Interesting Intersections

I have absolutely nothing new to write (including the whole current "hot-topic," - I never got around to writing that comment I talked about ... well actually I did do a form of it that is way too cluttered in its present state and I would not put it up without some serious editing, it's not even quite a "rough draft" really, more of a big box into which you dump all of the stuff from which you would create a rough draft if you had the time), this is just absolute trivial miscellany, but fun nonetheless. I was picking around on Rowling's website, looking at some stuff I had never really noticed before, like spell definitions etc, and on that page of "Extra Stuff" I noticed that one of the things pinned to the bulletin-board is a concert ticket for the band ColdPlay (I'm almost positive that it's a concert ticket, but hard to be sure at that size in flash, even tried print-screening it into adobe and enlarging but no real benefit). Anyway, a long time ago I referred to some lyric material from Johnny Cash in analogy to things Potter, talking about Cash as a sort of country mystic whose work enfleshed some similar themes as the Potter works. Interesting that Rowling likes ColdPlay because on their Album X&y they have a 13th track called "Kingdom Come" - really good. They wrote it for Johnny Cash to sing, and had even gone into the studio with Cash's producer Rick Rubin and recorded all of the music ... Cash died about a week before he was scheduled to come in and record the vocals. So, I thought that was an interesting confluence of tastes/interests in music. Oh, but I did see the news on the issue with the Vanderark project ... which was kind of a sad moment. I hope they get it all resolved. Seems like a grey area to me but I can see Rowling's point. I think Vanderark could do some stuff legitimately in the "non-grey" area, IE interpretation/critique - particularly the stuff he had at Lumos in 06 on "Wizarding logic" and "Jo Logic" - but you really have to be doing your own work, or rather making your own statement (such as "It is my thesis that the way magic functions in the world of Harry Potter indicates a shift in emphasis, away from materialism and towards reality as more relationally defined" - but I'm not sure that is not more my own read of his material he presented there - would have to go back and look at the Lumos stuff, which I haven't time to do at present, I think it is there at least latently in his material, just can't remember if he drew that particular point of relationality etc, I do think I clearly remember him saying that apparition and port-keys make it such that no matter where you live, you get to Hogwarts by going to platform 9 and 3/4 and get on the express because that is how students get to Hogwarts - in any event, I am not planning to publish on it so I don't have to work out which is whose and how much to credit in text or in citation etc) ... but that is not really the draw for the publishers. Theirs seems to be a pretty distinct, and understandable draw (meaning the draw is understandable, while doing the actual thing may not be) ... given how many people use the HP Lexicon, a print version of the apparatus of being able to find all the text references to a particular character etc in one place would probably turn a pretty penny. On Vanderark's side, he has done a lot of work in the HP Lexicon. Still a grey area I guess: I would still probably grant the argument to Rowling (Warner Bros I am less sure about, that is pretty much a money-grubbing world where I have a hard time conceding terms like "right" to such conglomorations, but ... whatever), but I would love to see Vanderark with some way to be compensated concretely for what has obviously been a lot of hard work (that's why I was saying, if he were writing his own critique stuff, which I think from his talk he at least might have some stuff there ... he's already done a HUGE amount of what is more like "taxonomy" research, it would be a great way to turn the research into something unarguably legitimately gainful). Anyway, I hope they work something out.