Reckless Abandon

Along with my friend Ben, I'm going to be launching a new site soon, devoted to video games and scholarship. We're calling it, appropriately enough, Video Game Academy.

There's a number of projects we're working on there, from game reviews and analysis to promoting the academic study of games and contributing to the diffusion of existing scholarship, so I hope you'll check it out.

This isn't to say I won't keep on with the occasional posts here re-imagining public education, or updating my long-term readings of Pullman or Xenogears, but I'm going to try to focus on the new site for a bit to get it established. 

We're starting out with a short course on Little Inferno, a brilliant mobile game, and a then digging into the classic Final Fantasy VI (initially released as FFIII in the US), one I never actually finished playing all the way through. See the new site for more info, and let us know if you want to get involved!

Pullman podcasts

A much more professional podcast featuring Pullman himself is up on Backlisted.

The topic is not his own work, but Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. There's all sorts of shiny bits of story there worth stealing, though. Probably the best podcast about books and reading I've come across.

Another one, making tea for Adam Buxton

Some great new insights and reprises of favorite themes in Pullman's work.

In a few weeks, we're planning a Signum Symposia event to coincide with the release of Pullman's new book, The Secret Commonwealth. Here it is!

Toni Morrison and the Living Language

It's tough to keep track of the news, for lots of reasons; however, the passing of Toni Morrison bears noting here, among all the others' passing that we pass over in silence.

Her Nobel Prize Lecture, her banquet speech, her books and essays, all bear reading and re-reading--words the quality of which most of us could only dream of leaving behind.

For her a dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences. Official language smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability, harmony among the public.

She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love. But she knows tongue-suicide is not only the choice of children. It is common among the infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is left of their human instincts for they speak only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience.

And her language goes on, wave after wave of this incredible wisdom, until the dialogue of the listening children picks back up:

“Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.

“Tell us about ships turned away from shorelines at Easter, placenta in a field. Tell us about a wagonload of slaves, how they sang so softly their breath was indistinguishable from the falling snow."

It's astonishing to think that I was growing up in a world where there was still a writer of this imaginative stature, this noble mien. Her novel Beloved is one of the first of the books I was assigned to read in school that really made me take notice of how far beyond the school these books might reach, how much more school could be. I've been writing about that in one way or another, inspired by that and similar moments, for a decade now, and still haven't quite recovered from the shock of those initial impressions.

Her essay Playing in the Dark, like much of the language in her Nobel speech, bears powerfully upon the discourse of video games and fantasy literature which I've been studying, and if I can get my act together I'll try to bring out some of these connections soon, and over the next few years.

Plato in the Summer, and Klein's Commentary

Having read or re-read most of Plato for a summer reading project, I also wanted to make some time to revisit Jacob Klein's Commentary on Meno. The writing of commentaries is something I've been very into lately, though mine are all about old video games and fantasy series, so it is gratifying to read one so masterful about so complex a subject. It's really the next best thing to discussing the book with someone else, which of course is in a sense the entire point of Plato's project. Klein makes this point in various ways, but also glosses many words and passages in Greek, engages with other scholars and translators, and draws connections to key arguments about knowledge and recollection which are widely scattered throughout Plato's dialogues, all of which is even more invaluable than your ordinary seminar, and well worth the difficulty of reading and re-reading.

Barfield and Tolkien, words and biographies

Though much lesser known than Tolkien, the importance of Owen Barfield's writing is powerfully attested to by Verlyn Flieger in her Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien's World. 

My review of a Mark Vernon's new book about Barfield, A Secret History of Christianity, is on A Pilgrim in Narnia. But I've been doing some background reading while I was working on that...

A number of people recommended that the place to start reading Barfield is with his History in English Words, so I duly read it after his Saving the Appearances, Poetic Diction, and lots of the essays available on the website dedicated to his work. History is a little more accessible--still forbiddingly erudite and fruitily British, a combination which won't be for everyone, but there is a wealth of interesting connections to marvel at if you can get into it. The foreword by Auden, which speaks of a "battle between civilization and barbarism," and the footnotes about the use of the term Aryan are still a little off-putting, and by the end of the book, I wasn't quite clear about what the ramifications of the study of philology were supposed to be. Is it for the benefit of the individual or the society to think a little harder about the language? I wasn't sure what I was being asked to do with all this, aside from taking Barfield up on his suggestions for further reading (OED, Max Muller, Pearsall Smith, Bradley, Weekly, Skeat).

As far as Tolkien scholarship, two of the most well-regarded books to come out in recent years are Tolkien and the Great War, by John Garth, and Tolkien, Race, and Cultural History, by Dimitra Fimi. The one is a biography, the other a survey of fairy-elements, and so while there is some overlap, they're really complementary, and well deserve their de facto status as required reading. Both highlight some of the lesser-known sources of Tolkien's inspiration: Chesterton, MacDonald, and Peter Pan, but also William Morris, whose romances were widely read at the front, and Francis Thomspon, about whom Tolkien said revealingly in an early essay:

one must begin with the elfin and delicate and progress to the profound: listen first to the violin and the flute, and then learn to hearken to the organ of being's harmony.

Both approach the topic of racial overtones with much more circumspection than Barfield. Fimi gives more attention to Tolkien's languages, though Garth does deal with them illustratively enough without digging in quite as much--in each, the integral role they play in Tolkien's thought comes through, and so it's clear how Barfield's musings would have been of significance to him. Still more with respect to Tolkien's own beliefs about what he was up to: recovering a lost truth through his stories. In Garth, copious research is brought forth to trace the role of WWI and his friendships with the members of the TCBS in developing Tolkien's philosophy, whereas Carpenter's earlier biographies understandably focused on the Inklings; in Fimi, a balanced background of myth, popular culture, linguistics, and sociology is fused in a compelling context for Tolkien's activity. Stirring stuff for the aspiring or amateur scholar, to be sure.

Gopnik on play, education, and reading

Alison Gopnik's The Carpenter and the Gardener (reviewed here) offers a number of insights on play and reading which would be worth a closer look.

Starting with ch 6, The Work of Play:

The passage in Dickens' Great Expectations where Miss Havisham bids Pip play sets up what Gopnik identifies as one of many paradoxes: "by definition, play is what you do when you're not trying to do anything. It's an activity whose goal is not to have a goal..."

Another follows on its heels: "There is also something scientifically paradoxical about play. The idea that play is good for learning has an intuitive appeal. But if play really makes you smarter, more focused, or better at understanding other  people, why not just aim to be smarter or more focused or more empathic directly? Why go through the elaborate detour of play?" (149)

She lays out five characteristics from "Biologists who try to define play"--not work, fun, voluntary, depends on other basic needs being satisfied, a pattern of repetition and variation--then looks at a series of case studies more closely.

