Harry Potter and Whose Stone?

[Lionel Mandrake]

I am no longer a member of the elite that ignores Ms. Rowling's books. I decided to start with book number one. But I had to decide which version to read. Among the British editions, titled Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, some contain the song by "Nearly Headless Nick" and some don't. Then there's the dumbed-down (did you think that was possible?) American version titled Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, the title page of which lacks the Latin phrase: "Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus". Rowling and the editor of the American edition decided to keep it simple and not confuse us with stuff we couldn't possibly understand. How thoughtful of them. :sarcasm:

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. My dear Lionel Mandrake!

Well, good for you!

Those stories are just wonderful, and contrary to popular opinion, not just for kids...

I found the first one the hardest to get through just because it was directed at kids...

The rest of them are much longer, much more complex and much darker!

I think you chose wisely in reading the American version, even if it might be dumbed-down...

I think it's wise to be consistent in these stories. By that I mean that it's most likely the case that you'll be reading the American versions throughout, since those are the ones most likely to be seen here...

Enjoy!

Oh, and BTW...Welcome to DU!

:hi:

[Lionel Mandrake]

2. Thank you for the encouragement.

I guess I'll try book number two, since you say that subsequent books are better than number one. I hope Ms. Rowling's writing has improved with practice. I don't suppose Harry's aunt, uncle, and cousin will ever become three-dimensional. I'd be surprised by any character development, but I will try to keep an open mind.

[XemaSab]

4. The first three books are pretty simple and straightforward

The fourth book gets a lot darker and more interesting, and 5, 6, and 7 are REALLY dark and REALLY interesting.

Many of the characters get a lot more back story in the last 4 or so books, and Harry's family is no exception. :)

edit: can't spell.

[Lionel Mandrake]

7. Thanks for the tip.

Maybe I should skip books 2 and 3. Let's hear it for darkness!

[CaliforniaPeggy]

8. No, you should not skip books two and three!

The story builds on those narratives......

You can't just pick and choose!

You'll miss something later on, believe me...

:eyes:

[badgerpup]

11. California Peggy is right on...

you get lots of backstory, character development and info that you need down the road so things don't come at you out of the blue and look like deus ex machina or :wtf:

Believe it or not, Ms. Rowling tried to be very careful about that...

[Lionel Mandrake]

15. Oh all right,

I'll read the damn things if they're that important.

[Lionel Mandrake]

14. Well, I could watch the movies instead.

Would that be an acceptable substitute?

[CaliforniaPeggy]

21. NO, that would not be an acceptable substitute!

For heaven's sake.....just read the damn things!

You will thank me later, trust me...

The movies are heavily edited, and even though the basic stories come through, key elements are abbreviated...

:eyes:

[CaliforniaPeggy]

6. Oh, you're welcome!

I think you'll find that things get a lot more interesting!

At least, I thought so...

:hi:

[Lisa]

3. I've heard some people saying that the US editions of the later books ...

.... keep some of the British vocabulary. (I read the Canadian one, which follows the British pattern.)

By the way, Latin translations are available for some of the books -- I have been buying them for my dad.

[XemaSab]

5. Alas, Hepzibah Smith's large and flourishing pot plants were lost in the American versions...

:(

[Lionel Mandrake]

13. Does Ms. Rowling not care about the heavy-handed editing

for the US market? Does she think we're all brain-damaged? Or does she agree to whatever the publisher wants? I don't understand it.

[Elidor]

18. We're Americans

That question answers itself, really.

[Lionel Mandrake]

19. Huh?

Help me out here. As an American, I'm a little slow. Which of my questions answers itself?

[Elidor]

23. "Does she think we're all brain-damaged?"

I can't speak for her, but personally, I think most Americans are brain-damaged. Isn't it self-evident? Oh, sure, you and I are different...but really.

[Lionel Mandrake]

24. I don't know about most of us, ...

but quite a few voted for W in 2004, despite plenty of evidence that W wasn't fit to be president. Maybe you're right.

[Lionel Mandrake]

10. I suppose eventually there will be annotated versions

of all the Harry Potter books, complete with scholarly introductions, footnotes, and indications of changes from one edition to another. Harold Bloom will be furious when that happens. He probably doesn't think much of the Latin translations, either.

