This year, Pioneer Day weekend is a true long one and I haven’t thought of the holiday for a few years now. Today, I had the day off, the first Friday off all month. I had espied it from the relentless days of the hottest June I remember and made a spa appointment to take advantage of the three days. What good are massages if you have to go to work the next day? I got a full 90″. And no, I didn’t feel like it was too long. It was just right and I may give up facials just so I can get the 90″ massage. After the spa, I went to the local Nicole Miller to shop for a dress for a September wedding. One dress was okay but then I thought people from work will be there and it was more like a hot date dress and not a dress to be seen in when around co-workers. I hated the rest of the dresses. What good is a sale if you don’t like what they’re selling? My mission continues.

After that, I walked slowly though the hot streets to the Garces Trading Company. I wanted to see if they had new wines in their store. I had nearly settled on a verdejo, even if it’s a seafood type of wine and I’m not into seafood much, when I saw a small row of rosés by the sparklers. A Spanish rosé with 50% Garnacha and 50% Tempranillo called out to me. It was a beautiful strawberry color and promised more weight than the Provençal rosés. I asked the woman but she hadn’t tried it. I have it in the fridge now. It looks beautiful and at only $10 how can you go wrong?

I was hungry after that and went back to Old City to Amada for lunch. Their tuna salad is not what you think. It had a tangle of frisee expertly dressed and decorated with some crisp haricot vert. The tuna salad didn’t have a whisper of mayo and was mounded generously on three slices of bread painted with fresh tomato. The tuna was bonito, heavy with olive oil and salted just like I like it, which is generously. Oh, delish. I had this with a glass of rosé cava since it’s still a wine that’s hard to find in this town. A perfect summer lunch. The tuna salad is a steal at $8 and if you have no alcohol, you could eat at one of the city’s finest for $10. The food trucks sell a styrofoam box worth of greasy street food for $7ish. Think about it. Thanks, Chef.

Second Street is home to The Book Trader, one of the city’s best used book shops. It’s packed full of books, books on every subject, books from one end to the other, high over your head, in tight corners, all those thousands of pages yellowing as you read the spines. There’s no AC, just a few fans churning mightily in the heat. The guys at the front were processing more books and talking about Glenn Beck. I’m so glad the Book Trader moved from horrid South Street to my beautiful neighborhood. I found a Complete Works of William Shakespeare in a modern printing for $10. The second floor has all the literature and I boldly went up even if the heat smacks you in the face as soon as you step off the staircase. Warm air rises… The smell of books is more pronounced up there thanks to the heat and the windows being closed. I stumbled upon the mystery section and book I had been wanting to read since I saw it reviewed in a publication years ago when it first came out, The Amber Room. It’s supposed to be wicked hot tomorrow and reading an art crime book that’s short on the Great Literature aspect might be just the ticket. It’s too hot for the end of Karamazov.

The books were furiously heavy and so was the wine by then, but I managed to make it over to the Franklin Fountain for some ice cream. I have never been disappointed there but I was today. I got a small Rum Raisin to go. There were raisins in the smooth ice cream but the rum was difficult to find at all and my scoop was so way tiny, I may consider avoiding that particular worker from now on out. Other people’s were way bigger than mine and they also had smalls. Wench. That place still reigns supreme as far as their perfect, sophisticated pistachio ice cream. It’s their best, though Cherry Vanilla with the ridiculous, no-corn-syrup anywhere hot fudge comes in a close second. I may only order those two things from them from now on. It’s way too expensive there to have something that is not perfection.

I came home with my bags where I will lie on the couch and watch TV. What a great day off.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him;
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones,
So let it be with Caesar … The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answered it …
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest,
(For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all; all honourable men)
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral …
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man….
He hath brought many captives home to Rome,
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then to mourn for him?
O judgement! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason…. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.

It’s National Backstabbed By Your Friends Day.

