Back tomorrow with more conversation about the artistry and meaning of the works by the world’s most famous writer! Joyous Noel!
The Rowling Library Magazine #97: BBC Ink Black Heart, Ghost Plots, Rowling Newsletters, and Very Potter Christmas
January 6, 2025 by 1 Comment
As I wrote yesterday, The Rowling Library Magazine for January 2025 is out and can be downloaded here. For serious readers of J. K. Rowling, it is the Christmas present you wanted; informative, ‘instructing while delighting,’ challenging, and a reminder of what a blessing TRL is to Rowling’s global fandom.
Here are my homeopathic doses of each of this issue’s articles:
Cover Story: ‘The Daily Prophet Newsletters — Uncovering one of the most elusive Harry Potter writings: J.K. Rowling’s Newsletters from 1998 and 1999.’ In an article I want to assume was written by Ibid, the eccentric Go-To expert and unchallenged authority on JKR textual histories, the reader is introduced to perhaps Rowling’s most elusive and curious work, the four newsletters Rowling penned in 1998 and 1999 for a short-lived Bloomsbury fan club in the UK. Surviving copies of the mailed newsletters are rare, especially as complete sets, and Rowling, Inc., has forbidden their reproduction. The author of this piece lovingly shares how s/he came to read an original set and enough of the newsletters to communicate their value without violating copyright. The sports page excerpts are a delight.
‘Ghost Plots.’ I expressed my frustration yesterday with this article’s lack of source citation in my ‘Rowling’s Real World Inspiration for Leda Strike: Nancy Spungen? but my having been inspired to write that post I hope points to the remarkable value of this survey of Rowling’s abandonded or re-shaped original ideas for the Hogwarts Saga. I expect it will inspire serious readers everywhere, as it did me, to follow up on an intriguing name or plot point suggesting a link to Rowling’s ‘Lake,’ her post Potter efforts, or to both. It merits repeated readings in this regard and makes the absence of source citations that much more disappointing.
Publication Announcement: ‘The Phoenix or the Flame Set for February Release — Explore the release date, essays, and insights from TRL Books’ newest look at the original outline for The Order of the Phoenix.’ I wrote a chapter for this new Rowling Library (TRL) anthology and enjoyed every minute of my exchanges with The Phoenix or the Flame’s editor and the publisher, but I confess to not having an appreciation of its depths and breadth until reading this brief piece in January’s magazine. I can say as a relative insider that the textual history provided in the book of Rowling’s outline of the fifth Harry Potter novel is worth to Potter Pundits whatever they’re charging for the essay collection and I’ll admit to being delighted for the opportunity to write up at last my thoughts about the Department of Mysteries adventure’s chiastic structure, a jewel box for those sensitive to Rowling’s artistry and meaning. I’m excited by next month’s publication of The Phoenix and the Flame and I’m grateful to this article for re-igniting that flame of interest.
Media Review: ‘A Heart Too Big for the Screen — The BBC’s bold attempt at bringing Robert Galbraith’s The Ink Black Heart to Life.’ TRL’s anonymous reviewer congratulated the screenplay writer for his adaptation of Galbraith’s Strike 6 and tipped the hat to the principal actor and actress, but noted with kindness the near impossibility of adapting this novel so that its power was communicated into an alien medium. Really, Ink Black Heart has been Rowling-Galbraith’s most challenging book to read due to its extensive use of simultaneous online chatter threads and, as hard as it was to convey that internet experience in codex, the jump to screened images alone was virtually impossible. [I thought of the conversation that was supposed to have been had between the translator of Marx’ Philosophical Manuscripts of 1848 into English from the German with its author, in which he complained of the difficulty in moving from one language to another with this book. Marx is said to have shrugged and replied, “The ideas didn’t translate easily into German, either.”] An excellent review that actually made me more interested in seeing the adaptation than I had been.
Lead Article: ‘Why Christmas to Me is J. K. Rowling’s Old Website.’ This was far and away my favorite piece in this month’s magazine, an article that touched me as it might few others. First, it provides an inside-look at the remarkable person behind the curtain that makes TRL happen, Patricio Tarantino. I communicate with him regularly and my debts to him for the resources and tools he has created for Rowling readers grow ever deeper in depth. Yet I know very little about him, really, outside of his sterling character and fine judgment. This autobiographical episode was, consequently, a revelation on several levels and much appreciated.
