Comments on: Interesting stuff

By: Ted M

Ted M — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 23:03:45 +0000

Tom Stoppard is has written the screenplay, so there may be some hope for it. However recent news reports indicate New Line fears the response from religio-Americans, so who knows if it will be recognizable in the end… This page collects news about the film’s progress.

By: harry

harry — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 01:06:07 +0000

I liked all three of the Pullman books too. The third is by far the weakest (why is it the one that won the pirze?) as all agree. But it was not disappointing. The weakness was inevitable: from about half-way through Northern Lights it is pretty clear that short of actually having made some real and profound and secret discovery about the actual physics of our world Pullman is going to be unable to give us the truly spectacular end that the first book deserves to have in the third. I know what you are talking about Timothy and like you I found that scene agonising. For what its worth there is no discernable difference in the reactions to HDM from my Christian and athiest interllocutors—if anything I find the Christians are more willing than the atheists to give him the benefit ofthe doubt in book 3. I read that he has a Hollywood movie deal. Can anyone confirm that? How the hell are they going to make movie of a book like that?

By: Sebastian Holsclaw

Sebastian Holsclaw — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 19:45:06 +0000

“This MS. is completely lacking in scientific interest and should be rejected.” The other reason to avoid statements quite this bald is that you risk being remembered as the idiot who discouraged the genius if they ever actually make something of themselves. It is an outside chance, but still….. :)

By: Ophelia Benson

Ophelia Benson — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 19:14:10 +0000

Yes, that’s right. That’s all book reviewing is, a protracted game of Whose is longer. Along with of course Who has balls.

By: chun the unavoidable

chun the unavoidable — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 19:02:28 +0000

Studying the initial critical reception in the middlebrow press of important books will give anyone who’s interested an important insight into this matter.

I’m not going to tell you what that insight is, however.

By: Keith M Ellis

Keith M Ellis — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 18:35:47 +0000

So we are to compare books by length, then?

By: Ophelia Benson

Ophelia Benson — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 18:20:37 +0000

Oh damn, it takes balls to put your work up for public examination?!? Oh crap! Oh damn oh hell oh rats! I can’t do it then! Disqualified before I start, oh it’s so unfair, I want my money back. “trying not to make foolish judgements like the reviewer’s “I read Gibbon, Gibbon is a friend of mine, and Vollman is no Gibbon” schtick.” Try not to make foolish paraphrases while you’re at it. The comparison with Gibbon is relevant on account of how Gibbon wrote, you know, a lot. Another great thick book. Scribble scribble, eh Mr Gibbon? So there is naturally a question, is such a long book worth the reading? How does it compare with other very long books?

By: biztheclown

biztheclown — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 17:26:59 +0000

I’m still on volume 5 of Rising Up and Rising Down so I can’t state my full opinion yet. I can state however, that that review is just terrible. I can’t believe I’m reading the same book as this guy did. In fact, I suspect I’m not, as I am reading carefully, paying attention to the arguments, reading the footnotes, and trying not to make foolish judgements like the reviewer’s “I read Gibbon, Gibbon is a friend of mine, and Vollman is no Gibbon” schtick.

By: Trickster Paean

Trickster Paean — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 17:01:28 +0000

Maybe because he had 3,300 not quite so brilliant but really very good pages to get out. As for humility, it takes a staggering amount of balls to put your work up for public examination, whether its one page or 3,300. David Yaseen is obviously talking about Vollmann’s goals in writing it, not his humility, as being misinterpreted, and you do the same, Ophelia. The majority of writing is not brilliance – most of it is crap. That anyone has gotten anything good out through the course of history, I’m convinced, is largely historical accident and luck (and that residue of luck, skill).

By: Ophelia Benson

Ophelia Benson — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 15:57:26 +0000

Hmm. Well if Vollmann is really as humble as all that, why write 3,300 pages then? That’s not a very humble thing to do. If you’re going to write 3300 pages they damn well ought to be 3300 brilliant pages.

By: David Yaseen

David Yaseen — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 15:14:03 +0000

I'm slogging through Rising Up and Rising Down, and, thus far, I have to attribute McLemee's review to a case of tall-poppy syndrome. It is an enormously ambitious book, and as such invites this sort of mocking critique. "Going to solve violence, are you? Oh, aren't you precious!" Vollmann repeatedly disavows any claim to having disposed of the subject, and says of his distillation of it, the Moral Calculus, that it's certainly incomplete and probably wrong. All of his grand conclusions (at least through the first third of the second volume) are likewise explicitly left open to doubt and scrutiny. McLemee sifts through the book, searching for "the proverbial needle in Vollmann's 3,300-page haystack," and is dismayed to find very little in the way of direct assertion. Given the author's early and repeatedly expressed intent to avoid such, I can only wonder why McLemee bothered to look. The book is an attempt to illuminate and make sense of the phenomenon of human violence, and to work toward defining the circumstances and motivations under which it may or may not be termed justified. It does not pretend to have the answers.

By: vivian

vivian — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 14:43:33 +0000

It’s a lot of fun to come up with pithy, nasty rejection sentences, but actually sending them off to the author/editor adds nothing but misery to the process. What kind of person is proud of getting off on hurting strangers’ feelings? It’s not even like flaming online, where there is the possibility of interaction, rebuttal, resolution. It’s different from publicly attacking someone’s published view, where one has to defend the attack substantively, not simply with snarkiness. Are any of us so pathetic that we need to wallow in cheap insults against someone clearly less brilliant? Oscar Wilde type wit has its place, but that place isn’t peer review of an attempt, however bad, at knowledge production. Now how to draw the line between being direct – “this piece has no merit as written” – and being nasty. I suspect that in most instances the distinction is clear; when in doubt, don’t be gratuitously nasty.

By: Doug

Doug — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 13:36:16 +0000

It’s been a couple of years since I finished the Pullman, and I remember thinking that the third was a disappointment, but heartened that Pullman had reached such heights with so much of the trilogy. If the third book didn’t live up to everything that was promised in the first, it was hard to see how anything could. I mean, lots of folks that Dante is pretty much downhill after Inferno, too. I liked all of the echoes of Milton in HDM. I have the feeling that we are living in an era of cheap pieties, and I was happy to read a book—a children’s book—that took on common bromides so directly. None of the coyness of Christian interpretations of Tolkien or Rowling for Pullman: God is dessiccated and wants only to end His misery. It’s a bracing counterpoint to the easy but false certainties of the Bush era. On the shortcomings front, Pullman is in good company as “uneven series, tendency to browbeating the religious message.” That’s Narnia in a nutshell. I hope HDM finds as many readers.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 13:05:05 +0000

I rather liked the third volume of His Dark Materials, though I agree it went over the top occasionally on the thematics of the whole series. There’s a scene in it that I found absolutely heart-breaking and beautiful—I’ll avoid details as some here are still (trying) to read it; for that scene alone I give it some props. On peer review, my sense is that history doesn’t quite have a journal of such overwhelming status that everyone strives to get in it, and where the standard is so high that it’s hugely selective. As far as books go, I don’t mean to say that books are always better than journals, merely that most people do a more honest job at peer reviewing books. If people are going to gatekeep and ideology-enforce, they’re going to do it with journal peer review, in my experience.

By: Donald Johnson

Donald Johnson — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 12:47:48 +0000

I’m Christian, so it was a bit of a relief that atheists also found the third volume of HDM a bit preachy. I also found it a bit odd that someone would use a fantasy novel soaked in supernaturalism (the quantum multiverse bits are a thin materialistic veneer) to write a sermon in favor of materialism. It’s cheating. I still liked the books, even the third one.