Freckles & Doubt

That brief radio interview I did about fanfic a while back? The interviewer wanted some examples of good fanfic, because he didn't believe me when I said some fanfic was better than the original text. I never got around to sending him any recs, being as how I was somewhat depressed at the time, but this is one of the recs I should have sent him: dirgewithoutmusic's "We must unite inside her walls or we'll crumble from within" series. Harry Potter; meditations on some of the more marginal female characters and their House characteristics: a remedial, redemptive and deeply political project of enormous insight and sophistication. Beautifully written. The Andromeda one has just made me cry, although to be fair most of the rest of them did, too. If Rowling thought about her characters like this HP would be a great and profound work of literature instead of merely an enjoyable, apposite and popular one.

Today's two most recent google search terms in my browser: "college impact theory" and "103 Ways to Annoy Lord Voldemort". This tells you absolutely everything you need to know about my working life. On the upside, this Harry Potter paper is taking vague conceptual shape. I darkly suspect we may actually be dealing with institutional climate theory.

In other news, if one more student panics his/her way through that door and turns out not to be clutching the relevant paperwork, I may find myself perpetrating spontaneous avada kedavra tests in a working environment.

The Daily Voice strikes again! This time, LESBIAN KILLED BY EVIL BUSH! or, possibly, LESBIAN KILLED IN EVIL BUSH! This is rife with possibility: (a) shrubbery, (b) the current anti-gay sentiment in the American administration, and (c) maddened dodgy euphemism. Also note the characteristic Daily Voice use of EVIL! It could never be a mildly annoying bush, or even a slightly badly-behaved one.

Ounce managed to distinguish himself this weekend by setting fire to his tail. He climbed into the Evil Landlord's lap while said EL was pewter-casting, turned around three times in that characteristic feline way, and passed his tail through the gas burner, causing it to merrily catch alight. He then lay there in blissful obliviousness to the conflagration, purring madly, while the EL extinguished the flames. Honestly, that cat has even less brain than Golux. Stv suggests that Ounce's drink is probably the Flirtini. I concur.

Have just sent jo&stv home full of reasonably successful tiramisu (I'm still in the recipe-tinkering stage), so that I can, at least, say that I achieved something this weekend. Oh, and most of today was spent reading Harry Potter papers and scrawling acerbic notes for this paper I'm writing jointly with wolverine_nun. Glory, but you did a lot of research for this, w-n! Shall try and have something coherent for you by next weekend. Currently, I'm deeply suspicious of the pedagogic principles inherent in the HP novels, and inclined to disagree with the critics who see the hands-off teaching styles of the Hogwarts faculty as a chance for children to engage in self-directed study. Call me old-fashioned, but a curriculum slanted towards defeating Voldemort is not, in my book, addressing the inner needs of the individual child.

It seems to be a random sort of morning. Thus, random linkery:

Programming language inventor or serial killer? Difficult to say, actually. I got 5/10. It's cheating to actually know what seminal programmers look like, all you geeks who are going to knock my score into a cocked hat.

And, apparently, Dumbledore was gay. No, really, Rowling says so. I have to say (a) I thought so, so much of his dottiness is explained by the Great Tragic Love Affair With The Proto-Nazi, and (b) she's timed the announcement beautifully: manages to have her political cake and eat it. All the liberals will be jumping around happily, the fanficcers are probably swooning, and she's already sold all the books to the frothing right-wing who will feel the need to denounce gay wizards. You go, girl.

I'm a bit sad that Neville marries Hannah Abbot, though. Gay!Neville is a curiously compelling fanfic creation.

Off now to herd toddlers. Wish me luck.

Am I alone in having a subconscious highly trained to keep my place in books? If I stop reading in the middle of a page and come back some time later, I'll automatically start at the line where I left off, as long as I don't actually think about it. This suggests that I might have done a lot better in general knowledge quizzes at school if I'd made a habit of answering questions on the turn, by instinct, preferably while distracting all conscious input by mentally reciting my eight times table, in French.

On an almost entirely unrelated note, although vaguely on the subject of reading (I'm now towards the end of the post-Snapely-insight Harry Potter seven-book marathon), possibly the single most annoying aspect of the wizarding world is their version of Muggle clothing. Honestly. There is absolutely no shadow of a shred of justification for that degree of ignorance about the world which surrounds them. Once again, Rowling sacrifices all logic for faintly comic effect. Pshaw.