Second, tonight is Christmas Eve to Orthodox Christians and I have experienced reading (and re-reading) this article, delayed from December when the great majority of TRL readers were preparing for their Nativity celebrations, as something of a personal present under my family’s tree, delivered by TRL House Elves dispatched from Buenos Aires.
Thank you, Mr Tarantino, for this gift and for all that you and the magazine contributors give to Rowling’s global fandom in these magazines!
Rowling’s Real World Inspiration for Leda Strike: Nancy Spungen?
January 5, 2025 by Leave a Comment
The new issue of The Rowling Library magazine is out and it’s another winner. Download it here.
I’ll write about my favorite pieces tomorrow. Tonight, though, I want to focus on one paragraph in Oliver Horton’s ‘Ghost Plots,’ his survey of the various plot directions, names, and characters that Rowling chose not to include (or to change into an unrecognizable version of the original) in the Hogwarts Saga. It’s a frustrating article, however interesting all of Horton’s points are (very!), because not once, anywhere, does he mention the source of these ‘Ghost Plots,’ even where Rowling called them that.
The paragraph in question is about Draco Malfoy’s original surname and its probable source.
Harry’s rival Draco Malfoy was at first called Draco Spungen, presumably because of Nancy Spungen, the blonde mentally ill teenage girlfriend of Sid Vicious, bass player in iconic 1970s punk band [the] Sex Pistols. This is a curious choice: the late Ms Spungen is a much maligned figure in rock history. Yet it makes you wonder if other musical notes have been embedded in the story. Are there references to The Beatles and The Smiths, favourite bands of the author, hidden as if under a Cloak of Invisibility? (13)
Again, I don’t know where Horton found this jewel tidbit but, if I ever knew it (as I did many of the Ghost Plots), I’d long ago forgotten it and I’m sure I’d never heard of Nancy Spungen before. So I did the quick online search — the Wikipedia bio, the Rowling Stone ‘Who Killed Nancy Spungen?‘ archive profile, the CrimeAndInvestigation.co.UK piece ‘Sid and Nancy: A Punk Rock Murder Mystery,’ and a piercing film review of Sid and Nancy (‘Requiem for a Blonde: A Tribute to the Most Hated Half of Sid and Nancy‘ — cameo from Sirius Black!).
Check those out if you have a minute. It is painful reading of a wasted life involving mental illness, drugs, and misery in the fast lane of the 70s high-flying punk rock scene. With names like ‘Johnny Rotten’ and ‘Sid Vicious’ — and ‘Nancy Spungen’! — it reads like a Medieval morality play or Victorian allegory of sin and consequences.
Why should we care, though, about Rowling’s one-time long ago fascination with a super-groupie attached to a 70s punk-rock band with drug issues, one who died a mysterious death that many consider a suicide but others are as sure it was murder?
It’s intriguing, to me at least, that Rowling originally named the Malfoys the “Spungens.” She clearly was very familiar with the groupie nutcase attached to Punk royalty who died horribly and mysteriously. The Malfoys are central figures in the Hogwarts drama; Draco plays the part of Harry’s Flashman patrician foil throughout the series so giving him that name had to have been as meaningful (or almost as, at least to the author) as the Malfoy moniker is.
I don’t get the connection of Nancy Spungen with the patrician wizard family, frankly, but, unlike Horton, I think most Rowling readers would connect the super-groupie with Leda Strike. In a flash.
The question that popped into my mind was “Did Rowling-Galbraith’s fascination with Nancy Spungen take flower years later with Leda Strike, Cormoran’s mother, whose death is shrouded in mystery?” There are some interesting parallels.
Points of Correspondence between the Lives and Deaths of Nancy and Leda:
I came up with seven after reading the four articles mentioned above. [Read more…]
J. K. Rowling Saved Western Civilization — Amy Hamm’s ‘National Post’ Essay
January 4, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Amy Hamm has written an essay (or “op-ed” in Newspeak) for Canada’s National Post with the daring title, ‘J. K. Rowling Saved Western Civilization.’
