Substack HogwartsProfessor New Posts

June 8, 2023 by Leave a Comment

We’re at a little short of a month since I announced the opening of HogwartsProfessor on Substack and it’s been several weeks since I updated this site with links to articles there, pieces that are sent directly to our subscribers. Here is a quick review of how things work with a free subscription to our Substack posts and a survey of our first articles on that platform:

I write a longish piece on the artistry and meaning of stories (with a special focus on the work of Rowling-Galbraith) that is sent out every Thursday. On Monday, Nick Jeffery, Evan Willis, Elizabeth Baird-Hardy, and an occasional Guest Post writer share their thoughts and insights. We hope to be adding a podcast soon, which project of three years’ gestation, now that I’ve found a potential host and engineer, may at last be taking off.

Here are short summaries with links to articles you missed if you don’t have a subscription or follow our Twitter feed:

Traditional Symbols in Harry Potter and Cormoran Strike: A Perennialist View

The purpose of the move to Substack (for me at least!) was to get away from the grind of daily posting and the inevitable adulterization of prime content due to deadline pressure. Too many YouTube videos, discussions of Rowling’s twitter feeds, and fruitless-if-fun speculation about plot points in future books made by following the bread crumbs of Rowling, Inc’s marketing team. Not enough pieces about the power and meaning of story to enrich and transform lives via the imagination. This first post, one taken almost directly from my PhD thesis, was a marker of our change in direction at the new HogwartsProfessor and what makes us different and, yes, better than other sites for serious readers of Rowling and other writers.

Cormoran in Cornwall

Nick Jeffery explains why he thinks Strike will be returning to Cornwall, if not in Running Grave then soon after, and what this might mean in terms of the legendary story background Rowling-Galbraith has rolled into her Strike mysteries.

Literary Alchemy: Sacred Science, Sacred Art, and ‘The Alembic of Story’ (A Perennialist Explanation of J. K. Rowling’s Signature Hermetic Symbolism)

A fellow Potter Pundit last month wrote me to say that “No one living has made the contributions to Rowling Studies that you have” and I was chuffed, of course. When I am criticized by twitter-talents and third tier academics as a snob or non-entity, it is nice to have a note from someone who knows the score as a bit of reassurance. The contributions I think this writer was referring to are my exegesis of Rowling’s use of traditional symbolism, her psychomachia, the ring composition structure of her novels and Series, the Parallel Series Idea, her “bookshelf,” and Literary Alchemy. I get a lot of questions about the alchemy aspect of Rowling’s work, a subject that brilliant readers have been building on since I first discussed it in 2002’s Hidden Key to Harry Potter, so I decided to share another piece from my PhD thesis, this one on what Beatrice Groves calls “the alembic of story.”

Cyber Strike: AI Created Plot Synopsis for The Running Grave

I begged Nick Jeffery to write a piece on the use of artificial intelligence to predict the plot of Strike 7, and, gentleman-genius that he is, he obliged. Rowling twitter-teased her fan base to guess the next book’s subject matter as part of The Running Grave marketing roll-out, an effort more intense and more involved with each book as first week sales for the last several novels continue to fall. Nick’s piece is simultaneously a fascinating look at Strike7 possibilities and a fairly persuasive argument that AI technology will not be displacing serious readers anytime soon.

A Math Teacher Looks at the Heart of Geometry

Evan Willis’ first contribution to HogwartsProfessor on Substack went up this morning. On the surface it has nothing to do with Harry Potter, Cormoran Strike, or even The Christmas Pig, subjects about which Evan has broken significant ground in the past. He writes instead about the ‘Heart’ or ‘Intellect,’ the so-called “cardiac intelligence” as opposed to the discursive “cranial” kind, that Coleridge called the Primary Imagination, the human faculty continuous with the Logos fabric of reality. Traditionally, the study of Geometry was considered the Golden Road to fostering this noetic faculty and I have never read a better explanation of why than Evan’s in this piece. (I also have never regretted so much not having had a math teacher like Evan in my elementary and secondary school years.)

Next week, Elizabeth Baird-Hardy will be writing about the new Hunger Games movie and I will return to posting on Thursday with, well, that will be a surprise. See you on the Substack!

 

Filed Under: Substack Post

Substack HogwartsProfessor First Post: First Principles and First Menu

May 20, 2023 by 2 Comments

The last HogwartsProfessor.com weblog post, #2900, announced our move after twenty years here to Substack, the long-form writing subscription platform. Beginning today and for the immediate future, the opening paragraphs of Substack HogwartsProfessor posts will be available here a few days after they are sent to subscribers so readers who may have missed Monday’s announcement learn about the change. To read the whole post, subscribe — it’s free! — or just click here.

Welcome to HogwartsProfessor at its new home on Substack! Thank you for subscribing, and, in advance, for letting me know what you think. All suggestions about how best to utilize this platform are welcome, believe me, as I begin to climb the upside-down learning curve of a new dashboard and posting system.

