Apparating Out Of The Closet

We interrupt our regularly scheduled travel blogging to bring you a bit of Harry Potter commentary.

Unless you've been living underneath a rock, you've probably heard about JKR's recent pronouncement that Albus Dumbledore is gay.

Woo-hoo! you might think. One step forward for kid-lit inclusiveness!

But look at how she handled it.

At the now infamous Carnegie Hall conference, JKR was asked if Dumbledore had ever loved anyone.

Her response?

"Dumbledore is gay, actually."

See, that's the problem. The correct answer is "Yes. Grindelwald."

Making it a "actually, he's gay" means that even JKR, despite her attempt at inclusiveness or diversity or whatever, views being gay as unnatural or deviant or "not normal."

What kind of answer is "actually, he's gay?" The conditional "actually" plays as a negative; it denies the love she's trying to promote.

"Has Dumbledore ever loved anyone?"

"Actually, he's gay, so he can only have that gay kind of love."

Not to mention that sitting on this and then revealing it seems to me a bit chickensh***ed on her part. Sure, the lit theorists are saying. The clues are there in her description of Dumbledore and Grindelwald's chummy adolescent relationship! I don't buy it. Maan and Firoz are a pair of discreetly-written lovers; Albus and Gellert are not.

Legions of fans were begging for a GLBTQ character (just like other fans were begging for a non-Christian character), arguing that in a school that large, non-inclusion would be a deliberate omission. So JKR gives us Dumbledore, after the fact. Not actually in the seventh book, when it really would have been a step forward for literary inclusiveness.

(And what did she have to lose, anyway? Everyone would have found out after they bought Book Seven; neither she nor her publisher would have lost revenue if people were upset with her choice.)

Anyway. On a more positive note, someone stands to make a lot of money off of a lavender "Dumbledore's Army" t-shirt. If I knew how to produce and sell them, it would be me.

Friends (TINY, NON-PLOT-HINGING HP SPOILER ALERT)

The following contains an itty-bitty HP spoiler which has very little to do with the plot or circumstances of the book. Blogger's beta format doesn't let us do cuts, so I can't hide it behind a link or anything like that. I'll skip some space before we begin.


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There. (It's a guy in a hat with a really long, skinny nose. ^__^)


So at one point in Deathly Hallows we are given a description of Luna's bedroom. (Get your mind out of that gutter!) We learn that Luna has drawn large pictures of Harry, Ron, Hermione, Neville, and Ginny, and has written on each picture the word "friends," in gold lettering.

I suddenly remembered that when I was that age (okay, a year older; I had just started undergrad) I had done something remarkably similar. Although it was my friends' names I had written in gold.


(The names are blurred, obviously.)

I've always felt a particular kinship with Luna. ^__^

Harry Potter Week: Cosplay!

I know, I promised you a hilarious story... but it's probably one of Murphy's Laws of Blogging that whenever one promises one's readers a particular post, it (for whatever reason) doesn't get written.

Instead I will give you my Harry Potter cosplay, right before I dash off to my Harry Potter party.

I'm going as Young Trelawney. From the "first prophecy" years. When she was hot.


How do you like them tea leaves?

(Editor's Note: The "tea leaves" are actually Madhur Jaffrey's Spinach with Ginger and Red Pepper. She also wants you to know that she realizes her blurred face looks creepy, and that one of these days she'll just give up and let you see it in all it's fantasticness.

She also realizes that she has now completely lost her scholarly credibility, due to slatternly costume and shabby apartment. But her hair looks amazing, doesn't it?)

Harry Potter Week: Remembering SS/PS

It was the morning I was scheduled to get my wisdom teeth out. I was depressed, not because I was going to get my teeth out -- that was something which could not be avoided and thus had to be dealth with -- but because I was sitting in the waiting room looking particularly ugly, and I knew it.

My mother had insisted I wear very old clothes, lest they, say, become blood- or spit-stained in the process, and I was at the height of teenager-dom when looking "unfashionable" was a humiliation far beyond the bounds of what should be endured. (I have had ten years to wear old clothes since then, and have gotten used to it.)

