Harry Potter and the Acceptance of Death

 

Last night, I finally finished Eliezer Yudkowsky's fan fiction series, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. It truly is a work of genius that should be recognized alongside the original series. It should be acknowledged that Rowling, for all of her talents with comic dialogue, mystery, and crafting a world you would wish to visit, had a weakness when it came to crafting magic systems and thinking through the implications of a power once written into canon. One can think of Yudkowsky as a satire on the original and an attempt to fashion a smarter version. 

Yudkowsky uses his alternative version of Potter as a means to talk about rationalism. It is to his credit that he is able to write a deeply ideological work of fiction without his message dragging down the entire story. It helps that becoming a rationalist superhero is actually something difficult to accomplish. You cannot snap your fingers and become a rationalist even if Yudkowsky's Harry does do quite a bit of finger snapping. Contrast this with accepting the non-Puritan version of Jesus as your personal savior or deciding to "follow your heart." Such ideologies make for boring fiction because there is no real obstacle that readers should take seriously. All the main character needs to do is get over themselves and do what they, deep down, really wanted to do all along.  

Furthermore, Yudkowsky deserves a lot of credit for his handling of Draco Malfoy and Professor Quirrell. Yudkowsky's Malfoy is not simply a bully but a smart kid, who has been raised by a terrible parent, Lucius Malfoy, and the wider society of Death Eaters to believe that non-purebloods are diluting wizarding magic and risk causing magic to disappear from the world. There is something highly relatable about him as he is introduced by Harry to science as something that forces him to think in ways completely contrary to how he is used to operating. Specifically, Malfoy has to come to terms with the notion that there is an objective reality that will not change no matter the rhetorical arguments or threats he makes. I would not say that Malfoy becomes a good person in the end, merely a less evil one. 

Rowling never bothered to develop Quirrel as a character. His function in the Philosopher's Stone was to be the butler, a character sitting off to the side that the reader does not really pay attention allowing them to become the surprise villain. When I first read the book back in 2000, I had to stop to remember who Quirrel even was. Yudkowsky's Quirrel is a brilliant teacher with a clear dark streak who becomes the primary mentor for Harry. Ultimately this also allows for the development of Lord Voldemort as someone with a plausible appeal. (The revelation, in the end, about Quirrel mostly parallels Rowling.) 

There is a major philosophical difference between Yudkowsky and Rowling that I wish to call attention to. Essential to the Rowling version is an acceptance of death. Already in the Philosopher's Stone, we are introduced to the idea that Nicholas Flamel would allow the stone to be destroyed even though it will lead to his death. This sets up Harry's actions at the end of the series where he overcomes the temptation of the Deathly Hallows and ultimately gives himself up to Voldemort to die. Voldemort, by contrast, is someone who flees death (something hinted at in his name). He made Horcruxes to keep himself alive, has Quirrel drink unicorn blood, and tries to steal the Philosopher's Stone. 

Voldemort only cares about his continued existence and therefore refuses to recognize the possibility that there are principles worth dying for. As such, he is unprepared for Lilly Potter being willing to sacrifice herself even though she had no reason to assume that her death would actually save baby Harry. Ultimately, this sets Voldemort up for being unprepared for people being willing to sacrifice themselves in opposing him even after he has taken over wizarding Britain and resistance is futile.  

Voldemort's pursuit of immortality is connected to his lack of any kind of friendship. Voldemort, even as Tom Riddle, is self-sufficient. He does not need or desire other people. The Death Eaters are servants to be used. He does not care about them nor does he rely on them unless forced by circumstances. If Voldemort is someone who is going to go on forever then there is no reason to attach himself to people who might live on after him. By contrast, Harry is distinctly dependent upon others, mainly Ron and Hermoine. There is no pretense that he could succeed on his own or that he is of ultimate importance. This allowed Rowling to plausibly sell Harry's death in Deathly Hallows. It would not have been inconceivable for Ron and Hermoine, helped by Neville, to finish Voldemort off without Harry.  

It should be noted that Rowling was fairly open-ended when it comes to the afterlife. Not even Dumbledore dares to claim that there really is life after death. Rowling's point was that death should be accepted with courage and part of that courage is not knowing that there is anything to look forward to. Nearly Headless Nick expresses regret for hanging on to the sure thing of life as a ghost instead of accepting what lies beyond, regardless of what that might be. One thinks of the example of Socrates agreeing to drink hemlock rather than violate his philosophical principles while not knowing if there is an afterlife or just an eternal sleep. 

Yudkowsky devotes much of that later part of his work to attacking this view. Harry refuses to believe in souls even when confronted with ghosts. The mark of the fundamental failure of the wizarding world in general and Dumbledore in particular in living up to the standards of reason is that, even with all of their power to violate the laws of physics, they have failed to eliminate death. Essential to Harry's ability to fight dementors (who become exponentially scarier in Yudkowsky's hands) is that Harry recognizes them as death and as a blight on the world that should not exist and that he will one day eliminate. This opposition to death eventually sets the ending with the Philosopher's Stone.  

To respond to Yudkowsky, it should first be acknowledged that it is a positive good to extend the human lifespan through advances in medicine. It is reasonable to imagine that future generations of humans will be able to live hundreds or even thousands of years due to superior technology. This is distinct from immortality though, presumably, longer lifespans will delay the development of a true awareness of death. As a kid, I had a difficult time imagining myself as an adult. Part of becoming an adult is an ability to imagine oneself growing old and then dying. 

I do not wish to dismiss immortality as a good thing. If someone were to offer me some, I certainly would not be able to resist the temptation. It may be possible to imagine a morality for immortals. That being said, our morality rests on the deeply rooted assumption that we are mortal. Being mortal forces us to consider whether life might have a higher meaning that will go on after us. This can be as part of the divine mind or the walls of Uruk. 

This affects how we relate to other people. We are social beings who aspire to be part of institutions that will live on after us. Part of being a parent is the recognition that you will eventually grow old and die. Instead of trying to be the main character of your story, your job is to be an important side character in someone else's story. To truly embrace this perspective, you cannot try to live through your children but, instead, must accept that your children will be different from you. Your job is not to create a clone of yourself but to equip another person, with their own identity, with the tools they need to achieve greatness. Perhaps your job is to read Harry Potter to them and then start printing off chapters of Methods of Rationality and reading them as well. 

Racism and the Fundamental Attribution Error

I recently started listening to Eliezer Yudkowsky’s fanfiction series Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality on Audible. There is an episode where Harry explains the fundamental attribution error. Living in our own heads, we are inclined to recognize the role that circumstances play in our behavior. I got angry and shouted not because I am a bad person who hates other people but because I just received some really distressing news. If did something good, it is likely because I did not find it so difficult to do so I felt it was my responsibility to offer a hand. When it comes to other people, though, we are less inclined to acknowledge such complexity. Other people act the way that they do because it is fundamentally who they are. Either they are wicked satanic sinners who act out of a conscious hatred of the good or they are heroic saints deserving of veneration. The practical implication of this mistake is that, if you believe that people act according to their fixed nature, then what people do is who they are. A person who does bad things is a bad person. 

It occurred to me that racism can be seen as an extreme version of this fundamental attribution error. Not only is Aleksis, in all of his complexity, going to be reduced to a liar, instead of someone who might shade the truth depending on the circumstances but now we are going to say that Latvians, an entity that is millions of times more complicated, are liars. It should be noted that the claim that Latvians are liars is an indisputable truth. It may also be true that Jews, Hungarians, and transgender Manhattanites are liars as well, along with the entire human race. Let us not get sidetracked here; I am talking about Latvians.  

What is really interesting is that it is not just racists that make this fundamental attribution. To be an anti-racist also requires making the fundamental attribution error. In reading someone like Ibram X. Kendi, one cannot escape the Manichean logic of either you are a racist or an anti-racist. This follows the larger critical tradition as we have seen with Paulo Freire. There is no sense that people say or do things based on particular circumstances. 

It is not practical to truly escape racist or otherwise prejudiced thinking. Everyone has a narrative about why the world is not a better place. This usually implies some sort of villain. Since the problems of this world clearly go beyond the lifespan of any individual person, it is inevitable that people will place some group or institution as their villain such as Latvian Hungarian Jews. If you are Richard Weaver, the big bad is William of Occam and 13th-century nominalism along with minor bads such as 20th-century jazz. One can hope that, with the help of a classical liberal education, a person can come to construct ever more intelligent narratives with factually more plausible groups of villains and gain a degree of skepticism even over their own narratives. That being said, just as every person shades the truth from time to time, everyone will make reductive statements about other groups that are less than charitable and demonstrate a lack of awareness or empathy for that group's historical circumstances. 

To make things even more difficult, any attempt to make a pro-tolerance statement about a particular group means that you are not making statements about other groups and, as such those groups are of lesser importance. For example, to put up a "Black Lives Matter" sign in your yard is not just to say that black lives matter but to say that, in some sense, black lives matter more than Uighur lives. To be clear, it may be ultimately defensible to argue that black lives may be more relevant to your situation as an American and therefore you have constructed a narrative in which blacks are the victims even as you lack a similar narrative to wrap your head around Uighur history. That being said, this is hardly an innocent claim. 

