A Compass made of Gold

Phillip Pullman’s spiritual novel of education is becoming quite the delightful read. Stories of children growing up in double worlds of reality and fantasy are a personal favorite of mine. They’re similar to stories that I’d like to create.

It invokes a lot of underlying themes based off of religious references that spark my interest. The fact that each child has another spiritual being that they’re attached to in another realm, and how it translates as them being innocent until they grow up is really intriguing.

It exemplifies a lot of religious themes, albeit transcribed in a different manner from Pullman’s point of view. Even though the majority of religions look at Adam and Eve taking the fruit from the tree as the origin of sin, it seems more like Pullman’s point of view is that of humans first being exposed to the truth of wisdom. It’s as if even though he doesn’t side with religion, he still points out that mankind has the choice between sinning and not once he realizes knowledge of what sin is. And that knowledge of difference between sin and not is what makes us human. It’s a rather interesting opposition to make.

The main character Lyra still has her own decisions to make. When Lord Aston wants to remove her spirit animal so that she may not grow up into a tainted adult, she chooses to escape. Also when she gains the ability to use the compass (althieometer?) because she’s acquired enough Dust, it’s as if it symbolizes her growing knowledge of the adult world and how she can apply it to situations that help her. Also towards the end when Lord Aston jumps into the portal asking her to follow. She chooses not too. Lyra does not follow this symbolized Satan because she makes the right decision for herself.

The way Pullman presents themes within The Golden Compass is the part that intrigues me the most. I really thoroughly enjoyed this story.

The Heroic Journey of a Hobbit

I used to be obsessed with Tolkien in Jr. High into High School. I remember the first time I read the hobbit was in 8th grade. That was around the time that the first Lord of the Rings movie came out. Having experienced Bilbo’s Journey and the Fellowship of the Ring at the same time made me really interested into figuring out as much about this fictional Middle-Earth as possible. I recall one of my friends having a map, and how we’d look through it trying to pinpoint all the locations of where things happened in the story. Its things like that that really bring interest into younger adolescent readers. They get intrigued by the mythical adventure, but also grow to understand the story behind it. It’s interesting going back and reading The Hobbit again as an adult and realizing all the good plot devices that so many common fantasies lacks these days.

The story can be defined as escapist literature. You’ve escaped from the jail of your life into a fantasy adventure. Tolkien really builds the whole world of middle-earth. It’s not linear, it goes in a direction and then its like “oh that reminds me of …” It’s really reminiscent of ancient folktales in it’s storytelling.

The thing with the Hobbit over other medieval fantasy is its really cunning an intelligent. Because Bilbo is a hobbit, a small humanlike creature that’s the size of a child even though he’s a middle-aged man, he results to outsmarting his enemies with wit as opposed to having an epic battle. He can’t physically defend himself the best, but he tricks Gollum by asking him the question about the ring. Gollum goes crazy looking for his ring, and Bilbo asks him if he can guess what’s in his pocket. Gollum guesses incorrectly, and Bilbo slips on the ring and vanishes out of sight.

The Hobbit has always been a tale that I’ve most enjoyed, as well as any of Tolkien’s other middle-earth stories.

Impressions of a Vampire

So this past week’s reading was Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire. Although the recent onslaught of vampires in mainstream culture – thanks Twilight – has built my distaste in vampires, I decided to give this story a fair chance.

Anne Rice’s vampires differ from that of the traditional Dracula. For one thing they’re immune to the whole garlic, holy water, stake in the heart kind of stuff. Also, instead of turning victims into fellow vampires upon biting them, victims are transformed when they feed upon a vampire’s blood. Now the story takes off as a young boy is interviewing Louis, who’s been a vampire for over 200 years. Louis’s character is portrayed as a teenager or young adult when he’s affected by life at the beginning of his told story.

Louis’s life is on its last rope. He’s pretty much at rock bottom when Lestat discovers him. Lestat takes advantage of Louis’s weakness and turns him into a vampire. He then shows Louis the way of life as a vampire as they prey upon unsuspecting victims that are both male and female. One thing that occurred to me while perusing through this story, although it’s not exactly mentioned, is that there is a sense of a bisexual dominance/recessive relationship between Lestat and Louis within this story. In a way it feels kind of like Anne Rice paved a pathway to making female pornography more popular, kind of like how it is in more modern culture today, particularly with Yaoi in Japan. It feels like Louis is trapped in this awful sort of relationship with Lestat in which he’s now forced to live forever as a vampire. Its not until he meets up with the old world vampires that he has his chance to leave. The story also sparks a lot of other interesting concepts, like Claudia for instance, who is pretty much like a child to Louis. She’s stuck as an immortal child, so that even though her mind matured to adulthood, her body never did. Also the Old world vampires are more like savages. They’ve been used to feeding on the living for so long, they’ve lost any sense of their human minds. Louis and Claudia tried to dispose of Lestat and failed. Its not really until after Lestat comes back to extract his revenge by killing Claudia that Louis is really fueled to get rid of Lestat. Also at the end of the story the interviewer, being the young naïve boy that he is, doesn’t realize any of the tragedy behind Louis’s woeful tales. Instead he thinks it’d be cool to be a vampire for the immortality and power. Louis angered at the boy’s ignorance, turns him into a vampire and flees. At that point the story ends with the interviewer wanting to seek out Lestat as well. In a way, this is kind of like a commentary about how people don’t realize the consequences of things as youth. They don’t tend to think things through, but rather learn the hard way because they do things that they think are cool.

