Sherry Chandler

from Political Wire:

Survey USA has released its latest poll of the nation’s senators, showing an average approval rating of 53% with 36% disapproving.

… Only three senators had negative net approval ratings: [Conrad] Burns and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), who are up for re-election in 2006, and Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY).

from today’s NYTimes:

TORONTO — An hour or so into what feels like eons of stage time, one wise, scared little hobbit manages to express the feelings of multitudes. “This place is too dim and tree-ish for me,” mutters a round-ish, twee-ish creature named Pippin, groping through a shadowy forest in the second act of the very expensive, largely incomprehensible musical version of “The Lord of the Rings,” which opened Thursday at the Princess of Wales Theater here.

You speak not the half of it, O cherub-cheeked lad of Middle Earth. The production in which you exist so perilously is indeed a murky, labyrinthine wood from which no one emerges with head unmuddled, eyes unblurred or eardrums unrattled. Everyone and everything winds up lost in this $25 million adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s cult-inspiring trilogy of fantasy novels. That includes plot, character and the patience of most ordinary theatergoers.

Presumably, there is a contingent out there that will regard this curiously homespun-feeling behemoth as a sort of sacred ritual. Indeed, perhaps the sanest approach to this production, adapted from Tolkien’s books by an international team of artists led by the British director Matthew Warchus, is to look upon it as an arcane religious pageant that can be fully appreciated only by the initiated.

Once upon a time I spent an entire Thanksgiving holiday closeted in my bedroom with Lord of the Rings when my father obviously thought I should be helping strip the tobacco crop. Having done that, I was willing to let it go. I am obviously not the stuff of which fans are made.

Though I would admit to being an enthusiast for Dr. Who, especially the Jon Pertwee years. As my son recently wrote to me about the premier of the new series:

I once read an account of the preview of the animated Star Trek series in the mid-70s. All the die-hard Trekkies were pooh-poohing the whole concept, but as soon as the theme song started they were enthralled once again. I find myself that way with the new Dr. Who. The theme is largely unchanged, and it just reaches down inside my enthusiasm center and pulls.

Alas, not having cable or dish or direct or anything, I guess I’ll have to wait until I can order it from Netflix.

Whenever we read anything, we find our attention moving in two directions at once. One direction is outward or centrifugal, in which we keep going outside our reading, from the individual words to the things they mean, or, in practice, to our memory of the conventional association between them. The other direction is inward or centripetal, in which we try to develop from the words a sense of the larger verbal pattern they make. In both cases we deal with symbols, but when we attach an external meaning to a word we have, in addition to the verbal symbol, the thing represented or symbolized by it. Actually we have a series of such representations: the verbal symbol “cat” is a group of black marks on a page representing a sequence of noises representing an image or memory representing a sense experience representing an animal that says meow. Symbols so understood may here be called signs, verbal units which, conventionally and arbitrarily, stand for and point to things outside the place where they occur. When we are trying to grasp the context of words, however, the word “cat” is an element of a larger body of meaning. It is not primarily a symbol “of” anything, for in this aspect it does not represent, but connects. We can hardly even say that it represents a part of the author’s intention in putting it there, for the author’s intention ceases to exist as a separate factor as soon as he has finished revising. Verbal elements understood inwardly or centripetally, as parts of a verbal structure, are, as symbols, simply and literally verbal elements or units of a verbal structure. (The word “literally” should be kept in mind). We may, borrowing a term from music, call such elements motifs.

These two modes of understanding take place simultaneously in all reading. It is impossible to read the word “cat” in a context without some representational flash of the animal so named; it is impossible to see the bare sign “cat” without wondering what context it belongs to. …

— Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princton University Press, 1957)