The Harry Potter comics on floccinaucinihilipilification are probably technically jokes but I feel like they capture the truth about Hogwarts better than most serious takes. For example...

From Lupin's first day teaching:

MCGONAGALL: ...finally someone good with children, who knows what he's doing

LUPIN: Hey kids. Who wants to be the first to look into the trauma closet

Much more succinct than my version!

From Lockhart's terrible job interview:

MCGONAGALL: Aw, Albus you are giving everybody a chance

DUMBLEDORE: I hope Harry kills this one too

Tell me this wasn't Dumbledore's actual plan.

And those memories of Dumbledore casually telling Snape to keep an eye on Quirrell and claiming Harry had to fight murderers and monsters every year to "try his strength" (which is a hell of a euphemism for "to get used to the idea of dying young") while Snape objects that Dumbledore's plans are actually deeply cruel make staff meetings like this one seem all too plausible:

DUMBLEDORE: Last school year was a bit stressful with all the soul sucking demons maybe we should do something nice for the students this year

MCGONAGALL: Aww

DUMBLEDORE: Let's invite some other schools and battle them and make them think that we drowned their family members and stuff

SNAPE: Or we invest in a school therapist
SNAPE: Or stop sending them into the murder forest as punishment
SNAPE: Or sex ed

I mean, I don't think the wizarding world has school therapists (maybe not any therapists?), and the idea of Snape and McGonagall teaching sex ed might be hilarious for us readers but is not an ordeal we should probably be wishing on the characters. But the general spirit...yeah.

Warning: long and, as the title says, a polemic.( Read more... )

I've had some Real Life stuff interfere with blogging lately, but I have a few things I'd originally posted to a community but not my own journal which might be of interest. Here's one on that dragon-smuggling episode in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone.

On a re-read, specifically looking for instances when the adults ought to know more than the kids about what’s going on, a penny finally dropped. Apologies to everyone who probably figured this out years ago.( Read more... )

I cannot even begin to formulate coherent commentary on this book yet, except to note that after about a hundred pages, the fact that you have sort of gotten to know a few characters (as much as you can get to know such bland voids) and that there is the beginnings of some sort of plot makes it a bit easier reading. So instead, quotes!

First up are two passages which, if transplanted into a better book, might actually be okay. Not terribly groundbreaking or original, but nice enough bits of commentary which are completely swamped by the morass of samey-sounding reflective blah blah blah that must have been intended to be deep and meaningful and poignant, except that 99% of it isn't. I feel honor-bound to pull these two bits out and allow them their moment in the sun, for as much good as it does them.( How sudden and complete death was, like a metaphor for a presence wrapped in an enigma in a metaphorical way. )

Just so you know the level of plotting and prose style mastery we're dealing with here. Except I think Deathly Hallows was, overall, a much better-written book.

The Founders

Wemyss has an excellent essay on the Founders’ geographical origins here, placing Godric in the moors of the West Country, Salazar in the Fenlands of East Anglia, Helga as a Viking descendant in Wales, and Rowena as a Saxon whose family ended up in Scotland. I wonder a bit more about Salazar’s origins here). But this raises another question: how did they meet and decide to form a school, and how did they gain enough magical knowledge to be qualified teachers in the first place?

( Read more... )

…and sheep and cows.

This is entirely frivolous, because I felt like being a bit silly.

Hogwarts students write on parchment. Parchment, as we know, is made from the skins of goats, sheep, or cows. Between all the essays, star charts, and notes they take, the average Hogwarts student probably goes through five to ten feet of parchment per week at minimum (Hermione no doubt goes through twenty or thirty). There are perhaps 300 to 600 students, or maybe 200 or 1,000, because oh dear maths. If we take the 300 number, then Hogwarts students probably go through 1,500 to 3,000 feet of parchment per week.

Now, I don’t know how many feet of parchment you can get out of the average goat or cow, but I’m guessing that means at least a few hundred animals per week must die for these essays. Do the cows go into shepherd’s pie for Hogwarts dinners, I wonder? The remainder into a Hogsmeade butcher shop?

But there’s another factor to consider: what are their books made out of? Paper did quickly take over as the primary material in the early days of printing, true, but some of the Gutenberg Bibles were printed on parchment. Do wizards make children write on parchment for tradition and print on paper (maybe with the exception of important official documents like Ministry decrees; Parliament still prints acts on parchment)? One hopes so. Because even with a lively used book trade, a fair number of students still seem to buy new books, and Flourish & Blott’s obviously sells a fair number of new books (some of their stock may be used, but who knows). We know new books get added to the Hogwarts curriculum every so often, and it’s unlikely that Flourish & Blott’s had a hundred or more used copies of The Monster Book of Monsters just lying around. We also know that Lockhart’s books are best sellers, which means that each book probably sold at least a few hundred copies before three hundred or so Hogwarts students got assigned seven of his books each. Unless every adult witch and wizard sold their copies back, that means a couple thousand more books printed. We don’t know the page count of any of the books, but it must be at least a couple dozen animal skins per book. Lockhart’s books alone would probably account for enough dead cows and goats to feed wizarding Britain for a year.

