tuckova

White Noise

I tried to read Don DeLillo's "White Noise" at some point in the late 80s or early 90s, I don't remember. It was published in 1985 and it wasn't then but not too long after. There were a lot of clever post-modernist books floating around my periphery then, and some I liked and some I just didn't. John and I would go rounds on them and I wanted to like what he liked or know why I didn't, so I'd try. Bret Easton Ellis. Mark Leyner. I liked more the older stuff - Vonnegut, Stoppard. Not a lot of women on the list in either direction. Anyway. I read "White Noise" and that was, as I remember now, the beginning of my quitting that kind of writing, the spectacular warp of a sentence that served no purpose other than to marvel at its own warp. There's a scene when two men are circling each other and talking about Elvis and Hitler and it is very quotable, and also very meaningful because it's a commentary on the blurring of pop culture and human history or something equally important and I just felt tired. 

One July day in 1993 I was driving to a job, this was when I was working in the Bay Area and going around to elementary schools giving speeches about multicultural education which seemed very meaningful but were really just the foot in the door for the sales company I worked for. That is, I was doing a good thing, maybe a very good thing, but for a fairly weak or even bad reason. On the way to work I drove through Richmond, the town next to mine, where there was a train yard and there was an explosion, and I drove through a cloud of toxic smoke. I went and gave my presentation with tears streaming down my face, and then I went out to the parking lot of the school and threw up, and then I drove home, and they'd closed the freeway so I took surface streets because I didn't somehow grasp the situation. I drove through a cloud of poisonous gas that was engulfing the place where I live. Twenty-four thousand people were affected, there were lawsuits, but I didn't think that way; I thought: this is very unpleasant. By the time I got home I'd caught up with things on the news and I understood that it was more than just a cloud but I didn't know what I could do. I didn't have health insurance so it didn't seem like I could go to the hospital. I took a cool shower and went to bed and I guess I was okay, because I don't remember much else other than a sense of vague embarrassment for having thrown up in the parking lot. 

And then later when I was talking to John I called it an "airborne toxic event", which is what it's called in the book when a train crash releases toxins into the air, and we laughed because it was in a book and then it was real and I thought about re-reading the book to learn more about the future but I didn't because it didn't feel like a wry commentary on the possible state of things or whatever, it felt too close to home. And of course now we know, if we didn't know then, that such things happen and happen again, past present and future.

Noah Baumbach directed a film version of "White Noise" and I have to tell you the internal dialogue on whether to watch it was exhausting even for me. I have complicated feelings about Noah Baumbach because I think he's clever in the same self-congratulatory way that yes yes it's wonderful but I'm tired of it. On the other hand, Greta Gerwig is with him and she seems like someone who wouldn't be with a bore. On the other hand, he seems to have left Jennifer Jason Leigh for her and I like Jennifer Jason Leigh. I can't ignore the whole "younger woman" thing either which I'm sure is a very unique and special circumstance for each person but you do see it piling up behind all the dudes who are sooner or later problematic. And I didn't love "Marriage Story". And I don't really like Adam Driver, I understand that you might but I don't; don't take it personally. But I like Greta Gerwig. And Andre Benjamin bonus (though he isn't in it very much, it turns out). Plus Danny Elfman on the soundtrack. 

Friends, I fell asleep four times and had to wake up and go back and try again. I can see how well done it was etc and there were certainly parts I enjoyed very much and I even forgive them for leaving out the barn, which was one of the parts in the book I liked. My takeaway is that I do really like listening about death and dying but to a much lesser extent listening about fear of death and dying, and basically this was two hours of that fear, even more that than the "we're wasting our lives looking at things instead of living" that I got from the book. I'd recommend it for insomnia. That's about that. 

reaping the just deserts of what you cooked up

In the course of my life I've had a number of people tell me that I should improve my appearance. This ranges from people I was dating telling me that I'd be attractive if I'd lose a little weight to complete strangers approaching me on the street to ask me why I don't wear makeup when I'd be so very pretty with just a little effort (sometimes I was wearing makeup at the time, but that's not the point). I've had friends offer to take me shopping so I could get some advice. Sometimes I think: well what's wrong with me? Am I so hideous you can't date me, or is it more probable that if I were hotter I would be dating someone hotter than you? Is my actual bare skin interfering with your ability to get through your day somehow? Are my clothes so unbearably unflattering that you can't be seen with me in public? 

