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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.

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Eeyore Moving On

I was poking around old sites I used to haunt more often, recently looking to see what anybody is saying about Rowling's now-famous comments in the Q&A session on October 19, 2007 in Carnegie hall here in NYC (and I am decidedly not entering the fray on this one, accept in one comment to this post, and owing to possible various levels/ages of readership and the sensitive nature of the matter and a belief in the rights of parents to be the ones who talk to their kids about these types of things I will not be naming the content ... I can quite easily state what I think are pertinent points about the debate itself, bullets point style, without doing so ... but for a decent discussion of the matter there are recent posts and comments on John Granger's site, www.hogwartsprofessor.com ... although I find some of his content, not really "leaning in directions I am not comfortable with" as much as over examining areas of the event etc that I don't think are as at the real heart of the matter- but I still think, as my own opinion and not necessarily that of this site, not wishing to make claims for the site as a whole, that Granger gives a pretty fair discussion of the matter).

In doing so I poked onto Eeyore's reflections and noted a post from October 1st in which she states she is sort of stepping down, meaning leaving the main fray of controversies surrounding the quality of Deathly Hallows (meaning controversies before the October 19th comments by Rowling, as this post cam, as I said, on October 1 - as described below, the controversies largely surrounded dissatisfaction with book 7 and an ensuing campaign of fanfcition, I guess to try to supplant the "official story" or some such thing) and and maybe just posting up some remaining notes she has in the margins from several readings of Deathly Hallows. Having not frequented web discussion much myself in the past year or so (outside of some writings of my own, best described as "OCB [obsessive compulsive behavior] pre-release jitters," just before the release of book 7), I can totally understand and respect Pat's sadness, expressed in the post, and her move (although she has links to her live-journal on her blog and so she may be pasoting there some to in the future). I have not always agreed with her reading of things in the works, but I have always thought she was a good and fair commentator. ... and I agree heartily with her: Deathly Hallows is a great book and a great finale to a great saga of a story.

I wish I was a good enough writer to put into words the thoughts that are in my head regarding fan-fiction (one of the main areas of unrest for Pat), but I will be doing above par to get the relevant base materials from which they are currently built into the course papers in which they belong in readable form by the end of the semester. So let me begin by making a confession ... I wrote a fanfic once. The reason nobody has seen it on this site is quite simple: I utterly, unapologetically and without any shadow of doubt, ABSOLUTELY, and probably irrevocably, SUCK as a fiction plot/dialog writer.

BUT, my main point is neither to support the genre as one I have dabbled (if one can call it even that) in, nor my aforementioned supreme suckiness at creative writing. My point is what that piece was to me. A central "incident" Pat writes about is somebody making a fanfic where Snape survives and He and Harry reconcile and do great things together in the new and improve, voldy-free, world. I guess this was done emphatically as a sort of "rebuttal" to what the author considered to be the supreme poorness of Rowling's final installment. As I said, or as a corollary, I agree with Pat on the Snape trajectory in the series and on how Rowling handled it really well in keeping with the character as built in the first six books (that final look in the eyes ... what was in it? you know there is some reconciliation, but to what degree? ... Severus Snape: while, I think, "redeemed" in the final book, still every bit as inscrutable and enigmatic in death as he was in life).

But beyond this, there is the question of what this fanfic means. I have been reading a lot recently of medieval Jewish exegesis known as "Rabbah" works, compendium of classical rabbinic commentary arranged by scripture passage and book (I am, for this course, particularly studying Genesis Rabbah, probably 6th Century AD/CE, on the "Akedah," the "binding of Isaac" in Genesis 22). The thing about a work like BR (Bereshit [Hebrew of "Genesis"] Rabbah). There is alot (and I mean A LOT) that could be discussed on the relation of this type of compendium of Rabbinic literature to "alternate stories" such as what fanfic is in its best instances, so I will try not to digress. The main point is that many times the Rabbis material explanations of anomalies (and sometimes things that are anomalous to their way of thinking but you and I would go "what is strange about that?") This, however, does not cause the reader/compiler to doubt for one second the validity/authority of the respective Rabbis who are being quoted. Theirs is a different perspective from ours, and one that is not damaged by what we in our scientific mindset call "mutually exclusive facts" (the old, and much prefered, word for these types of incongruities is, precisely, much prefered not only by those like myself, but GK Chesterton was also VERY fond of it - "paradox").

