Requiescat in Pace: Doris Day

My mother died in 2006. Looking through her effects, I found photo albums from her childhood. Almost all the pictures were of family and school. One page, though, was devoted to a celebrity. Doris Day visited Philadelphia and she traveled as a young teen in the late 1940’s from her Mainline hamlet into the big city to see what was obviously a promotional gig for a movie. There must have been hundreds of such star-turns in her youth. Doris Day was the only one she went to see and capture on her brownie Kodak camera.

The Harry Potter connection? Not much, obviously. But here’s the late Doris Day, nee Kappelhoff, singing “It’s Magic” from her first film appearance, ‘Romance on the High Seas,’ 1949. She lived a long and apparently unhappy life. May she rest in peace — and be remembered for the musical and silver screen magic she brought into people’s lives.

“Rowling is a Machiavellian Narcissistic Psychopath Who Wants to Kill Children”

That’s not a direct quotation but a summary of the argument in the book One Election Please...How J.K. Rowling Bought British Politics, Hid Her True Self and Hoodwinked the World—an Unauthorised Biographical Exposé by Bruce Masters. I have not read the whole thing (the author offers a free look at the first seven chapters online) but I confess to being astonished at what I found there and in the free excerpts from another Masters book, How Not to Get Sued by J. K. Rowling.

I learned, for example, that Rowling as a teenager carved “Joanne Rowling slept here” into her bedroom window frame. It checks out. Masters makes that a crime of defacement which may make you wonder if her father would have taken her to court for this crime as owner of the house.

And I read for the first time of the Rowling, Inc., lawyers suing a Hindu Festival in Kolkata, India, for creating a replica of Hogwarts Castle. Sound like the recent repressive acts against American street festivals with Harry Potter themes? Of course it does. The story survives an internet search for verification, as well. (Rowling’s lawyers lost the suit.)

How about Rowling owning a $30,000,000 yacht that she bought from Jonny Depp? That’s a stunner. It is sort of true, too. Variety reported in March, 2017: [Read more…]

Mailbag: Dumbledore a Manipulator?

I have spoken at an Augustana College retreat for students in Pastor Richard Priggie’s ‘Soul of Harry Potter’ class every Spring for the last nine years. Held at the remarkable Stronghold Castle in Oregon, Illinois, this retreat and my part in explaining the artistry and meaning of literary alchemy and ring composition there have been annual highlights for me and my family (especially my youngest sons).

I offer, in the Q&A session I do every year at the dinner after my last talk, help to the students with their end of term papers. The deal is, if they’ll write me their questions via email, I’ll send answers they can use, agree or disagree, in their arguments. I got this one last week:

Hello Mr. Granger, I am not sure if you remember me but I was on the Harry Potter retreat with Pastor Priggie. I am currently finishing up my final paper for the class and I have a topic I thought you might enjoy shedding some light on. The topic I picked for the paper is “Professor Dumbledore is a wise and compassionate mentor who guides Harry even from beyond the grave/ Professor Dumbledore is a flawed character who deceives and manipulates Harry in order to meet his own ends.” I decided to argue the side of Dumbledore being a manipulator as I feel Dumbledore used Harry for personal gain in much of the 5th and 6th books, as well as in Snape’s memory that Harry sees of Dumbledore in the Pensieve. So with that being said, I would love to know any opinions or examples you can give on the topic of Dumbledore being a manipulator. Thank you!

My off the top of my head answer — seven examples — was: [Read more…]

London Production of Rosmersholm (2): Starring Tom Burke (Cormoran Strike)

Back in February I reported in London Production of Rosmersholm: Starring Tom Burke (Cormoran Strike) the beyond-possibility-of-coincidence of the star of the adapted for teevee Strike would be playing the lead role in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm the year he plays Cormoran in the Bronte Studio’s version of Lethal White. As I wrote then:

Every chapter-heading epigraph in Robert Galbraith’s Lethal White is taken from Henrik Ibsen’s Rosmersholm. As we have discussed here, it would be hard to overlook the importance Galbraith/Rowling attaches to this play about the haunted lives of people living in the wake of a woman’s suicide for which they were responsible. That longish post and the conversation that followed with Joanne Gray in its comment thread — ‘Lethal White: Ibsen’s Rosmersholm‘ — offered five reasons beyond the ‘white horses’ for Serious Strikers to study the play.

Joanne Gray wrote me today to share the news that there will be a new production of the Ibsen classic in London this summer. Tom Burke, the star of the Strike novel adaptations for the BBC, will be playing the lead role of John Rosmer. As Professor Gray noted, he will be on stage with Rosmersholm just before he returns to filming Lethal White, the only Strike novel not yet transformed into little screen fare.

I am very hopeful that our Serious Strike Fellowship in London will be attending and reporting on this version of Rosmersholm, how it preserves and how it revises Ibsen’s classic (FYI, Social Justice crusaders do not come off well in the original), and how Burke chooses to play Rosmer, especially with respect to his responsibility for the suicide of his wife. Will it be a clue about Strike’s reflections on his culpability in his mother Leda’s supposed suicide and his denial of responsibility?

Daniella at SeatPlan.com in the UK wrote me after spotting my post (who else in the US is writing about this Ibsen revival and begging UK friends to attend?). She urges those looking to buy tickets to check out the Duke of York Theatre’s seating plan to be sure they get the best seat tickets for their money.

As well as information about the show, it is essential for your users to be able to get comprehensive details of the seating of the 2019 London production. We host an interactive seating plan with user reviews and view from seat photos for the theatre here: https://seatplan.com/london/duke-of-yorks-theatre/

It is a remarkable web site; you click on a seat in the theater the way you would for making an online airplane seat reservation and up pops a picture of the stage taken from that seat with a review-of-the-view written by someone who sat there! Highly recommended — I would certainly be clicking like mad on seats all over this page before buying my Rosmersholm tickets and I hope very much all HogPro readers and Serious Strikers who will be in London this summer will buy tickets, watch the show, and let us know what you think of the production.

‘Philosopher’s Stone’ Now in Low Scots: The 80th Language Barrier is Broken

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone has been translated into a multitude of languages, from Urdu and Arabic to Latin and Mandarin Chinese. For the longest time, the total number of acknowledged translations was stuck at 79 languages. I learned only last week, though, that the eightieth language threshold had been breached in 2017 when a Low Scots version of Stone was published, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stane by Matthew Fitt, Itchy Koo Press.

Here’s a taste of what it’s like, courtesy of Brian Basore, the HogPro All-Pro who alerted me to the existence of this new version:

A little more after the jump. What do you think? How many of you plan to purchase a copy for reading aloud on the next long car trip you’re planning with a Potter-phile or Scots expatriot? [Read more…]