Tao of Potter

According to this post from Juan Cole, the Potteriad is a favorite even at Gitmo. The Potter novels (not the movies, the books) sing with some very harsh truths about religion, ideology, government, and corporate greed. I’ve written a book covering many of these themes, and several of the posts below also explore the activism that lives within Rowling’s novels.

Harry Potter and the State

Defense Against the Dark Arts

Why Harry Matters Now

Harry, Geek Like Me

Book Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

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Into the Pensieve: an Excerpt from The Tao of Potter

No. 12 Grimmauld Place and the Voices of Neurosis

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Let’s Play Quidditch!

Last modified on 2009-10-28 19:04:56 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

OK, it might cost a few bucks…let’s see, there are six players on a Quidditch team, that’s $128,000 X 6 = $768,000 per team. Then you’d have to get the scoring hoops set up in the air, and you’d need a snitch flying around (a winged golf ball with remote control); but then you’d be all set for a game. And if anyone is knocked off their broom, they fall into the water, which might be safer than bare ground. Let’s play Quidditch!

Hogwarts School of Warcraft and Wizardry…

Last modified on 2009-10-20 22:07:14 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Looked like Hogwarts to me, but it’s actually a well-known war college in New York State, located in the Hudson Valley region, one of the more breathtakingly beautiful places on our planet.

The music, by the way, is from the third Potter film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The selection is “Secrets of the Castle,” by the extraordinary John Williams, whose musical absence from the Potter films has been painfully apparent since movie 4.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Cannon

Last modified on 2009-10-02 20:40:33 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

As it did last year with the development of an invisibility cloak, science imitated Harry Potter again with the introduction of the “sound cannon” at the recent G20 in Pittsburgh:

Those who heard it said authorities’ voice commands were clear and sounded as if they were coming from everywhere all at once. They described the “deterrent tone” as unbearable.

For the couple dozen or so readers who may have overlooked the Potteriad, here is a representative passage from the Deathly Hallows tome that might have inspired the inventors of the sound cannon:

Voldemort’s voice reverberated from the walls and floor, and Harry realized that he was talking to Hogwarts and to all the surrounding area, that the residents of Hogsmeade and all those still fighting in the castle would hear him as clearly as if he stood beside them, his breath on the back of their necks, a deathblow away.

Ron Weasley’s Psychedelic Moment

Last modified on 2009-08-20 14:56:15 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

To some readers of my book The Tao of Potter, it may seem as if I over-analyze the themes of the Potteriad. Well then, consider this piece in the Times on the alcoholic themes in the new movie.

Perhaps the drinking motif is worth some discussion, yet I found a somewhat more ominous theme in the fifth book of the series — this is a moment that the filmmakers chose to ignore. Here is the selection from my discussion of Ron Weasley, psychedelic:

Yet something odd does happen to Ron in the climactic battle scene of Order of the Phoenix, which is perhaps a reflection of the osmotic power of ego-infection, especially among the young. After a brief separation amid their initial escape from the Death Eaters, Ron rejoins Harry and the others. But Ron is apparently drunk or otherwise intoxicated; he totters comically about, like a clown in a graveyard, and then attempts to “catch” a disembodied but living brain from a holding tank in which a number of such brains are magically preserved. He is instantly trapped within its “tentacles of thought,” which do him some severe, though not irreparable, damage.

This is an example of how even the more playful of Mrs. Rowling’s metaphors carry a deep vein of meaning. Amid all this warfare, a teenager is seen getting high, and is then trapped within snares of abstract, disembodied Mind. For those of us who grew up in the ’60’s and ’70’s, this scene evokes the Vietnam War-era experience of children experimenting with peyote buttons, mescaline, or LSD—trapped in the attempt to escape the seeming prison of the body, to retreat into a realm of pure Mind.