The anti-racist needs to take all of these very real human foibles and label people as either racists or anti-racists. It is the same temptation as racism to wish to simplify the world into either good or bad people. Clearly, people are not one thing or another. As with every other virtue and vice, people exist along a spectrum and do better or worse depending on the particular circumstance. 

Obviously, the anti-racist cannot denounce say the Trump voter as racist without making themselves vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy. In the case of Kendi, he holds up Angela Davis as a model anti-racist. This is a person who defended jailing Jewish Soviet dissidents. In a sane world, Kendi could be forgiven for being a non-Jew who never internalized the history of Jewish suffering into his psyche. If we are to play by Kendi's rules, both Kendi and Davis must be rejected as anti-Semites. 

The traditional leftist solution to this problem is to engage in special pleading. Firstly, only certain kinds of blanket statements regarding racial groups really count as racism. It is not racist to declare white gun owners responsible for a Hispanic teenager going on a shooting spree because white people are responsible for most of the evil in this world as all true anti-racists know. Second, the anti-racist redeems himself through leftist politics.   

My purpose is not to say that, since everyone is a racist to some degree, it is ok to be racist. The fact that everyone lies and that society requires the grease of some judicious "manipulating of the truth" does not make lying ok. Whether we always know precisely where to draw the line, we can still recognize, at least in theory, a difference between the person who makes the honest attempt to be truthful and the person who no longer holds that they have a moral responsibility to society to tell the truth. Similarly, even if the wheels of society need to be greased with some prejudice, there is a difference between a person who imperfectly tries to still expand their circle of moral responsibility and the person who does not believe that they have moral obligations to members of the "wrong" groups. Can I tell you, in every case, who belongs in what category? I have no wish to fall into the fundamental attribution error any more than I have to. People exist along a spectrum. I will stand up for my imperfect sense of what is right and I will leave it to everyone else to judge their own hearts. 

Is Hogwarts Actually a Good School?

I have been reading the Harry Potter series with Kalman and homeschooling him through first grade. Reading Harry Potter as a parent and a teacher raises different issues from when I was in high school. Hagrid insists that Hogwarts is the best magic school in the world. We are told little about how other magic schools like Baubaxtons and Durmstrang operate. That being said, from an educational point of view, it is difficult to defend how Hogwarts teaches magic. 

Let us first agree to put aside the examples of Gilderoy Lockheart and Dolores Umbridge as they are meant to be bad teachers. Let us also put aside the slightly less obvious example of Severus Snape, who is a case of a very smart and knowledgeable person who should never be allowed near children. He is a bully and his classes are not teaching but child abuse. There is a more fundamental problem with the teaching at Hogwarts as it is founded upon the assumption that all students with a baseline of magical ability can take their classes. Even if we assume that teachers can fill their students' heads with the information needed for regular topics, that would not work for many branches of magic. Magic is not simply an intellectual exercise but requires a metaphysical component as well. This means that for many classes, many if not most students can never truly learn the material and it is a waste of time or worse to encourage them to try. 

Imagine me attending a class on dunking a basketball. While I might benefit from learning about the physics and cultural history of dunking, it would be useless to try to teach me to dunk. This has nothing to do with how smart I am or my desire to dunk. The physical reality is that, as a non-athletic person of average height approaching middle age, I might be able to work on jumping higher but will never be capable of dunking on a regulation basketball hoop. It would be irresponsible if not outright fraud for a basketball program to try to teach me to dunk. Similarly, while it is an indisputable fact that my acceptance letter to Hogwarts never reached me due to a bureaucratic mishap, at this point I have to admit that it would be pointless to accept me as I clearly no longer have the knack for magic. I would argue, similarly, that much of Hogwarts' curriculum is wasted on the majority of students.  

One can divide the classes at Hogwarts into three types. First, there are the intellectual classes like potions, herbology, care of magical creatures, and the history of magic. In theory, at least, these do not require any magical abilities and could be taught even by muggles who are knowledgeable about magic as a theory even as they cannot perform magic in practice. What these classes require is the ability to absorb information and a willingness to closely follow instructions. We can grant, for the moment, that such classes might be taught to all students. 

Second, you have classes like transfiguration, charms, and defense against the dark arts that clearly require some magical ability. As students at Hogwarts are supposed to have some baseline magical ability, we are supposed to assume that everyone at Hogwarts meets this standard and can reasonably be expected to succeed. What abilities these classes require is not altogether clear. Despite the fact that Hermoine combines a bookish intelligence with a talent for charms and transfiguration, such classes do not seem to require you to absorb that much information. There are not that many spells to memorize and knowing the right Latin words is clearly not enough to succeed. This suggests that spells require a proper frame of mind in order to perform. Perhaps, it is like riding a bicycle, difficult to intellectualize but quite easy once you have a physical sense of the process.   

Third, you have those types of magic clearly inaccessible even to most wizards as they require something beyond the general ability to perform magic. In this category, you would have divination but also the patronus charm, occlumency, and the ability to resist the imperius curse. In the case of the patronus and occlumency, Harry is introduced to them through out-of-class tutoring from Remus Lupin and Snape, unsuccessfully in the latter case. The fake Madeye Moody teaches students about the imperius curse and performs it upon them to alert them to its existence not because he expects anyone to be able to resist it. Judging from the later books, Harry's ability to resist the imperius is more remarkable than his ability to produce a patronus as it is something that even most high-ranking members of the Ministry of Magic and the goblins of Gringotts cannot do.    

Divination is clearly a subject that few wizards, including the teacher, are capable of mastering. This raises a question as to why divination is taught as a class at all. It would be one thing if Dumbledore kept Trelawney at the school to tutor the once-in-a-generation student with the gift. As it stands, the whole structure of the class is designed to encourage students to cheat and make up prophecies, a truly corrupting pedagogical exercise.   

Once we admit to the existence of a class like divination, where most students can never honestly succeed, we have to ask whether the problem also applies to the second category of classes. Do transfiguration, charms, and defense against the dark arts require something besides a general ability to perform magic, memorize spells, and personal discipline? Clearly, magical talent is not evenly distributed within the wizarding world. Dumbledore and Voldemort have something innately about them that other wizards could never hope to emulate much as the genes I was allotted at birth were never going to allow me to play in the NBA. It is not unreasonable to assume that Neville Longbottom was never going to succeed at transfiguration no matter how hard he tried and should never have been made to take it. This would free him to focus on herbology.

We can even work our way down to the first category and question whether certain students ever had the ability to succeed at such classes despite them not requiring magic. Snape basically makes this point when he compares the challenge of occlumency to that of potions. Harry struggles with both of them because he has little skill for making fine distinctions. This is an important part of his character. What makes him a successful hero is that he is a heart as opposed to a head sort of person. Harry is loyal to his friends and throws himself into danger to protect them. The flip side of this is that he has little talent for the details which is why he needs Hermoine. If this is the case, putting Harry in a potions class makes as much sense as trying to teach him occlumency. Instead, he should be focusing on defense against the dark arts.    

I am forced to conclude that if I were a wizarding parent, I would not want to send my kids to Hogwarts but would instead homeschool them or send them abroad to a different school. Putting Rowling's magical world aside, there is a serious question here about conventional schools. Are there classes that are the equivalents of divination or dunking a basketball that students are encouraged to take or even made mandatory despite the fact that many of them are unlikely to benefit from them? One might even go so far as to put the burden of proof on the school to show that a student would benefit from a class before allowing them to enroll. Does it make sense to pretend to offer special needs students "grade-level assignments?" For that matter, does it make sense to assign average students Shakespeare?  

Of Hobbits and Muggles: A Study in Fantastical Creatures

To Kalman and Mackie, my Wizard and Hobbit. 

J. R. R. Tolkien's Hobbit and J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series both open by introducing us to a fantastical race of beings. Tolkien gives us Hobbits and Rowling gives us Muggles. One might respond, Hobbits are make-believe beings who live in the fantasy land of the Shire in Middle Earth. Muggles are simply humans who live on Earth so it is silly to compare them to Hobbits. On the contrary, the problem is comparing Hobbits to Muggles. One of Tolkien's chief virtues over Rowling is precisely that it is the Hobbits that are truly believable while it is Muggles who require the suspension of disbelief. What makes this possible is Tolkien's love for Hobbits in contrast to Rowling's contempt for Muggles.

"The Boy Who Lived" chapter is different from most of the rest of the Potter series in that most of it takes the perspective of Uncle Vernon. Baby Harry does not enter the stage until the very end. The rest of the series is told from Harry's point of view. Our knowledge of the Wizarding world is meant to closely match Harry's and much of the books' plots revolve around Harry trying to find things out. Vernon and the Dursleys are held out as the Muggles par excellence. They are a stereotype of 1950s bourgeois conformity who have somehow managed to survive into the 1990s. As with Dickens' villains, we can laugh at the absurdity of the Duriksleys and their cruelty but let us never confuse that with reality. Wizards are introduced to us as hippies, complete with eccentric tastes in clothes.