Usually I think those people are kind, are only trying to help, believe in and value beauty to a degree I do not and because they find me so close to their idea of what physical attractiveness is, they want to help me be as pretty on the outside as I am on the inside (and I must be pretty on the inside, I guess, because I get waaaay fewer unsolicited offers on ways to improve my personality).

Anyway I'm using this as an attempt to understand why people who write things don't think they need an editor. Because when I say "that needed an editor" I almost never mean that it was hideous beyond bearing, that I was unable to even look at the text, or that spelling is more important than your very important story. And I AM trying to help, and I believe in and value good writing to a degree that you clearly do not, and I find the text worth reading and it would be much better if it were pleasant to read.

HOWEVER. I do have to go out into the world. It's my choice to go out mostly the way I am -- maybe with extra kilos, maybe with less concealer than you'd like, maybe dressed as a stagehand. But ... like, no offense, but very few papers have to be written, very few stories are so compelling that they must be told in printed form. So if you feel that your idea, your story really must go into the world... why not put it into the world as beautiful on the page as it can be, as beautiful in print as it was in your head? Why not make your ideas as easy to enjoy for others as they were for you to have? Why not hire me or someone like me to help you? WHY.

I don't feel this way about casual writing generally so don't get all huffy. But if you're at the point where you've hired a graphic designer, a translator, a marketing specialist, please for the love of font, hire an editor. 

Ten Books

for Patricia, who asked:

Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain , particularly "Taran Wanderer". Alexander is hands-down my favorite writer for children/young adults, amazing with the fantasy genre and so beautiful at the sentence level as well, and Taran's search for himself as reflected in his friends and embodied in the work he learns to do is perfection.

Margaret Atwood "Cat's Eye" because it's a perfectly constructed novel and because its description of friendship, among women in particular, still hits me between the eyes. 

Jane Austen's "Emma" because it made me go back and re-examine that whole period and wonder if it wasn't a lot smarter and funnier than I'd thought (it was!). It was my introduction to sophisticated irony, maybe.

Nicholson Baker's "The Mezzanine" because it does what I wanted "Ulysses" to do; it takes the reader inside a moment and makes the nuances of that moment visible through his eyes; and it made me see the value in examining my own moments more carefully.

Kazuo Ishiguru's "Remains of the Day" ... I went through a long period of fascination with characters who knew their hearts but couldn't speak them (Prufrock, too; actually it's an undercurrent with a lot of poets I like, including Parker and Bukowski). I feel like I've moved past that but the clarity that Ishiguru brings to that fear and the resulting anguish is still beautiful. 

Judith Martin's "Miss Manners Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior" because it's one of the funniest and smartest books I've ever read. 

Josef Skvorecky's "The Engineer of Human Souls" was a huge factor in deciding to live here, and the translation really influenced how I feel about what translation can and should do, so it's affected me professionally as well as just generally being a great book. 

Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" because time travel and regret and memory and everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. 

David Foster Wallace's "A Supposedly Fun Thing..." because "Infinite Jest" is a masterpiece, fictionwise, and I admire it intellectually, but his essays are where he shows his heart and where he took mine. 

Jeanette Winterson's "Written on the Body" because I love a gimmick novel and because it's just so poetic. And the questions of when to let love go for the sake of the beloved and when to fight for it for yourself are still interesting to me.  

“I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot.”