Her citations here:
Burghardt 2005; Panksepp and Burgdorft 2000; Smith and Hagan 1980; Pellegrini and Smith 1998; Pellis and Pellis 2007 and 2013; Himmler, Pellis, and Kolb 2013; Diamond 1988; Wood 2013; Berlin 1953; Macdonald 1987; Holzhaider,  Hunt, and Gray 2010; Perkins 1961; Cook, Goodman, and Sculz 2011; Bonawitz et al. 2012; Stahl and Feigenson 2015; Harris 2000; Gaskins 1999; Haight et al. 1999; Arie 2004; Gopnik 2012; Weisberg and Gopnik 2013; Buchsbaum et al 2012; Baron-Cohen 1997; Wellman 2014; Taylor 1999; Taylor and Carlson 1997; Mar et al. 2006; Mar and Oatley 2008; Kidd and Castano 2013; Bongard, Zykov, and Lipson 2006; Bonawitz et al 2011; Buchsbaum et al. 2011; Fisher et al. 2013; Weisberg, Hirsh-Pasek, and Golinkoff 2013.

(Conspicuous by their absence are Piaget and Huizinga, but well, the moral-religious and cultural elements of play are not her main interest here.)

A decent summary comes in toward the end of the chapter: "So rough-and-tumble play seems to help animals and children to interact with others. Exploratory play helps animals and children learn how things work. And pretend play helps children think about possibilities and understand other people's minds" (170).

"Play lets children randomly and variably try out a range of actions and ideas [explore, in engineering terms], and then work out the consequences [leading to the exploit phase characteristic of adult, focused attention]" (172).

Gopnik concludes, "The gift of play is the way it teaches us how to deal with the unexpected," which provides the evolutionary answer for why it's fun to play, by an analogy to the pleasure of sex: "we don't play because we think that eventually it will give us robust cognitive functions--although that may be the evolutionary motivation for play. We play because it is just so much fun" (172-3).

A final insight for intentional 'gamification' of education: "children played with the toy longer, tired more different actions, and discovered more of the 'hidden' features when the experimenter squeaked the beeper accidentally than they did when she deliberately tried to teach them" (174).


Turning to the applications of her research for schools in the next chapter, Growing Up:

"There is a parallel between the contemporary dilemmas of parenting [a verb Gopnik takes issue with in the first place] and the equally ferocious dilemmas of schooling. Like parents, educators often have a scientifically inaccurate picture of learning and development...that education is supposed to shape a child into a particular kind of adult... from a scientific perspective, learning isn't about test scores at all--it's about tracking the reality of the world around you." (179-180). I'd argue, of course, that it's primarily a philosophical issue, deeper than the scientific line Gopnik hews to here, but I think that's a minor quibble given her evidently deep and broad liberal education behind her approach to the scientific literature.

Her citations:
Smith, Carey, and Wiser 1985; Hatano and Inagaki 1994; Inagaki and Hatano 2006; Ross et al. 2003; Capelli, Nakagawa, and Madden 1990; Lagattuta et al 2015; Rogoff 1990; Dye, Green, Bavelier 2009; Zelazo, Carlson, Kesek 2008; Casey et al 2005; Markham and Greenough 04; Ungerleider, Doyon, kami 02; Paradise and Rogoff 09; Lave and Wegner 91; Reps and Senzaki 98; Bransford, Brown, Cocking 99; Gardner 2011; Snowling 2000; Halberda, Mazzocco, Feigenson 2008; Senechal and LeFevre 2002; Posner and Rothbart 07; Gopnik 09; Kidd, Piantadosi, Aslin 2012; Carhart-Harris et al. 2012, 14; Hinshaw and Scheffler 14; Molina et al. 09; DeVries 98; Taylor et al. 15; Opie and Opie 2000; Steinberg 14; Dahl 04; Steinberg 04; Casey, Jones, and Hare 08; Gardner and Steinberg 05; Flynn 87, 07; Pietschnig and Voracek 15; Shaw et al 06; Berlin 13.

(Notably absent here is the doyen of the moment for Spokane Schools ed research, Marzano)

She advocates for apprenticeship, project-based learning, assessment via observation rather than test-taking, play, service opportunities, travel, and safe sex.

On reading as a technology in the next chapter, she cites further: Dehaene 09, Wood 08, MacLeod 91, Olson 96, Ong 88, and, delightfully, Socrates in the Phaedrus.

So, on to Dickens and Plato, for a start!

last straws in the wind

last straws in the wind

There are at least three. It remains to be seen if they'll break this camel's back.

Last straw the first: summer school. They unexpectedly called me in to sub after the Spanish teacher's disappearance. If you're like me, you're imagining some glamorous and dramatic adventure that swept her up, a la Carmen San Diego, but most likely it was simple incompetence--or that most damning word in the administrator's lexicon, unprofessionalism. Or simple carelessness, her not thinking during the interview (she was the only applicant, so the interview was a total formality) that it would be a big deal if she told them later that she wouldn't be able to be there a few days out of the program. Those few days happening to be right at the start. But then she did tell them, or just didn't show up, and from there it sounds like the problem snowballed, as such things do. To the point where I now have a (temporary) job I never even applied for.  

So for the past couple of weeks, I've been paid to sit in an overly air conditioned room in an enormous, mostly empty school building, from 8 until noon. For some reason, I'm paid four and a half hours a day. It must be that new math they're teaching. There are never more than four students in the room, and frequently there's just one, or none that show up. They work on their computers, while I work on mine. 

And darned if summer school isn't just a microcosm of the whole public educational model, whose exquisitely tuned, theoretically efficient machinery is either abetted or undermined at every turn, smoothed along or stymied, by the craven kowtowing or blessed intransigence of actual human beings. What this comes down to, in short: the only requirement is to pass a test (that's the state of the curriculum). The test can be retaken (that's credit recovery and summer school). The test doesn't change (that's the reduction of teacher to technician). I can talk the student through what questions they missed on the test, and they can retake it as soon as they're ready (that's...well, actually that seems OK. Actual human interaction, even if it is mediated by a miserable situation not of our own making. That sounds like life). This all is the logical endpoint of the public school model. It's a way to recoup credit, without actually learning. I can decry it, but I have no recourse but to go along with it, in the position I'm currently in. It's the inevitable and natural end result of a system too big to fail, too expensive to break, too hollow to believe. 

Last straw the second: The Carpenter and the Gardener, by Alison Gopnik. If summer school is a strong push, this book is just as strong a pull. Gopnik presents discoveries in the science of child development since Piaget, woven into a coherent interpretive scheme of liberal education, grounded in wide reading and deep in fiction and philosophy. There's a particularly interesting thread of the classical and romantic, going back to Isaiah Berlin, and a call for a fundamental shift in values and structures, mindful of the picture of human nature that emerges. There's a dearth of religion, per se, but a rich well of philosophy, including plenty of good sources to help think through two of my favorite themes, play and reading.

