text:
For as a surfeit of the sweetest things
The deepest loathing to the stomach brings,
Or as the heresies that men do leave
Are hated most of those they did deceive,
So thou, my surfeit and my heresy,
Of all be hated, but the most of me.
I think in about five or six years of everyone wanting to know what-do-you-mean-you-don't-read-Harry-Potter, no one said what I think this well.
Thank you for that.
A few thoughts:
- I still like Harry Potter, so there.
- After my friends and I had finished the book, I said, "But why didn't they go to Aberforth much earlier?" and my friend replied, "That would have been meta-gaming."
- I once tried to write an essay on why J.K. Rowling is better than Philip Pullman. It's a difficult task and some of my answers probably exposed me as both a Christian (grr! atheist! grrr!) and a bit of a cretin (but J.K. Rowling's so much easier to read...) but the answer that I thought might actually serve in academic circles was that I actually care about the characters in Harry Potter. (Actually, this is probably the same reason why I think David Eddings is a third-rate fantasy author but still remember his books with fondness...) I'd gone off Lyra by the end of His Dark Materials and didn't find many of the other characters terribly interesting. For that matter, I read a couple of chapters of the Da Vinci Code and decided that I hated them all, except perhaps for the Evil Albino (TM). But I'd quite like to meet the Harry Potter characters... more to the point, I can actually imagine meeting them, even though most of them are wizards and I'm just some Muggle.
- I did enjoy your post very much. Miss Beale does sound rather familiar. Once we were told to write a story about a child about to be evacuated, so I wrote about a young Cockney and delighted in using slang and making deliberate grammatical errors (the relish with which I used double negatives and phrases like "should of" was perhaps a little more than was warranted). My teacher, though undoubtedly she and Miss Beale would have got on, fortunately liked me and realised this was meant to say something about my character rather than illustrate my own inability to use the English language.
the answer that I thought might actually serve in academic circles was that I actually care about the characters in Harry Potter.
On the flip side, something I suggested in my post about Harry Potter last time around (see the actually mostly defunct weblog) was that the reason we care about the characters in Harry Potter isn't so much that they're well written or likable. As Andrew suggests, Harry's chief distinguishing feature is his messy hair.
The reason (I suggest) that we care about the Potter characters is because they're familiar, because everybody knows about them. I've read more about Snape in casual conversations on the internet than I have in seven books worth of material.
Incidentally I've also got the first part of a chapter-by chapter breakdown of the books, and farewell to the series here
Very interesting. I find myself forced to agree with every specific point that you make (as Douglas Adams said of Asimov, "the actual writing is terrible") yet still wholly disagreeing with your conclusion.
Much as with your Return Of The King film reviews, actually. (Aren't we about due another one of these?)
Most readers of this blog will be familiar with the distinction that C. S. Lewis makes between Story and Myth. According to Lewis's conception, in the former, the telling is crucial: the choice of words, the rhythm of the prose: in a word, literature. In myth, though, it's the central points of character and plot that carry the weight, that have a resonance through picking out aspects of the universal that, however subconsciously, we recognise. For this reason, it doesn't matter than there is often no one definitive statement of a myth (e.g. all the Norse myths) -- nothing important is lost. In the same way, Lewis somewhere says that he was entranced by the myth that is Kafka's _The Castle_ when someone told him about it, but that his subsequent actual reading of the novel added nothing.
Elsewhere Lewis wrote of sort of obituary entitled "The Mythopoeic Gift of Rider Haggard" in which he pretty comprehensively dissed Haggard's actual writing, but strongly praised what he called the central myths of _King Solomon's Mines_, _She_ and others. He also asserted that while _Ayesha_, the sequal to _She_, is a better book than the original, it is an inferior myth.
All of this is of course by way of introducing the observation that while JK's writing is pretty terrible (especially in the earlier books), the myth is one of the most powerful I know. I think Lewis would have liked it a lot. Strange: back when I was reading _Chamber of Secrets_ (the HP book I read) I never dreamed for a moment that I'd end up holding it in the same basket as LotR and, I suppose, Narnia.
Of course HP is wildly different from both of those antecedents in that it takes place in our own world -- and not even entirely in such vaguely located pseudo-places as Hogwarts, but also in very familiar concrete locations such as King's Cross Station. Paradoxically, given its strong reliance on an thematic centre in magic, it has a reassuringly mundane feel to it.
So for me I guess the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Much greater.
There are many different ways to communicate with people and rouse their emotions..enough to have them coming back for more..again and again. Apparently some of these ways don't require absolutely perfect writing skills. HP is as much an adventure as it is an emotional soap opera, and it is these elements that grab the imagination moreso than perfect sentences and structure.
Does Stephen Hawking, who has to talk with the help of digital assistance, make the universe any less a compelling place because his voice and appearance are unconventional..out of the norm? Of course not..because his *ideas* are so compelling that they still manage to transcend the way in which they are conveyed to the audience.
Readers want a connection to the characters, the opportunity to see them challenged and grow,and the eventual unraveling of their secrets. This is far more compelling than being sure each sentence complies with the National Sentence Structure standards.
Just for some tiresome pedantry, Dudley does have a PlayStation. It buggers up the internal chronology of the series.
Is a JK Rowling/Agatha Christie comparison reasonable? The writing isn't great but it keeps you reading.
Thanks, Andrew. You hit many of the reasons I couldn't be bothered to read these books. Plus as an example you used Spider-man. I've made a spirited defense once of why I'd rather my nephew read Spider-man than Harry Potter.
Well, it's nice to get a more erudite reason for not reading the series than "it bored me." Which it did, but that was the first book and movie. I was mildly entertained but then forgot it almost immediately, and never picked it up again.
Maybe it didn't help that Lewis's (and other) descriptions of boarding school kept popping up in my mind, and so the school-story aspect just didn't work for me. If there had been some serious bullying, etc. early on, I might have found it more compelling. Somewhere along the lines of Dahl's Matilda, perhaps.
I'm not overly worried about kids getting turned off of fantasy or what have you by this. Thanks in part to Potter, fantasy is everywhere in the children's/YA section of the bookstore, and at least some of it is better-written than Rowling. Lewis, for example, but I believe there's a movie being made of the Dark is Rising series by Susan Cooper, which aren't that well-written but do a better job of being truly English and mysterious.
I don't think we can really predict the reading preferences of adults from what they read as children. If that were true, I'd still read nothing but horse-novels.
What I'm not going to miss is reading previewers and reviewers saying that "Rowling has created a world as detailed and complex as Middle-Earth or Narnia." These people have clearly never read either Tolkien or Lewis. Saying that Rowling's world is as complex and detailed as Tolkien's is insulting to Tolkien and saying that Rowling's world is as detailed and complex as Lewis's is insulting to Rowling. (Nothing wrong with Narnia, of course, but it's an obvious hodge-podge that Lewis was making up as he went along. It's enjoyable in spite of that.)
The Rowling books did lose their way after Book 3, but I thought Book 6 was decent and Book 7 was mostly satisfying. I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed that Dumbledore morphed from a brilliantly funny creation into a second-rate Gandalf with a third-rate backstory.
Yes, quite.
And yes, I read all 1.3 million words too.
You're perhaps being hard on the Kidstoday, though. I know some readers under the age of ten, and generally if they read HP, it's one of their multiple literary interests. I'm not certain that HP is "creating readers", so much as encouraging kids who like books to read more and engage with others socially about the books they like. (So, fannishness, basically, which is a nice side effect IMO.)
We consume all kinds of stuff when we're kids; I think it's just part of growing up. Not to say that I don't share your concerns about HP and wish the world were talking about better books--I just think young imaginations are resilient enough to handle a lot of stuff that's unworthy of them.
Also--well--I haven't discussed DH with my eight-year-old tutoring student yet, but I'll bet that if he liked it more than I did, he won't declare with passionate certainty that it's because I hate JKR/am a snob/can't accept that it {is, isn't} a children's book/wanted the characters to suffer {less, more}. He appears to know that different people may like different things, and that even if you think someone is silly for having a certain taste, liking a story someone else didn't like doesn't prove you love stories better than they do.
"I liked the part at Gringotts" is what he'll probably say, and I'll agree, or perhaps he'll say the ending was cool and I'll disagree, and we'll still be friends. I know people well over the age of eight with whom I would feel far less confident of a peaceful resolution. Y'know?
Wizards have godfathers, celebrate Christmas, name hospitals after saints and put quotes from the Bible on their grave stones, but they don't have churches, vicars or Christenings and their weddings and funerals are secular affairs.
So they'd be Anglicans then?
I think I'd go further than Mike; I agree with all the facts you present but not the conclusions you draw from them.
To take the most outrageous first; the idea that she should somehow have stuck with the format of the first three books. I like Buffy S1 and 2. I liked them when I first watched them. But mainly I like them now because I know how things are going to change.
However well or badly you think she's handled the changes to the series (and I happen to think it's one of the things she's done rather well, despite the series' other flaws), the books are almost entirely consistently Harry-focused.
The things that the first books are primarily about are the things that 11 year old Harry will be most aware of; the peculiarity of it all, the friendships, the sport, the homework. Voldemort is not really any more real to him than he is to us.
But a book about a 17 year old playing Quiddich and eating chocolate frogs while civilisation collapses around him? I suspect not. The move away from the school stories has to reflect the move of the hero away from school concerns.
Rowling is extremely good at keeping that focus. Fred and George's joke business allows her to throw in a few more chocolate frog type jokes without being too incongruous but generally she allows the more childish aspects of the magic (and eventually the whole school environment) to drift into the background of an older boy's perceptions in what one imagines is a pretty realistic manner.
I believe Rowling has stated that she intended that the series would grow up with its readership. It hasn't managed that of course because its readership has been so widespread- there were 7-8 year olds in the queue for the book behind us, as well as adults. But it develops for exactly the same reason that Buffy develops, and even Stalky and Co manage to do a little bit, because perceptions and the character's ability to interpret what is going on changes as they grow up.
