Can I buy an umlaut?

I love it when my second-favorite magazine meets the interests of my first:

"The young miller is naive, vulnerable and over-enthusiastic, with a poetic imagination, but not psychotic! As to the cycle's ending, his death in the brook makes me think of the Philip Pullman trilogy His Dark Materials. Pullman imagines death as a dispersal into the universe, an absorption into the cosmos, and that's very much the sense we have here."

--Tenor Mark Padmore talking about Schubert's Die schone Mullerin in the November issue of Gramophone.

This sounds like fun

My old friend Brian Alderson and Books for Keeps editor Rosemary Stones are going to be conducting a five day course about Philip Pullman in France this June. If that is not enough, listen to this from the course brochure: "Le Verger is a beautifully renovated complex of farm buildings in a small village in the Yonne département of Burgundy, France. It is easily reached by Eurostar and TGV or by car. Accommodation is a mixture of single and shared bedrooms. There is a swimming pool and large orchard garden. Burgundy is renowned for its Romanesque architecture, chateaux, food and wine and there will be time for visits to some of the many local places of interest."

Sounds like that great French movie Swimming Pool, lacking only a divinely nude Ludivine Sagnier lounging by said pool. But you never know. More details are available from Rosemary at piazza AT btinternet DOT com.

UPDATE: Rosemary tells me there is now a website for the program.

Philip Gets His Groove Back

After his unusual demureness in face of the star-making machinery, I'm pleased to see Philip Pullman recovering his characteristic pugnacity to defend his dark materials from the interference of the interfering Faithful: "Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good."

But enough about you. Or me.

As we did late last year, Child_Lit has been discussing the U.K.'s age-banding proposal with some ferocity the past few days. While I am firmly in the camp of those who oppose the scheme, a speech Philip Pullman gave on the subject is working my nerves. It's very much a speech to the choir (which it was, being delivered at a conference of the Society of Authors), and at the beginning quotes from the research report that allegedly boosts the proposal: "A recent trade survey has shown a general preference to move to age ranging, although with some strongly held contrary views, but now what’s needed is a piece of research that delivers some definitive answers from the people who matter most – book customers and readers."

Pullman then clutches his rhetorical pearls for this response:

The people who matter most?

Whoever wrote that – whoever read that and believed it – needs to be reminded that without us, without our work, our talent, our willingness to put up with almost anything in the way of reduced royalties, humiliating treatment over jacket design, endless travels to this bookshop, that school, that library, anything to help our books reach the readers – without us there would be no editors, no designers, no marketing teams, no publicity people, no secretaries, no helpful personal assistants, no senior executives, no expense account lunches, no pension schemes, no company cars, no sales conferences in attractive places, no publishing industry whatsoever. Any of the people who do those other things could be replaced with very little difference. Take us away, and you’ve lost everything. The people who matter most? Authors and illustrators are the people who matter most, and no publisher with any sense of what’s right and true would have allowed that sentence, and that attitude, to stand.

While I agree it would have been both politic and useful to ask writers what they thought of the idea of printing suggested reading levels on book covers, jeez, Philip, get over your bad self. I ask, with similarly high-camp drama but equal sincerity, isn't anyone thinking about the children? They are the people who matter most in this question. They are the ones who will have to suffer walking around with a book they want to read but are officially too mature for; they are the ones who will be told "you aren't ready" for a book deemed Too Hard. The problem with the age-banding proposal is not that it ignores authors, it's that it ignores young readers.

Take that.

As the suit over publication of "The Harry Potter Lexicon" begins in New York, Laurie Frost's The Elements of His Dark Materials: A Guide to Philip Pullman's Trilogy (The Fell Press) has just come across my desk. Like the as-yet-unpublished "Lexicon," Elements contains all manner of facts collated from the object work; unlike that project, it has been published with full consent from the author, if Pullman's preface is anything to go by: "It's flattering, of course, to find one's work the object of such care and attention; but how much more satisfying when the work of reference that results is so accurate, and so interesting, and so good."

Galleycat worries that if Rowling wins, book reviewers will lose. I doubt it--the issue here is not that the "Lexicon" quotes from the Harry Potter books, it's that it raids them wholesale, and not with the purpose of buttressing a viewpoint, negative or otherwise. I'm sure that publishers would love to vet reviews but I don't see how Rowling's victory in this lawsuit would give them that power.

And I promise not to withdraw it.

Claire's review of The Golden Compass is here.

Second thoughts?

Alerted by an anonymous commenter, I see that the Catholic News Service has withdrawn its review of The Golden Compass. Without comment. Maybe the Magisterium is at work.

But enough about you

This idea of the internet as a solipsistic wonderland--oh wow! You're reading my blog!--really gained ground this weekend with two of our leading internet magazines--Salon and Slate--each using the premier of The Golden Compass as a springboard for people to talk about themselves while pretending to do otherwise.

I have a lot of respect for Donna Freitas's work on His Dark Materials, but on Salon she unconscionably sets up Catholic Leaguer Bill Donahue as the Grand Inquisitor and herself as Galileo: "Allow me to plead my case, for I think I am innocent. (Though I fear I might be on trial, or even be found guilty without a trial.)" Stop, Donna, we need the wood.

And I would really like to see some documentation for "Catholic principals, librarians and teachers all across the United States and Canada are being told by their diocese to remove "His Dark Materials" from their shelves and classroom curricula." I can find three instances of The Golden Compass being removed from Catholic schools (two in Canada and in Oshkosh, Wisconsin), and in none of them was the diocese involved: trustees, principals and one benighted librarian pulled the book without orders from above. Of course there are probably other, quieter instances of the book being removed (as that's how it's usually done, in public and parochial libraries alike) but the point is that the Catholic Church is engaged in no war with Philip Pullman and no one is being threatened with excommunication. It's just weenie Bill Donahue calling attention to himself via his self-administered interviews, and Freitas falling right into his trap by making him seem more important than he is.

But Freitas, at least, does have a point to make, and it's an eloquent and important one, about the feast of religious inquiry in Pullman's trilogy. Emily Bazelon writing for Slate, on the other hand, explains that she's not going to encourage her sons to read Pullman's trilogy because she really dug Flowers in the Attic even though her mother said it was dreck. (Thanks to Kelly Herold for the link.) Did I mention that I'm going to see The Golden Compass tonight and Nobody Listens to Andrew used to be my favorite book?

Compass points

Kitty's put together a Philip Pullman page in anticipation of The Golden Compass opening this weekend; she's included links to both Monica Edinger and Bill Donohue, who must be stamping his little feet over The Catholic News Service's benevolent review.

And we apologize for the kind of rough audio, but my podcast interview with Pullman is also up for your listening pleasure.

Excuse My Dust

A Horn Book interview with Philip Pullman is forthcoming on our website later this week; Philip and I spent a few minutes on Friday discussing the upcoming Golden Compass movie and the peculiar Bill Donohue of the Catholic League, whose job I totally want: the man makes more than 300,000 smackers a year interviewing himself for press releases.

In preparation for the interview I reread The Golden Compass, something I hadn't done since reviewing it for BCCB way back when. In all the subsequent debate re the trilogy's weighty themes and dizzying ideas, I had forgotten just how action-packed this book was, complete with cliff-hanging chapter endings. It has completely propelled me into The Subtle Knife, which I'm re-reading via audiobook, an excellently addictive production (despite some cheesy musical interludes) narrated by Pullman himself with full-cast dialogue seamlessly worked in.

Now is this work-reading or pleasure-reading? Virginia Heffernan wonders why we draw a distinction.