What fun! Let me know what you think… There is a decent near transcript posted at LeakyCauldron.
A Big Thank You again to Nick Jeffery for finding the url to this video (the old one had been taken down)!
Charles Williams: ‘The Greater Trumps’
January 4, 2011 by 9 Comments
It is the week of Nativity for traditional Orthodox Christians and it promises to be a white Christmas here in upper New York State where my family and I are living. More than eighty inches of snow since 1 December… In the slow-down to the lead-up to the big day Friday (services begin tomorrow night and will go through the weekend), I’ve put aside my writing and publishing projects for some reading between shoveling shifts. I’m on something of a Charles Williams binge of late after reading David Downing’s Looking for the King in which historical novel Williams is featured. I just finished his The Greater Trumps (1932) and I thought I’d share some very brief notes here for serious Potter readers of the echoes of Williams’ supernatural thriller that we find in the Hogwarts Saga.
News from Iran: Harry Potter a Zionist Conspiracy
January 2, 2011 by 1 Comment
We’ve covered the ‘Ayatollah Condemns Harry Potter” story before (way back in 2008), but, forgive me, this kind of thing is just so bizarre that it still leaves me shaking my head. It really isn’t anything like the cockeyed “Pope Condemns Harry Potter” story cooked up by some Star Chamber Catholics at the release of Order of the Phoenix. That is almost rational and reasonable compared to a new documentary on Iran’s Irinn teevee channel. This production asserts that ‘Harry Potter is a Zionist Plot to Promote Devil Worship.’
As Perelandra, who sent me the link observed, “Just when you thought that Harry-hatred couldn’t get any worse…. It’s fascinating that [the Muslim film makers] make the same “mockingbird fallacy” as some Christian critics–condemning the work for the villain’s views.” I’d only add the obvious: Harry’s Christian critics, for all their failings in charity and in grasping the 9th Commandment, never in my experience have written or said anything as off-the-wall as this anti-Semitic vitriol. The Onion satire was more credible and less offensive than this.
Mailbag: Revisiting the Albus-Severus Suicide Pact
December 31, 2010 by 17 Comments
A young reader wrote to me several weeks ago to thank me for my books and ask a question. He closed by saying he aspired to someday making his living by just reading, writing, and talking about Harry Potter, what he imagined was a “dream life.”
I couldn’t really encourage him in this aspiration — the Potter Pundit category is rapidly becoming a crowded space! — but he is right to say that my job, if you can call the time I spend as one of the Hogwarts Professors here a job, is delightful. Almost all of my interactions with serious readers in person, online, and by correspondence is edifying, enlightening, even challenging. I respond to all my mail, to my wife’s distress as I fall further behind on deadlines, even when it is only challenging.
Mailbag: Questions About Literary Alchemy
December 30, 2010 by 6 Comments
I have been writing John Patrick Pazdziora the past two or three weeks on Narniad subjects and the last few days he has been peppering me with questions about literary alchemy. If you don’t know who Mr. Pazdziora is, stay tuned, because I hope he will be introducing himself soon enough. Though this exchange does not constitute anything like an introduction to the topic of literary alchemy as tradition and reader experience, I do think it is a helpful addition to the discussion of hermetic artistry in The Deathly Hallows Lectures. For those of you already familiar enough with the colors, sequences, and principal figures of alchemy, e.g., the Quarreling Couple, Philosophical Orphan, Alchemical Wedding, etc. from that and posts here, this Q&A back and forth between John Patrick in Scotland and John in Syracuse may help you grasp the sudden ubiquity of alchemy in today’s best sellers in the wake of Ms. Rowling’s juggernaut Hogwarts Saga.
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