Stephen Fry interview with JKR
The White Stag
Stabat Mater: Susan, Lucy and Aslan
Cuts and Shortcuts
Darth Snape
Lewis, Tolkien, Rowling and Drama
I KNEW Father Christmas looked familiar!!!
Saw Narnia
Sempra
More on Harry dying
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Hogwarts, Hogwarts,
Hoggy Warty Hogwarts,
Teach us something please,
Whether we be old and bald,
Or young with scabby knees,
Our heads could do with filling,
With some interesting stuff,
For now they're bare
And full of air,
Dead flies and bits of fluff.
So teach us stuff worth knowing,
Bring back what we forgot,
Just do your best
We'll do the rest,
And learn until our brains all rot!
1: The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.
2: Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.
3: There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.
4: Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun,
5: Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race.
6: His going forth is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it: and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof.
7: The law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple.
8: The statutes of the LORD are right, rejoicing the heart: the commandment of the LORD is pure, enlightening the eyes.
9: The fear of the LORD is clean, enduring for ever: the judgments of the LORD are true and righteous altogether.
10: More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold: sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.
11: Moreover by them is thy servant warned: and in keeping of them there is great reward.
12: Who can understand his errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults.
13: Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me: then shall I be upright, and I shall be innocent from the great transgression.
14: Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O LORD, my strength, and my redeemer.
Comments on "C. S. Lewis on Narnia films"
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Goggalor said ... (December 15, 2005 5:39 PM)
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Pauli said ... (December 15, 2005 5:57 PM)
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Merlin said ... (December 16, 2005 5:59 PM)
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Pauli said ... (December 18, 2005 12:39 PM)
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Merlin said ... (December 18, 2005 1:04 PM)
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Anonymous said ... (December 22, 2005 7:15 AM)
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Merlin said ... (December 22, 2005 9:07 AM)
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Pauli said ... (December 22, 2005 9:19 AM)
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Anonymous said ... (December 22, 2005 4:10 PM)
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Pauli said ... (December 22, 2005 5:36 PM)
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Merlin said ... (December 22, 2005 6:27 PM)
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Merlin said ... (December 22, 2005 6:57 PM)
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Merlin said ... (December 22, 2005 7:12 PM)
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Anonymous said ... (January 05, 2006 5:34 AM)
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Merlin said ... (January 05, 2006 6:42 AM)
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post a commentErm. Not what I was expecting, but you do it well. I personally, enjoy the books (HP); as they are meant for young adults, but I believe that they have drifted into the mainstream for children. Looking at the past few books, the underlying dirty jokes and the violence, it surprises me that it has become regarded as such. Regarding your post, I did read Narnia (all seven) but I did not recognize, albeit I was very young, any religous ties. So the story, in my belief, could be very easily told from a nonreligious viewpoint.
I suppose any good story can be read from a "non-religious" view and it still be a good story. Many atheists find Genesis to be facinating even though most people consider the Bible to be a religious book. (Okay, that was sarcastic, but I make my point this way....)
As for dirty jokes and violence: I experienced more violence first-hand at the Christian schools I went to when I was young, although there weren't any actual deaths. And I know a ordained minister who tells really good jokes, and yes, I suppose the typical Victorian would faint at a few of them. I don't remember any "dirty" jokes in HP though....
Well, there is a point to be made that in book 6 JKR does heighten the gravitas of effects, such as Draco literally breaking Harry's nose with a kick and then leaving him under petrificalus to lie helpless in his own blood ... which is a pretty graphic image and maybe a prefiguring of Harry's unplanned return later with Sectum Sempra. But as you can gather from my posts on Sectum Sempra and blood, I don't think either of these occurrences falls under the classification of "gratuitous" violence.
As far as "dirty jokes," I don't see them either. There is a difference between "earthiness" (such as Peeves blowing "raspberies" all the time) and sexual inuendo etc. I think Rowling does do exploration of gender identity, EG I think Tonks entertaining Ginny and Hermione in book 5 with her changling powers is a sort of mentoring of the young women, being as Tonks' feminine identity is a very interesting one because she is definitely feminine, but not what you would call a good candidate to win any contests in "conventional" feminine things like home-making (like Molly Weasely).