Seriously, 15 March is the infamous Ides of March when 2054 years ago, G. Julius Caesar, the original whose name became a title, was stabbed to death in the Theatre of Pompey in Rome. Here’s to the original Renaissance Man… when the things brought back during the Renaissance were having their original date in the sun. Marc Antony, who William Shakespeare would write a terrific speech for 1600 years later, dressed in slave clothes and ran away but gave a speech on the rostra that afternoon. Some people may wonder what the big deal is all about, but those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Think on the date for a moment how easily democracy can be taken away, how you have to stand for something or you’ll stand for anything, and how precarious power can be. And I’m not talking about Caesar, but the plotters who thought, in their blindness, that if they killed him, the old republic would come back. Little did they know that they killed it when they killed him and democracy wouldn’t be seen again until the Colonies broke with Britain. They had no plan, they only had jealousy and fear for their privileges which they felt his reforms were eroding. Think about that, especially with the big tug of war going on now In Washington.

Or just get educated already.

I first heard about the melding of east and west in one-time Bactria, current Afghanistan, in a biography on Alexander the Great. That fusion exists in its art, recently recovered and thought lost and destroyed by the Taliban. A king rides a chariot pulled by a dragon. A dagger is topped by the figure of a dancing bear. Curled mystical beasts provide round knobs to top spears. Aphrodite is dressed like a Greek, has a mark on her forehead like an Indian, and sports wings. It’s something new, the way all these styles were used by an artist in a single piece.

The exhibit is small and buried on the second floor next to the modern art. I did not get the audioguide as I was still smarting from the $20 entrance fee. Thanks to that book on Alexander and a symposium I went to by staff of the Kabul museum, I wasn’t entirely lost. The unfamiliar may need to get the guide ($7).

Coming up to New York from Philadelphia is harder and more expensive than it has any right to be, but things like this are worth it. I’m eating Greek food at a restaurant I read about on Serious Eats (thanks Ed and Robin). It’s fitting.

Afghanistan is in the news lately for all the wrong reasons. This small, spectacular exhibit puts its rich past front and center. Like the gold of the jewels, it will never tarnish and never fade, no matter if it’s the Russians, the terrorists, or the Taliban. Some things always go on.

The barbarians are to arrive today.

Why such inaction in the Senate?
Why do the Senators sit and pass no laws?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today.
What laws can the Senators pass any more?
When the barbarians come they will make the laws.

Why did our emperor wake up so early,
and sits at the greatest gate of the city,
on the throne, solemn, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today.
And the emperor waits to receive
their chief. Indeed he has prepared
to give him a scroll. Therein he inscribed
many titles and names of honor.

Why have our two consuls and the praetors come out
today in their red, embroidered togas;
why do they wear amethyst-studded bracelets,
and rings with brilliant, glittering emeralds;
why are they carrying costly canes today,
wonderfully carved with silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today,
and such things dazzle the barbarians.

Why don’t the worthy orators come as always
to make their speeches, to have their say?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today;
and they get bored with eloquence and orations.

Why all of a sudden this unrest
and confusion. (How solemn the faces have become).
Why are the streets and squares clearing quickly,
and all return to their homes, so deep in thought?

Because night is here but the barbarians have not come.
And some people arrived from the borders,
and said that there are no longer any barbarians.

And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?
Those people were some kind of solution.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1904)

So, feeling dejected and light-headed thanks to my calorically poor diet, I stumbled home and found the energy to make muffins and watch my new Netflix mailing. It took way too long to get something after their recent delivery meltdown. The muffins I cobbled together are great and will help get me through the rest of the week. Man cannot live on vegetables alone. My cupboards are nearly bare thanks to my not having time or money to shop and buying whatever’s on special at the market is great in one way but bad in another. You need to eat food with calories in it! Here’s the muffin recipe:

SWEET CINNAMON MUFFINS

1 c. white flour

3/4 c. white wheat flour

2/3 c. brown sugar

2 tsp. baking powder

1/4 tsp. salt

1 heaping tsp. cinnamon

1 egg, beaten

3/4 c. evaporated milk

1/4 c. canola oil

1/4 c. honey

Mix all dry ingredients together and make a well in the middle. Mix all wet ingredients together with a whisk. Pour it all in at once into the dry ingredients and mix just until incorporated. Fill muffin cups 2/3 full of batter. Bake at 400F for 19 minutes.

