Requiescat in Pace: Toni Gras

January 9, 2017 by 3 Comments

linkedinI am just home from Nativity celebrations on the East Coast and opened my email after four days away from the Internet. There was some good news; a dear friend and his wife in western Illinois have recovered from serious illness with her cancer officially in remission. And there was some hard news. A woman in the UK I met while at St Andrews who has been caring for her father for years wrote me to ask for prayers for his peaceful repose. He died that night.

orlandoThat was a shock but the real blow, because I had never met my English friend’s father, was reading a note from David Gras that said his wife, Toni, was on her deathbed and asking for my prayers. Toni’s condition was well known in the Potter Pundit community because she and her family are so dear to all of us who have met them. Her death on Orthodox Nativity was still a great surprise to me. We had exchanged notes in November about Emily’s aside in her post about the Chestnut Hill Conference that Toni had been missed and sending all our best wishes and prayers for Toni’s complete recovery from cancer.

It was the latest in more than 300 email conversations I have had with Toni and David since we met more than ten years ago. I have been to their home, eaten meals with them and daughter Courtney at conferences from San Francisco to Toronto to Orlando, they even put me up one night at their hotel in Boston when I found myself at the first Leaky Con without a place to lay my head. These conferences will never be the same for me. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes

Rogue One and the Paschal Mystery

January 6, 2017 by 5 Comments

[WARNING: Rogue One spoilers abound!]

rogueone_posterMany classic stories have a component of self-sacrifice for the greater good: Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, the original Star Wars. Heck, even Frozen has its “Paschal Mystery moment,” when Anna throws herself between her sister and the enemy’s blade. This notion of loving self-sacrifice that brings profound, new hope – which Christians call the Paschal Mystery – gets far more than a moment in Rogue One; its treatment is thorough-going, multi-faceted and reconsidered for modern audiences. The film’s ensemble cast shows there is more than one path toward a life of relinquishment, lived in deference to the greater good. Each member of the Rogue band is a pilgrim of sorts, on a distinctive path toward the same end, providing his or her own particular insight into what living the Paschal Mystery requires. For Chirrut, Cassian and Jyn, those insights can be summed up in the Christian virtues of faith, hope and love. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Emily Strand Tagged With: , , ,

“It’s Levi-O-sa!” Why Pronunciation Matters in Magic and Literature

January 5, 2017 by 9 Comments

It’s no secret that everyone here at Hogwarts Professor takes reading pretty seriously.  As serious readers of texts that often feature fabricated vocabulary, we have all, at some point, wondered how tImage result for hermione leviosa memeo say some of the remarkable words we run across at Hogwarts and elsewhere. Sometimes, after reading and re-reading a book for years, we are stunned to hear an audiobook or movie adaptation that completely contrasts with the way we have been saying the word in our heads (or in nightly read-alouds). With film adaptations, there are even some pretty divisive opinions about whether the movie people are, as Hermione would tell us, saying it wrong. It would be easy to say that it’s just potato/potAHto, and Sca-mander/Scam-ander, but, the fact is, words have power, literally and figuratively, especially in the books we discuss here, so let’s think about a few reasons that it does matter how we say words, whether we are making a movie, having a conversation, or just reading aloud at bedtime…. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Elizabeth Baird Hardy

A look at the Carve the Mark sneak peaks: prose, photos and artwork

January 3, 2017 by Leave a Comment

preprderVeronica Roth engages with her readers through a variety of social media outlets, notably Twitter, Instagram and Tumblir. With a scant two weeks remaining until the release of her new book, Carve the Mark, she is clearly doing what she can to generate and maintain interest, including offering an bonus epilogue to the Divergent series for those who pre-order. And yes, that particular bit of marketing strategy worked very nicely on me–not that I wouldn’t have ordered the book anyway.

In addition to releasing a preview chapter, Ms. Roth has been sharing regular “teasers:” sentences from Carve the Mark she has been releasing weekly, along with a photograph or painting, at least some of which her mother assisted in preparing. I thought it would be fun to look through the ten teasers released so far, speculate about what they could mean for the new series and look for any possible echoes to the Divergent trilogy.  So, here are the ten teaser quotes, in the order they were released, and including the art.

ctm-opening1. The first was the opening line of Carve the Mark.

Hushflowers always bloomed when the night was longest. The whole city celebrated the day the bundle of petals peeled apart into rich red– partly because hushflowers were their nation’s lifeblood and partly, Akos thought, to keep them all from going crazy in the cold.

As other previews have mentioned, plants apparently play a big role in this book. The red flower pictured above–presumably the hushflower–bears a strong resemblance to the red flowers featured in the book trailer.  A second plant, the “iceflower” is also mentioned as providing “lifeblood”–and given the opening trailer images of snowscapes interspersed with the fiery red flowers, and the red, black and white theme of the accompanying artwork, it is a possibility we could be looking at an alchemical organization, as Christine Wesley brilliantly deduced for Divergent. That would certainly be a nice Yuletide gift for John.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Divergent, Louise Freeman Tagged With:

Fantastic Beasts’ Seventh Deleted Scene Grindelgraves’ Vision in MACUSA Office

December 31, 2016 by 3 Comments


IR Interview: The Cast & Producer Of "Fantastic… by theinsidereel

Kelly Loomis has discovered a seventh deleted scene in Fantastic Beasts, one we learn about in an interview Colin Farrel, the actor who plays Percival Graves in the movie, did with ‘Inside Reel.’ He says:

[Graves] is probably a lot more tired from the burden of responsibility that he lives with and under than the film was allowed the opportunity to explore.

There was one scene that didn’t make the film that we shot where he was actually having a vision and he was cramped down in the corner of his office with his shirt off, just a vest on, sweating, and seeing something. And there was a vision.

It didn’t make the cut and I get why it did (sic), because it wasn’t about that, it was too distracting I think. But he is somebody who has physically and emotionally taxed himself for the good of wizardkind. He is somebody who has such a personally defined ideology on what he thinks is right and wrong with society. And these people are either great liberators or — and sometimes as well as great liberators — incredibly dangerous

Add this to the Six Deleted Scenes we have discussed already in ‘Unlocking Fantastic Beasts: Finding the Text,’ Part 3. They scene, according to Farrel, so we know it was in the “book” shooting script that was Rowling’s final after responding to at least three series of notes and revisions with Yates, Kloves, and Heyman.

Anyone want to guess where this scene appeared in the sequence of the story? Earlier than later, right? I am writing the “corrected found text” as Part 5B of Unlocking series. And what does what Farrel says about this scene tell us we didn’t know about Grindelgraves? Rowling confirmed by Tweet that Grindelwald was a seer “and a liar” and we’re left to wonder if she answered this question because of some disappointment that the film wasn’t released as written and shot. Stay tuned — or take your best guess in the comment boxes below!

Great find, Kelly Loomis! Thank you for searching and for sharing.

Filed Under: Fantastic Beasts