Mr. Dursley couldn't bear people who dressed in funny clothes - the getups you saw on young people! He supposed this was some stupid new fashion. ... his eyes fell on a huddle of these weirdos standing quite close by. ... Mr. Dursley was enraged to see that a couple of them weren't young at all; why, that man had to be older than he was, and wearing an emerald-green cloak! The nerve of him! (3)

Later, when Harry is living with the Dursleys, one of Vernon's main objections to him is his hair.

About once a week, Uncle Vernon looked over the top of his newspaper and shouted that Harry needed a haircut. Harry must have had more haircuts than the rest of the boys in his class put together, but it made no difference, his hair simply grew that way - all over the place. (21)

As readers, we are never meant to identify with Muggles like the Dursleys. I do not know about you but I am not a Muggle. I am a Wizard who did not get his letter to Hogwarts when he turned eleven due to a bureaucratic snafu. I may be thirty-seven years old but I still am waiting for that letter that is rightfully mine and, when I do, everyone will finally realize how special I am. Here is where the series’ focus on Harry as the point of view character becomes important. Harry’s discovery of the Wizarding world becomes ours. Hagrid is showing up with our letter of acceptance and taking us to Diagon Alley. Potter's greatest strength was that it offered a magical world just out of reach that readers would desperately want to be a part of.

The dark side of this is a contempt for ordinary people, Muggles. We readers always knew we were different from the Muggles around us; we read books. We might not be able to tap the right brick to enter the Wizarding world but we can still look down upon the Muggles around us. This is ironic as the bad guys hate Muggles in general and Muggle-borns (Mudbloods) in particular. Were it not for the fact that the Death Eaters are clearly Nazis with their obsession with racial purity, readers could easily become confused as to whose side they should be on. (To Rowling's credit, the later books show a sophisticated understanding as to how a society could fall to Nazism.)

One of the advantages of being on the left is that you are granted a license to hate anyone who you decide is a racist. In practice, this means anyone not sufficiently on the left. This is not counted as hate. On the contrary, it is standing up for justice for all. This makes leftism the ultimate enabler of hate as a true leftist can never conceive of themselves as guilty of hate. In a similar vein, readers are never meant to question their hatred of the Dursleys even if Dudley finally shows some flicker of humanity in the end. On the contrary, we can take a righteous pleasure in our hatred; they deserve whatever pranks the Wizards pull on them. We are never meant to see any link between our response to the Dursleys and that of a Death Eater. 

It is worth noting that the recent Fantastic Beast films have introduced a positive Muggle character, Jacob Kowalski. What is so great about Kowalski and what makes him a necessary corrective for the series is that he is not simply a fall guy to get magical poop on his head. He is someone that the audience can deeply empathize with as well as a voice that the Wizarding world needs. It is not for nothing, he gets the beautiful Wizard girl in the end.

In recent years, there has been a lot of talk about how Potter has inspired a generation of young activists with its anti-authoritarianism. I never read Potter as truly subversive of authority considering how much of the story rides on our willingness to trust in Dumbledore's wisdom and goodness despite his numerous mistakes. (To be clear, I consider Dumbledore's flawed sainthood and the need of Harry to still believe in him to be one of the strong points of the series. Rowling, in the later books, chose to make a point of Dumbledore’s fallibility instead of covering it up. Contrast this with how Stars Wars handled Yoda even as Yoda is far more guilty in the creation of Darth Vader than Dumbledore is in creating Voldemort.) My less charitable interpretation of how Potter has inspired a generation of youth activism is that it trained children to believe that they were special and to be self-righteous about it. They are Wizards forced to live among horrible Muggles with nothing worthwhile to teach them. Through activism, their magic specialness will become manifest. To be fair to Rowling, she has been a brave voice of sanity on the left for her willingness to defend Israel, attack Jeremy Corbyn, and leave herself vulnerable to the malice of supporters of transgenderism. That being said, I cannot help but feel a slight twinge of schadenfreude for how she made Dumbledore gay after the series was finished.

At the beginning of The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins is hardly more likable or open to magic than Vernon. Furthermore, it is not as if Bilbo does anything useful like run a drill company. Bilbo changes but it is not a matter of Gandalf convincing Bilbo to abandon his boring Hobbit ways to open his mind to adventure just like the more interesting Dwarves. On the contrary, Bilbo’s Hobbit love of the simple things of life like hearth and home plays a critical role in protecting him from the greed for treasure that consumes Thorin Oakenshield. Gandalf was not trying to convert a Hobbit; he was looking for a Hobbit because there is something incredible about Hobbits. Gandalf's greatness is that he can appreciate Hobbits. This sets up Lord of the Rings, where it is the Hobbits, Frodo and Sam, who save Middle Earth by carrying it to Mordor. Only a Hobbit could resist the temptation of using the Ring because Hobbits honestly would rather tend a garden with a beer and pipe of tobacco than to rule the world.

Belief requires something plausible that might exist and something important enough to care if it does. It is easy to believe in Hobbits. They are as perfectly ordinary as the corner grocery and should be as common. Tolkien's genius was to discover something incredible in this ordinariness. If Tolkien did not love Hobbits, Bilbo would have never become more than a comic foil for Gandalf and the Dwarves, nothing worth believing in.

It was with the Hobbits that Tolkien identified with as opposed to even the Elves. This despite the fact that the original purpose of Middle Earth was supposed to be for The Silmarillion, an epic about the Elves. Perhaps this is why Tolkien never finished it and it was only published posthumously. There is no doubt that if Tolkien could choose between being a Hobbit or an Elf, he would choose the Hobbit. Can you imagine, Rowling wanting to be a Muggle instead of a Wizard?

Until my letter comes, my Wizarding career will have to stay on hold but I will still not be something so absurd as a Muggle. But maybe I could be a Hobbit, an ordinary hero. If I fail, it will not be because someone forgot to send me a letter but because I am not worthy of such a title.

Scourged: The Price of Having a Character Who is Too Powerful

A few months ago, I used Brandon Sanderson's Second Law, which deals with the importance of non-omnipotent characters, as a means of talking about the Exodus narrative. Here I would like to further explore this with Kevin Hearne's Iron Druid series, one of my favorites over the past few years. It is about a two-thousand-year-old druid named Atticus O'Sullivan on the run from deities from numerous pantheons. As far as I am concerned (and the evidence of a tournament suggests that there is a large fan base that agrees with me on this), the real star of the series is Atticus' wolfhound side-kick, Oberon. This is in no small part due to Luke Daniels' incredible voice narration. Largely on the basis of this series, Daniels has become one of those narrators that, barring a romance novel, I will read a book regardless of the author just because he narrates it.

I would like to discuss one weakness of the series and its ramifications for its ending in Scourged. Even (and perhaps especially) for a fantasy series, Atticus is simply way too powerful. There is not a single character in the series that completely outclasses him in brute magical strength. Furthermore, he is immortal thanks to a secret mix of herbs a regularly consumes as well as a special relationship with a death goddess, the Morrigan. In addition to moral problems about Atticus' decisions as to whom he shares his herbs with, for all intents and purposes, Atticus being immortal makes him a god with all the narrative pitfalls that come with it.

For a story to have emotional power, the main characters need to change. A god, by its very nature, cannot change without destroying itself. The reason for this is that part of what makes change possible is confronting real stakes in which something important is at risk.  Gods are beings above the natural order of things including suffering and loss. Because of this, nothing that happens to a god can really have high stakes. A narrative event happening to a god as opposed to a mortal is the difference between playing a friendly game and being in the Hunger Games. Think of the Book of Job. What starts as a friendly wager between God and the Satan becomes a blood-soaked tragedy for a human being like Job. We can emotionally invest in a character like Job in part because there is actually something at stake for him. Will he or will he not get justice from God? It might be interesting to tell the story from Satan's perspective as he is playing a truly high-stakes game of baiting God. As for God himself, he is fundamentally boring in his utter incomprehensibility.

For a god to be interesting as a lead character, as opposed to serving as a personified force of nature, they have to face change in the form of the destruction of whatever context they made sense in, the true meaning of death for a God. The classic example of this is Norse mythology where the gods possess a tragic pathos precisely because they are fighting a battle they cannot win; their choices can only end in Ragnorak and their destruction. This is the essence of the Wotan character in Wagner's Ring Cycle. He is a god who is trying to cheat fate through his ability to make laws only to be undone by his own laws. The modern author who best comprehends this ethos is Neil Gaiman. Key to his Sandman series is the fact that Dream cannot avoid change. Ultimately, that means that he needs to die and his only real choice is the circumstance under which that happens. It is not a coincidence that in recent years, Gaiman has turned to directly retelling Norse mythology something that has been an undercurrent in almost everything he has written. What is particularly strange, is that Hearne is clearly a fan of Gaiman's and understands this principle. It is precisely for this reason, that he kills the Morrigan off in the middle of the series. That being said, he refuses to apply this same logic to Atticus.

What is ever at stake for Atticus? He is already two-thousand years old. Even his death would simply be his long-overdue fate as a human. For the series to work Atticus needed to embrace his godhood by sacrificing himself on the altar of facilitating change to a world that, even if it might be a better one, has no place for his kind of magic. Hearne, though, is too charmed by all of Atticus' power and his joking personality to write the kind of tragedy this character needed.