Last Night I Dreamed: that I was working for Simon Pegg, who was running for some kind of political office. I was doing research and writing speeches, as well as co-ordinating a massive pack of ditzy blonde female campaign workers, and playing housekeeper to the rather nice house. Vague apocalypse, with chase scenes up water towers, intervened. At some point I was also working in a bookshop, agonizing about shelving kids' fiction (I ended up separating "children's" from "young adult" depending on whether or not they mentioned sex). I think my subconscious is a bit paranoid about finding a new job.

When hopelessly submerged in Harry Potter, go with the flow. More (spoiler-free) musings. Or, if you've read it or don't intend to, an extremely scathing and amusing blow-by-blow review.

One of Rowling's major problems in constructing the Harry stories is the way in which she goes about isolating her child heroes from adult contribution or oversight. This is a perennial problem in children's fantasy: for purposes of kiddy-reader-gratification, as well as for a more or less romance plot to work, the hero needs to be testing his/her own abilities against the world without too much input from grown-ups. Quest romance is individualistic: children learning to work with adults, rather than apart from them, moves the whole thing back into the realm of the real.

Various children's writers deal with this in more or less intelligent ways. Options include:

• Giving the kids a good social/structural reason to work apart from adults. Examples: John Christopher's Tripods trilogy or Scott Westerfeld's Uglies: children deliberately escaping a predetermined social fate which hits them at a particular age and to which most adults have already succumbed.
• More or less related: children who cannot work with adults because the adults are more or less assholes across the board. Good example: Diana Wynne Jones, Year of the Griffin: another magic-school story in which the adult wizards are all idiots as a result of the social conditioning of the tours, whereas the kids are bright and able to think outside the box.
• Children with no adults to whom to appeal, i.e. orphans, runaways, children separated from their parents by circumstances. Diana Wynne Jones, again, does this very well in The Dark Lord of Derkholm, in which one parent is enchanted into indifference and the other critically ill, leaving the kids to struggle through an extremely demanding situation on their own. Rowling partially uses this technique, although she flaws it by including an isolated child within a validated system, rather than an isolated child outside an invalidated system (yes, the Ministry gets all totalitarian later on, but Hogwarts under Dumbledore is supposed to be a supportive and nurturing environment): you keep asking why the system doesn't compensate for the isolation, whereas in Dark Lord it's perfectly obvious that the system is unfair and stupid.
• Kids separated from the normal world by particular powers/destiny/what have you - the other half of Rowling's strategy. But I invite you to compare it to Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising, in which Will's realisation of his power and purpose is beautifully cushioned by mentor figures who offer a careful and effective balance of education, testing and support. This is possibly where HP is most flawed: Rowling randomly brings adults in and out depending on the narrative needs of Harry's quest, at the cost of any consistent or coherent relationship he can build up with those adults - or, in fact, with his own identity and abilities. Also, half the adults are idiots, or at least hamstrung by narrative necessity so that they're forced to act like idiots and later unconvincingly come up with justifications.

The problem with comparing HP to other kids' fantasy is that I find myself wondering why I actually enjoyed the series. Phooey. Possibly she's controlling our responses by hypnotic drumming from orbit. (Which reminds me. Major Russel T. Davies rant coming up, once I've fulminated a bit on the last three episodes of Who.)

Last Night I Dreamed About: exploring ruined fantasy Morrowind cities; being nervous late at night in campus corridors; breeding very small horses.

I woke up randomly at 5.30am yesterday, and couldn't get back to sleep, which means I staggered into Order of the Phoenix last night fighting off great waves of tiredness and expecting to fall gently asleep halfway through. In the event this was a foolish expectation, as (a) the film moves at breakneck speed which makes its two-and-a-half whizz past on amphetamines, and (b) there's no way anyone could sleep through all that breaking glass.

The film promotes interesting meditation on narrative. (Although in my case most things promote interesting meditations on narrative... darn all this academia). It's a fascinating process, watching Rowling's comfy, well-padded story, rife with scarves, hats, capes, bits of string, random bits of weird jewellery and the occasional extra appendage, being scientifically stripped to lean muscle and bone by the scalpel-wielding scriptwriter. You end up a bit sad to lose a particularly well-loved dangly accessory, but the aesthetic pleasures of the emerging svelte form are more than consolatory. The only problem is that Rowling's writing style, which is very much geared towards building up the whole out of buckets of trivia, doesn't always respond well to accessory-stripping, in the sense that sometimes the removal of a scarf or bit of string reveals the missing chunk of bone in the underlying limb. Some of that extraneous detail actually isn't extraneous at all.