I ate mine with Dalmatian fig jam. They hit the spot after another salad for dinner.

For my TV, I finally watched the first disc of that John Adams show from HBO. I’ve heard it spoken about a lot and well so being the history buff that I am I decided to look into it. I think Paul Giamatti is a bit much as the title character and there’s a little too much to do over the wife and kids back home in Massachusetts, but it still captures the era, most especially at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia when they decide to break free of Britain. They had nothing, just anger and an idea and yet they chose to take arms against the most powerful country in the world. And we all know they won, tradesmen, merchants, farmers, against trained soldiers. They were derided as terrorists in their day. It’s a lesson we need to learn from… and be proud of. There’s nothing more dangerous than a fool with an idea, but sometimes, wise men have ideas too.

To what point Islam has advanced in this development is a question beyond the scope of this book. But it may be said without fear of contradiction that Islamic society and Christian society have been generally bad neighbors now for nearly fourteen centuries, often eager to misunderstand each other. We stand in desperate need of contemporary figures like al-Malik al-Kamil and Francis of Assisi to create an innovative dialogue. We in the West must come to accept that a people numbering 1.3 billion and parked at our door for a millennium and a half will not go away. This is a force that cannot be conquered but must be reckoned with. Similarly, the Islamic East must come to terms with the immense spectrum of the Christian/ post-Christian West, a variegated society twice as large as Islam. We will not go away either.

I couldn’t have said it better. There is a middle ground between Bush’s war hawkery and uberliberal hang-wringing over the perceived sins of the West. Both positions are equally ignorant. This is our civilization and we have to keep it for future generations and defend it from both foaming, blind patriotism and self-flagellating guilt.

Regarding the Roman-inspired university curriculum of medieval students consisting of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric:

That so much time was devoted to what would today be compressed into a single course with a title such as “Freshman Comp” meant that, unlike contemporary graduates, all the graduates of medieval universities were truly literate and markedly skilled in an impressive repertoire of communication techniques.

It’s a point I’ve maintained for some time that students aren’t taught to defend their ideas with logic and argument. This neglect makes them technically skilled but essentially illiterate members of society. A government system like democracy that depends so much on input from its populace is in ill-suited hands.

I was afraid to read this book. Bad beginnings can be redeemed by a solid end but the same doesn’t work the other way around. I really didn’t want it to end on a bad note, but I had to see how it ended. Unlike a lot of other people, I at no time honestly thought Harry would die at the end. It would be a different kind of book altogether if he did, not the one I’d been reading for so long. But I did want to see how they did it, underage wizards with little experience against who’s been touted as a wizard whose expertise is only matched by his evil. And so I read it over an expanse of barely more than 12 hours (counting sleep).

It comes to a fitting close. It isn’t a letdown and actually this book is like a whole series of climaxes. It’s by far the most exciting and the most different since they’re not at Hogwarts and the framing story the school year provides.

I was right in my prediction when I said the remaining horcruxes would be items we’ve already seen before but haven’t realized were horcruxes. It’s not like it was an amazing prediction. I knew that’s how it would have to be if they were to find and destroy them all in the expanse of only 700+ pages without straining the story to the breaking point. It was cleverly done. The last catch of the final horcrux being Harry himself was also neat in how it fit in with everything already laid down. If he’s a horcrux, though, then he has to die to make Voldemort destroyable and that’s where it gets weird.

As I said before, I knew Harry wouldn’t die not least because if he did imagine the lawsuits from parents whose little darlings were upset their hero died. It doesn’t make business sense, but how Rowling squirmed out of that one was where the story got a little too metaphysical for me. It twists and turns over backwards just to create a loophole through which Harry Lives could squirm through. I’m not saying I know how to have made it better, but it seems strange to me that a killing curse could distinguish which soul to kill and if it could, it would have chosen Harry’s.

