birthday in December.) I certainly am not expecting a Jim Holman knowledge of the cycle. For that you'll have to turn to his book.
The first we see of the ring in Tolkien's world is in The Hobbit. We are in a cave where the unlikely hobbit-hero Bilbo Baggins is trying to escape from goblins. He encounters a strange creature named Gollum who seems to have gained more from Wagner's Mime than from Alberich. He is the owner of the ring, but Bilbo finds it by accident in the dark and carries it away with him, earning Gollum's enmity. We learn much later that Gollum had been a hobbit-like creature named Smeagol and he had murdered his friend Deagol to gain the ring many years before – 478 years to be precise –Bilbo's accidental "theft" narrated in The Hobbit. This sequence of events combines elements of the theft of the ring from Alberich by the gods Wotan and Loge, the killing of one brother by another to gain the ring (Fasolt and Fafner), and the storage of the ring for generations in an underground cavern (Fafner). The exchange of riddles between Bilbo and Gollum may also owe something to the Wanderer's riddling contest with Mime in the first act of Siegfried, although both contests may be derived more directly from the riddling poems of the Poetic Edda.
When Bilbo finds the ring, it is pretty clear that Tolkien had no idea how important it would become. It has one power here: it allows the wearer to become invisible. Bilbo uses the ring at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings to make a dramatic exit by disappearing from his eleventy-first birthday party. Soon after this we find that the ring is far more than a magical trinket that makes people invisible. It is a ring of power forged by the evil genius Sauron to gain power over the nineteen other rings distributed among the races of Middle Earth. Having lost this ring long before the story begins, he has now put his entire resources to work to regain it. The wizard Gandalf reads the inscription on the ring:
One Ring to rule them all, one Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
Sauron will be able to rule all of Middle Earth from his dark throne if he is able to recover the one ring.
Now that Tolkien's ring has been introduced, let us recall the curse placed on the Nibelung's ring by its creator and first owner, Alberich. I'll let him speak for himself:
[Play video – Alberich's curse]
I rather like my translation of one couplet in the curse better than the subtitles:
Solang er lebt, sterb' er lechzend dahin,
Des Ringes Herr als des Ringes Knecht.
As long as he lives, let him waste away,
The lord of the ring as the the ring's slave.
It certainly makes the connection clearer, in addition to being closer to the original.
Tolkien's ring has a similar effect on the characters of his epic. If Gollum does not pronounce Alberich's curse when Bilbo steals the ring, it is only because he lacks the eloquence to do so. He is limited to hissing: "Thief, thief, thief! Baggins! We hates it, we hates it, we hates it for ever." (p.134) The curse, however, is already on the ring.
Tolkien crafts telling details that remind one of Wagner's use of orchestral leitmotifs to bring home a point. He shows the effect the ring has on those who possess it. Bilbo finds it difficult to pass the ring on to Frodo. When Frodo has to pass the ring over to Gandalf so that the wizard can determine whether it is indeed Sauron's ring of power, the ring begins to work on him: "He unfastened it and handed it slowly to the wizard. It felt suddenly very heavy, as if either it or Frodo himself was in some way reluctant for Gandalf to touch it." (p. 54) An element of the Tolkienian Leitmotif is this heaviness of the ring. Throughout the latter part of the trilogy Frodo perceives the ring as growing heavier as they approach Mordor, Sauron's hellish land. Much later when he encounters Bilbo at Rivcndell, Bilbo asks to see the ring again. Frodo brings it out, but immediately pulls it back. "To his distress and amazement he found that he was no longer looking at Bilbo; a shadow seemed to have fallen between them, and through it he found himself eyeing a little wrinkled creature with a hungry face and bony groping hands. He felt a desire to strike him." (p. 260) Bilbo here takes on the features of Gollum, the earlier possessor of the ring. We don't know here whether this takes place in Frodo's mind, in Bilbo's actual appearance, or in some third world belonging to the ring.