And her writing is so clear, sensible, and fluent across all these domains. It makes me think about folding this shambling, self-indulgent mess of a blog into more hands-on projects, re-purposing some of it as books and essays which would be decent to present somewhere people might actually see them. Instead of writing endless notes to no one, to put time, and maybe even some money, where my mouth is, and just open a school. I hope Signum Academy will fit the bill. But meanwhile, Gopnik's insights on children and grandparents, of all things, have me looking around again at ways I might be able to do some read alouds and discussion groups back at Spark or at some of the senior centers here. 

Last straw the third: Todd Eklof's Gadfly Papers, and the surrounding tempest in a teapot. Similar to the recent furor over the drag queen story hour and endless debates about homeless people in the public libraries, but this one hits a little closer to home for me. I feel like his situation could well have been mine, if people read or listened to the things I have to say, if I were ever in a position of authority or had at least some degree of public notoriety. I think it's partly wise and mostly lazy of me not to have sought such a position, but who knows, I might still get there someday. And in the meantime, I'll certainly weigh in with what I think about the whole kerfuffle once I hear from him on Sunday and read his book. Personally, of course, I respect and feel for him, and for those hurt by the things he wrote or the way it's all been handled. I hope we may all make sense of what happened and learn from it. And it's looking like that might well involve me finding a new church. 

Social Justice Shibboleths, and a Cautionary Tale

I started listening to the Ezra Klein show on someone's recommendation for the episode(s) with Rebecca Traister. My favorite part is the insistence on learning, and reading, that runs through the conversations. My least favorite part is that I will never have time to read a tenth of what the guests have written and recommended!



So I started with Down Girl, by Kate Manne. It seemed like she would cast a little more light, throw off a little less heat than Traister on these topics of which I am still so ignorant. It's great to read such lucid contemporary philosophy. A little like Arendt does with Eichmann, perhaps, Manne builds an argument from a tragic crime, in this case a recent murder spree rooted in loneliness, basically an incel avant la lettre. She dissects the distinction between misogyny as an individual hatred of women and as a structural bulwark of patriarchy, locating in this killer and in the range of responses to him a determined if unconscious effort to put and keep women in subjugation. The treatment of "what is" questions, generally, was just as interesting as the specific applications to misogyny, sexism, and the double binds, pragmatic and rhetorical, they lay on us all.


Browsing at the library once Down Girl had arrived, I picked up these other ones:




Eve L. Ewing, author of Ghosts in the Schoolyard, would make a great guest for the Ezra Klein show. I've been curious for awhile now about this seeming contradiction: on the one hand, data seems to point to charter schools raising academic expectations and outcomes for kids of color; yet the NAACP and prominent politicians on the left have been turning against charters, more or less vehemently. Partly you might suppose this is just politics, courting the teacher unions' support, who have always cynically rejected the reforms charters represent and focused solely on their admitted complications and outright failures. But Ewing helpfully makes the case that there is a real love for public schools in black communities (those she studies being in Chicago) where, despite the numbers--which clearly don't tell the whole story--people see the schools as theirs, and resent them being taking away as one more betrayal in a long history of racism and white supremacy.




Nostalgia, by Anthony Esolen, runs athwart the liberal intellectual consensus and instead channels the likes of Lewis and Tennyson. The title is misleading, since it turns out to be a very circumscribed sort of nostalgia the author is interested in: conservative Christian, essentially, and this comes through increasingly baldly as you go along. For all his erudite references, Esolen is no Lewis, though. When he starts talking about abortion and homosexuality, or about how ignorant and pitiful his students are, you might start to wonder about the depth of his charity and humility a bit. Useful as a cautionary signpost for what happens if you don't dip into the contemporary, diverse discourse once in a while. And yet his basic argument is probably as sound, or more so, than anything you're likely to hear on Ezra Klein and the other purveyors of liberal prosperity, suitably tempered with serious social justice activism. The man has translated Dante, after all. He knows what's up.

Substitute School

substitute school

in loco parentis more and more gets taken literally; so school, always a supplement to parenting, is becoming in many cases a substitute for parents. Breakfast, lunch, counseling, all manner of care-taking are all necessary and praiseworthy, but less and less is learning even the ostensible activity taking place there.

"most natural and perfect to generate after its kind..."

so let this be in loco school, where learning can happen for those who want to learn. To midwife, rather than generate, and nurture metaphorically rather than literally. Though they say, too, 

"teach a man to fish..."

it could even be in a school, in that physical place, but it could be anywhere, anytime you do your night fishing.  Anywhere learning is for something more than a grade or a test score--for recovering lost time, self-rewarding, yet pointing far beyond itself--

For those who sit in school on their phones looking for they know not what.
For those who missed out when they were in school, and know it. (Remember when web pages would automatically start playing background music?)
For those who find learning interesting, including teachers who miss getting to actually teach.

in loco resources:

podcasts, live discussion, background, context, tutoring, languages, books, games, links, jokes, apps

opportunities:

jobs as subs

volunteering, mentoring, reading aloud

internships

partners, etc.

about:

a substitute teacher myself, this is one of the projects I work on while students are working on theirs 

some of our teachers:

Hamlet: king of infinite space, were it not he had bad dreams

--reading before bed; sleep, dreams, unconscious and awareness

Pascal, sitting quietly in a room

--imagination, religion

Voltaire, tending his garden

--outdoors; atheism

Lincoln, little remembered 

--Euclid and the Bible; public service; depression

Rousseau, discoursing

--Saying and doing

Whitman, teacher of athletes and children

--Freedom and expansiveness

and Dickinson, a thing with wings
--Solitude and restraint

Plato, on music and gymnastic, games

Toni Morrison, playing in the dark

and Marilynn Robinson, the other greatest living American writer

Montaigne's daughter?

Montessori, following

--self-directed (Piaget)

Pullman, repeating responsibility and delight

--telling stories

Three more books about Pullman and HDM

I'm very excited these days about the internet archive wayback machine, where not only old books and video games but even lost web pages can still be found--many of the now-defunct links which get cited in the footnotes and bibliographies on Pullman are suddenly within reach again! It's remarkable, first, that so many websites just disappear, even in so short a time, and second, that they're still there after all.

And I'm indebted once more to the Inter-library Loan program, an amazing service! Thanks to the ILL and its tireless outpost here in Spokane, I have recently been reading three more of the book-length studies of Pullman so far published. I'll review them here in order of how helpful I've found them.