When Squire Tuck was but a wee small thing, I read to him all the time. There were so many books that I had loved as a child and so many books that I had been introduced to as an adult that I wanted him to know, and so little time. And then there were the books that he loved that were new to me; you don't even want to know how many times we read "Dazzling Diggers" ("Diggers are noisy, strong, and big/ Diggers can carry and push and dig"). Striking the balance of getting a book into him at the right age -- not too early, so that it wouldn't be wasted, but not so late that it seemed childishly easy to him, was a frank delight. There were some missteps, of course -- like trying to read "The Once and Future King" to a nine-year-old obsessed with Arthurian legend was not my best choice ("The Sword in the Stone" was not so bad, but "The Queen of Air and Darkness" was... uhm, not age appropriate). But most of the time, reading to him flowed, and we both really liked it.

When he started reading for himself, he stuck mostly to books that were below level, which I know is normal for some kids, and which was fine because dude, nobody hated the Magic Tree House series more than I did, and I'm pretty sure the only reason they exist is so that kids can read below level. And it meant that the reading aloud could continue because even to a kid who can read pretty well, their own ability is usually not up to the speed of their comprehension yet. Plus (sing along with me, I know you know this one): I love the sound of my own voice ever so much. 

And then all of a sudden one day I realized we weren't reading together anymore. To an extent it's because he got old enough for movies and there are not quite as many movies that I love as there are books, but still so many great movies that you should see when you are still young, and we had a lot of watching to do. And to an extent his reading had caught up with his thinking and he didn't need me to read to him to make it fun. I mean, this is sort of a GOAL, right, so I'm not complaining. I tried having him read to me but as soon as I sit still enough to be read to I tend to fall asleep, so that didn't work.

And anyway, he was reading. Not as much as I thought he should, but more than most people, and not the best books but books that he really enjoyed. And since every study I've read says that basically: a) an avid reader has nothing to fear in terms of brain development, learning skills, etc and b) it really doesn't matter what you read, I figured: ehn.

Last week, it occurred to me that part of the purpose of reading was that I wanted him to be grounded in my culture -- the whole delicious American entertainment bundle; that he would know what an American 16-year-old student would know. Now, a lot of stuff that Czech teens and American teens know is the same, especially anything on the internet. But books, the books that you read in high school, are not something that seems to be actively taught here. In my experience, the average Czech high school student can rattle off Shakespeare's oeuvre in the order they were written, tell you what's a comedy or a tragedy or a historical drama, but odds are they haven't read a single one. This Will Not Stand.

So I started trying to find out what the books that are assigned in high schools are... it's interesting how hard it was to find a comprehensive list. I know that some of the books we read were ridiculous to assign to high school students (Gatsby, seriously?! Because as a teen I assure you I had no idea what that drunken mess was about), and some books are fantastic no matter when you read them (I didn't read "To Kill a Mockingbird" until I read it with Squire, and it was perfect for both of us), but there are books that you sort of HAVE TO read as a teen, because that's the ONLY time you're going to really, really get them. "The Catcher in the Rye" or "The Diary of Anne Frank" or anything by Robert Cormier.

Anyway. I'm working on a list, and I've told Squire he's got to read at least one a month off the list, and I have to read it too if I haven't already, so we can play book group about it. Anything you think I might have missed?  

 

oh, Sylvia

Sometime in my early teens for a mercifully brief period of time I had the absolute delusion that my ability to take somewhat decent care of my sister totally qualified me as a babysitter and I went to work. I babysat regularly for the people across the street, who were California Jewish and that was pretty interesting, all that art and strange half-held ritual. There was another woman whose children I don't remember beyond the smell of their bedroom, sleep and urine, but I remember she called me Sarah Bernhardt. I liked it after the kids would go to sleep, wandering the rooms of the house, reading the spines of the books or flipping through the record collections, imagining I lived there.

