‘Erased by Time and Blockbusters: Ron Weasley’

January 20, 2014 by 6 Comments

Emily Asher-Perrin writes in her ‘Erased by Time and Blockbusters: The Cautionary Tale of Ron Weasley‘ that the Harry Potter films have turned fandom against Harry’s best mate — and this in direct correspondence and causal line with the films departing from, distorting, and dreadfully inverting the role Ron plays in the books. She makes a more than cogent case.

I’ll make three observations along with this note to urge you to read the whole piece.

(1) Movie making from a story that was originally a short novel or screen play is necessarily a destructive act. Creative, too, after a fashion, but only in so much as blowing up a house and then re-building it with occasional reference to photographs or blueprints of the original is also ‘creative.’

(2) Serious Readers who have seen the films more than once, as a rule to which there are very few exceptions, have had their experience of the stories altered. Much in the sense that the emasculation or neutering of a dog is called ‘being altered.’

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes, Hunger Games, Movie Thoughts

Re-Packaging Harry Potter, Twilight, and Hunger Games Book Sets: For Readers, for Collectors, or for Christmas Gift Givers?

January 12, 2014 by 7 Comments

Serious Readers are dedicated re-readers by definition. Their favorite books and series collections have a much-loved, well-worn feel and appearance.

Serious Publishers, facing bottom line demands, are by definition shameless re-treaders. It’s nothing new, Dickens’ work appeared in three chapter pamphlets, then books, then library and collector’s editions. It’s a painless way of making a valuable commodity pay again and again into one’s account.

Witness these several new variations and versions of Harry Potter, Twilight, and Hunger Games:

  • Special Edition Harry Potter Box Set. All seven books in paperback — “The box itself is beautifully designed with new artwork by Kazu Kibuishi, and the books create a gorgeous, magical vista when the spines are lined up together.” $57.27
  • The Twilight Saga White Collection. “This gorgeous gift set–available for a limited time only–includes paperback editions of Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, Breaking Dawn, and The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner with exclusive white covers, making it the perfect gift for fans of the bestselling series.” $48.93
  • The Hunger Games Trilogy Box Set — Paperbacks. “All three books in the Hunger Games trilogy are now available for the first time in a paperback box set! This special edition showcases the iconic logos in a striking new design.” $26.48

I would bet good money (chocolate doubloons!) — if there were any way of verifying the data that would have to be gathered — that almost all of these sets are bought by or bought for readers who already have all the books in question. Scroll down the Amazon pages linked above and you’ll note that the most popular reviews are written by Twi-hards and their equivalent in Harry Potter and Hunger Games fandoms, fans who rate these sets on the desirability-for-obsessed-fan scale.

Curiously, though, if you scroll farther down, you’ll find reviews from readers who think these are new books about which they want to give a thumbs up or down with respect to their content for potential buyers. See especially the new hardcover School Books set. No joke.

Which makes me wonder. I’d say these re-treaded re-packaging bundles are sold largely at Christmas gift time to aunts and brothers not knowing what to get niece, nephew, sister or little brother — but because each knows the other will love anything to do with their favorite series of books, this is a no-fail present. Sure beats a movie-stills calendar or Snape action figure, right?

But maybe there’s more to it. Maybe the super editions actually draw in new readers? Let me know what you think — and please share your gift stories if you have given or received any of these sets.

Trivia time: What were the best selling Dickens novels of his lifetime? A HogPron No Prize to anyone that guesses two out of three before checking this literary historian’s best estimates. Maybe someday Ms Rowling’s Cormoran Strike mysteries will be better remembered than her Harry Potter novels?

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes

Celebrity Writers: What Socrates, Stephenie, and Solzhenitsyn Teach Us About the Insight of Poets Outside Their Inspiration

January 8, 2014 by 2 Comments

Thank you to everyone who has sent me and my family Christmas greetings on Orthodox Nativity. Joyous Noel! On to business!

Although the meme survives that everyone who reads Stephenie Meyer with admiration or fondness is a loser (and the contrary, those who despise her work and her fans are by definition winners, at least in comparison), I confess to being a Meyer-Reader and an admirer. I don’t recognize myself in the people being ridiculed in the Twilight of Our Literacy posts — 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10, thank you Alix —  and I do see my reflection, an unpleasant snobbish side, alas, in the attitude of those rolling their eyes at others who are beneath them in literary taste or acumen.

I say all that to introduce an aside Mrs. Meyer made in a recent interview about celebrities, politics, and the real world. And the wisdom of knowing when your opinion isn’t worth the consideration that many might give it for all the wrong reasons:

Stephenie Meyer on Twilight, feminism and true love

I ask whether she’s anti-abortion, and she says: “You know what? I never talk about politics, because that is one of my pet peeves, when people with any measure of celebrity get on their soapbox and say: ‘You should vote this way.’ First of all, celebrities don’t know anything about real life. They live in an ivory tower … I lived in the real world for 30 years, enough to know I’m not in it now.”

There are author-celebrities, alive and dead, whose view on political issues I do want to read. The two I think of immediately are both dead — C. S. Lewis and Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn — and I can honestly say I do not hold with the opinions of either with respect to partisan issues of governance. Their ideas, however, on all things including politics are more than worth my time and serious consideration because what made these men great artists and Christians, their gravitas and spiritual achievements won the hard way, demands my respect and deference, if not total agreement.

Do such giants walk the earth today? I assume they do but their names do not come to mind (please educate me in the com boxes below with your literary-celebrity guru list). I will add that I believe that the muses of more than one artist are more perceptive and more edifying than the expressed political positions of those they inspire — and who believe their fame entitles, even obliges them to speak out, truth to power!, on issues and concerns having little to do with what made them famous and without the depth or breadth of understanding that such commentary requires, if only in order not to be just psychological discharge or another voice of the age in which we live.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes, Twilight

Alchemy, Ring Writing, Doppelgangers, and Arabian Nights: The Artistry and Meaning of Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’

December 27, 2013 by 1 Comment

I’ve just finished a hurried reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus, a book I haven’t read in too many years. In the hopes of encouraging others to pick it up again, I risk making observations about its structures and predominant symbolism which the two centuries of critical literature almost certainly have raised and, as likely as not, dismissed for valid reasons. I’m certain that serious readers of popular fiction will recognize several of the ideas below as the heart of Harry Potter, Hunger Games, and Divergent (not to mention Twilight!). I ask your forgiveness in advance for whatever degree I have seen or ‘found’ only what I wanted to find, even allowing that perhaps having eyes to see such things is the only means of perceiving them.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes, Literary Alchemy, Ring Composition

21 December or 12/21: ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’ Day

December 21, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The novels of Jules Verne have suffered neglect in the UK and US because of their hurried and unfortunate translations into English, worse translations on to the silver screen, and the persistent misunderstanding, due to his space travel and submariner adventures, that he is a science fiction genre writer. Reading Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days with my son Timothy, the new translation by William Butcher, I was delighted to find, though not a formulaic ring composition, that this adventure story was composed as a circumnavigation of the globe written as a ‘there and back again’ mirror reflection. Everything from the modes of travel to the critical date of Phileas Fogg’s return to London — today’s date, 21 December — testify to a playful and careful obsession with story parallelism.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes, Ring Composition