This month’s issue of The Rowling Library Magazine was once again worth the time it took to read every single article, each one with a surprise inside for the serious reader, fandom zealot, book collector, and video game player. You can download it here as a pdf or read it online for free — and, yes, you should subscribe to support this consistently excellent collection of international writing about all things ‘Rowling.’

The four articles I enjoyed in this month’s issue were:

Solve et Coagula, Part One — Though very difficult to read and without links or footnotes to follow up on, A. Dalla Palma’s piece about the Fantastic Beasts film franchise’s alchemical backdrop and esoteric content was a delightfully challenging introduction to the speculation happening among serious students of these movies. I dropped out of that effort after laboring to discern what was Rowling’s work from the Hollywood formula dross in the first Beasts entry, an impossible and frankly disheartening task, but I am pleased both by the hermetic quality of this article’s contents and by the idea implicit in it that Rowling was attempting to craft a remarkably sophisticated and challenging experience in this medium, something akin to the transformative experiences of her written work. That the ‘Two Davids’ succeeded in frustrating (which is to say “hijacking and destroying” that effort to dumb it all down to blockbuster pablum?) that effort brings me back to why I dropped out of reading the Beasts screenplays closely. I hope very much in Part Two of this series that the author will include references to his or her sources as well as explanations of alchemical terms that are crucial for a reader’s ability to understand the symbolism involved.

Who Will Watch It: Adults or Kids? — The first article was very much the sort of thing I enjoy reading, namely, an interpretation of Rowling’s work that goes well beneath the story surface to get at its symbolic depths, but I struggled with the prose, organization, and referencing in the piece. The feature article, in contrast, was about a subject I know very little about and care about less, the HBO Max adaptation of the Harry Potter series for television, but which captivated me by the clarity of its argument and by the information it shared. In a nutshell, the unnamed author put his or her finger on the chief challenge facing the teevee team (identifying its core audience), speculating intelligently from the players now involved and their previous work what their direction will be in this adaptation, and suggesting a likely course. This was, frankly, The Rowling Library Magazine at its best: a topic of no little importance (even I recognize that the HBO adaptation will be a landmark event and displace to some degree the unfortunate film adaptations of the stories) approached from a fresh perspective with significant insight in well crafted argument. [Read more…]