I just recently subscribed to Poem-A-Day from the Academy of American Poets.  It's exactly what it sounds like - a random poem emailed every morning - and I'm enjoying the chance to get to know new poets and rediscover old ones.  Usually this last goes something along the lines of "Oh! Isn't he the guy that wrote the thing about shooting his brother and the alphabet soup?" which leads to me looking it up and reading several more poems.  Not only is this an excellent procrastination technique (all hail grad school, the most efficient way in the world to get all the least important things on your to-do list done), but I'm reading some poems/poets that I really should have read some time ago - like today's contribution:

blessing the boats
Lucille Clifton

(at St. Mary's)

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back      may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that


I have to say, though, I'm having some of my general opinions on modern poetry confirmed by this new subscription.  There really is just a lot of blah poetry out there, and even the Academy of American Poets' official Poem-A-Day seal of approval can give a poem heft and power if it doesn't have it on its own.  I'd say more than that, but I really do have 15 pages to write today, and one can only procrastinate so long (I know, I know...). 

1. I've started to refer to papers as "short" and "not serious" if they're less than 15 pages long;

2. After spending six hours today writing a final exam, I came home and wrote for another five, and didn't think that this was an insane thing to do, or worry that my brain might spontaneously combust;

3. Thinking about posting something here about writing makes me decide that I probably need to read a couple of books and an article or two so that I can be sure I have a good sense of the field;

4. Getting mildly twitchy thinking about whether LiveJournal does footnotes so that I can cite things properly in said post.

The good news is that tomorrow is the end for a few weeks...and over break, I get to re-learn Chinese.

This is what happens when I listen to Pandora and putter around my room late at night, procrastinating about the work I should definitely be doing.  I start analyzing the songs.  And then I write posts at 1:00am.  Sigh.

Well, tonight I was listening to "Yellow Brick Road," by Kristin Delmhorst.  I like this song, but I think she missed the point a bit.  She sings that she’s “not on a yellow brick road/I’ve got mind and heart and guts of my own/I don’t need anyone to set me free,” but Dorothy’s journey on the Yellow Brick Road is not that simplistic.  Sure, the Lion, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow acquire those qualities in the end, but they aren’t the main characters, and that isn’t why Dorothy’s on her journey.  She’s on the road to discover that she already has “mind and heart and guts,” even when it seems like everything is stacked against her, even when it doesn’t seem possible that she could be the one smart and brave and passionate enough to succeed.  It’s about the journey.

Perhaps the singer in Delmhorst’s song already has a great deal of self-confidence, and doesn’t need to learn about the same qualities of herself that Dorothy did.  But the Yellow Brick Road, and the journey it represents, is about finding the parts of yourself that you don’t know you have.  You discover more about yourself than you knew was there to discover because you are walking that road, experiencing things that can only be experienced there.  And in the end, you discover, of course, that only you have the power to free yourself.  That is the function of the Yellow Brick Road.  And the fact that the singer has an entire song about how she’s off to see the Wizard, but doesn’t need this old clichéd road to get there only shows that she’s just making her first steps on those worn paving stones.


On a completely different note, check out Kate Rusby, because she's awesome.

                Cultivation

In early spring, with ice still on the bough

in sleeping earth I placed a single seed,

its name unknown, or how it grows, or bears

or if on rain, or sun, or kindness feeds.

When in April (the days are warmer now),

I sat for hours beside it in the sun

and told it of my joys, or of my cares,

then many seedlings grew, instead of one.

All through the summer of my long repose,

I watered it with laughter from the park,

and stories bartered on the porch till dawn

with secrets whispered in the sheltering dark.

At last September, summer at its close,

my seed, grown great at last, has borne its fruit;

beneath a spreading chestnut on the lawn

I lay a banquet for each branch and root.

And so the season turns,

and summer ends,

and I taste bounty in a garden of my friends.

It is an enduring testament to the fundamental goodness of Man that the used bookstore continues to be a viable business model in so many communities, and a further testament to the fundamental goodness of Portland that it has spawned the Used Book Store in its purest and most divine form: Powells'.  No one who knows me will deny that if an earthquake were to crumble my building into, well, crumbles tomorrow, I could happily set up shop in one of the less visited corners of the Purple Room (because honestly, let's face it, the only reason anyone ever goes into Western Philosophy is as a short cut to the women's restroom).  One of the best things about Powells' is that its huge selection, mixing used and new books, makes it possible to constantly discover new favorite authors without paying so much as to be evicted from whatever apartment building has heretofore failed utterly to collapse dramatically and force the hapless reader into Bookstore Refugeeism. 

One of my favorite of the favorite authors I've discovered in the last few years is John Crowley, another living example of how to write meaningful fantasy without shame and still be a Respectable Person In His Field (he's a creative writing professor at Yale).  I discovered him mostly by accident in the high summer two years ago, when I was peaceably devouring every book by Graham Joyce that I could get my hands on.  Powells' must have been running out of Joyce books to put on sale for me, so instead they posted one of the little signs that makes me love the store more every time I see one: "If you like Graham Joyce, try John Crowley (Aisle X)."  Off I toddled to Aisle X (given a pseudonym here to protect its privacy), where Powells had obligingly put on sale Crowley's Otherwise, a collection of three novellas.  Now, I'm not a huge fan of the short story, and I generally regard a novella as a demon hybrid between a short story that didn't know when to quit and a novel that just wasn't trying hard enough.  But I was in the mood for trying a new author, and it's hard to justify spending almost $16 on one story when I could get three for less than $10.  So Otherwise and I went off together to see what we could see. 