Ron’s injuries from this encounter are a metaphorical reminder that the madness known as ego arrives in many forms, all derived, however, from the same false belief in the relative insignificance of the physical body. For the psychedelic seeker, as for the grim, self-referential hero, spirituality and salvation are the goals of a bizarre asceticism, which continually demonizes the body in its fantasy of a higher or more ethereal, “bodiless” realm. The body thus becomes a tool, or worse still, a servant of some superior purpose or ideal.

Ron, like many of us who grew up possessed to some extent by this delusion, is able to recover, and the experience will no doubt become a turning point in his own path of growth. As the healer who treats him later declares, “thoughts could leave deeper scarring than almost anything else.” (p. 847). It is no wonder, then, that the room in the Department of Mysteries, in which these disembodied brains live, is adjacent to the room of death and its ancient archway and veil. Whenever we are misled, even through naiveté, into beliefs and practices that espouse an escape from, or abasement of, our bodily nature, we are indeed flirting with death.

Bad Faith Dragon: Draco Malfoy

Last modified on 2009-08-20 14:57:05 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

In advance of next week’s opening of the next HP film, the LA Times is having a series of interviews with its principals. Today, they chose the composer Nicholas Hooper, who has done the scores for film five and the one coming out next week. The point he makes about the music for Draco Malfoy being both dark and sad reminded me of a theme I found in the books, and further discussed in my Tao of Potter, excerpted below.

“Do you?” said the boy, with a slight sneer. “Why is he with you? Where are your parents?”
“They’re dead,” said Harry shortly. He didn’t feel much like going into the matter with this boy.
“Oh, sorry,” said the other, not sounding sorry at all. “But they were our kind, weren’t they?”
“They were a witch and wizard, if that’s what you mean.”
“I really don’t think they should let the other sort in, do you? They’re just not the same, they’ve never been brought up to know our ways. Some of them have never even heard of Hogwarts until they get the letter, imagine. I think they should keep it in the old wizarding families. What’s your surname, anyway?”
(Sorcerer’s Stone, p. 78)

There can be no doubt that these are the words of a “bad faith dragon.” Draco Malfoy , however, is the product of the cultural forces that molded him, and thus is but a symptom of an illness that has been recrudescing for thousands of years. Already, at the age of 11, the racism, intolerance, contempt, and insularity of a vicious group ideology can be seen in Draco, as actually happens in real life among children even younger than he. The nearest source of this corruption is indicated in the first book, and specifically identified in the second (Draco’s father, Lucius Malfoy); but from a broader perspective, the source is the same cultural distortion that the iconoclastic psychotherapist Alice Miller describes in her books on the depravities of group assimilation among Western children. As she writes in Banished Knowledge , it all goes back to the inner death whose grip first forms within a home where there is no honor given to a child’s uniqueness—in other words, where there is no love:

It is only from adults that an unloved child learns to hate or torment and to disguise these feelings with lies and hypocrisy…The young child knows no lies, is prepared to take at their face value such words as truth, love, and mercy as heard in religious instruction in school. Only on finding out that his naiveté is cause for ridicule does the child learn to dissemble. The child’s upbringing teaches him the patterns of the destructive behavior that will later be interpreted by experts as the result of an innate destructive drive. Anyone daring to question this assertion will be smiled at as being naïve, as if that person had never come in contact with children and didn’t know “how they can get on your nerves.” (p.47)

Draco, like many children who are thus indoctrinated, is a victim of what may be called “learned deceit.” The rationale for this corruption is captured in the phrase “for your own good”—as classic a case of projection as can be found in our society. In their commentary to Hexagram 51 (“Shock”) from the I Ching, Carol Anthony and Hanna Moog discuss the workings of this process of conditioning:

This hexagram also addresses the shocks employed by the collective ego during childhood, in both physical and psychological forms, to condition the child to have reverence and respect for authority. This use of shock has the effect of deeply impressing the psyche with fears. The conditioning ultimately has the purpose of transferring the child’s inner senses from serving his true nature to serving outer authorities. This transfer is made first to the parents, then to other institutions that represent the collective ego. The parents are made to believe, through their own conditioning, that their failure in this duty will create shame for them in the eyes of the collective ego. The child, for his part, is always told that the shocks are being administered for his own good. (I Ching: The Oracle of the Cosmic Way, pp. 551-552).

