Another thing... Philip Pullman accuses Lewis of sado-masochism because of the scene at the end of The Silver Chair where Caspian, Eustace and Jill go into the school grounds and give the school bullies a good seeing-to with the flat of their swords.
Obviously Mr Pullman wasn't bullied at school, otherwise he might have enjoyed this scene more. Anyone who was bullied at school would appreciate this scene. It's not so much that one would actually want to carry it out, it's just a cathartic thing to read.
Also, the Narnia books are fairy tales - i.e. a fantasy version of life, where people get their come-uppance in a fairly graphic way. As in the Brothers Grimm fairy tales (Märchen), such as the original version of Cinderella, where the Ugly Sisters cut bits off their feet in order to fit into the fur slipper (not a glass slipper) which Aschenpüttel (Cinderella) wore to the dance, and the reason they are discovered is because blood oozes out over the side of the slipper. (The Grimm version was bowdlerised by Perrault, the French author who popularised the story. These are psychological symbols, not actual events (see Bruno Bettelheim's excellent The Uses of Enchantment for more examples).
As it happens, I think CS Lewis did confess in one of his more candid moments to SM leanings, but I think he would have been reasonably careful to keep them out of his writings for children.
Monday, November 28, 2005
mad ostrich
Mort the Ostrich - fabulous site discovered by Green. It's amazing what you can do with a copy of Paint, Flash, and a sense of humour.
Sunday, November 27, 2005
Pullman vs Lewis
I love Philip Pullman's books (apart from his propensity for killing off characters - I was really sad when Roger and Lee Scoresby were killed) but I wish he wouldn't keep on having a go at CS Lewis. He's been at it steadily since 1998, and has had another go recently because the Narnia film is about to be released. At least he likes the Swallows and Amazons books and hasn't had a go at those.
I count both CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien as influences in the process of my becoming a Pagan, because of their positive attitude to the natural world and the old gods (for example the bit at the end of Prince Caspian, where Aslan releases the river god from the 'chain' imposed by the Bridge of Beruna that was built by the Telmarines, and Bacchus and the Maenads dance through the woods). I was a Christian when I first read the books as a child, but later realised I am a Pagan, partly because of the wonderful magical worlds of Narnia and Middle Earth, partly because of reading Puck of Pook's Hill and Wizard of Earthsea and of course other factors in my life and spiritual development that had nothing to do with books. I also thought that Aslan was a much nicer deity than Jehovah, and therefore couldn't possibly be the same being, even though Lewis implies at the end of Voyage of the Dawn Treader that he is.
Pullman complains that Lewis's books are peddling a version of the Christian message: "It's not the presence of Christian doctrine I object to so much as the absence of Christian virtue," - well, Pullman's books unashamedly (and far more blatantly) peddle an atheist or at least an agnostic viewpoint. The only bits in the Chronicles of Narnia where it becomes a bit obvious that the stories are an allegory for the Christian story are the sacrifice of Aslan on the Stone Table in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (but then he is a sacrifice in Edmund's stead and not instead of the whole world, and it is the "even deeper Magic from before the dawn of time" that brings about his resurrection), and the bit at the end of Voyage of the Dawn Treader where he appears to the children as a lamb and tells them that they must get to know him better in their own world.
Also Pullman has taken a lot of his ideas about the Garden of Eden myth from Gnostic thought, and has not acknowledged this (though I suppose it's just possible that he came up with it independently). I think he is right, though, in his interpretation of the myth.
The other allegations that Pullman makes are that the Narnia stories are racist, sexist and mysogynist. Granted, the Calormenes are a fairly obvious parody of the Arabs, but they are not portrayed as all bad (think of Emeth in The Last Battle) and there are attractive aspects of their culture. Also, the Telmarines are just as bad as the Calormenes in many ways, and they are clearly white Europeans (even if they entered Narnia via an island in the South Seas). As for the charges of sexism, when the boys occasionally make a disparaging comment about girls (e.g. in Prince Caspian when Peter says that the trouble with girls is that they can't carry a map in their heads), the girls respond in a fairly spirited manner with an equally biting comment about boys. Another possible example is when they treat the girls in a chivalrous manner (e.g. when Caspian gives Lucy his cabin in Voyage of the Dawn Treader and Eustace complains because his mother is a feminist) - Lewis is clearly on the side of chivalry. But it has to be remembered that before chivalry was invented (by women in the 12th century), men treated women like mere chattels. Chivalry may be old-fashioned, but it is not misogynistic.
The other specific incident that Pullman criticises is from The Last Battle, when Lucy explains that Susan has lost interest in Narnia because she thinks it's all just a silly game that they played when they were kids, and now she's more interested in clothes and make-up. So Susan remains in this world while all the others go to Narnian heaven (from which you can see the heaven of this universe). Pullman claims that "One girl was sent to hell because she was getting interested in clothes and boys." This claim is simply not supported by the text.
