Category / Harry Potter

by DrMabuse

Who Wants to Be a Literary Billionaire?

J.K. Rowling joins the billionaires club. Unfortunately, since writing the Harry Potter series has largely involved the act of one, there has been nobody for Rowling to downsize. So Rowling, in an effort to turn the maximum profit from her stories, has made it a habit of regularly firing and rehiring herself for 17 cents an hour, only to resell her labor for the greatest price.

The Daily News has more on the Jayson Blair tell-all: “Zuza [my girlfriend] took pictures of me prancing around the newsroom wearing a Persian head wrap that covered my face, Kermit the Frog on my shoulders and a giant fake fur coat. I did a full tour de newsroom in this ?peculiar uniform. It is hard to know what I was feeling, other than it was exhilarating to shock everyone. Perhaps I was crying out for attention.” Crying out for attention? Nah, Jayce, sounds like you were trying to recall some obscure Polynesiasn ceremony that involved Kermit the Frog. But anyone trying to invent horrible euphemisms like “tour de newsroom” needed to be stopped.

Hemingway’s favorite daiquiri bar, the Floridita, is being recreated in London. The original Floridita created a double-strength daiquiri bar for Papa. And it was not far from the original bar that Hemingway began work on For Whom the Bell Tolls. The London managers, however, have planned to throw out all soused writers from the new place. Unless, of course, they demonstrate that they can pay their tab.

The Guardian confirms that Richard and Judy are the Oprah of the UK. Literary champions are hoping to replace Richard with Punch, just to “spice things up.”

Rynn Berry is obsessed with Hitler’s diet, believing that Hilter wasn’t the vegetarian everyone claims him to be.

Brian Greene: The Bill Bryson of physics?

by DrMabuse

Doctors, Lytton & More

British practitioners are tired of writing doctor’s notes. Apparently, there’s a rampant epidemic of comparative note shopping. This collection of notes, however, suggests that the aspiring malingerer might be better off forging their own. One note reads: “Both breasts are equal and reactive to light and accommodation.” Indeed. Unfortunately, doctor’s notes don’t make for compelling drama. That didn’t stop these guys from trying.

Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians has been a hoot, filled with some great reductio ad absurdum arguments: “Now, two propositions were accepted by both parties — that all infants are born in original sin, and their original sin is washed away by baptism. But how could both these propositions be true, argued Mr. Gorham, if it was also true that faith and repentance were necessary before baptism could come into operation at all? How could an infant in arms be said to be in a state of faith and repentance? How, therefore, could its original sin be washed away by baptism? And yet, as everyone agreed, washed away it was. The only solution of the difficulty lay in the doctrine of prevenient grace, and Mr. Gorham maintained that unless God performed an act of prevenient grace by which the infant was endowed with faith and repentance, no act of baptism could be effectual; though to whom, and under what conditions, prevenient grace was given, Mr. Gorham confessed himself unable to decide.”

What’s interesting is that a sizable chunk of Strachey’s papers can be found at the University of Texas at Austin. Who knew that such a pioneering iconoclast would end up where Bush II once presided as governor?

The Guardian has a list of 2003’s overlooked books. Plus, Crimson Petal author Michael Faber isn’t smitten with Motherless Brooklyn and Robert Louis Stevenson’s poetry is given a second look.

And, in a Maryland elementary school, comics are being used to get kids reading. Jim Trelease, author of The Read-Aloud Handbook (excerpts can be found here), is cited in the article as one of the inspirations. Among some of Trelease’s conclusions: He attributes the popularity of Harry Potter to a desire for plot-driven page turners. He sees human beings as pleasure-centric and believes that because of the greater likelihood of finding rare words in children’s books, reading narrows the word gap from the 10,000 words or so we use in conversation and the broader vocabulary that we don’t.