http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080408/lf_nm_life/reading_survey_dc
Bible is America's favorite book: poll
Tue Apr 8, 2008
When it comes to literary pursuits in the United States most people agree on at least one thing -- the most popular book is the Bible, according to a new survey.
It came in first in a Harris Poll of nearly 2,513 adults but the second choice in the survey was not as clear cut.
"While the Bible is number one among each of the different demographic groups, there is a large difference in the number two favorite book," Harris said in a statement announcing the results.
Men chose J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" and women selected Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind" as their second-favorite book, according to the online poll.
But the second choice for 18- to 31-year-olds was J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, while 32- to 43-year-olds named Stephen King's "The Stand" and Dan Brown's "Angels and Demons."
Picks for second-favorite book also varied according to region. "Gone With the Wind" was number two in the southern and midwestern United States while easterners chose "The Lord of the Rings" and westerners opted for "The Stand."
Whites and Hispanics picked "Gone With the Wind" as their second-favorite book after the Bible, while African-Americans preferred "Angels and Demons."
"Finally, they may not agree on candidates, but one thing that brings together partisans is their favorite book. For Republicans, Democrats and Independents, the top two books are the same -- the Bible followed by "Gone With the Wind."
Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code," "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee, "Angels and Demons" by Dan Brown, "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand and "Catcher in the Rye" by J.D. Salinger rounded out the top 10 favorites.
(Reporting by Julie Mollins; editing by Patricia Reaney)
Showing posts with label J.R.R. Tolkien. Show all posts
Showing posts with label J.R.R. Tolkien. Show all posts
Monday, April 14, 2008
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Geek Love
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/opinion/09rogers.html
March 9, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
Geek Love
By ADAM ROGERS
San Francisco
GARY GYGAX died last week and the universe did not collapse. This surprises me a little bit, because he built it.
I’m not talking about the cosmological, Big Bang part. Everyone who reads blogs knows that a flying spaghetti monster made all that. But Mr. Gygax co-created the game Dungeons & Dragons, and on that foundation of role-playing and polyhedral dice he constructed the social and intellectual structure of our world.
Dungeons & Dragons was a brilliant pastiche, mashing together tabletop war games, the Conan-the-Barbarian tales of Robert E. Howard and a magic trick from the fantasy writer Jack Vance with a dash of Bulfinch’s mythology, a bit of the Bible and a heaping helping of J. R. R. Tolkien.
Mr. Gygax’s genius was to give players a way to inhabit the characters inside their games, rather than to merely command faceless hordes, as you did in, say, the board game Risk. Roll the dice and you generated a character who was quantified by personal attributes like strength or intelligence.
You also got to pick your moral alignment, like whether you were “lawful good” or “chaotic evil.” And you could buy swords and fight dragons. It was cool.
Yes, I played a little. In junior high and even later. Lawful good paladin. Had a flaming sword. It did not make me popular with the ladies, or indeed with anyone. Neither did my affinity for geometry, nor my ability to recite all of “Star Wars” from memory.
Yet on the strength of those skills and others like them, I now find myself on top of the world. Not wealthy or in charge or even particularly popular, but in instead of out. The stuff I know, the geeky stuff, is the stuff you and everyone else has to know now, too.
We live in Gary Gygax’s world. The most popular books on earth are fantasy novels about wizards and magic swords. The most popular movies are about characters from superhero comic books. The most popular TV shows look like elaborate role-playing games: intricate, hidden-clue-laden science fiction stories connected to impossibly mathematical games that live both online and in the real world. And you, the viewer, can play only if you’ve sufficiently mastered your home-entertainment command center so that it can download a snippet of audio to your iPhone, process it backward with beluga whale harmonic sequences and then podcast the results to the members of your Yahoo group.
Even in the heyday of Dungeons & Dragons, when his company was selling millions of copies and parents feared that the game was somehow related to Satan worship, Mr. Gygax’s creation seemed like a niche product. Kids played it in basements instead of socializing. (To be fair, you needed at least three people to play — two adventurers and one Dungeon Master to guide the game — so Dungeons & Dragons was social. Demented and sad, but social.) Nevertheless, the game taught the right lessons to the right people.
Geeks like algorithms. We like sets of rules that guide future behavior. But people, normal people, consistently act outside rule sets. People are messy and unpredictable, until you have something like the Dungeons & Dragons character sheet. Once you’ve broken down the elements of an invented personality into numbers generated from dice, paper and pencil, you can do the same for your real self.