Perhaps the clearest description of the ring's powers comes in a speech by the elf Elrond addressed to Boromir, a member of the fellowship who had wanted to make use of it for his own agenda:
We cannot use the Ruling Ring. That we now know too well. It belongs to Sauron and was made by him alone, and is altogether evil. Its strength, Boromir, is too great for anyone to wield at will, save only for those who have already a great power of their own. But for them it holds an even deadlier peril. The very desire of it corrupts the heart. Consider Saruman. If any of the Wise should with this Ring overthrow the Lord of Mordor, using his own arts, he would then set himself on Sauron's throne, and yet another Dark Lord would appear. And that is another reason why the Ring should be destroyed: as long as it is in the world it will be a danger even to the Wise. (p. 300)
Later Boromir, forgetting Elrond's warning, tries to take the ring by force from Frodo, thinking he can use it to gain military advantage for his people. The episode ends in his death rather than Frodo's, but it also ends in the breaking of the original fellowship into several groups.
In Wagner's cycle the ring itself often disappears for long periods of time. It is not seen at all in Die Walküre, although it is mentioned. Let's follow the actual progress of the ring as it passes through the story. Alberich is able to steal the gold from the depths of the Rhine and forge a ring from it by foreswearing love. Wotan and Loge steal the gold, the Tarnhelm and the ring from Alberich in order to pay the giants for building Valhalla. Like Frodo, Wotan wishes to keep the ring, but he is forced to turn it over to the giants. One of them, Fafner, promptly strikes his brother dead in a struggle over the ring. Fafner uses the Tarnhelm to change himself into a dragon, in whose form he sleeps on the gold for two generations. Siegfried has no idea of the ring's significance as he carries it away from Fafner's cave after killing the dragon. He gives it freely to Brünnhilde in the last act of Siegfried. I might mention that some critics have suggested that the ring causes him to desire physical possession of Brünnhilde. I think a heroic version of youthful hormones would be quite sufficient to that task. In the last scene of the first act of Götterdämmerung, Brünnhilde's Valkyrie sister, Waltraute, attempts to convince Brünnhilde to return the ring to the Rhine daughters on her own, thus ending the curse. Brünnhilde refuses, saying that it is Siegfried's pledge of love. We find out what that is worth a few minutes later when Siegfried appears disguised as Gunther, wrests the ring from her, and takes her to be Gunther's bride.
When Brünnhilde discovers Siegfried at Gunther's court wearing the ring, she realizes she has been deceived and turns toward vengeance on Siegfried. Gunther's half-brother Hagen is the son of the dwarf Alberich and he plans to gain the ring for himself. After Siegfried's murder, he tries to take the ring from the corpse, but Siegfried raises his arm to prevent it, causing terror among those present. At that moment Brünnhilde appears and orders the final events. She will join Siegfried on the funeral pyre; the ring – which she now takes – will be purified by the fire and return to the Rhine daughters.
As the funeral pyre consumes the bodies and the ring is returned to the Rhine, Hagen make one last desperate attempt to grab the ring. The rhine-daughters drag him into the depths where he drowns. The fire spreads to Walhalla, which is seen in the distance, and the castle burns with all the gods. The music for the final moments of the great cycle portrays a utopian magnificence cleansed of the evil represented by the ring.
[Audio: Final pages of Götterdämmerung]
Alberich, however, is presumably still alive and so evil has not left the world completely.
Frodo carries Sauron's ring through many adventures and hundreds of pages to the crack of the volcano Mt. Doom, where it had been originally forged using the infernal heat of the mountain's fire. Gollum, like Alberich, follows the ring and its bearer on this trip. At the last moment the ring's power overtakes Frodo and he is unable to cast it into the fire below. Gollum makes a last desperate attempt to wrest the ring from Frodo, biting off the finger on which he is wearing it. Gollum, the finger and the ring fall into the depths of the fire and the power of the ring is broken. Here we can see a clear echo of Hagen's final attempt to grasp the ring at the end of Götterdämmerung.
