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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.

Monday, July 31, 2006

Canon and Fanon: Figuring Out Fandom at Lumos 2006

Ok, as Pauli said ... many posts on their way.
This is just a quickie though as far as my sort of "learning curve" at Lumos this year.
The ladies who I ran into from Le Moyne College in Syracuse NY (Dr. Cathy Leogrande and Sarah Fleming) were really helpful in helping me get a "birds eye view" of HP fandom as it was represented at Lumos. I'm only going to go into one pair of terms, the two that sort of define the major lines of the HP "fandom" (well, the term "fandom" itself, from what I can gather, applies more specifically to the fanfic side, but it seems to me that it should cover all who are fans of the works). Many who read this may already know this material, I'm just throwing it out there really quickly in case any are like me, who was not really familiar with it until Lumos.

The "canon" obviously refers to Jo's work, the actual Harry Potter books, and I'm guessing the two schoolbooks fall into this but maybe people have a subcategory for them. The "fanon" is the ever-growing body of "fanfic," which appears to be quite sizeable. As "secondary writers" like Pauli and myself and John Granger, I don't think we have an "official" status or term, except something general like "commentators" on the canon. John's work obviously falls under the heading of "people who are actually published and making some well deserved money on it because they are really good scholars and writers". I would guess that Jo's interview comments fall along the same line, although obviously much higher authority (although also more mysterious and ambiguous because she is not trying to give anything away) ... falling somewhere between the academic categories of "primary text" and "secondary resource", although closer to the former.

According to the Le Moyne ladies, last year's conference, the Witching Hour, appropriately held in Salem, MA, had a much higher percentage of "fanon" people. They said this year there were probably the same number of fanon people but with the increased size of the conference I would guess that brought the fanon percentage down to around 50. Of the remaining 50 percent I would guess that it was split roughly about in half between people writing mainly on educational issues and those writing on literary analysis of the content ... that's just my rough guess of the breakdown though.

Then, I would add in what I call the "facilitators." This crowd seems to me to be the "backbone" structure of "fandom" as such. Mugglenet and Leaky Cauldron seem to be the two biggest, and combined as the "Leaky Mug" they had a HUGE draw at Lumos. They seem to me, in what they actually produce, to stick mainly to pieces on the material details of the canon and what might be predictable from those said details, such as Mugglenet putting up the piece of the theory that Slughorn stood in for Dumbledore, etc. They also facilitate the "fanon" side of fandom with links to the bigger fanfic network pages etc, but in what they actually put up on their site (aside from the message boards and discussion groups they run, which are pretty huge in themselves), sticking to the basics seems to best allow them to sort of service the largest amount of the "fandom." I would put Steve Vander Ark in this category too because of the focus of his work on filling in the "encyclopedia gaps" left when you experience the world in a story, like an actual visual map of Hogwarts before she put one out, and his matched hers almost exactly when she did put it out, and compiling info together from throughout the work. His is a work that can be, and is, used by all parts of fandom: Pauli and I checking on facts to see if our philosophical/religious readings jive with the physical facts (which is a core tenet of an "incarnational approach" and not becoming gnostic about it); people like Felicity working on really good theories and predictions use it for research; and I imagine fanfic writers use it for consistency and details in their stories, i.e. helpful in keeping the "fanon" materially congruent with the "canon".

Anyway, that is my "bird's eye view" of Harry Potter "fandom" as I kind of got it at Lumos. There are other breakdowns within the "fanon" that I learned about which I won't go into here ... some for time consideration and some for appropriateness for our audience ... but also wanting to be helpful, I'll say that if you have kids and do not know what the terms "slash" and "het" mean [as I did not, and wondered when one of the talks was titled "slash vs het"] - just email me at the address I have here and I'll tell you what I know - always interested in helping people be informed, especially parents), and how it was represented at Lumos - so hopefully it is helpful to some ... I know it was helpful and educational to me learning it this weekend and I was grateful to Cathy and Sarah for taking the time to fill it in for me and some of the history of how the dynamic has been in the history of the conferences. The whole thing is a pretty interesting phenomenon on the sociological level.

Post Script

I just wanted to throw this in here because I forgot to before, and since I mention Felicity in this post I figure it would be a good place. One of the reasons I really like her theory on the Horcruxes being at Hogwarts is that it would keep the book, as a series culmination focused on the school (which represents the world we live in as a whole, with the 4 houses and 4 elements and all ... which makes it really important). Like I said in the comments of the "It's All Right Ma, I'm Only Bleeding" post (responding to Pauli's comment about Dylan's album "Bringing It All Back Home" in general) ... I think Book 7 will revolve around a series of "homecomings" (or "sorts of homecomings" ... I use that phrase for Jo2: in highschool one of my fave songs was "A Sort of Homecoming," both the "Unforgettable Fire" version and the "Wide Awake in America" one) - I think Privet Drive and Hogwarts will be 2 major ones and I like Felicity's theory that places a central part of the battle there (I think the Burrow and the Old Riddle House may be in there as "parallel homes" for Harry and Voldy. I also think that the MOM will be there in a central conflict between The Love Room and the Death Room).
Felicity's post is a good example of what I spoke of above as the importance of the "incarnational." When Pauli and I work on the side we work on, it is so cool to see somebody like Felicity working the detective angle in a way that, if she's right, goes along with some of these "deeper meanings" people like Granger discover, and shows how important it is for such "deeper meanings" to have congruity with the physical side of the equation ... the two are meant to work together, and there is a unique dignity to the physicality.

Anyway, I promise more Lumos material forthrightly. :)
posted by Merlin at 11:26 PM
3 comments


And many more...

Happy Birthday to both J. K. Rowling and Harry Potter! You can add your best wishes in the comments at this mugglenet post.

Well, Merlin has returned with many tales to tell. He's "off" today, taking care of many logistical issues regarding his past, present and future living arrangements. We'll be seeing a lot of post-Lumos posts up in the next few weeks, I'll warrant.
posted by Pauli at 10:38 PM
0 comments


Sunday, July 30, 2006

Oh, no, I've been TAGGED!

New dad Travis tagged Merlin and I to answer a bunch of questions about books. So...

1. One book that changed your life:
The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis

This book made me realize that I could lose my soul and go to hell. If I hadn't read it, I might be there right now. Seriously.

2. One book that you've read more than once:
The Everlasting Man by G. K. Chesterton

This book blew me away a decade ago and more recently about a year ago. It's not the easiest read, but don't give up on it. Just take small bites.

3. One book you'd want on a desert island:
Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy

The Deep Thoughts would go good with the sound of the waves crashing, I think, and it might make me laugh as I meditated on my plight and talked to Wilson.

4. One book that made you laugh:
Groucho and Me by Groucho Marx

The famed funny man's auto-biography.

5. One book that made you cry:
Right Turns by Michael Medved

During the part with his ancestors and relatives dying in their attempts to come over to America. Oy, was I bawling.

6. One book that you wish had been written:
How to Stop What Will Happen on 9/11/2001 by Whoever

7. One book you wish had never been written:
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Fred Engels

I'm sure there are lots that could be placed here -- that was just the first that came to mind. Probably because of Groucho above, no relation.

8. One book you're currently reading:
The Grail Code by Mike Aquilina and Christopher Bailey

9. One book you've been meaning to read:
Spirit of the Liturgy by Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI)

Sitting in my shelf, collecting dust while I blog about Harry Potter.

10. Now I'm supposed to "tag" people. Uhhhh.....this is like duck-duck-goose, right?

Whitney
John (Cubeland Mystic)
Felicity
Mr. Barlow
JKR2

Thanks, Travis, that was actually fun.
posted by Pauli at 10:15 PM
8 comments


Lumos 2006 Class Notes - Saturday - # 2

Why Voldemort Cannot be Named: Traditions, Taboo and Language in Rowling's Harry Potter
-by Jeanne M. LaHaie

This was, overall, a pretty interesting talk (and truly informative), even though I suspect this woman and I would not necessarily see eye to eye on some things (I'll stay away from some things ... she said "I'm more of a ..." but I couldn't figure out how that impacted her particular reading/interpretation here - so it seemed to me like it didn't impact how interesting I found her talk to me, which was cool with me).

She was basically making a suggestion of one possible source for the not naming Voldy thing - medieval Jewish magical practice ("Jewish Name Magic") and its taboos. Apparently they would not say the name of an evil deity because to even speak the name at least risked calling said evil deity to interact with you. This of course automatically set off the mental bell on Granger's thing on invocational magic versus incantational. In having Harry and Dumbledore call Voldy by his "dark lord" name, Rowling is actually not only using incantational magic and not using invocational magic, she is even presenting an argument (well, in the way that stories in particular present their arguments) against invocational magic. If somebody who does not worship a certain deity, say Baal, is still afraid to say the name, they are ascribing a power to Baal (or whatever spirits/demons may have "piggy-backed" on Baal worship) that Baal might not have, giving him undue credit for power by fearing him in that way ... and ironically it is often this very type of thing that actually does give such entities the power (although, I'm not saying to be flippant with a demons name; Baal/demon does not have that power because Christ is more powerful, not because any of us are).

Secondly, there was a neat parallel she had with the myths of Jewish Rabbis in a certain area (Prague, I think) in the middle ages forming a sort of protector from clay (only a very holy Rabbi had the power to do this) and inscribing one of the names of God on its forehead. At some point the protector becomes self-aware, but then, after the protector had saved the people from the particular evil in the story the Rabbi would remove the name and it would return to clay. This is a parallel that would lead one to believe that the scar might be removed when Harry has vanquished Voldy ... interesting theory (it would maybe mean too that Harry will die but then Harry did exist before receiving the scar. Voldy did not create Harry, only made him his equal).

Beyond that there are just a few interesting incidentals, some of hers and some of my mental hiccups from her stuff. She noted that these days title names refer only to context/function ... sort of stripped of idea of "person," which I found interesting. She also tied the lightning bolt to the sign of Zeus and the fear of Zeus. The talk also made me think of the movie "Pi" (the Greek symbol for 3.14...) but I would not recommend that movie to everyone, it is highly stylized and can be quite jarring (my sister, Pauli's wife, found nothing wrong or objectionable with it, but just the style really grated on her nerves) ... anyway, in that movie there is a set of Hasidic Jews trying to persuade the main character (an atheist of Jewish descent who is a number theorist trying to figure out the mathematical system behind the stock market, and also suffers intense [and intensely represented, hence the jarringness] migraine headaches and is paranoid reclusive) to share with them the 216 digit number his computer spit out just before it melted and just after it made a set of stock market picks that contained two picks that were completely illogical ... but dead on. Apparently their lore said that at the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD the last high priest was taken up into heaven, taking with him the true name of God, which has a numerical value of 216 in Hebrew. All that to say that names are really important, and hence the giving and taking of names. In Genesis there is specific formulaic text for God giving names to what He creates and the first task for man as having dominion over the earth is to name the animals (and indeed this leads to the revelation that there was not a mate suitable for him among the animals and the creation of the woman). Voldy's renaming of himself could be seen as a "dark re-creation" of himself.

Fasinating stuff.

The Slytherin Question
by Eva Thienpont

Ok, this one is for Pauli because he wanted to hear it. But also, when I thought about doing it tonight (not going to get to all of them tonight) I was thinking "hmmm not as much interesting as Pauli might have hoped" and I was thinking of doing another one because I thought that one had a point on it I thought very interesting (on the pentangle as a magical symbol) ... but then I checked the notes and found that indeed the other talk did NOT have the pentangle point ... this one did.