Which is why the comedic school of the first book changes to the sort of place where Umbridge has ministerial approval to torture children in the fifth. That's not really much different to the way I remember the teachers in my middle school and my high school- the middle school ones were either nice or frightening, the high school ones were rather more complicated. There's an increase in understanding of motivation and character by Harry himself that allows the adults to stop being ciphers and start being characters (to the extent that JKR does characters, of course.)
You might well not like the later books but there only seem to be three alternatives; stop at three books, start again with a younger child, or make Harry one of those awful characters from the sixth form school books where they play cricket a lot who always seem to me now to be dangerously institutionalised and pathetically naive.
Re the writing; yes, of course the style is not good. Every point you make is ca good one.
Nevertheless, there are many books that I give up reading because the style is so bad (the latest ones are the Hidden Empire series, where my loathing of the style finally outweighed my interest in the plot, Dan Brown where I got a chapter in, and as for Eragon....)
I've never found JKR's style a hindrance. It's not good; there is no pleasure to be gained from her phrasing, and the horrible paragraph quoted was one that did bring me up short. But, in the context of the story she's telling, it isn't really a problem.
By context I don't mean that its a children's book; that's certainly no excuse. But it comes back to the Harry-centric nature of the writing. There is no narrative voice (that's probably a technical term that I'm misusing).
The writing forms two functions at once (but only two); it's a description of Harry's perceptions and feelings at any given time and by default it's also a screenplay (which is why each conversion to film is the least controversial ever).
As a result there's no insight from the author that isn't an insight of Harry's. Harry's not a particularly introspective or eloquent character, so we don't get thoughtful and eloquent prose. And I think it's much easier to be tolerant of a character's bad prose than an author's.
That is presumably why the other characters come across as a bit cardboard. One only ever sees as much into them as Harry does. Harry himself I think is pretty rounded, in a teenage sort of way.
Incidentally I thought that style worked best in parts of the last book where the collapse of wizard society was seen in this rather disjointed and confused way. It was also in the last book that JKR moved away from it to describe scenes where Harry was absent, and that didn't work very well at all.
I thought your theory about computer games was interesting, but doesn't really explain why the first couple of books were successful.
And the children's fantasy market appears to be ever increasing, so I don't think it's putting them off (incidentally, I see the Belgariad has just been reprinted in snazzy covers and added to the Teen Fiction section).
On a similar note, because I can see you're not tired of reading this post yet, I saw a trailer last night for a fantasy film so cliched it actually had me laughing out loud in the cinema. To stop, abruptly, when they announced that it was an adaptation of "The Dark is Rising".
First, thanks for a thoughtful post. Now, to my disagreement with it. :)
As Andrew suggests, Harry's chief distinguishing feature is his messy hair.
Err, isn't somebody forgetting something. Isn't Harry's scar his chief distinguishing feature?!
I am on the side of Mike Taylor (excellent substantiation with Lewis, as I would have pointed to also). I should note, too, that Tolkien greatly disliked Stevenson, though you esteem both of them highly yourself. Philip Pullman hates Lewis and Tolkien. And plenty of Tolkien and Lewis fans I know hate Pullman. Point being: tastes differ.
Other commenters have rebutted most of the points I'd have disagreed with, so I'll just offer one or two short replies to your argument about good writing versus bad. First, that long sentence you so disliked from the beginning of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? There's nothing particularly wrong with it from a writing standpoint. Virginia Woolf (certainly no slouch!) has a remarkable, and structurally similar, sentence of 181 words in her essay "On Being Ill". Just because a sentence is long, it isn't automatically bad.
Second, your points about minimizing adjectives, avoiding adverbs altogether, and showing instead of telling — all of that is overly facile, mere pap fed to beginning writers. As very general rules, these are not bad suggestions, but when taken too strictly, they can produce writing every bit as bad as that you seem to dislike so much. And not following them doesn't automatically produce bad writing either. Take a look at Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer for elaboration on this.
Is Rowling's writing the best I've read? Certainly not. But I love her books nonetheless. And the idea that Rowling is "cur[ing] the kids of imagination for the rest of their lives" — hardly. If there's one thing you can't defensibly accuse Rowling of, it's lack of imagination — or the catalyzing of it readers of all ages.
From Charles Dickens's "Our Mutual Friend". Compare and contrast with the scene in the kitchen:
The great looking-glass above the sideboard, reflects the table and
the company. Reflects the new Veneering crest, in gold and eke in silver, frosted and also thawed, a camel of all work. The Heralds' College found out a Crusading ancestor for Veneering who bore a camel on his shield (or might have done it if he had thought of it), and a caravan of camels take charge of the fruits and flowers and candles, and kneel down be loaded with the salt. Reflects Veneering; forty, wavy-haired, dark, tending to corpulence, sly,
mysterious, filmy--a kind of sufficiently well-looking veiled-
prophet, not prophesying. Reflects Mrs Veneering; fair, aquiline-
nosed and fingered, not so much light hair as she might have,
gorgeous in raiment and jewels, enthusiastic, propitiatory,
conscious that a corner of her husband's veil is over herself.
Reflects Podsnap; prosperously feeding, two little light-coloured
wiry wings, one on either side of his else bald head, looking as like his hairbrushes as his hair, dissolving view of red beads on his forehead, large allowance of crumpled shirt-collar up behind.
Reflects Mrs Podsnap; fine woman for Professor Owen, quantity of
bone, neck and nostrils like a rocking-horse, hard features,
majestic head-dress in which Podsnap has hung golden offerings.
Reflects Twemlow; grey, dry, polite, susceptible to east wind,
First-Gentleman-in-Europe collar and cravat, cheeks drawn in as if
he had made a great effort to retire into himself some years ago, and had got so far and had never got any farther. Reflects mature young lady; raven locks, and complexion that lights up well when well powdered--as it is--carrying on considerably in the captivation of mature young gentleman; with too much nose in his face, too much ginger in his whiskers, too much torso in his waistcoat, too much sparkle in his studs, his eyes, his buttons, his talk, and his teeth. Reflects charming old Lady Tippins on Veneering's right; with an immense obtuse drab oblong face, like a face in a tablespoon, and a dyed Long Walk up the top of her head, as a convenient public approach to the bunch of false hair behind,
pleased to patronize Mrs Veneering opposite, who is pleased to be
patronized. Reflects a certain 'Mortimer', another of Veneering's oldest friends; who never was in the house before, and appears not to want to come again, who sits disconsolate on Mrs Veneering's left, and who was inveigled by Lady Tippins (a friend of his boyhood) to come to these people's and talk, and who won't talk. Reflects Eugene, friend of Mortimer; buried alive in the back of his chair, behind a shoulder--with a powder-epaulette on it--of the mature young lady, and gloomily resorting to the champagne chalice whenever proffered by the Analytical Chemist. Lastly, the
looking-glass reflects Boots and Brewer, and two other stuffed
Buffers interposed between the rest of the company and possible
SK: perhaps Unitarians rather than Anglicans.
Andrew: Thank you. This article confirms that I contain multitudes, because I enjoyed it but I also enjoyed the books.
I will add my voice to the chorus saying that I agree with most of the points you make (I had a teacher who took off points every time we used "said" in a story, grr), but not with the conclusion. (I love the HP books, though I certainly don't love them the way I madly adore Tolkien.)
It's a pity if their first meetings with dragons and unicorns are in this mushed-up watered-down baby-food form...But isn't it equally likely that 1.3 million words of knock-off reproduction fantasy will leave them never wanting to see another dragon ever again?
I do have to disagree strongly with this. No kid is going to be turned off fantasy by reading Rowling, for two reasons. First, as Le Guin remarked somewhere-or-another, kids read mush, and it is good for them. When I was a kid, I read indiscriminately: Tolkien and Le Guin and Dragonlance (which, by the way, is infinitely more twee than Rowling, plus having much worse grammar) and Cooper and Mercedes Lackey (which is much worse than Rowling, who at least doesn't pretend to be writing high fantasy). And I eventually learned to tell the difference.
Second, I'd be surprised if most kids even realize that adults would stick both Hogwarts and Earthsea in the same artificial "fantasy" category. They have entirely different feels.
I think I've only read, at most the first two Harry Potter books. I didn't continue because they didn't particularly interest me and I couldn't see what the fuss was all about.
Yet your criticisms do seem to me to be somewhat, shall we say, unfair, in the way that academics and adult-folk used to criticize the Oz books (which were banned from most public libraries as unliterary trifles) and the way that many criticise J.R.R. Tolkien's writing.
With Tolkien, they often use the same trick you did: the critic supplies a passage by another writer who writes in an entirely different style, and claims that because the writing of the former is almost universally recognized as "good writing", therefore Tolkien is not a good writer, as though one cannot appreciate both beef bourguignon and baked alaska.
I might claim that Homer was a bad writer, in calling Achilles "fleet-footed" instead of showing us that he was a fast runner, in calling Odysseus, again and again, "wiley" without showing us his wiles. And where did "tamer of horses" come from for Hector? Shouldn't Homer have either shown Hector breaking-in horses or have found some more reasonable descriptive phrase. How often must we be told that Agamemnon is "King of Men"?
It seems to me to be quite acceptable that Rowling, in providing a description if the entire gang together in one setting, should put them in one sentence as an emphasis on their togetherness and should also provide them with their normal descriptions. There is a delight in recognition in such passages.
That the books to some extent resemble D&D-style games is reasonable. As a child I recall reading some older books about "chums" at English boarding schools and many of those stories were rather contrived mysteries in which the protagonists gathered clues by talking to the right people and making the proper responses (in between getting kidnapped and beaten up and gettgin in trouble with adults and so forth).
Though I didn't like the Rowling books particularly, from the little I've read of them, I don't think comments comparing them with what you feel are obviously(?) far superior stories you read as a child makes a point any more than someone whose childhood reading was Hans Christian Anderson can make a point by looking down on Walter R. Brooks' Freddy the Pig. You do much better when defending your tastes against the absurd criticism of others than when taking the other side.