Killing the Imposter God, by Donna Freitas and Jason King

A work similar in spirit to Tony Watkins' excellent Dark Matter, in that Freitas and King situate HDM within a thoughtful Christian context, Killing the Imposter God goes a little further towards building up a scholarly theological apparatus for reading the trilogy. While the background in liberation theology, process theology, and feminist slants thereof is the book's strongest contribution, perhaps its greatest weakness is actually in how little it engages with other critical readers of Pullman, scholarly and more traditionally theological alike. Making a reading of HDM, rather than the secondary literature, their priority, though, is obviously the right move if one of the two has to be sacrificed for the sake of concision, or to appeal to a broader audience.

Their revisionist stance is announced in the authors' contention that Nietzsche's Zarathustra doesn't necessarily speak for the philosopher, emphasizing less the death of God than the birth of a new conception of God. Warranted or not, they place Nietzsche at the head of a lineage that stretches through Whitehead, Gutierrez, Boff, Keller and McFague. In short:

Pullman wrote this trilogy during a theological era when alternative visions of the divine abound, so it is hard to understand how Pullman overlooked all these available alternatives and why he seems unable--or at least unwilling--to consider his own alternative divinity [ie, Dust] in the trilogy. Pullman has by no means killed off God in general. He has killed off only one understanding of God--God-as-tyrant--and an oddly antiquated and unimaginative one at that. (19, cf. Pullman's critique of 'epicycles' in his interview with Watkins)

Again, the argument looks at Pullman's story, rather than his public pronouncements:

Once we are able to set aside Pullman's personal professions of atheism, it is not difficult to see how Dust takes on many qualities that are typically associated with the divine. Dust existed since the beginning. It always tells the truth... Dust is the source of all creation... And in The Amber Spyglass, we learn that Dust has yet another name: Wisdom--a name for God that many feminists have devoted much energy to exploring. (27)

Dust holds everything together. It takes on different forms to become spirit, soul, and body, and to make a person. In this way, Dust becomes matter and the world. Even the angels and the Authority are created and formed out of Dust... (51)

Now, surely that would imply that Dust does tell lies, starting with Authority claiming to be the Creator, all the way down to Lyra, until she learns the value of telling true stories? It may become a matter of semantics rather than metaphysics, but I wonder if the lengths to which Freitas and King take Dust might have been better informed by a brush with Rogers' vitalist monism. A similar squishiness enters in once they start talking about "agapic love" (93). All sorts of love are represented in Pullman, to be sure, but this one popularized by Lewis is probably further from his mind than Blakean (or even Dantesque) desire, which get much shorter shrift. One interesting distinction does get pushed quite firmly, though:

This claim [by the review in First Things]--that Pullman's notion of salvation is too shallow--is itself shallow. The end of The Amber Spyglass cannot be reduced to two distinct salvific moments--one superficial and one more complex. It should be understood instead as a complicated drama of salvation in three intimately interconnected acts, all of which are linked and indispensable, and correspond to his triune vision of humanity and panentheistic understanding of the divine. (108)

Those three moments, if I have them straight, are the descent into the underworld, the romantic awakening, and the final return to their own worlds. This is the strongest stretch of the argument in the book, for me. The tail end of the series has always been the most complex and difficult for me to interpret, and while I don't go along with them all the way, Freitas and King do a great job offering some support for the position that HDM's ending, far from being a disappointment as many readers feel, is worthy of the story as a whole:

In what may be the most powerful section of HDM (when Lyra decides to free the ghosts...) Lyra ... becomes the new Moses... Dorothee Soelle argues that humanity learns its purpose in creation through the Exodus story. "In the beginning," she writes, "was liberation." (120, cf. Soelle, To Work and to Love: A Theology of Creation)

Many liberation theologians read Exodus as logically preceding Genesis; the Israelites have to be liberated from slavery to become a people, and only once they are a people do they ask about and remember their creation. Similarly, it is possible to read God's revelation ...  to his chosen people as an act, not only of saving the Israelites but also of saving God... [Pullman's] story culminates, not in the death of God but in God's [ie, Dust's] salvation. (152)

Pullman has come to a surprisingly Christian conclusion. Echoing the Gospel of John, he seems to conclude that the key to the universe is love and that Real Love requires great personal sacrifice for the love of others. Jesus' mission was to save people... (156)

If the preservation of consciousness and creativity and everything else that Dust represents requires sacrifice--even the sacrifice of erotic love, at least on a personal level--then we must be prepared to make that sacrifice, to say the goodbyes that it demands (157)

The story of Lyra and Will becomes a new Gospel, "the grand story of salvation," complete with a creed (166).

It is also surprisingly Greek, indebted nearly as much to Socrates and Plato as to God the Father and God the Son. In these novels, preserving true knowledge seems to be more important than preserving true love. In the end, the mind trumps the body. Consciousness trumps matter. Divinity demands the sacrifice of humanity. (158)

Will and Lyra are asked by the force of circumstance to give up the expression of embodied love of each other, in exchange for the realization of a more ultimate love--their Love of Dust. Whether this is good news is up to the reader to decide. But there seems to be something of a Fall, even in Pullman's Gospel. (159)

Very much so! And it's an aspect of the story we'll see in a new light, perhaps, with the release of the further Book of Dust. Too much gets conflated and set into rhetorical flourishes there for me. The interview with the author of Wicked also seems like an odd fit, though he has some interesting points. Still, Freitas and King represent an important contribution to the study of Pullman's initial HDM trilogy.

Critical Perspectives on Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials: Essays on the Novels, the Film and the Stage Productions, edited by Steven Barfield and Katharine Cox

As Freitas and King were preceded by Watkins in their religious study oriented towards a popular audience, so Barfield and Cox follow Lenz and Scott down the academic essay collection path. Regrettably, they do not measure up in their scholarship; however, just as in the Lenz and Scott book, there are a few essays here which stand out and are well worth an ILL read.

Introduction, Katherine Cox
In the first place (aside from a plug for her entry on Pullman in the Literary Encyclopedia), Cox mentions Pullman's biographical sketch, but gives little indication of how marvelous it is. Remarking on his interest in education, she does not refer us directly to his essays or their contexts. Nor do I recall any reference to the prior Lenz/Scott essay collection. Nevertheless, the theme of education, specifically Pullman's own, but also the field of Pullman studies, such as it is, seems like it would be a helpful framing principle for a book like this. Instead, it is dropped in favor of brief summaries of each of the pieces within their (tired, arbitrary) thematic groupings. There are pleas for the novelty of perspectives we'll be offered on music, science fiction, Victoriana, gender, adaptation--which is all there, whether it touches the heart of Pullman's work or not--and so are the usual suspects, already adequately trotted out: influences of Lewis and Tolkien, to say nothing of Milton and Blake, and rehashes of theological arguments. The whole thing feels rather dry and desultory, and we haven't even got into the essays themselves...