Anyway, this lady started with some interesting observations: Rowling's interview statements on Slytherin as "embracing the flaws," the fact that traitors are not unique to Slytherin - Wormtail is arguably the biggest traitor because he was supposed to be the Potters' friend, and he was a Gryffindor, and the fact that everyone in the Order of the Phoenix whose house is known was from Gryffindor except Snape.

She moved from there to the "nature/nurture" debate in regards to Draco and Snape and Voldy, then discussed the "non-interference" policy at Hogwarts and the probability that it is something Rowling agrees with, then set up Gryffindor and Slytherin as a pair, with the former being courage and the latter calculation, and noted a quote from Rowling in an interview saying "the sorting hat is never wrong."

Finally, what she really blew me away with was the pentangle as a magical symbol. Four of the points on the pentangle are for the 4 cosmological elements (fire, earth, air, water), but there is a fifth point symbolizing their unity. In other words, once you get rid of Voldy, all you have is the four points still in oppositional tension ... you need a fifth point to be their unity. I think it is Granger in Looking For God in Harry Potter (but if it is not, if it was in your stuff Felicity ... I apologize ... a lot of stuff flowing in through my eyes and ears recently :) ) that voiced the suspicion that Harry will be shown to have the blood of all 4 founders (or in the case of Slytherin, Voldy's infusion of power/gifts). But, if Harry still hates Snape, he cannot be the unity point. Harry will not only need to see Snape through his mother's eyes of compassion, but part of that will be seeing the world through Snape's eyes ... in short, he must have not just sympathy for, but empathy with Snape.

Without this all is still the four points of tension. Thus she surmises that Harry will overcome Voldy before reconciling with Snape. I have noted this same sort of thing in Lord of the Rings: the ring is destroyed, the black riders gone, we have reached the climax right? No, evil, by definition, cannot exist without good, but good is always more than just the conquering of evil, it has a positive existence of its own. Thus on mid-summer's eve you have the onset of evil in the form of the black riders crossing the fords of Isen, and mid-summers eve one year later you have the symbol of evil finally overcome in Arwen arriving with the company from the north, betrothed to Aragorn. But the wedding itself is on Midsummer's day, beyond the mid-summer's eve book-end framework. The true culmination of the 7th HP book will be a positive relationship between Harry and Snape, even if it only takes place and the deathbed of one or both.

I think it was this lady, but it may have been somebody else, who said that the "If I meet Severus Snape along the way, so much the better for me, so much the worse for him" line is a very Slytherin thing to say -- Harry has more of it in him than he realizes.

The Slytherin Problem

The whole thing in all of this is a point this lady brought out, that in the sorting hat's songs there seems to be the idea that Salazar and Godric were good friends before the disagreement about "blood purity" came up ... ie, there was unity. It would seem to me that if the school with its houses represents the cosmos (4 elements cosmology ... she used the Rowling Quote that Granger had about the houses and the elements) then this original unity lay in the actual founding of the school ... originally the school was the unity. But like in Creation, the seeds of disunity are sown, not in the founding itself, but very quickly thereafter. Eventually this disunity crescendoes to Voldemort and the progress must be made beyond an institution as the unity, to a person as the unity (much like the development from the institution of the Old Testament Law to the person of Christ in the New Testament). This is much like the thought that is developed with regards to the Garden of Eden, that it was not ever meant to be the final rest, but rather a probation ground. So, if the couple had not sinned then the development would have come in another form that was "reward" rather than "redemption," but still the Incarnation.

Either way, as concerns the Potter series, this final unity will have to involve Slytherin in the equation. I think, and I think what she was driving at, is that Snape will be crucial to this, and not just as "a Gryffindor in Slytherin Clothing." It will be through his genuine Slytherin perspective of calculation (in the talk on memory, which I'll get to later, it was mentioned that Snape says to Harry in Book 5, that in not closing his mind, in allowing Snape into his memory, he gives Snape weapons to use ... it will likely be something about this kind of understanding that Snape has that will have played some crucial role in the physical events that help Harry to overcome Voldy, and Harry will have to "get it" that this was the case and that Snape was doing right ... did I already mention in writing on one of the talks that somebody presented the theory that even in actively killing Dumbledore, as a "cunning" and calculating move, that he was doing the "best thing," because he was weighing the life of Dumbledore, as an already doomed man, against his own usefulness to the good cause and that of Harry's survival?)

End
Anyway, that is it for tonight ... I'll continue the "Lumos Findings" when I get back up North East. :)
posted by Merlin at 3:03 AM
0 comments


Saturday, July 29, 2006

Lumos 2006 Class Notes - Saturday - # 1

Ok, this has been a mental whirlwind ... some seriously packed speakers here, pretty exciting.
This is going to be sort of a "highlights" of the stuff I went to today. There is still a ton to unpack ... 5 talks to listen to on CD that I did not make it to, another one I thought of that I am going to hop over there and order or order by email (the one on the "trickster" type) ... or maybe I'll just read the paper - there is a CD of data that was included with the packet that has all of the papers that were presented by non-"headliner acts." Amazing. I would suggest going to the Lumos website and see what deal they have going on as far as paper publication or download publication; their official deal with the presenters is publication of the papers.

But for now, here are the highlights and we'll discuss more later (drop comments here about what interests you most and I'll be sure to dig especially for that in the CD of the papers).

The Byronic Hero and the Gothic Fathers of Snape

That is, Lord Byron's gothic hero. Pretty interesting. ... There are 3 types that influence Snape as Byron's gothic hero: The "noble outlaw" (Sirius Black), the "gothic villain" (Voldemort) and the Prometheus character (Dumbledore).

The gothic villain is usually mysterious and handsome (as is young Tom Riddle, a charmer) - the Byronic hero elevated to a level beyond the human condition to a level that would usually kill such a hero; Prometheus is not gothic at all - his main crime is being kind or merciful ("I trust Severus Snape completely.")

What interested me was the outlaw because that character contributes anti-social/solitude characteristics. Here Linday Ludvigsen (the presenter) noted the individualistic tendency of Slytherin house (vs the group identity exhibited in the other houses) in this development of Snape (influence of Black on a Slytherin). In the other 3 houses people hold each other accountable for how their actions affect the house standing as far as points especially. (In Slytherin they won't say "hey, that's wrong, don't do it and get us in trouble" they'll say "whatever you do is your business, just don't get caught).

It really interested me because of some concepts in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger that my housemate Dom and I have talked about. Heidegger is a controversial figure, and there are some real reasons for that (including having been a member of the Nazi party) -- and I am not claiming all of his philosophy to be sound. But if you're like Dom, you look for the elements in a philosophy that, even if they are in a flawed form, once carefully separated from the flaws, are redeemable. Thus he take MH's 2 terms Daseign and Dasmann. The first is an individual being. The second is maybe closest to "group identity." Dom puts it "it is the someone new to be." In other words, in the group identity the sum is more than the whole of its parts because each of the parts is now given over to a new dimension of identity, that is being "a member of this or that particular group."

I have always been cautious of the dasmann, the group identity, the "us" ... mainly because it usually seems to yield a them as an "excluded other." I have said in conversation that "the only safe dasmanns are those that are sacramentally-based, such as the mystical body of Christ in the Church, marriage and family (believing as a Catholic that marriage is a sacrament) etc. But this causes me to formulate a little more subtly because the dasmann of the houses is a good thing. As a Christian-Catholic interpreter I would say that, on the symbolic level, the houses, as institutions of a school of magic, can be "given" in the way the sacramental is. A lot of fine lines here: you can become wrongly prejudicial about even such divinely given dasmanns. Sometimes the reclusiveness of the Slytherin could be all right as a balance to an over-zealous group identity ... but not at Voldy's level (I think there is more meant to be a dynamic flow of give and take between individual identity and identity as part of a group ... and Voldy never had the other distinct thing, the trust thing of what Martin Buber talks about as the "I and Thou" relationship, which is not a group identity, but rather a relation to an other, but not an excluded other). Slytherin house did turn out more definitely dark wizards.

That was more than a highlight of my thoughts interwoven with the talk ... I'm going to go get some food and write more later.

I promise, there is a lot for of good stuff and fun stuff to come!

(NOTE: See Comment 1 for a content amendment by Merlin to this post)
posted by Merlin at 11:28 PM
2 comments


Busted at Lumos 2006!

Well, It finally happened ... Snape busted me and exposed me to the whole Lumos wizarding community as a were-pirate. The Ministry swooped in and had me before the Wizengamot in a matter of seconds. A laptop with wi-fi was brought in and www.MuggleMatters.com brought up and they indicted me instantaneously of writing about Pirates of the Caribbean on a Harry Potter named page. They were just bringing that Dementor back in to give me a nasty smooch when I managed to escape through a daring burst of swashbuckling and magic. I hopped up on a table and grabbed a chandelier and swung and jumped (acrobatically doing a couple flips in mid-air, narrowly missed by numerous stun and impediment spells), landing just beyond the area protected by anti-apparition enchantments and apparated back to my hotel room across the way ... but not before yelling "Gryffindors, Hufflepuffs, Ravenclaws and Slytherins! You will always remember this as the day you almost caught Captain ... uh ... er ... Wizard Merlinus Ambrettus!"

The conference is not actually over yet and I am not actually leaving till tomorrow but I thought I would come over here and blog. They're having an auction and stuff tomorrow and the leaving feast (but I would not be in the great hall for that one anyway ... and it's from 9 -11, which makes going to Church at the Cathedral way over by the strip and getting to the airport on time for the security checks and all for the flight a little close). Tonight is mainly eaten up at the conference with a HUGE podcast by "LeakyMug" - the combined forces of Mugglenet and Leaky Cauldron. I figure they will have that available online for those interested, but I would have gone anyway if it wasn't just madly packed. Seriously, the thing did not start til 6 or 6:30 and there was already a huge line when I was walking to the last class at 4 pm. I'm more the academic type and am not really well traveled in the HP "fandom," but I gotta tell ya ... those folks have some seriously dedicated and excited fans... it's pretty cool.
posted by Merlin at 10:55 PM
0 comments


More Lumos Pictures and Morning Report


Wow ... busy and dangerous morning here at the Marriott in Vegas ... first thing I get here this morning, still groggy, and I get attacked by a Dementor in the hallways and have to kick his butt practically all by myself to save this girl.


And Harry was even nearby, but apparently he was too engrossed in Hogwart's a History (yeah, right) to lend a hand.


Luna was nearby with her lion hat but she said she and her said hat and friends only specialize in support at Quidditch games.


After that I just narrowly slipped by Draco and Lucius and a gang of Slytherins, but you can sort of see Lucius sitting there smiling evilly at me, I know just ready to whip that wand out of that cane and hex me ... but, like I said, I escaped ...

Well, that is I escaped from the frying pan into the fire ... right into the clutches of Ritah Skeeter, who thought it was terribly interesting that I kicked a Dementor's cold, scaly posterior all by me onesy but started focusing immediately on how I got my start as a complete wild nutter up in the hills (in the early Arthurian material.)

My case was definitely not helped by the fact that this guy, a vendor at the conference, who looks like he might even be crazier than me, if that's possible, was the only one who lent a hand in any way with said demented beastie.

