Notes for November 17th

His Dark Materials

--Can't get to far from Daemon
--Naggy; needy
--a part of its human
--Willing suspension of disbelief to enter book... needed to be able to suspend reality at a wim and believe what your mind is reading if only for a few seconds.

--Pullman talking about teaching people to write; no rules, willing suspension of certainty (changes Coleridge's willing suspension of disbelief)

--Lyre- wind plays instrument... Lyre= Lyra, the central character in His Dark Materials. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHq1H5cmL5w
Hopefully this link works... it is a link to a man playing the Lyre, he is claiming that the song is from 1300 B.C. in some of his playing.

--Get rid of the notion that the text is going to teach us anything.

-- 6 degrees of seperation

--"Its a pour memory that only goes one way."
-Aleithiometer
+leith- Lethe- rive in Hades where you drink the water and you forget.
-Aleithiometer= takes away the forgetfulness; 'un'-forgetting
--Glen Gould- "32 short pieces of Glen Gould"
-haunted by the idea of 'the north.'
--gold bug variations...
--Central metaphor at the basis of the trilogy is the Aurora Borealis
-I have seen the Aurora's. Growing up in North Dakota they were usually visual in the winter at some times throughout the winter. The following is a picture that I found that most closely resembled my memory of the Aurora's, this picture is close except they were slightly more red.

--Wallace Stevens Poems- about idea of 'North.'
--
Domination Of Black

At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry -- the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks. -Wallace Stevens

--Nobazembla- try to find it in text and reality...
-I found some pretty interesting facts on Nova Zembla
--Nova Zembla
+Novaya Zemlya is the proper name; it is only known as Nova Zembla in Dutch. It is an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean in the north of Russia and the extreme northeast of Europe. The indigenous population consists of about 100 Nenetses who subsist mainly on fishing, trapping, polar bear hunting, and seal hunting.

--the Aleithiometer is a guide to symbols and the importance and many meanings or level of meanings in them... such as a portmanteau.