Saturday, July 16, 2005
Harry Potter and the Disappearing Blog
Yesterday (Friday) evening I published a post under the title of "Harry Potter and the Cultural Phenomenon." The gist of it was that even though the HP books aren't the greatest of literature, I'm grateful to JK Rowling for writing something that compelled millions and millions of school kids the world over to leave behind their swimming and skateboarding for an afternoon and instead stand outside libraries and bookstores for hours, salivating with anticipation at the prospect of reading a book. That was yesterday. Today, there is no evidence whatsoever that I ever wrote this post. It's not on my page, it's not in my "edit posts" lists. I can't for the life of me figure out where it went. Now, it is a scientific fact that computers only do what people tell them to do. Sometimes it's someone at a PC who inadvertently deletes something, sometimes it's a distant programmer who wrote a program that runs amok, travelling through emails and devouring every third character of peoples' honors theses (i know someone to whom this happened), but ultimately it comes back to a person. Nothing happens on a computer that doesn't start with a living, breathing, geek. So here's my question: WHO THE FUCK GOT RID OF MY POST?!?!?!?!? It wasn't great literature, nor was it the culmination of a lifetime's work, but damnit it was my post and I want it back. I might have suspected HBM of somehow hacking into my dashboard and deleting it because it was a generally favorable article of the HP phenom, but A, I don't think he's got the technical know-how, B, though he disagrees with me on the whole HP thing, I'm fairly certain he's not the kind of slime weed that would attempt to stifle another person's right to freedom of expression, C, i did make a point of comparing Rowling unfavourably to Lewis, White, and Dahl, and D, he's a lazy twat. But that leaves me with a total vacuum of suspects. Could it be that crazed, HP fanatics are systematically scanning the internet and attmepting to eliminate anything that suggests that the HP books aren't, in fact, the new Holy Scriptures? Could I have fallen victim to even crazier people then me? (Scary.) Or did the big mother of all computers at blogger.com where all this shit is stored experience some kind of cyberbrainfart which caused my post to simply evaporate is a puff of vapor and gamma radiation? Question have to be asked. Enquring minds need to know. This diatribe has now gone on longer than the original disapearing post.
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3 comments:
Saying HP is ok because it gets kids reading is like saying that Macdonalds promotes healthy eating choices because their burgers come with salad. They are the equivalent of each other. Post your blog and if you want I'll post a blog listing all the tropes, echoes and similarities of other works in HP, present a persuasive argument as to why they have been so successful(right place, right time, right product) and generally hold fast to my belief that they just don't do it for me and never will. I'd prefer it if you didn't though because to do the article that means I'd have to read one and I don't want to do that. I've never gor past a third of the way through any of them without giving up.
No, reading HP is not the equivalent of eating MickyD's. For many kids, they wouldn't read at all if it weren't for HP. I don't know any kids that never eat. If I did, and the kid were starving to death, I would rather have said kid eat a cheeseburger from McDs than die of malnutrition. And when HP is read by those rare kids who do normally read good lit, a little trash and tripe now and again won't kill them. Think of it as desert.
And I can't repost the blog because it's gone, vanished, and I don't have time to rewrite it, so you'll be spared the agony. And i'm fully aware of all the tropes, echoes, and rip-offs in HP from other works and why they are successful, but knowing how the schmaltz is created doesn't make any less effective. They're still fun.
And finally, Rowling is no rehtorical genius. She's verbose, can't write action for shit, and is often just plain flat. In her best moments she is still lightyears behind TH White. I am in no way attempting to insinuate they Rowling and White are in the same league. They're not.
I meant in the sense that both are bland, tasteless and offer no lasting value...
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