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.

Nose to the Grindstone

Wrong grindstone for this blog, though. I haven't been writing as much as I'd like to be right now (although my latest Harry Potter fanfiction effort did inspire my freind DarkKnight to write a rather puzzled post on his "As Iron Sharpens Iron" blog, which is a strange kind of compliment, I think; you can read the blog post here)

Most of my time at present is consumed with preparations for my trip to Ireland and my little ten day excursion to London. I've been filled with budget concerns, travel time tables, and more emails from my trip director than I'd probably care to ever read, as most of them are giving me an ulcer about this trip.

Oh, and I turned twenty on Tuesday. So there was much cake being eaten. Good for my sweet tooth, bad for the developing ulcer.

So that's what's new. In leiu of a real post today, I'm going to post a poem that I think I have not shared with anyone. I found it on my computer the other day and decided it was good enough to share.

It's called "The Man I Killed."

The man I killed wore tattered blue --
he had a wife and children, too.
The uniform I wear is green --
and it is whole and somewhat clean.

The man I killed had hair of red--
he had a hearth, a home, a bed.
The hair upon my head is brown --
I have no family in my town.

The man I killed had farmer's hands,
streaked with the dirt from distant lands.
My hands are also streaked with toil
but not from dust, and not with soil.

The gun is resting in my hands, its barrel hot and black
His breath has left his body now, he is not coming back.

I don't know why I could not see --
The man I killed was just like me.

Finishing

Say, I haven't put any updates on here in a while, have I? I think it's time to rectify that.

Song of a Peacebringer -- FINISHED, finally. People died, people got married, people generally reflected on the whole story. It was interesting. Now I have absolutely no idea what to do with myself. You can read the whole thing, all 33 chapters, HERE.

The Hunting of the Sue -- Up and running at FF.net, and receiving generally complimentary reviews. You can read it HERE. The Summary:

Harry's stories may be over, but his adventures continue, no longer as leader in the fight against the Dark Lord, but as a Jurisfiction agent fighting alongside Thursday Next to defeat one of the most terrifying demons known to the BookWorld -The MarySue. A Thursday Next/ Harry Potter Crossover, produced in conjunction with the BookWorld in storycode WebBook1.0

I found out after posting this that Jasper Fforde does not condone fanfiction in any genre or style, so I assume that's the reason there's so precious little of it floating about the 'net. I wrote this because I wish he'd hurry up and finish One of Our Thursdays is Missing, and I'm not making any profit off of it at all, so there. And I combined it with Harry Potter, so his absolute dislike of fanfiction and Rowling's acceptence of it should make it only mildly bad, I think.

The Untitled Cranford Fic -- As yet unpublished Cranford fic (not a whole lot of them floating around, either) I thought I would post here to get some initial feedback from my Cranford fans in the crowd. (Mom, Dad, Helen, this means you.)


Imagine, if you think you can, a small village in Cheshire preparing, as it always does, for the end of summer. Carts of laborers going out to the fields, the market lane bustling with the comings and goings of the village folk. They are a simple people, unconcerned with the wars that fill their newspapers or the gossip about Queen and crown that is filling everyone else’s heads. If you are imagining, pray do not trouble yourself any longer, for the people and the town they inhabit are very real, and their comings and goings are much the same as yours or mine. The town is Cranford, and the year is 1854. If you are acquainted with the place (as I know some are) it is probably ten years since you have seen the place, but fear not; in its usual Cranfordian fashion nothing much has changed. True, some of the less colorful inhabitants have died or moved on to better climes (though what climate could be better or more healthful than Cranford’s the town’s greatest minds are still undecided) but some who have left are returning, names and faces who were once long associated with the town and the niceties of manner and speech that are still practiced here though they have quite left the rest of England.

See, here is one of them now – that young man there, in the lane, astride the bay mare. Do you see him? Topcoat tails soiled as if from a lengthy journey, trousers tucked inside equally stained riding boots, his body is well-formed and his seat on his mare is good, though he does not carry off the air of having ridden his whole life. His clothes are tailored by a professional hand and everything about him, from the shoes of his horse to the slight jauntiness in his top hat, suggests a young gentlemen home from school. This is of course the case, and the school (or rather the college, he is quite older than school) is Saint John’s College in Cambridge, a long way off in Cranford terms. Yes, this is Harry Gregson, once nothing more than a poacher’s son and sometime street urchin, now come back to his hometown a scholar of serious repertoire, well versed in Latin, Greek, the smallest of smatterings in Hebrew and of course his mother-tongue, which he speaks now with an upper-class city air.

He has learned mathematics, economics, and a hint of law, and – though he never admits to this – some of the other vices common to boys of a certain class: a regard for good company and a fine face, and a desire, however latent, to marry such a face and perhaps retain such comfortable circumstances as permit the fine face to shine even finer...