I skillfully got Ritah focused on said nutty vendor and proceeded to actually accomplish one of my stated missions for today ... a pic of Red Hen. Sorry for the darkness, it was from a distance with the zoom ... she was giving an interview to some podcast (probably Mugglenet) and just as that was ending there was a mad queue for a talk in the nearest marquis, so I didn't get to talk to her or get my pic with her, but the day is not done yet...

Her name is Joyce Odell.

Anyway ... there was a mix up with the ticket John gave me ... it was the red ticket that was for today's luncheon and he gave me the blue one ... oh, well ... hearing him and talking yesterday with him was the real bonus (but the meal would have been nice and I would have liked to hear the stuff on education models at Hogwarts.)

This morning I heard a talk on Snape as a Byronic (as in Lord Byron) gothic hero and the different literary types that contribute to him, which I'll do a spot more on later, and a talk on the whole not mentioning Voldy's name and Judaic medieval magic practices of fear of names and invocational magic (which kind of connects with Granger's stuff on it in Looking for God in Harry Potter, but with an interesting twist on Voldy ... more on that later, too.)

Good lineup this afternoon for me:

- A Shining Silver Thread: Memory and Identity in Harry Potter

- The Slytherin Question

- Harry Potter and the Problem of Evil: An Ancient Riddle Revisited (I'm drooling over that one ... the guy's bio sounds like he is an old-school powerhouse - Rev. Francis Bridger.)

- On Hobbits and Wizards: Comparing the Magical Realms of Middle-Earth

And with that, I'm off to class!

posted by Merlin at 3:37 PM
1 comments


Lumos 2006 Class Notes - Friday

OK - I was a delinquent student and missed a couple classes, but they have an order sheet of CD recordings of the talk, I got the order form. They said that there is a website in the works to order online after the conference (not at a discount price as at the conference but I'm going to be putting the email addy up here anyway ... I missed the talk given by the ladies I ate with last night, from Le Moyn College, because I was hanging out doing the Granger thing [there was a time overlap so I only would have been able to catch half their talk anyway], but they had been telling me last years conference was much more devoted to fan-fic and art and what they are calling the "fanon" (fan canon) but this years has much more on education and using HP in education ... lots of education types here, so some of you may really find some of that really interesting ... There was a CD that came with the conference packet and if it has education stuff on it maybe we can provide some of it here.)

But I got some very exciting stuff today.

(I'll try to post some of the pics I took today after I get this out ... just some fun stuff of costumes, and one where you can see how packed Vander Ark's talk was.)

Voldy as Malignant Narcissist - by Maria Hsia Chang

Really good. She went through Voldy's characteristics and showed how they were common of pathological narcissism - such as young Tom's affable charm, being a consummate liar, but obsessed with telling when others are lying, envious and projecting that onto others (connected with the duplicity issue in HP when talking to Dumbledore, "greatness inspires envy, envy engenders spite, spite spawns lies"[HBP 443]), prefers being feared to being loved (for a great portrayal of this see the lines by Chaz Palmenterri on it as "Sonny" in his movie "A Bronx Tale"), fearing loss of love (I noted to myself ... "Davey Jones").

The thing I liked about this woman's talk was her clarity on one issue. She asked the question of whether the source of this narcissism might lay in his childhood, and concluded that while there were factors there, these could not explain it all ... only his own choices could have full caused it. The best formulation was when somebody asked in the Q&A how culpable he is and if this is "mental illness." She said she has pondered this one a bit (ie this was not a pat answer, that it had taken her some thinking to arrive at this conclusion) that Voldy's is not mental illness but a spiritual illness. I was not quick thinking enough to get in on the Q&A but I should have asked her to compare and contrast Lupin and Voldy (or more accurately Lupin and Greyback) as a way to illustrate this point. If magic represents psychic capabilities, that is capabilities in the soul, that connect us to higher realities, then Lupin's "magical malady" is symbolic of psychological malady, but he does not make the same choices as Greyback or Voldemort.

Religion in the Wizarding World - Panel

I left this one early because it was not what I was looking for, but there were two things I thought would be useful here.

1. The reason it did not interest me is that it was too "realist." They were addressing the question "why don't kids in the books go to Church or practice a religion." They were all very professional and I respect their work, I just don't think that a good question. The one woman gave statistics on current UK and very low church attendance, especially among the predominant group, Anglicans - thus, the religious practice of Hogwarts student would accurately reflect the demographical stats in the UK. While this is a good argument for whether the books accurately do that, I don't think that doing that falls within the scope of their literary art.

What I mean is that I think a much better argument is one that I heard Joseph Pearce use in a talk at Franciscan University once, regarding the absence or formal religion in Lord of the Rings. He said the setting of LOTR is "pre-Incarnation" and since it cannot be about the Jewish people, the only option would be paganism. I would prefer the term "extra-Incarnational" and HP is exactly why. The time of Harry is obviously after Christ, but the setting, because it is mythic symbolism (magic and all), is "outside" of that historical setting (ie this only bears slight coincidental common characteristics with the official genre of "historical fiction" ... it is decidedly not that genre). They do practice Christmas and Easter but only in the aspects of these holidays in which the core meaning has been diffused into sociological affectation.

The panelists focused on a question "what would be the reaction in my religious tradition [they were from various backgrounds] if a kid got a letter from Hogwarts" and I just didn't feel like that was an accurate question for this issue, even though I respected the work and research they had put in on it.

2. The other thing relates to the "Potter teaches Wiccan" thing. One of the panelists (Karen Dougherty) was, in fact, a "frequent attendee of Neo-Pagan festivals ... a member of the Earth Spirit Community and ... a twenty year member member of Arn Draiocht Fein: a Druid fellowship" (- from the Lumos program) ... and her comment was "I just don't see it." (I view this as being kind of like Ian McKellan on the issue of homosexuality in Lord of the Rings ... he's a big activist for that cause, but he's also honest ... he said it would be untrue to Tolkien's text to introduce it and it would seem from his choice and performance that he still respects that text as a good piece of art to be involved with.)

In Defense of Ginny: Harry's Ideal Girl - Panel

There was some good stuff in this talk but only one thing I can work into a "structure/prediction" post here. Some of the other cool notes include the noticing that the library scene in Book 5 (over contacting Sirius) is where we see Harry start to trust Ginny in a mode that he can't pull off with Ron and Hermione (the trust is there but other things are too - Harry's worry about Hermione's judgment on morality and her reaction), and that each has a unique relationship with Voldy - not only unique from others but unique from each other ... Harry will never have the "possession" (the whole school year with that intimate of contact with Riddle) and she will never have his particular experience of Voldy, they will always have to trust each other's complimentary perspective and others will have to respect their combined perspective/knowledge.

The thing I thought was cool was their shared "leader" role in regards to what one of the women referred to as the primary and secondary trios, especially if the primary trio of Harry, Ron and Hermione go a little bit "Indiana Jones" for a bit in book 7 - Ginny will be the leader of the trio consisting of herself, Neville and Luna (another reason to see Neville and Luna getting together ... just kidding, just thought I would toss that in there) ... I thought that was kind of cool.

The only other thing here is that one of the women said that, based on reading the books and on some of the stuff Jo has said in interviews about how she wanted to craft that element of the books, romance is and will always be a "subplot" in the books, not a main plot. I would frame it, rather, in the language of symbolism in the line of thought of Charles Williams (in an out of print essay called "Religion and Love in Dante") that even not only is marriage symbolic of divine Grace (and in Catholic theology, that "symbolism" being seen as sacramental) but the psychological state of "being in love" is symbolic ... (along the lines of the medieval thing of seeing courtly love as symbolic of Grace), ie romance ... and I would call this more of a "subsidiary symbolism" in the books, but with a real connection to the main symbolism of the main plot.

"Lucky You": Gender Agency and Alternate Myth Making in the Characterization of Ginny Weasley - Gareth Fisher

This was a great talk. I'll try to compactly synopsize the main point and how I was a bit chuffed (I love that word since Jo2 brought it up on her site, I think from the books, but either way, I love it) that it supported my chiastic reading and the Quidditch imagery. :)

The "Lucky You" is from in Book 5 when Ginny confronts Harry about the fact that he thought he was possessed but never asked the one person who really had been possessed - her - to see how his experience compared. He say "I forgot" and she says "Lucky You".

Fisher started by saying he would not be focusing on the psychological meaning of myth (as do Jung and Joseph Campbell) but on the anthropological matter of myths as having a role in organizing society. Particularly he focused on the fact that this is not a static matter, but one in which some myth forms get re-written. Specifically, Ginny begins in book 2 as the "helpless maiden" heroine who owes Harry her heart because he saved her life. But Rowling rewrites the myth and in book 5 we begin to see Ginny develop as more than a helpless maiden in her relationship with Harry, and by book 6 Harry "gets the girl" but definitely out of the "heart debt for saving her life" deal ... the myth has developed. Fisher made the point that Ginny does pay Harry back, but in the form of other things he really needs like a good kick in the pants when he is moping, and also a sympathetic ear (library scene in book 5, about contacting Sirius, noted in the just previous panel discussion on Ginny). In book 5 we begin to see her development as a character and it is with the wisdom from this that she repays Harry.

The thing I liked is that book 2 (Harry saves the girl) and 6 (Harry gets the girl but no longer because of the "heart debt" idea) and linked in the chiasm. The other part is that Ginny's "non-passive" quality as heroine is shown in that she gets Harry as much as he gets her in that they get together after she catches the snitch to win the match.

Welcome to the Wizarding World - Steve Van Ark

Let me start by saying, Van Ark is a phenomenal speaker ... completely gripping and entertaining. I wish I could give you all the whole experience. At one point he had up a map of London and was cataloguing the POA text details on the travels of the Knight Bus when it picked Harry up, then he said "so I have overlaid on this map of London the route taken by the bus on the night in question." and up came a complete mess of lines criss-crossed all over the map of England. then he said "and I have overlaid that with the flu network" and up came scribbles in another color covering the whole map as well.

He had a ton of details, really fascinating, and I'll get to them under his second point, sort of my closing point on his talk.
Well, let me change that - he had 2 main points: Time (such as establishment of MOM in 1692 act of secrecy) and Setting, and these had fascinating details I will put under his second "preliminary point" - things you have to understand before even beginning to talk about the Potterverse - and these 2 preliminary points will be my two main points of his talk (hope that wasn't too confusing).

1. Wizarding Logic:
Because of magic, any place you are is ever only about 40 seconds from any other place. Thus, in the wizarding world (I loved this statement and so did everybody else, everyone was rolling laughing) - if you live in Hogsmeade, and you attend Hogwarts, how do you get to Hogwarts at the beginning of term? You go to London to catch the train at platform 9 and 3/4 ... because that is where the Hogwart's express leaves from and that is how you get to Hogwart's. My way of saying it is that in the hierarchy of truth, "scientific" truth (such as "the shortest distance between two points is a straight line" - material quantification) is lower down the totem pole that things such as relationship and function/role. (in other words, and I can explain this a little more in comments if anybody wants ... my point is that, even the material world is not truly/fully defined by the "material quantification" of Descarte's "res extensia" ["extended reality/matter"] ... ie the it's quantifiability))

2. "Jo Logic"
The point on "material quantification" dovetails nicely with "Jo Logic" because Vander Ark himself used the language that she has a clear and vivid mental picture, but "she's not that good at quantifying it" (personally I think this is why "Jomione" has Hermione into arithmancy, which is basically numerology rather than "quantification" math, like the "precision" needed for potions.