In the middle of the pile of magazines on the waiting room table was a Newsweek. Inside was a story about this new literary phenomenon: a story about a boy wizard, at a wizard school. There was an excerpt, which I read.

Well, it's cute, I thought. But... it's nothing special.

Harry Potter Week: Remembering COS

I don't have much of a story to tell about reading Chamber of Secrets. I read it during a sort of Harry Potter blitz, when I was trying to catch up with the books I had missed (having read Prisoner of Azkaban first).

But I do have a story to tell about watching the movie, and I do hope Daniel won't mind its telling. It's not about him anyway, but I'm sure he remembers the story. ^__^ This isn't, btw, the one I promised you. That one will come later tonight.

We all went to see the film together, all of us Honors-dorm nerds; not the whole dorm, of course, but the seven-odd of us who had formed our own little friendship and considered ourselves quite the nerdiest of them all. Most of them were already Harry Potter obsessed; I was not, not yet.

We had to drive forty miles out of our sleepy university town in order to get to the movie, and we spent the forty miles back in eager discussion of whether or not Ron Weasley would grow up with serious psychological problems because he spent his whole life as the shadow sidekick to the greatest wizard in the world. We quoted Dickens and noted that Ron was clearly not " the hero of his own life," and pondered what that meant for his future.

But the most memorable part of the evening was in the moment before the film began, when we were competing to see who knew the most answers to the movie trivia questions and mocking the syntactical errors of the advertisements for Coke and popcorn.

A trivia question came up about a movie I had seen in high school. Well... only half-seen.

"That movie was so boring that my boyfriend and I spent the whole thing making out in the movie theater," I said.

My friends were as shocked as if I had admitted to... oh, I don't know, fill in your own blank with the most scandalous thing you can think of.

"What -- you've never made out with someone in a movie theater?" I asked.

Faces began to redden.

"Well, you should," I continued blithely, "it's a lot of fun. Where did you go to make out, then, in high school? In the backseat of your car?"

There was a great deal of silence. All of the other young men in our company looked away, and suddenly I realized that I was perhaps the only member of our group that had gotten so far as first base.

Finally, the brashest member of the group spoke up.

"Well, let me be the first to say that I haven't yet kissed a girl, but I hope to while I'm in college."

And then, thank goodness, we all started laughing in simultaneous understanding and relief. And yes, I did offer to kiss them all, but was soundly refused.

And that is my Chamber of Secrets story. ^__^

White Girl Seeking Help: Questions about finances, communication, and electricity in Hyderabad

We're taking a temporary break from Harry Potter Week because I've got a few questions which I know y'all can answer for me.

And my thought is that if I ask them now, we'll all be less likely to have our noses buried in a book and won't mind the interruption. ^__^

I get on the plane for Hyderabad in 24 days. Wow. And, trying to get all of my ducks in a row, I have just a few more questions.

(BTW -- for those following the shoe story -- I bought another similar pair in black, so we should be all right. They're also much less comfortable than they appear. However, I refuse to perpetually wear beat-up sneakers with white sport sox. Eew.)

1. Finances. How do I handle my money? Would I be able to stick my Visa into an ATM and have rupees come out? Do I need travelers checks? How can I avoid having to carry around/protect four months' worth of money in cash?

2. Communication. Clearly the internet works much the same way in Hyderabad as it does in the rural midwest (although, from Manish's post today, I gather it works much less often, and in only short spurts). But what's the best way of making international phone calls? Getting a phone card and using the available landlines (in the university, in the hostel, etc.)? I'm pretty sure my cell phone won't work in India, since it barely works here -- do I need to buy one in Hyderabad, or can I manage easily enough without?

Also: is it possible to have my (snail) mail forwarded? Is it too much of a hassle? Would it be easier for me to ask my new roommate to Fed-Ex a month's worth of letters at a time? (I don't plan on getting a lot of mail, and the bills are direct debit.... but still.)

3. Electricity. Do I need to get one of those special plug adapter thingies? The only electrical appliance I'm planning to bring is my laptop, but it did occur to me that I might need some kind of adapter to go with it. Yes or no?

