Looking like a friend of Truman Capote

"This Harry Potter was a physician in Bergen County, NJ."

Harry Potter and the Vietnam War

Dear Diary,

Have been seeing fewer people walking around town toting the final Harry Potter book...



On Saturday I saw someone carrying a similarly proportioned tome, in similarly orange-yellow jacket...but it turned out to be:

Knock it off

Somehow I never tire of these articles about counterfeit Chinese Harry Potter books.

These include “Harry Potter and the Half-Blooded Relative Prince,” a creation whose name in Chinese closely resembles the title of the genuine sixth book by Ms. Rowling, as well as pure inventions that include “Harry Potter and the Hiking Dragon,” “Harry Potter and the Chinese Empire,” “Harry Potter and the Young Heroes,” “Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon,” and “Harry Potter and the Big Funnel.”

Some borrow little more than the names of Ms. Rowling’s characters, lifting plots from other well-known authors, like J. R. R. Tolkien, or placing the famously British protagonist in plots lifted from well-known kung-fu epics and introducing new characters from Chinese literary classics like “Journey to the West.”

This reminds me of the way Darger had his Vivian Girls meet characters from The Wizard of Oz and other books. I'm also reminded of this bit in Dizzyhead Douglas's excellent Reading Comics, re the early success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:

Within months, comics stores' shelves were flooded with knockoffs and parodies and parodies of knockoffs—Adolescent Radioactive Black-Belt Hamsters, Aristocratic Xtraterrestrial Time-Traveling Thieves, Pre-Teen Dirty-Gene Kung-Fu Kangaroos (I swear I'm not making this up)...

* * *

In other news: Woah, the reading tonight has been written up at this cool blog called NYTimes.com!

And—New York mag likes the New-York Ghost, calling it "a wonder of both style and substance"!

Attention Potter fans!

Time to re-read this poem by friend Jane: "THE ONLY CONFIRMED CAST MEMBER IS OOK THE OWL, WHO HAS BEEN TAPPED TO PLAY THE SNOWY WHITE OWL WHO DELIVERS MAIL FOR HARRY"

The ultimate Potter-spotting post?

Seen Reading spots Potter readers in Toronto.

George Bush — Potter census

"George Bush? A bookworm? In a crummy apartment?"

* * *

Last night: Counted six people reading or carrying Harry Potter on the subway.

Today: Four people reading it in Riverside Park

Reading Comics, Thinking about Harry

Dizzyhead Douglas's new book, Reading Comics, is a must for anyone (Chrita? Singer?) who takes the medium seriously—for example, now I'm going to be hyperconscious that I use "medium" instead of "genre" when talking about comics!

I dig the premise (or one of the premises): That the Golden Age of comics is...right now.

Largehearted Boy has his soundtrack and many useful links up. And here's a great interview our own Chrita conducted with him a while back.

* * *

I talked to Scott Timberg of the L.A. Times about what makes the Harry Potter books so appealing to adults. (I'm wedged between Lee Siegel and Laura Miller.)

So, Park, continued, we have the kind of fantasy people typically harbor: "I am special, I come from great, even legendary forebears, everyone is concerned with my well-being / life, and perhaps even secretly worships me."

Just for fun, here are my previous musings on the Potteriad—film reviews (from the PTSNBN) of the Chamber and Goblet adaptations.

Looking glass

The Harry Potter creator and Desperate Housewives star are beginning to look alike...

Researching this important item, I discovered that Andrea Bowen (the Teri Hatcher character's daughter) once "played the role of Zooey Glass in the ABC primetime series, That Was Then."

You can just name a character "Zooey Glass"?

Def Leopard

Via Dizzyhead Paul—this website translates a few passages from Harry Potter and Leopard Walk Up to Dragon. (What's that? Read this.) Look what happens in chapter 2:

There was a hobbit, who didn't even know how to return home. He lived in a hole in the ground, and didn't know where he came from or where he was going to. He even didn't know why he had become a hobbit. This was Hogwartz School of Witchcraft and Wizardry 5th year apprentice Harry Potter.

Harry lived in a hole in the ground. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat...

The Yeh Yeh Yehs

Old pal Jane Yeh's long-brewing, just released poetry collection Marabou is the bee's knees—and I'm not the only one who thinks so: She's just been nominated for the Whitbread! (The bee in question, however, is unhappy, and wants its patellae back.)(Wha?)

Anyway—she had better win! Or I'm never buying a book of poetry again! Ye Whitbread judges! Do the right thing! And while you're at it, let's give Nick Hornby a Whitbread, too!

Here is one of Jane's top hits, just in time for ye olde Goblet of Fire! (I like this one because it shows her sense of humor, or as they say over there, "humour.")(Wha?)

THE ONLY CONFIRMED CAST MEMBER IS OOK THE OWL, WHO HAS BEEN TAPPED TO PLAY THE SNOWY WHITE OWL WHO DELIVERS MAIL FOR HARRY
—article on preproduction for the first Harry Potter film, New York Post, August 2000


Claw up. Claw down. Cut.
My fine eyes. My fine eyes are— Cut.

I was fluffed and plucked, like a beauty-pageant winner,
Between takes. Like a news presenter.
Could I be a news presenter?

Rider: 5 rashers bacon. 8-oz. tin mixed nuts.
2 lbs. rabbit fillets. Assorted drupes.

Between takes, I did leg-lifts in my trailer.

If asked what is your most treasured possession, I would say
The woolly toy Tracey, my personal trainer, gave me when young.
I learnt to spy it from afar, then swoop down and seize,
But only on cue. Mr Sheep goes everywhere with me now.

If I could wake up having gained one ability,
It would be the capacity for more facial expression.
It is so tedious to have one's beak set in a permanent frown.

My greatest talent is impersonation—
To simulate a person's idea of an owl.
Sadly, I owe my success to typecasting.

My greatest fear is to be found wanting.

At the premiere party, the women were not very clothed.
It is of advantage to be clad always in feathers.

I allowed fake friends to pet me.
My picture was taken several times with the boy.
I enjoy parties because otherwise I see only Tracey.
Afterwards, you wonder what the glitter was for.