In late October, 2007, popular commentator and maven of commonplaces Chuck Klosterman predicted his own demise as a professional observer in an Esquire magazine article. That article, ‘Death by Harry Potter,’ argued that, because Klosterman knew next to nothing about The Boy Who lived — never having read a book or seen a movie — his continued ability to catch the references made by creative people whose imaginations had been shaped by the Hogwarts Saga was very much in doubt. Klosterman wrote:

The bookish kids reading Harry Potter novels may not go on to control the world, but they will almost certainly go on to control the mass media. In fifteen years, they will be publishing books and directing films and writing broad jokes for unfunny situation comedies that will undoubtedly be downloaded directly into our brains. And like all generations of artists, they will traffic in their own nostalgia. They will use their shared knowledge and experiences as the foundation for discourse. So I wonder: Because I don’t understand Harry Potter, am I doomed to misunderstand everything else?

You really should read the whole thing, but let me give you the short cut to his answer to that semi-rhetorical question. Yes, Klosterman wrote, he is doomed to misunderstand everything else.

Fast forward eleven years. Rolling Stone magazine published on 1 September 2018 an article by Sarah Grant, ‘Harry Potter’ at 20: Artists Reveal Tattoos, Tears, Tour Stories Inspired by the Wizarding World — From Lily Allen to Anthrax, Vic Mensa to Steve Earle – music’s biggest Potterheads on how series changed them, their music and their lives. Her conclusions?

What Klosterman wrote in 2007. Generation Hex has grown up and is taking charge of the music world. Not ‘getting’ Harry Potter is to be out of step, even clueless about what their collective concerns and imaginative vision includes. The Hogwarts Saga is this generation’s Shared Text, even as one singer’s English profesor dad said, their Shakespeare.

I wrote about Klosterman’s comments in a December, 2008, article in Touchstone magazine: ‘Book Binders: What I learned about the Great Books and Harry Potter.’ It was the first place outside this blog where I discussed the ‘shared text’ idea, Allan Bloom’s use of the term, and its applicability to Harry’s adventures. Does the idea of that article, that Harry is a part of our shared vision, hold up after almost ten years? Or has he been displaced or marginalized by latter-day phenomena? Let me know what you think in the comment boxes below.

Yesterday’s post about the ‘Trivial Pursuit World of Harry Potter Ultimate Edition’ and its being film rather than book based was something of a downer. Here, perhaps, is a bit of good news with what I think is a fascinating factoid: Jelly Belly, the professional confectioners that market Wizarding World chocolates and the like, are coming out with a new line this holiday season — and we’ll be getting some extra risky Every Flavored Beans!

Now, Jelly Belly is a weird bunch when it comes to their wilder flavors (check out the ‘Dead Fish’ and ‘Lawn Clippings’ in their non-Harry Potter collection called ‘The Bean Boozled Challenge’). The new Bertie Botts set includes the notorious ‘Vomit’ flavored bean, which is ‘Barf’ in Bean Boozled. How did they ever come up with some kind of consensus about what vomit tastes like in their olfactory laboratory? It turns out it was something of an accident. From The Atlantic, ‘Sweet Memories: How Jelly Belly Invents Flavors’ —

Sometimes a flavor must be recalled: Grandma’s Pumpkin Pie flavor, for instance, is back in development, because it turns out that nobody’s grandma makes pumpkin pie in exactly the same way. Occasionally, the scientists’ success overtakes them, as when an experimental four-cheese pizza bean managed to empty a whole mixing room with its noxious smell. But even disasters can redeem themselves: with the release of the company’s Beanboozled novelty line, cheese pizza, with a few tweaks, became barf. “They sell like hotcakes,” Brasher says.

As the lactose intolerant guy in the room, that makes sense to me. Cheese, even the smell of cheese, makes me want to wretch…

On a cheerier note, the Wizarding World of Harry Potter is now selling Butterbeer ice cream! Look for that in your neighborhood grocery store’s dairy case in the near future…

Did you catch that the 1800 questions are about the eight movie adaptations, not the book series?

Wingardium trashola! Imagine the fights, I mean, ‘family fun,’ to be had in answering these questions with your favorite serious readers of the Hogwarts Saga…

Swansea University, at which I am pursuing a PhD in English through a collaboration with the University of Central Oklahoma (read about that here), has a contest each year called ‘Three Minute Thesis.’ I’d never heard of it but was told it is a big deal not only in Wales but globally; more than 200 universities participate. I decided to give it a go, both to clarify the thesis for my own work, crystallize it really, and as an exercise in public speaking.

As a rule, I do not read a paper when I give a talk. This has the great advantage of bringing the exchange to life. Not being scripted, however, dynamism aside, has the downsides of making it very hard to know exactly how long the presentation will actually be. My best talks are solo performances, consequently, of about an hour in length before a large crowd. My embarrassing memories ‘on stage’ are all from academic events before fifteen or twenty people, at which events everyone else reads their exactly fifteen minute long papers — and GilderJohn goes over and gets cut off. Ouch.

Why not practice a timed talk, then, that wasn’t just read, a practice I find borderline unforgivable in a speaker? (“I didn’t travel all this way to hear you read; I can read the paper later and get more out of it that way. I want to hear you speak with me as an expert, not demonstrate your literacy…”) Why not try to speak from memory and within a set time? I decided to give it a try.

So I wrote out a ‘three minute thesis’ talk, timed it, cut it, timed it, cut it, timed it, and added a sentence and phrase here and there. Then I memorized it, practiced it with stop watch, made changes, and memorized that version. Rinse, repeat. The Swansea event is live in front of an audience of 200 (large by uni standards, I know, not fandom conferences); I had to record my talk in Oklahoma with a web-connection to Swansea before an audience of two. [Read more…]