Literature Does Not Exist in a Vacuum, and Other Things the Seventh Harry Potter Movie Taught Me

I don't think there are any spoilers in this post, but just to be certain, I am talking about the latest Harry Potter movie, so anyone who hasn't seen it might want to beware.

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Last night I was one of those crazy college kids out at midnight to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One. This morning I am one of those crazy, sleep-deprived college kids who will go through thier Friday absolutely over the moon at the fact that the movie was so good. I was euphoric leaving that theater last night. I was so happy I had no words. I just sat in the car and beamed. This was the story I loved, the story I read aloud to my little sister and then re-read out loud just for fun a second, and a third, and a fourth time. They kept many of what I thought were some of Rowling's best bits and I was grateful for that.

I had a rough day yesterday -- I gave my book review of Android Karenina (coming soon to a blog near you!) and I taught part of a lesson on Narrative Poetry.  The poem I chose was one of my favorites, The Geebung Polo Club by A.B. Paterson, and the response volume fell flatter than a water balloon eating concrete after being dropped from the 90th floor.

It was bad, in other words. No one said a thing. Getting answers out of those kids was like pulling teeth. And after all that stress, I needed a win, and I found one. Dan, Emma, Rupert. David Yates and all their many friends and accomplices DELIVERED. But stories are curious things -- as we were watching the movie, my friends and I, we couldn't help making connections to other things we had seen, things we had read. Each of us brings a unique selection of prior knowledges and texts with us when we read: it's like packing a suitcase and stowing in on the train for the remainder of the ride. And for us, many of those things we were bringing with us were poems.

Before the movie began (we were at the theatre two hours early, we had to amuse ourselves somehow) we were singing quietly amongst ourselves. Selections included Pippen's Song from Return of the King, The Call from Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, and There and Back Again, also from Lord of the Rings. All these songs can link back to Harry Potter -- they talk about the eventual triumph over evil, the renewal of hope, and the belief that we, too, have a place and a purpose in the world.

During the movie I thought several of David Yates' nature shots looked like Lord of the Rings country (including one where Harry, Ron, and Hermione are walking through a field -- I wanted someone to start singing "There and Back Again" right there) that Locket!Harry and Hermione reminded me of some perverse version of Adam and Eve (and also, at the same time, Scary!Galadriel from Fellowship of the Ring) and, perhaps best of all, that Dobby's death reminded me of a poem, one of my favorites and one which, unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to share with my friends on the car ride home because we were too busy discussing the rest of the movie.

While Dobby needs no other epitaph than the tremendous life he lived, Robert Louis Stevenson's "Requiem" is, I think, also fitting given Dobby's final lines.

"REQUIEM"

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie,

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be,

Home is the sailor, home from sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

And more than anything else, I wish I could share this expereince of poetry with my students, the idea that it connects us and shares threads of experience just like stories do. It provokes emotion, attempts to answer our questions about life, and binds us to other people. It does not always have an arcane meaning. You do not have to beat it with a hose to get a meaning out of it, to paraphrase Billy Collin's excellent poem Introduction to Poetry. Sometimes you can merely let it be.

Percy Jackson, Time Thief

Friends, I've been to the land of Young Adult Literature, and I've come back bearing wonderful treasures. Behold, a Percy Jackson addiction!

There aren't too many young adult books I hound my librarians for. Percy has become an exception. I read the first book in the five part series two or three years ago and remember not being terribly impressed -- I didn't like the main character, the language was simple...

Just me being an elitist jerk of a reader again, in other words.

After news that the movie was going to be starring two of my favorite leading men:

I gave the books another try. I wasn't disappointed this time. I went with a totally different approach and a drastically different set of expectations, wanting a young adult book that might be appropriate for reluctant readers and might also be great for a unit on the greek gods and perhaps mythology in general, and I found all I wanted. Percy was nicely snarky and pre-teen and perfect for any students I might have who deal with ADHD. In my true fashion, I stalked the library and devoured the first three books in a matter of a week and a half. Now I'm waiting for returns on books four and five and I'm still excited.

To make all this age-unappropriate fangirling even worse, I carved out part of my Monday afternoon two weeks ago to go and see the movie. Sean Bean and Kevin McKidd aside, I was more than a little disappointed. So much of the material that I had really enjoyed in the books wasn't there. I realize that sometimes film has to cut material to keep time manageable. Observe Lord of the Rings. But re-writing the whole plot so you don't have to cast someone as Ares, introducing some teen romance and topping it all off with lamentably poor fight quality? Poor show, Chris Columbus, poor show. My movie-going buddy Mal and I enjoyed ourselves, though, because we hadn't gone to the movies to see a top-quality, oscar winning film; we'd gone to see a tween movie. That's exactly what we got. (We also got the whole theatre to ourselves -- BONUS!) Mal hadn't read the books, so she didn't have anything to be disappointed about. (She has also been woken up to the wonderful realization that Kevin McKidd is VERY good looking, so there were no complaints on the car ride home about that.)

After all this, I've also starting following Rick Riordan's blog, and I have to say, he sounds like a wonderfully approachable fellow. He's in the middle of writing another Percy-Jackson universe book and another series, based in Egyptian Mythology, is coming out this year. I read the first chapter and I'm not going to deny that I'm excited.

Riordan's PJO universe has sparked a few fanfic ideas, one of which I've already started playing with about a semi-major Greek deity he left out of his universe, the sea-goddess (and wife of Posiedon!) Amphitrite, and per my usual, I've begun following the incoming stream of fanfic on FF.net to get a handle on what kind of audience exists out there for this kind of thing.