Y'all are fantastic. In thanks I'm going to post a (true) story so hilarious it will have whatever liquid you happen to be drinking at the time squirting out of your nose. It'll show up tomorrow, right before we all tuck in to read Mr. Potter.

Harry Potter Week: Remembering POA

Prisoner of Azkaban was the book that first hooked me on Harry Potter. I knew, of course, that there were these books going around, and I had seen the SS/PS movie, but it was kind of.... meh. Whatever. They were books for children.

But I was a sophomore living in the "honors dorm" filled with a bunch of truly dorky (and awfully clever) people, and so many of them were talking about these freaking Harry Potter books that I decided I might as well see why all these otherwise smart people were reading these things.

I settled myself in the university library, in the children's section, with one of the four copies of Prisoner of Azkaban available. (Even though there were only three of the seven books yet released, the Harry Potter books already took up an entire shelf of the library. Everyone seemed to want a copy.)

Before I continue I want to mention something wonderful about my university's library -- or, perhaps, their system of planning. The honors dorm, a lovely old building from 1912, was placed directly next to the university library. It was barely a few steps to go. I could do it barefoot. I *did* do it barefoot. The library was open all night, and I spent many wonderful late nights running from my little room to the giant expanse of books. Pure instant gratification.

Anyway. POA was a pageturner, and I read it cover-to-cover on a weekend afternoon. I still wasn't sure these things were "literature," or even if they were particularly well-written, but they were certainly well-plotted. I ran delightedly back to the honors dorm. Now I knew what these books were about, and I could join in the game.

Harry Potter Week: Remembering GOF

I've never actually read Goblet of Fire all the way through. I've tried. More than once.

The first time was soon after it was released, and I think it must have been Daniel's copy (though it may have been a library copy) and I turned the pages and ran smack into the Quiddich World Cup and my brain turned off, just like it does whenever I have to watch sports in television or in real life. (There are certain things my brain does very well. Others, it seems to refuse to do, rather like a stubborn toddler. I am perfectly aware of the rules of football, baseball, etc. but can find no way to connect them to the little dots running around on the screen, and with the lack of "language meaning," my brain gives up on the images.)

So... okay. Skip fifty pages. Jump back in and then try to remember who Mad-Eye Moody is and what he's doing there.

I've never made it through that section of the book. I tried again when I was babysitting the two dogs, substituting it for the copy of Order of the Phoenix that I wished I had. I fell asleep trying. It just didn't work.

And even the remainder of the book holds little interest for me; sure, Harry fighting a dragon should be fun, because I like to fight dragons myself -- but it's a lot more fascinating to do it than to read about it.

Ah, well. I suppose with seven books there can be one I won't bother to re-read. Or... um... ever fully read. ^__^

Harry Potter Week: Remembering OOTP

It was before we invaded Iraq, if you can believe that. I had chin-length hair which I clubbed back with bobby pins. I hadn't yet learned to drink.

I was in Saratoga Springs, NY, on scholarship to study with the SITI Company. It was our last day, and there was a party for the students. I was the second-youngest in the group, and that by a gap of nearly five years. I noticed that acutely. We were also, now that I think to remember, exclusively white except for the single Japanese instructor. I wouldn't have thought to notice that then.

But because I was so young, or because nobody else cared, I couldn't convince anyone to go into the city with me to get a copy of Order of the Phoenix. It would have been fun; but by midnight the crowd was pretty well drunk and enacting silly improvisations which involved people getting their clothing torn off by clothing-eating tigers. It was the usual theatre-people stuff. I went to bed.

I spent the summer, after that, housesitting for one professor while I was supposed to be doing a research project with another. But she had just become pregnant after a year of trying, and her plans had changed; she and her husband were spending the summer with her mother in preparation. We would communicate by email, she said, but we did not. I housesat for her house as well, walking the two miles back and forth between the two faculty homes and spending every third night sleeping in a different bedroom. Each house had a dog, but -- thankfully -- they were allowed to be kept together.

