Wednesday, November 21, 2007

A Report on Phillip Pullman

My sister came over today. I don't think she has time to be a guest blogger, but she told me all about her experience meeting Phillip Pullman in New York City! About three weeks ago, she got to attend an exclusive party where he was the guest of honor. It sounds terribly fancy, right? But she said it wasn't: they had pizza and she made daemon-shaped cutout cookies.

Phillip Pullman was very nice and friendly, but very tired. Apparently, he doesn't like traveling much, but had been doing a ton of PR based around the release of the film version of The Golden Compass. He is happy with the casting and felt the movie was true to the spirit of the book, which my sister took to mean that there were things he liked and things he didn't but obviously wasn't about to speak negatively of the project. She said that he eats pizza with a fork and knife, that they talked about Charles Dickens, and that New Line Cinema is extremely concerned about what will happen with the religious right and the trilogy.

She also said that there were a number of other interesting people there, all of whom were trying to play it cool and failing miserably. She got a picture of herself with him and his autograph.

Had I had the chance to meet him, I would've told him that, like he said in The Amber Spyglass, I believe that when you die, you do become part of everything, not just nothing, and that it helped me a lot. Because thinking about it literally, it's true whether there's an afterlife or not. Your body will nourish the soil, which will help things grow, and those things will be eaten by all sorts of animals. You'll help keep everything going in death, regardless of what you've made of your life. Dead people and animals were indirectly responsible for the food I ate for dinner, the trees used to build my house, the cotton that was used to produce my clothes, everything organic I come in contact with. They could've been kings and queens or long-lost ancestors, or criminals or just ordinary people. It's a very comforting thought, I think.