One time I watched two children whose mother was, I think, recently divorced. She was going to a party. This was the saddest house I remember being in, not a home at all. There was a hole in the living room wall and someone had penciled above it "Sue did this when she was mad." Sue being the mother. Things went along okay until bedtime, when the boy completely snapped and decided he was going to kill me and his sister with a baseball bat. Let me tell you, you do not want a 15 year old in charge in this situation, because we are perfectly capable of making enough drama on our own and do not need help from genuine dramaticians. I tried to take the bat away a few times, got cracked on the arm pretty hard, and gave up. Using I guess hurricane logic, I locked myself and the sister in the bathroom and she fell asleep against me while he banged against the door with the bat. Eventually the boy fell asleep on the floor. I tucked the girl in bed and proceeded to think of ways to stay awake. There was a book with a black cover, with a hand seeming to rip through paper, holding or dropping a flower, which looked like it might do the trick. And it did; I stayed up all night reading.

The mother didn't come home til the next morning. The man who had driven her home drove me home, which was my first ride in an semi, which was interesting. I have absolutely no memory of what happened with the children that morning, but for 50 cents an hour I'm pretty sure that that night was the end of my babysitting relationship with that family. And that is the story of how I read "The Bell Jar".

R.I.P., D.F.W..

That a young and gifted person should be in too much pain to be asked to stay alive in the world and give it more in no way diminishes the gifts already given, what they meant, what I learned. I know that. But I still spent most of last night and this godawfully early morning picking at a wound that isn't mine in the first place, reading bits over and over, laughing again at an insight and weeping over flashes of merriment that are forever gone.

I should have rented movies this morning and permitted myself a day of escapism. Instead I thought I would work past it, as the salt of sweat is the best salt for such wounds, and wound up punching aimlessly at work that while meaningful will never mean that much, failing and flailing and finding myself at 3 p.m. eating grilled cheese with the salt of tears and a side of punch-my-face for letting the day go the way it did, wasted because I did neither what my head intended nor what my heart wanted.

I am sorry for his family; sorry for us: for the words that won't be said, for the places we might never go because he can't take us.

dammit.

The Mysterious Edge of (children's) historical fiction (and more)

Dear E.L. Konigsburg,

With all due respect to you for bringing Claudia Kincaid into the world, you need to either get a better editor or stop writing.

"The View from Saturday" had a few sloppy mistakes in it. I was mainly angry at the Newbery people for choosing the book, because it meant it would be read more than it deserves to be read. The Magical Indian thing was ridiculous; the "she knew that she knew but she didn't know how she knew but he knew that she knew before she knew that she knew" stuff was just... you know, if you can't figure out what a character's motivation is, that doesn't mean you should coat it in twinkling magic in order to get the reader to swallow it. I thought it was sloppy plotting, and I thought it was beneath you. And then on top of that, sloppy writing: "[she] was not sure how much the correct amount [of French cuff to show from beneath jacket sleeves] was, but she knew that if she put a spirit-level to his, they would be exactly right." A...spirit level (hint: not hyphenated)? To measure length? Ch-wha? And then, as a nit-picking pointy brain, it really irritated me that a piece of the story hinges on a student standing up to the adults for what he knows to be right, and the book implies that he is right, only... he's not. This sort of took the wind out of the book's sails for me.

But I had no idea what it was to fall out of love with a beloved author from my childhood until I read "The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World" because... wow. And not a good "wow". First, the characters have no clear voices (one of the redeeming features of "The View from Saturday"). They have no clear voices because they have no clear characters, and I don't mean they're complicated, but that they're self-contradictory. Second, we've got the sleeping fact-checker again at the helm for the Degenerate Art facts. The book implies that the degenerate art that is in the exhibition is also the art that was in the exhibition in 1937, but Renoir was not in the Degenerate Art exhibition; neither was Braque, Picasso, or van Gogh. And... All the Impressionists had a disease of the visual cortex? Ch-wha-? See, and these are just things I KNOW are wrong. But worse, worse, is this Noble Goal to call attention to the homosexuals killed during the Holocaust. It's not a bad story, but it's better if it's told right: there is no way that Pieter came home wearing a pink triangle. Things like this are almost worse than not telling the story at all. If you want to slip a little fact into your fiction to spice it up, it is possible to find actual facts that will do that without leading people to misunderstand history any more than they are already inclined to do. As it is, you're doing the writerly equivalent of chewing scenery on your way to another children's book award show, and I loved you, I did, but you have to stop this. Sloppy writing makes the world an uglier place than it needs to be.

