walkingshadow (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
walkingshadow) wrote2005-12-31 02:52 pm
walkingshadow) wrote2005-12-31 02:52 pm
Entry tags:
she would be young for generations
if i made new year's resolutions1, i would resolve to post not more, but sooner2: i have the tendency to jot down notes in an open client window for a week or more, not bothering with sentences or actual reflection, until everything's old news and i'm ready to write it all off as a loss and start over. someone was talking the other day about the ahistoricality of livejournal (linked from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
metafandom), that as a culture we live only in the present moment—which i have no trouble agreeing with, but think is fascinating for a blogging tool that's named as a journal and was presumably designed as a method of recording events, in addition to a community space where people gather. things pile up with pen-and-paper too, though; the take-home lesson is get it down quickly, or it disappears.
so, i've got like, four different posts that i'm working on, but the absolute first order of business that just trumped everything else is thanking![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bunnymcfoo, profusely (and with much attendant flailing omg), for the PACKAGE that arrived bearing the HIS DARK MATERIALS trilogy, in compact and convenient box-set form!! i stared the stare of awe and surprise, and then did the dance of joy around the kitchen. thank you so much! <333!
i finished the golden compass (first in the series), um, two weeks ago? and i adored it and was absolutely fascinated by it, but i've just been too lazy to write anything up. story of my life, what?
my first instinct is to get huffy and wonder why nobody saw fit to TELL ME about these books3, because they're AWESOME. well, the first one is, and i'm extrapolating; if he crashes and burns in the next two, i'm going to cry. i'm at a loss to start listing what i liked, what i thought was successful, because EVERYTHING was, because the world he created is so HUGE and finely-detailed, and every single one of those details is suprising and completely natural, clever and perfect. his details have details. it's like a fractal, or an obscenely high-resolution picture, one you can zoom in on ad infinitum and never blur the image into pixels. and i suppose it could be an intricately-constructed universe that i couldn't care less about, but instead it's daemons and armored bears and oxford4, elementary particles and church-led research into original sin, a journey to the north, the country of texas, a supremely competent little girl for a heroine, and powerful, charismatic adults who just might be absolutely fucking insane. it's not so much that i want to live in this world, but that i want to shrink myself down to size, hop into the book, and see how far it goes.
and while i was getting swept up into this book, marveling at its depth and its scope, i thought about why it was labeled as young-adult fiction, and what that designation means for a possible audience. i decided it comes down to two things: 1) the part of the publishers (and the author) who designate which books are specifically for—and therefore safe5 for—children of a given age; and 2) the part of the general public, by which i mean the stigma attached to children's (and young adult) books. my basic problem is this: his dark materials is nuanced, action-packed, smart, and entertaining, and it runs the full gamut of emotions; why don't adults read it? why is it not a book for adults?
the answer to the second question is, i think, the age of the protagonist. lyra is a young adult, therefore that's the intended and target audience of the book. and the corollary to that (and the answer to the first question) is that books about and for children are by definition not for adults, i.e. not worthy of adults. technically children's lit is the umbrella category: children can't or shouldn't (according to authorities, etc.) read all adult books; but adults can read all children's books—and yet, as a rule, they don't. it's an interesting stigma, and one that extends to movies and television and games, etc., and it has two parts as well: the first is that adults don't give children enough credit for their intelligence and ability to grasp complex plots, characters, and emotions, and they therefore tend to design or expect all children's products to be simple, two-dimensional, elementary; the second part is the fear of being seen as those things—simple, two-dimensional; childish and stupid—if they show interest in those products. the result is that when a complex, eminently worthy children's (or young-adult) book comes along, it takes an awful lot of work to convince adults of it. this is what prompted reviewers to call jonathan strange & mr norrell "harry potter for adults," to which harry potter fans retorted that harry potter was harry potter for adults.6
frankly, i think the golden compass is much more adult in themes and execution than harry potter, and i thought it as soon as i read the epigraph and saw that "his dark materials" is a quote from john freaking milton. the book is about religion, but not (at least, not exclusively) in an allegorical, moralistic sense (see: the chronicles of narnia), but on an intellectual, philosophical, *meta* level. the harry potter series relies a great deal on resonance: the allusions are buried, implicit, unacknowledged. pullman doesn't renounce archetypes and he's obviously drawing heavily on the myths and the history and the christian bible, but he also puts the church IN the story: the church, its adherents, its detractors, its dogma, they all appear at the surface level, as themselves. it's fascinating. it feels so practical and real, it feels like he's giving his audience—those young adults—so much credit. also there's the part where he retconned genesis, which i thought was ballsy and, you know, completely awesome.