Both cycles concern themselves with the corruption of noble designs by greed and the will to power. Both rings offer the temptation of power, that the good characters supposedly will use toward good ends, but only those characters who are untouched by ambition are truly immune to its power to corrupt. Siegfried scarcely knows that he has it and gives it freely to Brünnhilde. After recovering it he offers to give it to the Rhine daughters, but holds back when they impugn his courage. Alberich, on the other hand, uses it to terrorize and enslave his fellow Nibelungs (dwarves). Wotan sees it as a further enhancement of his divine power. Fafner sees it only as the chief object of his treasure and something that he wants to keep away from the Nibelungs. Brünnhilde sees it innocently as Siegfried's pledge of love and then – on Siegfried's hand – as evidence of Siegfried's betrayal of that love. Hagen desires the ring initially for his father, Alberich, but as the drama progresses, it becomes clear that he desires it for himself. Brünnhilde is able in the last scene to purify the ring on her own funeral pyre. The susceptibility of the individual possessors of the ring is directly proportional to their greed and lust for power. Alberich, Hagen and Wotan are the most susceptible and Siegfried the least.
One can say almost the same about Tolkien's ring. Tom Bombadil is least susceptible to the power of Sauron's ring. Initially Bilbo and Frodo are also relatively free of its influence, but as their self-awareness and strength of character grow, so does their susceptibility to the ring until Frodo is unable to release it at the critical moment at Mount Doom. In both cycles, the destruction of the ring and those who desire it most brings about the end of an age in the history of the world.
Tolkienians are fond of saying that the similarities between the two cycles can be explained by their use of the same medieval sources. Let's examine this notion. Wagner found sources for the idea of a cursed ring in at least three of his Icelandic sources: the "Reginsmál", a poem contained in the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda, and the Saga of the Volsungs. The story told in all those sources has the gods Oðinn and Loki (Wotan and Loge) wandering through the world. They see an otter gnawing on a salmon. They throw a stone and hit the otter in the head, killing him. They rejoice in having bagged both an otter and a salmon with one toss of a stone. After flaying the otter and taking the animal's skin, they seek lodging with a farmer named Hreiðmar. It turns out that the otter was the farmer's son, appropriately named Otr, who spent the day in the shape of an otter so that he could catch fish. Hreiðmar insists that the gods repay him for his loss. Loki goes back to the waterfall and catches a pike there named Andvari – who was really a dwarf – there is a lot of shape-shifting in this story. Andvari had a large amount of gold. Loki demands the gold, which the dwarf gladly pays, but then he demands the ring Andvari is wearing. Andvari resists, saying he could recover his treasure with that ring. Loki insists on the ring and Andvari places a curse on it, saying that it would bring the death of anyone who had it. Loki returns to Hreiðmar's farm where he places the gold on the otter skin. It covers the whole skin, but he eventually has to use the ring to cover a single whisker that was not covered by the remaining gold. Hreiðmar's other sons demand their part of the settlement and are refused, whereupon they kill their father. The one son, Fáfnir, takes the entire treasure and turns himself into a dragon to guard it. There is no further mention of the ring in any of the sources, although its possessors all meet with a violent death.
The special powers of the ring were developed by Wagner who saw in the ring a symbol of the power of wealth. Tolkien adopted many aspects of Wagner's ring without associating it specifically with wealth. In the event, the ring brought Tolkien more wealth than it did Wagner. The composer died in debt while Tolkien died a modestly wealthy man as the result of the inordinate success of his books.
I maintain that Tolkien must have absorbed Wagner's notion of the ring even though he probably knew the Icelandic sources Wagner had used better than the composer himself. After all he had read them in the Old Norse original. There are too many aspects of Wagner's specific adaptation of the ring motif that show up in Tolkien for this to be an accident. The Icelandic versions of the story do not provide any characteristics of the ring besides its ability to create riches for Andvari and the curse he places on it. The curse is extraordinarily effective, leading to the deaths of Hreiðmar, Fáfnir, Reginn, and Sigurðr, but there is no specific association of these events with the curse on the ring in the sources. The curse is never mentioned again. The original thief of the ring, the god Loki is not affected by his deed. No one seeks to gain the ring. It does not have any mysterious effect on anyone. In Wagner and Tolkien the ring has virtually the same mysterious effect. It draws men and women to desire the ring, even at the cost of their own lives. It affects everyone who touches it in some way, although some more than others. Wagner has his entire brass section blare out the curse motif every time someone dies in possession of the ring.
[Audio – the curse]
Between the two repetitions of the motif, we heard Wotan's shocked reaction: "Terrible I now find the curse's power."