Today, I want to offer a frank statement, one I will try to keep brief, of my first principles and perspective as a reader who writes about the artistry and meaning of beloved prose, poetry, and plays and a short prospectus of the subjects I will be writing about in our first months on this new platform. I rush to add that these are my guiding ideas and post menu, not necessarily those of the other writers who contribute pieces here.

In a nutshell, I believe that human beings are a story-telling species more than ‘rational animals’ and that the best stories and art create a portal to an imaginative or noetic experience of archetypal reality. The keys to grasping the depths of the work created by writers who intentionally embrace the goal of crafting this kind of fiction are the symbols, allegory, and structure beneath the narrative surface that deliver this iconological means of ego-transcendence. The bumper-sticker version of that is: “the stories that matter are the ones that best reflect the soul’s journey to spiritual perfection and encourage us on our journeys.”

This set of first principles reflects the Perennialist understanding of sacred art, which includes “non-liturgical” or “not-obviously religious” stories. The Perennialist understanding of myth and epic, of Shakespeare, Coleridge and Blake, as well as contemporary writers informs everything I write that qualifies as literary criticism. It’s traditional, which is to say “theocentric” view is in direct opposition to postmodern understanding, which reads literature and understands all art in profane terms, most notably using aesthetic, political, and intertextual measures. 

I promised to be brief on this count, so I will not go into a prolonged explanation or apologia for these first principles. I am obliged to note, though, that my use of them is the reason that I have consistently been able to see and explain the depths and power of writers, most notably J. K. Rowling, when the host of Critique authorities and academic specialists have missed it. Literary alchemy, traditional symbolism, the debts of Rowling (Collins, Meyer, others) to the Greats, maternal love as cipher for Christ, and chiastic or ring writing and the utility of the above in anagogical depictions of the soul’s faculties in trial, so-called ‘psychomachia,’ were all blind spots in contemporary criticism, frankly, before my Perennialist reading of Rowling.

[If Perennialist ideas of non-liturgical sacred art and their relevance to understanding fiction are terra incognita to you, I explain them at much greater length in this post about Rowling’s The Christmas Pig.]

As I start out here on Substack, I have a few ideas about what I will be exploring and explaining. This is my first menu of post topics about which I hope you will share your preferences as subscribers and the subjects or questions you want me to address. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Substack Post

Weblog HogwartsProfessor is Dead; Long Live Substack HogwartsProfessor

May 15, 2023 by 3 Comments

This is post number 2900 at HogwartsProfessor.com and it is a milestone akin to 29’s association with the planet Saturn, whose revolution around the sun takes that many years and the return of which to the position in one’s natal horoscope signals a Big Change or transformation. A Saturnine end or death — and a new beginning.

I started HogwartsProfessor twenty years ago as a bulletin board website on which I posted outlandishly long posts even for the time. With the help and guidance of Travis Prinzi, who created this WordPress site and the first headers for it, as well as paying server costs for years of its existence, it became a Go-To site for Harry Potter fandom’s serious readers. Elizabeth Baird Hardy was the first to join the faculty fellowship as a contributor and has served as Deputy Headmistress for fifteen years. Louise Freeman Davis joined ten years ago, Evan Willis not long after, and Nick Jeffery last year.

The site has morphed intentionally in the last three years from a long-post page on which new pieces appeared only as frequently as the faculty were moved to write them (or Guest Post contributors shared their writing with us) into almost a ‘Daily Newspaper’ or at least that paper’s editorial page. Our longest streak of consecutive daily posts stretched for more than nine months, which was quite the drain on our time and talents in addition to the costs to my treasury in maintaining the site.

And, sadly, this commitment to posting daily meant more YouTube videos and twitter exegesis and far fewer long posts and deep dives into the artistry and meaning of Rowling’s writing, not to mention of contemporary writing and films not-by-Rowling. Maintaining an audience by frequent new articles — and by ‘frequent’ I mean ‘Every Doggone Day’ — in addition to eating up the time necessary to re-read, think seriously about, and then compose the in-depth pieces also left less mental energy to take on new projects.

Fortunately, a new venue has appeared, an alternative to WordPress weblogs, which allows a writer to create and maintain an audience via email rather than frequent posting. That ‘other way’ is Substack, a subscription platform for long-form writing. With this post, HogwartsProfessor begins what will be at least a month long transition from a WordPress weblog to a subscription only Substack site, at which the once-a-week posts I write will appear in your inbox for free on Thursdays and once-a-month posts by Evan, Elizabeth, Nick, and a Guest every Monday.

