Mail Bag: Love vs Death or Love vs Violence?

September 4, 2011 by 7 Comments

A note with follow-up from Peter Barber about the core issue and victory depicted as story transparency in the Hogwarts Saga (shared with his permission):

Dear Dr. Granger,

I’ve a problem with your reading of Harry Potter which I hope you will consider.  I notice you make great moment of the binary love versus death, whilst I’m convinced you’ve missed Rowling’s intended binary of love versus violence – the refusal of reciprocity (turning the other cheek) – which is indispensible to our Lord’s manifestation of love, and is that which conquers death.  I feel you’ve left a critical piece out of the puzzle in this regard, amounting to a misrepresentation of the essential theme of this narrative which ties it most directly to the Love of the Father in the Gospels, in Jesus Christ.

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Filed Under: Mailbag

Shared Text: Doonesbury and the New Potter

September 4, 2011 by 1 Comment



Filed Under: Shared Text

Welcome to the Capitol! New Hunger Games Website with Pottermore echoes

September 2, 2011 by 9 Comments

You may have noticed, in the recently released micro-clip trailer for next year’s film of The Hunger Games, a little blip about registering as a citizen of the Capitol. Well now, you can do just that. This new site, which looks to be mostly teaser at this point, gives you the opportunity to register via either twitter or facebook (I went with the latter, myself). Then you will be registered according to your district (which is chosen for you;). Evidently, more bells and whistles will be forthcoming. For some more thoughts on the new site, particularly what it gives us that we didn’t already know, follow me after the jump. [Read more…]

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First Look at the Hunger Games Film

August 29, 2011 by 3 Comments

 At last night’s video music awards, Jennifer Lawrence (via video, as she’s  still here in NC filming), introduced the first teaser trailer for the new Hunger Games film due out in March. The clip is the very epitome of brief, just a few shots of Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss walking through the woods, some footage which is obviously the fire scene from chapter 13, spliced in with a neat shot of Lawrence shooting the silver bow (taken from later in the film, as she does not acquire the bow until chapter 14 (the center chapter in the novel, incidentally) and the arrow landing in the mockingjay symbol, which then catches on fire. There is a little bit of voice over from Liam  Hemsworth as  Gale with some of the post-Reaping pep talk, and the music is the same as that used by Scholastic in their book trailers.

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Filed Under: Elizabeth Baird Hardy, Hunger Games Tagged With:

Publishing Gamemakers Desperate to Conjure up Another Rowling

August 26, 2011 by 11 Comments

A recent Wall Street Journal article profiles newcomer author Erin Morgenstern, whose debut novel The Night Circus is due out next month. The article posits the question of how far publishers are willing to go to find something to replace the Harry Potter cash train they have been riding . Yet, in profiling Morgenstern, the WSJ (inadvertently, perhaps) reveals much about the way the machinery of the publishing industry resembles the Gamemakers of The Hunger Games, but without ever really noticing that the most popular books, like Hunger Games and Twilight are those which are not so much Harry copy-cats as those which draw on the “bag of tricks” used so adroitly by Rowling. Follow me after the jump for more observations on these paradoxes and more.
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Filed Under: Elizabeth Baird Hardy, Hog Pro Notes, Hunger Games Tagged With: ,