Thoughts for the Serious Reader of Harry Potter
On Valentine’s day, Lindsey, one of the hosts of the Strike and Ellacott Files podcast, shared a very appropriate video short from inside York Minster. With the cathedral featuring in J. K. Rowling’s latest Twitter header, fans are hoping this is a good omen for the next installment.
Thanks to @cikadina for showing me this video on Instagram because OMG!!!! 😍😍 https://t.co/o4DcQZkm9K
— Lindsay (@LindsayMLand) February 14, 2025
At the largest graveyard in Port Townsend, ‘America’s Victorian Seaport’ on the Olympic Peninsula, a sharp-eyed serious reader found the headstone of one ‘Harold Potter:’
Here’s the close-up:
Read the November 2019 piece Real Life Muggles Named ‘Harry Potter’ for thoughts about what this might be like for those, living and dead (well, for their descendants obviously).
Regardless, fun find! Back to my formatting efforts…
I’m still not 100% so I haven’t made progress on the two remaining ‘Foundation Crime’ posts in that three-part series. God willing, I’ll be over this season’s bug in Oklahoma City sooner than later. What I was able to work on was a MS PowerPoint presentation for The Rowling Library’s anthology. The Phoenix and the Flame.
Because of that presentation’s brevity and the deadline for submitting it on Friday, I worked today on creating slides for the talk and how to embed a cameo-video in as many slides as I think appropriate. If I cannot figure this out (too likely I’m afraid), I will send TRL the slides and my video for them to play around with. [You’ll see it after TRL edits it into the collage of other Potter Punditry authors that have contributed to this anthology.]
I’ll try to create a ‘Foundation Crime’ video-cum-cameo tomorrow that moves that Golden Thread series forward, even if only by a Baby Step. Thank you for your patience as I try to climb this techno formatting Fuji!
I pledged yesterday to write three posts in sequence that together will reveal the Foundation Crime of the Strike-Ellacott series and an epicycle structure to the last three books. I had the second post sketched before I wrote up an introduction to this effort yesterday so I was hopeful I could complete it relatively easily today.
I have been sick and I relapsed. The second post, consequently, remains a challenging ambition!
So, to keep my six month streak of posting every day alive, I took my cue from a Serious Reader who was looking for the talks I gave at the Eighth Day Symposium in January 2011. The links in my original post about those talks were to Ancient Faith Radio but they apparently have been broken, i.e., the links no longer go to anything.
But the Web Archive, aka the ‘Wayback Machine,’ had saved it. I’ve been listening to it tonight in my malaise and I think it holds up. I discuss Soul Triptychs, Literary Alchemy, and Ring Composition, and, though it’s not quite the talk I’d give today, fourteen years later, it’s still challenging and fun.
So I post the Wayback Machine link here for you to enjoy! It’s another introduction to Rowling ‘Shed’ or Formalist artistry which will serve us well as we hunt for the Foundation Crime of the Strike-Ellacott series.
Enjoy!
I had a Skype conversation with Nick Jeffery this morning during which I think we figured out where Rowling-Galbraith is going in the Strike-Ellacott series’ last three books. How we got there, though, is a pretty involved argument, a winding path to say the least.
It involves three key steps: (1) understanding Rowling as in essence a writer of detective fiction and the signature element of that kind of story-telling, (2) a review of Rowling’s works for each of the very well hidden ‘Foundation Crimes’ out of which her involved stories all spring, and (3) a first look at the Strike-Ellacott books to guess its ‘Foundation Crime’ which will explain the epicycle of the last three mysteries in the series and how Strike 10 will match up with Strikes 1 and 7.
Today, in order to make the point about Rowling as a writer of detective fiction, I will review arguments I made in September 2018 in favor of Rowling’s nomination for a Nobel Prize in Literature. Those arguments all derived from my Junior Varsity attempts as part of my PhD thesis writing to use Russian Formalist tools to interpret her work, a quest I eventually abandoned (at the pointed direction of my Viva Voce readers!). I posted those Formalist arguments, however, here at Hogwarts Professor to make the point at the time of Literature Nobel Prize nominations every year, that Rowling was an excellent candidate despite the pervasive view in the Academy that she is a hack writer for proles.
Join me after the jump for a quick survey of those arguments — and the one among them perhaps the most important for understanding Rowling’s work crafting her ‘Lake’ inspiration into story in her ‘Shed’! [Read more…]
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