these books—harry potter, jonathan strange, his dark materials—they're a little anomolous for my general reading habits. fantasy has never been my genre7; if i had a genre (i was and am an eclectic reader), it was mysteries—the boxcar children, the happy hollisters, all the incarnations of nancy drew and the hardy boys, agatha christie, ellery queen, p. d. james, dorothy sayers. high fantasy still isn't quite my thing. i read the hobbit when i was younger and lord of the rings when the movies came out; as a kid it took three tries before the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe hooked me, though i enjoyed the rest of the chronicles well enough after that. none of them ever spurred me to seek out more of their kind. but those books i listed above—is there such a thing as low fantasy? they're somewhere between magical realism and high fantasy, and the key is that they're grounded in this world. it's the combination and the juxtaposition that's so appealing, the superimposition of the magical or supernatural over the mundane—or vice-versa; throwing someone from my world into a fantasy, magical, or future world and watching them make their way. i have the impression that the latter is the premise of farscape—true or untrue?
if anyone has any insight or information about any of this, i'd dearly love to hear it.
right, real life update to come sometime in the next year. don't bate your breath or anything. off now todevour savor book two. *flees*
1. which i don't, because arbitrary starting points don't help me enact change. i can tickle myself, but self-imposed deadlines are empty threats. all the changes i've ever made have taken me surprise, when i just started doing things differently—or at all—one day, suddenly, in mitten drinen, out of the blue.
2. my other hypothetical new year's resolutions are pretty self-evident, right? mostly they involve coming up with a plan that gets me out of the state of florida.
3. i owe it almost entirely totrinityofone and her gorgeous SGA story daemonology; philip pullman should be slipping her that twenty any time now.
4. in cambridge they call oxford the other place. i love academia!
5. for values of "safe" that are determined by the publishing house, society, parents, teachers, governments, etc. obviously this will vary across cultures and households, and between the official and unofficial—e.g. there are books my mother (a fifth-grade teacher) can recommend to a parent for a specific kid in her class that she could never actually read or recommend to the class officially; the reasons usually boil down to sex, graphic violence, disturbing themes. as her own child, i was never barred from reading anything.
6. i was convinced it was neil gaiman who came up with that one, but i searched his site and couldn't find it. google, bless its little heart, informed me that stephen king is the one most often attributed with the rejoinder, in a column he wrote in entertainment weekly (posted online on 11 november 2004):
7. neither has sci-fi, which is what makes SGA so strange and new.
metafandom), that as a culture we live only in the present moment—which i have no trouble agreeing with, but think is fascinating for a blogging tool that's named as a journal and was presumably designed as a method of recording events, in addition to a community space where people gather. things pile up with pen-and-paper too, though; the take-home lesson is get it down quickly, or it disappears.so, i've got like, four different posts that i'm working on, but the absolute first order of business that just trumped everything else is thanking
bunnymcfoo, profusely (and with much attendant flailing omg), for the PACKAGE that arrived bearing the HIS DARK MATERIALS trilogy, in compact and convenient box-set form!! i stared the stare of awe and surprise, and then did the dance of joy around the kitchen. thank you so much! <333!i finished the golden compass (first in the series), um, two weeks ago? and i adored it and was absolutely fascinated by it, but i've just been too lazy to write anything up. story of my life, what?
my first instinct is to get huffy and wonder why nobody saw fit to TELL ME about these books3, because they're AWESOME. well, the first one is, and i'm extrapolating; if he crashes and burns in the next two, i'm going to cry. i'm at a loss to start listing what i liked, what i thought was successful, because EVERYTHING was, because the world he created is so HUGE and finely-detailed, and every single one of those details is suprising and completely natural, clever and perfect. his details have details. it's like a fractal, or an obscenely high-resolution picture, one you can zoom in on ad infinitum and never blur the image into pixels. and i suppose it could be an intricately-constructed universe that i couldn't care less about, but instead it's daemons and armored bears and oxford4, elementary particles and church-led research into original sin, a journey to the north, the country of texas, a supremely competent little girl for a heroine, and powerful, charismatic adults who just might be absolutely fucking insane. it's not so much that i want to live in this world, but that i want to shrink myself down to size, hop into the book, and see how far it goes.
and while i was getting swept up into this book, marveling at its depth and its scope, i thought about why it was labeled as young-adult fiction, and what that designation means for a possible audience. i decided it comes down to two things: 1) the part of the publishers (and the author) who designate which books are specifically for—and therefore safe5 for—children of a given age; and 2) the part of the general public, by which i mean the stigma attached to children's (and young adult) books. my basic problem is this: his dark materials is nuanced, action-packed, smart, and entertaining, and it runs the full gamut of emotions; why don't adults read it? why is it not a book for adults?
