Read the next sentence, Mr Pullman
Another man does a pratfall by misusing that Simone deBeauvoir line.
Applause for Nigel Warburton there.
But Pullman went off the rails.
She didn’t mean by men saying they are women. Nope, that’s not what she was saying.
How easy it is nowadays to research your vaguely recollected quotes. It’s lazy and knee-jerk. Try finding out what the hell you are talking about before you start flapping your gums. Not only do they get the quotes wrong, but they are invariably misapplied to things they are completely unrelated to. That’s the trouble with social media, it insults all of our collective intelligence. Try Googling it first, shithead, then post your worthless opinion.
Pullman had someone (a man even!) offer to explain this to him several days ago:
https://excelpope.wordpress.com/2020/06/09/northerner-illuminates/
TNnB, that Pope excels. The Vatican should be asked for an opinion, IMHO. XLP Should consider also opening up for business in Avignon.
Philip Pullman was a remarkable writer, but had always a streak of ready didacticism that marred particularly some of his shorter stories, and in his latest trilogy, the first two volumes of which have come out, there is too much of an overt design on the reader, and the adoption of an easily flowing narrative through a series of places that have small concrete reality, though they have a rather vague allegorical significance, a manner that is taken from Spenser’s ‘The Faerie Queene’ (as ‘Paradise Lost’ was behind the first trilogy), where the allegory was justified. He is also far too obviously concerned with being ‘relevant’, constantly and too obviously picking on what he considers to be issues of contemporary moral relevance; the result is a thin-ness, for the story is driven by the moral issues he wishes to raise rather than through an imaginative engagement. Particularly in the first two books of his first trilogy, he showed himself a remarkable stylist and storyteller, and certainly a better stylist than J.K. Rowling. But in the end I prefer Rowling – for her down-to-earth and rowdy humour, among other things. She can write badly – particularly when she’s summarising the story of a previous volume in the series or reminding the reader of events in it: you can feel she just wants to get this over, so that she can get on with the story at hand – I always liked for this! But she is a natural and compelling story-teller.
I suspect it is Pullman’s concern for ‘keeping up’ with the latest issues and for taking a ‘moral’ stand that is responsible for his misconceived criticism of Rowling, and not much more than that.
I met the man once – he happened to be doing a book-signing for, I think, the second volume of his first trilogy in Thatcham in Berkshire where I was staying while back in England one summer. I bought a signed copy to give to the children of some good friends here in Japan, and we talked of Milton and Paradise Lost, which both he & I hugely admire. He is a good, intelligent, and likeable man. I wish he had not got involved in the attack on JKR.
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This is strongly reminiscent of those millions of times creationists try to rebut evolution by quoting that one passage from Darwin’s Origin of Species… and then failing to read the rest of the passage.