The Virtual Harry Potter Conference 2020

October 16, 2020 by 4 Comments

Chestnut Hill College is hosting its annual Harry Potter Conference online this year due to Pennsylvania’s draconian Covid measures and the nigh on universal conformity to state demands in this regard by university officials everywhere. The Conference begins today, you can register here, and all the talks can be watched at your at-home leisure via Zoom. The Featured Speakers and panels will present ‘live’ and answer questions; the great majority of presentations have been recorded to facilitate surety in broadcasting.

Three quick notes: [Read more…]

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes

Beatrice Groves: Trouble in Faerie Land3 T’was Duessa Who Did the Dirty Deed!

October 15, 2020 by 3 Comments

Oxford University’s Beatrice Groves, author of Literary Allusion in Harry Potter, has written the finale of her three posts about Edmund Spencer and Troubled Blood, posts that are all now up at her MuggleNet page, ‘Bathilda’s Notebook.’ Check out Trouble in Faerie Land – Part 3: Searching for Duessa in “Troubled Blood”.

In her capstone post on the subject, Prof Groves does a deep dive into the parallels between the Bad Girl of Spenser’s Faerie Queen, Duessa, and the doppelganger murderer of Margot Bamborough in Troubled Blood. She offers along the way fascinating and brilliant catches on the meaning of Cratylic Names in Strike 5 as well as several Spenser and Elizabethan era fun facts that throw light in the dark corner of the Faerie Queen epigraphs.

Part Three: Searching for Duessa in “Troubled Blood” is both more accessible and rewarding, I think, to the serious reader unfamiliar with Faerie Queen than Prof Groves’ first two posts on the subject, ‘Trouble in Faerie Land (Part One): Spenserian Clues in the Epigraphs of Troubled Blood‘ and ‘Troubles in Faerie Land (Part Two): Shipping Robin and Strike in the Epigraphs of Troubled Blood.’

You do need to read all three, of course, as well as Elizabeth Baird-Hardy’s seven part discussion of the Faerie Queen epigraph bonanza here at HogwartsProfessor, to appreciate the fullness of Rowling’s use of Faerie Queen as mirroring text both above and within Troubled Blood (i.e., the work is never mentioned in Strike5 but it introduces every Part and chapter as well as the work as a whole).

And all this literary detective work has been done within a month of Troubled Blood’s publication! My first post on the relationship of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm and Rowling-Galbraith’s Lethal White, in contrast, was four months out from Strike 4’s publication and Prof Groves did not write about it for almost two years (cf., ‘The Epigraphs of Lethal White: Shipping Strike and Robin’).

It goes without saying that there is a lot of heavy lifting to be done still to get at the artistry and meaning of Troubled Blood, but the Serious Strikers of the world, those who read the novels repeatedly rather than ‘once and done,’ owe a great debt to Profs Groves and Baird-Hardy. Both the speed with which they have written and the quality of the work each has done in bringing to light how Rowling-Galbraith uses Faerie Queen as a support and illuminating backdrop to Troubled Blood will inform all consequent exegesis of the work.

Three cheers!

 

Filed Under: Beatrice Groves, Cormoran Strike, Elizabeth Baird Hardy

Troubled Blood: Cormoran Strike’s Journey with Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner

October 14, 2020 by Leave a Comment

Elizabeth Baird-Hardy and Beatrice Groves have been writing about the Spenserian epigraphs adorning each of Troubled Blood’s seven Parts and all of its seventy three chapters, and, for those few, too-happy few Rowling readers well versed in Faerie Queen this has no doubt been a challenging and rewarding effort in literary exegesis. It is an unstated but key premise to everything we write here, I realized this morning, that Rowling writes and speaks to two audiences simultaneously — to those who read her work for entertainment and inspiration and to those who read her work (to include longer twitter threads as well as her novels and series!) for the text beneath the surface of the text, the narrative undergirding the plot narrative revealing the meaning of narratives in our lives. The Faerie Queen posts are, no doubt, examples of the hidden text within what the Russian Formalists called ‘literariness’ and we owe a real debt to Profs Baird-Hardy and Groves for the slow-mining they do per Ruskin to bring this gold to the light of day.