I put together the necessary research paper alone, not necessarily haphazardly but certainly without the hoped-for effort; I knew that nobody would bother reading it and it was now just a way to get a box ticked off before graduation. When I expressed my disappointment to a (third) faculty member, she suggested I try thinking outside of myself and told me that there was a summer student on campus, in a wheelchair, who needed to be transported to and from class.

And so every day I helped the student in the wheelchair and walked the two dogs (as well as the two miles between the faculty houses, and the miles to and from the university campus). I'm not sure it helped me think "outside of myself," but I certainly became very physically fit. I walked through the toes of my shoes, sewed them up with a 99-cent sewing kit, and kept walking.

Meanwhile I had gone online and found a detailed summary of OOTP, so I could play along when my friends (other honors students on campus for their research summer, albeit with a little more success) talked about the book. It was pretty easy. Finally I admitted to Daniel that I hadn't read it yet at all, and asked shyly if I could borrow his copy.

Earlier that summer a tornado had ripped through my hometown, leveling it in odd patches and destroying a good third of the homes; the weather continued throughout the summer and I found myself leading my friends, leading the dogs, leading the student in the wheelchair down into basements and waiting out storms and sirens. There were a lot of sirens and a lot of storms.

And what I remember most about that summer was that after I finished OOTP, I stopped having nightmares about tornadoes and started having dreams about Harry.

Harry Potter Week: Remembering HBP

I suppose I was twenty-three. I know I was waitressing; midnight every night, or later, at a restaurant whose most expensive dish was titled "Mako Shark Bites" and ran for $24.95. I ate store-brand granola bars hidden behind the side-work station. I was fetchingly thin, owing to circumstances rather than deliberation, and my feet hurt.

I was living with my parents, just for the summer, and was running a children's drama camp when I wasn't waitressing. I spent a week as a live-in babysitter for three unruly children while their parents were on vacation, and found that they had a habit of waking up in the middle of the night to make kitchen-destroying ice cream sundaes while the babysitter was asleep. They weren't my children, so I wasn't angry. We all had sundaes and went back to bed.

Because of the three jobs, and the money I had put aside from temping, I preordered Half-Blood Prince. Months in advance, knowing if I waited I could easily justify not doing it. But I had no friends in my hometown to loan me a copy -- truth be told I had no friends left in my hometown whatsoever, due to college and jobs and travel, and it was a welcome diversion to putter-Potter around on internet chat rooms.

And I wanted to know what happened next in the story.

I waitressed until midnight that night, and so forewent the release party at our only chain bookstore, twenty-five miles away. My copy was arriving the next morning at 10:30 a.m., courtesy of the United States Postal Service and Amazon-dot-com.

I went to bed in the same blue-flowered pajamas that I wear now; economy, as always, being the sole imperative.

What I remember most was the sense of giddy anticipation. It was like Christmas -- only better than Christmas, because I knew that the Santa Claus driving down the highway towards me was bringing me exactly what I wanted.

I fell asleep smiling.

Potter Puppet Pals: Mysterious Ticking Noise

This week is clearly going to be Harry Potter week at pretty blue salwar... and so let me present you with the little song that's been stuck in my head all day, as I anticipate the book's release. ^__^

I find this song particularly fitting because no one I know who is anticipating the book seems at all interested in the plot; they're only curious to find out "what happens" to our beloved characters.

And this song is all about the beloved characters.

These Are Only Predictions. NOT Spoilers.

Well, it's official. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has been leaked online. The entire text, from beginning to end. (And the poor kid who did it is soon going to be faced with one hell of a lawsuit from Scholastic.)

I'm not going to tell you how to get there. I found out through a blog post at Salon's The Machinist. Click there (no spoilers) if you want to know more.

Since we'll all know, perhaps a bit sooner, what will happen to Our Hero in the last volume of his story, I thought I would take the opportunity to lay out my predictions.

Mostly I just want to see how clever I am at guessing.

First off: the big one. What will happen to Harry?

Well... this is the deal. JKR has backed herself into a corner with this "will he live/will he die" thing. If she simply picks either "live" or "die," she's going to put off half of her fans.