Thus, hypocrisy is encrusted onto the child’s heart in the guise of prudence or outright opportunism; while prejudice and racism come decked in the alluring glitter of tribal religiosity (“we are the chosen people”) or nationalism (“my country, right or wrong”). Even the more flattering versions of these distortions must be reinforced through the inner weaponry of threat, violence, and guilt. The sneering contempt of Draco’s father, Lucius Malfoy, comes from the same attitude; it is the ideological fuel powering the twisted consciousness that smugly bears the “white man’s burden.” Slowly and inexorably, it blackens the heart, turning an innocent child into a sneering, raging bully. It is the inner force that turns people into walking corpses, families into corporate entities, nations into states; it is the power that causes parents to allow their children to be sent off to kill and die in deserts half a world away—”for your own good.” For whose good is never truly made clear, nor will it ever be, as long as this decadence is permitted to rule us.

Michael Jackson and the Consequences of the Lost Childhood: A Teaching from the Tao of Potter

Last modified on 2009-08-20 14:58:11 GMT. 2 comments. Top.

It obviously cannot be proven, but I have been long of the opinion that much of the reason for the tragically abbreviated lives of geniuses like Mozart, Schubert, and Mendelssohn lay in the fact that childhood was stolen from them. They were pushed, rushed, driven into adulthood, and then soaked by a culture greedy for the products of their genius. As a result, their lives were poisoned with fame and expectation, and they suffered continually from their hurried or missing childhood experiences. I am fairly certain that, had they been allowed a normal childhood experience, their lives would have been longer and their creative output as great, and perhaps even more diverse, than it was.

I suspect the same thing happened with the late Michael Jackson. While I don’t for an instant put him into the same category of genius as the above-named composers, nevertheless he suffered the same type of loss in his life. When you lose your childhood, you lose everything, for there can be no recovery from that loss.

I think there is a lesson to this from the novels of J.K. Rowling, and I mention it in the Introduction to my Tao of Potter. As discussed below, the lost childhood sets up a lifetime of regression, the fruitless search for what will never be recovered. Thus, you find a grown man turning his home into an amusement park and dressing up like a pre-teenage girl.

To force conclusions aborts solutions; development that is driven to a fixed point of culturally-defined maturity only sets the stage for a lifetime of regression. Therefore, the students of Hogwarts both arrive and return via a long journey, pulled by an old steam locomotive, during which they will have time to adjust inwardly, form relationships, contemplate, and literally feel the time and energy that is needed for growth. This process is what the psychologist James Hillman refers to as “growing down”:

By now, the upward idea of growth has become a biographical cliché. To be an adult is to be a grown-up. Yet this is merely one way of speaking of maturity, and a heroic one at that. For even tomato plants and the tallest trees send down roots as they rise toward the light. Yet the metaphors of our lives see mainly the upward part of organic motion.

Hasn’t something critical been omitted in the ascensionist model? Birthing. Normally, we come into the world headfirst, like divers into a pool of humanity…Descent takes a while. We grow down, and we need a long life to get on our feet.

“Grow up” is a message of forced urgency; often the phrase itself is spoken in a kind of harried impatience, usually to a person who we think is acting immaturely (“can’t you grow up?”). In the linear, upward model, development is pictured as a rapid succession of stages, which can be compressed and foreshortened through the technologies of progress, until childhood comes to resemble the boot-sequence of a computer. Hillman goes on to point out the frequent consequences of development that is driven by this demand to “grow up”:

College kids with bright promise sometimes suddenly…fall off the fast track. They want to “get down.” Or drinks, drugs, and depression set in like Furies. Until the culture recognizes the legitimacy of growing down, each person in the culture struggles blindly to make sense of the darkenings and despairings that the soul requires to deepen into life.

