Trusting in Lyra

D.H. lawrence said when reading a story trust the tale not the teller. That is exactly what I do when I read His Dark Materials. Even though Philip Pullman is a very outspoken atheist, I have always and will remain to ignore that when I read his books because there is more meaning in his books than what he intends (not because I disagree with atheism or Chritianity, but because I don't like the idea of knowing too much about the author of a book, sometimes it ruins my experience). Dr. Sexson points out that it is a rather odd thing to say that we might understand an author's story better than the author himself, but I think it is a very useful one. There is a great deal of religious material in the books and it is enriching and adds to the themes, but the politics of religion can get messy, so I try to focus on other themes. The themes seem to focus around innocence/experience, truth, storytelling, didacticism, what is a child, etc. as Dr. Sexson listed for us in class. The influences surrounding Philip Pullman's novels are rich and vast. He certainly does not worry about anxiety of influence, but rather embraces it. I want to blog later about some of the themes, this is just a quick intro blog to His Dark Materials.

A list of the impossible...or the possible?

It's kind of fun to do the impossible - Walt Disney

I was trying to think of impossible things, and it isn't hard to do, but I was still troubled. Impossible things depend on reality and dreams. Most of these impossible things could never happen in real life, notice I say most because I believe we don't really know what is impossible. But all of these impossible things are completely possible in our dreams.

So then if I write down a list of impossible things then it might really be a list of possible things. Or what if we read a book and we become the character in the book we do impossible things as the character like riding on the back of a polar bear who talks or talking to a large catapillar smoking a hookah or dancing down a yellow brick road with a scarecrow, tinman, and lion? Then we are able to do impossible things so that these things become possible through dreams and reading. So then am I providing you with a list of 5 impossible things or 5 possible things? Whatever it is, here is a list of both impossible and possible things:

1- I seperate my soul from my body and place it within my dog Copper and he will now live forever as my daemon.
2- When Sutter and I go fishing I will catch a Sperm Whale in the Upper Madison.
3- My hair will grow 3 feet over night.
4 - The law of gravity will be abolished by congress and we will all float around but we will still be able to breathe.
5 - A large ship from the 19th Century will plunge through the Overbrook neighborhood and Larry (our neighbor) will hop on board with Sue and Little Bear and they will fly away into the sky to play the ultimate game of jepordy to save the world with attacking aliens.
(6) - Sutter :P
I do the impossible for most college students everyday by waking up before 8 am.

"You pass through places and places pass through you, but you carry them with you on the soles of your travelin' shoes.......the littlest birds sing the prettiest songs..... it's time like these I feel so small and wild, like the ramblin' footsteps of a wanderin' child.....the littlest birds sing the prettiest songs....." The Be Good Tanyas

about 6 degrees of seperation....

From Alice to Oz -
A character in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is the Cheshire Cat.......

Cheshire is also the name of a county in NW England.....in London there is a pub called the Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese Pub.....

Charles Dickens frequented this pub which was popular for its gloomy charm, supposedly where he got a few of his characters for A Tale of Two Cities......

Charles Dickens also had a pet raven named Grip.....the Ravens are the American Football team of Baltimore.......

Baltimore is where Edgar Allen Poe spent the latter part of his life (his poem "The Raven" was the inspiration for naming the football team the Ravens).......

Edgar Allen Poe also wrote a news article about hot air balloons called "The Balloon Hoax" all about a man who lied about flying over the ocean in 3 days in a hot air balloon......

the hot air balloon is what the wizard from The Wizard of Oz flies away in abandoning Dorothy in Oz, but we all know she wasn't really abandoned.

Quiz #2......Good luck!

1. know the subject matter

2. know the pages of Sunderland discussed in class - I wrote some of the page numbers down, but I'm sure I don't have all of them, here are some: page 92, 27, 28, 206, 134, around183 - 186.

3. Know chapters from Alice:

• Humpty Dumpty
• Wool and Water
• Tweedle Dun and Tweedle Dee
• Caterpillar
• Question of morals

4.Know My Book and Heart Shall Never Part

5. Talbot movies.....i don't know why I wrote that down

6. Name and illustrator of Alice books: Tennial

7. Last word in Beauty and the Beast in the Tatar book: Virtue

8. Who wins after death, the worms, but we triumph over the worms how? - through art

9. Oscar Wilde "Life imitates art"

10. Know the themes of the class:

• history
• myth
• dreams
• art
• coincedence

11. The white knight might represent Carrol himself

12. What is the parodists counterpart to How Doth the Busy Bee? Carrol's How Doth the Little Crocodile -- Dr. Sexson mentioned that this sounded like a good essay question.

