1985

Happy holidays and best wishes for 2013 to everyone! While the weather outside may be frightful, I am pretty sure this column will not be so delightful. Last-minute deadlines and holiday consumption tend to jeopardize editorial quality (as does sitting on the couch playing remote hangman and scrabble on my iPhone).

There is news, however, and it is good. From the track world I received an update from Jim Sapienza. Jim was nominated and later chosen to be inducted into the Kentucky State Hall of Fame this year for his cross-country and track achievements. On January 5 the Kentucky Association of U.S. Association of Track and Field and the Kentucky Track and Cross-Country Coaches Association will combine to put on the eighth annual awards banquet. This banquet will be to honor all the venues of the running sports in the state of Kentucky. Congratulations to Jim on this great honor!

From the Dartmouth legacy world I have learned (well, really, I got an e-mail from Leslie Davis Dahl) that Trisha Madden Venacore’s daughter (Caroline) and Pres Romeyn’s son (Ted) have been accepted into the Dartmouth class of 2017. Congratulations to Trisha and Pres for this exciting news!

From the literary world Matthew Dickerson provided this update. “I’ve had three more books published in the past five years: Nos. 7, 8 and 9. The most recent one, A Hobbit Journey: Discovering the Enchantment of J.R.R.Tolkien’s Middleearth, is receiving lots of (positive) attention. I just finished a radio interview with KTIS 900 in Minneapolis. Last week I was interviewed by WCIAD 800 in Montreal. (I live in Vermont about 1:40 hours away from Dartmouth and teach at Middlebury, so this is a bit surprising.) I am scheduled in January for a recorded interview with Ken Myers (formerly of NPR, now of Mars Hill Audio Journal for its bimonthly CD com- mentary). Huffington Post asked me to do a piece because of my book; it is due out today, though as of 9:45 a.m. it hasn’t appeared online yet. Image Journal asked me for a piece for next week. I am invited now to speak all over the country. In 2011-12 I was the distinguished lecturer of the year at Trinity Western University in British Columbia, and a distinguished lecturer at University of Texas, San Antonio. In 2012 I also gave invited lectures on Tolkien at St. Olaf College and Augustana College (Sioux Falls, South Dakota) and in 2011 I was the keynote speaker at the annual Tolkien conference hosted by the English department at the University of Vermont Montpelier. This October I was flown to Anchorage, Alaska, and spoke on Tolkien at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Meanwhile, reviews and mention of the book keep coming in.” Google Matt’s name for a full list of links.

From the mindless activity world I am getting crushed in iPhone scrabble by Lynne Zeisler Petkovic, Barry Bass, Pam Lower Bass and Jim Sapienza. In what appears to be an amazing coincidence, all of them must have received the same book for the holidays: Obscure, Absurd Words Worth a Lot of Points. I’m not positive but I’m pretty certain Matt Dickerson did not write this one.

Wishing everyone a healthy, happy and safe new year!

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