Thoughts for the Serious Reader of Harry Potter
Chris Calderon, long time stalwart of Hogwarts Professor has submitted a guest post that argues that three of Dorothy L. Sayers Wimsey novels (Strong Poison, Have His Carcase and Gaudy Night), that feature Harriet Vane, form an alchemical sequence. Chris makes a compelling argument, check it out after the break:
On Sunday 1st January, @CormStrikeFan who runs the wonderful Strike Fans website tweeted a cheeky request to J. K. Rowling: “Waiting for @jk_rowling to change her Christmas header photo to something Strikey”. Wonderfully and unbelievably she responded the following day!
The new header is a picture of Cromer Pier a location we last saw in the header from 4th March 2022. After a brief visit to King’s Lynne in The Ink Black Heart, it now seems certain that Strike will return to Norfolk in book 7.
The news about Montgomery was so cheering that Strike didn’t much mind his first glimpse of a windmill, or the change in landscape to wide flat fens and marshland. He never went voluntarily into Norfolk and in fact had a slight prejudice against the whole county, because the worst of all the many places to which Strike’s novelty-chasing, peripatetic mother had taken her son and daughter to live had been a Norfolk commune, a place Strike sincerely hoped no longer existed.
The Ink Black Heart Ch. 48
Let me know what you think of the new header in the comments down below.
It’s New Year’s Eve and Ink Black Heart readers naturally think of Strike’s meeting Madeline at Annabel’s. The music that was playing as he makes perhaps the biggest mistake of his romantic life? Ronson’s ‘Uptown Funk.’ Chris Calderon shares his thoughts below about the song and why he thinks it is a meaningful choice for this scene.
Happy New Year!
In honor of the turning of the New Year, I thought it a fun idea to share the song that was playing at the club in Ink Black Heart, where Strike was foolish enough to let his guard down around Cupid, the god of eros, and thus fell into one of Charlotte’s snares. I do it for two reasons. The first is because the song itself acts as a subtle marker to the online nature of IBH. Much like the adventures of Hearty and Friends, the song Uptown Funk has gained the same sort of internet notoriety and fame due to the influence of fans exerting their will on the work of another artist, or in this case, a whole slew of past artists.
Russian enthusiast Vasily Polyakov has generated portraits of characters from the Harry Potter films in the style of Russian writers Anton Pavlovich Chekhov and Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky. Polyakov shared the results of his work in his group on VKontakte.
To create drawings, the author used the Midjourney neural network. It is not known what kind of requests Polyakov made. The selection includes images of Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, Ron Weasley, Dumbledore, Hagrid, Minerva McGonagall, Voldemort, Severus Snape and Draco Malfoy.
Please do go to the page linked above to see the others; the Hermione, Snape, Draco, Ron, and Dumbledore pictures not shown here are well worth the visit.
The first soul triptych in modern literature remains the best, namely, the three Brothers Karamazov. I think it is fair to assume that Dostoevsky deployed this Patristic-Platonic allegory because of the several allusions to copies of St Isaac the Syrian’s homilies found in that novel, in which collection the three faculties of soul and their right alignment are mentioned repeatedly. Regardless, Chekhov and Dostoevsky inspired ‘drawings’ of Rowling’s characters are a delight, despite their depressing demeanor.
What other authors or playwrights do you think could be used to generate like AI imagery? Shakespeare, for sure; Wodehouse? Dickens? Austen?
We often plumb the literary depths of influence here as we consider the ways in which Rowling/Galbraith draws upon a vast array of texts to weave together the adventures of our Denmark Street detectives. However, some of her influences are delightfully less cerebral, and, in The Ink Black Heart, a wonderful thread emerges, the influence of 1980s romantic detective shows. The 1980s, particularly the latter half of the decade, was a wonderful period for detectives on television.
Rowling has already indicated her knowledge of the world of TV detectives of the period by having Anna Phipps and her wife Kim Sullivan in Troubled Blood own cats named Cagney and Lacey after the titular police detectives from the early 19080s ( the female cats much to the amusement of their owners, seem to prefer the company of men. Cagney, whose namesake is the cat that immediately takes up with Strike, was involved with a slew of men on the series, unlike wife and and mother Lacey).
In Ink Black Heart, there are some wonderful salutes to some of the great 1980s detective shows that, like this series, include some serious romantic tension alongside the mysteries under investigation. Join me after the jump to take a look at a few fun and fascinating homages to some delightful series, including one that is finally streaming for a whole new generation to love.
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