So, in denigrating Lewis and Tolkien, secularists have entirely missed the point that the books may express a Christian worldview to a certain extent, but they are also about the mythopoeic worldview and spirituality in general, and children are not so gullible that they will uncritically soak up everything from a writer, but are capable of reading critically (I know, because I remember as a child disagreeing with some of Lewis's comments about things). Also, his portrayal of Jadis (the Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) did not put me off witches - I just assumed that there were two different kinds of witches, the wicked sort that you find in fairy-tales, and the village wise-women variety that dispense herbs and healing. That said, I think the portrayal of witches in His Dark Materials is absolutely brilliant, and I wish I'd thought of the idea of daemons (which, incidentally, are very similar to the idea of the external soul explored in The Golden Bough by JG Frazer).
Many people read both the Narnia books and His Dark Materials without ever drawing the parallels between the fantasy world and this world. I've seen Christians happily reading Pullman without turning a hair about the portrayal of their God, and atheists happily reading Lewis without noticing the Christian allegory. Maybe it's because these works are about parallel worlds, and not explicitly about this one, even though you can get to the parallel worlds from this world. Tolkien was a keen advocate of the concept of applicability (being able to apply ideas from fiction to life in general rather than to a specific set of circumstances) and he hated allegory (which was one of the reasons he disliked the Narnia books). But both the Narnia series and Pullman's work are applicable and not allegorical.
Whilst I am concerned about Pullman's attacks on Lewis (who is, after all, dead and hence unable to defend himself), I am also concerned about evangelical Christians trying to hijack the Narnia books and use them as a vehicle for the Christian message, and also about them attacking Pullman's work (or for that matter, JK Rowling's work) because they are afraid of it undermining the Christian message. If the Christian message was that great, it wouldn't need protecting or promoting, people would be instinctively drawn to it.
For goodness' sake, everybody just simmer down and realise that literature is literature, children do have critical faculties and are capable of reading between the lines, and these are, at the end of the day, just stories. We may be inspired by the characters in stories, but we read many different stories, and get different world-views from different authors, which enables us to understand that there are many different possible views of the world, and synthesise our own individual world-view from the many different versions available to us.
I count both CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien as influences in the process of my becoming a Pagan, because of their positive attitude to the natural world and the old gods (for example the bit at the end of Prince Caspian, where Aslan releases the river god from the 'chain' imposed by the Bridge of Beruna that was built by the Telmarines, and Bacchus and the Maenads dance through the woods). I was a Christian when I first read the books as a child, but later realised I am a Pagan, partly because of the wonderful magical worlds of Narnia and Middle Earth, partly because of reading Puck of Pook's Hill and Wizard of Earthsea and of course other factors in my life and spiritual development that had nothing to do with books. I also thought that Aslan was a much nicer deity than Jehovah, and therefore couldn't possibly be the same being, even though Lewis implies at the end of Voyage of the Dawn Treader that he is.
Pullman complains that Lewis's books are peddling a version of the Christian message: "It's not the presence of Christian doctrine I object to so much as the absence of Christian virtue," - well, Pullman's books unashamedly (and far more blatantly) peddle an atheist or at least an agnostic viewpoint. The only bits in the Chronicles of Narnia where it becomes a bit obvious that the stories are an allegory for the Christian story are the sacrifice of Aslan on the Stone Table in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (but then he is a sacrifice in Edmund's stead and not instead of the whole world, and it is the "even deeper Magic from before the dawn of time" that brings about his resurrection), and the bit at the end of Voyage of the Dawn Treader where he appears to the children as a lamb and tells them that they must get to know him better in their own world.
Also Pullman has taken a lot of his ideas about the Garden of Eden myth from Gnostic thought, and has not acknowledged this (though I suppose it's just possible that he came up with it independently). I think he is right, though, in his interpretation of the myth.
"I thought wasn't it a good thing that Eve did, isn't curiosity a valuable quality? Shouldn't she be praised for risking this? It wasn't, after all, that she was after money or gold or anything, she was after knowledge. What could possibly be wrong with that?"
The other allegations that Pullman makes are that the Narnia stories are racist, sexist and mysogynist. Granted, the Calormenes are a fairly obvious parody of the Arabs, but they are not portrayed as all bad (think of Emeth in The Last Battle) and there are attractive aspects of their culture. Also, the Telmarines are just as bad as the Calormenes in many ways, and they are clearly white Europeans (even if they entered Narnia via an island in the South Seas). As for the charges of sexism, when the boys occasionally make a disparaging comment about girls (e.g. in Prince Caspian when Peter says that the trouble with girls is that they can't carry a map in their heads), the girls respond in a fairly spirited manner with an equally biting comment about boys. Another possible example is when they treat the girls in a chivalrous manner (e.g. when Caspian gives Lucy his cabin in Voyage of the Dawn Treader and Eustace complains because his mother is a feminist) - Lewis is clearly on the side of chivalry. But it has to be remembered that before chivalry was invented (by women in the 12th century), men treated women like mere chattels. Chivalry may be old-fashioned, but it is not misogynistic.