[Lisa]

12. I've seen some of the literary analysis of C.S. Lewis's editions ...

One discussion about "Voyage of the Dawn Treader" (in a Lewis biography, I think it was) mentioned that some actual plot changes had been made -- for example, having the dark nightmarish island disappear once the boat sailed away. I think the rationale was that kids would be comforted to know that their fears do not outlast the night -- however, I seem to recall that a lot of readers argued that this was too contrived (and that bad things frequently do happen in daylight!).

My guess is that there will be decades of critical analysis ahead (not just in specialized journals like "Mythlore", but the more mainstream cultural studies periodicals too). I'm wondering about doing a bit myself ... I've actually alluded to both the books and movies in class so far (I teach a course on environmental perception and how it relates to landscape architecture and planning issues). The depictions of Hogwarts fit nicely with Romanticism -- spooky old castles in dark forests are a motif all the way from the Grimm fairie tales through William Morris and then Disney movies. All this cultural background both reflects and shapes our expectations about landscapes -- filmmakers take this into account.

[Lionel Mandrake]

16. Well that's very interesting,

even though I have not read anything by C. S. Lewis. Am I culturally deprived? I did read some Grimm's fairy tales, like Aschenbrodel and Schneewittchen, and I have seen the Disney versions thereof. Also, I read Tolkien's books about hobbits. But I'm not a hard-core fantasy enthusiast.

The connection with landscapes is something I hadn't considered.

[Lisa]

22. culturally deprived? No way!

One of the great things about teaching popular culture topics is that the background is pretty accessible, and most people have seen things like shopping malls and resorts (even worked at them!), and have seen movies like "Snow White" or "Lord of the Rings". I shifted the course towards this (with the agreement of the prof who originally developed it) because I thought it would be a good idea to link it up with real-world situations. Truth is that the entertainment, tourism, and development industries are a major part of the economy, and can have a big impact on what we see around us. (Even in this town, one of the most-visited sites is a fancy hotel with a "merrie olde England" theme and landscaped formal garden. Meanwhile, the marketing brochures go on and on about wildlife, unspoiled natural beauty, etc. -- so the things that residents and outsiders associate the most with our city are completely at odds, and in fact do not reflect reality at all!)

One of the things I mention in the course is that the people who design housing developments, and who work on movies, are trying to convey particular impressions using landscape ... and they know that if they can plug into existing expections (based on generations of folk and popular culture), they have a much better chance of getting rich from it! They have to be very cunning to do this without spending too much money .... so the movie people, for example, need to find settings that evoke particular responses from the audience -- and if they can't find them just-so, they have to alter them using props, special effects, or increasingly, create them from scratch inside a computer. If you want to show Tibet, you could go there ... or you could shoot film in Argentina (as they did for that Brad Pitt movie), or paint the scene in digitally without even leaving the studio (but you'd need to use something to base it on, real photos or maybe artwork from the 1800s?). Or if you want to go to Middle Earth, you could go to New Zealand, which has had a couple of hundred years of extensive reworking to make it look more like Western Europe, so you get wilderness and rural settings but without traces of the modern world (or at least, it can be digitally massaged to make a place that is neither Europe nor New Zealand). So we are being manipulated -- and I leave the students to decide on their own whether this is a reasonable and even good part of our culture, or whether it's deceptive and detracts from appreciation (and protection) of real places for their own sake.

I think my favorite student paper was by a guy who had claimed he was only taking the course because it fit his schedule -- he was an international student from a different department, who hadn't taken any of the prerequisite classes -- but he really got into the movie "300" and ended up explaining how the filmmakers had created a fictional landscape that was intended to set the mood and our feelings about the story and characters. I had him watch the movie, and also read the graphic novel (and some historical background on the actual events, plus dig up info on what the real-life settings are like, compared to the movie). On his own, he was able to figure out that the filmmakers were relying heavily on Romanticism (a big influence on art in the 1700s and 1800s, which was also when it was popular to study ancient Greece and heroic battles).

