Here is something I found today while searching for the article mentioned in the questions in the post under this one. It’s from a rambling 2005 Eurozine interview with Harold Bloom, “Breakfast with Brontosaurus“:

IL: Your insistence on what you call higher culture makes many people mad, and when you talk about your dismay at the decline of the book as a cultural phenomenon, they say that never before in history have there been as many books and bookstores as now.

HB: I spend a good part of my life in bookstores – I give readings there when a new book of mine has come out, I go there to read or simply to browse. But the question is what do these immense mountains of books consist of? You know, child, my electronic mailbox overflowing with daily mesages from Potterites who still cannot forgive me for the article I published in Wall Street Journal more than a year ago, entitled “Can 35 Million Harry Potter Fans Be Wrong? – Yes!” These people claim that Harry Potter does great things for their children. I think they are deceiving themselves. [Read more…]

Beloved and ever-helpful Lisa at the Lexicon and Accio Quote wrote me to say the house-elves at these sites have found the original Glasgow Herald interview in 2000 with Ms. Rowling by Anne Johnstone and posted it on Accio Quote. It’s even more interesting than the snippet we had this morning.

Before you get to the quotation discussed in the post immediately below this one, there is this lively exchange: [Read more…]

Anne Johnstone of Glasgow’s The Herald wrote an article that appeared in today’s paper called “Happy birthday Harry: 10 years of magic from the Potter generation.” It is a delightful read by a reporter who has known and interviewed Ms. Rowling for more than ten years, well before all the hype and madness of Potter mania. The article ends with delightful reflections of children (now in their twenties) from Glasgow and their first memories of Harry, to include the times Ms. Rowling came to their school classrooms to talk.

Those reflections aren’t why Hans Andrea at Harry PotterforSeekers.com wrote me this morning to let me know about the article. There was a bombshell near the end of this sentimental set-piece.

After explaining why she thinks Harry will still be on children’s reading lists a century from today, Ms. Johnstone offers this memory from her 2000 interview with Ms. Rowling: [Read more…]

Lev Grossman and Andrea Sachs at Time Magazine have written an essay about security for the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows called “Harry Potter and the Sinister Spoilers.” I’m no Lev Grossman fan (anyone who thinks C. S. Lewis would be a Death Eater if he appeared in Rowling’s sub-creation — and says so in a national magazine — has gone out of his way to make a poor first impression) but I especially enjoyed this point about it not being possible to spoil the magic of this last book: [Read more…]

I have had the pleasure of being a Featured Speaker at three Harry Potter conferences. Two of these, Nimbus 2003 and Lumos 2006, were multi-day affairs with close to or more than a hundred lectures and panels to attend in addition to games, movies, luncheons, and podCasting. They were, in brief, a delightful overload for Harry Potter readers like you and me.

I met Ann-Laurel Nickel and her dad Ken at a Nimbus 2003 luncheon. Ann-Laurel is as well read on the Harry Potter books as you’d expect at an HPEF Fanon but she was also delightfully enthusiastic and cheerful. We wrote on occasion after Nimbus (she sends the greatest Harry-themed Christmas cards) and met up again at Lumos in Las Vegas, where she hit it off with my wife Mary as well. What’s not to like about the lady in the Lion Hat with radish earrings? This serious reader was a lot of fun and took her fun seriously!

I was not very surprised, consequently, when Ann-Laurel wrote to say she was organizing a Harry Potter conference where she lives, the Antelope Valley in the desert above Los Angeles. It was going to be a one-evening “wow,” she explained, with just two featured speakers talking back-to-back in a Great Hall like at Hogwarts. She wanted me and Steve Vander Ark to be the speakers. She called her idea Sonorus 2007. [Read more…]