the answer to the second question is, i think, the age of the protagonist. lyra is a young adult, therefore that's the intended and target audience of the book. and the corollary to that (and the answer to the first question) is that books about and for children are by definition not for adults, i.e. not worthy of adults. technically children's lit is the umbrella category: children can't or shouldn't (according to authorities, etc.) read all adult books; but adults can read all children's books—and yet, as a rule, they don't. it's an interesting stigma, and one that extends to movies and television and games, etc., and it has two parts as well: the first is that adults don't give children enough credit for their intelligence and ability to grasp complex plots, characters, and emotions, and they therefore tend to design or expect all children's products to be simple, two-dimensional, elementary; the second part is the fear of being seen as those things—simple, two-dimensional; childish and stupid—if they show interest in those products. the result is that when a complex, eminently worthy children's (or young-adult) book comes along, it takes an awful lot of work to convince adults of it. this is what prompted reviewers to call jonathan strange & mr norrell "harry potter for adults," to which harry potter fans retorted that harry potter was harry potter for adults.6
frankly, i think the golden compass is much more adult in themes and execution than harry potter, and i thought it as soon as i read the epigraph and saw that "his dark materials" is a quote from john freaking milton. the book is about religion, but not (at least, not exclusively) in an allegorical, moralistic sense (see: the chronicles of narnia), but on an intellectual, philosophical, *meta* level. the harry potter series relies a great deal on resonance: the allusions are buried, implicit, unacknowledged. pullman doesn't renounce archetypes and he's obviously drawing heavily on the myths and the history and the christian bible, but he also puts the church IN the story: the church, its adherents, its detractors, its dogma, they all appear at the surface level, as themselves. it's fascinating. it feels so practical and real, it feels like he's giving his audience—those young adults—so much credit. also there's the part where he retconned genesis, which i thought was ballsy and, you know, completely awesome.
these books—harry potter, jonathan strange, his dark materials—they're a little anomolous for my general reading habits. fantasy has never been my genre7; if i had a genre (i was and am an eclectic reader), it was mysteries—the boxcar children, the happy hollisters, all the incarnations of nancy drew and the hardy boys, agatha christie, ellery queen, p. d. james, dorothy sayers. high fantasy still isn't quite my thing. i read the hobbit when i was younger and lord of the rings when the movies came out; as a kid it took three tries before the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe hooked me, though i enjoyed the rest of the chronicles well enough after that. none of them ever spurred me to seek out more of their kind. but those books i listed above—is there such a thing as low fantasy? they're somewhere between magical realism and high fantasy, and the key is that they're grounded in this world. it's the combination and the juxtaposition that's so appealing, the superimposition of the magical or supernatural over the mundane—or vice-versa; throwing someone from my world into a fantasy, magical, or future world and watching them make their way. i have the impression that the latter is the premise of farscape—true or untrue?
if anyone has any insight or information about any of this, i'd dearly love to hear it.
right, real life update to come sometime in the next year. don't bate your breath or anything. off now to
1. which i don't, because arbitrary starting points don't help me enact change. i can tickle myself, but self-imposed deadlines are empty threats. all the changes i've ever made have taken me surprise, when i just started doing things differently—or at all—one day, suddenly, in mitten drinen, out of the blue.
2. my other hypothetical new year's resolutions are pretty self-evident, right? mostly they involve coming up with a plan that gets me out of the state of florida.
3. i owe it almost entirely to
trinityofone and her gorgeous SGA story daemonology; philip pullman should be slipping her that twenty any time now.4. in cambridge they call oxford the other place. i love academia!
5. for values of "safe" that are determined by the publishing house, society, parents, teachers, governments, etc. obviously this will vary across cultures and households, and between the official and unofficial—e.g. there are books my mother (a fifth-grade teacher) can recommend to a parent for a specific kid in her class that she could never actually read or recommend to the class officially; the reasons usually boil down to sex, graphic violence, disturbing themes. as her own child, i was never barred from reading anything.
6. i was convinced it was neil gaiman who came up with that one, but i searched his site and couldn't find it. google, bless its little heart, informed me that stephen king is the one most often attributed with the rejoinder, in a column he wrote in entertainment weekly (posted online on 11 november 2004):
I'm thankful that Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke, was almost as good as its lyrical first reviews . . . but it's not Harry Potter for grown-ups, as so many of them said. Harry Potter is Harry Potter for grown-ups, you dweebs.interestingly, google also turned up a strange horizons review of jonathan strange, posted 27 september 2004:
By the way, this book is not, as has been suggested elsewhere, "Harry Potter for Adults." (Actually, I'd argue that Harry Potter is Harry Potter for adults.)but stephen king is stephen king, and he called literary critics dweebs, so i guess he wins.
7. neither has sci-fi, which is what makes SGA so strange and new.
no subject
no subject
no subject
and here's an interesting interview with Pullman from the New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/051226fa_fact), that I think you might like.
no subject
that was a fascinating article, thank you for linking it! pullman sounds like a brilliant, genuinely interesting and interested man, and i like that so much of what he believes in comes through in his books; i want to write and tell him, "mission accomplished!" especially the bits about harry potter, et al.; his books do just seem so much more sophisticated. i love especially what he says about his ideal reader, but his views on religion and theocracy and the school of morals are all both quirky and deeply serious and sensible. and i'm glad to know that there's a companion book waiting for me even after i finish the trilogy—i got the impression from the article that the end is going to break my heart.