Every turn of Tolkien's story involving the ring brings out its curse and its power over its possessors. Tolkien doesn't have the brass section, but he has a linguistic equivalent that reminds us of the ring's power at every juncture. We have already seen several instances of this at work. Nowhere is the power of the ring clearer than in the description of Sam's brief period as ring-bearer. The ring begins to take over his consciousness: "As it drew near the great furnaces, where, in the deeps of time, it had been shaped and forged, the Ring's power grew, and it became more fell, untameable save by some mighty will. … Already the Ring tempted him, gnawing at his will and reason." And so on. Sam is able to overcome the temptation represented by the ring only by his devotion to Frodo and his Hobbit/British subbornness.
The points of contact between the two Ring Cycles do not cease with the ring itself. There is a strong Wagnerian echo in the assumption of the "sword that was broken" by Aragorn, the man fated to reclaim the kingship of Gondor. Unlike Siegfried, Aragorn does not reforge the sword himself – it is forged anew "by elvish smiths" but its reforging and use by a hero fulfills expectations and prophecy much as Siegfried's reforging had done.
Another shared concern between the two works is their rejection of modern industrial society. The clattering anvils of Nibelheim could just as well be used to describe the industry going on under Saruman's control in Isengard. Wagner's music fits very well to the film version of this scene.
[doctored video]
I didn't have to change a thing.
In his production of Wagner's Ring at the Staatsoper in Berlin, Harry Kupfer violates the mysterious opening of Das Rheingold by showing Wotan breaking off a limb of the World Ash before a note is played. This wounding of the tree leads to its demise and with it the decline of all nature. Kupfer's production has the action weave around the fallen limbs of the great tree until in the final scene of Götterdämmerung Valhalla is set alight using the wood of the tree as kindling. The concluding ecstatic ending I played a few minutes ago accompanies the planting of a new tree by two children, a boy and a girl. The release from evil points humanity and nature toward a new birth. This was Harry Kupfer's answer to the meaning of those enigmatic, gleaming measures.
In Tolkien the defeat of Sauron also leads to a triumphal denoument of the story as Aragorn assumes the kingship of Gondor and all the many threads of the story are played out. But this victory does not stop the forces of industrialization as Saruman, now known as Sharkey, attempts to industrialize the Shire. (Peter Jackson chose to leave this out of his film version, which was already very long.) We are left with the distinct impression that the protection of nature – a dwindling resource throughout The Lord of the Rings – is a rear-guard action against an inexorably advancing civilization. This was certainly Tolkien's own view as he visited the haunts of his childhood only to find them eradicated by urban development and industrialization. In many ways Tolkien's conclusion is far darker than Wagner's. After driving Sharkey's forces out of the Shire, the hobbit heroes settle down, but Frodo is troubled by the wounds he has received and is never able to find peace. Eventually he joins Bilbo as they travel to the Grey Havens and embark for an unkown world that may or may not be death. The strait-laced Catholic Tolkien was unwilling and probably unable to depict a true redemption of his pre-Christian world without the coming of Christ himself.
The many points of contact between these two students of Germanic antiquity, Wagner the amateur and Tolkien the professional, should not blind us to the many points of difference. Unlike Tolkien, Wagner associates the power of the ring with the treasure of the Nibelungs and with plutocratic power in general. Money was obviously much more important to Wagner than it was to Tolkien, something that is reflected in their lives as well. Wagner always spent money he didn't have, while Tolkien lived the frugal life of an English academic, even after becoming wealthy. We are told that his one extravagance was a taste for brightly colored weskits.
Some of the differences are associated with the different genres involved. Even a drama cycle of four days cannot really encompass the kind of quest Tolkien depicts. Bound by his dramatic form, Wagner also has to eschew the giant battle scenes Tolkien puts in his narratives. The thousands of anonymous victims of battle make a good background to a heroic story and at least one of Wagner's sources, the Middle High German Nibelungenlied, also has massive battle scenes at its conclusion. The Icelandic sources Wagner preferred are, however, smaller in scale, usually restricted to a few individuals on the stage at any one time. Wagner does have massed voices for the Gibichung vassals in Götterdämmerung, but most of the Ring cycle involves only two or three characters at a time on the stage. Tolkien also built his human drama around small scenes with only a few players – one can cite the long and complex relationship involving Frodo, Sam and Gollum – but these alternate with gigantic scenes that would never fit on an operatic stage.
