The science museum had lost its charm

I twittered my on-the-spot reactions to the Harry Potter exhibit at the Boston Museum of Science, mainly, as a way to kill time because this show was definitely So Not My Thing. While I knew it was going to be about the films (which I've only seen out of the corner of my eye on TV) rather than the books, I dragged my companions along to the preview with the promise that there might be some cool stuff about moviemaking and special effects. Instead, it was an admittedly dazzling faux-Hogwarts gallery of costumes and props, a couple of minimally interactive pit stops (skee-ball like Quidditch tossing; plastic plants that made a noise when you touched them) and a big fat $ouvenir emporium. No ideas of any kind about science or magic or movies were offered. True fans will not be deterred, I'm sure, but I was a little embarrassed for the Museum, whose role, I think, is limited to giving the exhibit space (I wonder how the profits get sliced up). It could have been great, though, with opportunities to look at the science behind alchemy, say, or how CGI really works. But this was all "celebrate the magic," complete with English-accented guides and guards recruited from Craigslist. Why, so you feel like you're in an English museum? I dunno.

Claire saw the new Harry Potter movie

so you don't have to. Except, she says, you'll want to.

Oscar bait?

Score one for the big guys

J. K. Rowling has prevailed.

Take that.

As the suit over publication of "The Harry Potter Lexicon" begins in New York, Laurie Frost's The Elements of His Dark Materials: A Guide to Philip Pullman's Trilogy (The Fell Press) has just come across my desk. Like the as-yet-unpublished "Lexicon," Elements contains all manner of facts collated from the object work; unlike that project, it has been published with full consent from the author, if Pullman's preface is anything to go by: "It's flattering, of course, to find one's work the object of such care and attention; but how much more satisfying when the work of reference that results is so accurate, and so interesting, and so good."

Galleycat worries that if Rowling wins, book reviewers will lose. I doubt it--the issue here is not that the "Lexicon" quotes from the Harry Potter books, it's that it raids them wholesale, and not with the purpose of buttressing a viewpoint, negative or otherwise. I'm sure that publishers would love to vet reviews but I don't see how Rowling's victory in this lawsuit would give them that power.

"The Harry Potter Look"

The post about judging people--I mean, getting to know people--by the books they read on the subway and keep upon their shelves sent me back to the books-by-the-foot mavens, who this month are offering a special for would-be wizards.

I really don't have a horse in this one.

Interesting piece from The Guardian about the pending court case involving J. K. Rowling and the would-be publisher of a Harry Potter encyclopedia. What's intriguing to me is that both sides seem to have given statements that support the opposition!

Go flame her

But, Lord, I now adore this woman even more.

When Frog and Toad Are More Than Friends

Who needs old closet case Dumbledore when Claire has put together a first-class list of out-n-proud GLBTQ-and-sometimes-Y fiction?

I've got an editorial in the upcoming Horn Book about the outing of Dumbledore, who in fact joins a long line of characters who coulda-woulda-shoulda be gay if the reader so inclines--like Shakespeare in Susan Cooper's King of Shadows as we discussed here a few weeks ago. Or Harriet the Spy. (Or Sport, Beth Ellen, or Janie.) Betsy and Tacy! Frank and Joe! Nancy and George! Or not, too--the point is that characters become your imaginary friends whose lives, loves, and destinies can become what you need them to be.

I'm reminded of 1965, the momentous year when Barbie became flexible. Durable characters always are.

Three Little Words

Despite the fact I announced I would have no opinions in re Dumbledore's sexual orientation, I, of course, do and have been arguing them ferociously to the J.K. Rowling in my head. The short version is that while I applauded her mischief and relished the subsequent panty-twisting, I thought she had no business making up her readers' minds about what happens (or, in this case, happened) to Harry Potter and his fellows beyond what information she gave us in the books. By telling us that Dumbledore was gay, she implied that she had the story all sewn up, that readers had only to ask--her--to fill in the blanks she had left. But filling in those blanks, melding a story with one's (or One's, to quote from the hilarious Uncommon Reader) own imagination is what reading is all about. A huge part of the reason the Harry Potter books (volumes one through three, anyway) held so little charm for me was Rowling's insistence upon doing all the coloring-in herself, leaving the reader few opportunities to put his or her own imagination to work. That's why I grumbled that they were books for people who generally preferred to watch TV, and that's why I though Rowling's announcement was a little grabby. (The child_lit railings about whether it was a corrective or a confirmation of the Potter series' "heteronormativity" left me untouched; the only flag you need to fly is your own).