As a compilation of novellas went, it wasn't bad.  I liked one story well enough, mildly disliked another, and loved the third.  It was good enough that when I found myself back at Powells' (*cough*thenextweek*cough*) I picked up Little, Big, a book I'd been eyeing with wary desire for some time.  Suffice it to say, it was amazing beyond my wildest hopes, easily the best book I'd read in years.  I went back and came away with The Translator.  Then Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land (a good book, which nonetheless confirmed once again that I will never, ever like the epistolary novel, no matter how much fun it is to say).  At some point, I stopped caring if the book was on sale or not.  And then...I reached the end. 

This is my least favorite thing about authors.  No matter how excellent they are, at some point I am reading faster than they can write.  Which means I have to wait.  Which I hate doing.  Especially for new books.  And sometimes, horror of horrors, they up and die before they have provided me and the rest of the reading public with all the creative glory that flows in their veins (if I had my way, good authors would have a special dispensation from mortality - which would no doubt complicate things enormously).  Anyhow, I came to the point where I had read every John Crowley book Powells' had to offer.  It was a dark day days.

And then one day, I was mournfully petting the books in the Gold Room when I saw with joy that a new hardcover had appeared on Crowley's shelf.  You can imagine with what joy I took it down to discover that it was the long-awaited fourth book in a series I had never heard of (with three books ahead of it, I had a decent chance of finishing them just in time for this newest one to come out in paperback), but which was just being reprinted. 

Reading the Aegypt Cycle (I'm just about half way through Love & Sleep, the second book) is like opening up one of those dollhouses where the front is on hinges and swings all the way open, only to discover that the dollhouse is itself a dollohouse museum full of smaller examples of itself.  Every time the reader begins to build a picture of Pierce Moffet and the shape of his world, another door swings open to reveal an entirely different narrative landscape.  One of the qualities I like best about Crowley's writing is that he writes inward, requiring the reader to follow him deeper into the story to comprehend his meaning, rather than cluttering up the narrative by constantly explaining what's going on.  This means that by the time you're deep enough into the story to understand what's happening, you no longer know how to withdraw yourself.  In other words, when you step into the next dollhouse, you forget where the door is on the previous one.  This style is most appropriate for Aegypt, which is about cyclical changes in the structure of the world, in which the old understanding of What Is is erased, and a new comprehension is born.  When the world changes in Aegypt, it changes so profoundly that no one who lives in the new one can remember how to get back to the old one, and few even remember that the old one existed at all. 

I won't say any more about Aegypt than that, because I didn't put in a spoiler warning and don't wish to, but I wanted to write a little something about Crowley, who I fear gets relegated to the "sci-fi/fantasy" section, like many authors, and thus doesn't get the attention he deserves.  If an anonymous reader were handed The Translator out of a random pile, he/she would never call it a "fantasy" novel, and Aegypt would fit in beside Isabel Allende or any of the magical realists without a quiver, but because Little, Big, Crowley's best-selling book, is indisputably a fantastic novel (pun intended), Crowley ended up in the Gold Room, where the people who declare which books shall be Respectable Works of Fiction never go.  I'm grateful, of course, because I had the opportunity to discover him.  But as always, I'm afraid that people who scorn fantasy because they think it's all about busty women in scanty chainmail will miss one of the greatest living writers in America.  And as a result, they won't change their minds about fantasy.

Robin Hobb has it right.  Unfortunately, it's far too late for me.  Young innocents, beware!

http://robinhobb.com/rant.html

(Tribute to the incomparable George R.R. Martin, also among the fallen.)

Currently reading: The War for the Oaks, by Emma Bull.  And everyone else should be too.  Even if you don't like fantasy, it's an object lesson in why we should never, never let 1980s fashion come back into style.

I recently discovered that I was one of very few people my age to have read Phillip Pullman’s series His Dark Materials, the first book of which, The Golden Compass, has just been released as a major motion picture (as they say).  I discovered this when I tried to share my excitement over the imminent release of the film, which resulted in me promising to loan my copy of the books out to about 20 people.  Nevertheless, I was incredibly excited about the movie, especially since the trailers looked amazing and the cast was of high quality.  So off I went last weekend, almost jumping out of my boots, to pay $11 for two hours of joy.  I am sorry to report that I was utterly, absolutely, disappointed.

I was aware of the controversy swirling around the movie, of course, and I expected Hollywood to flake at least a little on that.  I was prepared for some more cowardly maneuvers to reduce the impact of the story’s most disturbing parts.  I saw what happened with LOTR, and that was a movie made by fans, for fans, of an epic that had been one of the most popular staples of English literature for 50 years.  The Golden Compass doesn’t yet have the kind of fan following that LOTR or Chronicles of Narnia do (mostly because most of the fans aren’t old enough to drive themselves to the theatre yet), so I expected some hanky-panky.  What I didn’t expect was a complete gutting of the story.

