Pullman rips on LOTR, others

[William Cloud Hicklin]

BTW, piosenniel, thanks for the livejournal link, which includes this very apt passage (I had forgotten it):

"Grown-up, indeed," said the Lady Polly. "I wish she would grow up. She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race onto the silliest time of one's life as quick as she can and stop there as long as she can."

And the very comparable quote from the short-story The Shoddy Lands:

...all her clothes and bath salts and two-piece swimsuits and indeed the voluptuousness of her every look and gesture, had not, and never had had, the meaning which every man would read, and was intended to read, into them. They were a huge overture to an opera in which she had no interest at all; a coronation procession with no queen at the centre of it; gestures, gestures about nothing.

About says it all.