The Latest--and Last --Harry Potter...

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I work in a small, independent book store and the promotional materials for the final Harry Potter book are flowing through the door like seepage from an undrained swamp. In an attempt to drive our customers to Wal-Mart or Amazon (Sorry, Tal; I know they support this board.) we can ask them such questions as:

1): Who will live and who will die? An easy one: J.K. Rowling, if she kills Harry.

2): Will Hogwarts close? No, but it will move to Jesusville, Texas, where it will be firebombed to oblivion. Filch escapes and becomes a faith-healer.

3): Relationships. Who will end up with whom? Another easy one. Lord Voldemort marries Mrs. Weasley after murdering Arthur. Everyone else dies.

I'll post the other Burning Questions as they come in--supposedly there are seven.

I do admire J.K. Rowling for her valiant attempt to maintain her equilibrium admidst the PR madness. Perhaps years of poverty armored her, or maybe she just has a built-in bull**** detector.

 

Good old Barry Trotter! Can't wait for this actually, seems a long while since the last book. I'll be a bit gutted though when the series ends.

 

last movie I saw had a dragon in it

hope it finshishes well though, I'd like to know how it all ends.

 

I recently came across Harold Bloom's take on Potter. Interesting, and helped me clarify for myself why the series never did anything for me.

 

I have not read any of the Potter books, but Bloom's remarks are not surprising, given his very "conservative" approach to literary studies. After reading his opus "The Western Canon," which is his personal overview of Western Literature, I came away with a reduced opinion of Bloom's approach to literature.

 

Oooh, crazy speculation:

1) Ron dies and saves Harry.

2) Nay, Hogwarts is like one of the characters, Rowling can't just leave it.

3) After Ron dies, Ginny doesn't want to be with Harry anymore and Harry falls in love with Hermione.

@AMaster, you don't *seriously* believe what that guy's saying?

 

Oops. This is the Bloom article I meant to link to.

Do I *seriously* believe him? No, probably not. But he's fascinating to read. Rather like the folks from www.inchoatus.com, actually.

 

gods, what an insufferable a$$ he is (bloom)
luckily he's old and will die soon

 

She is a below average writer, but that doesn't mean I don't enjoy the books...

[ June 15, 2007, 07:00: Message edited by: ChickenIsGood ]

 

Yikes! "Crappy writer", Harold Bloom. It's enough to drive a man to reading bad poetry. I did read both of the Bloom articles that A Master linked, and, predictably, pretty much disagreed with them.

I do sympathize with Bloom's anguish over the deplorable state of what are now referred to as the Humanities. I anguish over it too. It's on the specifics that we part company.

I haven't read many of the authors he names; I've always preferred "genre" novels to "bestseller" fiction or "serious" literature. (Perhaps this ruthless categorization is part of the problem; maybe there are just "books".) I did try Saul Bellow twice--the critics said he was so good--and thought him unreadable, also twice. I was put off by Arthur Miller's smug liberalism, although I'm a liberal myself. I believe any Philip K. Dick novel would be a more rewarding experience.

Or even--horrors!--J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books. I don't know how many times Rowling wrote "stretched their legs" in "Sorcerer's Stone"; the expression apparently didn't stick in my mind as it did in Prof. Bloom's; actually, I wasn't aware that it had occurred at all. Perhaps I was paying too much attention to the story.

For one of Rawling's strength's is her intricacy as a plotter, how events dovetail from one book to the next. Another is her sympathetic understanding of teen-age behavior, which seems pretty accurate to me. Yet another is her ability to make her story move. The novels, both individually and as a series, have great momentum. She is able to make you care about her characters; they are believable, perhaps in part because they so often do not do the "right" thing. Like her great model, Dickens, she can create a comic monster, Dolores Umbridge, in "Order of the Phoenix".

Is she a great, or even a good, writer. Time will answer that question. I will say that I don't feel over-burdened with cliche when I read her books.

 

Now see, this is funny to me. Simply because my only exposure to Miller has been via a feminist essay taking him to task for what, it was claimed (convincingly, IMO), was rampant misogyny is his work.

As for Rowling, well, I've nothing to say about her, as I merely read the first book, found it pedestrian, and never touched the rest of the series.

EDIT: damn it, I was thinking of Norman Mailer, not Arthur Miller. Grumble.

[ June 14, 2007, 22:06: Message edited by: AMaster ]

 

You know, I really wanted to hate the Potter books. Really really wanted to hate them. Everyone else loved them, it's all you heard about for a time, and I thought surely too many people love this series for it to actually be any good. I didn't pick up the first one until the second was already out, and only out of sheer boredom... I can't describe or pinpoint what it is about these books that I love so much (now), but I do love them. Believe me, I have been known to correct grammar and sentence structure in books, or start counting if an author overuses a word or sentence, or... any number of picky things; I'm a picky reader! However, these books really resonated with me and I'm so thrilled at how beautifully they've grown over the years.