13. What is the beautiful food the mock turtle sings about? soup....this is also a parody of something about a star

14. Hatter's riddle: Why is a raven like a writing desk? Stolba's answer: I haven't the slightest idea

15. According to Talbot who is the most quoted author after Shakespear? Lewis Carrol.

16. _______ is a depersonalized ______ and ________ is a personalized _______. Answer: myth is a depersonalized dream and dream is a personalized myth.

17. know about Humpty Dumpty, the Jabberwocky, and portmanteau

18.Stephanie thinks the rudest of all the flowers is the violet.

19. animated contains the word anima which means soul

20. Who is the volcano? Alice

21. Alice lives in the collective unconscious.......in The Golden Compass that would be Dust

22. The first time Alice drinks something she shrinks to 10 inches

23. What is the title of the deleted chapter from Through the Looking Glass? The Wasp and the Wig

24. How does Alice offend the mouse? by talking about her cat

25. During the Protestant Reformation the intent of literature was to teach moral values to children

26. According to My Book and Heart Shall Never Part the first Bible published was in Algonquin

27. What two animals sparked curiosity? the mammoth and the monkey

28. What machine influenced the 19th Century? the Guttenburg Press

29. Why are matters mad? the idea that mercury in the hat bands made hatters mad is an example of misplaced concreteness

30. Create an anagram of a Chapter title

31. White Rabbit drops what? white gloves and a fan

32. In Jean Cocteau's film version of the Beaty and the Beast, Beauty's tears turn into diamonds.

33. D.H. lawrence - When reading a story trust the tale not the author

34. Lewis Carrol's nickname was Dodo because he had a stutter which inspired one of his characters

35. tautology - circular argument it is what it is because it is

36. Goody-Two-Shoes is an emblem of perfection that adults lack - from My Book and Heart Shall Never Part

37. According to Dum and Dee: if Alice is a part of the Red King's dream then what are Dum and Dee? ditto ditto ditto

38. What image randomly appeared in Rebecca's dream? flying pigs

39. English class looks into the dark side of things

40. Who was the most prolific cereal.....haha i mean serial killer in 19th C England? Mary Ann Cotton

41. Two ghosts in Talbot book - Sid James and The White Lady

42. Jabberwocky poem about ledgend that haunted Sunderland the lambton worm

43. recreate last line of Alice books "Life, what is it but a dream?" this line is from the poem at the end which is an example of a structured poem called the acrostic poem which spells Alice Pleasance Liddell

44. Walter Pater - All art aspires to the condition of music because music doesn't ask the question of what does it mean

45. The text informs reality - from My Book and Heart Shall Never Part or rather life imitates art, things are only real because they are written about

46. What do the Tweedles really enjoy saying? contrary wise

Pretending and Daydreaming...or just Dreaming

In class we've been talking about dreams, reality, and imagination. And when we talk about dreams it might have mostly been about the kind you have when you are in your REM sleep. But what about pretending and day dreaming. I suppose many students know quite a bit about day dreaming. But both Alice (from Through the Looking Glass) and Lyra (from His Dark Materials ) have a different sorts of dreams that I wanted to highlight.

Instead of Alice suddenly seeing a white rabbit running by this time Alice decides to pretend. Page 156 she says, " 'Kitty, dear, let's pretend -' And here I wish I could tell you half the things Alice used to say, beginning with her favorite phrase 'Let's pretend.' " Later on Alice says about the looking-glass, "Let's pretend there's a way of getting through into it, somehow, Kitty. Let's pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so we can get through. Why it's turning into a sort of mist now, I declare!" And then Alice made it through the looking-glass. Was she dreaming, day-dreaming, or pretending? Maybe it started out as pretend and turned into daydreaming, which then led to a dream. And at the end of Through the Looking-glass when Alice is shaking the Red Queen it only turns out to be a kitten. So then was she dreaming or was she just pretending the whole thing. But then on Chpater XII she says she was woken by the kitty. It is all very ambiguous. But I suppose pretending is very much like day dreaming or even dreaming, because the impossible can happen. I used to pretend I was a ninja turtle when I was 4-years-old. It was physically impossible for me to turn into a ninja fighting turtle, but when pretending to be one and doing kicks and jumping off my couch, nothing was impossible and I became the Leonardo, one of the Ninja Turltles (turtle power!). But I was not dreaming, not sleep dreaming that is.

