I have posted here through the years an irregular feature called ‘Shared Text.’ Those posts were inevitably inspired by someone, somewhere — anywhere, everywhere — using a reference to Harry Potter to make a point. It could be to Snape or Hermione, too often it is to Voldemort (everybody thinks the other guy is the Dark Lord’s minion), more often than not, it’s just a ‘Hogwarts’ call-out. My favorite, the ‘own-goal’ of the Covid unvaccinated, to which group I belong, deciding to promote that status by pushing #PureBloods on Twitter. If you want to scroll through all those Shared Text posts for a taste of the variety, click here.
I am fairly frequently reminded not only of the Harry Potter books being the ‘Shared Text’ of our times but just the enormity of Rowling’s celebrity in the place where I work to pay my bills and student loans. It’s a grocery store and just small enough that almost everyone there knows me and about my ‘Dean of Harry Potter scholars’ Walter Mitty existence. At least once a month, sometimes once a week, an acquaintance there will walk up to me with their ‘smart’ phone saying, “John, have you seen this latest bit about Rowling?” And hold up their phone so I can read the story.
Last Sunday it was my beloved tattooed man in the Produce department. “I suppose you’ve heard that Rowling has black mold in her house? And they’re saying that it’s taken over her mind?” I thought he was kidding, but he showed me the story. You can read here the whole sequence of events about the first tweets on the subject, how it grew into a meme, and the pictures from 2022 that showed the same “mold” growing on her walls.
The take-away? People who hate Rowling because of her resistance to what Elon Musk has called “Woke Mind Virus,” especially with respect to Gender Theory Extremists and ‘transgender’ over-reach into women’s safe spaces, are really on the look-out for avenues to insult and demean her. The first tweet on the subject from @mushycrouton reads: “Sorry but is that black mould growing up the walls of her house? Is that why she’s the way she is?”
“The way she is” means, of course, “not onboard like all my followers are with everything LGNTQ+” and the mold reference becomes his explanation for her being so outlandishly wrong. The black mold, you see, has taken over mind… The internet ball rolled from there. You can read more about this at Rowling-despising sites here, here, and here. The time you spend reviewing that, though, cannot be reclaimed, alas.
The bizarre thing to me about the whole attack-meme charade was that it isn’t hard to see what this mold is. Join me after the jump if you’re at all interested in that.
The first thing I found interesting about the mold story was, as mentioned, that it’s not hard to see what the “mold” is if you’re looking for that rather than a means to defame Rowling. Take a look at this self-taken picture inside Rowling’s home, perhaps her library at the time, that appeared in September 2020 with the story of her choices on the Version’s ‘Tracks of My Years” show:
That fascinating interview’s transcript can be found here and the HogwartsProfessor discussion of it here. I’ll write tomorrow about a ‘tell’ to be found in that transcript that may be key to unlocking the central mystery of Rowling’s life.
Today, though, let’s just note that the “mold” growing on her walls in that picture on the far right is obviously a Japanese “woodblock print” style wall-paper, or, given Rowling’s wealth, perhaps an original okiyo-e painting. (Read about it here if that traditional nature iconography is new to you.) You can re-create a similar effect in your own home for pennies, relatively speaking, at wallpaper sites online like this one.
Maybe that’s only obvious to Nipponophiles, but it really doesn’t look anything like mold, does it?
[I am obliged to admit, though, it isn’t only Rowling Revilers who “see” it. When this interview was first discussed on a HogwartsProfessor moderator backchannel back in late 2020, one of Rowling’s greatest admirers asked the international board, “Is that me or is there mould growing up her walls? Very bad for the lungs.”]
Nick Jeffery assures me that the picture was almost certainly taken in her home library, the one she color-coded during the UK Covid lockdown and the consequent ‘the walls are closing in on me’ mania. It looks to be not only a beautiful and welcoming space to spend time with family or guests, but also an edifying space to sit and read a favorite book.
Which is what makes this choice of wall-paper or painting actually quite interesting. As you can see, the room has windows that look out on a garden or veranda, quite green. The Japanese artistry on the walls, which fosters an impressionistic or noetic transformed vision of the natural world, do much what the best in imaginative literature does to us via our imaginative experiences within the codex covers. It’s not “mold,” then, but another pointer to Rowling’s understanding of books, to include her work, as being what the Perennialists call “sacred art,” non-liturgical or explicitly religious work but the art of day-to-life that ties out to the eternal truths and greater realities (see this HogwartsProfessor post if you want to learn much more about that).
Tomorrow, that post on Rowling’s give-away about the most critical period of her life — and nothing about mold, I promise.
Speak Your Mind