Mark Twain wrote an hilarious essay proving, he thought, that James Fenimore Cooper was a horrible, horrible writer. I think Twain proved his point, mostly. But despite that, I still love Cooper's writing as do many others. You can't prove badness in the way you are attempting to prove it.
Remember Rudyard Kipling: "There are one and twenty ways To recite a tribal lay And each and every one of them is right."
Jim Allan
"If there's one thing you can't defensibly accuse Rowling of, it's lack of imagination"
That was a joke, right?
There are some valid points here and some that are less valid. Many of your problems with the series seem to be rooted in a dissonance between the story you thought you were reading and the one Rowling was actually writing. For example, your criticism against Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is that it is at this point that "Rowling ceases to treat Hogwarts as a literary device and starts treating it as if it was a real educational establishment", whereas I believe she was always doing the latter.
Whether this failure in communication is your fault or Rowling's is a matter for discussion - by the end of the second book, it seemed fairly obvious to me that the series was headed for a climactic battle between good and evil, but others' mileage may vary. Similarly, it is possible to debate which one of those stories - the revamped boarding school novel or the epic fantasy - is more worthy and more suited to Rowling's gifts (I tend to feel that one of the series's greatest attractions is the way in which she combines the two). Ultimately, however, it seems more than a little unfair to criticize the series for not being the story you wanted to read.
Which is not to say that you don't make some good points. Rowling is by no means a good writer, and in Deathly Hallows especially I was often brought up short by an unfortunate turn of phrase. It's also true that the plot token structure of Deathly Hallows is problematic. You've made the argument that Rowling wants to tell the story of the parent generation, not that of Harry and his contemporaries, before, and while I don't agree with it entirely - discovering his past is one of Harry's most important avenues to adulthood - it is certainly true that the adult characters are a great deal more interesting than the children.
All of these points, however, good and bad, are unfortunately overshadowed by some truly vile generalizations about the people who read and like the books.
It's the only form of narrative structure these people understand.
This is why fans of the series are so obsessed with spoilers. No-one pretends that they are waiting for the new book for the sheer fun of reading about what hi-jinks Harry and the gang will get up to this term.
Any sense of tension or suspense you may experience – and I can't deny that I kept turning the pages over – is created by the publicity campaign, not by the book itself.
I don't blame adults for reading this kind of thing. Adults use books to send themselves to sleep after a stressful day at the office. They don't expect them to make much sense. They probably don't pay much attention to them.
You're just a hop and a skip away from being A.S. Byatt at this point.
Oh, and as someone who read all seven books out loud, I can't for the life of me imagine what the problem is with saying "Harry, Ron and Hermione." Unless you're trying to cram all eight syllables into a single breath, in which case your kid is probably better off with the audio-books anyway.
Utter crap.
There are certainly a lot of things wrong with the Harry Potter books, but this missed all of them and focused on things that aren't actually bad.
we don't use "the vacuum cleaner", we use "the hoover" or "the dyson". So why say "the appliances" rather than "the fridge" or "work surfaces" rather than "Formica top"?
Uh, I say vacuum cleaner, and "appliances" is more than just a fridge. I have no idea what a "Formica top" is, but I would normally say bench. Unless I wanted to include the table as well.
So that criticism was complete crap.
To this vague language, Rowling applies teacher-pleasing describing-words like "gleaming" and "spotless". Is it physically possible to clean a "work-surface" so much that it gleams?
Has Andrew Rilstone really never heard "gleaming" (and similar words) used to describe something that is very clean? Whether it's literally possible or not is irrelevant.
A writer would have picked out some details which conveyed this comic situation: "The room smelt of pine and chlorine."; "Harry smiled when Hagrid plonked his big bum on the newly polished dining table."
Other than not really fitting the style of the book, I don't see how this is any better or worse than Rowling's actual words. Well, other than the "chlorine" bit. I have never encountered a kitchen that smells of chlorine.
Dudley is taken to "burger bars" rather than to "McDonalds"; he has a "computer console" rather than a "Playstation 2".
Not mentioning specific brands seems fairly reasonable to me.
In the movie, Ron is occasionally allowed to say "bloody", but in the books, the most he ever does is "use swearwords." In the latest volume, one of the adults gets to say "bastard" and "bitch" but the children limit themselves to "Merlin's underpants!" and "Merlin's baggy Y-fronts!"
Just a guess, but it could be because they're children's books.
When you are reunited with old friends, your heart does not "seem to expand and glow". I am not even sure what a glowwy expandy heart would feel like.
That would be a metaphor, and I understood it without difficulty.
A writer might have described actual human emotions based on her actual human experience: "Harry felt as if he had just finished some intense physical exercise". She might have shown us what Harry felt by showing us what he is doing: "He started to giggle uncontrollably at the weakest of jokes." Or she might have just told us how he felt in plain language: "Harry was very pleased to see them all again." Rowling simply mouths a boy-band lyric: a set of words which have no actual meaning behind them.
So, you'd prefer if it were written in a more boring manner?
The bit where he quotes other books, written in different styles, is pointless. Yes, it's written in a different style to those. So?
The problem sets in around volume 4, when Rowling ceases to treat Hogwarts as a literary device and starts treating it as if it was a real educational establishment. The whimsical "Billy Bunter with a magic wand" adventures become subordinate to a painfully derivative fantasy quest story in which Harry is the Chosen One who can defeat the Dark Lord.
So, you'd prefer if it had been the same book over and over again? The later books are different to the earlier ones. They're supposed to be. What's the problem?
The actual battle, by the way, is so convoluted that only a child could possibly understand it.
What? I didn't have any difficulty, and I'd been up all night (I was reading my sister's copy and wanted to finish it before I went home) by that stage.
And near the beginning he mentions liking things like "Diagon Alley, spellotape, the Mirror of Erised" but then later seems to be saying that similar things "Grimmauld Place" are bad.
As I said, there are plenty of things wrong with those books, but those aren't them.
Err, isn't somebody forgetting something. Isn't Harry's scar his chief distinguishing feature?!
Harry's scar is a mcguffin. Like his invisibility cloak. It's something he carries around with him and gets benefits from.
I think when Andrew says "his chief distinguishing feature is his messy hair" he means that Potter's hair is the thing that tells us most about his personality. We all know exactly what "the skinny kid with glasses and perennially messy hair" is supposed to be like. Several of, I imagine, were exactly that kid at school.
Second, your points about minimizing adjectives, avoiding adverbs altogether, and showing instead of telling — all of that is overly facile, mere pap fed to beginning writers.
I can't speak for Andrew, but several people here seem to be under the impression that Andrew is saying "JK Rowling is a bad writer because she does not follow this set of arbitrary rules". I think that he is in fact saying "JK Rowling is a bad writer, and here are some commonly accepted guidelines which describe the ways in which her writing is bad."
"Show don't tell" may be an oversimplification, but it's an oversimplification of a valid point. Throughout the Potter books we are told that Harry possessed many admirable qualities. He is brave and loyal and clever and noble and apparently also "the master of death." We seldom see him displaying any of these qualities. Instead we see him procrastinate, whine, shout at people and generally act like a moron. This creates a disconnect between the character Rowling wants us to believe Harry to be, and the character I see him as.
I'm sure you could come up with a long complicated name for that problem, one which is less "overly facile" than the one which Andrew uses, but really why would you bother when "show don't tell" works perfectly well.
The bit where he quotes other books, written in different styles, is pointless. Yes, it's written in a different style to those. So?
Oh, for Dumbledore's sake. I quoted two books and one comic, written in what is (in my opinion) a BETTER style to Rowling, and explained why (in my opinion) that style is BETTER.
The "point" that I was trying to make is that some people might (I thought, perhaps) say that Rowling's bad (in my opinion) writing didn't matter very much because of the age of her target-audience, so I felt that I should point out some books written for the same target audience where the the writing was (in my opinion) good.
If I say that the pizza in such-and-such a restaurant was (in my opinion) bad; then I don't have to show that I can cook a better pizza: I claim to be a restaurant critic, not a pizza chef. But I should point out some restaurant in a similar price range that (in my opinion) cooks good pizza, and explain why (in my opinion) their pizza is nicer.
ah, some proper criticism on the subject; thanks, mr. Rilstone.
Rowling, as a writer, simply suffers from having nothing to say.
Must agree with "charlene" though; if dragonlance (or Brown) could not kill fantasy, nothing will.
andrew stevens: you are certainly right about those being odd comparisons (such as viewing a children/young adult book on the same level as a fairly mature adult epic), but:
"(Nothing wrong with Narnia, of course, but it's an obvious hodge-podge that Lewis was making up as he went along. It's enjoyable in spite of that.)"
that would be the filmatized book only you are talking about, then?;)
"(Nothing wrong with Narnia, of course, but it's an obvious hodge-podge that Lewis was making up as he went along. It's enjoyable in spite of that.)"
that would be the filmatized book only you are talking about, then?;)
The Magician's Nephew.
Pure and (presumably) unashamed retconning.
I would much rather read a series (like HP) where the author has a reasonable idea of where it is going from the start. Even if (like Tolkien) he isn't always sure of how he's going to get there. Otherwise you end up with the Face of Boe. Or Twin Peaks.
(is that enough geek culture references in one para?)
Oh, but I like The Magician's Nephew!
It's funny how emotionally involved we can get in topics like these... After Order of the Phoenix, I got an e-mail from someone who'd obviously found some fellow HP fans on the internet, asking me to join the protest marches, boycotts and "letters to JK" campaigns to get [dead character] back. I thought the boycott idea was particularly inept.
Dan you said:
The reason (I suggest) that we care about the Potter characters is because they're familiar, because everybody knows about them. I've read more about Snape in casual conversations on the internet than I have in seven books worth of material.
I'm not sure what you mean - if you mean that they're familiar because the books are well-known, then that doesn't explain why anyone liked them when they weren't popular... and if you mean that they're familiar in the sense that we recognise them as being like people we know and it's easy to identify them, then I'd argue that that is evidence of good writing.
