A theme recurs, in two parts

Part One: Contemporary Trobaritzes

I have several recurring themes on this blog. If I were better about applying labels to the posts, this would be more easily demonstrated. Anyway, one of the recurring themes is that sometimes I suddenly understand a long-listened to Indigo Girls song differently, and then I look at my life a little differently, and when that happens I must post.

I've been listening to "Center Stage" for 18 years. (gulp!) It's on their eponymous album, the first one released by their ooh-la-la major label Epic. (You know, the album that won the Best Contemporary Folk Grammy, while at the same time the Girls managed to lose Best New Artist to Milli Vanilli. God, I hate the Grammys.) I might add that I ONLY listen to "Center Stage" when I am listening to that album, as I have never heard them play it live. I don't think anyone has heard them play it live. It is seriously one of the most obscure of their tracks, and, I have always thought, for good reason, because what on earth is it about? And by that point on Indigo Girls (track #9) you're sort of fading away, or if you're sharing the album with a newcomer they're about tapped out on willingness to listen and they want to go back and hear "Closer to Fine" (track #1) again.

I don't mean to say I've disliked "Center Stage," but really. Have I mentioned no one has any idea what it's about? And it's not particularly rhythmically exciting either (no offense). It's a bunch of random imagery, kind of like if Grace Slick had felt a lot more mellow while singing "White Rabbit," and also had read some nursery rhymes instead of Alice in Wonderland. It is probably the one Indigo Girls song whose existence I most often forget.

But not anymore!

I woke up on Thursday morning and thought, 'Gosh, we sure drank a lot last night.' Wednesday night the pitchers of Hefeweizen flowed freely, as did the laughter and the text messages. So Thursday as I lay there contemplating how much water I'd drunk before going to bed vs. how much water I should have drunk, I discovered that I did not really feel like getting up to go running. Now, to be fair, or perhaps to try to defend myself, I will say that I had not been running in the morning the three previous days either, but rather had had to run in the evening after my long days at my convention temp job. So it's not weird that my body thought it wasn't running until the evening. However, I wanted it to run before writing group. But it said no. It barely made it to writing group. It took two coffees.

I don't really get hungover, much, really, and especially not the headaches, not for many years. It's all about staving off the headache. Water, bread, painkillers. The holy trinity before bed. But you can still get that just-plain-wiped-out feeling the next day. Oooh boy, can you ever. What I noticed on Thursday is that this felt different. Hence my lying there contemplating it for so long. (I'm getting to the Indigo Girls part. No, really, I am. Stay with me.) I was sharing these "this morning after feels different" thoughts with a friend, and I started hypothesizing that what with me being ten weeks into my running training schedule at which I am ever-so-diligent, my body is in such a different place than other times when I've been drinking more often than doing such fit and healthy things. Example, law school. Even better example, Korea. Like that.

So then I thought perhaps when one is feeling so good and healthy one has farther to fall into drunken debauchery. This made me think of the Indigo Girls lyric (see?) "The higher the leap, I said, the harder the ground." From "Center Stage."

And suddenly, eureka! Center Stage! It starts like this:

"Laughing in a crown of jewels
numbness from a scepter's wound
Toss and turn, I spin and learn
Catch yourself before you burn.
A joker's dance before the king..."

Then it gets into a lot of jangling beads and jokers and thieves, and one could get the idea we're on a drug voyage, but now that I've had this epiphany I think they are just drunk and playing cards. The chorus goes like this:

"Falling falling falling falling down
Look yourself in the eye before you drown."

Hello. Do those lines scream "I'm drunk" or what? Anyway, the king makes another appearance later, when he is "in the counting house counting out his money." (Yes, we know Amy Ray did not come up with that, I told you she was reading nursery rhymes. Mary has a little lamb in this song, too.) Right? The bar owner makes a mint off of our foolishness. And then, "you must dance the dance that you imply."

So now I think "Center Stage" is totally about how we get wasted and it's all a big performance, really, in which we get caught up. And at the very end:

"Your actions will follow you full circle round
Your actions will follow you full circle round
Your actions will follow you full circle round
Your actions will follow you full circle round
The higher the leap, I said,
the harder the ground."

Finally, what made me so happy about this alcohol theory is that "Center Stage" is an Amy Ray song (the duo write their songs separately, then arrange and sing them together) whereas there is an Emily Saliers song on that very album that also contemplates the drinking we do. That is, of course, the aforementioned "Closer to Fine," in which Emily...

"...stopped by the bar at 3 a.m.
to seek solace in a bottle or possibly a friend
And I woke up with a headache like my head against a board,
twice as cloudy as I'd been the night before,
and I went in seeking clarity."