Rowling’s Harry Potter novels are marked throughout by this tension between the natural, omni-directional movement of growth, in which the soul “grows down” as the body matures physically, and the culturally-defined “upward and onward” obsession, familiar to nearly all of us. This again reveals that tension between the magical reality and the Muggle delusion — the forced separation of heart and brain. But early on, as she introduces her characters and settings, Rowling is careful to remind us that true magic is found not in the flick of a wand, but during a slow train ride, or through long nights of solitary gazing into a mirror that reveals the images of an unknown and idealized past.

Robert Bly: The Death Eaters

Last modified on 2009-04-21 18:36:29 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

20 years before Harry Potter, Lord Voldemort, and the “death-eaters” were a twinkle in J.K. Rowling’s eyes, Robert Bly wrote this verse in a poem called “The Teeth Mother Naked at Last”:

The ministers lie, the professors lie, the television lies, the priests lie…
These lies mean that the country wants to die.
Lie after lie starts out into the prairie grass,
like enormous caravans of Conestoga wagons…

And a long desire for death flows out, guiding the enormous caravans from beneath,
stringing together the vague and foolish words.
It is a desire to eat death,
to gobble it down,
to rush on it like a cobra with mouth open

It’s a desire to take death inside,
to feel it burning inside, pushing out velvety hairs,
like a clothes brush in the intestines –

The is the thrill that leads the President on to lie

Harry Potter: Beyond the Mania

Last modified on 2009-04-17 22:17:38 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

If you’ve grown a bit tired of Stewart v. Cramer, you may be in the right place today (though I think Greenwald’s analysis does merit attention).

So while the rest of the Intarwebs debates Stewart v. Cramer, I’m returning to a favorite old topic that I haven’t touched on in about a year or so — Harry Potter. As you will see further along in the discussion of the “trickster” figure, Stewart has a place even at Hogwarts.

The casual observer might conclude that the Potter craze is in its sunset, and said observer would be right. But, as with many things in our culture, where the craze ends is where the meaning begins. The next film in the series has been hampered by injuries to stunt men, a murder of one of the actors, and a profit-driven delay from the studio. Today, we learn that a test group screening the film found it seriously wanting; and I am not surprised to hear it — there has not been a truly artistic effort in that series since number 3, mainly because I suspect Alfonse Cuaron doesn’t know how to make a bad or mediocre film.

Back on the literary end of Potter, which is where it all started, of course, there has also been some distraction and conflict. Potter author J.K. Rowling’s lawsuit against the author of a Harry Potter encyclopedia ended ambiguously, in part because the law (by the judge’s own admission) isn’t clear or mature on the very point in contest; but also because of Rowling’s inability to let go of her emotional grip on the story that made her a billionaire. As I have mentioned before, she will not be able to move on as an artist until she cuts her inner ties to that wonderful but perhaps excessively explosive opening to her career.

In any event, I suspect that the screening audience’s dissatisfaction with the latest film is not merely a matter of the director’s obsession with romance or the mangling of the story. That is no doubt part of it, but I think the cultural timing, if you will, is also an essential aspect to this. The story has now been told in its fullness; we all know where it went and how it ended. Once that point is reached in any human affair, the natural impulse is to review the experience, search for meaning, and discover what you missed as the yarn unfolded. This applies to personal relationships; the working world; political contests; and of course to art. Books are no doubt being written as we speak of the financial crisis, the Obama phenomenon, the Bush era, and other political and cultural landmarks of our recent history — all of them guided by the effort to offer perspective and meaning. Most of these will fail, because they are being written to a market controlled by the corporate and its obsession with the superficial. Thus, caveat emptor.