I also think there is examination of the need for maturity in coming to grips with physical facts in the context of mature male feel relationship ... ie avoiding the puritanical and prudish - such as when, after the real Moody's warning about wands in back pockets blowing butt cheeks off, Tonks jokingly asks Harry, "Good ... both buttocks still on?"
But I think these instances bear a distinctly different tone and nature from inuendo and "dirty jokes."
"Hey, I can see see Uranus - get it! Ha, ha, ha..." - Ron to Harry
sorry ... just read my comment here and saw a typo (I know, you're completely aghast and utterly surprised ... not that I made one but that I eventually caught it), towards the end it should be "mature male-female relationships"
so nervous posting a comment here where you are all so learn-ed, but here goes.
i think there was a misunderstanding of lewis's use of the word 'vulgarity'.
rather than a moral issue, i think he was refering (in true british style) to one of taste and subtlety.
when you read it like that it changes the way you view his concerns.
cheers
jkr (another one altogether!)
JKR,
Thanks for you comment, don't let us fool you, we (or at least I) can tend to be a little like the other wizard, the one behind the curtain in OZ.
But your's is a good point. I think it is sort of a progression though. In other words I think that what you're talking about as "vulgarity" I would probably talk about as "earthiness" in the wrong place.
And I think Rowling is along these lines too. Some of what she has in the books is simply a good humorous dose of earthiness that lends to humility (remembering we are all dust and will return to dust), but I'm sure that if you met her and talked with her, she would be a lady, and from the footage I have seen of interviews etc, a very polite and rather stylish lady. The books and her own relating to people are different venues - in the books the earthiness doesn't offend, as you say, good taste and it does play a role; But in the the other realm (her "real world" relations)it would be inappropriate and embarrassing.
But even were such embarrassing things to happen in her real life, this is different than sexual inuendo. Inuendo usually carries with a polemical aspect in the form of using humor as a path to accpetance. Not all sexual jokes are this way (for instance I found the "spears as long as a man" joke in Braveheart to be perfectly fine and genuinely humorous in the context) but a good bit is.
My point with the intitial comment by goggalor was that I don't see much of even the innocent level in Rowling, let alone the inuendoe that is often sort of hin ted at by the term "dirty jokes."
Yes; the original comment contained an objection to "dirty jokes", not "vulgarity". Reminds me that Lewis believed that not all dirty jokes are created equal and that some could be legitimate. He points this out in The Screwtape Letters.
oh absolutely!
btw i am now considering myself a fan of HP and am definately a fan of earthiness in literature and in life.
my comment was intended to reflect how lewis felt about the possibility of making a movie about narnia. the idea of disney (as he saw his work)doing an animation of his aslan was vulgar. disney's treatment of pooh bear and mary poppins shows what the british would dread happening to aslan. way to obvious and unsubtle and garrish etc etc etc
this sends it off on a different tangent from whether some use of earthy humour is appropriate (which i have no problem with) and in keeping with the social climate.
an example of what i would consider INappropriate in this context would be hagrid having a little grope of madame maxime in the GOF movie. (for goodness sake. fume.)
an example of 'vulgarity' in the sense of brash and obvious would be the heffalump nightmare scenes in the disney pooh bear.
cheers,
jkr (this other one .... not 'her' )
Thanks for clarifying, JKR2. We must use the term "vulgar" somewhat differently because I wouldn't describe the heffalump scene in Winnie the Pooh as "vulgar". Definitely an example of artistic license though at the very least, and I think I understand what you (and Lewis) are getting at. I'm assuming you're British too?
I remember mentioning to Merlin this summer that I was pretty sure the producers of Narnia were going to screw up Narnia in general, Aslan in particular. This would relegate it to the realm of "kiddie stuff" at best, so maybe that’s the heffalump-nightmare connection. From what I've heard they did pretty good, so I'm glad that they proved me wrong.
Back to the word vulgar. I think that American's almost never use the term vulgar in this legitimate sense, i.e., definition 3 or 4. It’s interesting how many differing shades of meaning the word does have and how Merriam-Webster seems to list them from better to worse as far as what the shades of meaning convey. For Walt Disney-style vulgarity (dancing teapots, etc.), I would apply words like trivial, garish, whimsical, corny... all the things that Lewis was worried about.