 

The short version, for those of you who don’t want me pouring my broken, disappointed soul out to you, is that director Chris Weitz bowdlerized the plot, scrambling it around until it made no sense at all.  It was like some Hollywood executive decided one night to tear all the pages out of the book, shuffle them around on the floor, and then write a script based on pages drawn at random from the pile.  I went to see the movie with my cousins, who haven’t read the book, and at the end of the movie they had to ask me what the plot actually was, since the movie was so scrambled they had no idea what was going on.  Dear Chris Weitz – You want to change the plot around, shorten some things up, rearrange some minor events?  Fine.  But don’t take such liberties that people who don’t have Phillip Pullman’s voice correcting you in their heads can’t follow what you’re doing.  Especially if that causes you to neglect facts or events that are going to be crucial for the next two movies.

There were good things, and it pains me that the plot crimes were so horrendous that I am unlikely ever to watch the movie, and thus enjoy them, again.  Stylistically, the movie was excellent.  The quality of the CGI is somewhere between the Harry Potter movies and LOTR, and was simply beautiful.  I thought the daemons were extremely tasteful, and whoever designed Lee Scoresby’s balloon deserves a present for making it look completely different from how I’d imagined it, but still absolutely right.  I thought the costuming was excellent, and the costuming department assembled the cutest collection of hats ever for Lyra to wear on her adventures.  The costumers managed to mash just the right time periods together to get costumes that were almost exactly the way I had imagined them.  The gyptians were particularly well done, with costumes that were obviously Rom in inspiration, but that did not stoop to the stereotypical gypsy uniform.

However, the thing I regret most about this movie by far is that such phenomenal casting went to waste through no fault of the actors themselves.  I can honestly say that there wasn’t a single character who was mis-cast.  Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra was absolutely perfect; she struck the perfect balance between a kid raised by extremely educated people, and a kid who, despite that, had managed to gain almost no education herself.  She also made exactly the stubborn Lyra face that makes Lyra so sympathetic, and is at the perfect gawky adolescent stage.  Nicole Kidman as Mrs. Coulter was just as seductively evil as I could have wished, and Daniel Craig as Lord Asriel had all the hauteur and aloofness necessary to perform dastardly acts and still make you want to be him when you grow up.  I was pleasantly surprised to find both Ian McKellen and Christopher Lee making appearances (at least vocally), although I will now forever picture the Magisterium as headquartered in Isengard.  Everyone else was also amazing, although in the interest of the bleeding eyes of my readers I will not mention them. 

It’s a terrible disappointment to see a movie with so much potential fail to stand up in the most crucial ways.  His Dark Materials will be life-changing books for the next generation of readers, and I can only hope that this insufficient cinema adaptation doesn’t turn too many people off the magic that is Phillip Pullman.

Nota Bene: This post was supposed to be up awhile ago, but I wrote it and then forgot about it until Evadne's marvelous review reminded me.  Many apologies, although I'm quite certain that no one was holding their breath for it.

All the reviews agree: one of the most poignant scenes in the entirety of Deathly Hallows, and maybe the series, is Harry’s solitary last march from the Penseive to Aragog’s lair.  Aware that he is going to his death, which is the only way to save the Wizarding world (and the Muggles, although no one mentions that) from Voldemort, Harry chooses to sacrifice himself rather than risk anyone else ever again.

 Ah, sacrifice.

 You will now put down your crucifixes, please.

 Reviewers extol Harry’s bravery (I am tempted to say braverism, in tribute to Glinda) and selflessness.  Comparisons to various well-known sacrificial lambs are made.  A few enterprising souls pull out the Frodo connection.  And, of course, Jesus makes an appearance on the critical scene.  It’s practically inevitable.

 Well, before you get too excited, let me clarify my position for you: Harry is not Frodo.  And he is certainly not Jesus.  Trying to force him into a Christ-like role only diminishes the meaning of both stories, and cheapens the emotion of the scene.  Each of these characters does indeed make a supreme sacrifice, but the motivations, the road that led them to that point, the aftermath, and even the act itself are all different. 

 I’ll start with Jesus, just to get him out of the way.  I’m not going to pretend to be any kind of Biblical scholar, so I’ll settle for the obvious points I raised above and you can quibble with them if you’d like (as I know some of you will).  Jesus comes into his power knowing what will be asked of him, and with some knowledge of what his life will buy.  He is prepared for betrayal, for denial, for rejection and abuse, all of which are relevant and moving because his sacrifice is primarily a redemptive one.  He makes it for others, who perhaps cannot make it for themselves, but it is meant to atone for their past crimes.  The future he buys with his death is not for him, but it is also not immediately for his beneficiaries.  It’s only the first step on a road that will, eventually, lead the godly to the world Jesus’ sacrifice opened for them.  This leaves Jesus exquisitely alone in his sacrifice—because even though he will be hailed as a savior, he can never share in the corporeal victory.

 Frodo is similar to Jesus in this sense, although their sacrifices bear only the most superficial resemblance.  Sure, it is entirely possible to create some hoary analogy whereby the One Ring is the Sin of Man, and Frodo is carrying it to the top of the mountain, blah blah blah, but this cheapens the Lord of the Rings, even more than does comparing Harry Potter to Jesus, because Lord of the Rings is a deep book with stories and meanings on many levels and many themes.  Jesus is the only story in his book (yes, I’m aware there are subplots and fanfic they call gospels), but Frodo is just one of many forces trying to save his world.  His is not even the only sacrifice, although it is the most powerful.  Frodo’s sacrifice is purely preventative in motivation; if he does not make the journey and cast the Ring into the Fire, then his entire world will be enslaved and destroyed.   None of the alternatives—keeping the Ring for himself, hiding it, or giving it up to another—will result in anything approaching a positive outcome.  Therefore, Frodo has no choice, and it may seem that he does not suffer the potential consequences of his deed the way Jesus does. 