In an interview Jo said that she doesn't have a floormap of Hogwarts (although it seems like one has since been provided by her, at least as far the grounds in relation the castle), but that she does have "a clear mental picture." In fact, Vander Ark put up a map that he had made in 2001 from the books and then the one she provided since the interview and they were almost identical, and his point was not that he was so clever, but that her mental picture was so clear and brought through into the text so well that somebody else was able to make a map like this.

The thing he brought out is how believable this image she has is and how well she carries it through to the page. Hence some of the stuff he went through under "place." I mean, he did or has had done some serious stuff, and it was a riot to listen to. He has a buddy in England who actually did experiments in Surrey to try to locate the location of Little Whinging ... what neighborhood did she base it on, meaning what neighborhood has the "feel" (and I mean this guy did in depth studies on the noted architecture of the Dursley house) ... and he (this correspondent of Van Ark's) even actually did one test of walking around dragging a trunk through the various neighborhoods ... and is pretty sure he found # 4 private drive. This guy also pinned down the location of the Leaky Cauldron, and there is a place in Exeter (where Jo went to university) named "Burrow Hill Farm" surrounded by locations/towns, such as "Chudley" and "Dawlish."

He pointed out that the thing is not whether or not Jo consciously had these places in mind ... maybe she just passed by them once, but certain things about the world she has lived in stuck in her head, certain feels, and she is really good visualizing those feels in a concrete image of a place and at crafting those feels on the page (from my writing prof in undergrad, I would say that JKR is capable of putting "the smell" of a place on the page, the sense of smell being one of the most difficult to get but the most effective is you can nail it ... particularly the way she characterizes Harry's impression of Ginny when he smells amortensia fumes)

Disney Does Derrida - John Granger

Wow ... a lot to write here ... I may just pop some highlights up and then write a more thorough post when I get back, because in conversing with him briefly outside after the talk I got to ask him some about something from "Looking for God in Harry Potter" that I want to write about too because it relates (when I get the lines of thought drawn out) to the whole "bipartite vs tripartite" discussion Jo2 and I have delved into here).

First of all ... John Granger is a great guy. He's a great speaker too: energetic, genuine, clear ... in short amazing.

Second, I really respect the attention he gives and the respect he has for the intellectual hard work of others and the genuine interest he shows in it. Let me explain: there were two women with him helping him, one was his wife and there was another, and I'm pretty sure the one I am talking about here was the other. When I said who I was to John, she said "oh yes, I read the thing on Pirates of the Caribbean ... I took the advice and printed it out" ... Now all I ever knew is that Pauli had emailed John himself to check out our site ... but he must have cared enough to pass it on in his organization a little for others who work with him to see what they think too .. which to me speaks of respect for what people are doing, a willingness to take a minute and actually focus on what somebody is saying (and with as much email as the guy gets, his minutes are at a premium price). ... (and since you [the woman working with John, whose name I was too flustered, ie excited, in the business and jostling around of it to get] read the piece on Pirates, if you stop back and are reading this, please drop a comment and say hello ... it meant a lot to me that you had read the piece.)

Third - an interesting revelation ... Red Hen is a woman named Joyce who is in tight with Granger, has one of the pieces in the Who killed Albus DD book (she was there in the audience but by the time I could identify her from a comment he made back her direction and a reply she gave, I couldn't get the camera ready in time to snap a good pic before she left early and I didn't see her any after that) ... I have come to agree with Pauli that RH's theory of the whole remainder of Riddle's soul having gone into the scar, leaving only memory/ego and will/malice as "vapormort" (vapormort not having a soul) ... does not fit Rowling's world (and this goes back to the bipartite-tripartite thing that I hope to get into more in a later post.)

Signing Off

Anyway, that's all for right now. It's late here.
posted by Merlin at 1:35 AM
14 comments


Can you see Merlin now?

EVERYBODY should be able to see the pictures now. Love the one of Merlin & J. G. -- lot of brain power in that frame! It's great to hear that the Merle-ster is going to make it into the key-note luncheon.

I'm happy to have my copy of Looking for God in HP signed -- thanks M. I should take a moment to highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the symbolism in Rowling's books. If you are not particularly religious you will be fascinated by the symbols and narrative analysis. If you are a religious Christian, my bet is that you will learn a lot of things you didn't know; so much of the rich symbolism of early and Medieval Christianity have been tossed out in the fashion of modernism -- a revival is most definitely in order!

Which reminds me: just got my copy of another book The Grail Code by Chris Bailey and our friend and blog-roller, Mike Aquilina. I'd blogged about it earlier and we have a link to the site on the side-bar -- the book looks like another winner!
posted by Pauli at 12:02 AM
1 comments


Friday, July 28, 2006

A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words: John Granger and Merlin


Granger's Talk on Post-Modernism in Potter was fantastic and I got to talk to him afterwards and get this pic (and got your book signed too Pauli).

When Pauli and I had last spoken this morning I had had to inform him that I wasn't going to be able to attend the Key Note Luncheon of the panel discussion tomorrow with Granger in it because, as we had not known, those were separate deals that were sold out as far back as October of last year (according to the one girl at a table I sat at for the feast last night) ... well, I had not done my homework as thoroughly as Hermione and failed to notice Granger was doing the Post Modernism workshop talk, and then I found that and went and got to hear him and got to speak (he knew who I was when I told him, said Pauli's emails have been great) ... AND, I am now going to be able to attend the Luncheon of the panel Granger is on Tomorrow .... WOOO-HOOO !!

Much to write when I get back to the hotel later (lots of great talks today) BUT - for here, I do have a better answer for Felicity on the size. During Steve Vander Ark's (from HP Lexicon) this afternoon (which was packed) he made mention of future plans to do some more sleuthing in the English countryside next year for "real" HP places (this stuff was great, the places this other guy has sleuthed out for him and he has checked out, the real world settings that they have found that form the texture of Rowling's book settings) -- Vander Ark said something about "oh, you're going too? great! 1200 of us running around over there" or something to that effect ... the important thing is the number ... 1200 must be the rough head count.

I'm going now to get more info from the recordings table and see if they will give order sheets for ordering CDs of talks after the conference is over ... I missed the trickster talk for the Vander Ark talk today (the HP Lexicon is just such a huge name you have to go to that one if you can :) )
posted by Merlin at 8:06 PM
2 comments


Pictures and Fun Stuff From the Night Before "Classes Begin"

To answer your questions Felicity ... a lot. I snapped this during the welcoming banquet this evening (I was at the far end from the head table, but I was midway widthwise, which went probably 3 to 4 tables in either direction from me). I was at the opening banquet in the Great Hall because I have a blue dot on my badge - the people with orange dots had to eat in another dining room and they will get to have the farewell feast in the Great Hall, whereas I won't. ... To quote the Hitchhiker' Guide "It's big".

One of the lady's sitting next to me was from Le Moyne College, "the Jesuit College of Central New York" and says she knew the current President of Fordham while he was at Le Moyne.

This is in the vendors area, I'll have to take some mor pics tomorrow of some of the stuff they have for sale: Sets of robes, some pretty fancy wands and jewelry (oh yeah ... and that isn't a statue of Dobby ... that's really him - he made a guest appearance ... I've got some nasty welts to show for a wise-crak I made about Harry :) )


Just a taste of some of the costumes I snapped really quickly. Some of these people are pretty thorough. I'll try to get more better pics tomorrow ... there was a couple showed up as beaters, had the whole 9 yards, great costumes


This is Vegas from the air (with a little delayed exposure and some turbulence.)

NEWS

1. Okay, My (tentative) schedule for tomorrow:

- Not Just Good and Evil: Moral Alingment in Harry Potter

- Love Potion # 9: Vice, Volition and Voldemort

- A Study in Evil: Voldemort, the Malignant Narcissist

- I Solemnly Swear I am up to no Good: The Trickster archetype in HP and Beyond

- Harry Potter and the Sacntuary of Everyday Life: JK Rowling's Complex treatment of the Trope of Normalcy

2. Rock and Roll:

I was pretty impressed with the concert tonight. I figured it was going to be not the type of thing you can judge like other shows where you go to see a band and say that they were good, or not so good, etc. I was expecting it to be "actish," which of course it was because it is a big Potterfest; and I was expecting it to be "conferency," (rather than concertish) which it was - no real stage lighting, not a really big PA system - Draco and the Malfoys was basically 2 guys on guitars with a taped drum trak and the one "Draco" then played drums as Ron Weasely for the 4th year Hary and the 7th year Harry, who comprised Harry and the Potters (young Harry played keys and once a sax and old Harry played guitar).

For all that though, and the fact that all the songs were stuff from the books ... it was very interesting, fun ... and professional. the act was good ... they played the characters up well, and they played and sang really professionally ... although in the "pumped up rock" genre that has different tones than in other forms of music performance (I really like the rock myself)... what I mean is they were tight. Even with the taped stuff, they had it down well.

The stuff was witty. The Draco's did more Goth/Grunge type stuff, but pretty clean soundwise, not super-muddy arrangements. And the Potters did more of your Weezer-type popped up punk. Younger Harry had a pretty good semi-hyper-active version of Dan Radcliffe talking about how important themes like love and frienship, and Rock, would stick it to "the man," Voldy. The wit had some to do historical sense too. At one point the 2 potters and the Weasley all stood up and were doing the Pete Townsend Windmill but it was to a tape-track so it was basically the "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" motion, which I found hilarious. And The Draco's did a cool version of "99 Red/Luft Balloons" ... but only it was "99 Death Eaters" (with tones of both the Nena original and the live punk version t the band 7 Seconds did ... personally I always really liked the German version by Neena because she puts some personality into it that isn't there in the Enlish version ... you can tell German is her native tongue.)

... my point is, it all sounds campy on paper but these guys pulled the act off as a pretty decent rock concert, despite no stage lighting other than the house lights in the room and a smaller PA system and using taped drum tracks on some songs, etc. -- it was credible as a rock show as far as sound and performance. I was impressed and it was fun and witty ... All the costumed people were having a blast dancing too

I'll be posting tomorrow from the convention on the various talks.

posted by Merlin at 2:34 AM
5 comments


Thursday, July 27, 2006

Lumos

Lessee if this works...

Just taking a breather in the lobby after sifting around some more ... the wizards chess was a bit hard to follow from the sidelines, but looked terribly fun for those playing ... mostly younger types.

The Opening Feast is at 5, but not sure which room I'll be in, apparently so many people that they have to split up the opening feast and closing feast between two rooms, and you're assured to be in the Great Hall (rather than the other room) for one of them but you don't know which (they made you choose a colored dot coming in that determines...)

Pretty amazing how big this thing is!
posted by Merlin at 7:37 PM
1 comments


Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Study Finds HP Has Positive Impact on Kids School Work

Hat tip to Harry Potter's Page for this article. Here's an excerpt:

The vast majority of parents (89%) say that reading Harry Potter has helped their child enjoy reading more, and 76% say that reading Harry Potter has helped their child do better in school.

