quote of the day
Do it. If it is not good enough, observe more and think. And then do it again. – SK Lam
Pandagon’s Harry Potter Thread
The Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows discussion over on Pandagon – The Life and Loves of Severus Snape – is a thing to be hold, weighing in a something like 892 comments so far (including mine, added below the fold here).
Including some excellent dissection of the book, the series, the author, and an interesting discussion of its place in Great Literature of The Ages that is the only subject I responded to after enduring several pompous lectures on the subject from a twenty year old calling himself “Opoponax.” Snore. You’re not the first guy to read Joyce in the history of the world, kiddo.
the college professor in modern literature and film
After reading Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty” for book club, I found this article from the American Scholar on the college professor as portrayed in modern literature and film interesting:
The absentminded professor, that kindly old figure, is long gone. A new image has taken his place, one that bespeaks not only our culture’s hostility to the mind, but also its desperate confusion about the nature of love
Look at recent movies about academics, and a remarkably consistent pattern emerges. In The Squid and the Whale (2005), Jeff Daniels plays an English professor and failed writer who sleeps with his students, neglects his wife, and bullies his children. In One True Thing (1998), William Hurt plays an English professor and failed writer who sleeps with his students, neglects his wife, and bullies his children. In Wonder Boys (2000), Michael Douglas plays an English professor and failed writer who sleeps with his students, has just been left by his third wife, and can’t commit to the child he’s conceived in an adulterous affair with his chancellor. Daniels’s character is vain, selfish, resentful, and immature. Hurt’s is vain, selfish, pompous, and self-pitying. Douglas’s is vain, selfish, resentful, and self-pitying. Hurt’s character drinks. Douglas’s drinks, smokes pot, and takes pills. All three men measure themselves against successful writers (two of them, in Douglas’s case; his own wife, in Daniels’s) whose presence diminishes them further. In We Don’t Live Here Anymore (2004), Mark Ruffalo and Peter Krause divide the central role: both are English professors, and both neglect and cheat on their wives, but Krause plays the arrogant, priapic writer who seduces his students, Ruffalo the passive, self-pitying failure. A Love Song For Bobby Long (2004) divides the stereotype a different way, with John Travolta as the washed-up, alcoholic English professor, Gabriel Macht as the blocked, alcoholic writer.
Not that these figures always teach English. Kevin Spacey plays a philosophy professor — broken, bitter, dissolute — in The Life of David Gale (2003). Steve Carell plays a self-loathing, suicidal Proust scholar in Little Miss Sunshine (2006). Both characters fall for graduate students, with disastrous results. And while the stereotype has gained a new prominence of late, its roots go back at least a few decades. Many of its elements are in place in Oleanna (1994), in Surviving Desire (1991), and, with John Mahoney’s burnt-out communications professor, in Moonstruck (1987). In fact, all of its elements are in place in Terms of Endearment (1983), where Jeff Daniels took his first turn playing a feckless, philandering English professor. And of course, almost two decades before that, there was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
What’s going on here? If the image of the absent-minded professor stood for benevolent unworldliness, what is the meaning of the new academic stereotype? Why are so many of these failed professors also failed writers? Why is professional futility so often connected with sexual impropriety? (In both Terms of Endearment and We Don’t Live Here Anymore, “going to the library” becomes a euphemism for “going to sleep with a student.”) Why are these professors all men, and why are all the ones who are married such miserable husbands?
Rejected Openings for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
One morning, when Harry Potter woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single wizard in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wand.
The sky above Privet Drive was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Stately, plump Neville Longbottom came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: Wingardium leviosa!
To Severus Snape she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Lily Potter. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind … and yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Lily Potter, of dubious and questionable memory.
There once was a boy named Dudley Dursley, and he almost deserved it.
Dumbledore was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Harry Potter signed it: and Potter’s name was good upon Diagon Alley, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Dumbledore was as dead as a door-nail.
Once upon a time there were four little wizards, and their names were Neville, Ron, Hermione, and Harry.
You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of “Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone;” but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Ms. J. K. Rowling, and she told the truth, mainly. There was things which she stretched, but mainly she told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Petunia, or Professor Dumbledore, or maybe Hermione. Aunt Petunia – my Aunt Petunia, she is – and Hermione, and Professor Dumbledore is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.
When Mr. Harry Potter of Privet Drive announced that he would shortly be celebrating his seventeenth birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk in Hogwarts.
In a cupboard under the stairs there lived a wizard. Not a nasty, dirty, dark cupboard, filled with threadbare sheets and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, cramped cupboard with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a wizard’s cupboard, and that means comfort.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wizardry, it was the age of Muggles, it was the epoch of Dumbledore, it was the epoch of Voldemort, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Hogwarts, we were all going direct to Azkaban –in short, the period was so far like the present period, that the Daily Prophet insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Hermione Grainger was not beautiful but young wizards seldom realized it when caught by her brilliance as Ron Weasley was.
Call me Hagrid.
Last night I dreamt I went to Hogwarts again.