( Detailed dissection behind the cut )

For a far more entertaining take on the film, mistful does Emo!Harry and, predictably enough, mega homoerotic subtext. Memo to self: desperately require LOL-Dementor icon with "CAN HAS SOULZ" motif.

(p.s. did anyone else catch Jessica Stevenson in the Ministry of Magic hearing scene? She's listed in the film credits, but not on IMDB, which is weird. Plays Mafalda Hopkirk.)

In other news, the Friendly Psychologist insists that I note dreams on this blog, on the grounds that she enjoys reading them. Who am I to disobey instructions from a professional?

Last Night I Dreamed that jo came to visit, bringing with her about seven or eight more-or-less interchangeable ten-year-old girls - mostly blonde. They were very well-behaved, filing into the house in a long line and accepting in a polite chorus when I offered them tea.

It's a technojinx, that's what it is. Somewhere in my generally user-friendly, cookery-loving, innocently not-quite-in-this-universe aura is a fatal flaw that causes computers to randomly explode whenever I come near them. I mean, even Oblivion is crashing four or five times as often for me as it does for the Evil Landlord, although that could also have something to do with the fact that I keep accidentally walking through my horse*.

The Death Of The Motherboard a couple of weeks back was quite enough heart palpitation for one computer-year, but clearly karmic build-up had not been expiated. On Thursday my hard drive died. No amount of kicking, swearing and invocation of demon gods would allow it to boot up. Encapsulated on said hard drive is my revised thesis, work on several encyclopedia entries, and a great deal of information I do not at all care to lose. All but the most recent work is actually backed up on campus, but this does not include the file full of notes representing two months' worth of Disney research which I need to beat into shape to make an actual entry. There was, as you might guess, much wailing and gnashing of knees.

Fortunately the Evil Landlord leaped madly into the breach in his usual fashion and installed his own old hard drive, thus executing a neat echo of precisely the manoevre we used for the dead motherboard. (Memo to self, make creme caramel for Evil Landlord). Slaved to the new hard drive, mine can actually be read, although it has large holes in some of the data, including bang in the middle of the sixth episode of Doctor Who. (Woe! Woe!) Fortunately, however, thesis and encyclopedia entries are unflawed. What I have lost, with pinpoint accuracy, is the data file for my Thunderbird inbox, which means if you've sent me an e-mail recently to which I have not yet responded, please resend it, it has vanished irretrievably into the nether regions of aetheric hell. It's been a pretty weird day, trying to restore to my computer all my programs, settings and what have you. Talk about identity slippage.

Of course, my techno-jinx has had definite assistance of late from some sort of all-embracingly nasty astrological conjunction, causing not only computer crashes, but break-ups, cookery disasters and the theft, last night, of jo&stv's car, the famed Roachmobile of legend and song. I thus feel impelled to add my mite of joy to the unrelieved gloom by mentioning the happy little revelation accorded last night by watching Goblet of Fire again in the company of a sadly visa-stressed starmadeshadow. Did anyone else notice that Mad-Eye Moody's weird Scottish outfit for the Yule ball includes, in a gesture making for slashy swooning in all directions, a sporran made from a flayed white ferret? Heh.

* In other silly Oblivion news, the horse is buggy enough that its current stabling plan involves leaving it levitating outside my front door, stuck through the porch roof so you can only see its feebly galloping hooves and whatever the bottom part of a horse's leg is called. (Fetlock? Pastern? Something technical which no amount of Dick Francis is going to make me recall). Words cannot express how ridiculous it looks.

As my Evil Landlord points out, today's Order of the Stick (#253) is a particularly entertaining and rather rude Harry Potter rip-off. I always knew Dumbledore was a warthog.

The New York Times is making approving noises about the Goblet of Fire movie, which I suppose is not that surprising given that it's Mike Newell, who rather rocks as a director. But I liked their nuanced judgement of Ralph Fiennes: "His Voldemort may be the greatest screen performance ever delivered without the benefit of a nose".

Falkenstein tonight! The party have handily dispatched a trio of vampirish women who turned out not, in fact, to be the vampires they were looking for. Darned Jedi mind tricks. And Neil's character lost his head and tried to shoot an English aristocrat in good standing. Does anyone have floor plans of the Tower of London...?