The ring recycle

The year-end double issue of The New Yorker has some neat stuff, including a story by David Sedaris (“Let It Snow”), and an interesting article by Alex Ross on Tolkien vs. Wagner (“The Ring and the Rings”). An excerpt from the latter:

It is probably heretical to suggest that the “Lord of the Rings” films surpass the books on which they are based. (Correspondence on this subject may be addressed to Alex Ross, The North Pole.) The books tell a fantastic story in a familiar style, but the movies transcend the apparent limitations of their medium in the same way that Wagner transcended the limitations of opera. They revive the art of Romantic wonder; they manufacture the sublime. I hope that at least a small fraction of the huge worldwide audiences for these films will one day be tempted into Wagner’s world, which offers something else again. For Tolkien, myth is a window on an ideal world, both brighter and blacker than our own. For Wagner, it is a magnifying mirror for the average, desperate modern soul.

An aside: a couple weeks ago I changed the address on my magazine subscriptions so they’d be mailed to Thom’s place (where I am most of the time now), and when the first issue of The New Yorker arrived, I don’t know, I found something cute in seeing the label with my name and his address underneath.