The Golden Compass

One of the reasons I was slow in getting to The Girl with No Shadow is that I was determined to finish the next book club selection first. Some date tbd we are going to meet to discuss Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, the first entry in the "His Dark Materials" trilogy.

While reading, I was reminded of how lovely stories for young readers can be. How magical, and allegorical, and balanced between danger and safety. I was too old when this series first appeared to read it as a child, and I often found myself wondering what the experience would have been. Would I have identified with young Lyra? Or were there little moments in which Pullman hit false notes? Would they have mattered? (I have always leaned toward getting swept away by books - I am good at suspending my disbelief.)

Reading the novel now, I thought instead about the parallel universe in which Lyra lives, where people's souls (to oversimplify) reside in animal daemons. I thought about the little nods toward history - or moments in history where two paths diverged into separate universes. I wondered about how different things would be if the emotions you normally learned to keep hidden were on overt display. I meditated on the notion of loneliness - Lyra is terrified by the very notion of what it would be like to ever be without her daemon, Pantalaimon - and whether children feel that intense loneliness. I puzzled over the class distinctions, particularly at first before the plot took off and left most of those questions behind.

And perhaps most strangely, I stopped and thought about this passage, and wondered why it reminded me of Derrida:

The idea hovered and shimmered delicately, like a soap bubble, and she dared not even look at it directly in case it burst. But she was familiar with the way of ideas, and she let it shimmer, looking away, thinking about something else.

Not only did I play with it as far as an idea of meaning residing on the margins, which is where Lyra leaves her plan so that it cannot disappear, but I also stopped to consider myself and my friends. Our predilection toward overanalysis. This right here seems to me an simple and elegant explanation for why we should stop making ourselves crazy by overthinking. Grasping at straws (to begin some fun mixing of metaphors) we cause the very soap bubble we desire to pop.

I'll eventually take on books two and three. Looking forward to seeing where Lyra's adventures take her.

CHOCOLATE (and magic)

I read Chocolat sometime during the spring of my sophomore or junior year in college. I am unclear on how I had time to read a pretty little tale on domestic witchcraft and the joys of food and love and identity and acceptance and friendship, etc. while I was taking classes. But I have very clear memories about where I sat in our backyard and everything. The movie was not as good, despite my love for Juliette Binoche. In part I blame an intransigent movie-mate, and in part I blame the subterranean theater, and the NYC subway trains that shook the whole place every 5 minutes or so.

All of which leads me to Joanne Harris' sequel, The Girl with No Shadow (or The Lollipop Shoes in the UK) which I read in a great big rush at the beginning of the week. [We emphatically do not like the LAPL's new loan period. It is hard to begin a 440 page book on Sunday and turn it in on Tuesday.] But this was a good book to read all at once. It's immersive and fast and mysterious and (literally) magical. We meet Vianne and her daughter four years after the events in Chocolat. They have new names, and there is a new daughter, and a new witch on the horizon. Plus Vianne has abandoned magic in an attempt to create a normal and safe life for her family. And obviously this is not going to work. No surprise.

I was often swept away by the book in that lovely way that books can sweep you away. Where the magic of storytelling just makes you feel safe and free and alive with possibility. But I was also very deeply troubled. The dark aspects of the book were very dark, and the villain's cynicism seductive. The result for me was a kind of dissatisfied turmoil, not a black mark against the novel, but all the same enough to knock me off-kilter.

My Name is Will - actually about the book

This was my favorite line from the whole book. Totally simple, and yet it really got to me. (Maybe because it was in italics?)

"One minute I'm going too slow; the next too fast. We as a society have a very narrow window of acceptable behavior."

Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare

I've had some time to get over being disturbed by the whole Drench-a-Wench thing. Certain commenters didn't help, but I am being zen about it all. And so I finished reading Jess Winfield's My Name is Will.

I enjoyed the novel - Winfield is witty and evocative. And his two young Wills are human and flawed and clever and likable. (I have also had fun listening to Winfield on the NYT's Book Review podcast, which has utterly out of date archives, and on KQED Forum.)

Since watching him and the rest of the Reduced Shakespeare Company perform Hamlet was such a part of my childhood - and really the only part of the Faire other than the cinnamon sticky buns and lemon shaved ices that I liked - I feel this odd possessiveness. Like, I knew this guy (or my mom did? Whatever.) back before other people did.

So, reading the novel ended up being only about 20% reading the novel - and I'm sorry about that! I wish I could have experienced just as it is, like most readers probably will. Instead it was revisiting my childhood. (I would have been 6 at the time of the book, and hanging out in the Glade reading a totally unperiod book and sulking about how my costume wasn't pretty enough. And 2 or 3 years later the Agoura Faire would be bulldozed and I would be dancing and the Faire would be irrevocably past.) I was amazed by how clearly I remembered the small details - the potholes and the "5 miles per hour" signs at the entrance to the site, the huge tankers that sprayed water on the paths to keep the dust down, the rough locations of various stages and areas - that Winfield mentions during Willie's drug-induced stay at the Novato Faire. And it reminded me again of how different my early childhood was from that of my friends, whose parents hadn't spent the weekends playing high-caliber dress-up. And reminded me of all the things I did and didn't like about the experience. And more than anything, how it shaped me, and how long ago it was. How I am 3 years older than the swaggering Russian diplomat who came to Elizabeth's court and met my mother. And how strange it is to see my childhood in print.

So I guess Jess that I have to thank you for that.

Oh dear lord

From My Name is Will:

He probably would get laid at the Faire. He'd been to a Renaissance Faire once before, near L.A., a few month ago - May, was it? - and he'd gotten lucky, way lucky. Jesus, he'd fantasized about it dozens of times since. There was this game, Drench-a-Wench, that involved sling-shotting a wet sponge at an array of wanton maids sitting on a little bleacher of hay bales. If you hit one, you got a kiss. He'd wondered how long that game could possibly last with a new STD being discovered every day. Just for fun, he'd played. [He hits and kisses some blonde, and that was fine and then notices an exotic brunette checking him out, and she says...] "Truly, I am shocked, sir. Paying for thy kisses when thou couldst surely get them free."

Lovely. Just lovely. Anyone wondering how I came to exist, there's your answer right there.