Throughout the Potter books we are told that Harry possessed many admirable qualities. He is brave and loyal and clever and noble and apparently also "the master of death." We seldom see him displaying any of these qualities. Instead we see him procrastinate, whine, shout at people and generally act like a moron.
I don't actually think that is the case, though. Or at least, yes, he does procrastinate, whine, shout at people and act like a moron. But he's also brave, loyal, clever and noble. And I think that's what makes him an interesting character.
(well, maybe not clever...)
? Narnia did end up with a coherent cosmology; even that rare thing in a created world, boundaries. That it grew along the way is surely a mere formality?
But then, i liked the David Lynch parts of Twin Peaks as well.
I'm not sure what you mean - if you mean that they're familiar because the books are well-known, then that doesn't explain why anyone liked them when they weren't popular... and if you mean that they're familiar in the sense that we recognise them as being like people we know and it's easy to identify them, then I'd argue that that is evidence of good writing.
I mean a little of both, actually.
Before the books got famous, I think people identified with the characters because they were fairly archetypal. This I genuinely do think was good writing. Good, but not great. Harry, Ron and Hermione had just enough personality for us to like them, but not enough personality to put us off liking them.
Once they got famous though, I genuinely think that the fame began to take the place of characterization. It becomes glaringly apparent that, for example, Snape is much less complex than the internet assumed he was.
Essentially I don't think Harry is *badly* characterised, I just don't think he's very *well* characterised either.
I don't actually think that is the case, though. Or at least, yes, he does procrastinate, whine, shout at people and act like a moron. But he's also brave, loyal, clever and noble. And I think that's what makes him an interesting character.
Harry is moderately brave, moderately loyal, and has nods towards nobility. But he's no braver or more loyal (and arguably a deal less noble) than any of the other characters in the book.
I don't dislike Harry. I think he's a bit bland. I do object to being told every five minutes that Harry is totally and utterly wonderful.
I mean for Pete's sake, he gets to literally become Jesus at the end of the book.
By "hodge podge" I assume you mean "Spenserian synthesis"?
I had never read any Harry Potter till today. I had to go see the secret Potty chamber movie because I lost a bet (never bet against Lord of the Rings) but I mentally gave the books the benefit of the doubt, and figured that they were much better than the movies (thus being only horrendously bad). But now, after reading your sample paragraph it appears that the movies are actually better than the books.
Mr. Rilstone said:
"By "hodge podge" I assume you mean "Spenserian synthesis"?"
always wondered why people did not notice that.
but yes - after the first book, (and some criticism from Tolkien) lewis had a quite clear idea of what he was about.
I agree with your general point, but I think you might be a bit misinformed with respect to the difficulties a writer can get into when publishing internationally.
A book that is simultaneously published in many countries is subject to the laws of each of those nations. The brand names you've mentioned (Hoover, Dyson, Formica) are still legally registered trademarks in many countries, including the US. Ownership of a trademark in the US gives the owner the exclusive commercial use of that brand name, but it also forces them to vigorously defend their trademark lest they lose the right to that exclusive use. If the right is lost, the trademark passes into the public domain, and any competitor can describe their product using that brand name. (See "Webster's Dictionary" and (outside Canada) "aspirin" for examples.) If Rowling had a character "hoovering the floor" or sitting on a "Formica top", she would be using a trademark as a generic, and the owners of the Hoover and Formica trademarks would have the right and even the duty to sue her to protect themselves.
Perhaps less importantly from a legal point of view, many of these terms would not be understood in the least by the international readers who make up the bulk of Rowling's fans. A Canadian, for instance, would understand what "hoovering" meant but might giggle at the term (you hoover cocaine, not the floor, which you vacuum). He would likely, however, have no clue whatsoever what a dyson was, and he might wonder why the narrator felt it necessary to specify the exact composition of the countertop.
Some writers publish separate British and North American editions for these reasons, but perhaps Rowling or her publishers didn't want to do that.
I was under the impression that Rowling had indeed published separate British and North American editions. I've just finished reading the series as U.S. audiobooks and I'm sure they can't be the same as the U.K. versions. Some of the pronunciations are odd to my British ears. Stalactites have the stress on the second syllable, for instance. And the vocabulary is oddly American, too. Dustbins are called "trashcans", training shoes are called "sneakers" and fringes (back to the ubiquitous hairstyles) are called "bangs". And wasn't "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" published in the U.S. as "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"?
For me, the genre fluidity is one of the best things about Harry Potter. It's not 'just another school story' and neither is it 'just another fantasy adventure.' Obviously, as you prefer the first three books, you like traditional school stories. "Since Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Rowling's publishers have performed an Equus style striptease act" Book 4 is the point at which the series changes from being simply a school story to something much more complicated. It's a shame that you stopped paying attention in book 6 - you missed out or didn't recognise that these books are about what it means to be alive and what it means to be dead, rather than what it means to be teacher's pet. The reason for the "Equus style striptease act" is that is actually very difficult to briefly summarise the books, as each of the film directors has found out.
Thank you for stating beautifully why I never liked these books. I tried the first one in English, and it bored me. When I went to live in Austria for a year, I read them in German because my vocabulary wasn't up to adult books. By the fiftieth page of the third book, I was bored again. I read all sorts of books, so it isn't the story -- it's the atrocious writing. However, I dare you to answer the question, "(gasp) Why don't you like the Harry Potter books?!?" by saying, "Because they're bad." I'm pretty sure that's a good way to die.
Andrew, you wrote:
This may be the single worst paragraph ever committed to paper by a published author. The first sentence is far too long. It gets caught up in a monotonous and repetitive formula: "This character, with this attribute and this attribute, doing this thing: that character, with that attribute and that attribute, doing that thing."
Always wanting to play the devil's advocate, could I say that I found the deliberately extended almost hypnotic repetition to be quite interesting in a literary fashion - a kind of word picture as HP takes in all his friends and what strikes him about them at that time (which will turn out to be the last time for some of them).
Quite often monotony and banality can be used as a deliberate device, for example in Ravel's Bolero, of which Ravel himself wrote "I have only ever written one masterpiece. Unfortunately it contains no music".
A similar effect is used in the first movement of Shostakovich's 7th Symphony - seemingly endless repetition of an incredibly banal tune, of the kind that once you've heard it, never leaves your head. The tune, like in Bolero just gets layered with more and more heavy, and equally banal ornamentation till you're just desperate for it to stop. It irritated Bela Bartok so much that he inserted a parody of it in his own "Concerto for orchestra". By all normal standards of symphonic writing, it's abysmal - and yet the effect is deliberate, and overwhelming and conveys exactly what the composer thought about the war.
Going back to literary examples, as a matter of interest, would you apply the same dismissive literary criticism to Psalm 136 of which the formula is {God did this} (his love endures for ever) {God did that} (his love endures for ever) etc etc etc for quite a long time.
The question of "badness" in literature is quite difficult. I was taught never to start sentence with the word "and" or "but". But there are many decent writers who quite often break the rule. And I don't think that it is necessarily a response to say "Ha-ha: according to your rule, Tolkien must have been a bad writer." The writer's code is more guidelines than rules.
A gifted word-smith may have spotted that
"...he smote once more upon the brazen doors, and challenged Morgoth to come forth to single combat. And Morgoth came."
is better than
"...he smote once more upon the brazen door, and challenged Morgoth to come forth to single combat, and Morogth came."
"he smote once more upon the brazen door, and challenged Morgoth to come forth to single combat....and Morgoth came"
or even
"he smote once more upon the brazen door, and challenge Morgoth to come forth to single combat. To everyone's great surprise, Morgoth came."
(I think that the period before the "and" represents and exaggerated pause: we subliminally hold our breaths for a second and think "will he come or not". The full-stop makes us feel surprised, which is better than writing "surprisingly enough." Compare: "(He) besought Pilate that he might take away the body of Jesus: and Pilate gave him leave.")
I said that Rowling over-applies a rule that prissy school-teachers used to give to young children: "Put lots of adjectives in your writing", and pointed out that the advice given to adults is more often "Put as few adjectives as possible in your writing." But clearly, both "rules" are actually guidelines, and I am not such a fool as to think that the mere presence of a describing-word in a piece of text is sufficient grounds to damn the writing.
The ballad beginning "The old home town looks the same / as I step down from the train" tells us on now less than twelve occasions that the grass around the speaker's home town is "green". What other colour should it be? Is the protagonist an inhabitant of the planet Brupekedrin 13 who is surprised that the grass is not a purply shade of mauvy russet? Of course, the adjective isn't there to convey information: it's there to create a more subtle literary effect. It's what folk singers would call "a kenning", a repetitious tag that is intended to make a particular phrase memorable. We hear "it's good to touch the green, green grass of home" five times; and the two "greens" make it stick in our memory. This generates a certain sentimental impact when it changes to "and they'll lay me neath the green, green grass of home" in the final line.
Similarly, when Dickens uses the word "fog" 14 times in one paragraph, he is generating a literary effect which would probably have been spoiled if he had crossed the paragraph out and replaced it with "It was very foggy."
The Biblical example is problematic, because it expects the response "You surely aren't saying that God is a bad writer?" I don't think that the belief that a particular text is the carrier of the logos (or, for that matter, that it is Infallible Word Of God) requires you to believe that it is great literature, any more than a belief in the Incarnation implies that Jesus was necessarily a champion sprinter or the world's tallest man. The King James version of the Psalm 136 is a choral, call-and-response hymn, which makes use of "parallelism" -- as we were taught in Sunday School, the words don't rhyme, but the meanings rhyme.
So the same thing is repeated in different words, in order to give it emphasis: "To him which smote great kings....and slew famous kings...And Og the King of Bashann". Much of the poem is simply a narrative summary of the book of Exodus: "To him which divided the Red Sea in parts...And made Israel to pass through the midst of it...But overthrew pharaoh and his hoist into the Red sea..."
I assume that service leader is intended to call out the first part of each phrase ("Who remembered us in our low estate") and the congregation calls out the refrain ("for his mercy endureth forever"). Presumably, chanting "his mercy endureth forever" 26 times is intended to impress the concept on the congregations mind: and this is meant to have a spiritual effect on them (like a "mantra" in Hinduism). Or possibly the repetition was part of the musical setting?
