One of the things I dislike about the Kindle is I don’t know how to organize the novels, plays, and works of non-fiction on the device so I don’t have to scroll through every eBook I ‘own’ to find the one I want. No doubt there is a way to catalog or sort the books into virtual shelves or folders but I don’t know it (and cannot find an illustration of how to do it easily, say, via a John-proof YouTube video). I rarely use the Kindle, consequently, even when I travel and it would be a great convenience.
A WordPress weblog like HogwartsProfessor presents something of a similar challenge. It is a miraculous means of communicating thoughts to a large audience at a cost of close to nothing. But. Once a site has more than a few posts on it, even with a search device readily available to foster hunts for specific topics, it is no small thing for even the most serious reader to find all the relevant posts in a site’s archives, not to mention being able to tell which are the most important, except by sorting and reading for hours.
Which just doesn’t happen. The average first time guest at this site is here only for seconds. Requiring attention for hours for that reader to find the relevant posts he or she wants to find and read means quite simply that they will not be found and may as well, frankly, not have been written and posted. There are nigh on 2,000 posts on HogwartsProfessor. Without an easily accessed file system on the home page, a system cued to essential subjects, only 1 in 10,000 visitors will be able to find the posts they want for academic research into what has already been published or for personal benefit.
Last week I began the process of sorting and filing HogwartsProfessor articles into what Yaro Starak calls ‘Pillar Posts’ with a collection of urls to the things I and other Potter Pundits have written about literary alchemy in the ten years we’ve been online. For starters, these Pillar Posts will only be link lists that have been sorted into categories for easier navigation (let me know if there are subjects you want included in this project; I have twenty Pillars on my to-do list). The goal is to have proper write-ups of take-away points on the relevant subjects, something like a HogPro wiki.
Today’s entry in the Pillar Post Project is Crimes of Grindelwald. Believe it or not, there are already fifty HogwartsProfessor posts on the second Fantastic Beasts film. After the jump, you’ll find them all in one place and sorted into nine categories. There will soon be a sidebar on the left hand side of the page where the twenty Pillars will be prominently displayed.
Thank you in advance for your patience and support during this project! Sharing your ideas would be a simultaneous grace and blessing.
MSNBC’s review of Crimes of Grindelwald
Movies don’t have the same luxurious amount of time, at least not giant blockbusters. The first “Fantastic Beasts” movie synopsis promised fans a small-time magical romp with a bumbling magizoologist and a pair of accidentally switched briefcases. What viewers got was a story that barely had time to establish those characters, or check to see if their foundations were solid, before Rowling blew down the wall for the reveal. It could have worked, had the series given the viewers more time to settle in.
I highlight that last sentence because I don’t remember this “worry” in my two viewings of the film or my several readings of the published-not-original screenplay.
We haven’t known why Leta was so hostile in her meeting with Dumbledore at Hogwarts, in which she is almost petulant with the DADA teacher everyone seems to admire. That conversation with Theseus, if they shared concerns about a turncoat Dumbledore would make her behavior logical. She loves Newt and Theseus and thinks Albus a threat of sorts to them both.
We. of course, not being Legilimenses and not having the deleted scene with Leta and Theseus discussing Dumbledore as a possible agent of his best buddy Grindelwald, are clueless about what is going on — and left to lament the “many subplots” we cannot understand.
If you’re not a subscriber to ‘The Rowling Library,’ an online magazine sent out as a free pdf to readers around the world, you’re missing out. Get thee hence to 
I was invited out of the blue last week, as something of an afterthought it seems, by the editor of a book soon to be published on the subject of the literary alchemy in Harry Potter to make a contribution of some kind. It turns out the well-meaning editor had not read anything I’d written on the subject other than the chapters in 
This seemingly inexplicable ignorance on the part of a very smart person reminded me that I had been advised two years ago to create what are known as ‘Pillar Posts’ for the sidebar of HogwartsProfessor. The purpose of these posts on a weblog is to create easy access in one spot to the material on a specific topic of special interest that is otherwise just spread throughout the archives of a long-lived site in no particular order. If I am obliged to note, Gilderoy mask in place, that the editor of the upcoming book on alchemy and the Hogwarts Saga is at fault in not doing such work herself, I must take some part of the blame because I have too long neglected the duties of HogwartsProfessor weblog archivist.
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