Nearly five years ago, I was offering up a book on the Potter phenomenon, and it remains available to those who might be interested. I don’t know whether it, too, would have failed before the general public, because, though it did have an agent for a time, it never quite got the chance to try itself out on that stage. Nevertheless, it is the sort of treatment that this series needs, now that the story is told and the movies are proving to be generally unsatisfying. What follows is an example of the kind of thing I have in mind; it’s the ending of Chapter 1 of my book, in which the environmental aura of Hogwarts Castle — what the filmmakers of the series have referred to as “the Potter universe” — is discussed as a character in the novels:

Environment as Character: The Aura of Hogwarts

There were a hundred and forty-two staircases at Hogwarts: wide, sweeping ones; narrow, rickety ones; some that led somewhere different on a Friday; some with a vanishing step halfway up that you had to remember to jump. Then there were doors that wouldn’t open unless you asked politely, or tickled them in exactly the right place, and doors that weren’t really doors at all, but solid walls just pretending. It was also very hard to remember where anything was, because it all seemed to move around a lot. The people in the portraits kept going to visit each other, and Harry was sure the coats of armor could walk. (Sorcerer’s Stone, pp. 131-132)

There is a lot of unpredictable movement in the magical world of Hogwarts: objects that seem to possess not only consciousness but a mischievous sense of humor. Indeed, by comparison, the children themselves seem rather staid and mature—they are continually portrayed in attitudes of annoyance or alarm as they react to the petty, playful assaults of magical objects and ghosts. This kind of environment, with its trick doors, moving staircases, and paintings that invent unfathomable passwords for permission to enter a room, is highly suggestive of the trickster figures of primitive mythologies and Zen Buddhism.

Rowling’s metaphors are particularly Zen-like in the way they expose the self-conscious grandiosity and presumption of goal-directed spirituality. The stairway to heaven may contain a trick step, or lead in the wrong direction tomorrow morning, just when you assume that you’ve figured it out, that enlightenment is attained. The doors of perception that seem to be portals to the right hand of God or the end-point of realization will, once you have striven to gain a grip on their handles, turn out to be blank, laughing stretches of wall.

It is at a time like this that Peeves the Poltergeist (who is introduced in the very next paragraph following the one quoted above) will appear, to drop a water balloon on your head, thus completing the lesson in the folly of spiritual self-aggrandizement. It is no mistake that the one person at Hogwarts who is most tormented by Peeves is the caretaker, Argus Filch, who is a person that we all encounter in our own lives every day. Filch is a “squib”—a person born of magical parents but having no magical ability; his petty self-absorption in the most superficial aspects of propriety and routine has thoroughly clotted his true nature. He has not an ounce of humor or human feeling in him, it seems—he is the tattletale at school, the procedure freak at the office, or still more ominously, the grownup that beats a child for playing in the mud on Sunday. Peeves is one antidote to Filch-consciousness: without the cackling irritation of Peeves’ mindless sport in our lives, we would be far more prone to falling prey to the dark and petty meanness of Filch.

The role of humor in the way of natural magic will be more fully discussed in Chapter 4; it will be worthwhile here to briefly emphasize the playful aspects of the environmental metaphor at Hogwarts and its connection to the pre-institutional stories of ancient cultures. These latter have been delightfully recorded by Joseph Campbell, in his focus on the trickster spirits of myth:

This ambiguous, curiously fascinating figure of the trickster appears to have been the chief mythological character of the paleolithic world of story. A fool, and a cruel, lecherous cheat, an epitome of the principle of disorder, he is nevertheless the culture-bringer also. And he appeared under many guises, both animal and human. Among the North American Plains Indians his usual form was Coyote. Among the woodland tribes of the north and east, he was the Great Hare, the Master Rabbit, some of whose deeds were assimilated by the Negroes of America to an African rabbit-trickster whom we know in the folktales of Br’er Rabbit. The tribes of the Northwest Coast knew him as Raven. Blue Jay is another of his forms.