You think that the "haircut" paragraph in Rowling may have a specific literary purpose. I don't find it so myself; but I certainly agree that your explanation is the kind of defense that Rowling needs. It is no help to say "it's a children's book" or "it doesn't matter whether or not it is well written," or "yah-boo, Andrew's a literary snob" or "you just happen to prefer Stan Lee's style to J.K Rowling's". It is very helpful to say "In fact, Rowling's style, is one that she has deliberately adopted in order to produce a very definite effect; and if you tried to "improve" the text, you would in fact find that the books no longer worked."
I can certainly think of writers of whom this is true: everyone calls Lovecraft a terrible writer; yet everyone knows the Chthulu mythos, and it's hard to see how you could "improve" Lovecraft's style and leave the mythos intact. The idea that this is true of Rowling is worth exploring.
Looking again at the paragraph, I think my initial "explanation" of deliberate banality is probably incorrect, though it was an example of how such things could be used to valid effect. It seems to me the effect is more cinematic - one sees a long slow pan, the camera playing on each character in turn - with these characters, contrasted mainly by their different hairstyles, all united in a common goal.
I'm not sure if cinematic techniques constitute "good writing" as I'm probably more a literary chav than a literary snob!
"Dumbledore's death in the style of GK Chesterton"
By Zander Nyrond
Guardian Unlimited (Friday 15 July 2005)
I'm probably not the kind of guy who's supposed to call out writers (Most I have so far is 10th Grade English), but like you, I never really saw the appeal of the books. I'm the type of person who doesn't want to get bored from the start, and for this reason, I preferred the earlier books vastly, because they were just long enough to tell a story, and not drag it on. Then again, those earlier books were the only ones I bothered to read. (My Potter resume is just books 1, 2, 3, and 100 pages of 5.)
I personally think that J.K. Rowling jumped the shark around book 4, where it stopped being a situation of actually giving the action, and more along the lines of 'OK gaiz lets go for the world record of longest fantasy book evar lololololol'. While more things can be added, sometimes, J.K. Rowling just heavily embellishes onto things. What could have taken 2 pages now takes 50. For chrissakes, I couldn't even make it through 100 pages of book 5 because nothing happened. (I'm probably exaggerating, but I don't remember if anything of note even happened, or if Harry had even returned to Hogwarts in those 100 pages. I'm thinking he didn't, and I never want to check.)
I've read pretty long books before, but that's because they managed to keep things going all through it. (A difficult feat, but possible.) Of course, different strokes for different folks, and that's just what I personally like in a book.
"I don't dislike Harry. I think he's a bit bland. I do object to being told every five minutes that Harry is totally and utterly wonderful.
I mean for Pete's sake, he gets to literally become Jesus at the end of the book."
That reminds me, I'm also not really liking the characters, either. Harry Potter himself is arguably the perfect literary example of the fan term, 'Mary Sue/Marty Stu'. He's got all these virtues written about him and everything handed to him despite showing evidence of the contrary, but even then, those are twisted, somehow, into virtues themselves.
Some of the other students also suffer from poor characterization. Draco Malfoy kind of showed some potential as a 'friendly rival' type of character, but the potential was taken away and he became a cookie-cutter villian similar to those seen in Saturday morning cartoons with their convoluted Rube Goldberg machines. Harry's friends are just there as devices to give Harry himself more depth. (i.e. Ron's there to be cowardly, or Hermione's there to look good, or whatever.) If Ms. Rowling wanted to write about 1 person only, she could just commission herself to write biographies and call it a day.
I hope J.K. Rowling still has some leftover potential to use, to go back to her roots instead of letting all the fame get to her head and continuing to write mediocre-at-best 'attempts' at books in general. I won't hold my breath. At best, the next one might be 500 pages instead of 500,000, and at worst, I don't wanna know.
After reading your post on Harry Potter, and the subsequent comments made by others on this fine blog, I've come to the conclusion that you are completely and utterly wrong on just about every point you tried to make, mostly due to your unwillingness to take the Harry Potter series seriously at all, and the fact that you openly admit to not caring about any of the characters and then proceed to lambast the author for not taking your hand through all the pages and offering play-by-play explanations of what's been going on during the six books you should've read carefully before the start of the seventh. It's a series for Christ's sakes, not several different novels with loosely connected plotlines.
"This may be the single worst paragraph ever committed to paper by a published author. The first sentence is far too long. It gets caught up in a monotonous and repetitive formula: "This character, with this attribute and this attribute, doing this thing: that character, with that attribute and that attribute, doing that thing."
Let me explain to you why this supposedly 'worst paragraph EVER' moved me close to tears.
As the seventh book is the last book in the series, I knew that Harry's adventures would end at the final page. This is an intensely emotional passage because you know that this is the last time you'll get to see Harry and his friends all together in one room--not because of a sleezy Big Brother publicity campaign on who will be voted off, but simply by virtue of the fact that this is the final book of the series. Harry, who hadn't seen his friends for several months after a particularly trying year, wanted to take in as much as he can in one glance, absorbing them all and taking in their love.
I, too, find your criticisms of Rowling's use of trade names (or lack thereof) to be utterly invalid. Is the pleasure you get from a novel that affected by 'tissues' instead of 'Kleenex?' Why on earth would you even care? And if you're concerned with recreating realistic teenage dialogue, seeing as how I'm a teenager I can guarantee you that 'kids these days' aren't raising eyebrows at their friends whenever someone says "Let's go get fast food!" as opposed to "Let's explore the myriad of fast food possibilities like Burger King, McDonald's, and Taco Bell!"
"I haven't really given Harry Potter much thought since I tossed Harry Potter and the Half-Baked Prince aside in disgust: so I freely admit that I had forgotten who "Fleur" was: it didn't help very much to be told that she was the slender, beautiful one."
Erm, okay? You openly admit to tossing aside book 6 and not paying much of the rest of the series any attention, then whine when you're not given a paragraph recap of who Fleur Delacour is at the very end of the series? Honey, we're at Book 7 now. If you can't recognize Fleur Delacour by name alone after she's made significant appearances in the past three books, that's really not J.K. Rowling's fault at all. Plus, Rowling doesn't have time to drag along casual readers with constant references to Fleur's past so they won't fall behind. She's not obligated as an author to sparknote her own text for you.
Your further criticisms of Rowling's writing seem to be coming from a standpoint of English critics lauding her for excellence in writing. No one with any literary merit is proclaiming to the world that Rowling is God's gift to writers. She herself isn't walking around wearing "I'm The World's Best Children's Writer" crown on her head. We all agree: she's not a great writer!
"Some people think that it doesn't matter what the younglings are reading, provided they are developing the habit of picking up books. Give the kids a shot of Harry Potter (the first hit is free) and before long they'll be full blown James Joyce addicts. Transformers leads to The Seventh Seal and The Da Vinci Code leads to Documents of the Christian Church as surely as the Northern Line leads to High Barnet. Is there actually any evidence for this?"
There isn't any evidence to the contrary, either, which makes this section in your post rather pointless. I've known plenty of kids who have read Harry Potter (myself included) and who are now majoring in English lit. I have both read and enjoyed James Joyce as well as Harry Potter, so make of that what you will.
"Harry can't, by definition, miss his parents, because he doesn't have any: by another piece of looking-glass logic, the only time he feels homesick is during the holidays."
Not only is this statement probably quite offensive to orphans everywhere, it truly shows you have not been reading the books with any sort of care at all, and have no place calling their literary worth into question. Harry pines for his parents nearly every day. The central theme of all seven books is death, the fear of it, trying to connect with those who have gone, constantly feeling as though a part of him is missing because his friends all have parents and he doesn't...Harry's greatest strength is his ability to love, and that means he does ache constantly for his parents, who continue to drive him and motivate him up until the last page of the book, where he names his children after them.
I also agree with an earlier poster that argued that there was a disconnect between the book you wanted to read and the book Rowling was actually writing. Given the climax of Philosopher's Stone, it was exceptionally obvious to me where we were headed by Book 7...Voldemort would return and Harry would have to face him. And you can't expect a 11 year-old to have the same reactions, interests, and insights as an adult 17 year-old.
"In the fifth volume, evil Blairite Dolores Umbridge starts to physically torture misbehaving pupils. Are we to read this as comic violence or react to it as a realistic depiction of quite serious child abuse? If the latter, are we entitled to ask whether there are social workers or schools inspectors in the wizarding world? If Harry is now the Hero With a Thousand Faces are we really supposed to care (or imagine that he cares) about his wizarding exams or who wins the Quidditch tournament?"
The answer Rowling gives us to your last question is quite clearly: NO! Harry comes to this realization as early as Book 1--as he's rallying support from Ron and Hermione to capture the Philosopher's Stone, he argues that there's no point to worrying about expulsion or exams because if Voldemort takes over, there will be no Hogwarts to worry about! This also demonstrates that you really have not read the books with any sort of care. We are entittled to call into question the lack of social services in the Wizarding World--Rowling utilizes this world she's created as a microcosm of our own, pointing out institutionalized racism, bigotry, and the dangers of a totalitarian government. The wizarding world is by no means a perfect place, and Rowling rather candidly acknowledges this.
"We only cared about the identity of the Heir of Slytherin and the location of the Philosopher's Stone in so far as they provided a pretext for Harry to leave the dorm after lights out, sneak into the girls' toilets (sorry, bathrooms) and generally have a thrilling but slightly naughty time."
Correction: you only cared about the identity of the Heir of Slytherin because it allowed Harry to experience night-time shenanigans. My friends and I who have read and enjoyed the books are genuinely interested in the mythology and background of the world Harry lives in. The Heir of Slytherin Story is one of my favorites, and quite scary, too.
"So, instead of following any conventional narrative structure, the books are built like computer games."
