Readers who have read The Deathly Hallows Lectures know that I think a very helpful lens through which to look at Rowling’s work and especially the Hogwarts Saga finale is the logos epistemology of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. That is not a subject I want to revisit in depth here, but for the passersby who won’t read the relevant chapters in Lectures that make the connection between Coleridge’s understanding of God, man, and the world and Rowling’s artistry in Deathly Hallows, the short course is all the parallels between Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Harry Potter: a seven-part chiastic work, the eye symbolism and redemption via a transformed vision, the embedded story, the Christian content, and the genre melange and inversion.

I’ve been reading about Coleridge, consequently, for my PhD thesis research and am enjoying very much Malcom Guite’s Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a book I recommend to serious readers without reservation; it’s a joy to read and an edifying challenge. In it yesterday I stumbled on a reference to one of Coleridge’s better friends, John Cruickshank, whom Wordsworth claimed had a dream about “a skeleton ship with figures in it” which image STC lifted for Rime’s chilling scene of the dice game between Death and LIFE-IN-DEATH.

I suggested in Harry Potter’s Bookshelf that Hermione’s cat was named as a hat tip to Dickens’ illustrator and noted satiric cartoonist George Cruikshank. As fun as that connection was, I much prefer the Coleridge possibility if only because there are so few hints of a Coleridge-Rowling connection explicitly made in the books. Oxford’s Beatrice Groves in Literary Allusion in Harry Potter found one in ‘Porlocks,’ a harmless magical creature referenced in Phoenix and Fantastic Beasts the textbook, which is pointer to the “person from Porlock” who interrupted STC’s frenetic composition of Kubla Khan (p xiv).

What does Rowling say about the inspiration for Crookshanks? From ‘The Harry Potter Lexicon’ Crookshanks page:

When I was working in London in the late 1980s I used to eat my lunch in a nearby square on sunny days and a large, fluffy ginger cat that looked as though it had run face-first into a wall used to prowl around the sunbathers there; I assume it lived in a nearby house. I didn’t ever get close enough to give myself an asthma attack, but I became distantly fond of this cat, which prowled among the humans around it looking disdainful and refusing to be stroked. When I decided to give Hermione an unusually intelligent cat I gave him the appearance of this haughty animal, with the slightly unfair addition of bandy legs.

Hence the ‘crook shanks’ joke. I’m guessing hopefully that it was also a pointer to one of Coleridge’s friends and inspirations for Rime. Hermione’s pet has remarkable vision, for one thing, an eye for the evil in deceptive appearances, and while this works for the satirical cartoonist, it also matches up with the meaning and moral of Mariner. Let me know what you think. 

The Leaky Cauldron, the Sauron’s Mouth of Rowling, Inc., for fandom announcements, has announced in an “EXCLUSIVE Statement,” i.e., a press release vetted and redacted by Warner Brothers, that PotterMore is being folded into the movie goliath’s WizardingWorld.com franchise.

So what? Well, it seems there will be a subscription fee to get all the content though much of it will be free to all viewers. This ‘Gold’ level membership will create access to things that those unwilling or unable to pay won’t have. I’m not sure why this upsets fandom; they pay for books and for movie tickets to gain access to entertainment they wouldn’t have otherwise, not to mention the fees paid for entry to the internet.

The bad news? The “collaboration” thing is a joke. Warner Brothers has “engulfed and devoured” (Mel Brooks fans will get that reference?) PotterMore which is now no longer a Rowling property and responsibility. I’m not sure that’s bad news if all it comes down to is one less distraction for The Presence and one more channel for Warner Brothers to market their franchise (“fan servicing”).

The good news? If you read all the way down to the bottom of the “EXCLUSIVE Statement,” you’ll find this note:

Neil Blair said in an initial statement to The Booksellerthat the new venture between Pottermore and film rights-holders Warner Bros. means that now ‘the only limits will be our imaginations and what technology is available’ when it comes to crafting digital experiences for fans. The excitement of Pottermore originally was the promise of new J.K. Rowling content, and one main question fans seem to have is how involved J.K. Rowling is at this point. The new venture is run by a collaboration between Warner Bros. and Pottermore, so in a sense this is no longer her venture, but run by a collaboration between Warner Bros and Pottermore.

We were assured that the content written for Pottermore by J.K. Rowling (including the Sorting and Patronus quizzes, etc) will all remain free to fans. The aim, we were told, is not to take away from fans — ‘if anything we’re trying to put everything in one place to give bigger and better experiences’, our spokesperson told me.

If true, then the only thing I want from this membership site (and would be willing to pay for access to) will still be available for the cost of my internet hook-up. All good. It is hard to believe, of course, that they won’t be adding EXCLUSIVE Rowling content behind a Gold membership firewall to encourage subscriptions at that level, but we’ll see.

What do you think? Though Warner Brothers denies this is a profit-taking or money-making exercise, is this “adding insult to injury,” an expression one reader used in sharing this official-via-Leaky announcement? Share your thoughts by pressing ‘Post a Comment’ up by the post’s headline and writing what you think in the comment boxes below.

My mother died in 2006. Looking through her effects, I found photo albums from her childhood. Almost all the pictures were of family and school. One page, though, was devoted to a celebrity. Doris Day visited Philadelphia and she traveled as a young teen in the late 1940’s from her Mainline hamlet into the big city to see what was obviously a promotional gig for a movie. There must have been hundreds of such star-turns in her youth. Doris Day was the only one she went to see and capture on her brownie Kodak camera.

The Harry Potter connection? Not much, obviously. But here’s the late Doris Day, nee Kappelhoff, singing “It’s Magic” from her first film appearance, ‘Romance on the High Seas,’ 1949. She lived a long and apparently unhappy life. May she rest in peace — and be remembered for the musical and silver screen magic she brought into people’s lives.

That’s not a direct quotation but a summary of the argument in the book One Election Please...How J.K. Rowling Bought British Politics, Hid Her True Self and Hoodwinked the World—an Unauthorised Biographical Exposé by Bruce Masters. I have not read the whole thing (the author offers a free look at the first seven chapters online) but I confess to being astonished at what I found there and in the free excerpts from another Masters book, How Not to Get Sued by J. K. Rowling.

I learned, for example, that Rowling as a teenager carved “Joanne Rowling slept here” into her bedroom window frame. It checks out. Masters makes that a crime of defacement which may make you wonder if her father would have taken her to court for this crime as owner of the house.

And I read for the first time of the Rowling, Inc., lawyers suing a Hindu Festival in Kolkata, India, for creating a replica of Hogwarts Castle. Sound like the recent repressive acts against American street festivals with Harry Potter themes? Of course it does. The story survives an internet search for verification, as well. (Rowling’s lawyers lost the suit.)

How about Rowling owning a $30,000,000 yacht that she bought from Jonny Depp? That’s a stunner. It is sort of true, too. Variety reported in March, 2017: [Read more…]