The TERF Who Came to Tea & Murdoch: Is J. K. Rowling Writing Her Memoirs?

June 15, 2022 by 2 Comments

https://twitter.com/JKRsBarmyBooks/status/1535916939243053056

J. K. Rowling visited ‘JKR’s Barmy Book Army’ last week and it seems a good time was had by all (see the follow-up tweets about the visit here and here). “All you women, fighting your private and public fights, and all of you who are suffering as a result of this ideology, rest assured: this woman is with you. She’s listening and watching and thinking deeply.” I suspect as encouraging as this drop-in and conversation was to the women in Rowling’s audience it was as meaningful and heartening to The Presence.

I want to note the book Rowling held up to the camera, though, with the premise that she did this deliberately and with intention greater than advertising the Booker Prize winning novel that the Barmy Book Army discussed on her visit. As no mention is made of a book in the several tweets about her time at BBA-HQ or even of conversation about books in general, it is possible that it was the novel Rowling brought with her — and that she wanted the Royal Society of Rowling Readers to think seriously about it.

The novel in her hand is Iris Murdoch‘s The Sea, the Sea. I haven’t read it, alas, but Wikipedia tells me that this is the plot:

The Sea, the Sea is a tale of the strange obsessions that haunt a self-satisfied playwright and director as he begins to write his memoirs. Murdoch’s novel exposes the motivations that drive her characters – the vanity, jealousy, and lack of compassion behind the disguises they present to the world. Charles Arrowby, its central figure, decides to withdraw from the world and live in seclusion in a house by the sea. While there, he encounters his first love, Mary Hartley Fitch, whom he has not seen since his love affair with her as an adolescent. Although she is almost unrecognisable in old age, and outside his theatrical world, he becomes obsessed by her, idealising his former relationship with her and attempting to persuade her to elope with him. His inability to recognise the egotism and selfishness of his own romantic ideals is at the heart of the novel. After the farcical and abortive kidnapping of Mrs. Fitch by Arrowby, he is left to mull over her rejection in a self-obsessional and self-aggrandising manner over the space of several chapters. “How much, I see as I look back, I read into it all, reading my own dream text and not looking at the reality… Yes of course I was in love with my own youth… Who is one’s first love?”

Three quick notes on why Rowling might have held up this title for her serious readers’ attention, beyond “I like this book,” “Here’s what I’m reading now,” or “Had a great conversation about Murdoch with the BBA today!”:

(1) “Love and Loss:” Rowling told Cruz in 2008 that “I did not write only to escape but because I searched to understand ideas which concerned me. Ideas such as love, loss, separation, death… and all that is reflected in the first book.” She wrote about Troubled Blood that “change, loss, and absence” were its “major themes.” The Iris Murdoch page at Wikipedia describes The Sea, The Sea  as “a finely detailed novel about the power of love and loss.” Rowling may be signaling here that she is at a similar stage in here career of writing as Murdoch, the pan-sexual philosophical novelist, was when she wrote The Sea, the Sea, her nineteenth work. They certainly seem to be on the same thematic page.

(2) The Water: Troubled Blood‘s burial at sea on Easter morning of Aunt Joan and Strike’s later reflections at the ocean-side resort about his Cornish connection with the Absolute in its most powerful symbol, not to mention the ubiquity and constancy of rain and flooding in Strike5, make the Xenophon pointer in Murdoch’s title another link between Rowling and this book. Murdoch, a student of the ‘Greats’ at Oxford, simultaneously referenced in The Sea, the Sea‘s title a poem by Paul Valery, ‘The Graveyard by the Sea,’ and the most famous scene in the Anabasis that Valery was noting, in which the Greek mercenaries fleeing the Persians see the Mediterranean at last and weep in grateful recognition of their returning home, symbolically their salvation and victory over death. Again, Rowling is making the gesture so we connect the dots between her work and Murdoch’s.

