Is Rowling Silent Because of Lawsuit?

Yesterday Newsweek magazine posted a piece with the title, ‘JK Rowling Falls Silent as She Could Be Prosecuted in Imane Khelif Lawsuit.’ The lede was that Rowling’s absence from Twixter for ten days means she has been intimidated by a frivolous lawsuit with exactly zero chances of going anywhere into a cautious retreat lest she be punished for her feminist zeal.

As I pointed out earlier this week, it is much more likely that Rowling went on the tweeting tear that she has been on since late July in order to provoke this kind of counter-attack; as Julia Hartley-Brewer noted in The Mirror (UK), it cannot be cyber-bullying if Rowling was simply telling the truth — and a lawsuit, a serious one, would expose Khelif as a man and his women’s gold medal as fraud if it came to trial. The pictures of a man beating up a woman are so much more to the point than a man beating women in a bicycle race, swim meet, or weight-lifting contest that it is easy to see the world’s most successful story-teller grasping the potential of a court case to flip the narrative here.

But that’s not why Rowling has “fallen silent.”

A friend who tracks Rowling’s yacht via its plotting signal (no, I don’t know what that is) reported this morning that the yacht has gone so far north up the eastern coast of Greenland that it has achieved unplottable status. I’m going to assume that, if the internet cannot track the Murray family boat as they sail toward the North Pole — end of Frankenstein, anyone? — then they do not have internet connections either as they approach a magnetic pole. The odds are good, if that is true, that she hasn’t heard anything about the kerfuffle her twixting blitz about Khelif has caused, whether those thirty-plus tweets were intentionally provocative or not.

Tomorrow, some thoughts on Rowling’s shed artistry, namely, when did she begin writing ‘rings-within-the-rings’ of her novels? My first guess is Order of the Phoenix but I think a closer look at specific chapters in early Harry Potter novels will reveal much tighter rings. See you then!