 But a closer look at the story will reveal that Frodo’s true sacrifice is not made in the instant the Ring is cast away (an act which requires the active assistance of two other people, let us remember), but in the journey Frodo makes to get to that point.  As he travels, he gradually loses home, friends, health, joy, memory—in short, all the things that make his world worth saving, and he never gets them back.  He tells Sam, after the deed is done (and I paraphrase brutally), that sometimes we go out to save the world, and it is saved, but not for the one who did the saving.  Frodo will never recover from the wounds and hardships he endured, and in the end the only way for him to find healing is to once again leave the world he knows, which he nearly died to save.  Frodo may be like Jesus in that neither gets to enjoy the temporal salvation he brings, but whereas Jesus can expect those he saved to eventually join him in a place of even greater bliss, Frodo must leave all he knows behind, never to see it again.

 Compared to these great sacrifices, Harry Potter’s may at first seem insignificant, childish, but is not.  Unlike Jesus, Harry doesn’t know what will happen to him when he starts out on the road that leads to Voldemort’s eventual defeat (at that point, he barely knows how to chew his food).  Unlike Frodo, Harry’s journey to his moment of sacrifice is about gaining, about learning why the world is worth dying to preserve, not about losing it.  And unlike them both, Harry gets to enjoy the fruits of his victory.  He lives, marries Ginny, and sends his own children off into the world he preserved, a world in which he fully belongs.  So when Harry chooses not to raise his wand against Voldemort’s killing curse, his sacrifice is preservative in nature, meant to keep his world just the way it is, without any more change or upheaval.  There are certainly elements of preventative motivation in it—we’re given to understand that Voldemort is unlikely to bring about positive change—but Harry’s main motivation is to preserve the status quo.  And, perhaps most importantly, Harry knows that his sacrifice has a strong chance of success.  Unlike Jesus’ tenuous dependency on the faithfulness of men, or Frodo’s even more fragile hope that he can move faster than Sauron, Harry knows that Voldemort’s life is bound to his own.  So he approaches his sacrifice with a degree of hope for the future that neither of his predecessors can lay claim to (dispute if you will, Biblical scholars). 

 I don’t wish to belittle any of the three sacrifices discussed above.  All are meaningful, and should be honored.  I just want to emphasize the fact that it is possible to have a character make a sacrifice, even in fantasy, without it being a direct reference to Jesus or Frodo.  We all make small—and large—sacrifices every day that are neither Christ- nor hobbit-like.  Why should Rowling not have been emulating us, instead of them?

 
About the Epilogue: I said I’d say something about this, but I don’t want it to get too long.  I liked the epilogue, and was dissatisfied by it at the same time, but in the end I think that if there had to be an epilogue at all, this one wasn’t so bad.  I didn’t want Rowling to tie up every loose end (although a few more would have been nice), and it was gratifying to get snapshot of Harry’s future life without locking down every last detail.  I was particularly happy that Rowling limited her futurecast to an event that was important to Harry’s life (going off to Hogwarts), but was still fairly specific so that reams of explanation were not necessary.  All in all, I would have preferred not to have had any glimpse of the future that far ahead (a year or three would have been more than sufficient), but since she did it, I think she did it well.

 
*Although I made the claim that Harry is not Jesus, it’s pretty clear that Dobby the house elf regards Harry as something between Messiah and Divine Spirit Incarnate.  Please consider this my declaration of complete ignorance of house elf theology and Harry’s place in it.

WARNING: This post shall deal mostly with things I didn’t like about this book.  If that makes you angry, sad, or more likely to become a Death Eater, please close your eyes, hold your breath, and wait for my next post.

Horcruxes and Voldemort’s Soul

By far the most irritating plothole in this book for me was the treatment of Voldemort’s relationship with his Horcruxes.  Think back to Chamber of Secrets, when Harry destroys (unknowingly) the first Horcrux, the Diary of Tom Riddle.  Voldemort’s reaction is severe, to put it mildly.  However, in Deathly Hallows, Voldemort is not only unable to sense automatically when a Horcrux is destroyed, he must also physically go to the Horcrux’s hiding spot and check up on it.  How is this even remotely feasible?  What is the point of splitting up your soul for protection if you don’t even know when someone’s tampering with it?  What would have happened if Voldemort hadn’t caught on that Harry was after the Horcruxes—just expired suddenly with a surprised look on his face when the last one was destroyed? 

 I know that technically, that couldn’t have happened, because Harry was the secret Fifth Column of Horcruxes, but the point still remains.  There is no plot-driven reason for Voldemort to be so disconnected from his Horcruxes, except that Rowling needs to get him out of the way for a hundred pages or so.  It’s a huge liability for him to have to go personally check on each on and, blindly stupid though Voldemort sometimes is, I cannot believe that he would trust all his hopes of survival on that poorly designed a spell.

 
The Role of Authority Figures

One of the major themes throughout the books has been the constant failure of authority figures to do what they’re supposed to do—that is, protect children from the bad things out there in the world.  This is manifested in a number of ways, from sheer inability (Sirius Black), to willful negligence (the Dursleys), to outright malice (Umbrage).  The adults who can help (Dumbledore) are the rarest and most precious of all, but in the end, even they are insufficient. 