Shakespeare, of course, gave the trickster an eternal life in literature, from Puck of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to the Fool of King Lear. Peeves, often helped by the trickster twins Fred and George Weasley, is the modern literary incarnation of the trickster spirit, who noisily enforces attention, humility, and laughter upon those who would otherwise take themselves and their lives too seriously. For when we become too serious, we become self-absorbed; and before you know it, the passing truths of our lives are made into the concrete monuments of insular religion, science, and law.

The presence of Peeves reveals another of Dumbledore’s qualities as a leader: the poltergeist is tacitly accepted (and even encouraged) by the headmaster, who also has a taste for tipping sobriety onto its ear now and then. At the Opening Feast of the first book, Dumbledore solemnly announces that he has words of wisdom for the students, and then barks out, “Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!” (Sorcerer’s Stone, p. 123).

Indeed, there can be no inner growth without humor and the ability to embrace life’s seeming capriciousness. It is a teaching that has required repetition throughout history: Socrates was a Peeves figure, blowing raspberries within the most holy church of Athenian Democracy; literary figures from Aristophanes to Rabelais to Cervantes to Thoreau to Gogol have made the same blessed sounds, each in his own way.

This is a lesson which Mrs. Rowling repeats over and again throughout the Potter stories, perhaps in the awareness of its importance to a culture that is mired in a petty, self-absorbed Filch-consciousness—especially among its religious, political, and scientific leaders. Wherever there is pomp and self-consciousness, it is knocked flat onto its ass by a false door, a trick step, a violent willow tree, a “blast-ended skrewt,” a three-headed dog, or a ghost who can flip his head back like the cover to an ice bucket.

Modesty is the golden thread of the tapestry of magic; humor is the breath that allows Modesty to glow amid the morbid decadence of pompous ideology. One final trickster story from the American Indian mythology will be appropriate here—imagine as you read it that the “coyote’s arms” are the different departments within a modern corporation or a government bureaucracy:

One day the trickster, in the form of a coyote, killed a buffalo and while his right arm was skinning it with a knife his left suddenly grabbed the animal. “Give that back to me,” the right arm shouted. “This is mine!” The left arm grabbed again, and the right drove it off with the knife. The left grabbed again and the quarrel became a vicious fight. And when the left arm was all cut up and bleeding, Trickster cried, “Oh, why did I do this? Why did I let this happen? How I suffer!”
(from Joseph Campbell’s Primitive Mythology, p. 269)

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Movement is the metaphorical blood that both animates and nourishes the environment of Hogwarts: motion is the medium of spontaneity, of humor, of the magical dance of Nature. Movement is life, and movement across structural boundaries is evolution. So it is at Hogwarts, and in the world that its metaphors describe. In his book The Hidden Connections, scientist Fritjof Capra (still best known for his groundbreaking work of the ’70’s, The Tao of Physics) answers the question “what is life?” in the context of a “living systems” view of cellular biology:

…the cellular network is materially and energetically open, using a constant flow of matter and energy to produce, repair, and perpetuate itself; where new structures and new forms of order may spontaneously emerge, thus leading to development and evolution. (p. 31)

The more we learn of life—whether from a scientific, psychological, social, or cosmic perspective—the more we see its boundaries expanded. The limitations imposed on life by the science, law, and religion of the feudal past tend to crumble into cosmic dust before an open and receptive effort of understanding. The recognition of the organic nature of truth, its unceasing unfolding, may be considered a beginning step in opening to the way of natural magic. The truths discovered through this book will be expanded upon by every reader who encounters it in a spirit of sincerity and receptivity; there is no end to understanding, because there is no end to consciousness.

Harry Potter and the Half-Assed Lawsuit

Last modified on 2008-04-15 03:27:50 GMT. 3 comments. Top.

Questions you may have for me, if you’re aware of a certain book I wrote some four years ago:

Am I following the latest hearing of the Wizengamot? You bet I am.

Am I an expert on copyright law? You bet I’m not.

Do I have an opinion on the case anyway? Umm…yeah.