There are two things wrong with this critique. One is your assumption that books who don't follow a conventional narrative structure are 'bad,' and that the sort of 'adventure format' of a modern day roleplaying game makes for a dull, tedious story. I'd like to point to Final Fantasy (particularly FFX and FFVII, FVIII) for having riveting stories, as well as a score of other games that if put into novel form would make for great reading.
"Wizards have godfathers, celebrate Christmas, name hospitals after saints and put quotes from the Bible on their grave stones, but they don't have churches, vicars or Christenings and their weddings and funerals are secular affairs. But hey, it's only a kid's book, right?"
The Wizarding World Rowling paints is a largely secular one. There may well have been Christian Saints in Wizarding History hundreds of years ago, but the practice of combining wizardry with religion seems to have died out, most likely due to the way religion, in particular Christianity, has treated witches and wizards and the like. And at the same time, there are millions of families alive today who are not the least bit religious but celebrate Christmas and the like as secular holidays. And how do you know a Wizard Christening is remotely like a Christian one? Sirius is named Harry's godfather, but we have no idea as to how this title was bestowed upon him, there very well may have been no religious ceremony involved.
"This is why fans of the series are so obsessed with spoilers. No-one pretends that they are waiting for the new book for the sheer fun of reading about what hi-jinks Harry and the gang will get up to this term. The only reason for reading it is to discover which new pages from her notebook J.K Rowling is going to release into the public domain. Once you know that information, there's no actual need to read the book."
There is tension created, sure, by publishers who tease fans with potential spoilers about who lives or who dies, but this is not the sole appeal to reading the book. Why do people care about the characters well-being if it was so shoddily written? Obviously, people have come to love these characters fiercely (which I believe is a mark of a great writer, and I don't know how you could possibly disagree), and yes there is some sort of morbid fascination with finding out if they live or die, but the attachment and the love comes first. Otherwise, why bother?
"But something has gone very wrong with a world in which children would rather read about a school-shaped theme-park than Greyfriars or Linbury Court or Malory Towers or //please insert name of contemporary school story here//. It's a pity if their first meetings with dragons and unicorns are in this mushed-up watered-down baby-food form. Oh, maybe after finishing Harry Potter they'll go looking for more dragon-books and stumble on A Wizard of Earthsea or The Sword in the Stone. But isn't it equally likely that 1.3 million words of knock-off reproduction fantasy will leave them never wanting to see another dragon ever again? And is that why the Harry Potter series seems to be approved of by the kinds of grown-ups who openly sneer at Tolkien readers? Do they secretly hope that J.K Rowling is a kind of spiritual vaccination that will cure the kids of imagination for the rest of their lives?"
This last paragraph is equal parts silly and completely not true.
First off, you come off sounding incredibly elitist and out of touch with Rowling's story as well as her goals as a writer. No one can 'sedate' a child's imagination through bad writing. Claiming that a child's imagination is that prone to stifling is insulting to imaginative children everywhere. A child will keep imagining whether or not you feel like the unicorns in Harry Potter are properly presented.
Do you think that the kinds of parents who 'sneer at Tolkein readers' just unfortunately have an image of a Tolkein fan as someone who lives with his parents at the age of 30 and plays D&D every night with three other bachelors with substance abuse problems? I mean, if you're going to start stereotyping Harry Potter readers, I'm perfectly at license to do the same to fans of Tolkein.
I believe you did enjoy the first three Harry Potter books. I believe you found the fourth book's direction to be puzzling, wanting to read more of the same. What I have a hard time believing is that after your bad experience with the fourth book, you continued to read books five, six, and seven, each time becoming more 'disgusted' by the books and finally throwing down the sixth one in contempt. You were coming into reading these books with a negative perception already, whether that was from jealousy (HP getting more attention and praise than C.S. Lewis' work) or your annoyance with how immensely popular the books have become so much that people everywhere couldn't shut the hell up about them.
If you're ever interested, please, please, please read books four through five again, this time with more of an open-mind. They're quite beautiful, and surprisingly deep in social commentary as well as philosophy.
Whew, rant over. Thanks for reading!
Oh, don't hold back. Tell me what you really thought.
Excellent essay, thank you.
"Give children or thick adults ... Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and they will feel right at home."
Heh. I've come across quite a few of those 'thick adults' in the past year, trying valiantly to justify lauding Rowling as a literary God.
I appreciated very much your equating Harry Potter - and in particular 'Deathly Hallows' - with a computer game. What made Rowling's work even more amateurish, and this comparison even more valid, was her writing the characters themselves acknowledging this fact, multiple times, including Mr. Lovegood's observation:
"... One simply uses the symbol to reveal oneself to other believers, in the hope that they might help one with the Quest."
and Harry's outright statement:
"But you said it, Hermione! You've got to find out about them for yourself! It's a Quest!"
Capitalised 'Q' and all.
It's a sad indictment of an Author's desperation when she has the actual characters trying to legitimise the plot in this manner, practically breaking the 'fourth wall' in winking at the reader and making comments on the story in which they are players.
I disagree that your other examples of books focused up on children are better. They're simply different, from another age of writing.
What's wonderful about Harry Potter is that the characters are present day. Children can relate to them, or recognize their peers in them.
And they READ these books - without prodding from their parents. Something strikes a chord with them, as opposed to the more "skilled language" classics which are dry and frankly unapproachable to many children.
Your complaint about name brands of items (the PSP, for example) shows your ignorance on the topic. Name brands of electronics can't be used in these books without clearance from the company, with rights clearances for every single nation they're published in. Therefore, it's much easier - and safer - to be generic. Particularly with something as massive as Harry Potter, where every named company would be suing to get proceeds for their names being in the books. It would be a legal nightmare.
I think the summation of your entire rant is that you didn't like the books, the writing doesn't speak to you, and therefore Harry Potter sucks. It's snobbish "these books are better" elitism, simply because YOU like them more. But really? It just comes down to a matter of preference, of style, and personal interest.
I prefer to celebrate the fact that a few years ago, I watched a nine year old who had never willingly read anything over ten pages by himself pick up the Harry Potter series, and didn't stop reading, having to be forced to go to bed. And undoubtedly even after being told to bed, he was reading under his comforter with the emergency flashlight from his bedside table, as quietly as possible, so he wouldn't be chastized again.
Perfect books or not, who cares? Children love them, and many of them have discovered the joy of getting lost in a book. Said nine-year-old now reads voraciously, and he says it's because Harry Potter made reading fun.
Therefore, the books are wonderful. For that reason alone.
think the summation of your entire rant is that you didn't like the books, the writing doesn't speak to you, and therefore Harry Potter sucks. It's snobbish "these books are better" elitism, simply because YOU like them more. But really? It just comes down to a matter of preference, of style, and personal interest.
The "rant" above could be applied to any critical work ever written by any critic, from Samuel Johnson or Oscar Wilde to the hack who write 200 words each week for the local paper. If all criticism is subjective, and any attempt to say "This book is well written, this book is poorly written" is snobbish then we can never say anything about books. Ever.
I wrote a 2,000 plus closely reasoned words explaining why I didn't think the latter books in the series works. If that comes down to personal preference, then best just sit in a corner going "bibble".
If J K Rowling has really bred a generation of children so stupid that they find Winnie the Pooh, Treasure Island and Spider-Man too "dry" to read then I really don't see too much hope for the human race.
Man In Art Gallery: Oh, I really don't like that painting.
Whistler (a painter): Then let me buy you a gin and tonic. You're sure to write that.
Oscare Wilde (overhearing): I wish I had said that!
You know the rest.
I'm still finding it hard to pin down why I'm not a fan of the Harry Potter books. All of the above is very well-reasoned, of course.
I agree that once you know the plot, the writing doesn't really merit going back and rereading later on (perhaps until you've forgotten the plot again). And I agree that the characterisation is bland. The comparison springs to mind with Orson Scott Card of Ender's Game, and his "parallel sequels" (another set of novels about the same events written from one of the other characters' point of view). Can you imagine the 7 Harry Potter novels again from Hermione's point of view? Or one of the Weasleys'? They would be exactly the same.
The only character for whom that might work would be my long-standing favourite, Snape, and I'm not sure Rowling could pull it off, on the evidence I've seen so far...
Stirring the old porridge pot here, eh? It was a well-written article, and you made your points very well. But I found myself disagreeing with you on this most basic point: But I love Harry Potter, Andrew!
I won't make excuses for it, and I've got a lot more respect for your criticisms than I do for some of the comments posted here. Saying, "I really enjoyed HP, but Rowling is a shite writer" is tantamount to saying, "I like shite". It's a coward's way out and an obvious attempt at fitting in. Looking away while the cool kids beat up a nerd is no different than getting your own kick in while he's down.
If you're for something or against something, have the stones to say it without qualifying it. If you can't do that, you're just background noise to me.
Nice post, though.
The Sound and Fury of Kristopher A. Denby
I came here to rant and realised Eros had already said everything I wanted to say.
I am sorry for having criticised your religion.
"It gets caught up in a monotonous and repetitive formula: "This character, with this attribute and this attribute, doing this thing: that character, with that attribute and that attribute, doing that thing."
Isn't this particular paragraph just another take on the Catalog of Ships from Homer? By this time in the narrative everyone has their favorite character, so much like the Greeks wanting to make sure their home town is introduced, she's got to give everyone their due...
My daughter (8) is currently about half way through the final book and loving it, prior to starting Harry Potter (at around 7) she wasn't that into chapter books but thanks to a combination of JK Rowling and Roald Dahl, she no reads a wide range of writers. I think though that my daughter is more in debt (and therefore I am to) to Dahl rather than Rowling, as she was exposed to both at around about the same time and initially showed not that much interest in Rowling, it was only after the madness of things like Charlie and The Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach did she 'get' Hogwarts. But the Harry Potter series has taught her to follow very long story arcs, always a useful skill for when she gets into comics later ;)
I have to agree that JK Rowling's writing is not brilliant (it'll be interesting how she fairs when her adult book comes out) and she is overly descriptive and it bugs the hell out of me to see my daughter being taught in school to write the same way. It made me laugh, in an ironic sort of way, the other day when the school published a postcard Pullman had sent in reply to some questions sent by one of the older pupils, one of the questions had been 'you use 'said' a lot' (as in implied 'my teacher tells me not to use said'), to which Pullman replied something along the lines of 'yes I do use said a lot', if I remember correctly I think he said he found it useful.