Please get a better editor. No, really. You owe it to the children. You owe it to yourself.

****
In other books, David Sedaris sure loves himself some David Sedaris; Polish surrealism is troubling and excellent the second time around; and Alain de Botton writes well but keeping up with the Joneses is the least of my interests and I think he's lost me here. Squire and I are plugging along through Huck Finn and loving it a lot, though it makes us talk funny.

school in nature and books

Pretty much every year the elementary grades spend one week of school out "in the nature"-- it's camp, basically. Squire's first grade teacher didn't take them because she was afraid they'd all drown in the lake or get eaten by bears (that one did wonder for the fears of a number of students, I am sure, since she saw no situation without seeing a positively Gothic ending). But anyway, Squire's enjoyed the camps he's been to: he comes home with a dozen adventure stories, rich with the smell of campfires and unwashed boy.

He decided he didn't want to go this year because they're combining the two fifth grades and he doesn't like the other fifth graders and he particularly dislikes their teacher. He decided so firmly that he didn't even bring the forms home, so the first I heard of it was at the parent/teacher meeting when everybody was talking like they knew all about it. Awhoops: CAUGHT.

So anyway. The last week has been kind of a battle of him trying to put his foot down and me insisting that he doesn't have a leg to stand on. It is school. If he doesn't go there, I still have to send him to school every day to be babysat by the fourth grade teacher, and he still has to do the work. So. I've told him if he has a compelling reason, a logical articulated reason, then I will consider his REQUEST to not go, but he cannot REFUSE to go on the basis of "don't feel like it". We've gone rounds.

Don't get me wrong; I am not unsympathetic to disliking people. I myself dislike wide swaths of humanity. It's just, I ground my dislike in actions and outcomes. I dislike people who drive through crosswalks without checking for pedestrians because they hit me. I dislike people who are sloppy because other people have to clean up after them. I dislike teachers who talk about everything in terms of fear and danger because they frighten children into paralysis. So if he can say he dislikes this other teacher because of some action that has affected him in some way, I am behind him. But I suspect that the reason he doesn't like her is because she is the teacher of the rival class, which is the elementary school equivalent of being the coach of the opposing team: they make good lightning rods.

Since the classes will be combined next year, the sooner the two groups of students get over this rivalry and start learning to exist in each other's spheres (and respect each other's teachers) the better. I wish I knew more sports cause I bet there's a handy metaphor in their lexicon somewhere. Here: Imagine an apt sports metaphor for me, and I'll meet you in the next paragraph.

Anyway, so today he came home and said he'd decided to go because however bad the other kids would be, it wouldn't be as tedious as my constant harping on logic and reason, and the kids from his class would probably be enough fun to balance it out, and resisting it was taking the opportunity for fun out of it. He is smart, no?

So.

In other news, we're reading "To Kill a Mockingbird" which is just a great book to begin with and is enhanced now because I'm really enjoying Squire's interpretations of it as we go. Understand: this is a child who has not lived in the States, so on the one hand he's reading it as a foreigner would: it describes a past world that is not the world he knows or even an ancestor of a daily world he knows. On the other hand, he goes to school with a bunch of Roma kids, so he does understand what racism looks like (and xenophobia too of course) and the amount of sense it makes and what it's like to batter your head against it. And then plus there's sentences that are so simple and delightful, and the secondary characters (especially Calpurnia and Miss Maudie, who I would like to have run my house and garden respectively)-- they're like snapshots of a person you know or you'd like to know better, and it's a pleasure to read a book like this, that makes my head hum.

Line of Beauty

I finished The Line of Beauty finally. Around the middle, I started thinking: Are we ever going somewhere with this? and sort of sped through the second half of the book. I decided that we were not, in fact, really ever going anywhere, Alan and I, but that I would give his sentences the attention they deserved, so I went back to the middle and started again and finished.

