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!

We’ve made the turn — two weeks to the Birthday!

In today’s Lake and Shed conversation, Little John and Big Nick turn to the second entry of the Fantastic Beasts film franchise, ‘The Crimes of Grindelwald.’.

On the Lake side of things, Nick explores the Johnny Depp casting scandal and the lead-up in 2018 to the 2019 Tweet Heard Round the World. John explains that the cut scenes from this dog’s mess of a movie point to the probability that the shooting script, i.e., what Rowling actually wrote and approved before David Yates butchered the film in the editing room, was all about Leta Lestrange. More important, John makes the Shed point that every Rowling book features a text of some kind that the characters struggle to understand — and that Crimes of Grindelwald has ten of these, a veritable library of interior texts to interpret.

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!

Half-way to the Birthday!

In today’s Lake and Shed conversation, the Dynamic Duo turn to Strike 4, Lethal White.

Nick discusses the embedded class struggle in the book and its roots in Rowling’s background before dropping the bomb of the real world identity of Jack O’Kent and his unhappy family. John is so taken aback by this revelation that Nick has to prompt the Shed portion of the conversation with a fun history of the Sonia Friedman production of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm on London’s West End, a show starring Thom Burke as Rosmer and which ended just before Bronte Studios beginning the filming of Lethal White.

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!