For us, the character sheet and the rules for adventuring in an imaginary world became a manual for how people are put together. Life could be lived as a kind of vast, always-on role-playing campaign.
Don’t give me that look. I know I’m not a paladin, and I know I don’t live in the Matrix. But the realization that everyone else was engaged in role-playing all the time gave my universe rules and order.
We geeks might not be able to intuit the subtext of a facial expression or a casual phrase, but give us a behavioral algorithm and human interactions become a data stream. We can process what’s going on in the heads of the people around us. Through careful observation of body language and awkward silences, we can even learn to detect when we are bringing the party down with our analysis of how loop quantum gravity helps explain the time travel in that new “Terminator” TV show. I mean, so I hear.
Mr. Gygax’s game allowed geeks to venture out of our dungeons, blinking against the light, just in time to create the present age of electronic miracles.
Dungeons & Dragons begat one of the first computer games, a swords-and-sorcery dungeon crawl called Adventure. In the late 1970s, the two games provided the narrative framework for the first fantasy-based computer worlds played by multiple, remotely connected users. They were called multi-user dungeons back then, and they were mostly the province of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But they required the same careful construction of virtual identities that Mr. Gygax had introduced to gaming.
Today millions of people are slaves to Gary Gygax. They play EverQuest and World of Warcraft, and someone must still be hanging out in Second Life. (That “massively multiplayer” computer traffic, by the way, also helped drive the development of the sort of huge server clouds that power Google.)
But that’s just gaming culture, more pervasive than it was in 1974 when Dungeons & Dragons was created and certainly more profitable — today it’s estimated to be a $40 billion-a-year business — but still a little bit nerdy. Delete the dragon-slaying, though, and you’re left with something much more mainstream: Facebook, a vast, interconnected universe populated by avatars.
Facebook and other social networks ask people to create a character — one based on the user, sure, but still a distinct entity. Your character then builds relationships by connecting to other characters. Like Dungeons & Dragons, this is not a competitive game. There’s no way to win. You just play.
This diverse evolution from Mr. Gygax’s 1970s dungeon goes much further. Every Gmail login, every instant-messaging screen name, every public photo collection on Flickr, every blog-commenting alias is a newly manifested identity, a character playing the real world.
We don’t have to say goodbye to Gary Gygax, the architect of the now. Every time I make a tactical move (like when I suggest to my wife this summer that we should see “Iron Man” instead of “The Dark Knight”), I’m counting my experience points, hoping I have enough dexterity and rolling the dice. And every time, Mr. Gygax is there — quasi-mystical, glowing in blue and bearing a simple game that was an elegant weapon from a more civilized age.
That was a reference to “Star Wars.” Cool, right?
Adam Rogers is a senior editor at Wired.
March 9, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
Geek Love
By ADAM ROGERS
San Francisco
GARY GYGAX died last week and the universe did not collapse. This surprises me a little bit, because he built it.
I’m not talking about the cosmological, Big Bang part. Everyone who reads blogs knows that a flying spaghetti monster made all that. But Mr. Gygax co-created the game Dungeons & Dragons, and on that foundation of role-playing and polyhedral dice he constructed the social and intellectual structure of our world.
Dungeons & Dragons was a brilliant pastiche, mashing together tabletop war games, the Conan-the-Barbarian tales of Robert E. Howard and a magic trick from the fantasy writer Jack Vance with a dash of Bulfinch’s mythology, a bit of the Bible and a heaping helping of J. R. R. Tolkien.
Mr. Gygax’s genius was to give players a way to inhabit the characters inside their games, rather than to merely command faceless hordes, as you did in, say, the board game Risk. Roll the dice and you generated a character who was quantified by personal attributes like strength or intelligence.
You also got to pick your moral alignment, like whether you were “lawful good” or “chaotic evil.” And you could buy swords and fight dragons. It was cool.
Yes, I played a little. In junior high and even later. Lawful good paladin. Had a flaming sword. It did not make me popular with the ladies, or indeed with anyone. Neither did my affinity for geometry, nor my ability to recite all of “Star Wars” from memory.
Yet on the strength of those skills and others like them, I now find myself on top of the world. Not wealthy or in charge or even particularly popular, but in instead of out. The stuff I know, the geeky stuff, is the stuff you and everyone else has to know now, too.