I. Adversaries and Influences

"Recasting John Milton's Paradise Lost: Intertextuality, Stroeytelling and Music," Rachel Falconer
Aside from pointing us towards a couple of handy reads--one primary, "What! No Soap?" by Pullman (though it turns out this is the same as "Children's Literature Without Borders" in Daemon Voices); the other secondary, Revolution in Poetic Language, by Kristeva--and delivering a few interesting thoughts about Pullman's appreciation of music, with reference to the figure of Orpheus as transmitted by Milton, Falconer provides a decent overview of the story's indebtedness to the epic poet but few substantially new insights. Focusing in on the world of the dead and developing the Orpheus thing further, with greater attention to the Maenad-like witches, say, who actually sing the only song in the whole series, aside from the epigraphs or Mrs Coulter's wordless lullabies, would have been helpful. For a stronger take on Milton, I recommend again Shohet's essay in the Lenz/Scott volume.

"'When I Grow Up I Want to Be...'": Conceptualization of the Hero Within the Works of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Philip Pullman," Phil Cardew
Skip this sweeping, facile look at heroism in favor of reading practically any of the numerous entries cited in what is really a ludicrous list of works for such a slight essay: the likes of Frye, Genette, Propp, to say nothing of Tolkien and Lewis' essays, which even Pullman acknowledges the value of, much as he detests their fiction. On the topic of the bear's son motif, briefly brought up by Cardew, a really good essay might be written comparing Will and Iorek; or on the beauty and the beast motif, to bring Lyra into it a bit more... But the insistence on reading Pullman with reference to Lewis/Tolkien is unhelpful and forced and frankly impossible to address in a meaningful way in such a short space.

"Constructions of the Child, Authority and Authorship: The Reception of C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman," Elisabeth Eldridge
Through an intricate use of scare-quoted names, Eldridge shows ample evidence to prove a couple of simple points: that there is an important distance between the author and the narrator, provoking problematic misunderstandings by those who try to read them as if they were the same, and that there is a tension between the reading of these works by adults and children, creative in itself but again problematic when the adults try to make dogmatic assertions on the children's behalf. In a somewhat belabored critique of critiques pro and contra Lewis and Pullman, Eldridge comes to the unsurprising conclusion that these critiques end up mirroring one another, opposed as they are. Fine academic writing, but it really doesn't give us any insight into the story. Gray's work, building on Bloom's theory of anxiety of influence, is considerably more illuminating.

"'Dark Materials to Create More Worlds': Considering His Dark Materials as Science Fiction," Steven Barfield
In this piece, by one of the co-editors, no less, the sloppy editing of the collection really begins to become apparent, both in terms of run-on sentences and typographical howlers, and in the overall arbitrary order of the pieces and division into sections. It's too bad, because there is some interesting material here in the mess. Barfield cites Pullman's Foreword to Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale, and mentions his stage adaptation of Frankenstein--either of which would have been excellent topics to focus an essay around, rather than scattered bits and pieces of science fiction theory: alternate history, Amis' The Alteration, Suvin's novum, Clarke and Asimov's laws, Lewis' Space trilogy, L'Engle's Time Quintet.. .The Kendal Mint Cake parody of Raphael in Milton, from whose epigraph the essay starts, actually supports a read of the trilogy as satire as much as sci-fi. Finally, one more curiosity worth looking up: Uselton's paper on structural myth, hardly less amateurish than the sort of things I write.

II. Traditions and Legacies

"Revitalizing the Old Machines of a Neo-Victorian London: Reading the Cultural Transformations of Steampunk and Victoriana," Steven Barfield and Martyn Colebrook
Again, a lovely mess. Of the two (quite distinct!) topics the essay purports to cover, the authors' look at steampunk technology includes a read of the bomb chapter that's pretty interesting and original, if a little sloppy. We hear about Gibson's The Difference Engine, but not much about the Cave, the computer of Mary Malone. The alethiometer, the subtle knife, the intention craft even, are touched on only very briefly--could it be that they don't actually fit that well into the steampunk genre? On the other topic of Victoriana, we hear a bit about the dystopian London setting and Pullman's Sally Lockhart mysteries and early short stories, suggesting avenues for further study without actually providing much in the way of analysis.

"Revisiting the Colonial: Victorian Orphans and Postcolonial Perspectives," Laura Peters
The first really insightful piece in the collection. Pullman has acknowledged his status as a colonial child, and this is one of the ways in which his life story actually does parallel Tolkien's, besides his semi-orphanhood. Peters notes the echo of boy's own narratives in the descriptions of John Parry, sees the aspiration towards post-colonialism in the figure of King Ogunwe, and the Romantic leanings tempered by Pullman's vaunted realism, but her conclusion suddenly brings in way more material undigested. This by way of sensing, rightly, the crucial importance of that storytelling theme, but that would take another essay, or a book, to adequately treat! To discuss Blake's 'for empire is no more' epigraph alone would have been a much more satisfying way to close the piece.

"Exploring and Challenging the Lapsarian World of Young Adult Literature: Femininity, Shame, the Gyptians, and Social Class," Nicola Allen
Another essay, like Barfield's, riddled with grammatical errors. Sentences that ran on have simply been studded with periods, leaving fragments of what might actually have been interesting thoughts to languish in lapsarian shame. Why not just say fallen? Or better yet, actually explain what that is supposed to mean, in the context of a book which is entirely predicated on reinterpreting the story of the fall? Instead, we get Kruks reading Foucault through Beauvoir. It's hard to take Allen's points about the gyptians and other supposedly representative female characters seriously when the witches are straw-manned and Mrs Coulter's development all but neglected. The seed of a worthwhile essay is there in the use of the word grace for Mrs Coulter's charms and her theological interests, but that is not this essay. Quotes from a Lambert interview take the place of a structuring principle; references to Rowling and Gatty's Tale are beside the point for anyone mainly interested in HDM.

"'Imagine Dust with a Capital Letter': Interpreting the Social and Cultural Contexts for Philip Pullman's Transformation of Dust," Katharine Cox
Maybe the only finished essay in the book. Cox addresses Dust head on, putting her finger on the sort of semantic interplay of levels that reference to grace in the previous essay did, and actually developing an argument from it. For me, there is still too little Dust (which would mean looking at more passages from the text), too much dust (deep dives into the social contexts of domesticity and sanitation, glances at physics and ecology). But that's what the title promised, after all, and as academic papers go, it's perfectly well-written. Cox even references a few other scholars in Bird and Shohet, but does not engage with Freitas and King's sweeping arguments about Dust at all. Nor does she seem any more aware than I was (before Dr Shohet indicated it for me) of Rogers' masterful monograph on Milton and the vitalist moment.