Something else that went on for a little too long and was a little too confusing in a clear attempt to make the “right” result possible was the whole rigmarole about the Elder Wand. Okay, so if a wand that’s more powerful than all others exists then some flunkie could take it and rub off a far better wizard. So… it negates any ability or knowledge someone may have. Furthermore, the whole discussion of wands choosing who to go to as if they were sentient creatures is a stretch. But that’s the problem with magic. Where does it end? The series’ greatest weakness has always been the wand-waving magic, not least because it doesn’t exist. It was also confusing when Harry tells Voldemort that the true master of the wand after Dumbledore was Draco Malfoy and it took some thinking before I remembered that Draco had disarmed Dumbledore at the end of the previous book. When I first read that passage, I thought Harry was bluffing.

One more negative and then I’ll go on to the positives. I hated how Ron spoke Parseltongue to get in the Chamber of Secrets. I thought Parseltongue was a gift, not just another language and it’s unlikely anyone, Ron included, would have been able to memorize some hissing gibberish they’d heard only once and been able to reproduce it to get results. I really hated that detail. It rang wrong like a missed note in a piece of music. It would have made far more sense if Hermione had figured out a way for them to get in.

And what would they do without Hermione? She’s such a smart girl when very few girls are encouraged to be like that. If it hadn’t been for her, Harry would have gotten stuck ages ago and she saves all their lives more than once just by being ready and having done all her homework. She is my favorite character.

Dobby’s death was oddly the saddest, maybe because of the way it’s written with all the references to the “little” body and the fact that it’s a fluke Bellatrix’s knife connects just as they’re almost escaped. The scene of Harry digging the grave himself was well-done. Some people are bent out of shape because of the high body count. Wouldn’t it be ridiculous, though, if only bad guys died and good guys didn’t? Not only would it be wrong, it would also negate the sense of peril. That’s what happens in war. It also makes clear Harry’s incentive to have done with Voldemort for good.

Snape. Or course he was playing double agent and while that’s been clear for a while, here finally we get the whole story and why there are so many references throughout the series to Lily’s green eyes. It’s possibly the most affecting line in all the books, Snape’s last words, “Look at me.” He bows out of the books as a complicated, tortured man which no one understood until the end. All good and all evil people do not exist and at the end of the series Harry Potter understands that much better than any other book aimed at young readers that I’ve ever read.

Some are no doubt all bent out of shape over Dumbledore but that never bothered me in the least. Dumbledore isn’t an oracle, he’s an old man who was once young. His backstory puts him in perspective, that’s all. It doesn’t take away his wisdom, his skill, his care for Harry. It really doesn’t change anything.

I hope when they film this movie, they send it off with a good treatment, a good 3 hours long. How else can they do it justice? The latest Order of the Phoenix suffers from cuts they had to make. I hope they allot the time needed for this one because there will be no other.

I hated the epilogue. It just shows everyone as boring soccer parents and only states the obvious. I wish the epilogue had been set some time after the events of the final chapter but not quite so far in the future that everyone is rendered so happy they’re dull. It should have been set in a time where the fallout has settled, but the events are still fresh and the rebuilding has begun. But that’s a minor quibble. Next time I read the book, I’ll just skip it.

Because I remembered so little of the last book Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, I just reread it. I wish I had gone ahead and reread Order of the Phoenix as well but there you have it. People are getting themselves all in a lather on whether Harry will die or not. That’s neither here nor there. I just wish a number of loose ends are tied up and the series comes to a fitting conclusion free of gods from the machine and impossible coincidence. I hope there aren’t new characters that pop out of the woodwork and clues that have been planted all along explain themselves. I hope too many things aren’t left hanging. I’m not the kind of person who’s good at “reading the drama”. I can’t figure out the end by what happens at the beginning. I actually go out of my way to not look ahead or think ahead. I like to let the story breathe on its own and come to its own conclusion.

I can’t help wondering how she’ll do it, though. How can Harry go about finding four horcruxes and destroy them? He’s only a fair underage wizard. How can it possibly be done in one book. My theory is we’ve already seen all the horcruxes, we and the characters don’t know they’re horcruxes. Now there’s the problem of Harry having to suddenly learn a bunch of magic to destroy them since I don’t think a large rock would work at this point. I’ve thought the endings of the last two books were far from satisfactory. One ends with the revelation of an indifferent prophecy anyone could have come up with and the other with a fake horcrux. Both things made the human cost seem outrageous and neither one gets Harry closer to destroying Voldemort. We’ll see how it ends. I really don’t want to throw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows across the room. My neighbor wouldn’t like it.