Now, a second ago I refered to "fanfic at its best," and this obviously implies that the kind of controversy Pat is rightly adverse to is fanfic not at its best. So, to keep to my example (along with its noted poor quality as a work), back to that fanfic I spoke of that I wrote. It was an attempt at a narrative rendition of a pilot for a sitcom called "Godric's Howling Hollow" - in which Harry and Ginnay are married (heh, heh ... got that one right :) ... Ron and Hermione are also married but there is nothing about them in the opening pilot episode) and living with their seven kids in the 7 story ancestral home of the Potter family in Godric's Hollow.It included other hightlights such as Dobby envisioning himself as Howard Kosel type in an old sports jacket of Vernon Dursley, acting as the magical receptor for a new technology known as the "macro-oracular," based on the omni-oculars in book 4, basically a way for wizards to understand muggle culture better by adopting some of its pastimes - here, televised sports ... IE "Monday Night Quidditch" (had some funny ideas too about Trelawney heading up the "broadcast" end of the "technology" - and, thus, the newest and largest bane of Ludo Bagman's existence). It also included Fred and George as the crazy uncles from whom Harry and Ginny continually have to guard their children, the ones always trying to get the kids to act as test subjects for new magical prank items etc (the particular episode involved Fred and George apparating right in the way of Harry and Ron watching a match on the macrooraclar, having just almost escaped unharmed, such that the latter two miss the final critical snitch catch and are very put-out, Fred and George both suffering from Ginny's new and improved bat bogey hex, consisting of phantasm bogeys so that one looks like a complete imbecile ducking, dodging and scurrying from imaginary foes). Now, Fred dying in book 7 obviously throws the proverbial monkey-wrench in my fanfic being "consistent with the canon" (as does Dobby's presence), but you know what ... I don't care because that was not what I was interested in in the first place. I think such a fanfic (although written by somebody who can actually write) is a nice adaptation of character qualities that are really present in the "canon" texts, exploring them by using them in a fairly different genre, and relatively independent timeline/plot (the only thing it really assumes, at least major thing that was in question going into the final installment in the "canon," is that Harry lives through the undoing of Voldy).

(BTW: Personally, while using the "canon" terminology because I think it is accurate to an acceptable level, acceptable as the best quick handle for the issues involved, I do also think the emphasis gets a bit skewed in using the terminology - it is an emphasis of what you can "prove" and I would rather have more fun than doing that type of "prooftexting" - I loved doing logical proofs in symbolic logic, it was the funnest class I took in undergraduate - so satisfying when you finally get that last link in the chain and can justify that triangle of three little dots, that magic of the final "therefor" symbol, ask Rowling, with a minesweeper score like that [my personal best is now 144 seconds on the expert level] she is a clear sucker for games that deal in patterns of logical relationship [although, anybody notice? hers changed ... I think? - used to be 99 now it is 101]- but this level of polemical, down and dirty, courtroom style arguing just kind of leaves me dry... in the end though the "canon" is the story Rowling wrote, and, personally, as for me and mine, that is what I went to Barnes and Noble and stood in line for and paid money for - and I feel I got my money's worth ... probably a million, no, an infinite, number of times better than any enfleshment of my own points could have done, even though I still feel my observations on the text and themes and meaning are valid and insightful ... but that is he difference between a story and a discursive essay, and, any day of the week, I will put my money on Rowling above just about anybody else writing these days for a good story with really rich meaning behind it).