It was... good. I guess. I was reminded of the Penn Jillette rule of clapping for the title of a movie when it appears in the movie, and clapped dutifully every time Hollinghurst name-checked his own novel, and ovated whenever he wanted to explain the title. It happened a lot. It's true that it may have seemed worse to me for having Evelyn Wood-ed and then seriously re-read the second half, but I think this really was laid on thick and recurrent. Including, of course The Amazing Parallels (or perhaps, the Amazing Serpentine Curves, bwaha) between the title of the book, the plot, and the presentation of the plot. It was a little anvillicious for me, as was the whole "Wow, and so the character named Nick Guest turns out to be a permanent guest! Who knew?!" Uhm... the guy who wrote the book? I know, I should have been prepared after Edward Manners, but... really?

I don't know, y'all, maybe I can't read grown-up fiction anymore. I'm a little too aware of the author wanting me to go someplace and I feel the pull of the puppet strings too much and then I'm irritated. I've read precious little contemporary fiction in the last decade where it felt like I was reading something that was both True and true*, and I think that I now value the latter, the feeling of the latter, as much as the former. If you're going to give me a story set in a world I've experienced or believe is true (Thatcher's England or whatever, as opposed to, say, Prydain) I need to have it that things don't always line up, the murder isn't always solved, the object of affection is not always attained; and the misalignment and unsolved murder and unrequited love don't make everything worse--any more than coincidence leads to enlightenment or solving the murder makes it less gruesome or falling in love means your troubles are over. I like a revelation on the human condition as much as the next person, but if it's too contrived it feels like less a moment of clarity and more like smoke and mirrors.

*off the top of my head: The Crow Road, Remains of the Day, Cat's Eye, and Middlesex all did a great job of making me feel like I was in a real place and that the people were real without overdoing the reality and while simultaneously getting to a point.

So Hollinghurst: dude, I don't know. The sentences were nice, sometimes even activating that little tingly part of my brain, which is certainly a thrill. And the way he wrote dialogue, which at first made me nutty, eventually sort of got entertaining, which may have been the point in the beginning and I was too slow to catch it. He's all "Really?" said Nick, meaning to convey his confusion at the statement and also a sense of disbelief in Rachel's apparent unawareness, if she was, in fact, unaware. "Hmm," answered Rachel, and Nick understood that she was keeping herself unaware, willfully holding herself in check against the onslaught of inevitable, horrible reality.

So, I liked the sentences. I thought the backthought was clever. I liked the snooty arty stuff, assuming he meant it to be both informed, informative, and a bit pedantic. But the insights were... Hey, did you know that coming of age was tricksy? Did you know that when you move outside of the social circle you were born in, there can be misunderstandings? Did you know that no matter how comfortable you are with your identity, other people may not be? Put against a backdrop of "hey, conservative politics were bad for lots of people; also, AIDS sucks" and the message I get is that Hollinghurst thinks his readers are a bit on the dumb side, and then the pedantic charm becomes a bit less charming.  Maybe I should have just seen the movie.

NOTE TO G: I did like reading it, for clarity. I think I just miss our book group.

a lot of thinking about YA fantasy fiction

We watched Star Trek: Nemesis over the weekend. Squire told Friar that it was about "how we define our humanity under different circumstances" and I thought: well, yeah. And this is, I think, one of the appeals of fantasy. It's not just looking at a different world: it's also that it's interesting to look at what's true about ourselves against a variety of backgrounds.

The Chronicles of Prydain are my favorite fantasy books. They may be my favorite children's books, hands down (although Bridge to Terabithia now looks at me with its lovely painful face and I am not sure, but.... ) Okay, definitely my favorite series. I've re-read them every year since fifth grade, which is a lot of times to read the same books. I learned about writing from those books; I learned about the subtle beauty of "not without regret". And I learned about the difficult choices, and about both sides of trust, and about saying what you're afraid to say because not saying it is worse.