My Past Falwell Greatest Hits
Joke posts about Falwell I posted in the past that are getting traffic now that he’s died. No guarantees on the quality of the jokes…
The Theological Significance of Tinky Winky
5 Reasons Tinky Winky Can’t Be Gay
The Top 13 Reasons Jerry Falwell Thinks Your Favorite TV Character is Gay
The Batty Hymn of the Repugnant
Top Ten Jerry Falwell Pet Peeves About TV
And while we’re at it, some of Jerry’s Actual Greatest Hits—quotes from the man himself.
“AIDS is God’s punishment to gays.” – Jerry Falwell
“If you’re not a born-again Christian, you’re a failure as a human being.”
“I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!”
“Grown men should not be having sex with prostitutes unless they are married to them.”
“There is no separation of church and state. Modern US Supreme Courts have raped the Constitution and raped the Christian faith and raped the churches by misinterpreting what the Founders had in mind in the First Amendment to the Constitution.”
“AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals. To oppose it would be like an Israelite jumping in the Red Sea to save one of Pharaoh’s charioteers.”
“Textbooks are Soviet propaganda.”
“The whole (global warming) thing is created to destroy America’s free enterprise system and our economic stability.”
“(9/11 is the result of) throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools, the abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked and when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad…I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America…I point the thing in their face and say you helped this happen.”
“The idea that religion and politics don’t mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country.”
“It appears that America’s anti-Biblical feminist movement is at last dying, thank God, and is possibly being replaced by a Christ-centered men’s movement which may become the foundation for a desperately needed national spiritual awakening.”
“When lawlessness is abroad in the land, the same thing will happen here that happened in Nazi Germany. Many of those people involved in Adolph Hitler were Satanists. Many of them were homosexuals. The two things seem to go together.” – 700 Club, 1-21-93
“You know, one of the great misnomers in our society is the term `gay.’ That somebody who is involved in something that is leading to suicide, where the V.D. rate is 11 times that of others, which are almost driven and ashamed and fearful and confused and psychotic and all the others that we read about plaguing this part of our society. The term gay is the most serious misuse of the English language. They’re not gay, they’re very, very depressed and miserable.” – 700 Club, 5-6-82
“When you see the rise of blatant open homosexuality and lesbianism, what you also know is God has given a society up…and we’re at the mercy of the elements, the mercy of war, the mercy of economic disaster.” – 700 Club, 4-26-93
“The radical left is doing everything they can to destroy the moral fiber of America. They want to do away with the family. I am absolutely persuaded one of the reasons so many lesbians are at the forefront of the pro-choice movement is because being a mother is the unique characteristic of womanhood, and these lesbians will never be mothers naturally, so they don’t want anybody else to have that privilege either.” – 700 Club, 5-18-93
“[Vice President Gore] recently praised the lesbian actress who plays ‘Ellen’ on ABC Television…I believe he may even put children, young people, and adults in danger by his public endorsement of deviant homosexual behavior…Our elected leaders are attempting to glorify and legitimize perversion.” People for the American Way, “Hostile Climate”, 1998
Books I’m In the Middle Of…
Every once it a while I can’t decide what to read, so I pick up more than one book and I have several of them halfway done; this is one of those times.
Sword of the Guardian: A Legend of Ithyria (Legends of Ithyria)
by Merry Shannon
Actually, I finished this cheesy lesbian fantasy fiction novel, but I haven’t written a review of it yet.
YOU: The Owner’s Manual: An Insider’s Guide to the Body that Will Make You Healthier and Younger
by Michael F. Roizen and Mehmet Oz
I put this down while I was waiting to have my cardiac catheterization, because it was freaking me out to read about health stuff. Now that I know my results are good, I can pick this back up.
The Secret History of the Pink Carnation
by Lauren Willig
Also deeply cheesy, but light-hearted fun, which is what I needed to read.
Route 66 Adventure Handbook: Updated and Expanded Third Edition
by Drew Knowles
Planning our trip. This was updated in 2006, so it has a lot of new information.
Michele Bachmann
“Any of you who have members of your family that are in the lifestyle – we have a member of our family that is. This is not funny. It’s a very sad life. It’s part of Satan, I think, to say this is gay. It’s anything but gay.” – Michele Bachmann, (R) Minnesota 6th District.
I’m pretty damn happy, myself, thanks. In fact, I’d say I’m downright gay.
Clerks II
“Well then, you must be as blind as Anne Frank, ’cause what’s the point in having an internet connection if you’re not using it to look at weird, fucked-up pictures of dirty sex you’ll never have yourself?” – Clerks II
The Bushes are “suffering”
On the Today Show this morning:
ANN CURRY: Do you know the American people are suffering… watching [Iraq]?
LAURA BUSH: Oh, I know that very much, and, believe me, no suffers more than their president and I do when we watch this. And certainly the commander-in-chief who has asked our military to go into harm’s way.
AC: What do you think the American people need to know…
LB: Well, I hope they do know the burden of worry that’s on his shoulders every single day for our troops. And I think they do. I think if they don’t, they’re not seeing what the real responsibilities of our president are.
AC: It must be hard for you to watch him in this.
LB: It’s hard. Of course, it’s absolutely hard.
Yes, the dead and wounded soldiers, the families of the dead, the Iraqi people; none of them suffer as much as the president and his wife. Let them eat cake, indeed.
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