Thanksgiving is Over
Which means I’m out of excuses not to work. Rats.
Dani and I have been together for 7 years now, and married for three, but our families remain unintegrated. This means two of every major holiday, including Christmas, and an endless tug-of-war over who gets the ACTUAL holiday, and who we have to spend the next available day with. Since I’m a goy and she’s a Jew, we usually can at least spend Easter and Passover without guilt over leaving someone out. I think they overlap once every few years, but so far, so good.
It’s not that I don’t enjoy seeing the family, but it can be exhausting, running from Brooklyn to Jersey to Westchester and back in a long weekend. This year was especially tiring, because we worked a wedding in there, too. And I decided to take a yoga class while sore from chasing my 2.5 year old nephew and his cousins (4 and 1) around all day and still digesting 18 pounds of turkey and pie.
What was I thinking?
I’ve had a lot of excuses not to write since I quit the day job 3 weeks ago. There was the World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga. That was 4 days of hard networking disguised as drinking (or was it hard drinking disguised as networking?). Some people announced pregnancies, and we had to run around to see them and celebrate, and there was the Science Fiction Writers of America party, and seeing Beowulf in IMAX 3D, and of couse I HAD to re-read Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials in preparation for the release of The Golden Compass in theaters next month.
(As an aside, my friend Myke rants about how HDM is anti-Christian, but I don’t agree. Expect a rant about that when I finish book 3. Of course, he thinks everything is anti-Christian, including Beowulf. With Thanksgiving over, I expect him to start forwarding me “War on Christmas” news articles any minute.)
But I got an e-mail on Monday from John Parker, my UK proxy agent, who says Voyager is keen to print the first book in my series in 2008, which may be sooner than the US release. What does this mean, apart from me jumping up and down with excitement? It means I need to get off my ass and start cranking out book II, The Desert Spear, in earnest.
Most of the groundwortk is done. The book is plotted out in meticulous detail, and maybe 30% of the prose is written in first draft, but I put it aside a few months ago to finish final edits on The Painted Man, which took longer than I expected, and have been having a hard time picking it back up. I think I just needed a break between books, and should have given myself one.
Anyway, I’m back on it, trying to break through resistance. Last week, ostensibly because of the holiday, I wrote a pathetic 996 words. The week before that, ostensibly because I was finishing PM, a whopping 1323. Even when I was writing in conjunction with a full-time job, I had a quota of 1,000 words a day, or 5,000 a week, and I am going to have to maintain that as a MINIMUM, if I want to finish the book by late May, when I am contracted to hand it in.
So this week is my highway ramp week, as I get back up to speed. I will get out at least 5,000 words this week, and try to increase that gradually to 10-15,000, depending where I realistically level out. Monday started poorly with a mere 521, but ironically, I had a root canal yesterday, and still managed to knock out 1870. Part of that was writing in the waiting room, but 1100 words of it was sitting at home with an aching jaw. I also went shopping, watched Kurt Wimmer’s Ultraviolet (not as good as Equilibrium, but still breathtaking at times, if you like stunning martial arts and the hotness that is Milla Jovovich), and read a good 50 pages of HDM, so I guess I’m out of excuses. I can multitask when motivated.
Today’s tasks are updating the blog (check), yoga (an hour from now), writing 1000 words, and finishing The Subtle Knife.
I’ll let you know how that goes.
What you’re not telling your faithful readers is that I *loved* both HDM and the new Beowulf movie. I just call ’em like I see ’em. Now go write.
Dude. I thought Pullman was a Catholic. There was an article a while ago about how some priest was calling him the most dangerous man in England. And in case you haven’t read them already the Sally Lockheart books are really good too.
HDM…it changed my life. I said this in college interviews.
HDM is anti-organized religion, anti-manipulation.
Spirituality is still in there I think. It was a beautifully spiritual when they talk about their molecules and spirits being together forever and making new things. You know, that whole chapter where you want to cry your eyes out.
My point is that just because something calls into question the bureacracy of religion in general, and even Judeo-Christianity in particular, does not necessarily make it anti-Christian. Martin Luther took Catholicism harshly to task, and he certainly wasn’t anti-Christian. That would be like saying that everyone who disagrees with Bush’s foreign policy is anti-American. It’s nonsense. Myke just wants to feel put-upon.
No, Myke wants to feel honest. I don’t think that saying Pullman is anti-Christianity is overstating the case. You’re saying he is criticizing and wants to reform the faith. But he’s said in an interview that “I’m trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief.”
If you’re seeking to reform a system of belief to the point where it will effectively cease to exist, then I think using the term “anti” isn’t an overstatement.