Both epics end with the destruction of the ring. Brünnhilde realizes at the last moment that this is the only solution, while Tolkien builds his entire plot around the quest to destroy the ring, something that can only be accomplished by penetrating deep into the land of the enemy. The quest is long, arduous and very dangerous. The heroes seem good and the villains seem evil, but the borderline is often paper-thin. Characters waver between the good and the evil worlds or fall prey to evil: Saruman, the great wizard who becomes a pawn of Sauron; Theoden, the king who allows himself to be dragged down to premature senility by the evil Wormtongue; Denethor, the Steward of Gondor who despairs and commits suicide; Denethor's son Boromir, who tries to take the ring from Frodo and is shortly thereafter killed by orcs. Even Frodo spends much of the last half of the narrative in a losing battle against the power of the ring. All the figures of Tolkien's world are very close to the temptation to give in to Sauron and the temptation to power represented by the ring. Virtue is held upright in The Lord of the Rings by continuous exertion and the temptation is always there to give in, to relax and let events take their course. One would have to read very superficially to maintain that the characters in The Lord of the Rings are two-dimensional and lack complexity. The depiction of Sam's struggle with the power of the ring mentioned above should illustrate this.
Wagner's characters seem most virtuous when they are following their inner nature – and least so when their behavior is determined by what Wagner called "politics." In Die Walküre. Wotan is following his natural instinct until Fricka forces him to realize the political consequences of his all-too-natural actions. Political considerations cause him to condemn his son Siegmund to death and to eject his favorite daughter Brünnhilde from the circle of the immortals. Siegfried does everything right as long as he follows nature – represented by the forest bird – but he ends up doing everything wrong when human power politics takes over in Götterdämmerung.
To be more precise, virtue is represented in Wagner largely by love – including sexual love – and vice is anything that violates that: Alberich's original curse, Wotan's sacrifice of his two dearest children, Siegfried's seduction by the memory potion and so on. We might point out that the two brightest moments in the Ring are when the heroes are about to make love to close relatives.
A musicologist I know, who loves Wagner, is currently reading The Lord of the Rings and he had two complaints: "There is no sex and everyone is always stopping for tea." He said this to contrast it with his positive response to Wagner. Like money, sex clearly played a larger role in Wagner's life than in Tolkien's. In fact, if it weren't for the very sexy English sitcom Coupling, I might simply see Tolkien as an example of the often-cited show title "No sex please, we're British." Virtue and vice reside in other areas for Tolkien, as we have seen.
On the other hand, I think we can all see the virtue of a leisurely cup of tea or a glass of beer together with good company and good conversation. These were definitely virtues for Tolkien.
Tom Shippey, an Anglo-Saxonist who came to the defense of his older colleague, calls Tolkien an "Author of the Century," referring to the twentieth. He speaks of the many authors scarred by the wars and man-made catastrophes of the century and their inability to deal with them directly. Most of them needed many years, sometimes decades to come to terms with their experiences. Shippey cites the examples of Orwell, Golding and Vonnegut, all of whom were combat veterans, who in their works of fiction – 1984, The Lord of the Flies, Slaughterhouse 5 – moved into the fantastic to express the horrors of their times. Shippey sees Tolkien as a representative of such "damaged authors" of the century. His giant works are his attempt to come to terms with the monstrosities of his time.
Wagner, for his part, set out to shape his own time and was in many ways the pivotal figure of his century, the nineteenth. He revolutionized music. He invented a whole new kind of mythical art. He embodied the nationalism of the century in his focus on matters German. He portrayed the corruption of a plutocracy arising in his time while at the same time demonstrating his own entrepreneurial spirit in his festival project in Bayreuth.