I also noticed this passage which connected to a part of Alice in Sunderland. Chapter XII of Through the Looking Glass Alice says, "Now, Kitty, let's consider who it was that dreamed it all. This is a serious question, my dear.....You see, Kitty, it must have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream of course - but then I was part of his dream too! Was it the Red King, Kitty?" And the last line before the poem Carroll speaks to the reader, "Which do you think it was?" Which reminded me of page 181 - 186 in the Sunderland graphic novel, some of which we discussed in class. Page 181, "life is but a dream," then page 182 the author wakes up from his dream, but then on page 186 he says, "Or is this your dream?" speaking to the audience. This question of who actually had the dream is popping up in both of these texts. Why does it matter? Is this a questioning of reality? Is anything ever really real? Or is it all enhanced and twisted through our dreams, imagination, and pretend.

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I was re-reading The Golden Compass, and I have read it many times (and it is much more fun to read it in the context of this class along with other classes), but I don't remember reading this passage on page 284:

They spoke no more for some time. Lyra felt herself moving into kind of a trance beyond sleep and waking: a state of conscious dreaming, almost, in which she was dreaming that she was being carried by bears to a city in the stars.

She was going to share it with Iorek, but then she had to cross a crevasse. This may be a forshadowing. Or maybe it is how she is learning to see the other worlds, by day dreaming rather then focusing on reality which doesn't give way to the impossible being possible.

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Just a side note that I found very cool....page 244 when Lyra is talking to a prisoner at Svalbard, whom she thinks is crazy, and the prisoner says, "There is a correspondence between the microcosm and the macrocosm! The stars are alive, child. Did you know that? Everything out ther is alive, and there are grand purposes abroad! The universe is full of intentions, you know." I don't think he is all that crazy. But what I really found interesting was that in my Medieval Literature class Dr. Morgan stresses about all the overlapping meanings and allegories within Medieval drama, one key example that is found throughout all of the cycle plays is the microcosm and the macrocosom. Both words are derived from greek meaning. Read more about micro and macrocosom HERE. Both of which affect eachother, which would be the correspondence. When the microcosm is out of sync, the macrocosm is too. The microcosm is centered more on the earth and it's issues and the macrocosm is associated with the cosmos and the spheres around the earth. They represent this in the plays by tempests and intensely stormy out-of-place weather, it all calms down when Jesus is born because he saved us all right and everything is better now. I would continue on with this typology, but I fear I would spoil the book, so I will cease. Phillip Pullman used a medieval way of thinking in his modern text. It just goes to show all the influences he used and the genius behind his story, and I feel so sad because I probably miss most of the influences, allegories, etc.

Class Notes 11/7 plus a bit more

**films to rent if you desire:
-Alice Through the Looking Glass with Kate Beckinsale
-Dreamchild
~~QUIZ on Wednesday Nov. 12 bring your questions on Monday the 10th. Question ideas can come from your notes, the Tatar book, Alice in Wonderland, and Sunderland~~
**Paper ideas for those who are still looking
-history -Alice
-myth -Dorothy
-dreams -Lyra
-art*
-coincedence
~~Discussed Alice in Sunderland pages 184-186 about dreams/identity and the author addresses the reader directly~~
*Discussed Alice's Adventures in Wonderland specifically, the part where Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum tell Alice her tears may not be real (page197 in my Alice book) in relation to the Jean Cocteau's film Beauty and the Beast and how Beauty's tears turn into diamonds.

(not discussed in class, but a pertinent connection) There was a part in Through the Looking Glass that reminded me of Cocteau's film: At the very end of chapter one, "She [Alice] just kept the tips of her fingers on the hand-rail, and floated gently down without even touching the stairs with her feet; then she floated on through the hall..." (166). Just as Beauty floated down the hall in this magical scene:
Also quoted Alice's adventures in Wonderland, "Life, what is it but a dream?" page 272 in my book. Which reminded me of "row row row your boat etc."

People shared their insights about Lewis Carrol's Alice stories and Sunderland. Hopefully that will be on people's blogs because I failed to take adequate notes on this.

------------ One Liners from Dr. Sexson in class today -------------

• "transform terrors into art...which may be the only way to deal with terrors" (which is why we should read the Grimm fairy tales etc. to our children)
  
• "are you willing to dance?" (in reference to chapter X The Lobster Quadrille, "Will you, wo'n't you, will you, wo'n't you, will you join the dance?"


