Comments on Shell Cottage: Madeleine L'Engle, the author of A Wrinkle in Time...

One thing is for sure, britannia, you aren't Chris...

2008-04-01T21:35:00.000-04:00

One thing is for sure, britannia, you aren't Christopher Hitchens.

What a silly fangirl post! Only a Yank would take ...

2008-04-01T19:49:00.000-04:00

What a silly fangirl post! Only a Yank would take such an Edisonian view of the word "invention". Such ignorance. An invention is a fiction. And "invention" is spiritual every May 3rd.

Adelman is a fascist SOB. And so were TS Eliot and Ezra Pound. Ha! And you had to quote Pound from before World War One. What exactly did he write worth quoting in the Cantos? Drivel and logorrhea.

Wonderful essay!Another writer who has some fascin...

2008-02-29T08:02:00.000-05:00

Wonderful essay!

Another writer who has some fascinating self-reflective thoughts on writing, the subconscious and the 'undiscovered country' is Ursula Le Guin in her "Dancing at the Edge of the World", "The Language of the Night" and "Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Mariner and the Mutinous Crew (great title!). I couldn't recommend them more.

One minor quibble: Stanford is a private school and not part of the University of California system. Also, it's geographically 'down the road' from Berkeley:)

-- Marianne

Can I call you "Rattle" for short? ;-)Rattle writ...

2008-02-22T18:14:00.000-05:00

Can I call you "Rattle" for short? ;-)

Rattle writes: "I don't think the "official" encyclopedia will have the effect she thinks on readers. It will not answer "all" the questions, because so many readers disagree with her analysis anyway."

I took a few graduate-level courses at Georgetown Univ. on Shakespeare several years ago. The prof was excellent and I enjoyed the classes tremendously. The first course I took was just on Hamlet - the entire course, if you can imagine. The prof had one rule and one rule only when you took his course. In his class or in a paper you were never - and I mean never - permitted to utter the word:

Shakespeare.

I kid you not. If were to utter that name we'd be quickly shown the door. The prof, who actually taught most of the time on contemporary international relations for future foreign service officers and others was quite a forceful fellow. He had also been a former arms negotiator with the Soviets and had been nicknamed "Reagan's Missile Man." He was a pip. He knew how to argue and to make a case and leave you writhing on the floor. So no, no one uttered the name "Shakespeare" in his class.

For example, you would be shown the door forthwith if you made a statement like this in answer to a question, "I believe that Shakespeare was attempting to discover the meaning of reality and illusion when Hamlet talked to his father's ghost."

You might as well pack up and say goodbye.

That was irrelevant to the prof because his view was, Shakespeare's dead, we can't check him, and the point is what matters is the work.

So we were forced to stick to the text and make our cases according to the text. If we couldn't make the case from the text, we might as well hang it up for the day.

I can remember the first time I got up enough courage to take him on with one of his own text points - he was a big apologist for Claudius, Hamlet's uncle who married his mother after his father dies. I made my point using references - several references from the text and answered an inquiry using another reference from the text. I still remember the nod!

The discipline taught me a lot about a great deal of things. But one thing it made me appreciate as a writer and concerning great literature is that the text has to be able to stand on its own. I am as fascinated as anyone to learn more about the authors, but the author's own story should not be necessary to know or even their own opinions in appreciating the work.

A case in point is Ezra Pound - who made some extremely unfortunate and frankly tragic political personal decisions. But his work stands - and must stand - on its own. There are those who will not read Ezra Pound's poetry because of his political stupidity (he was finally deemed insane, at least for a while) - but even T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost defended him as a poet even though they did not share his views and in fact would deplore them. The poems stand on their own as did his art. He was a genius.

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Ezra Pound 1913

Of course, the poem has new meaning if you've read Harry Potter. ;-)

bb

From Rattlesnakeroot:I really enjoyed your essay, ...

2008-02-20T03:14:00.000-05:00

From Rattlesnakeroot:

I really enjoyed your essay, ZoeRose, and linked to it on my Livejournal. Thanks you for a very thoughtful read! You also inspired me to write my own thoughts on this topic of trademarking words. That is not the way the English language has grown in the past 500 years, and I hope it is not the wave of the future. It is too restrictive to scholarship and I just don't see a judge agreeing to all the demands of the WB.

Dictionaries and Encyclopedias are not illegal, no matter how "uncreative" they may seem to be.

As far as JKR's subconscious - I think she is right and her books came from there. Her books are masterpieces of the collective unconscious, mythology, religion, and every book she ever read. I've spent hours analyzing them that way, and been amazed at the richness there.

Unfortunately for serious readers, her subconscious does not give interviews.

She is much too flippant and self-conscious in her sound bites when someone puts a microphone in front of her. She is always editing the books while she talks, and it's unnerving when fans think they understand something and she explains it differently.

For instance, she tried to explain that the crying baby who appears with Harry in King's Cross is Voldemort's wounded soul, and that's why Voldie passed out in the forest at the same time as Harry during their duel.