One never gets the sense that, over his long life as an immortal on the run, Atticus was ever any different from the wise-cracking twenty-something bookstore owner. Note that this would have been fine if Atticus had started the series off as precisely that without any backstory. Once we have trapped Atticus into his two-thousand-year-old self, it is difficult to plausibly get him to change. 

Going back to the very first book, Hearne had the option of killing off Atticus and making the series about Atticus' student, Granuaile. This would have had the advantage of giving Granuaile all of Atticus' challenges even, as a druid in training, she would remain distinctly ungodlike. This would not be any different than having Luke Skywalker or Harry Potter having to solve the problems of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Albus Dumbledore. Oberon would still be in the series and would now have a real purpose beyond comic-relief. In between trying to convince Granuaile to give him more sausages and tell him what a good hound he is, he could cough up some partial bits of wisdom remembered from his time with Atticus. Instead, Atticus is left as the main character of the series, despite the fact that he is too powerful to serve in that capacity. Granuaile is left to serve as Atticus' love-interest despite the fact that their power differential make them uninteresting together. This further wastes an opportunity as Atticus and the Morrigan would have made sense as a couple.

The critical turning point in the series was the third book. Much like Prisoner of Azkaban allowed J. K. Rowling to elevate Potter from a collection of clever jokes about school and mythology to a story with real stakes by having Harry make the mistake of keeping Peter Pettigrew alive with the consequences for the rest of the series, Hammered allowed Atticus to make the mistake that he spent the first two books being maneuvered into, leading an attack on Asgard to kill Thor. Having Atticus take on the consequences of getting one friend killed and causing another to eventually betray him in addition to setting Ragnorak in motion could have elevated the series to another level. Instead, Hearne treats this as an afterthought to training Granuaile and Atticus being his upbeat self despite the fact that this does not fit the story that needs to be told. This is similar to the Star Wars prequels in which George Lucas wanted to tell all kinds of stories except the sci-fi Paradise Lost/Faust sci-fi telling of the origins of Darth Vader that was needed.

The prequels trapped Lucas into telling a story he did not want to tell, the downfall of Anakin Skywalker, causing him to pursue it as an afterthought. Similarly here, Hearne cannot escape the need for the forces of evil, led by Loki. to break out and Atticus having to unite all the various pantheons in a last-ditch effort to save the Earth despite the fact that about the only thing the gods can agree upon is killing Atticus. This essentially is the plot of Scourged and Hearne has been building to it on the side when he has not been distracted by less important things.

The problem with Scouraged is that it has no sense that anything is really at stake. The only urgency here is to wrap the series up so that the author can move on to other things without angering his fan base. There is no sense that the good guys are outgunned and in need of something desperate and creative. On the contrary, one feels that Loki's forces are like the British soldiers of World War I about to cross the Somme after giving the Germans a ten-minute warning with the end of the artillery bombardment to get into position. Obviously, Loki stands about as much chance of winning as a James Bond villain, but the author owes it to the reader to allow for the suspension of disbelief that this is not the case.

Hearne clearly understands this problem that he has written himself into and tries belatedly to inject some consequences. Atticus loses an arm with the tattoos that bind him to the Earth and that serve as the source for most of his power. He ends up betraying Granuaile in order to keep her out of serious danger and she leaves him in the end. This allows for the Morrigan (a death goddess is never truly dead) to appear and offer Atticus the opportunity to join her in death. Atticus turns the offer down even as he acknowledges that there really is no drawback to someone like him choosing death. Even at the end, Hearne loves his super-powerful immortal Irish hippie too much to take him where he needs to go.

Towards a Good Exodus Movie: Brandon Sanderson's Second Law

There have been numerous film versions of the biblical Exodus story, none satisfactory. In honor of Passover, I would like to consider what it might take to do the Exodus right. We do not need Prince Moses discovering himself. As great an actor as Charlton Heston was, Moses should not be some macho superhero who is emotionally invulnerable. That being said, Moses should not whine or feel sorry for himself like in Prince of Egypt. We do not need a cycle of repetitive big special effects plagues followed by a stereotypical stubborn Pharaoh refusing to let the Children of Israel go. We need Moshe Rabainu, the Jewish tragic hero.

The first thing to consider is the soul of the story, something that the Exodus can offer like no other story. Harry Potter is about being taken to a magical place that you dearly wish actually existed. The Exodus is about God exists and he cares about the downtrodden. The unjust moral order that you take for granted is about to be overturned. I do not care if you are an atheist, you desperately want this to be true. The Exodus is about a good man, Moshe, living in a terrible world. He has given up trying to fix it. He is content to be a shepherd and a  family man. Then he receives the surprise of his life. Not that God exists (without God there can be no standard to judge the world as wicked) but that God cares about the scum of the earth Israelites that Moshe has tried to distance himself from. Now it is Moshe's task to get the Israelites out of Egypt and make them into a people worthy of God's love.

The critical challenge to telling the Exodus is the fact that Moshe is simply too powerful. He has the power of God behind him. How can the story turn out any other way than him defeating Pharaoh, taking the Israelites out of Egypt, and living happily ever after? This is predictable and boring. Furthermore, it does not challenge us. As with all stories, problems are opportunities to make something truly great. For this, we turn to Brandon Sanderson's Second Law of Magic; what a character cannot do is much more important than what he can do. It might be cool to imagine a character with all kinds of superpowers, but ultimately what gives you a plot are the limitations that even the powerful operate under. What kinds of problems can't the hero solve with their powers? Even better, what kinds of problems are created by these powers?

Moshe has a staff, his brother Aaron, God, and a whole battery of miracles to beat Egypt into submission. Here is what he does not have, the ability to force either Pharaoh or the Israelites to consent to anything. This is what makes Pharaoh an intriguing adversary. He has the power to thwart God himself. All he needs to do is harden his heart and be stubborn enough to allow the destruction of Egypt. As the plagues unfold, what is happening is not the wicked Pharaoh getting what he deserves. On the contrary, Pharaoh is winning. Egypt may be burning but for Pharaoh that is a small price to pay for him to beat God and prove that, in some sense, he is a god too. Despite all of Moshe's power, Pharaoh can lie and humiliate him with utter impunity.

In the end, Pharaoh does crack after the deaths of the first-born Egyptians, but he has one last card to play. He knows that the Israelites do not want to actually leave Egypt and become some kind of chosen people. All he needs to do is show up with his army and the Israelites will gladly hand Moshe over and return to Egypt. Pharaoh will have won and there is nothing Moshe or God can do about it. Pharaoh's plan is undone because the Israelites possess the faith to jump into the water and God is willing to differentiate between the Israelites and the Egyptians. As the Israelites sing at the shore of the Red Sea, it appears that God's miracles have not only redeemed Israel from Egypt but have led to a spiritual awakening to make them worthy of receiving the Torah.

I would suggest a corollary to Sanderson's Law; any hero who is sufficiently powerful must ultimately fail and come to a tragic end otherwise the audience would never believe that their weaknesses were ever genuine to being with. Think of characters like Oedipus or King Lear, all-powerful in their domains with no plausible challenges. There is no way to tell a story about them that is not a tragedy. Oedipus and Lear need to fall not because anyone could beat them but because they self-destruct through their failure of understanding. Oedipus, the man who understands the nature of man, fails to see himself and accidentally murders his father and marries his mother. Lear lacks the theory mind to appreciate how Regan and Goneril could lie to him and fails to appreciate the value of Cordelia speaking a simple selfless truth that he does not want to hear. By this thinking, we must follow Moshe's success in Egypt and at the Red Sea with an act II in which everything falls apart.

Let us go back to Moshe at the burning bush as he tries to tell God that he does not want to be the savior of the Israelites. This is not the Hero with a Thousand Faces initially refusing the call of destiny (Luke Skywalker not wanting to abandon the family moisture farm to rescue the princess). This is Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane saying: "Take this cup away from me."



(Jim Caviezel anchors the movie with the scene. For the passion sequences to work, Jesus needs to both suffer and transcend that suffering. Jesus and the audience knows that he is about to be tortured.  Here we are allowed to see Jesus be truly vulnerable in a way that you can't in the rest of the movie as he needs to always be moving forward without ever wanting to escape his torment.)

Moshe knows that he is being set an impossible task. It does not matter if he can twist Pharaoh's arm into letting the Israelites go. The Israelites are not worthy of redemption and any attempt to do so is doomed to failure. Moshe is being asked to undergo not twelve hours of torture, but forty years of abuse and humiliation all for nothing. He is going to be Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill.

Moshe takes on this battle that he knows he cannot win. He undergoes his tribulations with Pharaoh and a few altercations with the Israelites to hint as to what is coming. They get through the Red Sea and on to Mount Sinai. Just as we are tempted to think that this might all work out after all, we get the Golden Calf. Here we get to the crucial moment for Moshe. He has proven that he was right about the Israelites all along. Even God now agrees and is going to destroy the Israelites and let Moshe off the hook. Moshe puts himself in harm's way to save the very people he despises by threatening God that if God will not save Israel, he does not want anything to do with God. More incredibly still, Moshe succeeds at doing what Pharaoh could not, forcing God to change his mind.