III. Religion, Sexuality and Gender

"The Man Who Walked with God: Philip Pullman's Metatron, the Biblical Enoch, and the Apocrypha," John Haydn Baker
This one is pretty well done, too. Baker tackles Enoch just as squarely as Cox does Dust, and strikes a good balance between drawing on different sources and speculating on how Pullman actually seems to use them in his story. There are even some larger issues hinted at, about the Bible and apocrypha, which I'd have loved to see compared in some way to Pullman's treatment of Christ and the Church, whether in HDM or in The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. Say, with more attention to those differences in Asriel's Bible, or in terms of Mary Malone and the Pauline triune nature of body, soul, and spirit? We also get a couple of wild Blake drawings helpfully pointed out for us, which always makes for fun discoveries. 

"The Republic of Heaven: East, West and Eclecticism in Pullman's Religious Vision," J'Annine Jobling
For whatever reason, Jobling insists on making Pullman's cosmos fall into line with Buddhism, even whilst acknowledging the vagueness of any attempt to generalize about Buddhism, particularly as it's understood in the West. It's all rather mushy. Again, engaging more with Freitas (who is cited) and Rogers (who isn't) might have provided a little shape to the argument, whereas references to Gresh only compound the sense that what is at stake is only a matter of nomenclature. The verbal echo between Pullman's sraf and karmic asrav is fascinating, but only makes a footnote. A nod towards environmentalism, of course undeveloped, closes the piece. Somehow this essay focused on the East includes nary a mention of the I Ching nor the whole Himalayan interlude of TAS.

"'Walking into Mortal Sin': Lyra, the Fall, and Sexuality," Tommy Halsdorf
Like many of the pieces, this could have fit either into the legacy or the adaptation sections as well or better than it does in the religion and gender one. In a variation on the question (answered by Milton resoundingly in the affirmative) Did Adam and Eve have sex in Eden before the fall? Halsdorf asks if Will and Lyra had sex at the end of TAS, and answers, rightly, that we don't know. Pullman's ambiguity on the point is well attested and would be worth considering at greater length in the light of his statements about authorial intention. Instead, we get some references to Milton and Blake and the bible, but also to Lacan's jouissance and the work of Wright and Butler on the HDM plays, which are worth following up. The quotation from the title about "walking into mortal sin," a very interesting one for this question of authorial intent and narrative voice, is never addressed. It also would have made sense to read Pullman's early Gnosticism- and sex-laden novels, but they're so difficult to find copies of that scholarship on them might never happen.

"Becoming Human: Desire and the Gendered Subject," Sarah Gamble
Another Butler is the subject of this essay, which sets Judith Butler's gender theory against a vaguely posited normative standpoint, and places Pullman's story into the resonating chamber between them to see how it fares. Mrs Coulter and Lord Asriel, Will and Lyra and their daemons, all get somewhat more careful attention than in most essays, but once again, Mary Malone is conspicuous by her absence. Moruzi is cited, along with "Womanliness as a Masquerade," to go along with this Butlerian spine, the upshot of which is to establish Pullman's radical politics and declare HDM safe to read for those concerned about woke bona fides. What a relief.

"After the Fall: Queer Heterotopias," Sally R. Munt
Revised from a book chapter, and it shows at times as the word shame is deployed in a particularly loaded fashion, as if we know what is meant by it. But perhaps we learn through the context of the essay itself, which is really very strong. Munt lays out a theory of self as narration derived from Cavavero and Irigaray, less sociological perhaps than Butler's stance, and places Pullman into conversation with the likes of these authors and Foucault in a remarkably lucid fashion for a change. She demonstrates a knowledge of a range of earlier works on Pullman, including a series of articles by the Rustins, and meaningfully builds on them with a quite novel interpretation of Lee and Hester, Baruch and Balthamos, and the colorful concepts of romantic heterocosms and heterotopias. Probably the essay which I learned the most from, and one that might actually put Pullman's achievement in a new light.

IV. Dramatizing HDM

"Staging the Impossible: Severance and Separation in the National Theatre's Adaptation," Patrick Duggan

"Staging and Performing HDM: From the National Theatre Productions to Subsequent Productions," Karian Schuitema

These are two more of the most interesting pieces in the collection, along with Cox', Baker's, and Munt's essays. Not, perhaps, as insightful into the books themselves as those were, what they do is to give a glimpse into the stage adaptations, which are otherwise inaccessible to us. Along with his illuminating notes on the dramatic experience, Duggan brings to bear trauma theory of dubious persuasiveness, but Schuitema offers a densely researched look at subsequent productions beyond the National Theatre run and includes an interview with the director of Playbox Theatre, to help make the reporting more concrete. Questions of the difference between adults and children, so central to Pullman's story and his great idea of the daemon, are cast in a fascinating new light. 

Overall, the collection is a little disappointing, but it highlights a number of other scholars I haven't had time to touch upon, and opens considerable vistas on room for improvement. 




Continuum Contemporaries: Philip Pullman's HDM Trilogy: A Reader's Guide, Claire Squires

This is probably the closest thing to what I would want to write, only I would want to write a much expanded, ever-updating version. In many respects, Squires work is consummate competence: her summary of Pullman's biography is excellent, and she does a smooth job of synthesizing a great deal of story and thematic material in a very brief space. There are a few outright errors: her assertion about what Asriel says to Lyra about Dust at the end of the first book and Pan's summary of it later leaves out what Asriel says to Mrs Coulter at the end of that book and then retcons later in his conversation with her in TAS; Squires calls Tony Makarios an old friend of Lyra's, which might be a mix-up with subsequent adaptations where the character is merged with Billy Costa, whose brother is also, confusingly, named Tony. She also puts a great deal of weight on the catch-all term politics, whereas I tend to think of that as largely a red herring in Pullman's story, subsumed under the much more important process of storytelling. Still, she is a perceptive reader overall, asking brilliant questions, connecting widely separated quotes from within the books, as well as essays, speeches, etc, and reviews (up until about 2003). A handy little volume, nothing earth-shattering, but I'll have to check out her other book on Pullman, Master Storyteller.

The necklace and the knot: Mary de Morgan's The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde

You guys can't envision the final collapse of capitalism? Incredible! 