However, I think she forgot that Voldemort still had a horcrux in the snake, so his soul shouldn't have gone anywhere at that point, expecially to King's Cross/purgatory. *headache*

Many fans thought the wounded baby was the horcrux soul from Harry's own scar. I thought that, but JKR said that was wrong. So where did that part of him go, since we are speaking metaphysically anyway? No one knows where it went. It's all unnecessarily complicated now because she told us too much.

As far as the trademark on the word "horcrux" - well, I wish her luck. That word has been used and abused every way possible already on Livejournal, DeviantArt, and every forum in the Potterverse. It's out there now, and if someone wants to use it, how can WB possibly defend a copyright on a popular word? It's a linguistic nightmare.

I don't think the "official" encyclopedia will have the effect she thinks on readers. It will not answer "all" the questions, because so many readers disagree with her analysis anyway. All the added stuff won't change a word that is printed on the page in the canon, anymore than all her interviews do. To me, it's just fluff.

~rattlesnakeroot

I think the quote I posted above takes some of the...

2008-02-19T17:45:00.000-05:00

I think the quote I posted above takes some of the wind out of your article's sails. In addition to which I cannot conceive that Bob Dylan would allow anyone to record covers of his songs for free!!!

I do not think that Mr Van Der Arks publisher has any hope of winning this specific case, regardless of his esteemed legal colleagues free help.

That said I agree with you that if WB are trying to restrict free speech by some devious legalistic means then any such move must be fought all of the way.

JKR addresses the issue of who writes the books in...

2008-02-19T12:31:00.000-05:00

JKR addresses the issue of who writes the books in this interview translated from the Spanish:

http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/2008/2/9/jkr-discusses-dursley-family-religion-us-presidential-election-and-more-in-new-interview

"...There’s nothing more gratifying than to listen to people saying that entire families read the books together. I’ve heard that a lot. They read one chapter together and then they gathered again to read the next one. Is unbelievable isn’t? A lot of families told me they did that and is gratifying in so many levels. The books have become a social act.

Q: Have you done that with Jessica? Are you going to do it with the rest of your children?

A: Jessica is fourteen and she is a fervent admirer of Harry.

Q: What did she tell you after she read the books?

A: She asked me why I did this thing or another, and I my answer was that that’s the way it had to be. Yes, sometimes you can give an automatic answer, like some things were made up as literary mechanisms, elements that helped the plot. In other cases, is harder to explain the process of writing. I wrote it because it came up that way. Sometimes I wrote as if something or somebody was saying it to me.

Q: Could you describe what that something was?

A: There are so many answers to that question. I could say: “It was me, it was my subconscious.” Yes, it was my subconscious, so what I’ve written comes from everything that I’ve done and all the people I’ve known because everything and everyone are somewhere in my head. Or I could say it was the muse, and I like to think it was the muse, because that means the writer is not aware of the origin of what they’re writing, or at least is not fully aware of it, and I know it’s a clichéd word about the Harry Potter books, but they’re magical.

Thank you so much, Linda! I've made the correctio...

2008-02-18T23:28:00.000-05:00

Thank you so much, Linda! I've made the correction - I changed it to "one of her early Fan Site Awards." You are absolutely right - I completely forgot about the Sirius Black site.

Thanks for posting - oh and Travis, I was inspired by your podcast. L'Engle is one my all-time favorite authors (my nine year old cat in fact is named after her) and I have an autographed book here by my computer that I keep nearby for inspiration. When you mentioned L'Engle and serving the work in your podcast I found the hook I was looking for to approach this most difficult subject. Thank you!

I really look forward to seeing your book and reading more about this topic - and L'Engle.

bb
ZoeRose

I concur. For a Dorothy L. Sayers fan, JKR seems ...

2008-02-18T23:26:00.000-05:00

I concur.

For a Dorothy L. Sayers fan, JKR seems not to have read or taken in, at any rate, "Why Work?" (an essay in Letters to a Post-Christian World re-titled The Whimsical Christian). Or, if she has taken it in, perhaps she has been more take in by the corporate mentality with regard to trademarking conceptualizations.

Heaven help us is someone trademarks the O.E.D. entries, right? Which raises the question of whether or not a dictionary could entry a notable term from the series which enters popular parlance and usage? Given the current battle over the concept, language itself may be horcruxed!

I have one correction to make. The HP Lexicon was ...

2008-02-18T23:22:00.000-05:00

I have one correction to make. The HP Lexicon was not the first Fansite Award. He did receive one, but he was not the first website to have that honor.

The first recipient was Immeritus which is a Sirius Black Fansite. It was JKR's attempt to apologize to fans of Sirius for killing him off and her website was launched after the publication of OotP and before HBP.

All you have to do is remove the word "first" and you'll be fine.

Linda

Very well said. I invoked L'Engle's concept of au...

2008-02-18T22:22:00.000-05:00

Very well said. I invoked L'Engle's concept of author as servant of story in a recent podcast, and I'm working on it in depth for my book. I do think it's hugely important to this whole discussion.

If Rowling has more to say about her world, she needs to write more stories. Let the stories themselves do the talking, not an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias and analysis are the jobs of fans and scholars.