The findings also show that Harry Potter books have had a significant impact on the reading attitudes and behaviors of boys. More boys than girls have read Harry Potter (57% vs. 51%), and a greater number of boys than girls say that they did not read books for fun before Harry Potter (61% vs. 41%).
posted by Pauli at 11:16 AM
3 comments


News from Lumos-bound Professor

I emailed John Granger yesterday regarding the "missing links" on his site. His reply confirmed my suspicions that this had some to do with the new publications shown on his home page. He writes:

The posts have all come down because I have revised and expanded them for publication along with a host of new stuff. The first collection is Unlocking Harry Potter: The Serious Reader's Guide to the World's Best Selling Books and it is about the four big patterns and formulas that Ms. Rowling uses to write her books. My talk at Lumos will be about her "postmodern realism" which, with literary alchemy, I think are the two big ideas to "getting" why these books are so popular -- and why both academics and culture warriors hate them.

The second collection, The Pope Hates Harry Potter? Hardly: Essays on the Controversies and Christian Content of Joanne Rowling's Harry Potter Novels, pulls together much of what I've written on the Potter books as edifying literature with an FAQ and a brand new essay on Rowling and Lewis, in light of her recent attempts to distance herself from that association. God willing, I'll have TOCs, sample chapters from each book along with ordering information "up" on the site by summer's end.
Firstly, thanks John for taking the time out from your "pre-Lumos scramble" to answer my email. When I read the phrase postmodern realism I knew I was in for a series of really good conversations with Merlin. He's often talked about how HP has a psychological layer that is absent in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. This absence is neither negative or positive of course, but PMR serves as a succinct explanation of what is new about the HP phenomenon. Some folks who object to the books have pointed out that while LotR supposedly occurs in the ancient past and fairy stories traditional occur "once upon a time", the Potter novels take place in the here and now in a kind of parallel universe. This realism, they conclude would make kids more apt to be sucked into magic, witchcraft, etc.

I don't know... if my kids want to race around the yard pointing sticks at each other and yelling stupefy" I don't see the difference between that and running around with sticks shouting "bang". And if my kids actually spend hours attempting to jinx a broom so it will fly I doubt that's a bigger waste of time that the hours a spent in 7th grade trying to beat PacMan. But I'm digressing.

I know Merlin will have plenty to say on this subject of PMR. In our conversation last night we covered everything from Shakespeare to Jane Austen to M. Night Shyamalan in the space of several hours. You can't talk about anything with him, you have to talk about everything. I guess that's what you get with encyclopedia managing editors, but that's what we like about him!
posted by Pauli at 7:32 AM
0 comments


Tuesday, July 25, 2006

R.A.B. and the Big Switcheroo

Hat Tip to Felicity/Maureen for pointing out this great theory from another sleuth, David Camillus. The gist is that R.A.B. is Regulus Black and that he pulled a switcheroo on the lockets before the fake was ever hidden. Felicity pointed out to me in an email that the theory
    1. Explains why the fake locket was at the bottom of the basin covered
      in the poison, apparently undisturbed, and
    2. Eliminates the problem of explaining how one person could have managed to cross in the boat and drink the poison.
Professor Mum posited in this post that Bellatrix may have been involved in the task of placing the Horcrux for Voldemort. She cites Bellatrix's quote in HBP Chapter 2: "The Dark Lord has, in the past, has entrusted me with his most precious--if Lucius hadn't--". Felicity concluded: "Voldemort gave the diary horcrux to Lucius, so there is no reason he wouldn't have given the locket to Bellatrix."

I feel like Dr. Watson surrounded by all these detectives. This theory made me ponder something about the nature of horcruxes: does the creator of a horcrux have to get away from his horcruxes for some reason, i.e., do the bits of soul cause pain to each other in close proximity? It does seem odd that Voldemort wouldn't take care of really important stuff like stashing a horcrux by himself. Of course he always hangs out with that silly snake which Dumbledore seems to think is a horcrux. Someone somewhere pointed out that if the diary horcrux had succeeded in taking bodily form in book 2 that version of Tom Riddle probably wouldn't have been very good friends with the reinvigorated Voldemort of book 4.
posted by Pauli at 11:59 PM
6 comments


Robed and Ready

I'm sure it will be nice for Merlin to get out of his whole "muggle disguise" for a bit. Is it just me or does this guy look as shady as Mundungus Fletcher? I assure you, however, that he smells better than ol' Dung. Definitely a wizard, but looks as if he's got some pirate in him as well. Hmmmmm...
posted by Pauli at 9:49 PM
1 comments


Monday, July 24, 2006

The Horcrux Hunt

Maureen of Felicity's Mind emailed these links to me from her site, on possibilities of 2 of the Horcruxes.

http://felicitys-mind.livejournal.com/2006/07/21/ - the Hufflepuff Cup hidden at Hogwarts?

http://felicitys-mind.livejournal.com/2006/07/22/ - "Something of Ravenclaw's or Gryffindor's"

As I said in a comment on the second one, detective work is not my strongest point ... but both of her pieces seem pretty well put together to me, and tied out nicely.
Some real possibilities, and both were a fun read.

I think Jomione (that is my new name for Rowling as a braniac Hermione type) is really into this kind of thing, that it is "up her ally." I can definitely see her working clues like this in.
posted by Merlin at 7:20 PM
2 comments


Sunday, July 23, 2006

New stuff at Hogwart's Professor

I popped over to John Granger's website only to be greeted with this picture, ostensibly a book cover for a new publication. Looks really interesting, but there's no description or link or anything. Definitely a teaser!

I checked Amazon -- nothing there, so I'm speculating that it might be something available only at Lumos. But never fear; our intrepid Merlin will uncover the scoop on this publication.
posted by Pauli at 10:01 PM
2 comments


Dead Man's Chest Post 2: Christ Figures and Bad Guys

Intro

(Warning: I HIGHLY recommend cutting and pasting this out to a Word document to read it more at your leisure ... if you want to know why, scroll down to the length details given in the section "The End (finally)" ... if you noticed Pauli's cautions on getting into late-night bull sessions with me at Lumos, you can guess why :) )

Ok, I am herein embarking ("it's a nautical term") upon the rewriting of the original post on Jack and Barbosa - let's Hope I don't end up feeling like shooting anymore monkeys :)

I wanted to use Sumara's questions on this because I think, as I said, that it is insightful on her part that the 2 basic questions came up together, because I think they are connected. In fact, I think they are connected in a theme that we have discussed here occasionally in relation to Harry Potter - the theme of the "cunning" of the serpent.

So to sort of lay out the following I'll restate Sumara's Questions:

1. Jack seems to be heroically Christ-like in facing the beastie on his feet ... but what do you make of how he got there? How "intentional" is it? Or did he simply "get caught" by Elizabeth.

2. Barbosa was the "bad guy" in movie 1 but at the end of Movie 2 he seems to be going to be the path to the finding of Jack resurrected from battle with said beastie

Christian Salvation Language

First, if we're going to examine Christ figures and Christian imagery, it will be good to sort of set a base by establishing the prevalence of the language and motifs of it in the second movie. First there is the Kraken, which Bootstrap actually refers to once using the OT name of the great sea-monster: "Jones's Leviathan will find you." Leviathan is part of the OT image-set of the sea as representative of chaos. In Genesis, there is the "formless and void" of the primal waters - chaos - Creation is primarily a bestowing of ordered relationship. The chaotic waters are used elsewhere, like in the Psalms often, the Psalmist talks of the waters overwhelming him etc. Leviathan is a part of this whole image set (In Job, said terrible beastie's name is "Behemoth")

One professor I had put it this way as regards Genesis: if you asked an Israelite, "well if ex nihilo creation is not the emphasis of Genesis 1, then where did the formless waters come from?" They would answer, "well, God made them, of course" - but that's not the emphasis of Genesis 1 and the Hebrew verb Banah("Creation Ex Nihilo," as a distinct concept, develops in the Christian era - although the fact that it does underlie Hebraic on a more latent level definitely sets Israel off from surrounding nations, in whose mythologies the matter of the world was often the body of a defeated god, who was defeated by their present god in a "war cosmogyny" - in a sense the reason that "Ex Nihilo" is only latent, and not explicit, in the "literal sense" of the mind of the Hebrew is that "Ex Nihilo" is a cosmogyny [origin of the cosmos] and the emphasis of the Genesis account is cosmology [order of the cosmos - hence the first 6 days are a "framework" with 3 realms being created on the first 3 days and the 3 rulers of those realms being created on the corresponding second set of 3 days: the realm of Light and Dark ruled by sun moon and stars; the realms of the Sky, Land and Sea that were separated by the firmament on day 2 ruled by the birds, and fish and beasts created on day 5; and the realm of biological life ruled by humanity)
(however, to be fair, I must mention that if I apply the same process to the waters as I do to the serpent below - I would have to say that "creation ex nihilo" is not in the literal sense of the Hebrew author's mind but it IS "in the text," when the text is viewed as written by the unified author of the whole Bible, the Holy Spirit - and what I have said about "latent" vs "explicit" here is the same as what I say below about the serpent being definitely evil temptation and this being the thing in the Hebrew author's mind that makes it congruous for the serpent to be interpreted as the devil by Christianity) .

Here the emphasis of Creation is that God bestows existence by bestowing meaning through order and relation (In a sense, this is what the Christian concept of Hell becomes based in: Aquinas spoke of evil as a "privation of being" - Hell is the final state of remaining evil, but you don't "cease to exist" in Hell, you continue to exist but in a state of finally and thoroughly disordered relationship with God). For the Hebrew mind extistence is relational - the body is primarily the means of relation to other persons (this is the concept behind St Paul's use of the Greek word soma for "body," he's using a Greek word but with a Hebrew background behind it). That is why the Genesis 1 account culminates in the Genesis 2 account of relation between man and woman and the Sabbath as humanity's relation to God (some great stuff here too on DMC's use of tension between sea and land, because in Hebrew "man" - "Adam" - is formed from the ground - "Adamah," which is feminine gender, and you have Tia Dalma in the watery land of a river delta vs the dry desert land Jones, who is the sea [in a sense he is the perversion of marriage because he did "become one flesh" with the woman as wild and untameable as the sea], chooses to bury his heart-chest in ... but can't get much more into it than that here).

The chaos of the sea is carried through to the Gospels in Christ calming the waters on the sea of Galilee, and other instances where, especially, John picks up Ezekiel's vision of the river flowing from the right side of the Temple, flowing out to the sea and turning all the salt water fresh (basically in John 20 they catch 153 fish and that is the numerical value of the Hebrew names of the two towns listed in Ezekiels vision, "as far as x and y" - that's the basic argument for the connection). Christ as redeemer is Lord of the chaos of the sea, and lord of all the beasts therein, including the biggies like the one that swallowed Jonah for 3 days.

(Back to DMC)
In DMC you even have this sea imagery carried to the level of the crew of the Dutchman in a way that, I think, connects with the OT dietary laws (I could be reading this in but it just seems like it would be a really odd coincidence). With the exception of Sharkey's head, all of the crew pick up particularly crustacean elements (and the shark head is the only thing about sharkey that breaks the rule ... he has a crab growing out of his back ... I know, I seen it 4 times now :) ). In the OT dietary laws it wasn't only pork that was off-limits, sea crustacean dwellers were too, because they are bottom-dwellers, scavengers. In fact, one of the things that makes me think it would be really odd as a mere coincidence is that we have Bootstrap eating one (I had the same reaction as Jack ... I have been scarred by the experience of a friend eating a particularly messy snow-crab across the table from me, a table I did not feel put enough distance between us in that case)

When it comes to Biblical language of salvation in the film, we have two instances. The first is Pintel and Ragetti's conversation about reading the Bible ("you get credit for trying!") and their discussion of "salvaging is sort of like saving, after all." Then later you have a very key figure (as per the first Pirates post) bring up redemption - Jack says, "ah, the dark side of ambition," and Norrington says, " I prefer to think of it as redemption." All in all, very loaded with the language of Christianity and the Bible.