 

Hating the Harry Potter series because it's popular is something I see a lot of people fall into. Sure - popular things can be overrated pieces of **** (e.g. The DaVinci Code) - but that hardly necessitated that everything that gains a mainstream following sucks. Both sides - those that will only read something that's popular and those who won't read anything that's popular - well, there are a multitude of things I could say here. I'll leave you to fill it in

Incidently, I have just finished The Deathy Hallows and am extremely satisfied. The flow of Rowling's writing style is brilliant. I couldn't comment on how sophisticated it is simply because due to the way she writes I barely notice the technicalities. In this way she's somewhat like Robin Hobb (though Hobb is probably the better writer overall ... but that's not really relevant).

Pretentious wankers like Harold Bloom can - frankly - stick their great works of literature up their arses. Sure - I like great works of literature. Some of them are wonderful (some of them are horrible too, and some of them are so near to wonderful, except that the author tried to make them more pretentious and wanky than they ever needed to be). That does not diminish the value of Harry Potter and stories like it that are excellent in an entirely different way.

 

Amaster: While I didn't touch a Potter book (doesn't interest me), I tend to agree to Mr. Bloom's opinion about Stephen King. The man is an awfully bad writer. If the Potter books are like King's, I will not ever read one of Rowling's.

But Bloom isn't above doubt. His praise of Philip Roth is to high. I read "The Plot Against America", and was quite underwhelmed.

 

Stephen King reminds me of a can of paint. (Just bear with me, I'm going somewhere). You take a base colour and add a little blue and a little red to get, say, lavender... if you add just a little more blue you'll end up with a darker lavender. To get a completely different colour you've got to add a different mixture of stains to the base.
Poor ole Stephen King just keeps adding a little more blue, looks at the resultant lavender (in a slightly darker shade!) and shouts "Eureka! I've done it again!"
I have to admit that I love "The Eyes of the Dragon," though it's obviously the one time where he dabbled in a different colour.

 

It's easy to be scornful of Bloom but difficult to disprove him. He, of course, shields himself by referring to his detactors, as the "School of Resentment." If that is not loading the argument, I'm not sure what is. But his disdain for PCism in American universities and colleges really struck a unique cord with me. Because, as Bloom points out, there is a real "resentment" by that particular school towards those "dead, European, white male writers."

I share Bloom's admiration for Shakespeare, and was taken aback in a discussion with a former literary prof who fit all of Bloom's stereotypical traits - a Marxist, gay, feminist, young woman, just starting her career as a college prof, who commented to me in private, that Shakespeare was indeed the most overrated writer of our age, and that it was a conspiracy by the "Ango-male" heirarchy of acedemics, such as Bloom, who found it in their own interests to defend a very mediocre, Euro-centirc writer such as Shakespeare. Needless to say, I was horrified by her remarks.

Yet, they are two sides of the same coin, pushing personal agendas to the exclusion of anything outside their own literary "heirarchies," and not allowing for literature to be more "democratic," for lack of a better term. Both sides seek to keep "literature" rarefied, exclusive and academic, rather than popular. In my opinion, Tolkien has been the worst victim of this type of irrational "literary snobbery" by both the PC and "conservative" schools of Literary Studies.

[ July 27, 2007, 01:18: Message edited by: Chandos the Red ]

 

I think it's been stated or implied several times by people in this thread: books are just books, and criteria for 'good books' vs. 'bad books' vary from person to person.

Some people like J.K. Rowling's creations, some people don't. Their reasons for doing so are perfectly valid...for THEM.

Really statements like "I despise the harry potter books because they're populist trash" or "I like harry potter books because they're printed in the Lucidia font" (or whatever it is in the Scholastic printings ) are fully valid - it's when people start implying that either a) other people should/shouldn't read books because of the opiner's reasons, or - worse yet - b) people who read a certain author or genre of book are inferior (or even superior) to the rest of the reading populace that I start to lose respect for the pundit.

Bloom has - in my eyes - characterized himself as a closed-minded, eliteist, ivory-tower snob of a academic who (probably due to a lifetime of delving into the inner workings of writing) can no longer just enjoy a story as a story...

...anymore than a master mechanic can enjoy the bodywork/paint job of a car, if he hears a false note in the melody of the engine, resulting in him heaping scorn on whoever set the timing.

Back to the point - I have written a fair bit of narrative fiction as a hobby so I *did* begin to find...not so much 'faults' in the first Harry Potter books, so much as 'stylistic quirks'. But either I haven't fallen so deep into the Wordsmith Pit or the quirks weren't big enough that my enjoyment of the MESSAGE - the story in these books was dampened.

I have enjoyed the tales of Hogwarts, and even though I have yet to read ...& the Half-Blood Prince (didn't get a free time when the furor died down, so I'll catch up with that book once the interest in the latest book settles ) I'm confident that I'll enjoy these last two books.


(And since I have a compulsion to finish any serious post with a joke; I'll leak my favourite 'fake spoiler': Harry, Lord V, Ron, Hermione, Snape, Malfoy & all the rest turn out to be fragmentary personalities within the mind of an institutionalized woman who's trying to resolve all the conflict they spawn in the hopes of her core self regaining stability. )

 

I honestly prefer this fake spoiler: Rowling does a Dallas, and it all turns out to be a dream. Harry shot JR!

 

Harry is Darth Vader's father.