My money's not on "die." As fun as it is to end a long-running series with the death of the hero (cough-cough-C.S. Lewis-cough-cough), I can't see that happening. Especially, as has been mentioned on other sites, because Warner Bros. is going to soon open a Harry Potter theme park. Killing off Harry won't exactly inspire kids to jump onto rides.

So my money's either on "live," or (my wicked suspicion) "disappear." That is to say, for whatever reason Harry's not going to turn up after that final battle with Voldy. But they won't find a body, either, and people will claim to catch glimpses of him now and again. He'll be like the wizarding Elvis.

She'll write it so it leaves enough hope for the fans in the "live" camp, and equally satisfies the people who think he should die.

Of course, coming so soon after the Sopranos finale, this will be seen as anticlimactic. But... can't be helped, I suppose.

I stand in the group of fans who hope that the last chapter will take place with the next generation of kidlets arriving at Hogwarts. Possibly in Diagon Alley or at Platform 9 3/4. Hermione and Ron will drop off their son (named Harry, of course), Tonks and Lupin will drop off their wolf-baby, and (as was predicted so beautifully on The Leaky Cauldron) Dudley will be reluctantly escorting his own wizard child.

JKR has stated that one of the main characters will end up teaching at Hogwarts, though it won't be "who we expect" (i.e. Hermione). Plenty of people have voted for Neville, but I'm beginning to wonder if he won't go down in some kind of blazing sacrifice or if he and Bellatrix won't manage to simulatneously off each other.

So my guess is it will be Ginny meeting the kids at the gate, in her role as "woman who devotes herself thoroughly to her work because she will never love again now that her One True Love From High School has disappeared."

Unless Harry lives, in which case my money's back on Neville. ^__^

As for the characters she is planning to kill... oh, I'm sure it will be the usual suspects. Hagrid, a Weasley or two, a professor or two, anyone in the Order who isn't Tonks/Lupin, and perhaps Luna (she has no future in the "real world," anyway). Obviously Snape will die. It would be interesting if she killed off Petunia. (Was Petunia a witch who "denied the call???")

As for "is Harry a Horcrux," I find myself rather uninterested either way. I've told people IRL that this will probably be the Final Fantasy of HP books -- that is, Harry and his group of friends will travel all over the world to find the lost orbs-I-mean-Horcruxes. And they'll have to fight mini-bosses, like Bellatrix and Snape, before Harry fights the final boss. So that structure in itself is less interesting to me than how JKR plays out the denouement.

But -- as long as they're traveling in search of these things -- I hope she included a trip to Fire World. ^__^

Harry Potter and the Blink-And-You'll-Miss-'Em Order of the Phoenix

OOTP is my favorite Harry Potter book. And, I have to shamefully admit, during my weekend in NYC I took S. on what turned out to be a nearly seven-hour trip to see the film. (We found a theatre but got lost on the subway and missed the showtime; then we found another theatre but it wasn't showing HP; then we found another theatre but it was closed for the day because the building had no water; then we finally caught a 10:40 p.m. showing in the heart of the city. S. remained a good sport throughout. I owe him BIG TIME and know it. ^__^)

I wasn't necessarily disappointed. I thought the imagery was fantastic. The effects were finally streamlined to the point where they looked "real" rather than like clunky digital animations (OMG FLIGHT OVER LONDON!!!). The editing, while not the wickedly clever work of Mr. Cuaron (as Blogical Conclusion notes), was charming.

But I was a bit perturbed by the truncation of the story -- and even more so, the truncation of the characters. For a film titled "Order of the Phoenix," the actual Order had a collective four minutes of screen time.

Let's take, for example, Nymphadora Tonks. In the text, she's a major player in the story -- in the film, she's given less than a minute of screen time and one line of dialogue. Warner Bros. spent months agonizing over whom to cast (and the online fangroups agonized along with them), and yet the role was so circumspect, anyone could have played it.

S., who has read some of the HP books but did not follow the series through OOTP, kept asking me "who's that?" each time a new character appeared onscreen. At first, I gave him a bit of detail; but as the film progressed it became very clear that it didn't matter who Tonks or Arabella Figg or Dawlish were, as they were neither given character development or allowed to enhance the plot. They were merely images flashed onto the screen for brief seconds, to keep the fans satisfied that no important character had been left out.

