Our Class Today - Monday before Thanksgiving

-Can 12 year olds feel the emotions of an adult and does this change the impact of the end of the book?

Well, we've heard from some that the emotional response is not the same when you think that the book is about young kids who would end up breaking up anyway.

-"My friend doesn't like that Pullman wrote about Atheism and killing God," and what can we say about that. It is good that the Fake God killed at the end of the book is killed because he represents everything that the Christian God is not, i.e. stuborness, idology, greed, and other sin-type actions among other things.

-Original sin is required, not only to live a fulfilled life, but a life of knowledge, scholarly and complete.

-"His Dark Materials...ends like a lamentation of a loss... loss of childhood." Sadie. (I need to talk to her about my term paper in this class! Get who she was talking from here.)

-"Listen with a double ear, one that hears what he's saying, and one that hear's what could be said." -MS (correct me here if this is not correct)

-Sutter is full of interesting observations in his blog, we talked today about what Dust could be. Perhaps a connection with remembrance, experience, children. Lyra and Pan had decided that they never actually figured out if it is bad or not (by the end of the book).

- River Letha = bad ~ River Mnemosity = good

-Sam said, "How do you like dem apples?" (but she says that she never said this). And even though she never said this, it's true because it's the better response. Beauty is truth and truth is beauty. And that's all that matters.......? ;)

-Relations between Alice, Lyra, and Dorothy. The word "curious" is infinitely connected to "care". Curious-Curator-Museum-Muse-Mnemosity/Cure-Healed-Paying Precious Attention to Things

-Why no L.A.D (otherwise boy, comes from Lyra, Alice, and Dorothy) in the stories we focus on? "Because they don't read." -MS :) It is the women doing the curious things. Eve and the Forbidden Fruit, Alice, Lyra, Dorothy, and all the Old Fairy Tales. Histories written by men, and men like writing about women. :) (That's my thought)

-All wars have been fought by those who want us to know and those who want to keep us in tame, obedient nature. "Brothers Karimov" (AHHH, I can't spell!) ****Need to look up why the speech one brother gives to the other about being obedient.****

-MS does not believe that there is a certain age for certain materials. "Nonsense, you know what you should give them at the age of three? Shakespeare!" "Do not condescend to children" -Pullman. Give them good stuff from the very beginning. They may grow up a little bit odd, but odd is good in this world of Irony and Chaos (any child growing on Shakespeare should not be worried about falling into the realms of Chaotic speech, saying things like, "LIKE TOTALLY AWESOME DUDE!" Maybe this is our way to pull our society back from these depths!)

-Acrostics make very good poem beginnings. ;) (I need to check for the words used by Sutter that MS spoke. What were those words from?)

-pg. 864, The Page in which the dead are starting to come out of an opening made by the subtle knife. Mary gets out of her world into other worlds, and develops through out this journey. She was the one who could make the Amber Spyglass because of this transformation. Mary had never seen so much joy. ***Mary was not a child, but still became transformed.*** Mary said, "Tell them stories, they need the truth."

-Truth can only come through stories. "Whether it's the Bozeman Chronicle or the Bible, they are all stories. They all come through humans, they are put in human language, and they are all literature." -MS

-*Poems of T.S. Elliot, look at my past posts for my "Term Paper Topic" if you want the entire passage from the Four Quartets, Little Gidding, pt. 5 that he read in class. These lines speak many truths.

-Dame Francis Yeats, she is the one who introduced us to the Alethiometer. "To set out to do consiously what you can only do by intuition."

-You can travel by imagination. It is not making up or pretending, but just another form of seeing. This is much harder than pretend. pg. 912 in His Dark Materials. **Good for Apolopgy!**

-Shakespeare's Tempest - He soaks the books in the end. Magician loses his powers.

**Big thought - You must put away these tools that get you where you are, and look around at where you are and what you must do now. That magic doesn't last forever!**

YOU NEED TO DO IT WITHOUT THE FEATHER, BECAUSE THEN THE BURDEN IS PUT ON YOU TO BE WHERE YOU ARE, AND LIVE WHERE YOU ARE.

Blake says this, "Be here now."

The only paradise you'll ever know is going out that door, going into the November weather and walking across MSU. Love it, for it is what you have. The world is what you make it. This is why they lose their pieces in the end. This is why Pullman must end the book the way he does.