Jack's Cunning

So, I am going to make a case here for Jack as "Cunning," a term and concept we have discussed in Harry Potter as connected with the serpent, and as a human capability that is good in and of itself (in the NT believers are encouraged to be "wise as serpents and gentle as doves"). The first thing to note, however, is that, while "cunning" is a human potential created by God and therefore good in and of itself, the serpent in the garden of Eden is definitely cunning taken in the bad direction, perverted to evil purposes and temptation to evil.

As I hinted in a comment with Sumara, the "Hello beastie" of standing and fighting on your feet cannot be separated, in PotC, from the line, "Why fight when you can negotiate?" The thing under question is that relation between them and the difference ... when does Jack stop trying to negotiate (ie use his free-spirited wits, often himself and others escaping by the skin of their teeth ... but he most-often does pull it off) and when does he stand and fight head on, and what does it say bout him as a Christ figure (remember that Christ was good with verbal wits too, when he tells the Pharisees, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone," it involved a sort of well-sprung verbal trap in that it put the ball back in their court - they could have honestly claimed they thought themselves without sin, but the thing they were trying to do was to trap him in a web that would put him either in trouble with Jewish law for denying the justice of an OT law, or with the Romans for ordering a death sentence, which only the "authorities" [which did not include the Pharisees] were allowed to do under Roman law. Christ's response does two things: it confronts them head on - they knew that He was condemning their arrogance - while outwitting them in their own little game - they couldn't say "he told us to stone her" because he could have simply replied "can anybody who has ever heard me speaking in the Temple and elsewhere honestly say that they could have mistaken me to be saying that? could they actually say, with a straight face, that they got the impression I thought you were a good bunch of guys, without sin?")

Soul Music

At one point Pauli turned me on to Motown classics, so I like to use the concept when I can. Here, what I mean by "soul music" is a passage from the Kraken piece of the soundtrack and it's relation to a certain aspect of Jack as "Christ figure" (this is another "examining a border context of the use of images before I get into the part where I make an argument for seeing things one way or another, sort of as a basis" thing).

There are several main elements to the Kraken piece on the soundtrack: you have the heavy, and heavily syncopated, cellos that go along with the crew often; you have the whirling syncopated strings and brass that accompany the mayhem during the Kraken's attack ... and then you have that ominous organ of the Kraken's finisher - which you see on the ship of men being led by the wedding dress "spirit" when the Kraken attacks after they pick up Will, as you have that looking straight down shot and the Kraken's mouth opens beneath the ship and swallows it.

So, where do those guys go? - They go down below, basically they are in a physical symbol of hell/Hades/sheol. The thing is, Jack has a certain responsibility for those guys because Will got them into it while getting out of Jack's wheelings and dealings. The fate of such men is important because it functions as an image ... when they are going up the river to Tia Dalma's Gibbs tells them about the Kraken and says "imagine the last thing you [I forget the verb he uses] ... the stench of a thousand rotting corpses" - which is basically what Jack gets at the end. More-over, Jack has certain responsibilities because, in his attempts to outwit Jones, he has been "soul-dealing" - "99 Souls, 3 Days."

In the end Jack can't get out of going into the Kraken because these things have led to his responsibility to "descend into hell/Hades and release the captives," so to speak ... and of course I speak thus because the "descent into hell" during the three days in the tomb is a
traditional Christian belief about what Christ did (it is also the name of a very thick, but very good if you can get through it, novel by Charles Williams - what I mean by thick is that often its "landscape" is much more psychic/psychological than physical)

AND, I just realized in thinking about the movie (in the midst of tossing things from one bin into another and back again, trying to prepare my worldly belongings for the move to New York ... looking a bit like Jack frantically emptying and re-filling the jar of dirt) that we have, in the beginning of the movie, a foreshadowing of Jack as Christ figure and the fact that he will need to "die" at sea and be resurrected in movie 3 - especially a clincher because it is our "introduction" to his character in this movie. He blows a beastie away (crows being notorious as birds of death) and arises from a coffin at sea.

"Riding the Waves" vs "Playing the Angles"

So, I have been saying that there is a relation between Jack's final stance of "Hello Beastie" and his statement to Will, "Why fight when you can negotiate" ("it's just a matter of having the proper leverage" - like in movie one, and notice that in this movie, "turn-about is fair-play," and "not much incentive for me to fight fair then is there?" comes back to bite Will in the butt a little - in movie 1 he told [unconscious] Jack "Sorry, I'm not going to be your leverage" just after he whacked him over the head with an oar, and Jack's gets him back in this movie with a good oar-whack on the head, and a classic line, "into the boat ... unless you plan to use him to hit something with")

So, what of Jack's "cunning negotiations?" (which will be discussed more fully below, under the "intentional ambiguities" of the movie makers). I would say that the thing that leaves Jack's negotiations open to being congruous with his eventual standing and fighting is that he is "riding the waves" rather than "playing the angles." But admittedly, this is sometimes questionable - I mean, that little deal with Davey Jones over "establishing stand-in principle but haggling over price" is pretty shady - and in the end I think Jack does have to, in a certain sense "become" the Christ figure by being "shown" by Elizabeth that the time has come to stop "riding the waves" - because Jones's question of "can you live with yourself," is a very real question: if the deal goes south and Jack loses his gamble of being able to ride the wave successfully, Will's fate is on his head.

I think Jack is trying to trick Davey Jones with the "not half as cruel as allowing them to be joined in Holy Matrimony," and that he does believe that their love and marriage can be a good thing ... but it is pretty dicey business. And then there is the whole thing even, from last movie, of the Jack-Elizabeth thing. Is he just "testing her" to make sure she will be true to Will? I'm not sure it's that simple ("not that easy, is it?")

So, what of Jack Sparrow, who is he? I think, like I said in a comment on my last post about G. Swann, he is a character in flux between being symbol and being human, but that his "symbolic value," as it were, must be based in his humanity (in other words, he is a mix of traditional Christ symbol and realist psychological character of the type that really began with Shakespeare, it the tale end of the medieval period). Thus, he really does go through some draw to be, as an individual human being, the particular fulfillment of Elizabeth's draw to the pirate husband. But it is also in tension with his own kind of "knowledge of his own symbolic role," ie that she wants Will as a "good man" but wants the free-spirit to be in him too, and the primary path for the latter is Will's relationship with Jack, not her own - but ... "not that easy, is it?" The purest statement of it is From Elizabeth behind bars at the beginning, "I believe in you ... both of you" - her faith in Jack through Will's relationship with him - but it's very easy to run afoul of the reef and be facing Davey Jones once the ship (of unfolding that trust in real life) actually gets underway.

Below, under the same heading of "intentional ambiguities" (which I'll say, here, has to do with "existentialism"), I'll talk about this whole thing from Elizabeth and Will's side of the equation. But for present, in closing out this "riding the waves" section, I'll just make a comparison to another movie that is strictly about disillusionment and loss of identity from "playing the angles." In the Cohen Brothers' 1990 "Miller's Crossing," Gabriel Byrne's character, Tom Reagan, "wins." In the end he is still alive and he is in the good graces of the mobster who came out on top ... but he walks away disillusioned, having basically, I think, lost his soul from "playing the angles" (This is, at least to me, a very dark movie ... and guess what ... it's got a hat symbol that runs through it). In short I think that the thing that makes Jack able to become a Christ-figure, whereas Reagan is more of a Judas -character in the end, is that Jack only "rides the waves" whereas Reagan "plays the angles" ... but Jack's is still a very tricky business - "not so easy, is it?"

Intentional Ambiguities:

So, just to help with a little weather-eye as to where we are, or rather how this sub-section will work, based in what of it I have alluded to above - basically I see 2 main "intentional ambiguities" in the final sequence where the Pearl goes down: One involving Jack's "heroics" and the other involving Will and Elizabeth's relationship.

Existentialism

What I am speaking of under "Intentional Ambiguities" is basically known as "existentialism." What I mean is that existentialism is what is going underneath the action. I do not necessarily suspect that this is what the film-makers would call what they are doing. I think that they do what they are doing on the conscious level, but that they would speak only of things like the "tension" created by the "ambiguity" or "ambivalence" of the imagery and characterization, as a path leading the viewer hopefully to discover certain things in the experience ... maybe not, they may be thinking of "existentialism" or they may not be (would be hard to tell) ... what I'm more sure of (I think) is that they are focusing on the image tension and concerned, in the text itself, with "intentional ambiguities" as a path to drawing the viewer in a certain frame of mind in thinking about the characters ... Existentialism is what I am suggesting is the framework that makes it work, what is "behind" their text and them (although, like I said, they may be consciously intending existentialism - don't know ...)

Existentialism can be, for our purposes here, of two basic types, which come out in two main formulations. The basic formulation of Existentialism is "existence before essence," which means that a thing exists before it is defined and then is defined in existing (how's that for a tongue and brain twister?). This definition, though, leads fairly easily to the bad kind of existentialism, where it is said that a thing (particularly a person) exists and then decides what it means to be a person and makes themselves that.

The formulation that is more conducive to Christian thought is that of "becoming" - as distinct from language of "being." (NOTE: In orthodox Christian thought, this does NOT work for the divinity of Christ - He was fully God before He ever entered the Incarnation, and his humanity was pure from the beginning too, He grew in "stature" and understanding, but his humanity did not have to first be purified before being untied with his humanity [Saint Thomas Aquinas discusses at length the "growth" of Christ's human knowledge, but not His purity]. It should also be noted that this type of existentialism does not work that well with what is known as the "state of grace" - you can "Be" in the state of Grace before your life of "becoming" is complete ... this type works best for character types in stories, although I do believe this life to be one of "becoming" - but those are deep waters - which is why we have Dogma ... we're called to explore and understand more deeply this mystery as we are able, but we have some guidelines to help us not to "run afoul of the reef")

Just as a side note, the lines in literature are not so cut and dried as this, but generally not to problematic. For instance, Ralph Ellison used a lot of existential imagery and language in his Invisible Man - but what he was examining was a case of sociological "existence before essence." "African Americans" were a distinct group before they had any distinct positive definition as a group (an "essence" to their cultural identity in the USA) ... I mean outside of being slaves (which is not a positive thing for human beings, of course) . I liked Ellison's book a lot when I read it for a course in 20th century American novel.