In the intellectual and artistic world of Europe and America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – the time when Tolkien was growing up – Wagner was one of the central artistic touchstones. French Wagnerites like Baudelaire virtually worshipped him and his works. George Bernard Shaw, a generation older than Tolkien, was the intellectual leader of Wagnerians in England. Aubrey Beardsley produced a rich sequence of illustrations to Wagner's Ring that played a decisive role in C.S.Lewis's early infatuation. Wagner and his music became a prime mover in the rise of both opera and symphonic music in the eastern metropolitan centers of America. In Tolkien's generation we find Wagner's positive and negative influence everywhere. T.S.Eliot's The Waste Land opens with a quote from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Richard Strauss and Giacomo Puccini wrote Wagnerian operas while Stravinsky and his school violently rejected Wagner's influence and were thus shaped negatively by the same forces.
The bridge between the world of Wagnerianism and Tolkien's circle in Oxford was C.S.Lewis, an ardent Wagnerian. Lewis was a lecturer in English at Oxford during most of Tolkien's career and the two men became close friends. Lewis is famous for his works of popular theology, his interplanetary trilogy, and – probably most of all – for his Chronicles of Narnia. I have read – but been unable to confirm in primary sources – that Lewis and Tolkien regularly attended performances of the Ring in London, a fact that Tolkien and his biographers generally "forget." Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien's official biographer, wrote a history of the "Inklings," the informal group in Oxford that included both Lewis and Tolkien, which mentions Wagner only twice, but both instances are telling. The first involves a dramatic reading of Die Walküre undertaken in 1934 by Lewis, Tolkien and Lewis's brother Warnie, who is the source for this episode. Both Lewis and Tolkien wanted to read the work in the original German, but Warnie's inability to keep up with them in that language forced them to read it in the English translation. Reportedly the three continued their discussion of the opera until very late. Carpenter also cites Tolkien's daughter Priscilla as his source for an incident in which Lewis and Tolkien attended a performance of a Ring opera in London without the requisite evening dress and were the only men in the audience committing this faux pas.
If Tolkien had never heard of Wagner; if the Ring of the Nibelung had not been a part of every young man's education in the first quarter of the twentieth century; if his best friend had not been a powerful Wagnerian; then we might believe that Tolkien had derived some, if not all these aspects from other sources, but the evidence is overwhelming. Tolkien stands convicted of being a closet Wagnerian.
How do we explain Tolkien's virulent rejection of Wagner as a source? Let me draw a last parallel.
In the early 1840s Wagner was a virtually unknown composer and conductor who was seeking his fortune in Paris, the opera capital of Europe. An older, more established – and financially successful – figure in the field helped him with introductions, found him work to keep bread on the table, and eventually arranged for the production of Rienzi in Dresden which was Wagner's first real success as a composer. That production led to his being appointed conductor in Dresden with a comfortable, if not lavish income. Wagner also learned a great deal from the operas of the older composer. Wagner's strong sense of indebtedness led to his total rejection of the older composer, Giacomo Meyerbeer. His resentment at owing his career to another was a component of his violent anti-Semitism and led to his use of Meyerbeer to represent all that was wrong with opera and with European culture as a whole. Wagner also conveniently forgot that Heinrich Heine, another German Jew, was the major source for his Flying Dutchman. With the exception of Franz Liszt and King Ludwig of Bavaria, virtually everyone who really helped Wagner along the way was treated in the same shabby way.
Tolkien was certainly not as petty a man as Wagner, but I sense in his rejection of Wagner a similar refusal to accept the fact that he had learned much from Wagner's mythopoeiesis and from his art as a whole. This refusal may not have been conscious, but it was powerful. Although Tolkien and Wagner may have had different attitudes toward religion, politics and many other things, they shared a notion of a grand mythic design drawn from the Germanic past and expressed in an old-fashioned version of the language of their own day as a means of exploring the nature of evil and the struggle against it. The resemblance between the two great ring cycles certainly does not end with the shape of their central symbols.
2 comentários:
- Steve Sailer disse...
I'd add that Tolkien fought the Germans at the Somme in 1916, which might have something to with it. - 4 de junho de 2012 às 18:04
- Brade disse...
Love this! I'm a new fan of the opera cycle (the recent Met performance on PBS) after reading LOTR many years ago. I immediately picked up on the similarities, so your post was very helpful in distinguishing who came up with what!
- 22 de setembro de 2012 às 12:54
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