The other specific incident that Pullman criticises is from The Last Battle, when Lucy explains that Susan has lost interest in Narnia because she thinks it's all just a silly game that they played when they were kids, and now she's more interested in clothes and make-up. So Susan remains in this world while all the others go to Narnian heaven (from which you can see the heaven of this universe). Pullman claims that "One girl was sent to hell because she was getting interested in clothes and boys." This claim is simply not supported by the text.
So, in denigrating Lewis and Tolkien, secularists have entirely missed the point that the books may express a Christian worldview to a certain extent, but they are also about the mythopoeic worldview and spirituality in general, and children are not so gullible that they will uncritically soak up everything from a writer, but are capable of reading critically (I know, because I remember as a child disagreeing with some of Lewis's comments about things). Also, his portrayal of Jadis (the Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) did not put me off witches - I just assumed that there were two different kinds of witches, the wicked sort that you find in fairy-tales, and the village wise-women variety that dispense herbs and healing. That said, I think the portrayal of witches in His Dark Materials is absolutely brilliant, and I wish I'd thought of the idea of daemons (which, incidentally, are very similar to the idea of the external soul explored in The Golden Bough by JG Frazer).
Many people read both the Narnia books and His Dark Materials without ever drawing the parallels between the fantasy world and this world. I've seen Christians happily reading Pullman without turning a hair about the portrayal of their God, and atheists happily reading Lewis without noticing the Christian allegory. Maybe it's because these works are about parallel worlds, and not explicitly about this one, even though you can get to the parallel worlds from this world. Tolkien was a keen advocate of the concept of applicability (being able to apply ideas from fiction to life in general rather than to a specific set of circumstances) and he hated allegory (which was one of the reasons he disliked the Narnia books). But both the Narnia series and Pullman's work are applicable and not allegorical.
Whilst I am concerned about Pullman's attacks on Lewis (who is, after all, dead and hence unable to defend himself), I am also concerned about evangelical Christians trying to hijack the Narnia books and use them as a vehicle for the Christian message, and also about them attacking Pullman's work (or for that matter, JK Rowling's work) because they are afraid of it undermining the Christian message. If the Christian message was that great, it wouldn't need protecting or promoting, people would be instinctively drawn to it.
For goodness' sake, everybody just simmer down and realise that literature is literature, children do have critical faculties and are capable of reading between the lines, and these are, at the end of the day, just stories. We may be inspired by the characters in stories, but we read many different stories, and get different world-views from different authors, which enables us to understand that there are many different possible views of the world, and synthesise our own individual world-view from the many different versions available to us.
Thursday, November 24, 2005
demotivational images
Despair, Inc.: a plethora of beautiful images designed as a healthy remedy for those pompous motivational posters.
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Moon trees
The trees that went to the moon - wow, what an amazing story - I had no idea that one of the missions to the Moon actually took tree seeds with them - it was one of the crew of Apollo 14, Stuart Roosa. And these trees were planted in various places in America. Cool.
Monday, November 21, 2005
The Libertine
Great acting, interesting chiaroscuro sets, good writing, and lots of steamy scenes with Johnny Depp with not much on. However we still came away from the film feeling a bit depressed. The moral of the story is "Aren't condoms brilliant?" - except they weren't commonly used during the reign of Charles II. (They had been invented by the Romans, but weren't very pleasant.) Johnny Depp did a marvellous impression of Father Jack (looking scabrous and with a filmy eye, slouching in a chair and shouting "Drink! Drink!") and Samantha Morton was very good as an actress who couldn't act, and was then coached by Johnny's character (it takes considerable acting skills to be able to depict a person who can't act). Also I couldn't help noticing that even when Johnny Depp is covered in horrible syphilitic scab make-up, he still has lovely bone structure... Ultimately, as my friend commented, the film depicts a person who has his self-destruct button permanently pressed. Nice cameo role from John Malkovich as Charles II - shades of Dangerous Liaisons, I thought - there were quite a few parallels with that film. Also I liked the device of a prologue and epilogue, borrowed from the plays of the period - a neat Verfremdungseffekt. Also the way the film appeared to end with Wilmot's death, but then actually ended with his stage death in the play about him written by an acquaintance of his, George Etherege.