The Jack-in-the-Boat

So, what is the "intentional ambiguity" with Jack in the final scene? Glad you asked :) (more like said, "get to the point already!" LOL) When Jack is in the boat he looks at the land and then back to the ship and then checks his compass and looks slightly dis-heartened. The ambiguity is in what he is thinking, for which there are several possibilities. The first is that he is trying to run away all together and then feels guilty. The other is that he is not so cowardly, but not so forthright either (as he is when he makes his final stand, hat and all, before said terrible beastie) - that he is still riding the waves, still wheeling and dealing, still casting the dice and seeing how they land. He may be thinking that, since the beastie is sentient (can discern things like who has the spot, can be drawn to the hat etc) that it will come after him and leave the ship, but also gambling that he can make it far enough in to frustrate it, or at least make its maneuverings in the shallows difficult enough that he can escape to land. He may be looking at the land longingly for the cowardly escape or he may be looking at it realizing that the beastie must be able to sense how close it is to the shallows, and thus he must go back (once said compass, for the first time in the movie, tells him what he wants and how to get there, although, either way, this is understandably a little disheartening for our hero).

Of course, said beastie is probably a little blind with rage too, after that first blast Will gave its tentacles with the cannons, maybe too blindly enraged to discern captain from ship. After all, they were together a few moments ago ... and the ship is a "marker" for the Kraken in the same way the hat works as a decoy earlier. So is Jack counting on this as a decoy while he absconds or is he frustrated by it as a hero?

So, Which is it? That's the hard part, and that's also exactly why Jack is a Christian existential symbol of the human person who has the potential to be Christ-like. Even at the very end, Jack is still trying to "wheel and deal" his way out, trying to use his legitimate cunning, and has to have it revealed that it is time to stop trying to "negotiate" and to say "hello beastie." (basically when said hat is past back at him --- hmmm, maybe said beastie is a revealer of some sort, maybe the first ship was not a mistake ... maybe, because of the original deal, in order for said beastie to "get Jack" it has to be all three things of the deal together: hat, ship and captain [that is the problem with proofreading and editing your own stuff - gives you another chance to mull over and then you wind up writing more ... it's a trap :) ]) One can spend forever second-guessing one's own motives and desires etc, and it is not that there is not a very proper place for examining your conscience (as a Catholic I believe it should be done daily and especially before going into the confessional) ... but there is also the place where you have to examine the situation without obsessing about how you got there, and stand and do the right thing.

So, I would say that Jack Sparrow is, as a both Christian classical and Christian existential symbol, a symbol of the human being and the free-spirit (the sparrow in the field) with the potential to live up to being Christ-like. This is precisely what I mean in speaking of Jack as "cunning," in the terms of the serpent. The serpent in the garden was a creature made by God, just as cunning is a human potential created by God as a good thing (indeed, Christ's answer to the Pharisees could be said to be very "cunning"). The particular serpent in the garden was not necessarily, in the mind of the Hebrew author of Genesis, the "devil" in the way we think of him in later Christian revelation, but later Christian revelation is a congruous development (by the Holy Spirit as the unified author of Scripture) and thus a fuller revelation of the same reality (ie "what happened in the garden of Eden") - precisely because in the mind of the Hebrew author the serpent was not just "cunning," but was "cunning" (that human potential) concretely taken in the direction of evil. Jack is more "raw cunning" but if he is to become cunning taken in the right direction (the direction that would make the movie "good" from a Christian standpoint) he must "become" what the Christ symbolism in the character has been pointing to, which he does when he stands and fights at the end.

If the pirate is to be the Christ figure, then "Now ... show me that horizon!" must be the same as "Hello Beastie." Or, in the words of Robin Williams as Peter Pan/ning in the movie "Hook": "To die, that would be an awfully big adventure."

Elizabeth and Will In the House (hut)

Whilst I was editing said terrible beastie of an encyclopedia (which my friend Mike told me on the phone Friday was finally in to the publisher), one of Mike's fellow profs at GCC had not yet seen DMC, and then he went to see it and said he pretty much really liked it but felt the "love triangle" was unnecessary. He said he thought it would have worked just as well for Will to be upset with Elizabeth over her chaining Jack to his doom, rather than the more sordid issue of a love triangle. I wasn't as sure then what I thought of that but I am more sure now, that I think this it is both-and ... another "intentional ambiguity." (and maybe even more than an "ambivalence" and more properly a "multi-valence" - but I'm not sure yet).

I have already discussed some of this above, but, as I said, from Elizabeth and Will's side of it, when they are in Tia's hut, I do not think the the only question Will is asking Elizabeth is "would you bring him back if you could? do you love him instead of me?" I think that when they leave in the long boat and she says what she says, that he knows that she shackled him into it. I think that part of the question is, "what part of me do you love? can you love the pirate part too?" This is, of course, a reversal from movie one, where, as Sumara pointed out, she removed his aristocratic hat ... but here her perspective may have changed some, she may be hearing Jack's words, "not so easy is it." On the ship, I think she says "I'm not sorry" more to convince herself than Jack.

The shoe is, so to speak, "on the other foot" from movie 1. There will had to find his place of balance with respect to Jack, protecting Jack from the institution. Here Elizabeth must try to find what her place is with respect to that same balance, which may be why we hear such a sympathetic line from her to Norrington, "James Norrington ... what has the world done to you?" And Will's question is both "will you have the pirate part of me?" as well as "do you want only the pirate part? in which case you might as well have Jack himself." In short, there are two halves to Elizabeth's original statement of "I trust you ... both of you." There is the obvious possibility that she might trust only Will and not his connection to Jack, his pirate half - but there is also the possibility that she might trust only the pirate half, that she might want Jack instead of Will. This is, I believe, the conflict that is going on with the compass always pointing to Jack.

If Jack is the "free-spirit," the "artistic," the imagination, this is a similar choice (although I'm not saying exactly the same ... I had more on this in the "lost post" but I can't remember it right now) to what I described as Rogue's decision in X-men 3. I suggested, based in Cyclops as vision and Phoenix as unbridled psychic emotion that kills him, that mutant powers symbolize the imaginative power, and that in Rogue this is manifest in an extreme form of "empathy," so extreme that she not only empathizes with the state of another but begins to draw out their very life-force (the original meaning of the Greek psyche/psyche, as well as the Hebrew nephesh which it is used to translate in the Septuagint, and the Latin anima which is used to translate both in the Vulgate). She cannot control the use of her power, cannot choose when to use it or not, as Kitty Pride can choose whether or not to walk through a particular wall, so, for the sake of communion she chooses the suppression cure. I'm not saying Elizabeth makes the right choice, just that that is the nature of the choice she makes - and that I think this is the whole question Will is asking in Tia Dalma's hut.

Just as Jack tells Will, "Pirate is in your blood and you'll have to square with that someday" - this is where Elizabeth deals with squaring with it. Movie 1 opens with Elizabeth and her fascination with pirates as a girl (and there is a tip-off there in the "re-orientation shot," when she wakes up the audience sees her as if she is standing upright, and then the camera spins and pans back to show she is lying down). This is all tied to Will's identity too because it is his father's role in his own identity that provides the medallion, and in this movie you have a reversal of the father quest, like in Return of the Jedi - "I will not abandon you." We know this father/identity quest will play out in movie 3 because Stellan Skarsgard is already credit-listed as Bootstrap for World's End.
(This whole set of images surrounding Elizabeth's dilemma is really neat because, if you notice, this movie opens with the same song as movie 1, "Yo Ho Ho and a bottle of rum . a pirates life for me" - Movie 1 opens with her singing it as a girl, then she teaches it to Jack on the rum island [and believe you me ... I do intend to get to the rum island and my jar of dirt :) ] and he says he's going to teach it to the whole crew and then ends movie 1 with it - "and really bad eggs" ... at least, I think it's the same song, and if not I shall simply pull the fast one of demonstrating how it being different but related songs shows a particular development from movie 1 to movie 2 - and so on and so forth ... :) )

In a way, movie 2 picks up where movie 1 left off ... Will made his choice in finding his place, so that Elizabeth could find her place beside him (that being the treasure) and this movie could rightly be called Elizabeth's movie because it is about her choice and thoughts concerning that role in relation to the pirate/free-spirit/cunning and the institution (Norrington's in movie 3 too, as is Lord Cutler Becket) ... this all follows very nicely too THE original dilemma of the "cunning" - for there is a lot of textual-narrative consideration of the order in which the serpent approaches the couple and tempts them (it simply says Eve turned and gave the fruit to Adam ... so was he there the whole time and just being conspicuously quiet?)

Barbosa's Cunning
(finally Sumara's second question, in case you got bogged down in the answering of question 1 and might be too weary to recognize the change to question 2)

Ok, I have to confess something here ... Second only to quoting and quipping like Sparrow, my friend Dominic and I love to quote Barbosa from movie 1. Geoffrey Rush's performance is just so good.

Sparrow and Barbosa are really two sides of the same coin; I would call them "fluidity" and "jarring schitzophrenia." Both, as pirates, have the same dichotomy of calculating cunning and free-spiritedness (can I just add here that I love the Ragezzi and Pinel characters? "What is it that vexes all men?" Gibbs: "The Sea?" Pinel: "Sums?" Ragezzi: "the dichotomy of good and evil?") In Sparrow we see a fluid interchange between them though. In Barbosa, on the other hand, we see a jerky shifting back and forth between being the consummate legalist (such as his 3 responses to Elizabeth's demand to be taken back to shore in movie one) and the downright whimsical (the looney way he says "the code is more kind of guidelines than rules really" after which he jerks right back to utterly ruthless and cruel in the way he says "Welcome to the Black Pearl, Miss Turner!")

On a side note, I was so stoked at reading Verbiski's comment that led me to believe he is having an eschatological dimension to "World's End" in movie 3 because one of mine and Dom's favorite lines from movie 1 is one that reveals some of this shared identity between Jack and Barbosa, and also takes on a new shade in light the idea of an schatological development: "What then, Jack Sparrow? Are we two to be locked in immortal combat till judgment day and trumpet's sound?"

But, back to the question of Barbosa as bad guy in movie 1 and seeming to going to be good guy in movie 2. There are some subtle "hint drops" in the 2 movies that show at least a glint of an answer ("something a little more ... shiny")

1. There is the timing discrepancy in movie 1. For Barbosa to die the sequence should have gone: Jack lets his blood onto the final piece, Jack tosses piece to Will, Will lets his blood on the piece, Will drops piece (that now has both his and Jack's blood on it) into the chest, THEN Jack shoots Barbosa. In fact what happened is: Jack and Will let their blood onto the piece, then Jack fires the shot, Barbosa taunts him about waiting 10 years only to waste the shot, Will retorts and THEN drops the piece in the chest. So there is something funky going on. Some of it may be that it would have been difficult to "explain" to the audience with an immediate impact what has happened without doing it that way, but I think there is more behind it ... I think Verbinski himself is clever enough to have figured out a way to do it with the right sequence if he had wanted to.

2. I didn't fully get this one till viewing 4 of DMC. In spite of the question of # 1 just now (the timing discrepancy in movie 1), I think Barbosa really did undergo some type of death and resurrection in the form of a "better guy." Notice when they are in Tia's hut the first time and she lets the monkey out of the cage - Ragezzi leans to the right of a post, looking interestedly, and there is a quick shot of the monkey looking longingly up past a pair of boots that is sticking out. I think that is Barbosa dead - I watched it carefully this last time and I think I am pretty sure that the monkey looks sad. Barbosa and Jack the monkey always had a special bond in movie 1. I think it takes something more for Barbosa to resurrect - in fact, my theory is that what it takes ... is Jack going down with the Pearl. That's just my personal theory though, my hunch.

If I'm right, though, then you have a pretty neat picture of Christian history as one in which the work of Christ (death on the Cross, just as Jack goes down just off the shores of the Ille Cruces) brings about the redemption of what CS Lewis referred to (in The Abolition of Man) as the "seeds of truth" in barbarian paganism.