• "The end is where the adventure begins"
  

Dreams and Imagination, Oh my

DREAM: I am living with Sutter's family in a huge mansion that is fashioned more like a palace, with an enormous winding staircase, and the glow around everything is yellow. I am wandering around the house wondering where I am supposed to sleep when Sutter runs up to me wearing a white robe and a stocking over his face, like robbers wear. He said something like, "Did you see that guy run by? He's an intruder!" Sutter started racing down the stairs after this intruder. I started to run after him but panick started in my stomach, and rose to my chest, and burst. ...
*

AWAKE (halfway): I sat bolt right up in bed and looked to my right where the closet/bathroom door was open and there I saw the intruder staring at me with black clothes and a black hat from the darkness. I screamed. And screamed. I finally turned to my left and switched on my bedside lamp, hands shaking, and looked to the closet, but the intruder wasn't there. Sutter panicked when I screamed and was no use at all for defense. When everything calmed down I made Sut look in every nook and cranny of our house to see if there were intruders. It was 2 a.m. and we turned every light in the house on.
*
This incident happened at the beginning of the summer. I did not sleep well for three months after that. I was convinced there was a man that came into our house and watched us sleep. Before going to bed I locked all the doors, checked closets and dark places for intruders, and I shut all the blinds, and locked the bedroom door. In the morning I would check for footprints around the house. Every night I still felt a presence. Sometimes I would lay awake with the TV on as Sutter slumbered deeply. (I nearly hated him for the peace he could find). I was able to sleep better, but not perfectly when I got a night-light. The nightly routine of checking everything was still in place. I was getting better week by week until I watched a scary movie, Mr. Brooks starring Kevin Costner. I was back to my old habits of a paranoid freak. (I really sound like a nut case here, I am really not).
*

Now everything is fine. I sleep well without checking for intruders, without checking all the doors, and without shutting all of the blinds in the house. I am still baffled about how a simple dream ruined my sleeping life for so long. The impact was so deep I considered an exorcism of the closet. I was given Feng Shui books from my friends. Therapy was an option I hadn't ruled out. But now everything is fine and I fall asleep like I used to and sleep peacefully.

*

I blame my bad dream experience on my overactive imagination and maybe a fear of something destroying my happiness. Did Alice (from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) have an overactive imagination? Of course she did. How could she fall asleep and have such a dream about Wonderland without an overactive imagination. Northrop Frye says in The Educated Imagination,

But we use our imagination all the time: it comes into all our conversation and real life: it even produces dreams when we're asleep. Consequently we have only the choice between a badly trained imagination and a well trained one, whether we ever read a poem or not (134-5).

I obviously have retrained my imagination to be positive rather than drak, scary, and negative. I forced myself to think of good and happy things before bed. I stopped watching TV before bedtime/scary movies and I have returned to reading books(not scary books) to put me asleep, which I used to always do in highschool.

*

There seem to be no morals to dreams. Only images and fragments of story lines that merge and morph into other story lines. Like in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland on page 103 (in the Barnes and Noble's Classics edition with an intro. by Tan Lin) the Duchess says that Alice is thinking about something and that makes her forget to talk and she can't remember what the moral of that is. Alice responds, "Perhaps it hasn't one." The Duchess responds, "Every thing's got a moral, if you can only find it." Onto page 104 after the Duchess points out several morals, Alice thought, "How fond she is of finding morals in things!" That does seem to be the trend in children's literature, didactic practices, and adults (like the Duchess) often like to insist on morals to teach children a thing or two. Maybe in a dream and in our imaginations there doesn't have to be a moral. We don't have to learn anything from our dreams, or from our creative thoughts, but rather experience the imagination and put it to good use in our feelings, conversations, and basic daily life. Does that make us more interesting? Like Dr. Sexson suggested in class, that the text is not boring, but if we are bored with what we are reading than it is us who are the boring ones. Dr. Sexson said, "the more interesting we become, the more interesting books are." So then I assume the more interesting the books become, that mean we are becoming more interesting. This made me a little concerned with my sense of self....am I boring!? No of course not. No one really is....well maybe there are exceptions, and wouldn't that be awful to be the exception. Just thinking about exceptions, Alice is not exceptionally imaginative, but does she become imaginitive because she has this creative dream that a boring girl shouldn't have? I should think so, for she seems to have a "well trained" imagination.