In their second look at The Christmas Pig, Nick by the Lake shares the history of the Murray Family and their beanie pig toys as well as a likely source for the defenestration of DP (in Esquire magazine, no less). John talks about the promise and the limits of reading literature through a biographical lens and then explains the anagogical and psychomachian meaning of the Power Palace kangaroo court trial of CP and Jack. Both share their reasons for thinking that The Christmas Pig is the perfect distillation of everything Rowling is doing as a writer, to include the relationship of her Lake inspiration to her final Shed product.

The original post for this episode at the Hogwarts Professor Substack site comes with notes for the program. The index to the 31 Kanreki posts for easy reference to all the posts can be found here. Enjoy!

Nick champions Casual Vacancy as Rowling’s best work, as he must as the ‘Lake’ subject-matter-expert. John cannot make up his mind about Rowling’s best, at times advocating Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, at others Troubled Blood, and most recently, Christmas Pig. He believes the latter, because of its relatively brevity and it being a crystallization of every Shed tool signature, will be what undergraduates read by Rowling in Surveys of 21st Century Literature in future years.

In light of that admiration, the Lake and Shed readers devote two of their Kanreki episodes to Rowling’s Christmas Pig.

In the first, Nick discusses Rowling’s many interview statements about the Things which were lost and how many of them match up with things she has in fact lost; he takes a deep dive into the Blue Bunny episode outside the Gates of the City of the Missed and Rowling’s embedding herself and her daughter Mackenzie in the story. John talks about the Blue Bunny and his being “found” or “saved” as an allegory of the human condition written in the Rowling shorthand-symbols for (and obsessions with) love, salvation, and what is real.

The original post for this episode at the Hogwarts Professor Substack site comes with notes for the program. The index to the 31 Kanreki posts for easy reference to all the posts can be found here. Enjoy!

In their second look at the brilliant Troubled Blood, Nick discusses Rowling’s history with the Clerkenwell neighborhood. John talks about Troubled Blood as a double re-telling of The Faerie Queene, Book One, with Strike and Margot as the Redcrosse Knight and Oonaugh and Robin as Una.

The original post for this episode at the Hogwarts Professor Substack site comes with notes for the program. The index to the 31 Kanreki posts for easy reference to all the posts can be found here. Enjoy!

The COVID Era Fairy Tale, released at the height of twin unfounded hysterias, to almost universal acclaim – The Ickabog!

In our Lake and Shed conversation about it, Nick takes the ‘Shed’ point and lays out the controlled demolition of her reputation among Group Thinkers on the Left in the lead up to Ickabog’s publication and John shares the meaning of ‘The Ickabog’s Song,’ the embedded text of the tale, as interpreted by Daisy Dovetail (an embedded author?).

The original post for this episode at the Hogwarts Professor Substack site comes with notes for the program. The index to the 31 Kanreki posts for easy reference to all the posts can be found here. Enjoy!