Tag Archives: Fantasy

POETS Day! Why Is Tom Bombadil?

Posted on by
Reply
Illustration by Rene Sears

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

A friend of mine has a deep booming voice. Years ago, he was the MC for The Tragic City Rollers roller derby team, a play on Birmingham’s Magic City nickname. I’m not sure what to call roller derby participants. Players doesn’t sound right, but whatever they are, they pick campy or funny nicknames for themselves, kind of like drag queens.

I worked with a quiet, clever, but shy waitress around the turn of the century who moved off to Austin. Next thing I know I’m channel surfing and come across a roller derby reality show on A&E. It’s her. The waitress is on the screen smashing people and not being shy. It was amazing. She was named rookie of the year, which I know because of course I became a regular viewer. She had the best roller derby name I’ve heard. She went by Venus Envy.

Back to Birmingham, I don’t think my friend cared much for roller derby. I asked him if there was strategy and he said there was, but he didn’t know what was going on most of the time. He said he did it because his friend picked the name Sister Mary Merciless, and he really liked introducing her as “Full of grace and in your face! It’s Sister Mary Merciless!”

He said he had to be there mid-afternoon before the weekend matches. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s what he said and it got him out of work early Friday. That was brilliant.

Whatever silly thing you want to do is a valid excuse. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

But first, some verse.

—

Hey dol! merry dol! ring a dong dillo!
Ring a dong! hop along! fal lal the willow!
Tom Bom, jolly Tom, Tom Bombadillo!

Continue reading →

POETS Day! Ursula K. Le Guin

Posted on by
3
Photo by Marian Wood Kolisch, Oregon State University, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Happy POETS Day everybody. Another week is almost in the rearview and here comes a weekend peaking its devious head full o’possibilities over the horizon. What will you do this go round? Go for a sail? Hit the beach? Skydive? Watch an Impractical Jokers marathon?

You’re probably going to watch an Impractical Jokers marathon.

Weekends used to be more fun. Remember when you were a kid and the bell rang. You couldn’t get home, strip off your precious school clothes, throw on some Swiss cheese jeans, and hit the road on a bicycle or skateboard soon enough. You had the neighborhood gang to meet and do scampish things with. Now you watch the clock and tap stuff with your fingers when the boss isn’t looking. Stop it. You’re not a kid anymore. You’re a grown up with agency and the legal right to buy fireworks assuming you don’t live in Massachusetts or certain counties in Nevada, Wyoming, and Hawaii. Quit waiting for the prescribed departure time and do something proscribed. Carpe volutpat vestibulum. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Dissemble, obfuscate, fudge the truth, and gleefully trespass the norms and delicate pieties that preserve our hopefully durable civilization. Nearly all means are justified by the urge to prematurely escape the bonds of employment just get out of there as soon as plausible. It’s your weekend. Do with it as you will, but in homage to the mighty acronym may I suggest setting aside a moment for a little verse? It’s a particularly good way to pass time waiting on friends who may not run as roughshod over the delicate pieties and were not as successful as you were in engineering an early exit.

***

I had no idea Ursula K. Le Guin wrote poetry. I knew all about the fantasy and science fiction books and all the Hugos and Nebulas but her verse was totally unknown to me. I was in the poetry section at my local library trying to find the ill-advised The Dolphin by Robert Lowell where he included bits of private letters from his ex-wife in the poems and I saw Le Guin’s name on a spine. At first, I thought somebody made a mistake and one of her novels was mis-shelved but before I pulled it to give to the librarian I saw the 811 Dewey number. Sure. Why not. Lowell can wait.

Continue reading →