We live in Gary Gygax’s world. The most popular books on earth are fantasy novels about wizards and magic swords. The most popular movies are about characters from superhero comic books. The most popular TV shows look like elaborate role-playing games: intricate, hidden-clue-laden science fiction stories connected to impossibly mathematical games that live both online and in the real world. And you, the viewer, can play only if you’ve sufficiently mastered your home-entertainment command center so that it can download a snippet of audio to your iPhone, process it backward with beluga whale harmonic sequences and then podcast the results to the members of your Yahoo group.
Even in the heyday of Dungeons & Dragons, when his company was selling millions of copies and parents feared that the game was somehow related to Satan worship, Mr. Gygax’s creation seemed like a niche product. Kids played it in basements instead of socializing. (To be fair, you needed at least three people to play — two adventurers and one Dungeon Master to guide the game — so Dungeons & Dragons was social. Demented and sad, but social.) Nevertheless, the game taught the right lessons to the right people.
Geeks like algorithms. We like sets of rules that guide future behavior. But people, normal people, consistently act outside rule sets. People are messy and unpredictable, until you have something like the Dungeons & Dragons character sheet. Once you’ve broken down the elements of an invented personality into numbers generated from dice, paper and pencil, you can do the same for your real self.
For us, the character sheet and the rules for adventuring in an imaginary world became a manual for how people are put together. Life could be lived as a kind of vast, always-on role-playing campaign.
Don’t give me that look. I know I’m not a paladin, and I know I don’t live in the Matrix. But the realization that everyone else was engaged in role-playing all the time gave my universe rules and order.
We geeks might not be able to intuit the subtext of a facial expression or a casual phrase, but give us a behavioral algorithm and human interactions become a data stream. We can process what’s going on in the heads of the people around us. Through careful observation of body language and awkward silences, we can even learn to detect when we are bringing the party down with our analysis of how loop quantum gravity helps explain the time travel in that new “Terminator” TV show. I mean, so I hear.
Mr. Gygax’s game allowed geeks to venture out of our dungeons, blinking against the light, just in time to create the present age of electronic miracles.
Dungeons & Dragons begat one of the first computer games, a swords-and-sorcery dungeon crawl called Adventure. In the late 1970s, the two games provided the narrative framework for the first fantasy-based computer worlds played by multiple, remotely connected users. They were called multi-user dungeons back then, and they were mostly the province of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But they required the same careful construction of virtual identities that Mr. Gygax had introduced to gaming.
Today millions of people are slaves to Gary Gygax. They play EverQuest and World of Warcraft, and someone must still be hanging out in Second Life. (That “massively multiplayer” computer traffic, by the way, also helped drive the development of the sort of huge server clouds that power Google.)
But that’s just gaming culture, more pervasive than it was in 1974 when Dungeons & Dragons was created and certainly more profitable — today it’s estimated to be a $40 billion-a-year business — but still a little bit nerdy. Delete the dragon-slaying, though, and you’re left with something much more mainstream: Facebook, a vast, interconnected universe populated by avatars.
Facebook and other social networks ask people to create a character — one based on the user, sure, but still a distinct entity. Your character then builds relationships by connecting to other characters. Like Dungeons & Dragons, this is not a competitive game. There’s no way to win. You just play.
This diverse evolution from Mr. Gygax’s 1970s dungeon goes much further. Every Gmail login, every instant-messaging screen name, every public photo collection on Flickr, every blog-commenting alias is a newly manifested identity, a character playing the real world.
We don’t have to say goodbye to Gary Gygax, the architect of the now. Every time I make a tactical move (like when I suggest to my wife this summer that we should see “Iron Man” instead of “The Dark Knight”), I’m counting my experience points, hoping I have enough dexterity and rolling the dice. And every time, Mr. Gygax is there — quasi-mystical, glowing in blue and bearing a simple game that was an elegant weapon from a more civilized age.
That was a reference to “Star Wars.” Cool, right?
Adam Rogers is a senior editor at Wired.
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Del Toro a Hobbit-Forming Director
http://www.eonline.com/news/article/index.jsp?uuid=c4fe9cef-bd34-436a-9144-ae73e4ba1c69
Del Toro a Hobbit-Forming Director
by Natalie Finn
1-28-5
After delving into Hellboy and Pan's Labyrinth, MiddleEarth shouldn't feel like that much of a descent for Guillermo del Toro.