JKR2,
yes, I do have diferent feelings on posting email addies than Pauli but that is mainly only because I have a Yahoo account dedicated solely for this site:
merlinmusing(at)yahoo(dot)com (pardon the alteration, makes it harder for web-crawling bots to pick it out - it can also be reached from my profile)
Please feel free to email me and I can pass it on to Pauli as well - I in particular am very in favor of having readers email me questions because I like the style I have seen on some other blogs where bloggers address/repsond to emails in posts and it gives the site a feel (say for first time readers) of openness to discussion etc - albeit we have some of what those sites have covered in our ability to post (which they usually do not, and they have a "guarded" web based email submission interface) but I've always thought it would be cool to have both - I like how responding to readers in a post gives the ability to kind of keep fuel in the "discussion fire" (and plus, doing it through the email helps me justify paying for pop3 and smtp services for the MM account LOL)
I agree with Pauli that we often completely misuse the
word "vulgar." For instance, the Traditional (big T) translation done of the Bible by St Jerome, is refered to as the "Vulgate." All it means is that the style of Latin into which it was translated was the common speach of business/everday life, as opposed to the official high rhetorical Latin of Cicero used for rhetorical speaches on the senate floor.
And I also completely agree with you, the grope scene in the movie was completely un-neccesary - my primary response was "good grief - do you think you're lending some type of 'real world' aspect to it? Whatever!" I liked a lot of things in the interpretation the movie gave or even where I disagreed thought, "well, it is consistent as an interpretation and that raises some interesting questions for discussion" but the grope scene was basically an insult to the great Character Rowling has written in Hagrid, which makes it even worse since I like the movie for the most part. It's like "You guys have something good, or at least viable ... why do you have to go and screw it up with that kind of thing ... what's the point?!?!?!"
I love that Rowling herself does not go there ... she definitely explores young love themes like the fact that Cho's crying and female emotional quandry leaves Harry completely baffled (I think of this now because last night our friend Nathan, although married with 7 kids, did the tradtitional bachelor thing with me and we went to a pub, got some food and beer and then went and battled the last-minute shopping crowds because neither of us had gotten our shopping done yet - poor guy was beat because his wife had playfully tricked him into getting out of bed an hour early yesterday morning, she had the baby and it didn't hit him till he was standing there at the sink with his face covered in shaving cream, I laughed pretty hard when he told me, I wouldn't have noticed till I got to work and nobody was there - but when I got in the car last night he was listening to bbok 5 on tape and it was at that scene) ... but Rowling never goes there, she knows how to be a real genuinely respectable woman (not the fake respectability) but have her feet on the ground (earth).
Now, on earthiness in general: if you like it you should read some of Jonathan Swift, such as Gulliver's Travels. I had to study him for a course in 18th Century English Lit. Some pretty Raucous stuff. Or Try Lawrence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, but be warned, the underlying theme of the book is the healthily humble comedy of how hard we try at narrative and how digressive we always are at it (but we really do have to keep trying, it's the only way to survive), so the structure and style carry that through.
Just a word of Consideration on Pauli's mention of The Screwtape Letters.
I mention it only in hopes of providing readers with a more informed appraoch to reading it, because I do recommend the book and think it is very insightful.
Tolkien reportedly had a problem with the book and it was particularly the problem of Saruman: that it is dangerous to study the arts of the enemy. In Potterian/Rowlingian terms: it is dangerous to teach the darks arts themselves, rather than simply defense against dark arts - even under the pretense that this gives one a better grasp of how to defend against them (as Durmstrang does - and one must admit, the DADA post is a dangerous one ... I think the message is that the post cannot be handled properly until somebody like Harry, who has learned not just the practice but the real hardcore thing, teaches it from real world experience against the darkest wizard ... but this is admittedly based in my theory that Harry will live and go on to be the 7th and final DADA teacher and the final answer to the DADA riddle in book 1[the potions riddle on the way to the stone])
Like I said, I recommend the book, but what I recommend is more than anything Charity ... don't treat it as a merely intellectual learning thing - conscoiously make an effort to keep in mind that there are people who suffer greatly under these things, whether you think of them as "Demonic influences" or "mental disorders" such as neurotically compulsive behavior etc. (My personal belief is that there are demons who can capitalize on neurosis very well, not for the sort of "sensational" "possession" but rather for the more subtley dangerous "influence" that is spoken of in the movie Constantine, the "influence peddlers".)
