des fleurs, toujours & toujours

a long-forgotten pressed flower

[fleurograph]

[dame-de-pique]

Anton Cornelis Thomann - Stilleven met bloemen in een vaas, boeken, een karaf en een glas, 1907-1930

[loveridden1999]

― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Sensible Thing

[theinternetarchive]

from 'bird by bird: some instructions on writing and life,' anne lamott, pub. 1994.

[history-of-fashion]

1869 James Tissot - Young Women Looking at Japanese Articles

(Cincinnati Art Museum)

[marypickfords]

Großstadtschmetterling (Richard Eichberg, 1929)

[garbagequeer]

[fleurograph]

More Rose Field spoilers

Not sure if I'm wildly off base here, but I suspect that the phrase "merchant people" used by Chen and others is a literal translation of 商人 or 生意人 in Mandarin? And it got me thinking about the "othering" of East Asia in this book's message about globalized capitalism.

I am really disappointed that this book sets up the "Far East" and particularly China as a mysterious place that is poorly understood and treated as a threat by Europe, yet the narrative never demystifies anything. Instead, "Cathay" is utterly secretive, technologically advanced, developing infrastructure at massive scale, and is strongly implied to be the force behind the "merchant people" who lack all imagination or spiritual side and are destroying the rose world and Lyra's world alike, not even out of greed, but out of their ruthless mechanistic drive for efficiency. I am uncomfortably reminded of Western writing that derides Asian people as conformist "automatons" incapable of creative thought while simultaneously threatening the world with brutal state-supported capitalism, utter disregard for nature, and dazzling technological prowess.

We do not meet any sympathetic people from "Cathay" or Central or Eastern Asia. And of course, any cultural, linguistic, or political specificity to Uyghur communities is ignored- imagine if this book had the knowledge and imagination to address some of the issues of spiritual repression, environmental exploitation, and atomization of community within the context of Chinese and Central Asian history and politics...

Finally, the people of the Rose World are all just Europeans (an Italian widow, a little old English couple) shocked by outsiders and victimized by all the horrid foreigners coming in! Who else would you find at an interdimensional Silk Road nexus on the other end of the richly painted Chinese-style marketplace that flourished as a portal of exchange for generations? Who else would Pullman portray as the ultimate victims of global capitalism and resource exploitation?

As an aside: I often noticed in this book that while non-English speakers get broken syntax, even when they are speaking a language that is not English such as Dilara (sorry, I don't own a copy, so I think I'm getting her name wrong) speaking Chinese, English speakers' words are never rendered this way even when they are described as struggling to speak other languages, such as Lyra's French, Malcolm's many languages, or the Tashkent researcher's Chinese. It will just say something like "he struggled to articulate it in his poor Arabic" but the quoted speech will be perfectly grammatical. Meanwhile, the multilingual fluency of the "merchant people" is presented as one of the spooky signs of the evil capitalist world they are trying to make.

[frostedmagnolias]

Necklace

1820s

Gold, amethysts and pearls

France

Victoria and Albert Museum

[fleurograph]

Rose Field spoilers

Okay, to have one bastard child alethiometrist who destroys the Magisterium (dramatically prophesied, known social scandal, providing your driving motivation) is a tragic backstory, to have another (who you, society, and literally omniscient beings never even allude to) seems like carelessness

[unscriptd-deactivated20260317]

Robert Hawcridge

[arsvitaest-deactivated20260111]

Frederick Judd Waugh, Rum Row, 1922, oil on board

[fleurograph]

Lot of thoughts about The Rose Field. Tore through it and thought it was beautiful. I'm not really happy with how much of the plot was resolved (or... many themes of the plot itself...), but I'm not like, table-flipping mad about it. I'm surprised Pullman says he rewrote the ending many times before he was happy with it, because I think if I were his editor, I'd have told him to maybe keep trying or go back to an earlier draft...

[bakwaaas]

[greengableslover]

EMMA. (2020) dir. Autumn de Wilde

[mirrorsinner]

[frostedmagnolias]

Brooch of Leaves and Berries

c. 1903

gold, glass, enamel, citrine

by René Lalique

The Walters Art Museum