The Academy Award-nominated writer-director is reportedly in talks to helm back-to-back epics adapted from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, which, after various delays, are finally going forward with Peter Jackson set to produce for New Line Cinema and MGM.
A rep for New Line had no comment on the purported negotiations, but del Toro's name has been on a short list of auteurs who could do the fantastical source material justice ever since the studios announced Jackson was back on board.
"I’ve heard some rumblings, but nothing official," del Toro told Entertainment Weekly last month when asked if he'd been approached for the job. "I don’t want to think about it because it’s such an eventuality. It’s the only Tolkien book I read...I read it and I loved it. So it would be a privilege."
The fate of the Lord of the Rings prequel remained in doubt for several years while Jackson, who struck box office gold with his Oscar-winning Rings trilogy, tangled with New Line over royalties.
Lucky for Bilbo Baggins fans, the two sides settled up last month and are ready to proceed with plans for two Hobbit films, which they're planning to shoot one after the other with a budget estimated at $150 million per picture.
Jackson, who has been busy adapting the bestselling novel The Lovely Bones for the big screen and has signed on to share directing duties with Steven Spielberg on a series of Tintin movies, had to pass on helming The Hobbit himself.
Principal photography is tentatively scheduled to begin next year with an eye on respective release dates in 2010 and 2011, but no screenwriters have been hired yet thanks to the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike, now in its 13th week.
Del Toro, who earned an Oscar nod for his original screenplay for Pan's Labyrinth, and Jackson, who shared adapted-screenplay honors in 2004 with wife Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, will oversee the writing process, whenever it comes to pass.
Tolkien fans, at least, have been largely positive about the idea of del Toro handling their beloved dwarves and elves, although some are concerned that he might cast a dark shadow over the production.
"Well, all I can say is I certainly can think of directors that I would not want to see touch TH with a 10-foot pole, and del Toro is NOT one of them," wrote the Watcher on LOTR supersite the One Ring. "I do agree with some others here that I fear he alone might make a very dark and disturbing version, but with P.J. on board and New Line basically really needing this film to work, I think it might be pulled off."
"I have hoped that P.J. and del Toro would be working together, it was only a pipe dream," mused Ari-Anna on the One Ring."And it will either be phenomenal or a bust. I am hoping for the first."
At least he didn't come up in an old discussion of "nightmare" Hobbit directors. Those shunned included George Lucas, M. Night Shyamalan, Spike Lee (they probably didn't have to worry there), Sam Raimi, Alfonso Cuarón, Michael Bay, Tim Burton and David Lynch (again, nothing to lose sleep over).
Before making an international splash with Pan's Labyrinth, a horror-tinged fantasy about a young girl seeking respite from her tyrannical stepfather in 1930s-era Spain, del Toro was responsible for the sci-fi thriller Mimic, the vampire-action sequel Blade II and the hit adaptation of the comic book Hellboy.
The 43-year-old filmmaker, who was mentioned frequently last year alongside Babel director Alejandro González Iñárritu and scribe Guillermo Arriaga as one of the Mexican-born masters of cinema taking Hollywood by storm, is currently in postproduction on Hellboy II: The Golden Army and recently executive produced the Spanish-language horror film The Orphanage.
Del Toro a Hobbit-Forming Director
by Natalie Finn
1-28-5
After delving into Hellboy and Pan's Labyrinth, MiddleEarth shouldn't feel like that much of a descent for Guillermo del Toro.
The Academy Award-nominated writer-director is reportedly in talks to helm back-to-back epics adapted from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, which, after various delays, are finally going forward with Peter Jackson set to produce for New Line Cinema and MGM.
A rep for New Line had no comment on the purported negotiations, but del Toro's name has been on a short list of auteurs who could do the fantastical source material justice ever since the studios announced Jackson was back on board.
"I’ve heard some rumblings, but nothing official," del Toro told Entertainment Weekly last month when asked if he'd been approached for the job. "I don’t want to think about it because it’s such an eventuality. It’s the only Tolkien book I read...I read it and I loved it. So it would be a privilege."
The fate of the Lord of the Rings prequel remained in doubt for several years while Jackson, who struck box office gold with his Oscar-winning Rings trilogy, tangled with New Line over royalties.
Lucky for Bilbo Baggins fans, the two sides settled up last month and are ready to proceed with plans for two Hobbit films, which they're planning to shoot one after the other with a budget estimated at $150 million per picture.