Someone, somewhere should run a calculation of the amount of time each of the following characters appears onscreen: Tonks, Moody, Lupin, Shacklebolt, McGonagall, Kreacher, etc. etc... and Ron. Poor Rupert Grint had nothing to do in this film. For one of the three major characters, he barely registered onscreen.

Alan Rickman, meanwhile, seemed to be using his screen time to show us how tired he was of this whole business. He's one of the few people besides JKR who knows the "truth" about Snape, and he could have presented a nuanced character, deliberately tantalizing the fans with this secret; and yet every line was uttered in the same dreary, deadpan tone. When I saw the film, every Snape line was accompanied by hoots of laughter.

To be fair, Snape was given a lot of extremely bad dialogue... as was everybody else. Screenwriter Michael Goldenberg seems to be doing an even worse job than Steve Kloves (the man who gave us "Oh my God, I've killed Harry Potter!" in GOF). He completely butchered the script's high-charged moments by handing round trite and sentimental cliche, and the climactic "Love is the weapon you have that Voldemort does not" scene was laughed out of the theatre.

Interestingly, the one character who really stood out was Luna Lovegood. Press releases reveal that untrained newcomer Evanna Lynch was essentially allowed to do as she liked with the part, from costume choices to dialogue rewrites, and thus we got a reader's interpretation of Luna rather than a Hollywood one. (For the uninitiated: Evanna Lynch won the part of Luna by convincing JKR and Warner Bros. that it would be a good -- and marketable -- idea to put an untrained fan into the initially minor role. From there, it seems the part expanded to fit Lynch's talents.)

In comparison, the wildly talented Helena Bonham Carter, who has plenty of skill but no real knowledge of the books, managed to reduce Bellatrix LeStrange into a series of "boogidy-boogidy-boos!"

And the less I write about wands becoming light-sabers, the better. I'd hate to spoil the ending for anyone who hadn't yet seen it.

It'll be interesting to see what happens to the films after the last book is out. HBP is trying to open in November 2008, but they won't get DH out until nearly 2010, and by then, will people still care? Even this film seemed to open with much less fanfare than the others (I haven't seen a single picture of any opening-night costume parties), and my guess is that after the book releases and people finally know "what happens next," enthusiasm will wane considerably.

And yet I still have immense gratitude for S. coming along for the day-long ride to see a movie. ^__^

The Life (or is it Death?) Of Mr. Potter

As a brief note to the Suitable Boy anecdote in my last post:

I'm becoming a little worried about Harry. That is to say, I don't believe there's any way that we'll be able to pull off the distribution of Ms. Rowling's final book without someone spoiling the ending for everyone. News travels too fast. It'll be up on YouTube, on CNN... or maybe person #1 in line at the bookstore will grab the book, flip to the last pages, and shout out the ending to persons #100 and beyond.

I'm not a fan of the HP books as literature (mea culpa, Mr. Daniel and Ms. Ginny). I am, however, fascinated by the HP books as catalysts for community -- for speculation, discussion, creativity, and play. I thoroughly enjoy the experience of reading an HP book because it gives me the chance to talk about books with other people. (Also it gives me the chance to put on a silly costume and jump around. Yes, I have cosplayed Hermione before. No, there aren't pictures.)

The ideal way to present the final book would be for everyone to read it slowly, maybe a chapter at a time, and then talk about it (online or IRL). Because what's fun about the books is the chance to predict and analyze and follow JKR's clues.

However, everyone is undoubtedly going to sit down, on their lonesome, with the book and rush as fast as they can towards the end because OMGWTF i wanna know whether Harry lives or dies!!!!

And then someone's going to find out and broadcast it, and spoil it for all of us.

And, as I will not be reading the book myself until at least a week of the HP madness is over (as I will have my copy in a corner of Borders, instead of paying full ticket to take one home with me), someone's going to spoil it for me. It's sure to be spoiled by then.

Which makes me sad, just a little.

But only a little.