Shared Text: Boston Massacre II and Echoes of the Potter Panic

September 7, 2013 by

‘Bombing Suspects Followed Harry Potter-Hating Australian Sheikh’

That’s the headline of a FoxNews.com article by Jamie Dettmer that was posted 19 April this year. Here are the lede paragraphs:

Four months ago, the Boston bombing suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed yesterday in a shootout with police, uploaded to his YouTube Channel an eight-minute lecture by the radical Australian Muslim preacher Sheikh Feiz Mohammed denouncing the Harry Potter movies for glorifying and promoting paganism.

“How can you allow your children to watch this?” the sheikh demands in the table-thumping lecture. “This film glorifies, magnifies, promotes paganism…What does Harry Potter do and his devilish schoolmates, what do they do? They cast spells, learn magic, brew potions, learn how to tell the future…And this is called harmless.”

He condemns the Harry Potter movies for being built on shirk — the sin of worshipping someone or something other than Allah.

Two quick notes:

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes, Shared Text

Rowling, Inc., to Follow Christie Estate Lead and Commission Harry Potter Fan Fiction Under Its Own Trademark Brand?

September 6, 2013 by 5 Comments

All I’m trying to do here is start a conversation. Well, maybe a rumor, too. One without any basis in fact.

Except that the Agatha Christie Estate has commissioned noted mystery author Sophie Hannah to write a new Hercule Poirot novel:

Hercule Poirot is to test his famous grey cells once again in a “new” Agatha Christie novel – the first featuring the Belgian detective since Christie’s death in 1976.

 

Christie is the latest author to be resurrected by her estate, following novels in the style of Ian Fleming and PG Wodehouse written by contemporary authors. Bestselling crime writer Sophie Hannah is to write the as-yet untitled novel in Christie’s style, which will be published next year.

She said: “Writing a book with Poirot in it will be like writing about someone I know really well. I’ve read all the books so many times – I wouldn’t want to do this for any other writer. It was Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple who, between them, made me want to devote my working life to crime fiction.” The work, published by HarperCollins, will be the first fully-authorised Poirot novel since the author’s death.

The grandson and chairman of Agatha Christie, Limited, explains why he thinks grandmama would have liked the idea:

“The argument that might convince her is that it’s an attempt to reintroduce an already enthusiastic public to the books she wrote. That would have made her sympathetic to what we’re trying to do. When we heard that someone of Sophie’s eminence wanted to be involved in a project like this, we felt the opportunity was too good to miss.”

If you’re half as jaded as I am, you snorted at that. I wrote Potter Pundit and Friend of this Blog Heidi Tandy, who works as a copyright lawyer when wearing Muggle dress, to ask about the possibility of there being another motivation to this move (besides making the Christie books and plays generate even more millions annually), as well as what she thought of the rumor I’m trying to start. Y’know, that Ms Rowling would do the same?

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes

‘Allegiant’ Leaking Out: Quotations, ‘World of Divergent’

September 5, 2013 by 4 Comments

As we await the final installment of the Divergent trilogy, I am obliged to note that there are previews of what we can expect in Allegiant that are being leaked in what I assume is a campaign to inspire discussion and interest. Who needs inspiration? Let’s take a look, though, at what we have and what we’ll be getting soon.

What we have: Divergent, Insurgent, ‘Free Four,’ and ‘The Transfer’ are canon, per se. In addition, there are the items that have been published as a 48 page booklet included in the Divergent box set (which set, of course, will look silly when the third book is out, hence the incentive ‘extra’). Many of these previews and peeks behind the curtain have been posted by the author and by fans online — see the Faction Manifestos, the Series Inspirations, etc. — and will be released as a Kindle give-away on 24 September as Path to Allegiant: The World of Divergent. Here is the Amazon description of that —

Fascinated by the world of the Divergent series? This fifty-page bonus, previously only available in the Divergent Series Box Set, includes faction manifestos, a faction quiz, Q&A with #1 New York Times bestselling author Veronica Roth, book playlists, discussion questions, series inspirations, and much more!

So what we will have, in this case, is something we already have for the most part. More on this in a second.

We also have in hand a quotation from Allegiant, chapter 7, that was posted on Entertainment Weekly last week.

“We don’t know what’s happened out there since they put us in here, or how many generations have lived and died since they did. We could be the last people left.” Chapter Seven, Tris

What We Will Have: The insert to the box set was 48 pages long and The Path to Allegiant is 50 pages. A formatting glitch? Maybe. It could also be the actual only authentic ‘extra’ that we don’t have already. The Amazon teaser for Path concludes:

It also contains ten enticing teasers from Allegiant, the final book in the Divergent series.

Three quick questions:

(1) Do you believe, as I do, that we will not be given anything substantive, anything not already apparent from the ‘wow’ finish of Insurgent, in any of these teaers and extras?

(2) In the quotation from EW, are we to assume that Chapter Seven is titled ‘Tris’ or that this is Tris speaking? There must be quite the opening action scenes or play-back for us (her?) to have only learned this much after six chapters, no?

(3) I’m guessing that there is more to be learned about Allegiant in The Transfer, especially in Tobias’ relationship with the woman who read him as a Divergent and the man in charge of his initiation (who tags him as ‘Four’) than in anything that we’re getting from the publisher. Ms Roth enjoys a good mystery, I think, and it isn’t afraid to offer hints to serious readers.

Your thoughts?

Filed Under: Divergent

Roth E-Publishes ‘Divergent’ Short Story: ‘The Transfer’

September 4, 2013 by 4 Comments

If you cannot wait for Allegiant to come out next month, Veronica Roth has published a new Divergent short story, the first in a series of four, available on Amazon Kindle for $1.99. At 30 pages in length, it’s not a per page bargain but for the Divergent-o-phile, it’s certainly worth the price of a decent comic book (okay, half that price).

My first three thoughts on reading it are after the jump. You don’t want to go there, of course, if you don’t want to know what The Transfer is about before reading it yourself.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Divergent

Literary Alchemy via ‘Harry Potter’ — An Introduction

September 3, 2013 by 8 Comments

For those needing an introduction to the black, white, and red stages of literary alchemy or a pair of magic spectacles to grasp what Christine Wesley is describing in her exegesis of the Divergent trilogy, there’s the Wikipedia entry, of course, but here is a quick introduction from Deathly Hallows Lectures. I gave a talk at Biola University’s Torrey Honors College in the fall of 2007 and ran through five keys to unlock the artistry and meaning of the Hogwarts Saga finale, then hot off the press. One of those keys was literary alchemy.

Here, after the jump, is an excerpt from the first chapter of Deathly Hallows Lectures that I hope will bring the serious reader of Divergent up to speed on the hermetic tradition Christine Wesley assumes you know. If you want more, please see chapter devoted to this subject in Lectures, Harry Potter’s Bookshelf, and How Harry Cast His Spell.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Divergent, Literary Alchemy