Editor and writer Anna Broadway has blogged herself into a book with Sexless in the City: A Memoir of Reluctant Chastity. I don’t think the blog is the book, but maybe it is.
The essays on Makoto Fujimura’s blog are to become a book as well. That should be good.
Ken Myers and Alan Jacobs talk about Philip Pullman’s books, which sound worse the more I hear about them. Beautifully imagined, but unfulfilling and not so much fantasy as argument for religious anarchy. Whether The Golden Compass is toned down or spun out enough to be acceptable to most audiences, it sounds as if the two sequels will have to depart from the books a great deal, especially the third.
“Be Thou My Vision” is one of my favorite hymns. It’s one I wish I could speak as a confession instead of an aspiration. Here are two of the less familiar verses:
Be Thou my battle Shield, Sword for the fight;
Be Thou my Dignity, Thou my Delight;
Thou my soul’s Shelter, Thou my high Tower:
Raise Thou me heavenward, O Power of my power.
Riches I heed not, nor man’s empty praise,
Thou mine Inheritance, now and always:
Thou and Thou only, first in my heart,
High King of Heaven, my Treasure Thou art.
Speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we beat? . . . which we strike? Where’s that thesaurus? CAAF plays a little game with Bovary’s line.
1. Chicago, Tampa, Miami, Phoenix, and Atlanta have the highest percentages of caffeine consumers. That includes cokes and chocolate, not just coffee. Atlanta, by the way, is the HQ of Coca-Cola. Philadelphia and Baltimore were among the “least caffeinated cities.” Perhaps picking up the coffee drinking would help you in your war over E.A. Poe, Philadelphia.
2. Chicago readers who drink coffee (or Coffee-drinking Chicagans who read) may be interested in this round-up of local coffee shops.
File this under Waiting to See. I gather that several people have seen the Snopes article on the upcoming movie, The Golden Compass. The outcry is that the movie will be as atheistic and anti-church as the books are, but I don’t know that to be true yet.
Months ago when we first talked about this, I remember reading the spiritual themes of the movies would not be like the books. That belief is backed up by this EW article, in which Catholic actress Nicole Kidman says, “The Catholic Church is part of my essence. I wouldn’t be able to do this film if I thought it were at all anti-Catholic.” The article reports, “Conspicuously absent, for instance, is any reference to Catholicism; instead, the malevolent organization that snatches children to surgically remove their souls is referred to in the movie only as the Magisterium.”
So the movie may not be the atheist tract some are thinking it is, regardless what the author says about the books. It is the movie coming out in December, not the books, which have been around for several years, so (perhaps this is a point too technical) Pullman did not write the movie just as Tolkien did not write the adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. Scriptwriters adapted both works for the big screen, which means there will be differences.
So will the movie be a hateful diatribe? I don’t know. The books are another matter. Note this summary from a 2001 story in Crisis Magazine:
That is because Lyra is, as Mrs. Coulter learns from a witch she has tortured to death, Mother Eve reincarnate, destined to bring about a redemption from original sin.
Pullman’s treatment of the Catholic Church in his fantasy-Oxford world is at times imaginative (he names one of the popes John Calvin the First). But it is also unflattering. Mary Malone, a physicist introduced late in The Subtle Knife, says, “I used to be a nun you see. I thought physics could be done to the glory of God, till I saw there wasn’t any God at all and that physics was more interesting anyway. The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that’s all.” What is a seven-year-old to make of that?
Note also the blasphemous quotation at the beginning this article. For a lengthy consideration of Pullman’s writing, see this Touchstone article by Leonie Caldecott, in which she calls Pullman “anti-Inkling.” She sums up the books (not the movie) this way:
Pullman may be a spellbinding magician painting an awe-inspiring scenario of hugely ambitious scope, but I suspect that in His Dark Materials he is trying to remodel the universe to his own taste. It is a kind of Luciferian enterprise to try to do in his story what Sauron tries to do in The Lord of the Rings. Or indeed to believe one can co-opt this power for good, as those whom the Ring has tempted, like Boromir, or even Frodo at the end of his quest, try to do.
Sherwood Forest is now 450 acres, down from 100,000, and come Britons are concerned, saying the forest is one of England’s essential features. Only 450 ancient oaks are still alive. I wonder what that ancient shepherd of trees, Treebeard, would say about this.
The Springfield, Oregon, police have been overrun by gnomes among other things. “Somebody stole 75 lawn ornaments from around town and placed them meticulously on and around the lawn of one house on Oct. 17,” reports the AP. Now they are at the police station.
“We need to get them out of here,” Capt. Richard Harrison said.
Oh, yes, you do, Captain Harrison, but that won’t be the last of them. They will come again, and they will come here too. The gnomes are on the move!
I agreed to review The Dark River, second in the Fourth Realm trilogy, in part because I had not read the first book. I thought I could give a unique perspective. Most reviewers would have read the first book, wouldn’t they? After I agreed, I thought I may have made a mistake. I read somewhere that the plot was so complex a reader should start with book one, and if I had picked up The Two Towers without any knowledge of the rest of The Lord of the Rings story, I’d be lost at the start. But I didn’t have any trouble following the story. There are many times the narrative recalls past events, all of which could be part of book one, but I don’t know and not knowing didn’t hinder my enjoyment of the story here.
The story begins exploring the black hats’ attempts to eliminate the white hats. The black hats in this story are The Brethren, a high-tech, international organization that wants to virtually imprison all free people through data networks, security checks, and surveillance cameras. They believe that once everyone in the world agrees to being watched or recorded for security reasons then everyone will become fairly controllable. The Brethren believe people are fundamentally products of their environment, so if the environment can be completely controlled, then everyone in it can be controlled. This belief earned the black hats the label Tabula by the white hats, who are Travelers and Harlequins. Continue reading The Dark River by John Twelve Hawks (JXIIH)
Here’s the perfect gift for the reader who complains about big books and the length of modern literature–800 pages, 18 inches tall, complete with display case, all on The Big Apple.