-- NPC in the Stoic Club, EarthBound

If you read much new writing about writing these days, or from the past generation or two, at least, you'll inevitably come across a statement along the lines: I realized I needed to read more books by women, or writers of color, or Latinx authors, or what have you. There has been a deserved discovery and rediscovery of the importance of diversity, and an equally inevitable resistance put up from people who continue to care about all the other very deserving works they might like to study, but which are diverse only in a narrow, intellectual way: the canon, which includes Karl Marx and Adam Smith, Montaigne and Machiavelli, Woolf and Wilde--but not nearly enough women or queer people, etc, embodied behind the ideas for contemporaneity to be OK with. And so what are reading? has become a loaded question. If you read old books instead of new ones, your social bona fides are suspect. If you expect people to read for pleasure at all, to have time to do something so decadent, your entitlement is probably showing. Whenever woke commentators even mention a thinker like Socrates--possibly one of the most woke people ever to wake--they can't help but do so in a way that broadcasts loud and clear the mentioner's utter lack of pretension, their distaste for any whiff of aristocratic valuations of thought or spirit; whereas on the other side, conservative and reactionary types have doubled down on their defense of the canon and their haste to align themselves with it, to appropriate it wholly, as if that were possible, within their ideology--which imagines itself, of course, to be free of ideology. It isn't possible, I think, because the value of art transcends political ends, but speech about art never truly does... But maybe my saying so in the first place only brands me a conservative despite my protestations to radical neighbor-love of a very idealistic, lefty sort--I just think the left jettisons the canon at their peril--while the latter half of the statement makes me sound like a total relativist, perhaps. I'd submit the Dude's critique of Walter is valid for much of what the popular right-wing apologists have to say: "You're not wrong, Walter. You're just an asshole."



Which is all a long-winded way of saying, I was browsing in Bloom's (Harold's, not Allan's) Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages (though, to brazenly if tongue-in-cheekily acknowledge there might be differences in intelligence, and that some stories and poems might not be for everyone, probably already sounds borderline fascist to many of my fellow educators) and I thought I'd read some stories and poems by women. So I read some lyrics by Christina Rossetti, and then I came upon this fairy tale by Mary de Morgan, "The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde." In it, people are turned into objects, the beads on the magic necklace, and then finally the evil princess herself gets turned into one, and the others are all freed. They are all tempted by her, and its, beauty--the spell is cast by encircling the gold necklace with one's fingers--but she is finally tricked by a servant who claims that his necklace of acorns and stuff he found in the woods is more beautiful than hers. He knows the secret, you see, having been warned by the princess' maid, who then fell victim to the necklace after all. In her greed and incredulity, the princess agrees to trade necklaces, and so is caught as she goes to take hers off. One way of reading this, I thought, might be as a critique of capitalism, the golden collar par excellence, which has a tendency to convert its admirers into trophies. But if that's the case, the chain can only be cut once the capitalists are so glutted with their own wealth that they run after an authenticity, a natural alternative, whose attractions haunt them by their very commonplaceness. But that even so doing will only usher in a return to the status quo ante, a feudal model, basically a much less efficient form of capitalism where people are much less free, but feel much better about where they are. And in the rise of environmentalism and influencer-media, and in what is happening in public schools and halls of power, the crass ignorance of unions and populists alike, it strikes me that a good portion of this reading is borne out. Only who the brave and clever servant will be who finally cuts the cord, remains to be seen.

Philip Pullman as teacher

A number of the pieces in Pullman's collection Daemon Voices touch on education in various ways. In fact, most of the arguments he makes in his essays come back to his deep love for language, and thus concern for the teaching of language. A teacher himself for many years, he wrote plays for the students to put on, which were later adapted into his first books for children. His feelings about national testing and slavish curricula will be familiar to anyone with common sense. Who, even if they bow to the necessity of testing, can help but at least see the appeal of the old days, when people were allowed to teach without it? Who can help but recognize that we need to recover something of that freedom and spontaneity? 

His autobiographical sketch, I have the feeling this all belongs to me, recounts considerably more about his actual memories of teaching. He speaks there of teaching mythology; there and elsewhere, of teaching writing as a fellow-worker (Isis lecture). In other places, he expounds upon ways in which he comes to see the teaching system as one symptom of a larger problem (Miss Goddard's Grave, and perhaps even in his fiction). 

In this short autobiography I haven't got the space to write about the thousand things that interest, delight, amaze, sadden, baffle, infuriate, or anger me. If I had the space I'd say something about the wholesale and vicious destruction of the public services in this country that's taken place over the past few years: especially that of education. If I were still a teacher and tried to do now the work I did for twelve years or so-and did well, I think-not only would I be discouraged, I would be forbidden. We now have a National Curriculum that lays down exactly what all children should be taught, and when they should be taught it, and insists on regular pencil-and-paper tests which seem to be checking on the pupils, but whose real purpose is to check on the teachers.

When I was teaching, I was free to decide what I should do and how I should do it, and one of the things I decided was that the pupils in my classes should learn about Greek mythology. So I began to tell them stories about the gods and heroes. I had to find good versions to work from, because I wanted to get the stories right; I didn't want to simply read to my pupils, I wanted to stand up and tell them the stories face-to-face. So I used Robert Graves's two-volume version of the Greek myths, which was the fullest I could find; and the Iliad and the Odyssey in the Penguin prose translation.

I worked out a course that lasted a year. In the first term I'd deal with the births and origins of the gods and goddesses, and their natures and deeds, to use Graves's phrase, and tell some of the stories about Theseus, Jason, Oedipus, Perseus, Heracles, and the other heroes; in the second term I'd start with the origins of the Trojan War and then do Homer's Iliad from start to finish; and in the third term I'd tell the Odyssey.

It was important to tell, not read, so I had to prepare the stories thoroughly. I taught three separate classes of twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, so I'd tell each story three times in a week; and I taught for twelve years, so I must have told each story thirty-six times. The result is that now I have all those stories entirely clear in my head, from beginning to end, and I can call them up whenever I want to.

(I did this once on holiday. We ate our evening meal in a restaurant, and my younger son, Tom, was finding it hard to sit still while we waited for the waitress to bring us the food, so I told him the Odyssey as a serial to keep him quiet. On the last night, when I got to that wonderful climax where Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, finally reaches his palace after twenty years away, to find it infested with rivals all seeking to marry his wife Penelope; and is recognised by his old nurse because of the scar on his leg; and gets Penelope to offer to marry any of the rivals who can string the bow of her husband, but no one can; and then Odysseus himself asks to try, and they all jeer at the ragged old beggar, but he picks up the bow and flexes it and with one easy movement slips the string into the notch and then plucks it like a harp, sending a clear note into the shocked silence of the hall. . . . Well, when I got to that, Tom, who'd been holding a drink in both hands, suddenly bit a large piece out of the glass in his excitement, shocking the waitress so much that she dropped the tray with our meal on it, and causing a sensation throughout the restaurant. And I sent up a silent prayer of thanks to Homer.)

Now as with my brother in Australia, the real beneficiary of all that storytelling wasn't so much the audience as the storyteller. I'd chosen-for what I thought, and think still, were good educational reasons-to do something that, by a lucky chance, was the best possible training for me as a writer. To tell great stories over and over and over again, testing and refining the language and observing the reactions of the listeners and gradually improving the timing and the rhythm and the pace, was to undergo an apprenticeship that probably wasn't very different, essentially, from the one Homer himself underwent three thousand years ago. And the more I think about it the more grateful I am for the freedom that allowed me to think about what would be best for my pupils and to design a course that provided it. I wouldn't be allowed to do it now.