But I've since learned that Rowling's remarks were less peremptory than I had thought. While the newspapers were reporting that she said "Dumbledore is gay," the Leaky Cauldron has posted a rough transcript of the Carnegie Hall q-and-a, and according to that she said (in response to the question "did Dumbledore, who believed in the prevailing power of love, ever fall in love himself?") "I always thought of Dumbledore as gay." That I always thought matters enormously. Writers are as free as readers to mentally embroider or annotate a book; I imagine that a writer has to, even, settling into her imagination a rich landscape from which details are drawn for the page. I'm reminded of Margaret Mitchell being asked if she thought Scarlett ever got Rhett back. She didn't think so, she said. That didn't--and needn't--stop optimistic readers everywhere from imagining otherwise.

Merriman is gay?

Oops, wrong fantasy*. But in honor of the upcoming extravaganza with Susan Cooper and Gregory Maguire, Kitty and Claire have put online some of the Horn Book Magazine's finest fantasy articles, including Susan Cooper on Tolkien and Tom's Midnight Garden, Gregory Maguire on Philip Pullman, Philip Pullman on The Republic of Heaven, and several more esteemed writers on the whole doom-and-unicorns shebang. They won't be up forever, so read 'em now.

*But I still maintain that, in Susan Cooper's time fantasy King of Shadows, young hero Nat and the Bard of Avon totally had it going on, if you know what I'm saying.

A small correction

I have a short piece about Harry Potter up on the New York Times site, and it has a small but glaring (to me, anyway) mistake. The passage that reads

Nonreaders found in Rowling a benignly authoritarian guide: she told you what to look at and how to feel about what you saw. Those already accustomed to the pleasures of action learned early on to skip the adverbs, rejoicing instead in the wholly imagined world.

should read

Nonreaders found in Rowling a benignly authoritarian guide: she told you what to look at and how to feel about what you saw. Those already accustomed to the pleasures of fiction learned early on to skip the adverbs, rejoicing instead in the wholly imagined world.

The Times editor is on vacation so I don't think it will be fixed there anytime soon, and I hate sounding even more clueless than I am. At least I don't sound as churlishly brain-dead as Orson Scott Card does on the same page; there's a comfort.

Get a grip.

I'm staggered by the readers' comments, all four hundred-plus of them, attached to NYT public editor Clark Hoyt's defense of Michiko Kakutani's review of Harry Potter. I routinely skip reviews of things I want to "see for myself" first: did this not occur as a strategy to anyone? (I saw the epitome of this thinking on Child_lit, where someone pronounced the book satisfying, and somebody else started screaming about spoilers.) And the outrage that the Times did not honor Scholastic's embargo--why are so many so willingly led by the nose?

Not by Harry Potter, I hasten to add, but by the mentality of a herd that somehow thinks that its numbers--and the presence of children, cautiously surrounded and protected by the adult bulls and cows--justify a ludicrous degree of entitlement. Is the book's merit so shakily dependent upon plot turns that it is so easily spoiled? Why can't the Times give Harry Potter the same treatment they would give any book? (That is, review it ahead of publication date?) How can Scholastic (admirably) turn the release of a book into news and then complain that it is treated as such? And don't quote "Jo" at me. I haven't met her, neither have you, but in any case respecting--even considering--her wishes regarding the reviewing of her books is both ickily sycophantic and cowardly.

Yes, it's hot here.

Wanna get spoiled?

Actually, she doesn't give all that much away, but Claire Gross' review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is up. The review will appear in the September/October issue of the Horn Book Magazine.

Pursuant to the topic at hand,

Claire Gross sent me here.

The Owl Has Landed

And the UPS lady told me they had two trucks in my neighborhood this morning, packed with copies. Our reviewer is on her way over now.

While you're waiting, take a look at this op-ed from a man after my own heart: "Our obsession with spoilers has a diminishing effect, reducing popular criticism to a kind of glorified consumer reporting and the audience to babies."

Harry and the Horn Book

And while I was whining over here, Kitty Flynn posted links to all the high spots in the Horn Book's coverage of Harry Potter. Missing is the letter from the (former) subscriber who took her leave from us upon our less-than rapturous review of The Chamber of Secrets.

Speaking for myself, that Harry provided me an entire chapter in my memoirs, so, thanks, kid.

And here I thought Monday would be timely.