Do not pull a "Danny Saunders." Danny is the genius character in Chaim Potok's The Chosen. At one point in the book Rebbe Saunders, Danny's Father and the Rebbe of the Hasidic community, tells Reuben, the first person narrator, why he has raised Danny in silence. When Danny was 4 he was able to read, and read a very tragic story of a man who lost everything, and all 4 year old Danny could think of was his own glee in finding that he could read and understand the book. "A mind without a heart is a terrible thing," and so Rebbe Saunders taught his 4 year old prodigy to sympathize with the suffering of others the only way he could figure out how to, not through the suffering of active abuse of course, but through the suffering of silence ... trust me, you ball your eyes out when you read the final climactic scene. But this is indeed what the Rebbes of Old did, the "Tzadikkim" (or righteous ones, literally in Hebrew). They led their people as father-figures by taking their people's sufferings on themselves.
All that to say, I recommend the book, but I recommend not being too "fascinated" by it, or too "objective" about it.
Just a note on terms, and I put it here rather than in a post because it is more of a fun thing for me (and hence something with which to reward the reader dilligent enough to follow the comments thread down this far ... I know, and you're thinking, "some reward, buddy" LOL).
In my last comment I used the term that I jokingly said once that I was going to try to coin, "Rowlingian," and I gave very particular guide to pronunciation, which I have since been informed by Dominic was WRONG. But Like Dom's proper pronunciation, it is super cool. With the "G" in that position with the "N" and vowels surrounding it, it must be a soft "g" and thus the pronunciation resembels that of the "Carolingian" and Merovingian" dynasties in French history (the latter being used as a character name in the 2nd and 3rd Matrix movies and Rowling having majored in French in College and taught high school French, so it's even more cool)
I would also like to coin the phrase "Potterian" with the pronunciation "Pa-TARE-ian" (the caps indicating the accented sylabble) ... welcome to the world of the mind of somebody who gets WAY to into languages LOL
just found this reply too....
merlin! is it possible to get WAY too into language? i find it fascinating. can't wait to start doing latin/greek word origins with my kids! i get excited about it. how's that for needing to 'get a life'?
there are a few things i love in reading. one is when the author captures 'moments and moods'. (rowling does this beautifully eg. in the end of GOF when a traumatised harry is just enjoying ron and hermione's company. just being with them while they talk about other things or play chess etc)
another is a beautifully turned phrase. gives me a visceral (?spelling) thrill. unfortunately i can't think of any off hand.
i find a lot of that reading ursula le guin.
and of course a beautifully woven plot or character being revealed is a true delight!
ok.
"rowlingian" so is that rowLINJian?
potterian i like!
my dad is from the midlands in the uk and does the 'g' thing at the end of ing words, so eg, 'singing' is quite a difficult word to say!
(btw pauli, i'm not british myself, but both my parents are/were. i'm very australian really, but have a strong family history in the arts generally, so it comes through. also, my mum's grandfather was a publisher and so books are a big deal in our family.
probably explains a lot of my bias against 'americanizing' british texts (and the other way round too, to be fair) (mary poppins being a particular sore point).
books mentioned.
i have read screwtape letters. it was yonks ago and i seem to remember having a few laughs and a few 'ooohs' but apart from that it wasn't particularly intense or anything.
gullivers' travels i read as a teenager. enjoyed it mostly.
i LOVE 'my name is asher lev' but have never read any more of chaim potok's works. what would you recommend as the next one to look for?
when you were writing about lawrence sterns you lost me completly. could you explain what happens that i'm to look out for again? (maybe in really small words lol)
this is getting long.
ciao
jkr (in australia)
JKR,
yes ... pronuniation = RowlLINJian
I don't think it is possible to get too into language ever ... but when Paulie "de-facto" edits my writing I'm sure he thinks differently LOL
Potok: I would recommend The Chosen first, then maybe The Gift of ASher Lev (sequel to "My Name ..." ... btw, I bought that for a friend who lives in Brooklynn - poor Amy started crying when she finished it ... sitting in a strabucks) of Davita's Harp
Lawrense Sterne - the very nature of his work makes it hard to describe succinctly (it is excessively digressive because it is a humorous look at the digressive tendency of narrative) - the best I could do is retype the 10 page paper I did on it in college for you (and SERIOUSLY edit it - I'm sure I started it at midnight the night before it was due LOL)