 

The Ministry of Magic

I know I’m not the only one who thought this scene was absolute rubbish, but I have to say so again here.  Polyjuice Potion was an excellent plot device the first time it was introduced, because it gave us insights into how unfamiliar characters might think and feel, and it was cleverly brought back for the Seven Potter sequence, but it is not enough to pull of the stunt Rowling attempts here.  The reason Harry and Ron were able to make Polyjuice Potion work so effectively for them in Chamber of Secrets was because they knew Crabbe and Goyle, were immersed in the culture of Hogwarts, and knew how to behave appropriately in a wide variety of situations.  None of this is true at the Ministry.  Harry, Ron and Hermione simply have no business being able to sneak in, steal a highly valuable trinket, free all the Muggle-born wizards and witches, and then escape with a minimum of damage, and Rowling has to stretch our belief beyond the breaking point to get through. 

 As she does so, she glosses over a number of things that would have increased the depth, relevance, and believability of this scene.  She gives us almost no information about how the Ministry is handling the coup, or what various important people are actually doing (do you expect me to believe that Umbrage’s entire job is asking wizards and witches for their Muggle birth certificates?), or whether the Ministry bureaucracy is actually buying into Voldemort’s hate-Muggles-find-Harry game.  She mangles the plot to give Umbrage possession of both the Black’s locket and Moody’s mad eye.  And she brushes right past the implications of rounding up Muggle-borns and registering them.  I’m not saying I wanted a full-blown exploration of discrimination and race hatred…but some concern might be nice.  This kind of behavior is exactly the sort of thing that would have deeply disturbed and angered Harry in previous books; here, he accepts it almost casually.  When the trio rescues all the captive Muggle-borns, it’s almost an afterthought.  This was a chance to inject some real relevance into an otherwise meaningless scene, and I’m disappointed Rowling ducked it.

 

Cameos

Because this is the end of the books, it comes as no surprise that Rowling wanted to bring everybody in for a last hurrah.  In many cases—Ollivander, Gringott’s bank—these cameos worked very well, and let all of us remember fondly as well, but many others are forced and add nothing to the story—think Umbrage’s appearance, and Percy’s inexplicable change of heart (not to mention knowledge of the secret passage into the Room of Requirement and connection to Dumbledore’s Army).  I sympathize with the desire to bring everyone out for a bow, but I wish she hadn’t sacrificed plot or consistency to it.

 

Wizards v. Other Magical Beings

I’ve wondered throughout the entire series why wizards don’t seem to have a good relationship with goblins, unicorns, dragons, and other magical beings (I think house elves have been adequately explained).  In Deathly Hallows, when Harry and Griphook drive their bargain, I thought I was finally going to get an answer.  Unfortunately, Rowling settled for some vague insinuations that wizards weren’t great neighbors, that goblins were conniving, and failed to explain at all how the magical races interact.  The interactions between races would have added some depth to the series that this book lacked, and I’m disappointed that Rowling either didn’t think about it, or didn’t find it necessary to share the conclusion with us.

 

Dumbledore Explains Everything

On one hand, I was extremely happy to see that the tradition of Dumbledore sitting down to explain everything with Harry had been kept.  I missed Dumbledore’s insight and humor throughout the book, and Harry definitely did too, so it was nice to get a little taste of it again.  That said, that entire chapter has the feeling of a huge cop-out.  It feels like Rowling wasn’t up to explaining why her logical leaps made sense through plot and normal dialogue, so she reverted to blatant exposition.  This brought the action to a juddering halt and knocked me out of the story.  I didn’t want to be in King’s Cross Station any more than Harry did, and if I had to be there, I wanted something a little more than “Voldy killed you Harry, but you don’t have to be dead if you don’t want to, thanks to some deus ex machina I won’t bother to explain, so feel free to go back to almost-certain death at Hogwarts, or stay here with Mr. Cheerful The Whimpering Mess In The Corner.”

 

Deus Ex Machina

Speaking of deus ex machina, I have three blatant abuses I’d like to complain of.  First, the use of the two-way mirror to get the Magnificent Trio out of tights spots.  I thought it was awesome when Harry hypothesized that the blue eyes looking out of the mirror were Dumbledore’s, particularly when he recalled that quote about how help will always exist at Hogwarts for those who ask for it.  To go from that to Dumbledore’s embittered, useless brother Aberforth as the explanation was a betrayal of Rowling’s talent and creativity.  And then, to compound that with the impossibility of Aberforth having any connection to Dobby or knowing where and when to send him! (Which, of course, reminds me of the deus ex machina of house elf magic, which I won’t even go into.)  Rowling should go back and read some of her earlier books, to see how it’s supposed to be done.

 Second, the dragon in Gringott’s.  Was there really no other way to get Harry, Ron and Hermione out of that tight spot, a spot, I might add, that it was improbable they should have gotten into in the first place?  Dragons, as Rowling has created them, are notoriously ill-tempered and useless, even around Hagrid, and the appearance of a conveniently blind dragon in the deepest vaults of the bank that can also fly through rock is a bit much to ask, in my opinion.

 Third, the Fiendfyre.  Let’s proceed right past the logical improbability of Crabbe knowing a spell like that.  Are we really expected to accept that these Horcruxes, otherwise so indestructible that only basilisk venom is a sure bet, can be destroyed by random spells cast by 17-year-old boys who don’t really know what they’re doing?   And how did the diadem get caught up in the ‘fyre without frying Harry’s hand off, anyway?  I’m okay with there being more than one way to do away with a Horcrux (this isn’t the One Ring, after all), but I’d like it to be a bit more convincing and/or grounded in the material Rowling has already created.