But the New York Times and Baltimore Sun got the jump on us, with reviews today of the new Harry Potter. And bravo to them: while Scholastic is entitled to try and stoke the flames of publicity--I mean, "preserve the magic moment"--by insisting on all kinds of secrecy, it's equally the job of the press to get the scoop. More than equally: by loudly embargoing review copies, swearing booksellers to hide the boxes, and going after bloggers who might or might not have reproduced pages from the book, Scholastic made their own blockade news, practically obliging journalists to get their hands on a copy. (You wouldn't know this from the deeply embarrassing Huffington Post story, though, which, in its stomping around like a little girl, reminds me that we are talking about a book for ten-year-olds.)

Our review, if the owls or whatever get the book to my house on time Saturday, will appear online Monday. Given that Scholastic seems to be insisting that the entire world should and will read the book this weekend, I guess we don't have to worry about spoilers. Except I do think we need to worry about spoilers, or at least be concerned about a willfully infantilized culture of suspense junkies so insistent on "not knowing the ending" that the future is probably going to kick our whiny, self-obsessed ass into oblivion. But that's a topic for another day.

More Harry

for the insatiable; Claire Gross reviews the new Harry Potter movie. And I had a few more words to say about the boy in USA Today.

Waiting for Harry

The reporters are calling again, looking for a new Harry Potter story. I wish I could be more helpful, but there really is no news. When they ask what the "next Harry Potter" will be, I point out that there was no last Harry Potter, depriving us off the crucial second dot from which we might be able to derive a meaningful line. Of course, we've seen book crazes before--Goosebumps, Sweet Valley, Babysitters' Club--and we can look back into the early 1970s to see another children's book that took over the adult bestseller list: Watership Down. But there has been nothing like Harry. And the next one, if there is one, probably won't be about a boy wizard, if the lack of success of the many post-Harry wannabes is any indication.

As for another frequent question, I really have no idea whether Harry Potter will be widely read in twenty years. One journalist floated the notion that once All Is Revealed, the series' cultural capital will be spent, but knowing that Frodo succeeds in his quest hasn't stopped fans from reading Lord of the Rings over and over again. There is an interesting comparison there, I think, but more for its differences than similarities: while both Harry Potter and the Tolkien books are multi-volume fantasy tales of an unlikely hero shouldering the weight of the world, Lord of the Rings for years was what you read if you were cool (at least, that's what its readers thought) or if you were a dork (that's what its scorners thought). The mass-market success of the Peter Jackson movies (and a Harry-wrought fantasy-friendly zeitgeist) might have changed that, but Harry Potter has been a crowd-pleaser from the start. You don't read Harry because that's what the cool kids are reading, but because that's what everyone is reading. (And I've never seen popular taste so ferociously defended. Tell people you don't like John Grisham, fine. Tell 'em you don't like Harry, and it's as if you have insulted humanity.)

The review copy of the latest Harry should arrive Saturday morning [correction: the 20th] at my house, from whence it will swiftly be retrieved by the assigned reviewer. When she's done, then we'll have some news.

All hail the Potterologist!

That would be Cheryl Klein, so dubbed by Time magazine in a refreshingly informative story about the forthcoming publication of the new HP. While the article about just how Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows makes it from Rowling's manuscript to American bookstores is online, you need to read the print version in order to see the cartoon of Cheryl looking slinky in a swoopy Veronica Lake 'do. One of Cheryl's jobs is to serve as continuity editor for the series; all I can say is: yikes. This time around, she also had the responsibility of going to England to retrieve the second draft from Rowling and endured a hair-raising escape at Heathrow security: "Wow! You have a lot of paper in here," said the bag inspector. Chills!

Not to get Cheryl in trouble or anything, but I feel I need to point out a potential lapse in security that occurred when we were in Germany together on an "editors' trip." Now I know, of course, that this was but a blind for some more secret purpose, and I have to ask:



Cheryl, what is in that bag and how could you leave it so casually untethered?

Well, you do know it's going over the net.

I like the commenter on Alison Morris's new ShelfTalker blog at PW (welcome, Alison) who says that the cover for the new Harry Potter looks like our lad is serving a tennis ball.

Maybe if I had read Harry while imagining he looked like Roger Federer I might have gotten further in the series than 2.5. And there's a Higher Power of Lucky joke somewhere in here but I can't seem to get my hands on it.

If They Could Turn Back Time

The Boston Globe's David Mehegan takes a look today at the evergreen topic of boys and reading, focusing on a pair of Houghton Mifflin veterans who are repackaging, for Sterling Publishing, the old Random House nonfiction Landmark Books series for a new generation of boys. We'll see. Leonard Marcus is quoted as being a little doubtful; thinking back to my parents' attempts to interest me in the Tom Swift books of their childhood, rather than the Danny Dunn books of my own makes me wonder, too. Times change. So do boys.

And who says that boys don't read? How soon they forget the wizard knob.