Despite Moshe saving Israel, things do not really improve. The Israelites demand meat, and the spies convince them not to go to Canaan and Korah rebels. Eventually, when the Israelites demand water, Moshe just snaps; he yells at them and hits the rock. God punishes Moshe and refuses to let him into the Promised Land. Moshe dies standing on Mount Nebo looking down as the people under Joshua prepare to enter the Land. We know that this is not going to turn out well. We have hundreds of years of the Israelites sinning against God, culminating in their expulsion from the Land and the destruction of the Temple at the hands of the Babylonians.

As with most good tragedies, there is transcendence and hope. Long after the pharaohs have gone, those Israelites who rejected Moshe time and again still keep Moshe's Torah. Every year, they gather around a Passover seder to remember their teacher as parents tell their children the real greatest story ever told.

Wandering Through Fantasy Worlds with Kvothe and Harry Potter (Part II)

(Part I)

This focus on character and world-building leads, in the cases of both Harry Potter and Kingkiller, to something that would in most writers be considered a fatal flaw, but which J. K. Rowling and Patrick Rothfuss manage to survive even if at times by the skin of their teeth, the tendency to abandon plot in favor of character and world exploration. Both of these series do have plots centered around the defeat of antagonists, Harry Potter has Lord Voldemort and Kvothe has the Chandrian, a group so mysterious that they hardly appear even in legend and who murdered his parents just for attempting to write a song about them. That being said the reader quickly realizes that these plots are only incidental to these series, a prop to be brought out when the characters need something to react to or to offer an opportunity for further world exploration.

Harry Potter is not really about Harry's hero quest arc to defeat Lord Voldemort; it is about Harry at Hogwarts with Ron Hermione, dodging Draco Malfoy and Severus Snape, with clever back and forth dialogue and the existence of magic to provide a canvas for Rowling's vivid use of language. Now even Rowling is not talented enough to keep a book afloat with just clever writing so by the end of each book she brings out some larger element of danger and ties it to this Lord Voldemort character, who serves to explain why Harry was first placed with his relatives and why he is the continued subject of the mostly unwanted attention that keeps him interesting. Now part of Rowling's genius is that she weaves her plot throughout the rest of the book, turning much of what the reader thought was just her meandering through the story into critical plot points. This also places Harry Potter among those rare books that need to be read several times to properly be appreciated. Furthermore, starting with Goblet of Fire, Rowling abandoned the stand-alone year at Hogwarts adventure format of the first three books, which had served her so well, in favor of a more focused narrative surrounding the return of Lord Voldemort to a physical body. This part of the series also marked the point in which Rowling escaped the bounds of any meaningful editorial control, causing the books to balloon in size and leading to more character meandering. Not that I ever complained about this as Rowling is one of the rare writers who can hold you just with their writing, regardless of content.

Rothfuss seems to be following a similar path. Name of the Wind was only incidentally about Kvothe's quest to learn the truth about the Chandrian and really about Kvothe the poor scholar and musician trying to keep body and soul together as well as make tuition payments to stay in school, a task made almost impossibly difficult due to the spiteful animosity of Ambrose Jakis. Reading Rothfuss, I realize that Rowling missed a valuable opportunity by simply handing Harry a massive fortune at the beginning of the series, whose origins she never bothered to explain, taking care of Harry's finances so he never had to worry about tuition. Forcing Kvothe to struggle to meet his finances allowed for plot tension, will Kvothe find the money or won't he, without having to resort to placing Kvothe in constant mortal danger, a refreshing change of pace for a fantasy novel. Kvothe needing money also makes way for my favorite character in the series, besides Kvothe, Devi. To put it bluntly, she is a loan shark, who demands that Kvothe hand over drops of his blood as security. She is also really charming and forms a delightful friendship with Kvothe, albeit one underlined by fifty percent interest rates and threats of bodily harm if he ever reneges.

In waiting four years for the second book, Wise Man's Fear, I took it as a given that now with this book the story would begin in earnest. I expected Kvothe to be thrown out at the very beginning of the book, allowing him to finally pursue the Chandrian. The first several hundred pages are more of the first book, Kvothe trying to get money and dodging Jakis. Not a bad thing in of itself as Rothfuss, like Rowling, is fun to read just for his prose. Finally, Kvothe is forced to take time off from school and takes the opportunity to do some traveling. This leads to Kvothe being placed in a new setting, but I was almost disappointed by the fact that Rothfuss simply has Kvothe do more of being Kvothe instead of actually advancing the story.

Besides for the fact that Rothfuss is still a fun writer even when meandering, what kept me in the book was the strong suspicion that Rothfuss was weaving a giant trap for Kvothe and that things were not as pointless as they seemed. This was confirmed nearly three-quarters into this thousand-page novel when Kvothe meets a creature called the Cthaeh, who informs him that he had already met one of the Chandrian. Now the Cthaeh, despite his small part, has to be one of the most interesting villains conceptually. He is imprisoned in a tree due to the fact that he can perfectly foresee the future and can say the exact words to any person who visits him that will cause them to do the most harm. Furthermore, since the Cthaeh knows every future conversation that the person will ever have, he can calculate how that person's words will affect every other person he will ever talk to and so on and so forth until, in theory at least, the Cthaeh has the power to destroy the entire world with just one conversation.

It is hard to actually criticize a book that held my attention for over a thousand pages, but I must admit that I liked Name of the Wind better. Wise Man's Fear for too much of the book felt like it was wandering around when I wanted things to actually happen. I eagerly await the final book in the series to see how things will turn out. Rowling did not disappoint and I have every bit of faith in Rothfuss that he can match her.



                    

Wandering through Fantasy Worlds with Kvothe and Harry Potter (Part I)

If I were to describe Patrick Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicles series in one sentence it would be that it is Harry Potter's more mature and sophisticated sibling, who, instead of going to grade school to study magic, went to college. In a similar vein, my reaction to watching the first season of Heroes (the only one worth watching) was that it was the younger smarter sibling of the X-Men, who went of to university and got into heroin. (In the case of Heroes there actually is a character whose superpower is to be able to see and paint the future while high.) As with Harry Potter, Kingkiller is about a teenage orphan, Kvothe, whose parents were murdered off by dark powers, studying magic. As with J. K. Rowling, Rothfuss' chief strengths as a writer are his ability to create interesting characters, backed by witty dialogue and a world for us to explore through the eyes of these characters.

What Rothfuss has over Rowling is that, like Tolkien, he offers the impression of depth to his world; that it is not just a prop that will collapse if touched. Rowling's wizarding world, in contrast, while utterly fascinating as a concept striking deep into the collective subconsciousness of readers (I cannot think of another fantasy world that I so desperately wanted to be real), remains an immensely clever joke. Even by the end of the series one does not get the sense that Rowling ever bothered to work out the mechanics and limitations of her magical system and the inner workings of her wizarding society. Particularly the question of why wizards, even muggle-loving ones like Arthur Weasley, live in secret outside of general society and in ignorance of it. (See "Yeshiva Hogwarts.") One suspects that this is the reason why Rowling kept her story so narrowly focused on Harry, only allowing us to experience the wizarding world from Harry's limited perspective and kept Harry's own experience of the wizarding world to specific set pieces, like the Weasley home, Diagon Alley, and Hogwarts. Allowing Harry broader range would have forced her to take her own wizarding world seriously and not just as a prop.  Rothfuss, in contrast, treats his magic with a level of sophistication surpassing the "science" of most science fiction. As Tolkien managed to invent several fully functional languages for Lord of the Rings that people can study today, one suspects that Rothfuss would, if pressed, be able to present a plausibly sounding "scientific" lecture on his magic. The same goes for his world's various races, religions, countries, and politics.

Rothfuss' other major advantage over Rowling is in creating, in Kvothe, a fully flesh and blood lead character the likes of which exist in few other works of fantasy. With Harry Potter, the interest is always the world and characters around him. Harry serves as a means to explore Hogwarts and characters like Ron, Hermione, Hagrid, Dumbledore, Sirius, and Lupin, all of whom are far more interesting than Harry in of himself. Harry starts off the series as a star-struck modern-day version of T. H. White's young King Arthur, Wart, before evolving into a moody teenager. It is only in Deathly Hallows, as Harry contemplates the necessity of his death to defeat Voldemort, that Harry steps in as a worthy protagonist in his own right. (It is for this reason that, whether or not Deathly Hallows is the best book in the series, it is certainly the best written of the series and the one in which Rowling stepped into her own as a mature writer.) One suspects that this is why Rowling never allowed Harry to exist on his own but always has him interacting with other characters, even going so far as to make Harry's chief strength his connection to his friends as opposed to Voldemort who is completely self-contained. (See "Adolescent Military Genius.") Kvothe, in contrast, is the star attraction, not just a cipher through which to tell a story. Rothfuss does not just focus his narrative on Kvothe, he tells almost his entire story from inside Kvothe's head. One almost gets the sense that Rothfuss could have eliminated his entire world, leaving Kvothe floating in ether, and still hold on to the reader's attention.