Why the Rum is Always Gone

Well, speaking of barbarians ... that leads pretty neatly to my obsession with the rum as symbolic of paganism, eh?

All right, here is my jar of dirt ... and you can be the judge of whether you think it has any "thump thump" in it. :)

But first, let me just say that I think this relates to the present discussion on Christ symbolism because cowardice is not the only way for Jack to fail to live up to becoming the Christ symbol ... there is also the possibility of the free-spirit going the pagan direction - in Biblical terms, opting for Baal rather than Christ, as the "dying and rising god."

So, here is some of my original argument for seeing the rum as symbolic of paganism (which raised some eyebrows in suspicion of my sanity :) ). You ready for this? My argument is/was ... the rum is always gone. ("Top That!" for brevity LOL). But seriously - rum and other hard alcohol are always referred to as "spirits" and there is more than one place in movie one where you have it noted that "the rum is gone," that the "spirits" have gone out of something - I say the "spiritual value" has gone out of paganism (GK Chesterton made the argument that, whatever else you can say, Christianity changed things ... it maid it entirely much more difficult to be the "noble pagan," like Cicero and Virgil). Particularly I think "piracy"(what Gibbs refers to as " spec of honest pirating" ... and Gibbs will come into play in a second here) symbolizes pagan leanings with regard to imagination and the free-spirit (ie, myth). What do you notice about Gibbs flask after a certain point in movie 1? (that is, after you notice that he is introduced as a drunkard sleeping with the pigs, like the prodigal son). ... It's usually empty, at least in key scenes. After it has been loaded into the cannon on the Interceptor and fired over to Pearl, Jack finds it, he is looking forward to a good swig, but it is empty. When swings from the Pearl to the Interceptor and meets Gibbs, he hands it back with either some words or some gesture indicating ("revealing" I would say) to Gibbs that it is empty ... that the "spirits" have gone out of it.

Now, for the confirmation (and vindication? LOL) in DMC. First you have the Three pagan cult images in the movie. The most interesting is obviously Tia Dalma because she is Jamaica Voodoo, which has ties to mainland Southern and Central America voodoo, where one of the problems the Church encountered was syncretism of Voodoo cult and Christianity. But there is also the "sea - death cult" from whose chambers-o-death Jack retrieves the "much more better" drawing of a key. But for the purpose of my argument the one to notice is the Pella Costa tribe that holds Jack captive as their chief, subsequent to his fleeing Jones and his death-dealing beastie.

(Drum roll, please... ) Notice the "bait" they trap Will with ... you guessed it, Gibbs' rum flask.

Now, one might raise the objection ... the Pella Costas are conspicuously never seen drinking rum - they are seen wearing wigs and with a store room full of EIC goods (and this really interested me, that the ultra-modern EIC has had dealings with pagan tribes) - but apparently they traded no rum into their stores ... by all appearances it is a "dry island." Well, I am glad you raised this objection (*uh oh ... he's talking to himself ... "not good"*), for the Pella Costas are a very interesting pagan tribe indeed ... in fact, they are Gnostics (a heresy that E. Voegelin and I have accused many modern schools of thought of ... and thus I would say that the "dry island" symbolizes a sort of "neo-paganism," paganism affected by the refined Gnosticism of the Enlightenment and "modern" thought). What Gibbs describes to Will is basically classical Gnosticism ... although the classic Gnostics didn't usually (that I know of) involve cannibalism in it ... they had very elaborate systems worked out of how the specs of the divine in humans were released, upon death, up to the moon and the moon somehow passed them onto the sun, where all the divine specs were being regathered together ... it was pretty intricate.

There is one further thing I would like to mention with in regards to the Pella Costas, basically as a springboard to note some things I think are great about these 2 movies thus far. I'm not sure if it is "flashback" from the perspective of movie 2 or flash-forward from the perspective of movie 1 - but either way it was downright hilariously clever. In movie 1, just before Jack jumps in to save Elizabeth, he is on the deck of the Interceptor talking to the 2 English soldiers, and when the hear the splash he has just said, "and then ... they made me their chief." Dominic and I loved this line because it gave you this mysterious back-story that made Jack interesting ... he's a pirate for goodness sake, how would he be made some tribal chief. But the point is it hooked you more onto his character because it was so mysterious (and turned out a great spin in DMC too). We always compared it to the difference between the first Star Wars trilogy and the prequels. In the prequels Lucas left hardly any mystery of back-story, at least in regards to things and characters that appear on screen, no allusions that actually grab you as interesting for a central character (I mean, I suppose you could wonder what Bubba the diner owner in Clones used to do, what scrapes he got into, that he knows so much about kimino darts and that they are made by cloners ... but, seriously, who cares? He simply an "information vehicle" - not an actual character - you could wonder how Jar Jar spent his days before hooking up with the 2 Jedi, or what he got kicked out of Gungan city for but, seriously, I heard somebody did an edit of Phantom Menace with him completely removed, as an experiment, and that that in no way hampered the plot seriously - I think it was an edit out of the Gungans altogether).

Han Solo, on the other hand, and his exact relationship to Jabba before, and how it made him so edgy sometimes (I mean was it just the money? Jabba seems to take some greater pleasure in getting Solo) ... now that is something that interests us, especially because it makes his character more mysterious and he is the one we cheer for when he and Leia admit loving each other in Empire Strikes backs.

But, enough ranting on the prequels. The other thing that scene (Interceptor deck: "And then they made me their chief") leads to is a consideration of the two English soldiers. Basically I really appreciated those guys. Obviously they are primarily comic relief. But that can be done better or worse. Particularly, it can be combined with either cowardice or courage. When they come up over the rail of the Dauntless in movie 1, and see the reality of the cursed pirates to be faced, if they had jumped back into the water below, we all would have snickered our jaded "worldly-wise" snickers at their cowardice. But they don't. Like Wallace and Hamish in "Braveheart," our boyishly funny duo shake hands in resignation and courageously charge headlong into the battle. I, for one, really appreciated that (and I loved how they were paired off against Pinel and Ragezzi. It is the stout soldier who is always explaining what is going on in the action/plan to the thin one, whereas, on the "mythic" side, it is always the thin Ragezzi who is noting similarities to Greek mythology, and ironies, and Scandinavian etymologies, and delving into the character motivations [during the 3-way sword fight] for the explanation to the stout Pinel).

Post-Script

In Conclusion:

Am I, like Barbosa, schitzo? - yes. So I should apologize for the places where this post makes that overly abundantly clear. I am that particular kind of schitzophrenic who particularly dislikes the Enlightenment era thought, what is known as the "modern era" of thought, and finds myself simultaneously drawn to the pre-modern, medieval thought (standard Christ symbols and figures) and existentialism in post-modern thought (becoming in the sense of a progression of the character to the point where they make choices to fulfill the Christ figure role). I see Jack as both BEING the Christ figure and as in the process of BECOMING the Christ figure.

My only hope is that somehow this fits into Chesterton's definition of a "paradox," when he speaks of the "romance of Orthodoxy" in his book Orthodoxy. He speaks of the fact that the Greek column is a very stable balance ... but also very boring. Truth, he says, is more like the balance of an enormous boulder balanced on a fine pinnacle of rock, always in danger of being thrown off balance from the huge (sometimes even seeming "monstrous") weights on both sides, but always keeping balance - the only exciting balance to be found. (The Incarnation not as some midway mixture of humanity and divinity, but as both full-blown in the same person).

Kant and Sheler

In regards to this "Schitzophrenia" I wanted to say a brief word on what Sumara said about the "yearning for the sea" (and, just for the record, not saying such yearning is schitzophrenic, just that these matters connect ... but then I have already said that I don't think my "schitzophrenia" such a terrible thing, so where does that put the matter? Best not think about that one too much ... best pull one of those Jack Sparrow "quick exit stage right or left " moves LOL)

There are two philosophers who's thought is in a direct tension that illustrates this really well. Immanuel Kant was one of the big names of the Enlightenment. One of the things that Kant talked about was "duty." For Kant the highest moral action was that done precisely against desire, strictly out of a sense of duty. A later German philosopher named Max Sheler reacted directly against Kant's concept of duty. Sheler developed what was called "value-philosophy" or "value-ethics," based in the "value response," doing the right thing but doing it because you want to rather than out of duty. The ironic thing is that I have been friends with some whose fathers have been kind of "Scheler crusaders," and for the kids, Sheler's "value-response" became (or so it seemed to me in relating to them) a "Kantian duty."

The truth is that both extremes are wrong. We cannot deny that duty is a part of life, and for good reasons - that we do have real duties. But at the same time, we are meant to strive for doing the right thing out of a genuine and vivid love of God and neighbor, as a "value-response," to also be "doing what we want because we want to do it."

In short, It is Jack who tempts Elizabeth with "you're going to want to do what you want because you want to do it," BUT, it is Tia Dalma who says, "Ahhhhhh! Jack Sparrow do not know what he want!" And he does not know that until the "opportune moment" finally comes and the compass must show him ... and then he fulfills his role as Christ figure.

I myself, as a bachelor in the present cultural setting, feel a little bit too much of "Bootstrap's doom" in my blood, the feeling of being meant to die at sea and cast adrift etc (and, believe me, some days my 1990 Volvo with 220,000 miles on it, as I pilot it between Weirton WV and Grove City, PA, is a lot like that little ship on which we first meet Captain Jack bailing water in movie 1 LOL), and I wonder if I will arrive in NYC stepping off the masthead as it sinks to its final rest, or get there with a pair of sea turtles strapped to my feet, with Jack's voice ringing in my ears, "Not that easy, is it?" But I think that is where we all find ourselves, with Will and Elizabeth trying to find and live in the balance between Jack and Norrington, between Kant and Scheler ... sometimes (at least for me) in the schitzophrenia of being both pre-modern and post-modern. And neither the pirate nor the institution (institutions such as marriage and family) are "the lesser of two evils," both are good (in fact, in the old meaning of the word, they are both "violently good," blazingly and uncontrollably good) ... the trick is finding that Chestertonian balancing act that is the "romance of Orthodoxy." It is all the over-powering music of the spheres present to us in the details of life that seem so mundanely obligatory. To quote Chaim Potok, it is, " a mystery, of the sort theologians have in mind when the talk about concepts like wonder and awe." (and that is the exact quote ... for once I looked it up instead of paraphrasing and saying, "well that was the basic gist ... I'm pretty sure" LOL)

The End (finally :) )

And with that I think I have achieved what was once thought impossible - running dry the well of my own extreme verbosity on things concerning Pirates of the Caribbean (which is not to say "don't comment ... I don't have anything more to say" - you know how wells tend to fill up again LOL - just thatI ran myself dry of everything I was going to say or thought of on this post ... and I am hoping that it takes you all a bit to digest it and start asking questions because I think it will take my noggin a bit to recover from writing it ... at least it had better take you a while, I just copied and pasted this out into Word and it is 8,000 words - at college rule that is between 25 and 30 pages ... if you all can read and digest an essay that size by me quickly, I'm in trouble in grad school LOL ... just kidding, this is much different writing venue and style than a graduate argument paper ... much more funner :) )

So, on that note ... I'll see you all at World's End.
posted by Merlin at 3:38 PM
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