As far as the movies are concerned, I don’t like what they’ve done with Ralph Fiennes as Voldemort. He was scarier off-screen when people spoke of him in whispers. All of a sudden he’s on screen and he has feet and a weird singsong voice. And I really don’t understand why he has no nose. It looks fake in a weird way. It’s not the actor’s problem. He played an Amon Geoth that made your skin crawl in Schindler’s List. He has no problem playing bad guys. I just think that in this scenario, the camera would benefit from showing less of him rather than showing more, especially since people holding wands looks more ridiculous than scary to me. We have to fear him if he as a villain works and he doesn’t and that’s a shame. It goes to the heart of what I think about villains anyway. It’s very hard to pull off an all-evil villain since they end up looking like caricatures and both the movies and books have been at their best when Voldemort’s off-stage and the characters are fighting back the weaknesses and dark sides of themselves. The best villains are the sympathetic ones and Voldemort comes up short.

This July, all questions will be laid to rest and I just hope I don’t have to post about how much I hated the ending in two weeks, like I did about His Dark Materials. Endings can be great or terrible. I hope this one does the rest of the narrative justice. I hate when things don’t end well.

Here’s a review on Amazon.com that I found and I think I’ll start with that. It’s by a reader Talia:

After reading the trilogy, I was left wondering what the hell happened? I have just read all 3 of the His Dark Materials trilogy and what was a strong start in book 1 and 2 is utterly demolished in this clunker.

Pullman allowed his eagerness to bash religion to completely destroy an engaging story – one of the most creative stories I’ve come across in 20 years of reading fantasy. There isn’t even a remote chance of a sequel to fix up this mess. If you look up `anticlimax’ in the dictionary, you’ll see a picture of this book. From first page to last, time is wasted on boring characters, while all the good ones are either killed off, or just MIA for the entire book. Spoilers ahead.

What about Lyra and her parents? Somehow, she never knows what happened to them and after all she has been through is supposed to be content with going back to school like a good little girl? She never even confronts them to try and understand their motivations. And Will just goes back with Mary Malone to her apartment so they can figure out how to avoid the cops. Over a cup of tea, naturally. And that’s it for him.

In addition to all that, this book doesn’t even seem to be connected to the first two. None of the characters resonate they way they used to and instead of being good friends, Will and Lyra fall in love and have sex at the tender age of 11 or 12 . . . all in the last 30 pages. What happened to the story, for cripes sake?! And what happened to the `temptation’? Was choosing not to stay with Will her way of not succumbing to it? The whole premise is just so lame to start out with. As an earlier reviewer pointed out all the windows that were opened for centuries didn’t endanger the universe, why not leave one open for 60 or 70 years to give Lyra and Will a chance to know each other. The flimsy reasoning behind this is just as contrived as their sudden and immediate love for one another. Supposedly, they had more than gonads going for them, they survived death together!
Pullman didn’t feel like thinking it through, he just wanted a gut wrenching ending. In addition to that, he wanted to mock the reader by taunting us with the `reality’ of knowing that nothing they did in the trilogy has any hope or meaning. All of Will and Lyra’s efforts are futile, kind of like – guess what? religion for the rest of us morons.

After having the reader go through endless pages on the mulefa-elephant aliens or whatever, ultimately the characters the reader wants to know about disappear with barely a whimper. Iorek Byrnison, Lee Scoresby – instead we get page after page about Mary Malone the Disaffected former Nun. Pullman all but pants in his eagerness to give the finger to anyone of us who believes in Him or anything for that matter!

This is NOT children’s literature, it’s a hate ridden manifesto that is more suitable for adults who at least have some way of maintaining some sort of perspective throughout this sloppy mess. It’s totally dishonest to sell this as a children’s book, or even as a competent work of fiction. All of the painstaking work of the first two books is undone with this one.

