Reflections of a Toaster
Tony Watkins' blog on life, work, books, contemporary culture and who knows what else.
Thursday, February 26, 2004
A few useful websites on Pullman
There's stacks of stuff on
His Dark Materials on the web. What I've realised during my research is that a lot of it is recycled endlessly round loads of sites - including mistakes. Some of the stuff around is innacurate or poorly thought out, some just trivial. And some is fabulous! These are a few of the useful sites:
- Philip Pullman's own site
- Random House (publishers)
- BridgeToTheStars.Net
- His Dark Materials
- His Dark Materials annotated
- Dark Adamant
- Annotations for Pullman's 'Dark Materials'
More on the book
Here's an outline of what the book will include:
Part 1: Chapters about Philip Pullman, the influences on him, etc., and chapters about the three volumes of
His Dark Materials.
Part 2: Chapters about the big philosophical and theological themes which Pullman explores.
Since it's a 'thinking fan's guide' it will be both enthusiastic about the trilogy
and subject it to some probing criticism in Part 2. I was fortunate to interview Philip Pullman in late 2002 and I think he enjoyed a little intellectual sparring as much as I did. The interview may go in as an appendix. I hope to have enough time to write an appendix on the science of HDM.
I ought to stop for now - my editor is expecting a chapter from me tomorrow and I'm nowhere near finishing it yet!
Wednesday, February 25, 2004
Philip Pullman book
True to my word, here I am telling you a little about the book I'm writing on Pullman. The focus, of course, will be on his magnum opus,
His Dark Materials. It will be the second in a series of 'thinking fan's guides' from
Damaris Publishing. I was a contributor to the first book,
Matrix Revelations: a thinking fan's guide to the Matrix trilogy which was the first book to be published on the entire trilogy after the third film had been released - we managed to publish it in 40 days. For more on this, have a look at the
Damaris website.
The Pullman book is due to be published in September 2004 but I've got a lot of work to do on it yet. I had hoped to see the National Theatre two-part production but the tickets sold much quicker than I'd anticipated having decided I couldn't see it before Christmas. I'll try to get to the revival of it later in the year even though the book will be out by then.
I'm going to
try to be more regular with blogging (I could hardly be less regular!) so I'll say more about the book soon I guess.
Slow start to blogging
Oh dear, I set this blog up a while ago but haven't done anything with it at all yet. Most of my time is spent writing my book on Philip Pullman. I'll tell you about it one day!
I came across some fun puns earlier, including a category of puns which I was well aware of but never knew were referred to as Tom Swifties. Here's a couple of those that particularly tickled me:
"That's a nice robotic poodle you have!", Tom said dogmatically.
"My raft has caught fire," Tom yelled flamboyantly.
"I need to be careful not to add too much water," Tom said with great concentration
"We have to leave the ship even though it did not hit the iceberg," Tom said with reckless abandon.
More of these gems (if you think that's an apppropriate way of describing them) at: www.bigpuns.com and www.badpuns.com
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