The problem with this work is that I do not think the overlap portion of a Venn diagram of ‘Readers of Troubled Blood,’ ‘Readers of Harry Potter,’ and ‘Readers of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen‘ constitutes even a very small shared sub-set of serious readers. More to the point, perhaps, in an area proportional Venn diagram in which the three sets of readers are represented in size relative to the number of their living members, the Faerie Queen set, alas, is the smallest of the three — and has virtually no overlap, with the important exception of Profs. Baird Hardy and Groves, with the other sets.

No doubt Rowling labors here to foster interest in Spenser’s epic poem among her faithful as well as her Straussian readers of her public and hidden texts, of her surface and hidden meanings, just as she did with Silkworm’s Jacobean Revenge Drama epigraphs and Lethal White’s chapter heading glosses from Ibsen’s Rosmersholm. But Faerie Queen is by far the biggest ‘ask’ in this regard, one with rewards proportionate to the time and effort necessary to enter Spenser’s realm, and the prompting I have to think that will be the least likely to be taken, even with the encouraging glosses written by Serious Strikers.

What I wish to offer today for your consideration is a much less obvious parallel text within Troubled Blood, one that many more if by no means most Troubled Blood readers have already read and which all could read with understanding in less than an hour. This work, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ when read in parallel with Troubled Blood, highlights essential artistry and meanings of Rowling’s latest, of Rowling’s oeuvre taken as a whole, and even of the references to Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare in Strike 5. Join me after the jump for a deep dive into the parallels between Mariner and the fifth Strike novel, an Estecean interpretive journey through Troubled Blood! [Read more…]

Filed Under: Agatha Christie, Beatrice Groves, Cormoran Strike, Elizabeth Baird Hardy, Shakespeare

Shared Text: SNL, JKR, and Harry Potter

October 12, 2020 by Leave a Comment

Where do you start? That the two actors cannot pronounce Rowling’s name correctly? That the Gingrott’s Goblins are not cartoon Jews? That the transphobic controversy, #RIPJKRowling, is a hate-driven Cancel Culture social-media production?

Oh, well. At least Robby Coltrane had the courage to speak in defense of Rowling. And Davidson’s Dobby Look Alike joke was pretty funny…

Why this post? The Shared Text point is that there is no other written work by any author that Pete Davidson, confessed non-reader, could have referred to and been so sure that his audience would get the jokes. Maybe someday she’ll be so famous that everyone will know how to pronounce her pen and maiden name?

Filed Under: Shared Text

Troubled Blood: Questions for Rowling-Galbraith from US & UK Serious Strikers

October 9, 2020 by 5 Comments

If you have watched the ‘Robert Galbraith Troubled Blood‘ interview and your experience is like mine, you left the fifteen minutes of actual questions disappointed at the wasted opportunity. Rowling will almost certainly not do another ‘event’ on the subject — with Troubled Blood topping the best sellers lists in the States and Great Britain, why should she? — and this softball exchange told Serious Strikers, Potter Pundits, and Rowling Researchers next to nothing.

Just one ‘for instance’ to make a point of what a blown chance this was. One third to half of her time was dedicated to praise for the teevee adaptations of the Strike series and the actor and actress playing Strike and Robin. I get that producers had an obligation of sorts to keep non-readers interested (and to promote teevee viewing) but the only interview with the world’s best selling author about her longest novel ever largely turns on Tom Burke and Holliday Grainger? Egad.

Let’s pretend for a moment that Rowling, Inc., was as disappointed as we were in this interview rather than the very people who chose the questions, wrote, taped, and edited her responses, and presented it as exactly as it stands. That’s a real stretch even for professional pretenders, I know, but it is a necessary imaginative leap for the exercise I want to propose.

Please tell me what you would ask Rowling-Galbraith if she were drunk on Veritaserum and the interview was filmed live.

What are the three questions you would ask Rowling-Galbraith about Troubled Blood?

Post your questions in the comment boxes below by clicking on ‘Comments’ in the space beneath the post’s title line. Make a naïve wish as you blow out the candles on Robin Ellacott’s birthday cake, a wish that The Presence sees them and will answer. I share my three questions for the author-who-must-tell-the-truth after the jump. Thank you in advance for writing out your questions and sharing your thoughts about the interview, especially, if, unlike me, you thought it was a brilliant Q&A that really opened up the artistry and meaning of Troubled Blood! [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike, Hog Pro Notes