We never get closure on Lyra’s parents.
We never really understand what Dust is and where it comes from.
We never see Will reunited with his mother.
We get a lame battle where `god’ dies and no one even knows why or how.
Lyra and Will fall in love, but have to `sacrifice’ it so that all the windows to other worlds can be shut forever, with only flimsy reasoning behind it.
The mulefa and Mary Malone’s work together amounts to nothing, everyone just goes home. Presumably, Will goes home, although we never see it. All that yearning after his mother and so forth . . .nothing.
The major enemies are killed off too easily – and what about Armageddon? What happened to the Fortress and all the rebel angels and . . .you get the idea. It all just sort of disovles.
Mary forgot to be the Serpent, or else I missed that in one of the countless pages on the mulefa.

Another reader pointed out:
” Phillip Pullman could have written a masterpiece with this series. Instead, the story falls flat under the weight of the author’s own agendas and mockeries. What a waste of time. I can’t believe this book actually won awards. It stopped being thought-provoking and started being inane and silly.”

It would have been better if Lyra had just awakened one morning and it was all a dream. Instead, relearning how to read the alethiometer will somehow enable her to build the Kingdom of Heaven in the course of her lifetime. Absurd.

This was one of the most disappointing and infuriating reads of my life.

Yes, I had to quote the whole thing. I agree with just about every word. I’ve already expressed on this self-same blog that I hate when good coffee shops go bad. And that’s just coffee shops. I hate even more, in the deepest marrow of my being, when I see something creative that could have been so good go bad. I hate it. It’s against everything I value. And this was one of those moments, the second I read the last page of the third and final book.

There’s an Irish proverb that advises to “Never let truth get in the way of a good story” and for Philip Pullman, he does just that. He allows his story to unravel and instead become an anti-God, anti-Church, atheist diatribe. The story comes to a screeching halt just as it should be speeding up and there’s page after page of slow, boring exposition that turns out to have very little to do with anything else. If he wanted to go on about why he hates God and religion and all that, fine, but write an essay or two. He allows it to get in the way of his story and it all but kills it. I’ve heard Pullman calls C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia a Christian manifesto, but with The Amber Spyglass he makes the same mistake Lewis did with The Last Battle and allows his agenda to crush his story.

And it doesn’t stop there. He also commits some poor storytelling blunders. While in real life, some things are never resolved and not all motivations are explained and closure doesn’t happen, that’s life. This is fiction. Fiction has to make sense in some way otherwise it sounds made-up. Here it sounds made-up with plot strings and characters abandoned just to allow him more room to rant on against God and Church like a loon at Marble Arch. The things that bothered me the most was Lyra never learning in real-time what happened to her parents. In The Golden Compass the stories she tells the gypsies’ children are full of references to her powerful father and she’s lived in fear throughout the series of her mother. At the end, she simply forgets to ask about them?! Please. It’s absurd from the characters’ perspective and a massive blunder from the storyteller’s perspective. Pullman fails to show respect for one of his prime villains and who should be one of his prime heros. In the scene itself at the abyss, there’s an odd point of view problem. Neither one of the children are there and the scene is told through Marisa Coulter’s perspective. Right? If so, the narrative should refer to her as Marisa and him as Asriel, not the proper titles the children’s point of views would use. It shows no sympathy or respect, furthermore, it should be at or near the climax and instead is near page 400 of a 500 page book. Mercy, please!

The whole battle is anticlimactic and Pullman treats it as a futile aside. Granted, the battle’s already started when the children arrive and since they’re the protagonists, the main narrative must follow them. Instead of joining in the action or being near the nerve center of the action which Lyra’s own father is supposed to be spearheading, the two kids, who by this time we’ve heard to the nth degree that they’re so valuable for this, wander off to find their pets as if this were a church picnic and not the greatest moment in human history characters have been saying it is. Furthermore, the God character who by Pullman’s thought must be this great enemy just fades away without a whimper. If he’s so easy to defeat, why didn’t someone do it earlier? Why is their resistance movement great then? The villain must be great if the hero is to be admirable. It all kinds of fades into the background like it doesn’t matter, and if it doesn’t matter, why should I, the reader, care? Why did I just read 1300 pages? Give me back the 4 days of my life I just lost.