Jackson, who has been busy adapting the bestselling novel The Lovely Bones for the big screen and has signed on to share directing duties with Steven Spielberg on a series of Tintin movies, had to pass on helming The Hobbit himself.
Principal photography is tentatively scheduled to begin next year with an eye on respective release dates in 2010 and 2011, but no screenwriters have been hired yet thanks to the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike, now in its 13th week.
Del Toro, who earned an Oscar nod for his original screenplay for Pan's Labyrinth, and Jackson, who shared adapted-screenplay honors in 2004 with wife Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, will oversee the writing process, whenever it comes to pass.
Tolkien fans, at least, have been largely positive about the idea of del Toro handling their beloved dwarves and elves, although some are concerned that he might cast a dark shadow over the production.
"Well, all I can say is I certainly can think of directors that I would not want to see touch TH with a 10-foot pole, and del Toro is NOT one of them," wrote the Watcher on LOTR supersite the One Ring. "I do agree with some others here that I fear he alone might make a very dark and disturbing version, but with P.J. on board and New Line basically really needing this film to work, I think it might be pulled off."
"I have hoped that P.J. and del Toro would be working together, it was only a pipe dream," mused Ari-Anna on the One Ring."And it will either be phenomenal or a bust. I am hoping for the first."
At least he didn't come up in an old discussion of "nightmare" Hobbit directors. Those shunned included George Lucas, M. Night Shyamalan, Spike Lee (they probably didn't have to worry there), Sam Raimi, Alfonso Cuarón, Michael Bay, Tim Burton and David Lynch (again, nothing to lose sleep over).
Before making an international splash with Pan's Labyrinth, a horror-tinged fantasy about a young girl seeking respite from her tyrannical stepfather in 1930s-era Spain, del Toro was responsible for the sci-fi thriller Mimic, the vampire-action sequel Blade II and the hit adaptation of the comic book Hellboy.
The 43-year-old filmmaker, who was mentioned frequently last year alongside Babel director Alejandro González Iñárritu and scribe Guillermo Arriaga as one of the Mexican-born masters of cinema taking Hollywood by storm, is currently in postproduction on Hellboy II: The Golden Army and recently executive produced the Spanish-language horror film The Orphanage.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
'The Hobbit' is a go with Peter Jackson
http://hollywoodinsider.ew.com/2007/12/its-back-to-mid.html
'The Hobbit' is a go with Peter Jackson
Dec 18, 200
by Nicole Sperling
Categories: Movie Biz, The Hobbit
It's back to Middle Earth for Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and the boys from New Line. Finally, the years of disputes have ended, and the partners (including co-producer and co-distributor MGM) are gearing up for two new Hobbit movies. EW investigated, talking to the parties behind the negotiations to uncover how everything got resolved, and to get an idea of what viewers can expect of these adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's original literary masterpiece. Here's the lowdown:
Jackson and his life/creative partner Walsh have always envisioned the big-screen adaptation of The Hobbit as two movies. The first would deal with the 80-year old novel. The second, imagined entirely by Jackson and Walsh, would link the conclusion of The Hobbit to the start of the first Lord of the Rings book, The Fellowship of the Ring. New Line and Jackson will develop the properties over the next year with hopes of entering into pre-production by 2009 for a 2010 and 2011 release. No writers, including Jackson, Walsh, and their longtime partner Philippa Boyens, have been commissioned. (None can be, because of the strike.)
'The Hobbit' is a go with Peter Jackson
Dec 18, 200
by Nicole Sperling
Categories: Movie Biz, The Hobbit
It's back to Middle Earth for Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and the boys from New Line. Finally, the years of disputes have ended, and the partners (including co-producer and co-distributor MGM) are gearing up for two new Hobbit movies. EW investigated, talking to the parties behind the negotiations to uncover how everything got resolved, and to get an idea of what viewers can expect of these adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's original literary masterpiece. Here's the lowdown:
Jackson and his life/creative partner Walsh have always envisioned the big-screen adaptation of The Hobbit as two movies. The first would deal with the 80-year old novel. The second, imagined entirely by Jackson and Walsh, would link the conclusion of The Hobbit to the start of the first Lord of the Rings book, The Fellowship of the Ring. New Line and Jackson will develop the properties over the next year with hopes of entering into pre-production by 2009 for a 2010 and 2011 release. No writers, including Jackson, Walsh, and their longtime partner Philippa Boyens, have been commissioned. (None can be, because of the strike.)
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