steepholm

That's exactly why I never got a tattoo - apart from sheer cowardice, of course, and nervousness about having identifying marks in case I got on the wrong side of the law, and never really having the urge to anyway. But still! The confidence it suggests in the idea that one is "finished" and ready to make a statement about oneself that will hold true to the end of one's existence, is something I can't quite comprehend. I suppose a tattoo is indeed like a fixed daemon in that way.

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gair.livejournal.com

I think many people with tattoos don't see them as a statement that one is 'finished', but that one learned something or went through something at a particular time that one wants to remember. Like the old-skool thing that sailors got them when they crossed the Equator: marking a moment in time, not stating an end-point. So you can recontextualize a tattoo as you go. I tend to see them as marking the end of phases: I got my angel to commemorate my intention to shift from being a witness to being a protagonist, so it's a version of Benjamin's 'Angel of History', who's trapped in time, as a hopeful statement that that period of my life was over, but that it had shaped me and marked me in ways that were permanent. I'm going to get another piercing when I finish my first book. And so on. I don't know when I'll get my next tattoo - when the next big phase in my life ends, I suppose. I hope that's not for a long time, though, I'm enjoying this bit.

Anyway, yes. Childhood/adulthood separation v problematic. Talk to

gerald about this next time we meet, and mention the name 'John Marsden' if you think you would enjoy seeing her spit with rage...

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Well, I think I can see that way of looking at it. Just make sure you do your tattoos nice and small, though, as we want you around for a long time and you mustn't run out of space.

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Oh, and as for seeing

gerald spit, I am so up for that! Will bring umbrella.

At first, I thought you were talking about John Marston. But I'm wiser now.

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lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com

I suppose a tattoo is indeed like a fixed daemon in that way.

It's a theory, at least! But how it fits with your knowledge of people like Becca, I'm not so sure...

(You do remember that I'm entirely with you on everything else, I hope?)

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Despite appearances to the contrary, I'm only speaking for myself here, and my own eccentric reaction to the idea of being tattooed - which in my head is rather too close to being branded for comfort. But clearly lots of people have a different perspective on it entirely - such as Becca and

gair - and more power to them.

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lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com

It was the multiplicity of Becca's tattoos that I was thinking wouldn't fit in with the theory of a tattoo being equivalent to a daemon - rather than her just having got one, like gair. But I get it now.

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altariel.livejournal.com

Glad you got to see the episode in full. No, you're not alone, I was thinking much the same as I watched earlier. I feel a strong continuity between how I was as a child and how I am now, except that now I can reach light switches more easily. In fact, these days I feel much more like I did when I was six than I did when I was twenty. The big differences are the well of experience to draw on, and a different relationship to time.

As for why, I'll have to ponder further.

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Ooh, cute icon! Whence?

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altariel.livejournal.com

From an illustration by Jacky Fleming (more here).

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Thanks! Yay for stripy tights!

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gair.livejournal.com

Wow, the things you learn! I didn't realize JF was doing illustrations now - they're gorgeous.

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I do think to a considerable extent childhood shapes you. Even in little things - when I try a new food, I know I probably won't like it; I can't seem to take to anything I didn't already know and enjoy before I was 12. Also the mind is surely more flexible in childhood and adolescence - I can still recite by heart loads of things I learned then, but learning anything by heart now is harder and doesn't tend to last as well. (I gather that's true for most people).

Whether puberty, as such, causes the narrowing of horizons and greater rigidity of mind that seems to come with growing up, I don't know, but most adults seem to me to be less open to possibility than most children. And those who retain that openness are often objects of suspicion or scorn.

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most adults seem to me to be less open to possibility than most children. And those who retain that openness are often objects of suspicion or scorn.

You may be right on both counts, but if I had Philip Pullman's influence I'd like to be working to reverse that situation, rather than reinforcing it.

My food tastes have expanded considerably since I was 12, for what it's worth - good job, as I was exceptionally fussy then. I have the same experience as you re. learning things by heart, and also I'm not so good at touching my toes. In other ways, however, I'm far more flexible.

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a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com

I'd never really thought of it, but now that you mention it, I'm annoyed, because you're right. I still don't feel all that grown up, except when I look around me ...and then I frequently feel old AND grown up.

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mevennen.livejournal.com

Very interesting point.

I don't know where this view that Susan (in the Narnia books) is going to Hell comes from. Even as a child, I took the point as being not that she's cast herself out of Narnia because she likes lipstick and nylons, but because she now thinks that these are *only* what life is about.

I want magic and high heels, myself.

My main issue with Pullman - whose work I like - is that he can't have his ontological cake and eat it. If you're promoting an essentially atheistic view of the universe, then how can someone have a visible soul? Or am I wrong in that this is what he is doing?