[Lionel Mandrake]

25. 300 - Is that the movie where the Spartan freedom fighters are gloriously

slaughtered by the evil, effete Persian Empire? :rofl:

The real Spartans were not especially interested in freedom. Nor were the real Persians effete. Iranians were outraged at the movie, which they viewed as sinister propaganda aimed at them by the Great Satan. :mad:

What's a graphic novel? Is that sort of like a comic book? I used to read comic books when I was in junior high school. Again, it seems to me that I must be culturally deprived. :dunce:

Your international student was a clever fellow. I'm not half that clever. I would never have made the connection with Romanticism. I think of Romanticism as a step backward from the Age of Enlightenment, a substitution of heat for light, the triumph of the dark side of human nature, etc. Furthermore, I am more of an Ohrenmensch than an Augenmensch. I'm more familiar with music than visual art.

It has been popular to study ancient Greece ever since the Renaissance, although the popularity declined somewhat during the 20th Century. I would guess that only a tiny fraction of the audience had ever heard of Leonidas before seeing the movie.

[Lisa]

29. yup, that's the one ...

I'm giving kudos to the guy's girlfriend, who clued him in on the real history behind the story -- her family's Iranian. At first he was just mesmerized by the special effects (and graphic violence), and she kept insisting that there was a whole bunch of stuff that the filmmakers didn't know about, or deliberately overlooked. I just passed along some ideas to get him thinking about why Western culture might be so taken with Roman/Greek myths.

This was a student who missed the first 2 weeks of class (and didn't crack the textbook until the end of that month ... when I saw him removing the shrink wrap as I came in one day). And by the end of term, he was looking up Greek topographic maps so he could see whether they were showing the site accurately (the sea level is lower now so it looks different today, but apparently the film didn't show the ancient coastline that well either). It was cool to see him get so turned onto something. Before this, he hadn't read any any of the historical background -- if he had seen the Miller graphic novel (I'm showing my age by calling it a "comic book", I guess, since it's accepted as a literary form now), he'd have been more interested in the gore.

[Lionel Mandrake]

31. So the moral of the story is that prerequisites don't matter, and

it's safe to skip the first two weeks of class and not look at the textbook for the first month. Or am I over-generalizing?

If you tell me this guy was reading Herodotus in the original Greek, I'll be REALLY impressed. ;-)

[Lisa]

32. well, I'm choosing to look at it more along these lines ...

If a person who probably would have flunked the course otherwise, is able to get interested about something we covered, enough to go out and learn about it on his own initiative, and come out knowing enough about an unfamiliar topic to explain it to other people -- as a teacher, I figure I'm doing something right.

All that, and a paycheck besides.

p.s. not that I encourage my students to skip class, but they know that it's their job to read the notes on reserve in the library if they want to catch up -- I don't do individual tutoring.

[billyskank]

9. Harry Potter and the Philanderer's Stone

Was the version I read. :shrug:

[Lionel Mandrake]

17. Phil who?

Never heard of him.

[TechBear_Seattle]

20. I've stuck with the American versions put out by Scholastic

But on my next trip to the UK (Autumn 2008, most likely) I intend to pick up a boxed set of the British ones and see just what was cut out for the American audience. Any suggestions on publisher?

[Lionel Mandrake]

27. Why wait?

You can by books from web sites like www.amazon.co.uk and have them shipped across the pond. There are children's and adult editions of the Harry Potter books in print. There's a boxed set of the first six books. There are paperback and hardcover editions. Used books are also available. I don't know if there has been more than one publisher of the Harry Potter books in the UK.

[AllegroRondo]

28. great idea!

Looks like my daughter might get a set for Christmas.

[rucky]

26. And then when they made the movie...

they changed the title to "Hairy Pooter and the Sorceror's Bone"

and the made it into a porno!

yeah, I saw it. never read the book, though.

[Lisa]

30. upon re-reading the book, I'm suspecting deliberate double-entendres ...

I seem to remember there's a scene where a popular seduction guide (of the type that might be read by teenaged guys) is mentioned. Anyway, there's a line about how there's more to getting a girl than "wand-work".

Maybe JKR is tired of people assuming she's a stereotypical "uptight British writer lady"?

[Lionel Mandrake]

33. Yeah, I wondered whether "wand work" was intended

to have more than one meaning. I certainly hope so.

[Onceuponalife]

34. Harry Potter and I'M stoned