So it's good to see that they were both drinking. And it's even better to see that while they were busily transferring away from their first universities back to Atlanta where they reconnected after knowing each other since elementary school and began playing guitar and singing together again and the rest is history...it's even better to see that they can be all drunk and searching and then do healthy awesome creative artistic things and find the answer and have great lives. 'Cause then there must be hope for the rest of us, yeah?

Part Two: Amazingly Talented Rock n' Roll Gods

Continuing along with my epiphany-laden week, I woke up this morning decidedly less hungover but no less ready to enter into philosophical discussions online. This time, the site of choice was MySpace. I was clicking around some friends' pages, and then to some friends of friends' pages, and suddenly on the page of a girl I've never met but of whom I've heard tales through her friend I do know, I heard the strain of Led Zeppelin, specifically "Going to California." And I stopped in mySpace tracks.

Led Zeppelin. Man, those were some talented folks. Well, are/were talented, you know what I mean. I will direct you to what I wrote about on my actual MySpace blog this morning, rather than attempting to duplicate the moment here. So, go read that and then come back here for the final summing-up paragraph. Paragraphs.

The point is, how purely solidly joyful it makes me, even if it's a bittersweet thing, to listen to certain Led Zeppelin songs. And certain Pink Floyd songs fill me with a similar bursting hurts-to-be-this-happiness. And many of the songs are associated with life moments I've had, but also bring strong associations of their own, of course.

I can think of two particular days in Korea when I was utterly, completely, 100% aware of that heart-bursting life goodness. One was the day we traveled to Pusan for the "English Work Club" trip. Me, Bryan, JJ, Charlie, and BK. And the live baby octopus. Oh, what a day. My cheeks hurt from laughing just like my heart hurts from the bursting. All the pictures you see on MySpace and Facebook involving me and a large frog come from the Pusan Aquarium that day. What bliss. That was early in my Korea time. Later, as I was nearing the end of my indentured servitude, we had a cast party after the last Speak Truth To Power performance in Daegu. Simon and Greg played guitar and we all sang and drank beers and I for one danced and whirled a lot. But I sat, subdued, for many of the songs, and at one point the song of choice was Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here." I actually stopped singing and closed my eyes and listened to the people who had come together for this play -- expats from the U.S., Canada, England, Wales, New Zealand -- sitting in our scrappy arts space in Daegu, Korea singing:

"So, so you think you can tell
heaven from hell
blue skies from pain...
How I wish, how I wish you were here
We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl
year after year,
running over the same old ground
What have we found? The same old fears
Wish you were here."

It was nothing short of amazing. I was fully aware and fully alive, and I knew I never wanted that moment to end. But I also knew that it would end, and I would leave that room and leave those people and leave Korea and go on to the next stop on the journey, in search of my life's next moment.

I think the important thing is to carry the song with you. So that you don't have to wait to stumble across someone's MySpace page full of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, although it's nice when you do. I don't believe I will ever think of the phrase "a song in my heart" in quite the same way; turns out that's not a cheesy phrase at all.

Look, it's Linda's soapbox! oh, and there's Linda with it...

First off, I love Chipper Jones. I do. He often tells off the media or says surprising things refusing to kowtow to dumb crap. This time he boycotted the New York media after they twisted his words about A-Rod. Awesome! When the sports journalists all walked into the locker room before the next Mets game, he said, "I'm not talking to you if you're from the New York press" and he only talked to the Atlanta reporters. I love it!!!

OK I totally have something to bitch about. I am tired of people complaining about public transportation. If I hear one more person uselessly whine about how they WOULD BE so inconvenienced by all things mass transit that they HAVEN'T EVEN TRIED, I am going to throw them in an oil well.

In New York where I live now (kind of, and soon for real again) there are major subway issues from time to time, and they suck. There are also a lot of righteous things going on, subway-wise. You people with your shiny cars in your driveways who have never so much as passed by a turnstile except maybe at Disneyland would be hard pressed to tell the difference between a good subway day and a bad subway day. And the bus? There are many of us here in Boston and in New York who rely on the bus. There was a time in L.A. when I happily relied on the bus. But there are a million cities where people refuse to try to ride the bus, drive down demand, then bitch that the bus is not "worth it" to them.