text:
Living in London – How to Call 911 in London
If you are moving to London then you will want to know where to go and what to do if you have an emergency. While you will be able to find all the information that you need once you get there, it might be nice to have a list of numbers that you can have as you arrive. No one wants to think about the fact that they may need the help of one of the emergency services, but the fact is that it is always better to be prepared for anything. You do not want to feel stranded in your new London rental apartment without having the number of all the emergency services readily available.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Eating healther. Exercising more. Quitting smoking.
Sound familiar? Those probably are the three most popular resolutions made every time a new year rolls around.
You, undoubtedly, have compiled a list a resolutions for yourself. We hope those we've elected to represent us at the local, state and federal levels of government have done so as well.
In case they haven't, we have developed a list of recommended resolutions in 2012 for governmental agencies:
• For all lawmakers to get past partisan bickering and embrace a working relationship consisting of compromise.
• For lawmakers at the federal level to make decisions based on what is best for the American people instead of on the basis that it is an election year and you will do only what it takes to get re-elected.
• For lawmakers at the state and federal level to make it less about the lobbyists and more about the people.
• For Congress to get federal spending under control, take the necessary steps to turn the economy around, examine the federal tax code, and tackle meaningful Social Security and Medicare reform.
• For state lawmakers to stop ignoring the elephant in the room: Illinois' pension crisis. Not only does future pension benefits need reform, but there is the $85 billion the state is behind in pension fund payments.
• For state lawmakers to take a hard look at spending and cutting the waste.
• For lawmakers in Springfield to mandate that the state pay its bills.
• For state lawmakers to practice what they preach when it comes to ethics and ethics reform.
• For lawmakers in Springfield to make Illinois more business friendly.
• For local governments, to attract new businesses to fill empty storefronts.
• For local governments and school boards to live within their means. Taxpayers already are stretched thin. Please don't ask for more from them.


text:
Beatport is the world's largest electronic music store for DJs
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My Beatport lets you follow your favorite DJs and labels so you can find out when they release new tracks. So go follow someone!
The Okeh Rhythm & Blues Story 1949-1957
Big Maybelle,
The Thrillers,
Little Joe,
Hurricane Harry,
Chuck Willis,
Annie Laurie,
Cliff "King" Solomon,
The Royals,
Sammy Cotton,
Big John,
The Buzzards,
Cliff 'King' Solomon and His Orchestra,
Titus Turner,
The Bill Davis Trio,
Earl Williams,
Irlton French,
Jumpin Joe Williams with Red Saunders,
The Ravens,
Jumpin' Joe Williams,
Maurice King & His Wolverines,
Billy Stewart,
Marvin Gaye,
The Marquees,
The Treniers,
Leroy Johnson,
The Five Scamps,
Andre Williams,
Screamin' Jay Hawkins,
Chris Powell,
The Five Blue Flames,
Mr. Google Eyes With Billy Ford & His Musical V-8's,
Hadda Brooks,
Paul Gayten,
Larry Darnell,
Pinnochio James,
Red Rodney Sextet,
Pearl Traylor,
Little Brother Brown,
Little Brother Brown,
The Shufflers,
Lee Allen,
Lloyd Fatman


text: Wade Brainerd wrote: > On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 7:04 PM, Dave Bauer <dave.bauer at gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> >>> Actually, you can create a .vmdk from .img using the QEMU tools. It's >>> just that .vmdk is much more widely supported that .img so it would >>> save a conversion step for most VM users. >>> >>> I agree that we should be providing 1 click solutions *in addition* to >>> providing .vmdk files for people who already use VMs regularly. >> Right, VMDK is not easily reusable though, for Parallels you have to perform >> a few steps to reuse it. >> >> One click solution is the goal of course. QEMU really isn't that solution >> unless you can use acceleration. The speed is pretty much unusable >> otherwise, and that is really only useful for testing if you are very >> patient. Anyone who needs a 1-click installer also would expect reasonable >> performance. >> I haven't found an easy way to get QEMU working with acceleration on OS X. >> I think we are working towards a solution, just not as quickly as we would >> like. >> >> Dave > > I brought up VMware Virtual Appliances as an option at one point, has > anyone tried creating one of those? I'm not sure how close to "one > click" they are though. > > VirtualBox appears to have the beginnings of some appliance support as well. > > Best, > Wade Okay folks, sorry for the late reply, as I just came across this thread (I was a bit behind my e-mail). So let me explain some things: There are the appliance-tools (www.thincrust.net) available which do in fact exactly the thing which has been discussed here. You can even specify a output file type, so that you'd get vmdk, raw or other files. Sounds cool, heh? :) Well, what I've done now is that I've taken our kickstart files and made one for the appliance creation up out of them. It's also in the soas GIT repo. Then I worked on getting appliance-tools to work on our build systems (thanks erikos here!) and it now creates flawlessly such a .vmdk file. I already gave it a try and it boots, but doesn't come up with the Sugar desktop, but fails when trying to log in. A good idea would be probably to have these images built together with the other snapshots. Cheers, --Sebastian


text:
Three strikes and Amanda Bynes is out...of a driver's license. Finally.
Unless President Barack Obama decides to take time out from his nomination tonight to grant a pardon, the former All That star is far from all right, now that she reportedly just had her license revoked to go along with a DUI count and two hit-and-run charges.
Why didn't Amanda lose her license sooner?
U.S. & World
According to the Los Angeles Times, the California Department of Motor Vehicles has put the kibosh on her being behind the wheel. There was no word on when she officially had her license revoked, but presumably she will need a lift until she takes care of her court docket.
Earlier this week, Los Angeles prosecutors formally filed the two hit-and-run counts for separate incidents on April 10 and Aug. 4. The charges carry a maximum sentence of six months behind bars and a $1,000 fine.
Amanda seeks presidential pardon
The DMV would not confirm the report and Bynes' lawyer, Richard Hutton, declined to comment on her license status. However, Hutton did tell E! News that Bynes would not appear in court next Wednesday to answer to the DUI charge, which springs from a April 6 incident involving Bynes temporarily parking her BMW into a Sheriff's patrol car. (It's because Bynes doesn't need to attend in person, not because she couldn't find a car pool.)
According to attorney Troy Slaten, who is not involved in the Bynes case but is familiar with such matters, refusal to take a Breathalyzer test, such as Bynes did in her DUI case, results in an automatic one year suspension.
Seriously, what the heck's wrong with Amanda Bynes?!
Bynes has pleaded not guilty to the DUI count, which potentially could also include prison time and a hefty fine, and begged Obama to use his commander-in-chief powers to make the case go away.
So far, no dice.


text:
- Product Info
All fixtures and fittings are included in the box so you can put your Mirror/Cabinet on the wall/table as soon as you receive it. If you need more information then please call or email for a full explanation on fitting and how the Mirror/Cabinet and its different features works.
Technical Info
Not to be confused with low power, low quality audio systems fitted to other products. The Bluetooth™ audio option available on a wide range of our bathroom cabinets produces a high quality stereo sound from an impressive 20Wrms per channel amplification system. Pair your mobile device easily using Bluetooth™ 3.0+EDR, or connect directly to the system using a 3.5mm jack plug.
For the audiophiles, the full technical specification of the Bluetooth™ option is…
- Bluetooth™ Specification
- Bluetooth™ , 3.0+EDR compliant
- Typical +2dBm Class 2 output power
- Receiver Sensitivity: GFSK typical -90dBm,
- Amplifier Specification
- 0.03% THD+N @10W 4ohm
- 0.1% THD+N@12W 4ohm
- 0.18% IHF+IM@1W 4ohm
- High power
- 25W@4 ohm,10% THD+N Vdd=14.6V
- 22W@4 ohm,10% THD+N Vdd=13.5V
- 13W@8ohm ,10% THD+ N Vdd+13.5V
- Class-T architecture
- High efficiency
- 88% @12W 8ohm
- 81% @ 20W 4ohm
- Dynamic range=99dB
- Over-current protection
- Over-temperature protection
- Speaker Specification
- Frequency Response: 105Hz - 18KHz
- SPL 82db, Qts: 1.31, Vas: .0140Cuft., fo: 160Hz free air
- Impedance: 4 ohms
- Power: 40W
- Mirror Cabinet Specification
- 56 x 0.2 watt LED's (included).
- Built in Demister pad on both doors.
- Internal LED lighting.
- Internal 240 volt shaver socket with integral on/off rocker switch.
- Shaver socket can be used with lights off.
- Self branded infra red sensor on/off sensor switch (bottom). Please allow 10cm from nearest obstacle e.g tap or sink.
- Beautiful Highest Quality Aluminium Chassis.
- Soft close Hinges with easy clip doors.
- Fully adjustable shelf holders.
- Internal Cabinet Lighting
- This cabinet needs to be connected to an earth wire.
- Please ask a professional if you are not capable of fitting yourself.
- The cabinet is in accordance with IP44, CE and RoHS regulations.
- We recommend 2 people are needed to fit this cabinet as it weighs 26.5kg.


text:
Scrap Heap Heroes
He's finished. He's washed up. He's through. He's a loser. Why bother with this guy?
All things some current Yankees have probably heard over the past couple of years. But right now, no one is saying any of these things. Right now the Yankees are in first place in the American League East, mostly because of the players who were taken off the so-called scrap heap.
I'll begin with the obvious: Bartolo Colon.
Tonight he played the role of stopper, pitching eight strong innings en route to a 3-1 Yankee win over the Chicago White Sox, ending a two-game losing skid. Colon worked effectively, throwing 99 pitches, striking out six and only issuing one walk.
He only allowed one earned run, an RBI single in the sixth inning from Adam Dunn which plated Carlos Quentin. Other than that hiccup, Colon was masterful. He worked out of a bases loaded, no out jam in the second inning and his fastball had both life and movement, topping out on the speed gun at 96 mph.