This places Kingkiller as one of those rare fantasy series that is only incidentally about fantasy. In much the same way that Orson Scott Card novels are about characters and relationships and only incidentally take place in a science-fiction universe, Rothfuss has one utterly compelling character, Kvothe, and a world for Kvothe to operate in. The fact that this world is a beautifully rendered fantasy world only serves to establish Rothfuss as one of the greatest writers of this generation of any genre. 

(To be continued ...)                

In Memory of Brian Jacques

My sister just informed me that Brian Jacques has passed away. For those of you not familiar with him, Brian Jacques was the author of the Redwall series. It is about mice, squirrels, badgers and hares fighting off rats, weasels, foxes and ferrets with all the blood and gore my child self could have ever asked for. The series now consists of over twenty novels, most of them bad, consisting of telling the same story over and over again, but the first six novels were truly inspired. Beyond those first novels (the only ones I recognize much as I only recognize the original Star Wars films) I owe a debt of gratitude to Jacques for, along with my mother and my grade school teacher Mrs. Kristine Coyne, helping to make me a reader. The Redwall series was my Harry Potter (and to all those people upset with Rowling for not writing more books, I ask you to look at Redwall and ask yourself if you would really want twenty Potter novels).

The Redwall books were not just a personal thing to me, but a beloved series within my family. My older brother was the first to come to them. I first learned about them after he spent an entire Sabbath reading the first novel, Redwall, coming down and drafting me for a role playing game. He would play the hero Matthias the mouse and I was to play Cluny the Scourge with   his whip-like tail. This was a variation of his usual game of him playing Beowulf and me Grendel. You can say this for my brother, he beat me up in good literary taste. Soon after this Brian Jacques came to Columbus for a book signing and my mother took my brother and the rest of us kids along. So I got to meet Brian Jacques, probably the first author I ever met, and he introduced us to starfruit, which he was eating. With such inspiration, it was only natural that I would make a go at the books, despite the fact that I was only in second grade and Redwall was by far the longest book I had read up to that point. (Long before Rowling, Jacques was breaking the unofficial 350 page limit for children's books.) It took me awhile, and by the time I got through it my older sister had also taken an interest.

At this point the series consisted of only three books, Redwall, Mossflower and Mattimeo. We had to wait for the fourth book, Mariel of Redwall to be published in the United States. When our copy finally came in by some agreement I can no longer recall, the reading order was my sister, me and then my older brother. The next morning I got up early snuck into my sister's room and nicked the book while she was sleeping in order to get a harmless jump start on the book. My parents disagreed and as a punishment, my brother got to go ahead of me. Thankfully for me, both my siblings finished within a few days.

Farewell Brian Jacques warrior of Redwall. May you find peace in the Dark Forest.       

Alice Cullen Eclipsed

So last night I finally got around to seeing Eclipse, the third Twilight film. Despite the fact that Eclipse was my favorite of the novels, I did not see it while it was in theaters this past summer. I was seriously dating a non-Twilight fan and trying to spend every moment I could with her. (I bring an Edward like intensity to relationships, which is probably why I am still gloriously single.) Under such circumstances I was not about to take the time to go by myself to a movie and if she showed no apparent interest in going then that was the end of that. To be honest, though, I had dropped out of my previous interest in the Twilight series as it has become too popular for all the wrong reasons, too much about the "sexy stars of Twilight," and I dreaded to see how this trend might affect even the best of the series. I am a proud member of team Alice. This means that I could care less about Bella having to choose between Edward and Jacob and would have much rather seen her develop a friendship with Alice. (See More on My Favorite Friendly Neighborhood Vampires.)


Seeing the film has confirmed my fears, even if the film was not completely without merit. The main addition from the novel was that the film actually included a series of brief scenes with the newborn vampires and actually develops Riley, their supposed leader, as a character. In this the filmmakers were taking their cues from Stephenie Meyer, who actually wrote a novelette, The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner. That novel, though, did not actually focus on Riley, but rather on the newborn Bree. This was actually the sort of move that would have greatly benefited the early Harry Potter films. Those films needed their villains, the present Lord Voldemort, his younger self in the form of Tom Riddle and Sirius Black (a supposed villain) to have major screen time. This could have easily been done by writing new scenes with material hinted at in the books. For example Voldemort breaking into Gringotts, Riddle killing Moaning Myrtle or Sirius' fight with Wormtail. These characters worked in the books as specters in the backdrop. This is not something that works on film. Also the actors playing Harry, Ron and Hermione were not ready to carry the films so any attempt to place the focus on other actors would have been welcome. If the three child actor leads of Harry Potter were not up to the task, the three adult leads in Eclipse, were not much better and could have used having the film taken out from under them.


In a two hour film, everything that stays in let alone anything added is going to come at the expense of something else. The cut part that most caught my attention was Alice "kidnapping" Bella and forcing her into a slumber party. This was not a major plot point in the book and hardly necessary to incorporate into the movie. That being said this was my favorite part of the entire series and the decision to cut it says something about the values of the filmmakers, as opposed to say my values. I love eccentric characters and relationships that offer unusual dynamics and lot of witty back and forths. Alice trying to be human and practicing on Bella is interesting as is Bella monologuing and taking her vampire/werewolf world perfectly in stride. Edward going back and forth about killing Bella is interesting. Bella having a platonic relationship with Jacob, fooling around with motorcycle is interesting. What I have no interest in is a romantic triangle between Bella, Edward and Jacob with Edward going emo, Jacob ranging from sulking to being an SOB (literally) and Bella being a ditz head. What should the filmmakers have found so valuable in the books to be reproduced on screen, but this annoying romantic triangle.


What made the romantic triangle bearable in the book was that, for the most part it was presented through Bella's monologuing. The Twilight movies, for the most part scraped the monologuing, leaving nothing but corny dialogue to be recited with a serious dramatic romance face. They could not have left the story to Bella' monologuing. That might have taken away some of the serious sexiness of the story and left it as a joke. For this same reason, they could not give the time for Alice and Bella's friendship or to develop Riley into a worthwhile character. It might have taken away from the romantic triangle of the sexy stars of Twilight.

Muggle Quidditch and the Revenge of the Potter Nerds

NPR has a piece on the growth of Quidditch, the wizard sport in Harry Potter. It is now being played at several dozen high schools and colleges, and there is even a move to make it an official NCAA sport. Unlike the Quidditch of Harry Potter, Muggle Quidditch does not involve flying, but players do run around with a broomstick between their legs.

I take pride in this much as I take pride in the success of television shows like Big Bang Theory, Lost and Battlestar Galactica; it is a sign of the increased cultural power of us nerds, people who relate to the world primarily through the mind as opposed to the physical or the social. This "nerd" sensibility is most obviously manifested in an attachment to reading or, in the case of television, shows with strong literary qualities. In the case of Quidditch, what we have, in a matter of fashion, is a deconstruction of athletics in which the product of a literary culture is allowed to dominate the culture of athletics, the most obvious manifestation of our physical culture. The nerd is allowed to take on this physical culture on his own terms and come out victorious. For this reason, I would support the continued use of broomsticks in the game; it maintains the sport as a parody. I suspect that Quidditch would cease to be interesting if it became just another sport, unmoored from its connection to the most successful product of literary culture. We nerds would lose our revenge.

Articles of Interest (Harry Potter Economics, Asperger Vampires, Coming Back to Judaism, Jewish Gospel Music and Conservative Health Care)

The Economist has an article on Harry Potter, dealing with, with what else, the economic side of Potter. In particular, the article looks to the future of Potter now that the films are about to be finished. Are you looking forward to Harry Potter: The Theme Park? To the people at Bloomsbury and Scholastic, who were transformed into giants of the book publishing industry, may I humbly suggest a musket and magic fantasy series being written on a blog near you?

Speaking of novels being written on the blogosphere, Miss. S. has started posting her Eternal series. This is a story about vampires in the spirit of Twilight and True Blood. (She is another person that I converted to the Gospel According to Stephenie Meyer.) This is not a horror story; this is a story that has some great characters, some of whom happen to be vampires. (Do these vampires have Asperger syndrome?) I unashamedly admit that Miss. S. is the more polished writer than yours truly and I think she has a real shot at being able to turn this into a published novel. I would not solicit readers and comments for myself, though that would be nice too but please give Miss S. your support; she deserves it.

Kosher Academic has a guest post on In the Pink about being the child of a mother who converted out of Judaism and coming to Judaism as an adult. Steven Levitt of Freakonomics has a somewhat similar background. It is the subject of his book Turbulent Souls.

Kerri Macdonald writes, in the New York Times, about Joshua Nelson, a black Jewish gospel singer. No, he is not a convert. According to the article: "When he was growing up, Mr. Nelson and his family went to a black Orthodox synagogue in Brooklyn on holidays." I am curious if anyone knows what synagogue they are referring to.

