I agree with this – Warner Brothers is leaving a few billion dollars on the table by not making any Wonder Woman films.

Get Jennifer Lawrence to play the part, and every fan in the universe would go apeshit and the movie would gross $100 million the first weekend no matter how good or bad it turned out to be.

When people complain about Tolkien’s lack of writing chops, it merely reveals their lack of historical knowledge of what tradition Tolkien was drawing from and what he was attempting to achieve.

He was of course writing in the tradition of epic mythology – specifically Northern European mythology – and following many of the writing conventions and styles of that genre in his most-known work, The Lord of the Rings.

Wagner’s also-turgid and epic Der Ring des Nibelungen flows from the same source, though is considered a classic in most circles because of its genre and that the composer is longer-dead than Tolkien.

If you read translated works of Old English, Norse, German and Finnish mythology, unsurprisingly they sound and read just like LOTR.

It’s not really that Tolkien’s writing was bad, then, but that as an academic he made the mistake of accidentally writing a popular work. And even worse, it had magic and elves in it.

In nearly any field, there are few worse crimes than exceeding your peers. In academia it seems a particularly high crime for some reason, and there were few guiltier of that particular infraction than Tolkien.

And for that he has never been and never will be forgiven.

And this is a pretty good summary of why I do not read and cannot stand most literary fiction – not because it is over my head (whatever that means), but because, well, it is so limited by its attempt to be unreadable to the hoi polloi.

LitFic is a genre just like any other, with its own conventions and limitations. I believe it is actually more limited because it is restrained – unlike many other genres – from using the implausible and fantastic to throw a revealing spotlight on the quotidian and the commonplace.

This is some really good writing about one of my favorite shows of all time that hardly anyone watched – that being Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

This group of characters, who are not on Team Connor, add so many layers of depth and complexity to the show, and elevate it from a pretty good show about soldiers and family preparing for a future robot apocalypse, to a truly compelling, complex, graceful piece of television that deals with war, loss, robots, the preservation of what makes us human, and how who and what gets written in the book of myth is only a fraction of the story.

That show went from ok at first to good, then to great, and then to absolutely amazing. Two episodes of that show are my two favorite episodes of any TV show of all time. Others are not even really close.

Lena Headey was so very good in the show. So was Summer Glau. And unlike basically every other show ever, it didn’t treat the female characters as some bizarre species that vaguely had something do with the story and could be killed off at need for dramatic effect, but instead they were absolutely essential parts without which that world (like the real world) would not turn.

When that show was cancelled, it was a very sad day.