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jadelennox

I don't think he is an athiest. I think he doesn't like a having an anthropomorphised bearded king, but I think he's *far* more theistic than he'd like to believe he is. My reading of HDM is that the text believes it has a Tao-like, intent-free metaphysical force -- but that the text is wrong about itself, and in fact portrays a very intent-driven metaphysics. Dust and Angels, after all; it's all *about* intent. It's just not about the two dudes who were *in charge*.

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I don't know where this view that Susan (in the Narnia books) is going to Hell comes from. Even as a child, I took the point as being not that she's cast herself out of Narnia because she likes lipstick and nylons, but because she now thinks that these are *only* what life is about.

I want magic and high heels, myself.

Amen to all of that.

My main issue with Pullman - whose work I like - is that he can't have his ontological cake and eat it. If you're promoting an essentially atheistic view of the universe, then how can someone have a visible soul? Or am I wrong in that this is what he is doing?

Now there I think he may be doing something more interesting. The way I read it, Pullman's universe has a spiritual side, but it's a material spiritualism. He doesn't buy into the Gnostic idea of immaterial spirit vs. matter - so daemons/souls can be real, without implying the existence of an immaterial realm. And Dust is precisely that which makes matter self-aware, and hence spiritual.

I do think there are some difficulties with the way Pullman plays this out, because he can't make it graft neatly onto his neo/anti-Christian framework, but it would make an interesting basis for a fantasy set in an animistic universe.

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sovay

I do think there are some difficulties with the way Pullman plays this out, because he can't make it graft neatly onto his neo/anti-Christian framework, but it would make an interesting basis for a fantasy set in an animistic universe.

That would have been awesome.

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jadelennox

I have said for years that Pullman is of Lewis' camp without knowing it. Pullman completely, 100% buys into a notion of (a) metaphysics, (b) gender, and (c) childhood innocence (with all the etc you include above about puberty, personality, fixity, and such) -- he just places his value judgements differently. He doesn't disbelieve in Narnia, he just dislikes the Emperor over Sea. He doesn't disagree with leaving Susan behind, he just thinks she was the lucky one for not getting in a train accident while she was still young and fluid.

And he has no problem at all with the different career paths available to Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve. In fact, his opinion of the White Witch might be one thing he *does* agree with Lewis on, for all Pullman gave her the opportunity of a deathbed (death-chasm?) change-of-heart.

Er. I might be angry.

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Clipped from White Witch Weekly: "Chocolatl vs Turkish Delight - which is better for luring children?"

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jadelennox

See, and this is why Mrs. Coulter should have been far more successful. Chocolatl is good, and Turkish Delight is nasty.

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I wrote somewhere - it's in the Children's Fantasy Fiction volume edited by Nickianne Moody - that Pullman attacks Lewis for his attitudes to sex (I've a quote here from PP: ‘the sensible Lewis [...] was thrust aside by the paranoid bigot who proclaimed that an interest in lipstick and nylons was not an addition to the pleasures of life, but an absolute disqualification for the joys of Heaven.’) only to punish any of his characters who do have sex.

For Lyra we have the Douglas Sirk ending with life as a bluestocking the best she can hope for. I could list what happens to his other sexually active characters but it'd be full of spoilers

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Hey, we're both in that volume! I'd forgotten.

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I should read through the book more than I actually have - but I was scared off by not being entirely sure which edit of my contribution was actually used (I don't think it was the one I proofread) and a sinking feeling caused by the introduction finishing in mid

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Yes, there were definite copyediting problems with that book! My chapter escaped relatively unscathed, with just one paragraph from Nathaniel Hawthorne set out as if I'd written it myself, but others were horribly mangled. The piece on Susan Cooper came a particular cropper, I recall.

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ending with life as a bluestocking the best she can hope for.

Hey, that's a happy ending! Certainly better than being with soppy old Will. You sound a bit like Clarence the angel, telling George Bailey of the fearful fate that has befallen Mary - "she's a librarian, George"....

One thing I like a lot about that ending is its dismissal of the idea that Love Conquers All and that romance is the most important thing in the universe. Lyra and Will, even in love, are allowed to see that there are wider issues which must take precedence over Twu Wuv (a sort of junior Casablanca ending) and Lyra can even contemplate meeting someone else. That was good.

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As I say, the best she can hope for...

She's joining the sort of people she despises at the start of the books, and it sounds as if the instinctive and experiential learning she has or picks up will be replaced with book learning and the didactic. She has to put away childish things. Including fantasy.

It'd be interesting to know how long she hangs around park benches pining over Will - which is probably wrong and wromantic.