David Brooks is one of my favorite columnists for his ability to make the case for conservative principles (something different from the Republican Party) and doing it in a judicious and moderate fashion. This is once again on display as he examines his mixed feelings about Health Care Reform. As a Libertarian, I do not support any government involvement in health care. I do not support Medicare; I do not even support a Food and Drug Administration. That being said if we are going to have government health care we might as well try to have good government health care. As of right now we already have government run health care. You will not be refused care in a hospital because you are not capable of paying for it. Our government health care system, though, is simply horrendous. The question for me is that, recognizing that the sort of Libertarian health care reforms I support are not going to happen, not even if Republicans get back into power, should I support President Obama's plan which is relatively sane and moderate as far as government health care plans go?

Lunchtime Book Recommendations: An Idea as to How to Create Must Read Books

I often eat lunch in the Hebrew Academy lunchroom during the same time as some of the elementary school grades. The other day, I was in the lunchroom when I saw one of the teachers do something very interesting. Towards the end of the half hour period, when students were beginning to finish, she took the microphone and asked if any students would be interested in coming up to tell everyone about a book they recently read and would recommend. The teacher then asked for a show of hands as to who has read the book. A young friend of mine recommended Diary of a Wimpy Kid. It seems that the vast majority of the kids have read the series. I am not familiar with these books but they clearly seem to be very popular. Another kid came to the floor carrying a copy of Garth Nix’s Lirael and suggested the first book in the series, Sabriel. When asked what he liked about the books the kid did not say anything so I shouted out “Mogget.” Mogget is a cat shaped spirit, who likes sleep and fish and will kill you if you take his collar of. His main role in the series is to be the sardonic voice of reason, saying “this is stupid and we are all going to die.” I raised my hand, but was not called upon. I wanted to recommend Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games. This is a teenage book about a reality show in which twenty-four kids are thrown in a giant arena; the last one alive wins a life of fortune and fame. Think of it as Theseus meets Lord of the Flies with a totally awesome heroine armed with a bow and arrow.
This whole idea of allowing kids to come up and make book recommendations is an excellent exercise in controlled chaos. We are handing a microphone over to kids without any prescreening and they get pitch any book they so wish. I also think it is a brilliant way to sell reading to kids. One of the advantages that movies and television have over books is that they start with a wider audience and there are fewer of them to compete for an audience. This allows for the creation of a “must see” factor; people will watch films and television shows, regardless of their actual merit, simply because they know that other people are watching these things and they do not want to be left out when these things are being discussed say around the office water-cooler. The model here is for committed individuals to take an interest in something. Once a critical mass is reached, these individuals become a group and the object of their interest becomes a lightning-rod for others to bring them into the group. A larger and larger group of people will “tune in” to find out what the whole fuss is about.

It is certainly possible for books to do this. Harry Potter and Twilight are proof. In both cases, Goblet of Fire for Potter and Breaking Dawn for Twilight, these series had a moment where they went from just being very successfully books to being “cultural phenomenon.” The key to this was that these books became big enough to catch the attention of the media. The media, true to its fashion, made these books front page news as they “examined” the phenomena. Of course being front page news sold more copies of these books, bringing more “examinations” and continuing the cycle. Potter and Twilight succeed through a bit of luck and because they possessed certain qualities to give them mass appeal. The question becomes, how do you create a dozen Potters and Twilights? Take Nix’s Abhorsen series mentioned earlier, these are the sort of books that have the right mixture of in theory being for children while having more adult content to appeal to a mass audience. All that is needed is that bit of luck to create the needed critical mass in order to attract media attention and make them “must read” books.

Having kids come up and recommend books to their peers in a public forum allows for the creation of small groups around a book. I get up and recommend a book. Someone else raises their hand to show that they read it. Now I have something to go over to that person with in order to talk to them. A third person in the audience in the crowd sees that two people have read this book and are excited about it. This person then goes and reads the book. Now you have three people interested in something. Interest gathers interest and before you know it you have chain reaction of people reading the book to find out what everyone else is talking about. And you have it, Must Read Books!

The Attack of Some Vampires from my Past

When I first posted on Twilight I mentioned a series of books called The Vampire Diaries L. J. Smith.

These books are very similar to Twilight. Vampire Diaries even has a werewolf making an appearance. It makes a very useful comparison in that the Vampire Diaries serves to demonstrate how easily Twilight could have gone wrong in the hands of a less talented author.


I read Vampire Diaries when I was in fifth grade. Like Twilight, Vampire Diaries is built on the premise of girl meets guy, girl falls in love with guy, guy falls in love with girl, guy just happens to be a vampire and stuff ensues from there. The Bella Swan character here is named Elena Gilbert and the role of Edward Cullen is taken up by Stefan Salvatore. Stefan, a vegetarian/black-ribbon vampire, comes from Renaissance Italy where he had a brother named Damon. Both he and Damon, while hating each other, fell in love with the same woman, Katherine, and asked her to choose between them. Katherine, unbeknownst to them, was a vampire and, unwilling to make a choice, decided to go with both of them. Stefan and Damon proved unwilling to live with the arrangement. Seeing this Katherine committed suicide by stepping out unprotected into sunlight. (The obvious plot twist does occur. We later find out that Katherine faked her suicide and shows up in the present.) Elena looks almost exactly like Katherine and, once Damon shows up, she becomes caught up in this centuries old brotherly war. Damon in the right hands could have been an interesting character along the lines of Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He is the villain through the first two books, who becomes good, at least sort of, and provides the cynical commentary. As it plays out in the book though, Damon comes out as making no sense. When the books needed him as a villain they made him a villain and then make him one of the good guys once Stefan needs a brotherly sidekick.

Just to be clear, I do not consider Vampire Diaries to be worthwhile reading. They are like the Twilight series, but without the charm, Bella’s running straight-man commentary and the long supply of characters that one actually cares about. The quality writing is about the same as two better known young adult horror authors of that generation, R. L. Stine with his Fear Street series (This is before he turned to writing for pre-adolescents with the Goosebumps series.) and Christopher Pike. Smith is on the more chaste side of things, more Stine than Pike. I find it to be an interesting reflection on our society that Twilight has been controversial for its abstinence message. There is more sexual content in Twilight than Vampire Diaries. Vampire Diaries was written long ago in the early 90s when one could write young adult novels without any sex and no one would think twice. (One had to be careful on the off chance that ten-year old Orthodox boys might read them.) To be fair to Smith, I did read all four of the books in the series back then. (I have since found out that she has continued the series in recent years.) Despite the fact that I viewed the books then as trash and would likely have an even lower opinion now, there must have been something that drew me in. I even fantasized about being able to play Klaus, the “big bad” who appears in the fourth book as the vampire behind the scene pulling the strings of the story. I do think I would make a great vampire and would love to play one. Klaus, though, would be too head man Dracula vampire for me. I would be better off as the second-in-command vampire who gets to run around, kill people and laugh.

Soon after Twilight became really big with Breaking Dawn, I noticed Vampire Diaries on sale in a two-volume edition. I had a laugh at that; apparently Twilight was powerful enough to resurrect a book from the netherworld of used paperbacks. Now I find out that Vampire Diaries is being made into a television show by the CW. That counts as taking the desire for something Twilight-like to an extreme. Since the source material was mediocre at best and is being made, one assumes, because it is like Twilight, I do not expect the show to be any good nor do I expect it to last for more than a few weeks. I would like to say that will have the good sense to not bother watching it at all. I suspect, though, that I will find myself watching at least an episode for all time’s sake.

I would like to add a side note as to the nature of young adult/teenage fiction. As it should be clear from the post, I regularly read young adult fiction before I was a teenager when I was a pre-adolescent reading on a teenage level. I still read a fair amount of young adult material since I have a strong inner-child and like a good story no matter what age category. In this sense, I represent both ends of the market for young adult literature. This begs the question of is the audience for young adult literature really teenagers. The book reading population is quite small and those who do read are likely to be significantly above average readers. Teenagers who actually read books are likely to be at an adult reading level and therefore reading adult books. Pre-adolescent readers, though, are likely to be reading at a teenage level and will, therefore, turn to young adult books. On the flip side, there are also going to be adults who are going to be attracted to young adult fiction. Sean Jordan argues that since most adults are not capable of reading adult fiction there is a large market for children’s books that are mature enough to appeal to adults but are “childlike” enough for such people to read. He makes this argument in regards to Harry Potter. The model would also fit Twilight and to a large extent the Da Vinci Code (a young adult book openly marketed for adults from the beginning) as well. In the end audience for young adult books are not teenagers, but pre-adolescents and adults.

Harry Potter in the Dragon Age

I am in middle of reading Dragonseed, the newest book in James Maxey’s Dragon Age series. It is about a post-apocalyptic age in which humans are ruled by dragons. (This is one of those story ideas that sound absolutely lame, but somehow, due to some brilliant writing and character development, manages to work.) In the beginning of Dragonseed, two characters, Shay and Jandra, find a cache of old books, dating from before the time of the dragons, among which is Harry Potter:

Shay let out a grasp. Jandra looked at him. He was in front of the bookshelf.
“By the bones!” said Shay. “He has all seven!”
“All seven what?”
“The Potter biographies! The College of Spires only had five of the volumes… four now, since I stole one.”
“What’s so special about these books?” She picked up one of the fat tomes and flipped it open.
“Potter was a member of a race of wizards who lived in the last days of the human age,” said Shay.
Jandra frowned as she flipped through the pages. “Are you certain this isn’t fiction?” she asked.
“The books are presented as fiction,” said Shay. “However, there are other artifacts that reveal the actual reality. I wouldn’t expect you to know about photographs, but-“
“I know what a photograph is,” she said. …
“Photographs recorded the physical world, and a handful of photographs of this famous wizard still survive. Some show him in flight on his …” His voice trailed off. He turned toward Jandra, studying her face carefully. …
“How did Potter control his magic?”
“With a wand and words. Is this how you control your magic?”
Jandra was intrigued. Her genie could take on any shape she desired. Why not the form of a wand? Of course, she’d never needed any magic words – the genie responded to her thoughts. Still … could this Potter have been a nanotechnician? (Dragonseed pg. 78-80.)