(3) A Memoir: The story told in The Sea, the Sea is of an aging writer consumed by his past caught up in reflections, outrageous behaviors, and no little regret about “love and loss.” The book is that writer’s attempt at a memoir. Is Rowling-Galbraith-Murray at a similar point in her own life? Could this display of The Sea, the Sea be the first indication that Rowling is writing her own Apologia Pro Vita Sua? Rowling’s work is becoming increasingly autobiographical, obviously in The Christmas Pig in which the story premise is from her own family but in which she also makes a cameo appearance herself as Jeannie’s mum, and less obviously but I suspect more profoundly in the core cause of Margot Bamborough’s death in Troubled Blood. If Rowling is writing up her life story, “listening, watching, and thinking deeply,” she dropped her first clue about that on this visit to JKR’s Barmy Book Army. As she said in her 1998 interview, “You heard it here first.”

 

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes

New ‘Cursed Child’ Condensed Version: Will the New Play’s Script Be Published?

June 14, 2022 by 4 Comments

As discussed here earlier this month, there is a new Harry Potter and the Cursed Child appearing on stages worldwide. The original four act play is only now performed in London and Hamburg and the much condensed new play has significant changes, most notably, the relationship of Scorpius and Albus has shifted from friendship to young gay love. From The Guardian review of the shorter version:

Some characters are dropped entirely and go unnoticed; others are reduced to the point that you wonder why they are included at all. (Albus’s older brother James is forgettable now; their sister Lily is entirely gone.) One major character, who is secretly a villain and was included in much of the original show, is now barely on stage at all, making their big reveal feel a little wet.

And yet, among all the cuts, one scene has noticeably been added: in the second half, Albus takes Harry aside to inform his father that he will have to accept Scorpius as “the most important person in my life”, a declaration made with weighted urgency and one that his father benignly accepts. The original show was criticised for “queerbaiting” Albus and Scorpius, but director John Tiffany – who is gay – then said it “would not [have] been appropriate” to make the nature of their relationship any clearer.

Six years on, it is clear someone felt it was now appropriate. The sub is gone from the subtext; Scorpius’s female love interest in the original is now a platonic friend. Whether giving Harry a son who seems ever-so-slightly queer has anything to do with Rowling’s now public views on trans people, aired since the play debuted six years ago, is unknown and unlikely ever to be confirmed by anyone. Some wouldn’t even spot the change. What is inarguable is that someone thought the change was important.

Brady Dalton Richards, the queer actor playing Scorpius in the Broadway short-version, has said he feels it is his onerous responsibility to give this new representation of the story believability: “As a queer person, a gender non-conforming person, to be a visible voice, gives the gift of ‘anyone can be a part of this world’ — and that’s a responsibility, y’know, to be this open and visible force for inclusion and representation in presenting this newer version of the story.” I preferred “queer-baiting,” frankly, with its hetero-normative gestures at the end to what is obviously fan-servicing and capitulation to the Zeitgeist.

But I have only read the 2016 ‘Special Rehearsal Edition Script’ and never seen either version of the play (it hasn’t traveled to Oklahoma City, for one thing). Rather than make judgments about the play and the new version specifically, as I have done in admittedly careless fashion, a play which the Australian producer of the Melbourne Cursed Child claims that Rowling co-operated with Tiffany and Thorpe in revising and condensing during the UK Covid hysteria and lockdowns (see film clip above), when will serious readers of Rowling’s work, to include a play she didn’t write or re-write but had some part in crafting, have a chance to own a printed copy of the new play?

The play will almost certainly never have a traveling company or be performed by high school students for their Spring Drama credits. It’s much too expensive a production, one requiring remodeling of the theaters in which it is performed costing millions of dollars. That being said, the revised version of the play, having displaced the original in four of its six global venues, is the one most likely to be the accepted or most performed version. I hope Bloomsbury decides sooner or later that a second edition of Cursed Child with the updates and revisions is in order, maybe even before Christmas…

 

Filed Under: Cursed Child

More Bad News for Fantastic Beasts: Ezra Miller Role Open for Re-Casting?