So far Colon is 2-1 with an ERA of 2.77 and honestly, who expected this from him?
Probably not many people.
It's still early in the season, and Colon has not logged more than 200 innings since 2005, the year he won the A.L. Cy Young Award. In 2007 he tossed 99 1/3 innings, but only registered 39 innings the following year. In 2009 he only threw 62 1/3 innings.
The question has to be asked: can his arm hold up for the rest of the year?
Time will tell. If he continues to pitch as effectively as he has this month for the rest of the season, the Yankees will not have a problem. However if the season rolls along and his velocity goes down, his pitches lose life and they fall flat, the Yankees may have to take action.
But they will cross that bridge when they get there. For now, the Colon signing is looking as if it was the right move. Bench Coach Tony Pena managed him over the winter and recommended him to the front office.
At the moment, Pena deserves a vast amount of credit.
Another signing the Yankees made during the off-season, which right now is paying off, was the acquisition of Freddy Garcia.
Although Garcia hasn't gotten a lot of mound time, he has made two starts and is 1-0 with a 0.69 ERA. On April 16 he beat a powerful Texas Ranger team, pitching six innings and giving up no runs on just two hits. He only walked one and struck out one, but he made a statement with that game:
"I'm for real and I can still pitch."
On April 24 he certainly pitched good enough to win, befuddling the Orioles for six innings and not allowing a run while giving up just two hits. He walked two but fanned seven. The Chief did not pick up the win, as the combined efforts of Mariano Rivera and Joba Chamberlain weren't enough to handle the O's in the late innings.
The Yanks did win the game though, 6-3 in 11 innings.
Garcia still has a little bit to prove because he only has two starts under his belt in this early season. But both starts have been of the quality variety and he has demonstrated decent control and good command of his pitches.
Another signing paying dividend: Eric Chavez.
Some analysts called having Chavez on the bench a "luxury" being that he is a former Silver Slugger winner (2002) and a six time Gold Glover winner (2001-06). Again, he hasn't had a lot of playing time (12 games played) but he is making it count when he does play.
So far Chavez is batting .348 (8-for-23) with two doubles, three RBIs, and four runs scored. He has also done a pretty good job playing defense, as he made a nice bare-handed play at third in yesterday's game, playing third base for Alex Rodriguez who served as the designated hitter.
Chavez has had a series of injuries in his career and the Yankees took a chance signing him. That risk is proving to be a great reward, at least for now. Again, we are in the early stages of the 2011 season, and there is no telling what can happen in terms of injuries.
But if Chavez remains healthy, he could be looked at as a steal in the future; a brilliant acquisition and one of the better moves the Yankees have made in recent years.
Along with Chavez is Andruw Jones – a player once regarded as the most dangerous hitter in the National League. Like Chavez Jones is a former Silver Slugger (2005) and he is a 10-time Gold Glove winner and a five time All-Star.
Jones has played in eight games so far this year and is batting .316 with a home run and two RBIs. He isn't as fast as he once was, and maybe not even as athletic. But serving the Yanks as the fourth outfielder, he has made a couple of good catches in left field.
As the year progresses, he could become more and more valuable to the Yankees. Jones hit 19 homers for the White Sox last year and knocked in 48 runs. If you ask me, that type of production from a bench player is definitely a plus, and in many ways a bonus.
Yankees' General Manager Brian Cashman was criticized heavily by the media and the fan base for making these questionable moves in the off-season. Skeptics (including myself) thought the players taken off the scrap heap were never going to make it.
I think the only way to look at it this way:
If the GM signs the player and he bombs, the GM looks like an idiot. If he signs the player and the player prevails, the GM comes off looking like a genius.
So far, Cashman is looking like a genius.
Yet, it cannot be stressed enough: the season is young. Very young. Through the first month each of the scrap heap signees has done extraordinarily well. They have stepped into these roles and flourished, keeping the Yankees (13-8) above the rest of the teams in the division.
But they need to keep on trucking, otherwise Cashman, as smart as he looks now, will look like a person who didn't know what he was doing in terms of making these signings.
And for now, they are the scrap heap heroes.


text:
Availability: In stock
Established in 1972, Aussie Vac is a family owned and operated business, specialising solely in ducted vacuum systems. Now a familiar household appliance, ducted vacuum cleaners have come a long way since the 1970's when such machines, only available fully imported were considered a luxury. Through our work in the housing industry an opportunity presented itself to develop a locally manufactured ducted vacuum system to meet the needs of Australian householders.
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text:
The threats that led to the U.S. closing almost two dozen embassies abroad this weekend is based on intelligence that is reminiscent of the "chatter" preceding the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, a top senator on intelligence matters said Sunday.
"The one thing we can talk about is the fact that there's been an awful lot of chatter out there," Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." He said the chatter is "very reminiscent of what we saw pre-9/11."
Sen. Saxby Chambliss talks about the current global terror alert with NBC's David Gregory, and Sen. Dick Durbin offers his input.
The United States has closed more than 20 embassies for the weekend, mostly in north Africa and the Middle East, in response to unspecified intelligence assessments about a mounting terrorist threat. Lawmakers offered their first glimpse of the seriousness of the threat in their public comments on Sunday.
"This specific threat, that we've been briefed about over and over again, have reached a new level," said Sen. Richard Durbin, Ill., the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate. Durbin said on Meet the Press that Vice President Joe Biden briefed him and other senators this week, during which the administration identified 25 embassies overseas that are particularly vulnerable.
"This is the most serious threat that I've seen in the last several years," said Chambliss.
President Barack Obama has been briefed throughout the weekend about the evolving threat, most recently on Saturday, when he met with counterterrorism adviser Lisa Monaco. The White House said that Obama would continue to receive briefings throughout the weekend.
The sweeping security precautions, in some ways, represent the lessons learned from the attack against a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya less than a year ago.
In that attack, suspected terrorists sieged a compound in Benghazi and killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens. Critics of Obama, mostly Republicans, have vocally complained that the administration was caught flat-footed by those attacks, accusing the White House of having suffered an intelligence failure.
The period of heightened alert coincides with the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. Aug. 7 also marks the 15-year anniversary of the deadly, coordinated attacks against U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998.
This story was originally published on Sun Aug 4, 2013 9:47 AM EDT


text:
All University Information Services - Staff Learning & Development courses
11 matching courses
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An informal guidance session for anyone thinking about joining the IT Community and UIS Mentoring Scheme. Professional Development Manager, Rinku Raina will give a brief overview about what you can expect from joining the scheme. You'll have the chance to ask informal questions and hear from previous members of the scheme.
An informal guidance session for members of the IT Community and UIS Mentoring Scheme. The session will provide the opportunity to meet with other mentees enrolled on the scheme. You'll be able to talk openly as a group and share any successes or challenges while being a mentee. Please think of examples before coming along so we can discuss in the session and this will hopefully encourage confidence to help you gain the most out of your mentoring relationship and the scheme.
An informal guidance session for members of the IT Community and UIS Mentoring Scheme. The session will provide the opportunity to meet with other mentors on the scheme. You'll be able to talk openly as a group and share any successes or challenges while being a mentor. Please think of examples before coming along so we can discuss in the session and this will hopefully encourage confidence to help you gain the most out of your mentoring relationship and the scheme.
A Business Briefing to present an update on recent activities relating to IT Portfolios
Meet UIS' User Experience and Business Analyst team members. Find out what they do and how they can help you
A Business Briefing which will mark the official launch of Microsoft Teams at UIS. There will be a quick demonstration of how it might transform the way you collaborate with your immediate colleagues, the UIS community, across the university and beyond
A Business Briefing to talk about the roadmap for the Raven authentication service and related IAM plans, including:
- transition of the current Raven service (i.e. WebAuth) into Raven as the umbrella brand for the next generation University authentication service that now includes SAML2 (Shibboleth), OAuth2 and, in future, ADFS.
- plans for retiring the current Raven WebAuth Service (which will become known as the "Raven Legacy Service")
- an update on the implementation plan for introducing two-step verification and the rationale behind selecting the chosen solution.
Unconscious Bias happens automatically, without conscious control, when our brains make quick judgements or assessments about people and situations. Combatting unconscious bias isn't about blame. It's about accountability.
This session will provide an introduction to implicit or unconscious bias and will help you start to understand how our biases influence the decisions we make.
Time to Talk Day 2020 is an opportunity for all of us to raise awareness of mental health issues and advocate against social stigma.
As part of the UIS Wellbeing initiative we are very pleased to invite Hisham Ziauddeen a Clinical Senior Research Associate in the Department of Psychiatry and the University's Wellbeing and Disability Champion to deliver a talk on Optimising Brain Functioning. He is a consultant psychiatrist working in early intervention in psychosis.
He will talk about how we model other minds and how we manage the cost of mental functioning. He will particularly discuss the impact of work and other stress and the phenomenon of burnout. These are complex problems that don't have simple solutions but there are a range of things that may help and these will be discussed along the way.
What is the Search Inside Yourself programme?
The Search Inside Yourself (SIY) programme will teach emotional intelligence skills that lead to sustained peak performance, strong collaboration, and effective leadership.
Search Inside Yourself was born at Google from a dream to change the world. It began in 2007 when a team of leading experts in mindfulness, neuroscience and emotional intelligence developed an internal course for fellow Google employees. It quickly became an incredibly popular training program within Google as well as other corporate, non-profit and government organisations around the world
The mindfulness and emotional intelligence skills you'll learn will help you:
- Experience greater well-being, resilience and stress management
- Improve performance, collaboration and empathy
- Increase effectiveness and decision-making capacity
- Cultivate innovative, creative thinking
- Build more effective relationships
The Wellbeing Team invite UIS staff to join them for an open discussion on stress management. The group discussion will provide the opportunity to share thoughts, ideas and techniques for managing stress. Participants from the recent Search Inside Yourself training event will share some of their learnings from the wellbeing training programme.