Hogwarts Professor

My friend in Hollywood tells me it’s not a trip to Disney World she’s after…

Yes, I know I have a no-comment no-posting policy on the copyright case pending. No, I haven’t changed my mind regarding the indisputable fact that we won’t know what is going to happen until the trial is over and the case decided (even then, I doubt that we’ll know what happened and what it means; that will take several years). Speculation and fuming about whose right and wrong in the matter and “what is certainly going to happen” is at least as silly as our guesses last year pre-Deathly Hallows, nowhere near as much fun, and not at all edifying. Plus, I know one of the principals. HogPro is not going to be a place to vent and fume about anything other than reading Ms. Rowling’s books seriously.

So why do I bring this subject up here, besides it being the Headline you’ll be reading in newspapers and hearing about everywhere on Monday? Because it seems Warner Brothers has got another lawsuit brewing against a man who can prove he made the first Harry Potter movie, a movie, that is, with a lead character named Harry Potter, albeit not from a book by Ms. Rowling, way back in 1986! [Read more…]

I received this question in the HogPro mail today:

John, I have a question and couldn’t find where to send it to you, so please forgive this nonsequitur “comment”! My son’s literature teacher (another home school mom) has told her students that the philosopher’s stone is a corruption of the Eucharist, a counterfeit of the Body and Blood of Christ. Would you care to comment on that? I think implicit in her lecture was that any writing about the philosopher’s stone is somehow inherently blasphemous. I’d sure appreciate your thoughts on this! Dare I thank you in advance of them?!

My response: [Read more…]

Ms. Rowling received a “Lifetime Achievement Award” yesterday and her fifth ‘Nibbie’ at the Galaxy Book Awards last night. It was presented, if I read the story correctly, by no less a personage than the UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.

It’s hard to take this kind of celebrity event seriously (forgive me) but it was reassuring to see Ms. Rowling and Dr. Murray looked anything but at home on the red carpet. My favorite pictures in the GettyImage collection from the event were the ones of Ms. Rowling with Katie Price (Jordan), both mothers of three children and two of the richest women in the UK.

Would anyone like to supply “thought balloons” or captions for any of the Jordan/JKR photos? After a day with Dostoevsky, we could use a smile. Did Katie Price win a book prize and Achievement Award as well? I wonder if she’ll enter the contest Amazon.com is sponsoring for the opportunity to read Beedle the Bard…

As I have said here before, encountering Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov was a landmark event in my life as a reader and thinker. My mother gave it to me the Christmas of my junior year in High School. It was a Bantam paperback edition of Brothers translated by Andrew MacAndrew that she wrapped up with Anna Karenina and Ivanhoe, if my failing memory serves, in the hope that big books were what I wanted from Santa Claus. I worked that summer for my father at his auto body shop in Pennsylvania and started reading Brothers on the long drive to and from work each day.

Within a hundred pages, I was lost to the larger world and neglected my work as custodian and car-cleaner even more than usual to read every moment I could. As providence would have it, the novel assigned in my first semester as a senior that fall at Exeter was The Brothers Karamazov, the Garnett translation. I was able to read the whole novel again, discuss it with friends (and with a teacher who loved it), and write about it. [Read more…]

From a link at HogsHead Tavern: Q&A at University College Dublin

“About Pope Benedict complaining ? (laughter) Well. (more laughter) If it is the case, I’ll tell you what — see, you may know more than I do on this, I read that he had, when a cardinal I think, responded favourably to a woman who had written to him about the Harry Potter books being dangerous, but that’s as much as I know. If he has since said more than that I don’t know about it. Has he said more than that that I don’t know about ? I don’t know, you know, I was invited to a kind of symposium at the Vatican. It took a very circuitous route to get to me and I’m afraid to say it was to short a notice by the time I got the letter. So someone there is pretty open-minded about Harry Potter. I’ve always felt and I continue to feel that… Firstly, I’m vehemently anti-censorship. I think that it’s foolish and misguided to ban books. Secondly, I feel that… Now that the seventh book has been published I can say very openly, I think these are very moral books. They don’t promote a specifically Christian agenda, and I think that that, coupled with the fact that clearly they deal with folkloric mythical themes many people see as a cult, which I do not, but many do… but that has always antagonized a certain brand of Christians. And I’m fine with that (laughing). I am fine with that. I detest fundamentalism in any religion and that includes my own religion. As far as the Pope goes, I truthfully don’t know what his current opinion on Harry Potter is. So I can’t really ****.”

Your thoughts?