Thoughts for the Serious Reader of Harry Potter
Just sayin.’ Not many book series and consequent film franchises inspire home decorating innovations like this one. And can you think of a better way to keep children away from the electrical socket or wasting volts with silly appliances?
Hat tip to James McG — and Semper Fi!
I attended the inaugural meeting tonight: a new Harry Potter fandom organization in Virginia. Organizers were back from Misti-Con and very enthusiastic. The hope is to have a couple of events per month and a trivia night is already scheduled.
Any Virginia HogPro readers who are interested should check out the MeetUp and/or Facebook pages.
For those of us who are old enough to remember when dinosaurs walked the earth and the Hogwarts Saga was not yet finished, the ‘Red Hen,’ aka Joyce Odell, is a VIP of the first order. Her Red Hen Publications website was the online place to go for the most closely and cleverly argued speculations about the artistry and meaning of the books. My Ring Composition work, all of which was done post Deathly Hallows, owes a great deal to work that Ms Odell did as far back as 2003 (when she detailed all the Stone-Phoenix connections and parallels) and to her post Half Blood Prince work in which she predicted that Hallows would resonate in like fashion with Prisoner.
Did I mention that she predicted the Horcrux story line years before we knew there was such a thing? Check out ‘The Changeling Hypothesis’ for some amazing literary detective work — and browse through her fanfic publications while you’re there (the Red Hen is a graphic artist of the first order, as well). There’s enough fascinating Potter Punditry collected here and here to keep future academics (and serious readers of Potter canon) who really do their homework busy for weeks.
I was delighted, consequently, when I learned in our e-correspondence, that she updated her web site at long last to reflect Hallows realities and her disappointment with the finale. I asked her for a statement to publish here and she obliged me with this note: [Read more…]
MISTI-Con in Laconia, New Hampshire was a blast! This joint production of The Group That Shall Not Be Named and MuggleNet.com was set on a lake-side resort whose buildings, Big Top tent, and props (can you say, “Life Size replica of the Fountain of Magical Brethren”? Wow.) had a Hogwarts feel, especially with the nearly 500 attendees who all seemed to have five or six Wizarding World outfits to change into. The Beauxbatons uniforms were stunning and the spot-on Gilderoy Lockhart outfit Clay Dockery wore to the MNet podcast still makes me laugh.
And the live podcast with MNet host Keith Hawk and special guest Janet Batchler was a big hit. Janet is a long time friend of this blog and she blew the full house (well, tent) away with her insights and observations as a screenwriter about what worked and didn’t work in the film adaptations of the Hogwarts Saga. Listen to the whole thing; I’m no friend of the movies but I loved talking with Janet about Hollywood realities as well as the effects of the Franchise on Fandom’s experience of story.
Two other MISTI-Con notes below concerning Leaky Con and a delightful Potter Pundit I met with a mind-blowing idea: [Read more…]
Hunger Games readers and movie fans are needed for a study being conducted at Mary Baldwin College on empathy for fictional characters. If you are age 13 or older and a native speaker of English, you are eligible to participate. It will involve taking an anonymous online survey (Click here for the link) and should require no more than 30 minutes to complete. This study is approved by the Mary Baldwin College Institutional Review Board.
PS. If you run into any problems with the survey, please alert me at lfreeman@mbc.edu Thank you, friends!
Recent Conversation