On the other hand, I suspect that had it been the happy ending I would have felt like it was a consolation ending and too wish fulfilment. I'm not sure what ending would have satisfied me to be honest; but in too many places Pullman has his cake and eats it.

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Yes, but she has learned that she shouldn't have despised them in the first place. Also that their kind of learning has value too.

I still have issues with your "best she can hope for". If she were a man, with the prospect of becoming a learned professor, would you be so negative, saying that was the best she could hope for? Maybe I'm misinterpreting but I hear behind this phrase the hint that Woman's True Destiny is to fall in love with some man and have his kids...

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If you hear that, it isn't consciously meant to be there - which is not to say that it isn't. I wouldn't wish being a learned professor on anyone (unless you got to be Indiana Jones or his father) when there's a chance to have adventures and save the world. Lyra's True Destiny is to have adventures rather than settle down and have kids. (Personally I tend toward the avuncular rather than the paternal.)

I found it refreshing that Northern Lights appeared to be a female Bildungsroman which (I am told) is relatively rare compared to the male version, and that at the centre is an intelligent and resourceful child who seems comparatively in control of what she does and who won't take no for an answer. Then she meets Will and suddenly she's cooking breakfast and it's all about his adventure. It would be more interesting to have her going out and still having adventures - for some reason I have an image of John Wayne in The Searchers who can't live in the society he's saved - rather than a) being a frustrated spinster in the college, b) finding some nice young man in society to settle down with or c) what I'm calling a bluestocking existense. I like the idea of a boy and his bear (or here a girl and her bear) always playing in the enchanted places rather than the boy going off to boarding school and then get a job in the civil service.

I think the Sally Lockhart novels deal better with the growing up thing - but then I guess the narartives start in a later part of the process.

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Argh! It was going so well until you got to "frustrated spinster" (why assume spinsters are frustrated?)and "bluestocking", which is such a pejorative way to refer to an intellectual woman...

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Frustrated because she's not having adventures - as opposed to necessarily being sexually frustrated. And I still don't get any sense of the females in the college being any fun at all. There are of course other possible futures for Lyra imaginable, but I really got the sense of the novel closing down the possibilities for adventure.

For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure that the word "bluestocking" was applied to Lyra by a female acquaintance of mine. I don't want to entirely lose the pejorative connotations, because it suggests the disatisfaction we both felt at her fate. Neither of us bought the idea of Lyra sitting around and being intellectual - and I mean the sitting around part wasn't convincing.

I guess it's a generic trope to grow-up, to drown your book, to put away childish things, to set off for the Grey Havens, to wake up and find it was all a dream, but I'd hoped Pullman was going to be more radical.

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Frustrated because she's not having adventures - as opposed to necessarily being sexually frustrated.

Then why add "spinster" - surely an unmarried woman is likelier to have adventures than a married one? And spinster has such unnecessarily derogatory overtones that it is scarcely used now, good riddance to it.

I didn't take it that Lyra would necessarily never travel or leave the college again. I take it that she is going to learn something first - don't forget that as well as being intelligent and brave at the beginning, she is a largely ignorant, inconsiderate little savage with no manners. A bit of knowledge never made anyone a worse traveller.

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I think you are mis-taking DRASEcretcampus's terminologies as reflecting his belief, when he's appropriating these words to demonstrate the ludicrousness of the texts.

It's one of those conversations in which, were it in a pub, tone would carry his sarcasm across.

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sartorias.livejournal.com

One of the many probs I have with him.

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Do you remember that talk at the IBBY conference we sat through that also had rigid divides in ages? I do wonder if it comes from the whole traumatic boy thing of hair cutting, breeching, public school, loss of teddy bear. It never applied to women, and it applies less and less to men. Male dominated societies tho do tend to have these rigid dividing lines for boys (and then punish them fiercely for dropping back into childly behaviour).

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That's an interesting point about the maleness of rites of passage. "Putting away childish things" when one becomes a man would be the Christian locus classicus, I guess.

Did you ever see Jack Rosenthal's Bar Mitzvah Boy? I watched it on television when it was first broadcast (I was thirteen then myself), and the line that stayed with me was when the protagonist's female, non-Jewish friend says to him musingly: "I suppose getting a first bra for a Christian girl is like having a Bar Mitzvah for a Jewish boy." Or words to that effect. I remember wondering about that a lot at the time!

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I think he wanted to say first period and couldn't.

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Yes! Which is a genuine rite of passage as opposed to the artificial male ones...

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lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com

That's an interesting point about the maleness of rites of passage.

I was about to protest the idea of 'rites of passage' having been all male, until it occurred to me that that's right, because the female versions were all about confinement rather than passage into the world. Put your hair up, cover your ankles, never run, do your corset up tight - tighter! - no more real studying. And etc.

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