A few new posts - From Goblet of Fire

I have recently been listening to GOF while traveling. Over the weekend on a trip from NYC back to my hometown I made it up to about chapter 22 but since then have been listening only really on subway trips from Bronx down to Manhattan, which is only a couple times a week. I have a larger post I intend to write from the recent listening but it might take me a little while to whip up properly, so in the meantime I thought I would toss a few things out here - some of a content (of HP) nature, and some informative on my own goings on and relation/disposition to this site. So, since that last phrase sounded a little ominous and foreboding and the type of thing that Rita Skeeter would love to delve into: "Trouble with the Muggles? Dissension in the Ranks at Muggle Matters?" - I'll address that one first. The truth of it is far less scandalous, and really not scandalous at all. It actually involves legal concerns possibilities more than anything, and in relation to "web-publishing" in general vs paper publishing. Web publishing in general is drastically less defensible in the area of plagiarism than paper publishing. Theoretically one could find oneself later sued for writing ones own ideas if one put them out on the web and somebody else plagiarized them but in a more official and traditional publishing venue like a peer-reviewed journal - the latter as "evidence" of originality would stand up much better under examination by copyright lawyers etc. It is not that I actually greatly fear such an extreme situation or think it a very strong possibility; I simply mention it to say where the outer bounds of sillyness are in such matters, at least in material possibility. The main thing here is that I have some idea and materials that I am working on that I actually want to shop around to some peer-reviewed academic journals in the field of English and to some inter-disciplinary journals that concentrate on popular culture, art etc. I won't be putting those materials up here, partially for the concern of protection I just mentioned, but also for concerns of time, and will instead simply be focusing on writing them in standard college-rule essay format (these are then articles I have to research a little more to, use sources and footnotes and all that good stuff). The writing on here thus far is not of that level, and I am simply at a place where I am wanting to do more writing at that level and get things published (because of the nature of blogging and the vastness of the field, one could not really put blog level writing on one's Curriculum Vitae as one could do with a peer-reviewed journal publishing). I would say that the level at which most blog writing goes on it is not technically as able to be plagiarized, but the level of writing I am wanting to get into is. I'm not saying I think it necessarily probable that somebody would plagiarize if I put these writings up here - they may just look at it and go "too crazy to be worth stealing" - I'm just talking about what is materially possible and the material level of the writing I am trying to move more into. Having said all that though, there will be stuff I write on here sometimes. The little teaser I will drop here in this post is one, and then I am working on a longer post sort of defending my chiastic reading of the series. This is stuff that I have already written on here and am just adding some support for. In the second post I just mentioned, on chiasm, I will be broadening out, honing in and clarifying terms a little, but not to the level of research and documentation and precision of the material I will be trying to publish. It's not really that I think the things I'm writing on this site are of a lower level, just that they are, here, in a more informal and less "pulled together" fashion. Things in a journal article have to be much more thorough on demonstrating material tenets through because ... as I said, it is just a different venue/arena of writing. So, here is the one for here: I have commented elsewhere on this site about Barty Crouch Jr disguised as Mad Eye Moody, what we see in BC Jr's character. I have said that I think we see that Barty Jr is a person who could have been very attracted to teaching for good reasons, a person who would might have enjoyed teaching kids and getting to know them as a mentor ... which is what makes what he has become as the results of the combined forces of Voldemort and his father/the ministry such a tragedy. So, here is one brief piece of something I found in GOF that I think supports that reading. In the first class with "Moody" - he says he has one year to get them up to snuff on how to deal with dark arts. Ron cuts him off - "What, aren't you staying?" Ron Blurted out. And then "Moody's magical eye spun around to stare at Ron; Ron looked extremely apprehensive, but after a moment Moody smiled - the first time Harry had seen him do so." (GOF, Scholastic Trade Paperback, 210). Now, Rowling goes on to say that the smile basically makes his marred features look even more marred, and there are a myriad of possible explanations for the smile as stemming from perverse, evil "death eater type" reasons, such as the irony that he is a DE and the kids of the good guys are begging him to stay as teacher. In truth I think a lot of these explanations are valid, but simply not exclusive. They do not rule out that at that momen, for however fleeting of a second, Ron's affection touched a vestige of something genuine in Barty Jr. I do not even say it is a concrete or substantial genuine part of Barty JR, at this particular stage of how far gone he is in the dark arts etc, merely a vestige. And when I speak of Ron's affection, I'm not talking about some simple sentimentalism. In text it is obvious that it is a very particular guy-student teenager emotion of "you're really cool ... you kick *ss ... I hope you stick around to teach us more." Rowling notes how Ron is relieved and both he and Harry seem to take Moody's response as genuinely friendly. Now, this could be John Granger's "narrative misdirection" at work but if it is I would definitely class it among the level that Travis Prinzi has insightfully referred to as "narrative misdirection on steroids." I would say that within GOF the natural level of narrative misdirection is in Dumbledore's trust of "Moody" and the other teachers following the lead when, in fact, the person teaching Dark Arts Defense in a DE. The biggest issue to me here is that there is no large instance of the theme of prejudice at play here - to this point Harry's take on Moody has been one of mere curiosity, and I can't see any possible major biases (like those against Snape) that would color his perception to the level of making the scene a fitting vehicle for the narrative misdirection element. Likewise when Moody takes Neville off after class to cheer him up, Harry notes that it is the type of thing Lupin would have done. To be sure, again, there are other explanations that Barty is simply covering his backside from any fall out damage to his ruse if Dumbledore finds out he shook Neville up like that, with an actual performance of the cruciatus. But Barty Jr chooses a particular path for such "damage control" that tips something off for Harry, a particular vestige of goodness in BC JR, a choice and revelation that may not be in any way thought out or intentional on Barty's part, but does subconsciously validly communicate a vestige of real goodness. There may be a point to saying that one of the points here is that Harry unwisely lets his guard down more after that, particularly because of the similarity he saw with Lupin, and that he has been subject to some extent to his own and Barty's use of narrative misdirection, but that does not nullify the core of the insight in the first moment. In other words, the discrepancy in such narrative misdirection as this particular case with comforting Neville is not whether or not the observation of the likeness to Lupin is valid, but rather, I think, the question of prudence in how Harry lets this affect him and his disposition in further relations with Moody (particularly thinking him always safe, even when he is pulling Harry away from Dumbledore even after the return from the graveyard and Cedric's death). In the end I think these elements show that trace, that vestige of natural goodness that BC Jr could have had, that particular goodness that makes for good teachers who are involved with their students in a lively way that shows that they are doing it not just for the paycheck but because they really believe it matters and that their students matter - and the loss of that kind of goodness is what makes BC Jr becoming a DE and helping Voldy return to bodily form and eventually having his soul sucked out by a dementor such a really true tagedy