She makes an excellent argument; her review of the collective insanity crisis that threatened to overtake the West in support of the gender confused, the asylum inmates calling the tune, is comprehensive and compelling and her presentation of Rowling as the most important single voice, largely because of her unique position but due as much to her personal courage and determination to follow through the endless character assassinations and threats of violence is a cogent case.
If you haven’t got the five minutes to read the whole piece, here is a taste from Hamm’s conclusion:
That’s Rowling. She possesses a defiance that is both legendary and critical for our times. She did not need to do any of this. It would have been far easier had she not. In fact, in her essay on sex and gender, she admits that being hounded by gender extremists is “endlessly unpleasant.” She’s human, after all. “I’d stepped back from Twitter for many months both before and after tweeting support for Maya, because I knew it was doing nothing good for my mental health,” wrote Rowling.
Her wealth and fame ensure that when she speaks, people listen — but they do nothing to insulate or make her immune from the vicious hatred she gets in return. And yet, she doesn’t let up.
A civilization that institutionalizes and enforces the telling of absurd lies — including the lie that humans can change their sex — is in decline. Likewise, for a civilization that not only does not protect women and children from male violence — but enables and excuses it to occur in the service of upholding the states’ mandated lies. Again, the same can be said of a western culture that normalizes the chemical — followed by surgical — castration of its own children, as we see with the medical scandal that is pediatric “gender affirming care.” The West is very sick right now.
We have been living under forced subservience to the foolish and dangerous notion that nothing is more important than “identity” — including self-declared and patently false ones — and that we must upend our culture, institutions, and even our safety and lives in a demonstration of fealty.
I do not wish to imagine where we would be, in 2024, had Rowling not done what she has done — for women and children, for freedom, and for the West. Do not mistake my praise for celebrity worship, either: this is about character, bravery, and virtue in the context of the power conferred by Rowling’s celebrity and reach. If any single person is to one day receive credit for saving western civilization, it is Rowling.
The fight is not over, but she has shown us the way.
Read the whole thing.
It is catnip, of course, for those of us who have agreed with Rowling’s conclusion from the start, though our reasoning to arrive there might have been and certainly remains for me quite different. I hope that those who disagreed back then, who participated in the transphobe-slander game, and those who still think that there are gendered souls, that “transgender women are women” or that “transgender children” exist, will read Hamm’s essay.
It’s an excellent packaging and vivid presentation of how close the West came to accepting nonsense as “science,” ignorant bullying posturing as empathy, and how significant Rowling’s role has been in reversing the tide. Who knows? Maybe one or two people might finally get how mistaken they have been and reach out to apologize to those whom they insulted or, worse really, those friends on whom they turned their backs.
Tomorrow, back to the hottest subject in Rowling Studies today, ‘Pregnancy Traps’ as a ‘golden thread’ throughout JKR’s work, beginning to most recent, and what it means from a ‘Lake and Shed’ perspective. Check out the latest Hogwarts Professor podcast which is an in-depth and entertaining conversation on just that topic. Cheers!
Pregnancy Traps in Every Rowling Story: The Golden Thread of Coercive Love
January 3, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Dr. John Granger and Nick Jeffery explore the theme of pregnancy traps and coercive love, as a golden thread running through all the published works of J. K. Rowling. The new episode can be downloaded over on the Hogwarts Professor Substack.
After a long delay, Rowling studies returns with a discussion of a theme that is found throughout Rowling’s work. The Hogwarts Professor posts that John and Nick reference can be found here:
Rowling Pregnancy Traps: Merope Gaunt
Rowling Pregnancy Traps: Casual Vacancy’s Krystal Weedon, Kay Bawden
Rowling’s Pregnancy Traps: Bellatrix Lestrange and the Cursed Child Delphini
Rowling’s Pregnancy Traps: Leda Strike
Rowling’s Pregnancy Traps: Four Strikes
Rowling’s Pregnancy Traps: Last Strikes
Rowling’s Pregnancy Traps: Fantastic Beasts, The Ickabog, The Christmas Pig
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