The only thing I didn't like about those books was the ending. It seemed unbearably unfair to my childish hedonist heart that the choice would come down to happy oblivion or emotionally wrenching reality. Later I concluded that the happy oblivion was a metaphor for death (see also: C.S. Lewis; Tolkein), and I was irritated that this was presented as happiness. I mean: really irritated. Because in fact I think the choice is: emotionally wrenching and rewarding reality or... nothing. Do you want to go through life standing in the dank armpit of the tram and watching the light catch the snowflakes as they fall and listening to your child laughing or do you want... nothing?

And I felt like Alexander skipped the real choice, which is interesting, in exchange for a fantasy set up: You get the kingdom of happy ever after or you get the kingdom of right here right now. The first one is unreal, is blissful oblivion, is heaven, is death. And the second one is...hard. According to Alexander, a hero chooses the second; death comes to a hero only incidentally, only later. I'm not crazy about that, but at least I get it. Certainly I prefer it to the choice of deciding whether you believe you can go further up and further in whilst in a room too small to swing a dwarf, because it seems like a fairer choice. Though I don't like the choice as it is presented, at least it is a choice, and the point is clear: If we are heroes, we choose what is right, and what is right is difficult. It's like Fantasy Novels for a Young Poet or something.

Second favorite fantasy series: The Dark Is Rising. It's a child swept into a parallel world; it's time travel; it's Arthurian legend; it's beautiful You Are There writing (first time I saw the Thames, I was like: yeah); it's trust and honor and all the things I want a book to do. It's also Destiny, which I have problems with. You should have seen me try to have a reasonable discussion of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" because it induced the same sputtery anger that hits me any time I see destiny, no matter how pretty the packaging: That's not fair.

I don't mean fair like "she gets more candy than I do" because while that is not fair, it is certainly true. Some animals are more equal than others: some people will get more advantages than they deserve and they will get away with murder and they will be rewarded rather than punished. This is true, and I don't expect fantasy books, no matter how fantastic, to present me with something truer than reality can muster: I do not expect the fairness of equality. But the unfairness that I cannot handle is the unfairness conveyed by Destiny, by Fate.

So I was pretty excited to read Philip Pullman's books, because I thought he would have no truck with Because God Said So, whether we called it God or The Oracle or The Light or Dumbledore. I thought: Yay! A new children's series with free will! Characters doing what they think is right without regard for messages from higher beings. Characters stumbling in their steampunk darkness, so like our own; characters making their own choices. And then on top of that, Pullman can write his way around a sentence and through a book like nobody's business. I even thought in my naivety that perhaps the characters would not get the kingdom of hard work vs. kingdom of happy oblivion choice at the end, and wouldn't that be nice!

HAHAHA. I should have known already in the Golden Compass, when the alethiometer gave me pause, but Lyra seemed so self-determined and Will even more so: "I may be inclined to be this sort of person but it doesn't mean I have to choose it." And so we bopped on through three books of me thinking my lofty thoughts about fairness and free will and real choices. Boy, was I pretty pissed when I finished Amber Spyglass. Philip Pullman so didn't "kill god". He pulled deux ex machina like a rabbit out of a hat. Fate? We pretend it doesn't exist only because it's too depressing to contend with. Destiny is reality, and the only reason the human characters won't be told their destinies is so that they continue existing under the apparently illusory free will they hold so dear (even though they don't have it really have it, since Destiny trumps Free Will). And so to be heroic is to acknowledge the existence and even inevitability of your fate without even asking what it is. This is... not free will. Oh, and yeah, and the final choice (which isn't a choice)? You have to give up what you want most because an angel said so. OH, ferfle.

We're totally going to see the movie still, but I am disappointed. I'm getting my Alexander books encased in gold, I guess. And I will continue living in the Star Trek world with Squire Tuck, unless somebody can recommend some fantasy books where the world is fantasy and the moral approaches something I can live with, something at least as true as reality.

SORRY THAT WAS SO LONG.