June 13, 2022 by 2 Comments

It looks like Ezra Miller is even less likely to return to his role as Credence Barebones-Aurelius Dumbledore than he was before. According to reports in Deadline and in Rolling Stone magazine, the parents of a teenage woman have gone to court in pursuit of a restraining order for the non-binary movie idol because of his supposed grooming of their child beginning at the age of twelve and culminating last year in her needing to be taken to a mental health facility to recover from a “bad LSD trip.” Per the parents’ request from the courts for help, “Ezra uses violence, intimidation, threat of violence, fear, paranoia, delusions, and drugs to hold sway over a young adolescent Tokata.” 

This news, of course, comes on top of Miller having been arrested twice already this year for a bar-fight and for second-degree assault. If the Beasts franchise dumped Jonny Depp over Amber Heard’s #MeToo allegations, accusations since found in a jury trial to have been spurious, I’m having a hard time seeing Miller being invited back for Beasts 4, assuming there will be a fourth episode, or thinking that there will be more Flash drives featuring the mentally unstable and violent actor.

I have heard, on the other hand, that Disney is now excited about reviving The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise now that Depp has been vindicated (sort of) in the A-List Nightmare Trial of the Century (assertion post verdict and denial of rumor pre-verdict). Perhaps Depp could return to Fantastic Beasts, too, as an older, broken Credence Barebones, years after the Secrets of Dumbledore revelations, for a final showdown with Gellert Grindelwald in Beasts 5, the finale set in 1945.

Talk about a wild latch for the series ring! In the first film, Depp only appears as Grindelwald in the last seconds, another actor having played that part throughout the movie. If Depp returns in the last installment of the series, he can confront the Bad Guy playing Gellert who so groomed and abused Credence in Beasts 1. This is not to mention the spin of Miller’s being accused of grooming a helpless innocent and being burned in the process, a too-close-for-funny replication of what Grindelgraves did to him in the first Beasts…

Filed Under: Fantastic Beasts

Forty Year Old ‘Cold Case’ Is Solved: Missing Person Reunited With Family

June 12, 2022 by Leave a Comment

Louise Freeman wrote on Friday about a likely real-world model for Janice Beattie, Poisoner Granny and Troubled Blood’s nurse with a secret. The Giggling Granny Serial Poisoner also included as an introduction the several times the real world has had representation in Strike mysteries, almost all of which instances I think Professor Freeman discovered and in one case predicted.

Today I want to share a ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ news story here in Oklahoma that could not have been a model for the Troubled Blood story line, a missing person cold case that is forty years old, but for which story Strike5 might have been inspiration.

In brief, a family of three disappeared forty years ago in Texas. All were presumed dead but no bodies were ever found. The parents and their one year old daughter, Holly, had vanished without a trace. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes

What Was Rowling-Galbraith Saying via ‘Career of Evil’s Transabled Characters?

June 11, 2022 by

Critics of J. K. Rowling’s defense of women’s rights to safe spaces, protection of children from life-damaging surgeries and chemical ‘gender transitions,’ and her pushback against transgender overreach have libeled her with the “transphobe” and “bigot” Permanent Sticking Charms. They have scoured her writings for evidence of this supposed prejudice against and fear of transgender people and found two cases to highlight: (1) Pippa Midgeley, the transgender woman-writer wanna-be in The Silkworm who is emotionally unstable, tries to terrorize a woman by shoving dog poop through her mail chute repeatedly, and attempts to kill Strike twice with a knife, and (2) Dennis Creed, the psychotic murderer and torturer of women in Troubled Blood, who was a sometime cross dresser.

I have found it curious that these critics as a rule with few exceptions do not mention the transabled characters in Career of Evil. They suffer from Body Integrity Dysphoria (BID) or apotemnophilia. You can read about the various “signs and symptoms” on the Wikipedia page for this mental disorder, but in brief the condition is the delusion that the person needs to have a limb amputated to be in their right body, i.e., they identify as “disabled” and wish to transition to that status by surgical removal of one or more limbs. Rowling’s depiction of these transabled characters in Career of Evil is as cartoons consumed by their delusions. Strike’s final comments to the pair in the Art Museum Cafe are those of a disabled man furious and disgusted with their fetishizing his unfortunate condition. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike