I suppose this shall be my final progress report, having met my quota of five progress report posts with this one. My half of Geneseo’s website is near, but not quite, complete. Three pages still need to be written, namely my analysis of the censorship case, an historical overview of censorship, and the page which I already have the research done for and simply need to spent a few minutes to write, on the religious objections to The Golden Compass, specifically focusing on Philip Pullman’s rather inflammatory comments. I also need to touch up the several other pages I completed over this weekend, namely adding pictures as opposed to the plain text several pages have now.
Ultimately, the writing of these pages was not too terribly arduous, once I finally managed to sit down and do so. Sitting in Crickets Coffee, my cafe of choice, on a rather uncomfortable stool for around four hours until my once-fully charged laptop was on the bring of battery death (using the term “dying” for running out of power is somewhat bizarre, honestly). Before getting into the individual pages I just wrote, an irritance: I know not if this is how WordPress sites are or if this is a function of our chosen theme, but putting words in italics on our site also bolds the words without actually marking them as “bolded,”independent of whether that is wanted. Considering MLA has book titles in italics, this is certainly somewhat upsetting and something I am unsure of how to change. So it goes.
In writing the page offering a short biography, I was impressed at just how many awards Philip Pullman had won for his writings. Pullman was even granted a knighthood this prior 2018 holiday season, which is pretty impressive. Pullman also won both a Carnegie Medal and “the Carnegie of Carnegies,” for being the reader-chosen best recipient of the medal within its first seventy years. Pullman also has won several other awards, the most notable of which to my untrained eye seems to be his status as the first children’s author to win the Whitbread Book of the Year Award.
One of the other recently-created pages was a brief history of the Halton community, which, having done my research and written the page, is not necessarily as useful as one might have hoped. Halton is a regional municipality in Canada, formerly a county and before that a district, meaning it is not a community in the traditional sense, rather being a somewhat more reaching municipal jurisdiction which actually includes three towns and a city, each of which have their own identities. Still, the page was written, though it feels like it mostly has to do with a history of the shifting administrative tendencies in Canada than a specific community.
I also created a StoryMap JS this previous Saturday showing the locations and details of those other challenges to The Golden Compass that I could actually find information for, in chronological order. The reasons for the challenges, or at least the main ones mentioned, were all pretty similar, focusing on the (here I would typically put “supposed,” and consistently do on the website, but Pullman is about as explicit as one can be) anti-Christian and anti-Catholic elements of the novels. Though, the challenger in Winchester, Kentucky, also objected to drug consumption in the books, namely wine and poppy with meals. The Halton case also seemed to have had some amount of objection to the novels’ supposed violence. So it goes.
That is all that comes to mind for this post. Enjoy thine day.