 There are several other instances of unnecessary deus ex machina, but as I do not want to reread the book to find them all or turn this post truly epic, I’ll settle for these three as the most inexcusable.  Feel free to differ.

 
Why It All Worked

Since Saturday, I’ve had several discussions about the exact explanation for why Harry was able to destroy Voldemort without dying himself (for real).  As far as I can see, this is how it actually works:

-The first time Voldemort tried to kill Harry, he was nearly destroyed by the force of Lily’s love for her son.  This love permanently marked Harry, making him invulnerable to Voldemort’s more traditional methods of doing away with enemies.

-Instead of looking for more creative ways to kill Harry (large rocks, cars, nuclear explosions), Voldemort concludes that what he really needs is some of that impervious mother’s love.  So he takes some of Harry’s blood.  Of course, nothing can be taken without something being given, even when the taker is the Dark Lord himself (this law of reciprocating giving is not something Rowling does much with, but it’s a pretty consistent law of magic and power, and it’s the only thing that makes all this make sense). 

-Therefore, when Voldemort takes Harry’s blood, he inadvertently splits his soul one more time, making Harry into a Horcrux, although neither of them know it.

-When Voldemort kills Harry in Aragog’s den, he thinks he’s got the ultimate upper hand.  Not only does he have the Elder Wand, but he thinks he’s trumped Lily Potter’s protection.  Unfortunately, Lily Potter didn’t love Voldemort, so Harry is still the only one with maternal protection.  The only thing about Harry not protected by his mother is…wait for it…that little piece of Voldemort’s soul.  So…poof! It gets destroyed. 

-Insert the death of Nagini, via Neville, who more than deserved this moment of glory.

-Now Voldemort is really mortal, and since he doesn’t actually have control of the Elder Wand (thank you ingenious plot device which did not require any deus ex machina), his spell goes awry, hits that irritating shield of mother’s love, and rebounds upon its originator, with disastrous results (for Voldy and the Death Eaters). 

 The moral of this story?  Blood magic is disgusting, and you should always check the past owner history of your wands before taking them into climactic final battles. 

 I don’t really have any complaints with this explanation, if it’s what Rowling intended, but I wish she had explained it in a way that made sense within the text. 

 That’s it for now.  This has, as expected, gotten ridiculously long, and I apologize, but the beauty of having my own blog is that I can ramble for as long as I want.  More to come later, but probably in a more condensed version.

Over the next undefined period of time, I’m going to offer a couple of posts on Deathly Hallows and Harry Potter in general.  This is mostly to get it all out of my head so that I’m not tempted to spew gibberish at everyone who even looks remotely like they might have read Harry Potter, so feel free to ignore at your leisure.  But if you do, and then you ask me about Harry Potter, and I spew gibberish, you shall have only yourself to blame. 

 Fair warning: I am not a Harry Potter fanatic.  I enjoy the books and have read them all, but I do not believe the sun rises and sets on Hogwarts, and I am not part of the “Harry changed my life” crowd.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  But I don’t want anyone conceiving the notion that I know everything there is to know about Harry Potter and his world, because that inevitably leads to nitpicking and detail-mongering, and I only hold with that sort of behavior for Lord of the Rings.  So there you are.   

 
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: A Review

 Right off the bat, I have to say that I think people were expecting too much out of this book.  People put off all the small concerns and niggling little inconsistencies in the first six books by believing that the seventh book would be a creation so wondrous it would solve all those problems, not to mention deliver an enthralling storyline and a thrilling conclusion…and, possibly, divulge the meaning of life, to hear some people talk.  Obviously, Deathly Hallows was unable to meet those wild expectations, which has resulted in bitter disappointment on the part of reviewers and fans around the world.

 This does not mean that it was a bad book, however.  Ultimately, I think Deathly Hallows was almost what we should have expected from J.K. Rowling, based on her previous six examples; a book full of characters we instantly love doing improbable (but never impossible) things, with a storyline rife with creativity but struggling to reach a conclusion.  Rowling has always had trouble ending her books (a problem I can empathize with), and it must have been harder than ever to know she was writing the ending of endings, that after this one there would be no return to Hogwarts.  You can see marks of her reluctance to leave the Wizarding world in every last loving detail of the portraits in Dumbledore’s office, in every minor character dragged in for a conspicuous last hurrah, even in the way she dwells on the epilogue, hanging on to Harry, Ron and Hermione’s children as they head off into the world her pen is leaving forever.  It is a testament to the connection Rowling has forged between herself and her creation, and when we open a Harry Potter book, we can feel her love for her world as surely as Harry ever felt his parents’ love in any dark hour. 