As a historian, I find this passage to be of interest. This is a version of a scenario that I often play with my students; imagine a future historian, who knows nothing about our time period trying to make sense of a given document and constructing a historical narrative based on it. The secular version of this involves audio recordings of the Rush Limbaugh show. The Jewish version involves a stack of Yated Neeman newspapers. I have actually used the example of Potter when dealing with narrative construction. If I were J. K. Rowling and I wished to write a series of books about a boy named Harry Potter that was going to sell millions of copies, what would I put into it? I would stick things in that were out of the ordinary like magic and a world full of wizards. But beyond the obvious issue of magic there are a host other more subtle devices. To keep the story interesting the stakes must always be maximized. Harry must constantly find himself in mortal peril with the fate of the entire wizarding world in the balance; mere detention just will not do. The story should be fairly neat with a clear beginning and end. Harry should escape from the Dursleys and get to Hogwarts. Once he gets to Hogwarts he should sniff out some evidence of a foul plot. After spending the main part of the book investigating matters, Harry should walk right into the villain’s clutches, setting off a rousing climax and a happy ending. There should be a fairly limited number of characters. All the important actions in the story should be carried out by a select group of people, who the reader is already familiar with. There should not be random characters coming into the story, performing crucial actions and then disappearing. Furthermore, in order to maintain an orderly plot, there should be clear cut heroes and villains. The audience should be cheering for Harry Potter to defeat Lord Voldemort. There is no need to give Lord Voldemort a fair hearing and allow him to explain his side of the story.

In addition to the structure of the plot, there is a need for a certain amount of story logic to move things along. For example, it is necessary that top secret objects be hidden in maximum security facilities that are nothing more than obstacle courses to be traversed by a group of eleven-year olds. Schools like Hogwarts need to stay open despite the fact that there are mythical monsters on the loose and not act like real schools, which close down for any two-bit bomb threat. Villains need to suffer from excess monologuing, thus allowing Potter to constantly not get killed. The teachers at school should be incredibly powerful to allow for any necessary dues ex machina actions and yet either be less capable of dealing with the yearly acts of villainy than a group of pre-adolescents or have the eccentric pedagogic theory that allowing children to end up in extreme mortal peril is something to be recommended. (The lack of any functional child services is also a necessary plot element.) With all due respect to Harold Bloom, this is not a weakness of the Potter series. Potter, at its heart, is an attempt to graft the hero story onto a school setting. More importantly, like almost any work of fiction, Potter operates on its own logic, which needs to be accepted on its own terms as part of a suspension of disbelief.

These elements, far more so than claims of magic, serve to tag Potter as a work of fiction. Potter engages in narrative and story logic in order to craft a story that someone would actually wish to read. The historian, as part of his arsenal, can think counter-narratively. Any narrative that contains things like an organized plot, clear heroes and villains and relies on certain leaps of logic to move along can be viewed as a created narrative, as fiction. Shay and Jandra are trained to think like scientists, but not like historians. They therefore have nothing to protect themselves with once a narrative moves past some theoretical baseline of physical plausibility.

Religious Choices: A Response to Bart

This is a response to a recent comment from Bart, who challenged me as to my consistency in choosing to follow certain laws while ignoring others. He raises some good questions. Different people may respond differently to them, here is mine.

There are two issues at hand here. There is the issue of the relationship between one’s personal values and the public policies that one supports and then there is the issue of the process of religious decision making. As to the first issue, which I think is really the side issue here, I do not believe that making laws against theft is forcing one’s values on other people as theft is an action that does direct empirical harm to others. Someone breaking into my apartment and stealing my television is different from my atheist gay neighbor having gay sex with his boyfriend and reading PZ Myers to him in the privacy of his own home. Since I am a Libertarian and take a hard-line stance on the distinction between empirical and non-empirical damage, I am in a far better position than most when it comes to this issue.

To transition into the second and what I think the real issue at hand. While my religion may ban me from having gay sex and, arguably, bans my neighbor from having gay sex, there is nothing in my religion that says that I have to try to stop him either through physical force or through my vote. The most my religion may ask of me is to politely “rebuke” my neighbor and point out that there are alternatives to his way of thinking and living. Even this would be assuming that I am qualified to rebuke people. There are many people out there who have taken it upon themselves to serve as rebukers, who are not qualified and do far more harm than good.

Just as I am under no obligation to stop gay sex I am under no obligation to stop gay marriage. I am sorry if I was not clear on this matter previously, but while I do not support having Judaism recognize gay marriage, I have no problem if the State of Ohio or the Federal government decides to legalize gay marriage. Homosexuality is not different than any other sin. How much sleep do you think I have lost over the government subsidizing pig farmers? Well mainly because, as a Libertarian, I oppose pretty much all government subsidies, but not because of anything having to do with Leviticus. So I am not "amending" God’s law to suit modern times. The same ban on homosexuality from biblical times is still in place in full force. I would also point out that as a Jew I am in a far better position than a Christian in regard to this issue. I do not say that homosexual sex is an abomination while pork or a shrimp cocktail (a la Prop 8: the Musical) is okay.

All serious thinking people, no matter their theology, will, on a regular basis, find themselves having to weigh different issues against each other. The threat posed by Saddam Hussein weighed against the cost and dangers of trying to removing him from power. The desire to protect unborn children weighed against a person’s right to control their own bodies. (Unlike most feminists, I am actually consistent on this issue since when I talk about the right to make choices when it comes to one’s own body I am not only talking about abortion but also the right to use drugs and sell one’s organs on an open market. I do not believe in men’s rights or women’s rights. I believe in human rights.) Inevitably, one is going to have to make compromises. I do not believe that all those who opposed the war in Iraq wanted Saddam in power or that those who support abortion want to butcher fetuses. They made a decision to way one issue over another.

This applies to religion as well. When one engages with a religion one is engaging a whole complex tradition. For example Islam. People who quote passages in the Koran that support violence against unbelievers and compares Jews and Christians to apes are missing the point. Islam is a lot more than just the Koran; it is a whole body of different legal traditions. If you wish to understand Islam’s view of violence toward unbelievers you cannot just look in the Koran you also have to follow the issue through nearly fifteen hundred years of Islamic legal thought. The Koran deals with a situation in the seventh century where Mohammed and his followers were at war with Jews and Christians. How should Muslims in twenty-first century America apply these passages? There is a range of possibilities and a religious Muslim would possess a lot of leeway, while working under the guidance of his local Islamic religious authority and the Islamic legal tradition. There are a number of Muslims in the history department here at Ohio State. The ones that I have gotten to know are all really good people. To the best of my knowledge, none of them have tried to murder me. That does not make them bad Muslims or cafeteria Muslims, choosing to practice some things while ignoring other things. They are simply the products of a fifteen hundred year tradition in dialogue with twenty-first century America.

Here is a World War II Bugs Bunny cartoon featuring Bugs Bunny taking on a pack of Japanese soldiers. It climaxes with Bugs handing out ice cream covered grenades to apelike Japanese soldiers to blow them to bits. This is a fairly racist piece and not the sort of thing that I would want to be shown to children without corrective commentary. That being said, I would not interpret this cartoon as Warner Brothers telling me that my Japanese neighbors in twenty-first century America are monkeys and that I should go wage jihad against them. It is self-understood that this cartoon was made in a very specific context, World War II, and that it is meant only to apply to this very specific context.

This past week, in the weekly Torah portion, we read the famous (or infamous) passage of “thou shall not suffer a mechashefa (usually translated as “witch”) to live.” (Exodus 22:17) This passage has been used to justify a lot of horrible things, among the least of which has been the attempt to ban Harry Potter. As one can see from this blog, I am a very big Harry Potter fan. I do not see this as me making compromises with the modern world. As I understand the passage, it is not meant to ban the actions described in Harry Potter let alone to ban me from reading about them.

To conclude, I do not see myself as making compromises with the modern world. At no point do I simply say that something does not fit in with modern values and can therefore simply be done away with. My actions and lifestyle choices are well rooted within Jewish tradition. I grant you that there is a personal element to this. I am ultimately the one who has to make choices for myself. I am a product of twenty-first century America so the process with which I look at Jewish sources and make decisions about how to act as a Jew is going to be different than Jews who lived in first-century Judea or fifteenth-century Spain. This does not mean that I am making arbitrary choices simply to suit myself; there is a thought process.