poliphilo: (Default)
poliphilo ([personal profile] poliphilo) wrote2005-10-26 11:17 am
Entry tags:

Narnia

The trailer for The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe makes it look just like LOTR.

Same gorgeous New Zealand landscapes.

I used to want to visit New Zealand. I don't any more. It's so fuckin' empty.

Somehow or other I've managed not to read the Narnia books. I don't quite understand how this happened. But I've dipped into them in adulthood and not noticed any stardust. Lewis talks down to kids, he's so goddam preachy...

...And he's very 1950s (see last entry.)

I've read other books by Lewis. I enjoyed The Great Divorce. But, as with other "religious" writers, he leaves me with a taste in my mouth like I've been sucking on a horseshoe- a sour, metallic taste. He doesn't trust his own perceptions and feelings, but dresses up in pretty images the cold, nasty, unfelt doctrines he's been showered with from some Northern Irish pulpit.

He says in his Autobiography that his favourite mythology was the Norse, followed by the Greek, with the Judaeo-Christian coming in a poor third, but because he believed, against his aesthetic instincts, that the Judaeo-Christian mythology was true, he opted to become a believer.

Keats would have set him right on that- "Beauty is truth, truth beauty...."

But Lewis was an establishment man through and through. He went where he perceived the power to be.

Traitor.

[identity profile] amritarosa.livejournal.com 2005-10-26 10:14 am (UTC)(link)
The thing that struck me about the trailer was that it looked so _clean_. Where's the grit, I wondered...

I agree Hutton is 'tha shit' :-)
As far as scholarly Pagan writers go,I dig Chas Clifton, too.

[identity profile] poliphilo.livejournal.com 2005-10-26 11:37 am (UTC)(link)
Hutton has given Pagans their "true" history- and a fascinating history it turns out to be.

I don't know Clifton. The other pagan "scholar" I really dig is Margot Adler.

[identity profile] amritarosa.livejournal.com 2005-10-27 12:42 pm (UTC)(link)
http://www.chasclifton.com/

I particularly like the essay "Nature Religion For Real"

Clifton is also one of the founding editors of The Pomegranate, a scholarly Pagan journal.

http://chass.colostate-pueblo.edu/natrel/pom/

There used to be sample articles to be read online, but I'm not sure that they're there anymore- good stuff

I like his blog too, "Letter from Hardscrabble Creek"

[identity profile] poliphilo.livejournal.com 2005-10-27 01:55 pm (UTC)(link)
Thanks for the recommendations. I'll follow them up.