Friends, that audience is big, it's bad, and it's all under the age of fifteen and incapable of writing anything other than Mary-Sues. It's scary and exciting at the same time -- I want to know what happens when someone introduces something that's not quite Canon (and hopefully better written) into the fandom pool. (All these Mary-Sues also make me want to send in Thursday Next and some Reality Rounds, but that's a fanfic for another time.)

On the subject of Canon, one of the other things I've noticed about Percy Jackson's fans is that unlike some other genres of young adult literature (Harry Potter comes to mind) PJO people are VERY concerned about adhering to Canon. We're talking "almost to the point of insanity" concerned. If you don't ship Percy-Annabeth, they don't want you there, period. I've read the books, and just as in Harry Potter, I know that a case for Percy being romantically involved with any number of other female characters could be made and written very well. I'm wondering if this narrow-mindness with the Canon is due to the relative youth of the fandom itself or the relative youth of the fans themselves. More observations might have to be conducted for me to find out.

Anyway, that's all that's new from the Wordsmithy.

Frank McCourt

It seems I only mention famous writers on this blog when they die, which is sad and unfortunate, really, because Frank McCourt was a writer who probably deserved to be mentioned more.

The recent streak of celebrity deaths has taught me a lot about what we value in America in terms of celebrity. Michael Jackson, the "King of Pop" got the entire first section of the Chicago Tribune (about six pages of newsprint) dedicated to coverage of fallout from his death and wall-to-wall coverage for the next twentyfour hours on every major news network. However, Walter Cronkite, the man who brought us the news for I don't know how many years, got a very nice write up on the front page of the Trib and a mention on the nightly news. I realize, of course, that Cronkite's death was more eminent than Jackson's, but why should an entertainer get more coverage than a broadcaster?

I know that McCourt may not even make the nightly news, even though he won a Pulitzer and, more amazing to me, he taught in public schools for a great deal of his life and then went back to write his three amazing auto-biographical works on his life as an Irish American. He wrote at the beginning of Teacher Man, my favorite of the three books, that you go into teaching hoping that some day you'll write your memoirs and you'll win prizes and someone will decide to make your life into a movie and you'll be famous for teaching, and that inevitably that doesn't happen. Interestingly, his first novel, Angela's Ashes, was made into a movie with Robert Carlyle and Emily Watson and it was nominated for an Oscar. Still Mr. McCourt went on injecting his realism.

He was very realistic about the whole process of teaching, but even amidst the sandwich throwing incidents and the kids who just wouldn't behave in class and explaining the structure of a sentence through the anatomy of a pen and the many, many times he nearly got fired for doing something or another, he always showed a certain humor and humanity in the classroom. That's why I loved his books. He was a great educator and a great story-teller, and I hope someday I can be the same.

Rest in peace, Mr. McCourt. My hat's off to you, sir.

Public Enemies!

Today the Trailer for Public enemies came out, and I have to tell you, I'm just as excited for this film as I was when I first heard they were filming in and around the city of Chicago. (As a native of the Chicago Suburbs and something of a sucker for Chicago crime history, this piqued my interest immediately)

You can see at least one Chicago landmark, the Great Hall of Union Station, in the trailer.Oh, Union Station, how fond my memories are of you. I remember walking into that room and thinking, "This building was made for films about the 20s." Wonderful piece of Chicago architecture history, something that also fascinates me.

You're probably wondering why I'm writing about a movie trailer on a writing blog, but I promise to make this legitimately about writing (or reading, actually.)

Public Enemies the movie is based loosely on Public Enemies, the book by Brian Burroughs, a wonderful history of America's greatest crime wave, and the personalities behind it, including the fledgling Federal Bureau of Investigations. I read the book back in January, and loved every minute of it -- Burroughs takes a very narrative approach to retelling history, and the non-fiction reads a great deal like fiction, which I suspect is the reason they decided to make it into a movie. It's a little hard to follow at points, probably because Burroughs follows several different criminals, and the G-Men who pursue them, simultaneously; One chapter will deal with Dillinger in September and the next will deal with Baby Face Nelson in the same frame of time, and the next after with Bonnie and Clyde during the same September. Then he returns to Dillinger.

It makes sense to follow the events in this fashion, since Burroughs is writing about these men to show the evolving process (or lack thereof, in some cases) of the FBI, which, during this period, was under the command of J. Edgar Hoover and still trying to figure out what the ideal FBI agent followed in regards to process, how he looked and who he answered to. I'm interested to see Christian Bale tackle Melvin Purvis, the agent responsible for the Dillinger case -- according to Burroughs, Purvis was, like many agents in his day, little more than a pretty face with a Southern accent, a good education, and no clue about how law enforcement really worked. One of the things that I enjoyed about "Public Enemies" is the frank, no-nonsense way Burroughs dealt with the extremely human errors and flaws of his characters -- none of the vast cast of this Depression are heroes in any sense. Bonnie and Clyde are two-bit, second rate criminals put up on a pedestal because they made a good story, Dillinger is an image obsessed playboy, and Hoover is a man in charge of running an agency that has little jurisdiction and little clue about how to use the little power they do have.

So -- Public Enemies. Go read the book. If you like the book, go see the movie! Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Marion Cotilliard, David Wenham, Billy Crudup, Channing Tatum, Carey Mulligan -- it's a great cast with some great names on it and I'm sure it'll be a great show.