Oooh, it IS Halloween! I should pull out Hill House and give it a good reading tonight.
Oh, look at the pretties!
Kaylee ,'Shindig'
Literary Buffistas 3: Don't Parse the Blurb, Dear.
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
Strix - Oct 31, 2010 6:58:28 am PDT #12775 of 28293
A dress should be tight enough to show you're a woman but loose enough to flee from zombies. — Ginger
Typo Boy - Oct 31, 2010 9:29:13 am PDT #12776 of 28293
Calli: My people have a saying. A man who trusts can never be betrayed, only mistaken.Avon: Life expectancy among your people must be extremely short.
I'd managed never to encounter the concept of the Fall as a positive thing until Pullman
There is a really good Harlan Ellison short story on this theme. The title escapes me, but perhaps someone else will remember.
Kathy A - Oct 31, 2010 10:15:19 am PDT #12777 of 28293
We're very stretchy. - Connie Neil
In my cataloging class yesterday, we were discussing relational databases, and I brought up LibraryThing. Turns out the only people who were familiar with LibraryThing in my class were me and the teacher, so I spent my break showing some of my classmates my list of books over there. That made me realize how long it'd been since I last updated it--I have to work on that soon!
Laga - Oct 31, 2010 10:34:10 am PDT #12778 of 28293
You should know I'm a big deal in the Resistance.
I think Ishmael looks at The Fall as a positive thing.
Is Intentional Fallacy why, when Georgia O'Keefe says they're Just Flowers, it's OK to laugh?
Steph L. - Oct 31, 2010 1:55:30 pm PDT #12779 of 28293
I look more rad than Lutheranism
was amused by Catholics getting all huffy about it.
Yes, it's pee-in-your-pants HILARIOUS when people object to their faith being skewered.
erin_obscure - Oct 31, 2010 2:24:17 pm PDT #12780 of 28293
Occasionally I’m callous and strange
Pullman never names a specific Real Life faith in any of the books or makes a direct correlation to the Catholic faith. Catholics can make that correlation all they want, but the books are pure fantasy.
eta: by which i mean that even as a someone who heavily studied religions, i never grokked the series as an attack against a belief system, but against a superpowerful Oligarchy using an ancient belief system to do terrible things to people, and that it is a good thing for people to question what they are being told in the name of Faith...which i consider to be true for every belief system.
Steph L. - Oct 31, 2010 2:42:13 pm PDT #12781 of 28293
I look more rad than Lutheranism
Pullman never names a specific Real Life faith in any of the books.
Yes. Because, as you say in the very next sentence, the books are fantasy. C.S. Lewis named the lion Aslan and not Jesus, and yet people get that Aslan is a Jesus figure without him being specifically named as such.
as a someone who heavily studied religions, i never grokked the series as an attack against a belief system
Many other people (I don't mean Buffistas, though several certainly have), however, did read it that way, and if Pullman himself said that he wrote it that way means that the interpretation is, at the very least, extremely viable.
-t - Oct 31, 2010 2:50:39 pm PDT #12782 of 28293
I am a woman of various inclinations and only some of the time are they to burn everything down in frustration
It struck me as being more actively Gnostic than anti-Catholic.
Deena - Oct 31, 2010 2:59:12 pm PDT #12783 of 28293
How are you me? You need to stop that. Only I can be me. ~Kara
I'm not Catholic, and I found the third book offensive.
Strega - Oct 31, 2010 4:07:40 pm PDT #12784 of 28293
Pullman never names a specific Real Life faith in any of the books or makes a direct correlation to the Catholic faith.
The Authority is explicitly identified as being "God, the Creator, the Lord, Yahweh, El, Adonai, the King, the Father, the Almighty." And then there's an ex-nun whose view of the church is fairly pivotal. I didn't see the books so much as anti-Catholic as anti-religion-in-general, but a) I'm not Catholic, and b) that's basically why I was reading them.