Your team of Potter Pundits — Travis Prinzi, Pepperdine’s James Thomas, and yours truly — sent in a ‘Luna Lovegood’ segment to the The Leaky Cauldron’s PotterCast and it aired this week. It was a lot of fun to record, which is a good thing because we got to do it three times, and the feedback from Fandom for this show, John Noe tells us, has been “excellent.” The show segment is several minutes into the program. Please share your thoughts about the program and about Luna here.

For those of you who have asked and others who might be interested, here are the Speaking Dates on my 2010 horizon with stops in Manhattan, Louisville, and Tucson coming right up! [Read more…]

Friends at Scribbulus sent me this exchange, which, to use the language of the Pontifical Council on Culture about Twilight, certainly borders on the “excessively esoteric.” The dialogue, however, stretches the conversation about Horcruxes in a direction I wouldn’t have taken and thought you might find interesting. I especially enjoyed the aside about Severus Snape. For your comments and corrections, then, a dialogue between ‘Rotfang’ and ‘Caltheus:’ [Read more…]

Speaker Relates Harry Potter to Contemporary Issues

(H/T to David G!)

The LA Times suggests in an article, Is Percy Jackson’s mythology too close to Harry Potter’s magic?, that Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series is necessarily derivative of our favorite boy wizard. That seems likely; I mean, how could anyone living in in the wake of Potter-mania write a coming-of-age story about a boy learning he has mythic parentage previously unknown to him and not make readers and movie goers think of Harry and Hogwarts? When Percy is assigned to Camp Half-Blood, the reading world has associations with “Percy” in mind that are more “Weasley” than
Authurian and with “Half-Blood” that give us Severus Snape (or at least Alan Rickman) as well. [Read more…]