Thoughts for the Serious Reader of Harry Potter
HogwartsProfessor.com Deputy Headmistress and C. S. Lewis scholar Elizabeth Baird-Hardy joined Keith Hawk and myself for another look at the influence of C. S. Lewis on Joanne Rowling’s Harry Potter novels. The occasion? The 50th anniversary observances of the Narnian’s death in 1963.
For more on that, our sister site, TheHogsHead.org, is hosting a month long discussion of this topic! Enjoy the podcast above and the posts!
Attention Sherlockians of every stripe, and everyone else who like to unravel, deduce, detect, and ponder! The good folks over at the Mythgard Institute are currently recruiting students from around the world to join the amazing Dr. Amy Sturgis for Sherlock, Science and Ratiocination, a course that is bound to spark insights, conversation, and briliant deductions! Here is the official description of the course:
The intellectual sibling of science fiction, born of the same parents (the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution), is what its father, Edgar Allan Poe, called “tales of ratiocination.” Poe created the first scientific detective, C. Auguste Dupin, who in turn paved the way for one of the most enduring and beloved literary characters of all time, Sherlock Holmes. This course focuses on Poe and Conan Doyle and how their works blended scientific method, mystery, and imagination to create the modern literature of detection. Students will consider why Sherlock Holmes remains an often revisited and reinterpreted character with remarkable resonance in our own time, and how the genre he helped to create and the literary descendants he inspired continue to question the idea of order in our universe and how we know what we (think we) know.
Find out more:
‘Bella and Katniss Meet the Bard‘ is the title of a Verve Magazine cover article on Hogwarts Professor’s Deputy Headmistress, Elizabeth Baird Hardy. It’s worth a reading to learn all about her — and the pictures are a hoot, too!
Congratulations, Elizabeth, on coming through your contact with Skeeter-dom as gracefully as you have here. Soon the whole world will know and love you as much as we do!
Even well before the release of the first Hunger Games movie, I was troubled by the fascination with Capitol trends and fashions. Yes, it was interesting to see how costumers and make-up designers were bringing to life Suzanne Collins’s evocative descriptions, but a nail polish line based on the books? That sort of thing just seemed like a bad joke or a demonstration of the marriage of ignorance and greed in someone’s marketing department. I was surprised that even some people who had read the book bought into the Capitol mindset. Join me after the jump as we look at the shocking pre- Catching Fire film fashion trends that reveal we may already be living in Panem.
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I don’t get to see that many movies in the theater, although I do serve as our Hogwarts Film-Fancier in Chief. Now that we’re done with new Harry Potters and Twilight films (at least until the inevitable re-boots), I’m patiently waiting for Catching Fire this fall, but I did recently get to catch Star Trek into Darkness. I am an unabashed Star Trek fancier as well, having really enjoyed writing “Shakespeare (and the Rest of the Great Books) in the Original Klingon” for the newly released Star Trek and History. Though I enjoyed the film very much, I noticed that it was loaded with plenty of wonderful allusions to other pieces of the Star Trek universe, but somewhere along the way, had lost one of the most important features of that universe: its deft use of literary allusions. So join me in the transporter room as we beam around the beautiful and complex world of literary allusions and think about why it’s so troubling that we see them less and less these days, in both books and films, or that people don’t recognize them when they see them. Energize!
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