 That said, love for and deep connections with one’s creation cannot hide or excuse every shortcoming in the writing itself.  I’m going to leave my specific, nit-picky gripes for another post, mostly because I’m trying to keep this short(ish), but also because I want this to be a general review, not a page-by-page rant.  This is the first book that has taken place largely away from Hogwarts, and it demonstrated how dependent Rowling is on the school year routine.  Without Hallowe’en, Quidditch (oh, how I mourn another book without Quidditch!), Christmas and classes to give a basic structure around which the plot can weave, Rowling seems to flounder into the Great Abyss of the Interminable Plotline.  Many ferocious monsters lurk in the Abyss, including the Beast of the Circular Plot which consumes its own tale and so begins again, the ferocious Pacing Monster, which distorts space and time until the plot is twisted all out of proportion, and the fearsome Stagnating Character Creature, which forces characters to endlessly repeat actions until all emotion or purpose is drained out of them.  I’m a pretty patient person when it comes to authors detailing the nitty-gritty parts of a journey (remember, Lord of the Rings fanatic), but even I was getting more than a little sick of watching Harry, et al. set up camp, argue/not argue, almost get killed, run away, rinse, repeat.  The trips to Godric’s Hollow and the Lovegood residence were welcome diversions, but it wasn’t until they arrived at Hogwarts that I really got back into the action.

 Once things started moving again, though, I was reminded of why I keep reading these books in a single sitting.  I cannot imagine putting the book down anytime in the last 250 pages.  Rowling did a phenomenal job of giving everyone (and everything) at Hogwarts a final bow while still moving the plot along swiftly and creatively.  The use of the Room of Requirement was a great staging ground, and I was more than glad to see Harry finally accept the fact that he could not defeat Voldemort and the Death Eaters alone, and take advantage of the Army he founded. 

 Speaking of which, I found the themes of trust in Deathly Hallows to be a refreshing change from the previous books, where, no matter what the odds are, Harry has to face down the forces of evil by himself.  Not only did he learn some trust himself—allowing the D.A. to help him—but through his discoveries about Dumbledore’s past, he also learned that trust can be lost, and gained again.  A simple lesson, perhaps, but these are children’s books, and these are extremely important lessons for kids to learn in a world full of potential hazards.

 I have a lot more to say about this book, but I’m going to cut myself off for now.  Overall, I found the book to be an enjoyable read, and more or less what I expected of Rowling for the ultimate conclusion.  It isn’t the best books in the series (Prisoner of Azkaban), but neither is it the worst (Order of the Phoenix).  I’ll have some more to say about inconsistencies and plotholes, the meaning of sacrifice, and what I think about the epilogue, but not just now.  In the meantime, I’m going to go put a library hold on Philosopher’s Stone.

Well, I've finished it.  The final installment of Harry Potter's quest for personal growth and the ability to drink a pint of butterbeer in public without fearing assassination and/or fangirls lies quietly on my desk, with every page read, every period marked.

It took me a little under seven hours to read it, which means that with 759 pages, I was reading approximately 110 pages an hour, a speed which embarrasses even me.  Apparently, Harry Potter can improve everyone's reading skills.

I'm not going to say any more, at least for a day or so, because I hate people who spoil things, and I would particularly hate it if someone came across this entry by accident before they'd finished the book.  But eventually I'm going to have some things to say, and I'm warning you all right now that comparisons between Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings are going to rear their heads, so bring a hard hat.

When I started this blog, I decided that I was going to limit it to my thoughts and discoveries related to writing and reading.  I wasn't going to start bringing in my (frequent and passionate) opinions on politics and current affairs.  Given how much of my life is consumed by politically oriented things, I thought it might be nice to have a place to dump my purely intellectual baggage. 

Oh well. 

Three things were reported in the news today that should alarm any American who still believes that the Constitution and the rule of law have some place in our society.  A lieutenant general gave a press conference.  An under secretary for defense wrote a letter.  And the President clarified a position.

This is going to get long, so I'll let you decide what you want to read, or even if you want to.  The articles are pretty stunning all by themselves.  But for those who want a little more, here are a few thoughts on the general, the secretary, and the executive decision.

How could I say it better than this?

http://endicottstudio.typepad.com/endicott_redux/2007/06/why_it_matters.html

As plugged by Ellen Kushner, whose good taste I would not dare to deny:
"Baby Got Back" circa the 19th Century

"Please see my man Godwin for my card
and do call on Sunday for tea" ... oh goodness.  Hysterical.

Read it.  Trust me.  You shall find it hilarious.  And if you don't, go read some atrocious Victorian novels until you do.

...I learned today that the word yeti, translated literally, means "that thing over there."  Amazing. 

Which is why everyone should read books.
Specifically Neil Gaiman.

And that is all.

Dear World,
I'd just like to take this opportunity to apologize for cruelty, short-sightedness, blind selfish greed, and pigheadedness, wherever it may have been supported or tolerated by basically well-meaning people.  As someone said before me, they know not what they do.  Of course, that doesn't mean that they're excused for doing it. 

I'll get back to you about that.

Love,
Me

Like everyone else, I'm thinking about Virginia Tech--about the victims and their friends and families, of course, but also, what this tragedy means and where we can go from here. The more I think about it, though, the more I remember _Ender's Game_, and how Ender's lessons can be relevant, positive, and powerful here.

For those who haven't read this book (go read it, immediately), or who don't remember the story, a brief synopsis of the relevant portion: having completely destroyed an alien species before being old enough to drive, Ender concludes that the only way for him to make retribution to the lost is to serve as a living vessel for their memory. He travels the galaxy, learning whatever he can about his fallen enemies, then spends the rest of his life writing and speaking about the species--who they were, where they came from, what they wanted, why they died. Eventually, he becomes known as the Speaker for the Dead, and inspires an entire pseudo-religious movement based on remembering lives that have ended, and the meaning behind them.