Luther’s theses were clearly aimed at curbing Catholic excesses (we’re talking the nastier stuff out of Canterbury Tales) while preserving the foundation of Christian faith. Pullman isn’t trying to do that.
Another point. I made this to you before, Peat, and repeat it now for your readers. Read Golding’s essay on thinking as a hobby: http://www.zafar.se/bkz/Articles/ThinkingAsAHobby. Luther identified a problem and attacked it (level II) and then suggested a better alternative (level III). Pullman stays at level II. The church sucks, and we’re better off with God dead. The end. That’s not advocating reform, that’s advocating destruction of a belief system. I think we can all pretty much agree that the notion of God dying isn’t compatible with even the most reformed elements of the Christian faith.
Card’s “Ender’s Game” had the same cathartic impact on me that HDM had on Lo. “There’s only one thing that will make them stop hating you. And that’s being so good at what you do that they can’t ignore you.” I think that is possibly one of the most profound things I’ve ever heard in 34 years.
Sigh.
I could have sworn I said I wanted to save this discussion until I read the last book in the series again. Alas.
Giving an out-of-context quote that seems damning is all well and good, but there is a difference between undermining some of the root problems in an institution and wanting it to “cease to exist”. I have never seen Pullman say he hates Christians or wants Christianity to end. These are extrapolations you have made that are unsupported by the article you reference. Opposing certain precepts of an institution is not the same as opposing individuals.
As Luther’s comments were an attack on the excesses of the Catholic church, the thrust of Pullman’s argument is that the church bureacracy has grown to the point where God isn’t really in control anymore, and a great many atrocities are committed in His name that he is helpless (or unwilling) to prevent. This is something that anyone can see is a real problem in the world that has been with us since the beginning of organized religion. I think there are a GREAT number of Christians who could get behind it.
In the story (which a christian vicar in the same article you reference claims to have “found the books’ moral base to be secure”), individuals have a personal relationship with the divine through the physical represenations of their souls in the form of daemons, and evidence that there are indeed higher powers in the universe that want humanity to be all it can be via Dust and the Golden Compass, amongst other things. In so doing, Pullman implies that a relationship to the divine is possible outside of the bureacracy of organized religion. If that is anti-Christian, why are there so many splinter sects of Protestantism?
Pullman also attacks the idea of Original Sin, which says, essentially, that mere interest in understanding the world around us is a crime against God (represented abstractly by Eve eating the apple from the tree of knowledge), and one we are all born with by way of the ‘unclean’ act that creates life, carrying the sins of the parents in our very blood.
Original Sin means that all scholarship, all science, all technology, is a result of sin. It rejects in one fell swoop almost everything about the modern world we live in. Pullman shows that you can embrace original sin and still be a good and moral person who cares about the both the physical world and the spiritual one.
So I would argue that HDM is indeed “Level III thinking”, despite the fact that I found William Golding’s “Thinking as a Hobby” article boring and pretentious. Lord of the Flies was a great book, but I think it’s a little hubristic for him to go around comparing himself to Einsten.
Self praise is no praise at all.
Articles of interest:
The much-quoted-out-of-context “undermine” article”: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23371-2001Feb18?language=printer
Something more recent: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article2953880.ece
I think we’re closer to one another’s POV than you think. That said:
– A weak god being killed by the protagonist cracks the foundations of Christian belief. That’s not a comment on church bureaucracy.
– If the precept you’re opposing is the existence/power of god, then you are, as Pullman says, undermining the very basis on which the faith exists. It may as well go away at that point.
– Christian faith is not about a vague belief in moral goodness. It is about a hard edged recognition of the existence of God and Jesus Christ. Without those precepts, you may be a decent, spiritual person, but you’re not a Christian. All protestant faiths, no matter how varied, accept those two precepts – an omnipotent God, and Jesus Christ his avatar to mankind.
Ergo: Pullman’s “reforms” are tantamount to an erasure of the Christian faith.
Not at all.
The book is a metaphor, not some literal manifesto. The story is clearly a commentary on how Church (and Angelic) bureacracies strive to take away the free will of man.
Besides, if some dude writing a young adult novel can crack the foundation of your faith, then that foundation is not very secure.
I don’t really remember how the whole God thing goes down in the end, BTW, and I would appreciate you not telling me. Killing God is the quest in books I and II of Lord Asriel, who is not the protagonist. In many ways, he is the antagonist, power-mad and morally bankrupt in much the same way the Magisterium is.
Pullman never denies the existence of God or Christ in his stories, and has stated clearly that he is looking to make people think, not convert them to atheism or erase Christianity. That is just alarmist nonsense.
Sure, he’s posing some hard questions, but I think they’re good ones, and could lead to positive thinking amongst Christians and heathens alike.