As far as my posts go, I am very excited about returning to what I do best, namely, deep dives into the artistry and meaning of Rowling’s work (as well as that of other contemporary and traditional writers) with a special focus on the allegorical, anagogical, and alchemical content, the symbolism, structure, and story scaffolding of poems, plays, and longer prose. I have used these ideas in the past to speculate about what Rowling’s next books would include, a fun way to illustrate the tools in this writer’s kit, but an exercise that sadly (pathetically?) has become an end in itself. Freed from the self-imposed burden of daily posting, I look forward to exploring and explaining in depth the books we have in hand.

As a former colleague recently wrote to me, “You have done more for Rowling studies than anyone alive” (her emphasis). I’m confident she was referring to my work with traditional symbolism, literary alchemy, ring composition, psychomachia, intertextuality or literary allusion, and the peculiar parallel series in progress between the Strike and Potter novels, all of that being ground-breaking, original work on which other critical readers have built more and less successfully. I’m certain, though, she was not referencing my notes about The Presence’s tweets or the guesswork I have done or can do about what will happen in Running Grave by searching Deathly Hallows and Cuckoo’s Calling for clues lost in the crevices.

So — beginning Thursday, a new HogwartsProfessor! Thank you for twenty years of reading the posts at this WordPress weblog, and, in advance, for joining me and the fellowship of writers dedicated to bringing you the best and most original insights at our new Substack platform about the more profound craft and meaning of imaginative fiction and the literary arts.

 

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes

Beasts2 — and Phantom of the Opera?

May 8, 2023 by 4 Comments

A thought from Randall:

Just re-watched the 2004 Warner Brothers film version of “The Phantom of the Opera” and was struck by (anti-)parallels to the 2018 Warner Brothers film, “Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald.”

In “Phantom,” Erik is a deformed boy imprisoned in a freak show in Paris. A young girl (the future Madame Giry) feels pity for him, so when he strangles his handler/jailer, she helps him escape into a crowd. Erik becomes the Phantom, living underground in the dark, and continues to kill.

In “Crimes,” Nagini is a blood-cursed girl imprisoned in the Circus Arcanus, in Paris. A young man (Aurelius Dumbledore) feels pity for her, so when she attacks her handler/jailer (Skender), he helps her escape into a crowd. Nagini eventually becomes permanently trapped in snake form, serving Lord Voldemort, living concealed in mostly dark places, and continues to kill.

Maybe we will see more (anti-)parallels, if and when J.K. Rowling publishes more of the “Fantastic Beasts” story. Maybe others have noticed these (anti-)parallels; I did a search but did not find any mentions of them.

This reminds me of the reader who wrote that the Gloria Conti “termination” of mobster Luca Ricci’s child was a simple re-telling of the Godfather, Part II, plot in which Katherine “Kay” Corleone (née Adams) aborts the child of her husband, Michael Corleone. Rowling-Galbraith’s character enjoys a much happier fate than Kay. I cannot find the email or post comment in which the reader shared this; apologies all around on that point.

I wonder if Potter Pundits and Serious Strikers, in our common denominator text-source focus are not overlooking the influence of much more popular culture, blockbuster movies, on Rowling’s imagination. I know it’s something I never choose to explore, largely because I know very little about movies (I have not seen either Phantom of the Opera or any of the Godfather films) and I am not a fan of the medium.

The thing is, Rowling drops repeated references to the Godfather movies and their influence on Gloria Conti in Troubled Blood, to include that character’s resistance to seeing Part II. If these had been book teases, I would have definitely been reading them because of the strong indicators that these references were bread crumbs dropped by the author as helpful clues.

A movie? It never occurred to me to watch the Godfather films or even read about them on Wikipedia.

Thank you, Randall, for throwing light in my most glaring media blind-spot!

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Teevee Harry Potter Trailer Released

May 2, 2023 by

I found this new trailer near the end of another article in the UK press celebrating Rowling’s new ten year contact with MAX television for adaptations of the Hogwarts Saga. The first was The Telegraph‘s ‘The uncancelling of JK Rowling: Tide appears to be turning for the Harry Potter author ostracised for her trans views.’ That 15 April piece was followed yesterday by a Daily Mail article along much the same lines: ‘Cancelled? Thanks to her new £16m Harry Potter TV deal, it’s JK Rowling who’s having the last laugh over trans activists.’

Imagine the conversations at MuggleNet and Leaky Cauldron about what to allow on their Harry Potter fan sites. Each has posted declarations, libelous statements in fact, that Rowling proclaims “harmful and disproven beliefs about what it means to be a transgender person,” i.e., maintaining that biological sex is real, and “commitments” that their sites will not print her image, include links to purchase items from which she might profit, or allow discussion of her post Potter work and “life.” See here and here if you have your doubts about those “commitments.”

For Leaky, which hasn’t posted any Harry Potter news since last October, this wasn’t much of a stretch or sacrifice; the website is largely dormant. For MuggleNet, answerable as they are to their Media Labs owners for generating clicks and traffic, this has been a bit more difficult. [Read more…]

Filed Under: HBO+ TV Adaptation, Hog Pro Notes