So where are all these goats and cows grazing? Do they rustle them from Muggle herds? That sounds like a lot of work, not to mention risky to keep up long term. Are they filling the next ten valleys over from Hogwarts, tended by House Elf cowboys and goatherds? When there is leftover meat, do they Vanish it? Put it in stasis for emergencies? Send it to Romania for the dragons? What do they feed them during the winter - grass made by multiplying the last summer grass for months on end? (If the first principal exception to Gamp's law of elemental transfiguration applies to materials any animal could eat rather than just human food, then you can't create animal feed from nothing. Or thistles, tin cans, or three red shirts right off the line, for that matter.)

And is Aberforth a secret animal rights activist, saving goats from being made into copies of Magical Me?

Via Tobias Buckell's blog, this article on the pitfalls of brainstorming offers interesting evidence against traditional brainstorming techniques, and alternatives which seem to work better. (Working alone is one. At last, I am vindicated! All those poorly-constructed group projects in elementary school I had to suffer really did lead to fewer ideas...) Making sure everyone has to run into people working on other topics to promote unpredictable cross-fertilization of ideas is one that sounds obvious once you hear it. But what I found especially interesting was the modified brainstorming in which you debate and poke holes in each other's ideas: this means House does something right, using this technique. Who knew? (They still should crack open a reference book once in a while. And they still would have killed a lot more people in real life. Do not try this at home.)

Buckell also posted this interesting video on motivation. Turns out paying someone $800 million to be CEO probably doesn't motivate them better than paying them $200, and might be worse. Who knew? (Oh. Right. Everyone.)

And via Ferretbrain, Ekaterina Sedia has translated the titles some Russian LJ-ers have invented for an imaginary encyclopedia of feminism for Harry Potter. If this were a real thing, I would pay money for a physical book to put on my shelf. Some sample titles:

• House Elves: Just Like Women, Only Ugly and Invisible



• Pomona Sprout: Good Girls are Liked but not Noticed



• Professor Vector, or Anonymity of Women in Mathematics



• Poppy Pomfrey: a Subservient Suffragette, or the Outcome of Courses of Higher Women's Studies in St Petersburg



• Bellatrix Lestrange and Luna Lovegood: Psychiatric Disabilities and Ableism in Hogwarts



• Luna Lovegood, Tom Riddle, Harry Potter: Good Children Don't Get PTSD



• Luna Lovegood: Forced Acceptance into the Family Strategies of Psychological Repression



• Conventional Man is Allowed Anger but not Grief. Harry Potter: The Masculinity Trap



• Remus Lupin and the "Good Cripple" Archetype



• Rolanda Hooch: Professional Women's Athletics as Deviation

You know you'd read that. I know I'd rather read that than the essay in one of those Firefly collections about how the show is totally awesome because it lets you enjoy the Civil War and chivalrous southern heroes with all the icky "defending slavery" bits taken out. (It's been years, and I still can't believe that essay. Just... what? Whitewashing history to produce guilt-free entertainment is a positive good now?)

I'm honestly trying to update more often, but it's tough right now. So here's something I wrote before Deathly Hallows came out which I never got around to posting, updated slightly to reflect DH material.

Warning: this is a crack theory. ( Dumbledore's Horcrux )

Thanks to terri_testing, I've been re-reading Jodel's essay on Wizard/Muggle relations, and a thought shook loose on how wizards might have gone about finding Muggleborns before the Hogwarts Quill came into operation.

We don't know exactly when that was. It could have been the 18th century, purely because when you see people scratching away with quills in the movies, it's so often those guys in wigs and stockings. But take your pick from between the 6th and 19th centuries. (Did you know the U.S. Supreme Court still hands out quill pens to lawyers as souvenirs? I didn't! I guess we can't get on the Brits' case too much about the wigs.)

Because many of the magical discoveries we know of come in the 13th century (Floo powder) or later - and while they did invent things in medieval times, the rate of discovery was slower than in later centuries - for the sake of argument, let's say the Quill was invented some time after that. While they probably wouldn't want untrained magical kids running around causing who-knows-what troubles in any era, due to the small population, it probably was not a really pressing need until the major witch hunts of the 15th through 17th centuries and the imposition of the International Statute of Secrecy in 1689/92. (I mean, it's maybe two unidentified kids who occasionally accidentally blow something up. Not such a big deal.) So I'll date it to, say, the first few decades of the 18th century, and we can have our bewigged wizards consulting with Dilys Derwent over at St. Mungo's on figuring out a better way to locate these kids. (And then she became Headmaster, watching over the kids she'd helped identify. Very neat.)

But how did they locate the occasional Muggleborn before that, if they did?

Jodel has some good suggestions in her essay. Local priests might notice and take the kids into the church (and if there were any wizarding priests around, give them some magical instruction or send them off to Hogwarts). Wizarding "great houses" who found one in their regions of influence (probably an unacknowledged cousin of some sort anyway) might sponsor their training.