Johnny Depp Zone
John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester
Johnny Depp Zone
John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester
Friday, November 18, 2005
killer app
Is it too much to ask? All I want is the ultimate application.
I'm sure there's more but I can't think of them at the moment. If all the various software for editing code had all of these features, it would be so much nicer. Particularly annoying is the lack of a global find and replace function in XML Spy (you can only do one file at a time).
- The ability to parse text like Excel (Text → Data to Columns function) - useful for breaking up text and inserting XML tags between bits of it
- A global find and replace function like the one in Text Pad, with regular expressions, and which remembers your previous search strings and replace strings and stores them in a drop-down menu for you to reuse, but also has the ability to search and replace multiple lines of code like the find and replace function in Dreamweaver
- A directory tree display and site manager function like the one in Dreamweaver (where you can select multiple files from different folders)
- A pretty-print function like the one in XML Spy
- The ability to customise how the text appears in code view (another great XML Spy feature)
- The ability to display XML Schemas graphically (XML Spy and oXygen)
- The ability to easily expand and collapse the DOM tree (also from XML Spy)
- Drop-down tag and attribute editor for XML and XHTML (Dreamweaver and XML Spy)
- and drop-down property and value selector for CSS (Dreamweaver MX 2004)
- Built-in code validation (XML Spy)
- A design view like the one in Dreamweaver and the ability to transform XML using XSL like in XML Spy
I'm sure there's more but I can't think of them at the moment. If all the various software for editing code had all of these features, it would be so much nicer. Particularly annoying is the lack of a global find and replace function in XML Spy (you can only do one file at a time).
erosion of habeas corpus
Synesis: Magna Carta? Wossat then?: "Magna Carta? Wossat then?
No freemen shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor send upon him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.
(Article 39 of Magna Carta)"
No freemen shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor send upon him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.
(Article 39 of Magna Carta)"
Excellent post by Synesis on the erosion of the right of habeas corpus represented by the increase of the police's detention powers to 28 days.
not even numbers
Reg Keys: Letter to Tony Blair: "to you, the dead are not people; the dead are not names; the dead are not even numbers.
You did not, on 1 May 2005, know how many British forces have been killed."
You did not, on 1 May 2005, know how many British forces have been killed."
white phosphorus
BBC News: US used white phosphorus in Iraq
If you use something as a chemical weapon - even if it is not classed as one - then it is a chemical weapon. White phosphorus was fired into the covered positions of insurgents, to "flush them out". In that case it is being used as a weapon, not as a smokescreen, and it has a chemical effect on human flesh, burning it down to the bone, therefore it's a chemical weapon.
If you use something as a chemical weapon - even if it is not classed as one - then it is a chemical weapon. White phosphorus was fired into the covered positions of insurgents, to "flush them out". In that case it is being used as a weapon, not as a smokescreen, and it has a chemical effect on human flesh, burning it down to the bone, therefore it's a chemical weapon.
no compromise
BBC News: UN human rights team will not visit Guantanamo
I think the team made the right decision - one which highlights the criminal way in which the US treats detainees, in both Guantanamo and Iraq.
The UN has formally rejected a US invitation to visit the Guantanamo prison camp, saying it cannot accept the restrictions imposed by Washington.
UN human rights experts said the US had refused to grant them the right to speak to detainees in private.
UN human rights experts said the US had refused to grant them the right to speak to detainees in private.
I think the team made the right decision - one which highlights the criminal way in which the US treats detainees, in both Guantanamo and Iraq.
even MI5 against ID cards
BBC News: Ex-MI5 chief sparks ID card row
Even Stella Rimington (ex-head of MI5) thinks ID cards are a waste of time.
The argument put forward by the former government crime advisor Lord Mackenzie, that an ID card would have prevented the Soham murders (by preventing Huntley from getting the job in the first place), may well be true - but the existing system of safeguards should also have prevented him from getting the job in the first place, if Humberside police had been using it correctly. It is also cynical in the extreme to use this kind of emotive argument to try to whip up support for the flagging ID cards scheme.
Related articles: Ex-MI5 chief lukewarm on ID cards (16-11-05)
Minister rejects ID card fears (17-11-05)
Even Stella Rimington (ex-head of MI5) thinks ID cards are a waste of time.
The argument put forward by the former government crime advisor Lord Mackenzie, that an ID card would have prevented the Soham murders (by preventing Huntley from getting the job in the first place), may well be true - but the existing system of safeguards should also have prevented him from getting the job in the first place, if Humberside police had been using it correctly. It is also cynical in the extreme to use this kind of emotive argument to try to whip up support for the flagging ID cards scheme.
Related articles: Ex-MI5 chief lukewarm on ID cards (16-11-05)
Minister rejects ID card fears (17-11-05)
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