Even though the whole male dominance relationship part of this book kind of creeped me out, I still think it provided some interesting points with the concept of being an immortal child and the mindless old world vampires.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Although I’ve never had any intention of reading any of Jane Austen’s books, I have to say that ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’ provided a slightly different experience. At first I was really only inclined to read it because I’m a huge fan of zombies. After perusing through some of it, I admit that it is quite humorous seeing the book presented in a satirical fashion.

The story introduces the characters in what I’d assume is the same way they are brought about in the original story. I get the impression that it’s a very traditional early 19th century England. Even the way they first start talking about the “unmentionables” feels like it actually fits into the text. When I first saw “unmentionables” I felt like I wasn’t sure what it was they were talking about. And I feel like, that’s how it would be talked about in the early 1800’s because the word “zombie” wasn’t even added to the English dictionary until much later. These extra characters actually seem to fit quite well into the story. However when they start calling them “zombies” and describing their specific martial arts techniques, that’s when it starts getting ridiculous. There are certain snippets of the story like that where it makes sense up to a point, and then after that it’s kind of ridiculous. The first time a ninja actually showed up into the story I thought, “Wait, did that actually just happen?” It was kind of strange to see all these random Japanese elements of ninjas and karate fighting styles integrated into old English culture. It was at the point I realized, “Well, I can see why it’s described as a mash-up.” In a way, it kind of reminds me of the same satirical format you’d see in an Onion News Network article. They present it in a way that makes it sound believable, yet there are so many ridiculous things added to it which is what makes it so hilarious.

‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’ was entertaining to say the least, and I feel that this book is one to keep for years to come. I’ve also researched the book and found information regarding it being turned into a movie. It’s rumored to be in pre-production now with directing by David O. Russell and Elizabeth Bennet being played by Natalie Portman. I have to wonder if they’ll keep the satirical format without ruining it.

Frankenstein First and Foremost

So this blog was created for my Literature of Horror, Fantasy and Sci-Fi class taught by Dr. Steiling. Our first assignment was to read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. I've heard widely about it, but this was my first time sitting down and actually reading the original novel.

I have to say the book was kind of hard to get into at first, given that it started out with these strange letters. I wasn't sure what the letters had to do with the story, but after the letters were finished I realized that it was just point of view of the storytelling. I actually quickly perused through the whole story to try and picture it as a whole. It helped to fundamentally put everything together, and then realize that it was actually shifting points of view between the main character of the story, Victor Frankenstein, and the eyes of a man by the name of Robert Walton that wrote the letters describing the experience of how he came about meeting Victor. After realizing that, I preceded to go back and read the more individual parts of the story and slowly realize the plot setup, symbolism and hidden meanings.

Victor starts off as any young college student would, so involved and passionate about his work with science, and curious about such taboo as creating human life. What he underestimates, is that his creation turns into a "monster". This monster is born a giant with the mind of an infant. He does adapt fairly quickly in terms of learning language by observing a nearby family. Even though the does accidentally kill them, it's not intentional. There's almost a level of innocence to it. What I think actually kept me interested in the story though was the paradigm shift in personalities. Character development is always my favorite part of stories, and this story is no exception. Watching Victor go from young and naive to desperate out of grief was rather interesting. Victor even argued with himself for a while as to whether appease his creation, which was pretty much like his son, the one thing he asked for, a female. After contemplating it for a while, he decided to go ahead with it, only to scrap it before completion and throw the parts out to sea. This really symbolized abortion. Not only was Victor a terrible and irresponsible parent to his first child, but he also aborted the second one. Meanwhile, his first creation has killed his best friend, to which he gets blamed for himself. Victor really evolved from a naive science practitioner into a complete narcissistic jerk. He was too worried about himself, and what would happen to people if he didn't kill his monster. The fact that he contemplated killing his creation, his only son, as opposed to accepting his responsibility for it really showed something about this character. It should also be noted that all the significant feminine roles in the story weren't very significant at all. The all didn't have very much dialogue time overall, and when they were killed they were rather accepting of it. It's more like it was all about Victor's reaction, and all about him being the center of the universe. The way I figure it, it's like Mary Shelley's social commentary on how unimportant women roles were looked upon in at least in her life, as well as the acceptable responsibility level of young parents. Overall, I feel that Shelley's story was very well conceived, even if it was kinda slow to start. It certainly gives some insight towards how she really felt upon roles in society, and I did enjoy the swap of roles between Victor and his creation. His creation was his innocent child, and Victor Frankenstein became the real monster.

If anything, this story certainly reaffirms my decision of waiting until I'm around 30 before I even have my own children. Although some young parents do a swell job, Victor certainly did not.