Right now, we are standing precariously on the line between the event and its aftermath. At this point in time, we have the opportunity to decide what we want Virginia Tech to mean for us. It can be a senseless tragedy in which one mindsick young man decided that the best way to deal with his own demons was to destroy 32 of his fellow human beings. It can be a noble, if tragic, story of those who survived and those who sacrificed themselves so that others might. It can be just another example of everything that's wrong with American society (and there's an entire dictionary's worth of different definitions for that). In a month or a years' time, Virginia Tech can mean sacrifice, sorrow, hatred, fear, or hope.

What Virginia Tech's tragedy could be is the catalyst for a sea change in American thinking. I don't just mean American thinking about gun control, or mental health, or the stresses of integrating into American society, or of college life, although all of those things are important and should be reconsidered in the light of Monday's events. I'm talking about the way Americans think about themselves individually and in relation to each other. I'm talking about the way we think about friendship, and isolation.

Here in America, we're pretty proud of being self-reliant. We don't need anyone else--we're all taught from the time we're children that the highest good is to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, without anybody's help. Parents tell their children: don't rely on anyone. If you can't do it yourself, don't rely on someone to do it for you. Frequently, this lesson is the right one, but the cult of self-reliance has become so widespread that we've forgotten an important corollary: self-reliance is not the same as self-sufficient. Just because we can perform many of the basic acts of living without help from others doesn't mean we don't need other people. We do. The more self-reliant we get, the more we need other people to ground us, to bring us back into the web of life and remind us that we all exist as extensions of each other. Too often, I see people behaving as if they were the Last (Wo)Man on Earth.

The result of all this self-reliance is a tendency on the part of Americans to leave people alone behind the barriers they've erected. We're too willing to allow isolation to pass unmarked and unquestioned. We don't want people to think we're being nosy or intrusive, so we stay so far out of their personal space that we may as well be on different continents. This is the lesson I wish this country would learn from the events at Virginia Tech: it is not okay to encourage isolation and call it minding our own business.

I don't know if any of this could have prevented what happened on Monday. From what I've read, it sounds like a number of people tried to intervene with the killer at various points, all without success. But I'm thinking about Ender again, and his quest to remember those he destroyed. To bring something positive out of the death in Virginia, we must speak of the victims, yes, of the potential lost and the lives diminished, of the sacrifice made. But we must also speak of Cho, and his life, and death. We must remember all the lives lost, and like Ender, talk about why they were lost, and what they were striving for. To tell the story truthfully, we must have a reason for telling it, a lesson we want our listeners to learn. For me, that lesson is that we are never alone, and that to abandon another human being to isolation through neglect, laziness, or cowardice is just as bad as killing them. I draw hope from this lesson, because it gives me something to work for, a reason to tell and retell this story. I hope that this tragedy will encourage us all to reach out to other human beings in need and isolation with a story that, in the telling, reduces the chances that it will ever repeat itself.

Let us all be Speakers for these dead.

It's Christmas, so instead of family, friends, snowmen, peace on earth or goodwill toward men, I'm posting about...Harry Potter, of course.

I'm not an HP fanatic, but neither am I a member of what the roommate calls the Harry Potter Zombie Assassination Squad--i.e., the seven people in the world who haven't read the books, and who therefore won't be turned into zombies when J.K. Rowling flips the switch her works have implanted in our brains. Well, it's a theory, I guess. Anyhow, this is all to say that while I enjoy reading the books when they come out, I do not follow every new development in the writing process, unlike with some other authors. (George R.R. Martin, anyone?)

But this new title that has been announced for HP's seventh book is just ridiculous. For the seven of you on the Zombie Assassination Squad, and the four other people who have someone managed to avoid the media blitz of the last week, the new title is apparently going to be "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." Umm...what? For those of you who had any lingering "Return of the King" fears that the title would give away the ending to the series, you can rest with an easy heart. The rest of us will be trying to comprehend why J.K. Rowling is allowing 12-year-old boys to write her titles (although maybe I should just be grateful that it's not "Harry Potter and the Laser Monster Hallows of DOOM"). I appreciate that she's using the word 'hallows,' which is a fine word and deserves more airtime among English speakers, but unfortunately, the title doesn't have anything else going for it.

At a bare minimum, the title should be "Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows." For those of you who have not spent the last four years as copy editors, the grammatical situation is as follows: if the hallows are described as deadly hallows, it means they are likely to kill (or at least maim in a serious fashion) anyone who interacts with them. But if they are described as "deathly hallows," it means that the hallows themselves are experiencing poor health and/or are near death (e.g.- "The woman in the sick bed appeared deathly ill."). Unless Rowling's hallows are dying of consumption, the use of that word is just plain wrong.

Disclaimer: if Rowling's hallows are actually dying of consumption, I will acknowledge her as a Grand Duchess of English grammar, and possibly even forgive her for the 5th book.

The other major fault with the title is that it tells us nothing about the story. The titles of the other HP books, while not awe-inspiring, have at the very least been informative. "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban." "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire." These all introduced us to previously unknown people or things around which the action in the book occured. Just by looking at the title, you got that little shiver of delight because you knew that in a few hundred pages you would know all about the Order, or the Goblet, or the Prisoner. But this new title tells us nothing except that Rowling and her editors probably don't have a strong grasp of the language in which she is writing.

Sigh.

In other news, I have come off well from the holidays with a whole new batch of books to read and a goodly number of fuzzy warm things in which to read them. Expect a book list sometime soon.

Who says you can't mix politics and fun?

GO DEMS GO!