And meanwhile, of course, I was writing my three pages every day. ...

But for whatever reason, the autobiographical sketch and Isis lecture were not included in the essay collection. I hope that an anthology or even a fresh monograph dedicated to education will come to light at some point. I made a copy of the version of the former piece, which used to be available on Pullman's website along with the Isis lecture. It's also archived on the wayback machine; and I believe it can still be found in Vol 65 (not 71, it turns out) of Something About the Author, which he wrote it for in the first place.

I would love to hear from people who had him as a teacher, whether at school or university, for more anecdotes. At a wonderful recent interview at the London Literature Festival, the question came up, organically it seemed, of what kind of teacher he was, but I wonder if a more painstaking investigation and research into the material wouldn't be worthwhile. 

In that same interview, reaffirming what he's said before and in writing, he called for books of folklore, fairy tales, and nursery rhymes to be bound in gold and given to parents. 

Some of the people I've talked to have taught his books. What about his teaching? 

(this is another element of Tolkien-Pullman connection. Is there a study out there yet about Tolkien as teacher?)

And supposing we could get recordings of him telling stories--would it be anything like as effective as having the classroom teacher telling the stories aloud? Recall, he didn't read, he told them. The analogy is to physical books and conversations and screen-texts and online discussions. In gaining something with our access to the latter, we're giving something up--but we need not make this an either/or. We can focus on learning how to use online resources, not being captured by them; and can retain in-person interaction, for teachers and students have to have somewhere to be, transforming lost time into learning. Not every teacher a storyteller, but those who aren't can show their kids what storytelling looks like through such videos. Not every kid needing that, but those who don't wouldn't be forced, they'd have other options, like writing stories or making videos of their own...

Letting Go of the Old School: On Childhood's End, by Arthur C. Clarke

In preparing to launch into my own study of Xenogears, I've been reading around in this awesome Xenogears Study Guide and came across a section about works which were influential in the history of the game's development:

Takahashi was a pretty small kid, so he was better at study than sports. Chemistry and physics were his favorites, "but I was awful at math" he recalls in an interview on Sony's Website in 2002. For art he would sometimes get good grades, sometimes bad, depending on teacher. "I used to read a lot of manga and those science fiction novels with the blue spines from Hayakawa Publishing" he says, referring to the publishers of Japanese translations of Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov, which have clearly influenced Takahashi.

In fact, Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke was directly referenced in Xenogears in the naming of the character "Karellen" (localized as "Krelian" for U.S. audience) who, according to Soraya Saga on Yggdrasil's Periscope Club BBS back in 1999, was the name of Takahashi's favorite character in Childhood's End. The title of "Guardian Angel," given to the character Citan Uzuki, was another reference. Clarke's idea for Childhood's End began with his short story "Guardian Angel" (1946). 2001: A Space Odyssey is referenced with the "SOL-9000" computer that houses the Ministry, and also in Xenogears: Perfect Works with the discovery of Zohar - a monolithic artifact - on Earth in 2001. This event, with some rewrites, was later used as the opening cinematic in Xenosaga Episode I: Der Wille zur Macht...

(So I guess I'll need to brush up on my Nietzsche and Kubrick soon, too). Naturally, I made a visit to the library at once and got a copy of Childhood's End, by Arthur C. Clarke. Somehow, I'd made it this far never having read anything of the SF master, and while I am in awe of Karellen/ Krelian, I don't know that I would have found the book as interesting if I weren't already fascinated by the game. This could just be me, but it poses an interesting problem for this whole project of mine, in which I'm attempting to bridge the worlds of reading books and playing video games in the hopes that learning itself will continue to flourish by the exchange.



I can well understand the appeal of Karellen for the young man who, in partnership with his wife, would create Xenogears, writing the alien into the game as Krelian. Clarke's Karellen is brilliantly mysterious and intriguing as the spokesman for the Overlords, the benign, seemingly all-powerful race which makes contact with Earth in Clarke's novel. The most interesting thing about him, though, is his secretiveness, hinting at some purpose which, until it is revealed, keeps us turning the pages. Once it is out, though, even more than once we've finally seen Karellen's physical form, he really diminishes in impressiveness. Perhaps, as we learn more about the Overlords' true place in the cosmos, Karellen also gains in pathos, but I would have needed a little more, I think, some hint that he feels the insufficiency of, and wants to do something about, this purpose, to really have Karellen keep my sympathy.

As we're told, though, the Overlords are inscrutable to our sensibilities as we, with our uncanny potential, are to them.

So ultimately what left me unimpressed with the book was the absence of a party corresponding to Fei and his compatriots in Xenogears. There isn't much of an arc for any of the other characters besides Karellen; they all seem like ciphers more than fully realized personalities. There are flashes of something great here, but it never feels like a great novel: the whole paranormal thing is grandiose, if a little stilted; the recapitulation of Jonah is clever, but what message does it convey, really? The rewriting of the past through the future, in the underlying myth of the Garden of Eden, is too pat, delivered as a punchline rather than developed as it would deserve, thematically, through, say, a more engaging Jeff, admirably sketched but too late and too underdeveloped as a young protagonist, or Jean, his mother, who gets so little breathing room as a character beside her cad of a husband.

I guess my question, then, is what it tells us about the creators of Xenogears, that they were so into this book? Of course, they're hardly unique in that, and their borrowings from all sorts of places are well-documented, but still, it might provide a helpful lens into the problems with characterization which the game, too, suffers from at times.

To pivot to the overarching project here again, though: it really seems to me that Clarke is onto something, metaphorically if not literally, with his Chestertonian/Lindsayan interest in the paranormal playing such a critical part in his story. That is, we might be profoundly limiting ourselves in unthinking acceptance of our traditional notions of human potential, and how best it might be nurtured. I deeply disagree with the loss of individual personality and emotional relationship Clarke imagines as prerequisite for some incomprehensible telepathic advance, but from his foreword to the 2000 reprint he seems to disavow some of that, too, later on. Nevertheless, if a school is conceived solely as an incubator for social-emotional comfort, a place where the state provides not only meals and shelter but psychological care as well--and all signs are that this is where we're heading, rapidly--then the utopian experiment Clarke trots out in his island Athens (and Sparta) seems like a good corrective, or at least worth a try. The way I see this actually playing out, however, is more as an add-on rather than an alternative to the social school status quo. That within the parameters of the home-surrogate environment our benign caretakers seem to be establishing in law and practice, there is actually an opportunity to find all sorts of unsuspected breakthroughs, if kids on their phones or devices are allowed to play and learn largely at their own pace. They need not go to some elite artistic colony; they will be there already, if it exists, and if they want to. It will just be a matter of making sure that there is material out there worth their while, and likely to challenge them to reach the full and free deployment of their talents. Something like that, anyway, it is the aim of the new school/Night School to provide.