Let’s start by getting Rowling’s climb-on-the-cross act out of the way. This is perhaps the most repulsive aspect of the entire scenario: “I don’t want to cry,” and it has “decimated my creative work.” Aside from the fact that such nonsense has no legal standing as either a defensive or offensive tactic, it is as lame as you can get. If your creative spirit is so weak that it can be destroyed by the appearance of a mere reference work, then I hope that billion or so you have now can last you a lifetime.

Now, to substance: what is Rowling attacking here? A fan-focused, printed version of The Harry Potter Lexicon, an online encyclopedia; an organized compendium of names, facts, information, and other background data from the novels. A printed version, by the way, of a website that Rowling has herself praised and referenced. In other words, a reference work that organizes data on the same model as, for example, the DC Comics Encyclopedia.

Plagiarism? Hardly. No plot, character, setting, or language is being stolen, re-worked, or represented as an original creation. In fact, the author and publishers are clear in their intent: to offer a fun and thorough compendium of Potter-related information drawn from a study of the novels. Barry Bonds might as well be suing the authors of The Baseball Encyclopedia for plagiarizing his name and lifetime statistics.

If Rowling wins this suit, literary reference works and literary criticism overall will be endangered. Authors of compendia and criticism on the works of Tolkien, galactic hitchhiker Douglas Adams, Simpsons author Matt Groening, and many more, will be facing disastrous litigation. But those authors know that such reference works generate interest — they actually draw people to buy the original stuff.

Literature, like politics, scientific theory, and many other aspects of intellectual life, is meant to be shared, debated, analyzed, and interpreted. The more this sort of stuff is done, the better. If we are going to understand ourselves and our culture, we had better be free to organize and study the primary influential movements in our society. And like them or not, the Potter novels have been influential: some half a billion of them have been sold in virtually every language read and spoken on the planet. There are philosophical, religious, and scientific works, along with a panoply of predictive or analytical writings on Potter: all of these will be facing shutdown or litigation if this inane lawsuit against the Potter lexicon is victorious.

What about me? Hell, my book on the Potter universe has sold all of five copies, and I’ll most likely be buried before it reaches double digits in sales. I have no vested material interest here; I’m just a lover of the Potter tales who would like to see their author behave like a grownup, drop this frivolous lawsuit, and get back to what she does best. This asinine talk of being creatively disabled by the compiler of a Potter encyclopedia is as far beneath her as the Chamber of Secrets is below Hogwarts (will that sentence generate a cease-and-desist letter, I wonder?). My only message for Ms. Rowling is this: if you choose to jump into the pit, don’t cry that you’re getting stuck in the mud. Grow up and get back to work.
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Site note: Beginning next Monday, I’ll be back among the painfully employed, and my new bosses will not care whether or not I have time to blog properly — they will have certain other expectations, which I will strive to meet. If you’ve ever been out of work for four months, then you know where I’m coming from.

That said, you can’t cork a geyser. I will continue to spout, perhaps sporadically. If I were a rich man, I’d lay out some cash on getting my co-author, Mr. McKenna, to write more; but as things are, he gets as much out of this as I do, which is zero. And if you read him regularly, you will agree with me that McKenna’s a guy who ought to be cashing big checks from Slate or The Atlantic, rather than scribbling into an anonymous WordPress blog for nothing.

But writing for nothing is our choice, and has no impact on a principle that I wish many a more famous writer than we two here would recall: that when you present yourself in a public forum, you have an obligation to produce stuff that is thoughtful, fair, and meaningful (at least occasionally); that you try to avoid wasting your audience’s time with fluff or stupidity (e.g., Obama — orange juice or coffee?). In short, there should be a Hippocratic Oath for writers as well as doctors — primum, non nocere (above all, do no harm).

We’ll keep trying to honor that principle here.

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Audio Files

In Diagon Alley
Up the Xenophilius Tree
On the Hogwarts Express
Within the Castle
Meeting Professor Snape
The Third Floor Corridor
The Two Stone Faces