I'd like to add another possibility, closely related to the first:

We know that the Hufflepuff House ghost is the Fat Friar. For years, I saw that and thought, oh, look, there's confirmation that sometimes wizards did have a vocation, and that was the end of it.

But the thing about friars is, they are not cloistered or even as closely tied down as a parish priest, who usually served an area roughly corresponding to a township or great estate. A friar is one of the mendicant orders which got going around the 13th century - and their deal is to wander around in whatever province or county they have chosen or been assigned, begging for sustenance and serving the spiritual needs of everyone in the area. Of course, this is not always what happened in practice. Nevertheless... doesn't that sound convenient for wizards? A wizard friar could move from town to town in his county, getting to know all the local gossip, and so would have a better chance of hearing about children who did "odd" or "miraculous" things than someone who stayed put. He would also be able to find out and intervene if a parish priest who had discovered one of those "odd" children was more inclined to think it demonic than miraculous. And of course, he would have an excellent excuse if anyone heard him muttering funny words in Latin and performing small miracles.

Any Muggleborn children discovered this way could then be sent off to Hogwarts, under the cover story that they were obviously very holy children and just had to go to Whatsit Abbey for proper religious instruction. (For that matter, just because we don't see it happening now doesn't mean Hogwarts never offered religious instruction. They were all theoretically Catholic for about half of its existence, and the early universities founded a little after Hogwarts were all kinds of mixed up with the church - Oxbridge fellows were supposed to be ordained priests right up until the 19th century, iirc.) Just as the children discovered by a great house might then owe them a debt as retainers of some sort, these children might owe the wizarding members of the church, and eventually would be encouraged to join a mendicant order themselves to pay it forward, as it were. (They could get married and have lots of magical babies first - no hurry. For that matter, wizards might have had different opinions on clerical celibacy, which took a while to get established anyway and was, er, not so strictly followed as some might have wished.) The Fat Friar may in fact be one of these cases, who went so far as to stay on as a ghost watching over his House's children when he was no longer able to wander around like a living person. Although actually we don't know any reason he couldn't have carried right on wandering, unseen by Muggles, until the Quill went into operation and this particular services was no longer needed, after which time he stayed at Hogwarts.

I was reading this article - Isaac Newton, World's Most Famous Alchemist - when an odd detail caught my eye. It says, "Principe notes that Newton suffered a mental breakdown a year after Boyle’s death [in 1691] and wonders if that episode might have been brought on by mercury poisoning... But Newman thinks that Newton’s breakdown is just as likely to be related to Locke’s trying to set him up with a well-to-do widow."

So. Newton's alchemy partner dies and he has a nervous breakdown. Sounds understandable enough, if he thought now he'd never manage to make a philosopher's stone and join the ranks of Nicholas Flamel and... well, Nicholas Flamel. But the timing leaves some interesting possibilities for the Potterverse!

Consider: the Statute of Secrecy was apparently drafted or maybe signed in 1689 and put into effect in 1692 - the year Newton had his breakdown. I would imagine that if he had close ties to both Muggles and wizards, the statute could be a major stressor. Plus, if Locke was pressuring him to marry a witch he didn't like simply because marrying a Muggle was not looked on favorably at the moment and he had a duty to propagate magical traits or whatever, that could be stressful even if Newton had been inclined to marry as a general principle. (Since iirc Cambridge required fellows to be ordained - which Newton managed to wriggle out of - and since I've heard fellows were unmarried before the 19th century, maybe his reluctance to marry had as much to do with liking his job as not liking women.) So, not only has he had a major setback to his chances at making a stone, he also has to live a double life and dodge his friend's attempts to marry him off to that awful Cornelia Black! It's no wonder he cracked a bit.

(He was discreet about his alchemical work even before this date, but that might have more to do with the King not being too keen on anyone learning how to make gold and thus screw with the economy, which is why some alchemical practices were technically illegal.)

Newton obviously remained prominent in Muggle society, so either he cut ties with wizards somehow, or he was allowed to keep his identity so long as he didn't do any actual magic where Muggles could see. Which actually makes sense from a strategic standpoint: what better way to get Muggles on the track of deciding magic isn't real than to have an actual wizard there distracting them with math and science? And what do you know, in 1693 he started publishing his work on calculus, which shortly led to the HEY GUYZ I TOTALLY DISCOVERED CALCULUS BEFORE LEIBNIZ controversy. And then he went on to run the Muggle mint. No goblins here, no, of course there's no such thing, your majesty! What ever gave you that idea? And I can assure you, those counterfeiters I caught absolutely were not using any supernatural methods of reproducing coinage, no way. And psst, wizard friends, you might want to explain again to Julius here about the not letting Muggles get ahold of magicked objects part again... Finally, some of his papers were destroyed in a laboratory fire, and others (the Portsmouth Papers) disappeared from view until the 1930s, when they could safely be passed off with, "Isn't it interesting how silly superstitions like alchemy paved the way for modern chemistry!"