Another annoying plot thread that just kind of disappears is the knife. A witch overheard one of the cliff ghasts saying Asriel’s rebellion is doomed to failure if he doesn’t have the knife. He never gets the knife nor does the knife have any role in the battle at all. So does his rebellion fail? Does it matter? Things seem pretty peaceful when Lyra gets back home as if a war of the worlds didn’t just happen. If it just happened, things would be much different. If it didn’t happen and it was on a scale of a playground fight rather than the greatest moment in human history then Philip Pullman just lied to me and I don’t care about anything else he has to say. Dear writers, this is not what you want your readers to think. This so-called rebellion against the angel who would be God comes off like an overhyped joke and the problem with Dust appears to be some Italianesque guys getting a little overenthusiastic with a knife. That’s it. That’s IT.

The last thing I’ll pick over is the very, very end when Lyra and Will must separate forever because an angel said so. Firstly, they’re in love. That was the “temptation”? If the idea of thirteen-year-olds being in love forever and ever and ever just like that doesn’t crack you up, it must be making you cry with this feeblest of hooks that Pullman’s based his epic on and years and years of his life. If closing the doors would make the Dust not leave, why didn’t that angel Xena or whatever her name is say so in the first place. Did all those people have to die? If closing the doors is all they have to do, but that’s easy, as Sir Robin said. This could have ended 800 pages ago. And Lyra and Will are going to accept it just like that even with them being all in love and all even if they just saved all the universes. If they didn’t save all the universes, then what was the point. Asriel and Marisa should have been the protagonists, then. And leaving one more little door open after thousands have been open for centuries is going to make all that much of a difference just so Pullman can have the ending he wants is ludicrous. Actually, the word is “contrived.”

Why do I go on like this? Why do I pick over point-of-view problems in a published and successful book? Why do I write a long blog post on a work night? Why do I do these things and behave in these ways? Because it’s good. It’s only so sad and such a shame only because the whole of The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife are extraordinary in spite of their anti-God, anti-Church agenda. It just comes apart at the end and it’s a tragedy. U2 should never rerecord POP but Pullman needs to rewrite The Amber Spyglass. Someone needed to edit this. Frighteningly, Hollywood may do a better job.

The characters are strong and brave when they have to be but they’re broken only as good characters can be. Pullman’s imagination runs rampant and he has skill with turning a phrase. How good and evil coexist in a single character is profoundly refreshing, especially in young adult literature where that never happens. I loved how Lyra’s family doesn’t present as a saccharine family unit. You get the parents you’re dealt and it’s more clear here than in any other young adult book I’ve ever read. Asriel and Marisa’s freckled history and complicated relationship is one of the series’ greatest strengths. Details from Pantalaimon and daemons to the little people that attack with spurs on their heels are scattered throughout in a book world Pullman owns for two and a half books. I liked how Lyra’s world was like and yet unlike Will’s. It was an odd difference, enough so they’d have something to teach each other but similar enough so it would be believable that they’d understand each other enough to become best friends. Real sacrifices are made and felt and valued. People don’t just trip and bump and elbow. They die and fight and grieve so others might live. That’s what you do in war and covering it up like how it’s done in practically all Disney movies is a disservice to children everywhere. The books are full of real tragedy, real adventure, and real friendship. If only the problems that plague it hadn’t gotten in the way. If only!

There was too much on science and talk of elementary particles and physics, things I neither enjoy or understand (and if I did want to learn about them, I’d get myself a real journal or textbook, not a fiction book). Mary Malone and the whole stupid elephant-people story line almost put me to sleep. Reading that was almost like reading Hugo’s Les Miserables and wading through 60 pages on argot. It brought the action to a screeching halt and I still fail to see what was her use as a character and what the amber spyglass was actually supposed to do. It didn’t merit a chapter heading, much less a book’s title.