Now, obviously, as is more than evident in the genre chosen, I do not have the same attachment to my fanfic as those who are writing the type of thing Pat is talking about (I did it as a thought experiment mainly), but I think the approach to the realm does merit some noting in this regard. There is a backbone to the world Rowling creates (meaning the immediate world of the characters onscreen, the social network of the work, as it were) just as there is a backbone to the major plot-arc. The sets of characters and their inter-relation is a real masterpiece. and I think fanfic is a fine thing sometimes for people working out the meanings of , and in a way unique to narrative.

Back to that whole Rabbinic thing - there was a distinct move at one to a new type of interpretive literature, one that included all of the (sometimes) outlandish (at least to our ears, but I think not so much in reality) elements brought forth by the Rabbis (some making you say "that is nowhere in Biblical the text!" - but that is the point of interpration: these things are in the text for the Rabbis, just not fleshed out fully in the actual textual narrative). This new form took these elements by the Rabbis and sort of collapsed everything into a new narrative, rather than simply a listing of the Rabbinical "vignettes," such as the Rabbah works were. And there is the connector, interpreting the original through a new narrative. To the Rabbis this was what was in the original narratives of the text, but at a "higher level." For the Rabbis that higher level was divine inspiration (the Torah as "written with black fire on white fire," the true meaning dancing elusively like flames just behind the "surface"), for Rowling it is what I have called the "backbone of the world/character-network."

I think fanfic is fine. But Rowling is the author who built not only the world, but the particular story in which it is enfleshed, from the ground up, and it is she who tells us her story in book 7 (I mean some of my guesses before book 7 were pretty wild, I think that the making of guesses did flesh out some of my interpretations of the texts of the first 6 books, but thank goodness it was Rowling writing ... a much better story in the telling, believe me). I myself would say that an author like Rowling was "given" the backbone (whether you want to think of it in terms of a tradition inherited by a particularly gifted mind, or as Homer's muses visiting the poet), but that is my own particular way of putting it. And that is also a harder thing to "demonstrate" - just as is "really pinning down" the unique strata of what I have called the "backbone world." In the end, we as readers receive that world only by receiving it "enfleshed" in a story - and Rowling wrote that story, and I think she wrote book 7 fairly consonant with the first 6 books (which makes sense, since according to her she had it all planned out, including book 7, before she put out book 1). Anybody is perfectly entitled to disagree with that statement, and perfectly free to write fanfictions that they think better flesh out the themes they feel, in respectful disagreement with even Rowling herself, are the truly central ones in the narrative logic of the story (eg, Snape should have lived and been more concretely reconciled with Harry and worked in concrete ways with Harry to build a better world because this would have better fulfilled their character logics) built in books 1-6 the (but, for the uninitiated reader, from what I have seen even this approach represents a very small percentage of fanfiction ... its a very broad, and often scary world, just FYI and "reader-beware").

But when it reaches this level of "disgruntledness" and sort of "fanfic as polemics" - I think it has gone way overboard ... in other words "way" meaning not just in degree but in kind/type.

In any event, as I said, I understand completely Pat's "stepping down" (and have basically, de facto, done so myself ... I have nothing left to say at this point - "if you ever really did" they chuckle back - or I should say that my remaining and further thoughts are not such that I can put in words even remotely resembling pertinence, at least for a web-based audience), and as far as that thing in itself goes I look at it as simply a really good person stepping on to other venues and focusing on other adventures and other types of adventures (that vast array of infinite possibilities called "human life"), and I think it totally cool. But I am also, as Pat expresses in her piece, a little saddened when I see those polemics going on ... such a waste of a good story. And that's my (as ever, completely miscellaneous, grossly verbose and utterly parenthetical parenthetical to anything even remotely resembling "normal life") two cents.

"See you in the funny pages ..."
posted by Merlin at 1:33 AM
1 comments






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