I don’t have a problem with Pullman’s position on God and religion. I only have a problem with how he beat it over the head until it was senseless and dead and pounded into the earth. He had an opportunity to open up a dialog, a discussion, a rational debate (and he claims to be so fond of reason and consciousness) and instead comes off like the equivalent of a Bible-belt Fundamentalist zealot. There’s no reason of conscious in that. It sounds foolish and quaint. He’s become what he beheld by the end of the last book. I believe what I believe and no book of fiction or rantings of a madman will change my mind. Yet, by the end of The Subtle Knife, it was disturbing me, in a good way, in a debate sort of way. The fear that nothing happens when we die and it’s all for naught is really the number one fear, isn’t it. It wasn’t long into the first book, that I felt that prickly feeling of, “What do mean by that? What do you mean?” But then it all comes tumbling down and Pullman disappears, crushed under his own self-importance. Dostoyevsky he’s not. He’s just a nutjob and I don’t argue with nutjobs. It’s only a shame he ruined a perfectly good trilogy on the way.

The first movie comes out in December, just in time for Christmas. We’ll see how they water this down for mass consumption. They’ve already cast two very blonde actors for the supposedly dark and inscrutable parents of Lyra Belacqua.

The auditorium was packed to the gills and I was happy enough to sit in the back. Those present were a mix of students, families with kids, and wealthy older couples. Every single one listened, rapt, throughout the hour that he lectured. He’s very good at what he does and at telling us about it.

He gave a synopsis on recent finds like the Golden Mummies, how he and his team had to dig down beneath existing dwellings to unearth unspoiled tombs of governors and their wives. We heard about the latest at the Valley of the Kings and the hunt to find Hatshepsut’s mummy. He hinted at a big announcement coming from National Geographic in May. He couldn’t tell. He told us about how he thinks the real burial chamber may be still hidden inside the Great Pyramid and the chamber we know of is nothing more than a dummy, a red herring. Wouldn’t that be something? To find an important king’s burial chamber intact? It would make Howard Carter and Tut a small asterisk. Maybe then terrorism, Dudya’ ineptitude, and Iraq would be off the front page for a while. Finally, of course, he spoke about King Tut, since his lecture was supposed to dovetail with the exhibit that opens Saturday with fanfare. He showed us the CT scans he had taken of the mummy and noted the damage Carter’s eagerness had done.

He very clearly loves his work and loves talking about it. He makes it looks exciting, rappeling down stone shafts with nothing but a flashlight and hope. He bought Bill Gates lunch. A poor woman with barely enough to keep flesh and soul together insists he have breakfast with her every morning he visits that particular dig. He estimates 70% of ancient buildings are still covered by the sands of the Egyptian desert. He handpicked the pieces that are in the Tut exhibit on their journey out of Cairo and into the United States. He loves his job. That’s the most inspiring part.

In Other News:

• I got written up today for forgetting to swipe twice in one pay period. One of the incidents was when I forgot my ID at home. I feel valued.
• Molly Ivins died a couple of days ago. I heard her lecture at the main library a couple of years ago. She’s missed.
• I love Devotchka’s Curse Your Little Heart.

In the days before television and electric light and the radio, kings and princes had professional storytellers to keep them entertained when the sun set outside. The good ones could become famous, wealthy, and influential. The tradition persisted even after kings and kingdoms disappeared in favor of delegates and republics. The truth is, fairy stories are entertaining tales with grains of truth in them, not because they’re morality tales, but because they’re written/ invented by humans, even the most fantastic creatures in them have human traits.

The adult fairy tale seems to be undergoing a resurgence of sorts. The latest entry is Pan’s Labyrinth which I saw today because I had the day off and what better to do on a rainy day than go to the cinema? As reviewers and critics had warned, it isn’t for children though the protagonist is a child. I’m not here to review the movie, leave that to the professionals. I’m only here to note that people are buying it, a movie with fairies and fauns and doors that open into blank walls and prophecies and quests. I overheard a woman say to a friend after the show, “It was a bit heavy.” Heavy, not cute or whatever else fairytales have been reduced to over the years. I’m not saying anything needs to be tragic to be taken seriously, but there are new opportunities for storytellers sprouting up all the time. Here’s another one.

As I said in my high school essay, there’s no reason for something to be pushed aside because it seems “unrealistic”. Everything has a grain of truth.