And no this rant is not because Lindsay Lohan supposedly blamed her current mess on lack of public transit in LA. She probably didn't even really do that, and even if she had, it would get a big ol' "Yeah, right" from the collective universe. But the point is, people always pull this nonsense that "if only" the bus/train/subway/unseen forces of public transit-dom would do X-Y-Z, then and only then would they park their car and try to do a damn thing to reduce their consumption/dependence on foreign oil. (<----for the love of god read my tone here and if you can't then just move on because I do not say that the way your frightful leader does. I am replete with irony)

What the hell do you people want? It's mass transit! It has a lot with which to contend! People seem to want a bus to pull up in front of their very front door every five minutes. Ugh. I am so disgusted by people who won't even try. All this solo driving for commuting so your car can sit in a parking lot at work all day = such a waste. But all anyone does is bitch and whine and moan about how crap it is, and then they pour more and more money into roads, when widening highways will never solve the problem. Cars, like homework and internet surfing, expand to fit the time/space allotted to them.

And by the way, I LOVE the public transportation in Los Angeles. At least they have 24-hour bus service there! Unlike Boston!

I read the best article ever - seriously, it might be my favorite article ever - in either Time or Newsweek once. It taught me that traffic behaves like light. Which is to say that although it is composed of and behaves like particles, it also has the properties of and behaves like a wave. Therefore, it reaches amplitude and ebbs and flows and instead of throwing more space at traffic, we should study it the way we study the particle/wave behavior of light.

So until you have scientifically examined the situation, or taken even one small step of your own, quit your bitchin'.

"It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness."
- i don't know who said it

Double crossing

There is so much weirdness going on in this wonderful wacky world. Here's some of it: did you hear that Johnson & Johnson (of whom I have never been too fond, for animal-testing reasons) has filed a lawsuit against the Red Cross because they are disputing the Red Cross' use of - wait for it - the red cross logo, which apparently has been trademarked by J & J. I guess they signed a deal with Clara Barton long ago agreeing that the company could exclusively use the cross on pharmaceutical products. Big thanks to Mike for alerting me to this story. My response, of course, is this: Are you serious? No, wait. Are you !#$%* serious? It's the RED CROSS. So there are, what, like, two first aid kits they sell? And the money for those goes back into humanitarian efforts. But this is infringing upon Johnson & Johnson (whom I am about to rechristen Jackass & Jackass) and their exclusive use of the cross to sell medical-ish things? Are you kidding me? Because, yeah, when I think of J & J, yeah, I just won't know what to buy if I don't see their little red cross on the Band-Aids?

EVERY BIT OF MONEY AND TIME BEING SPENT ON THAT LAWSUIT COULD BE SPENT VOLUNTEERING TO HELP SOMEONE WHO'S BEING BOMBED OR DRIVEN FROM THEIR HOMES OR GOD KNOWS WHAT!!!

("And yes, I'm shouting. I'm shouting, I'm shouting, I'm shouting!!! [bonk on head with candlestick]" - Clue)

Now I must get on to what I really wanted to post about tonight. I have made an amazing discovery involving Indigo Girls, alcohol, and the king in the counting house counting out his money. Stay tuned...

Ketchup, precisely

Sometimes I make dramatic statements and I'm exaggerating a little. But sometimes I make dramatic statements because they're absolutely true, I tell you. Now for an example. When I first got back to Boston at the beginning of the summer, the first time I went to the place down the street where I love to get my cheese fries, the girl did the usual routine of throwing waaaaay too many ketchup packets in the bag. I said, "No, really, just a couple." The next time I went back, I insisted, "No, really. No ketchup. You gave me enough last time to last through my whole summer of cheese fries."

Not wanting to waste, I did toss all the extra ketchup packets in the refrigerator, and I have told them not to give me ketchup each time I've returned for cheese fries.

Tonight I got cheese fries, and when I came home I took two ketchup packets from the refrigerator stash for tonight's delicious feast. I noticed that the supply has dwindled to the point where there are enough left for just a couple more cheese fries events this summer. As it turns out, I head back to New York for year two of law school in about three weeks. So my ketchup prediction was just about perfect.

Now, go to my Literary Supplement and vote on whether or not I should keep reading Don Quixote.

Tomorrow I'll tell you all about this temp job I'm working that proceeds so far into boring it actually at some point laps itself and becomes interesting again.

Redemption

I very recently watched the movie Tsotsi and I LOVED it. I watched it Sunday night on the Greyhound bus from New York to Boston. (On my laptop.) I had a seat to myself. I was in my own little headphone world, watching this movie in the darknesss while the majority of the bus passengers slept. It was amazing.

Part of why it is amazing is because it is about forgiveness and redemption. I am very philosophically into what forgiveness and redemption mean, separately and in relation to each other. And it's interesting that this was a South Africa movie, because the last deep moving experience I had with forgiveness and the incredible human capacity for redemption was also related to South Africa. I loved Desmond Tutu's words on forgiveness in the Speak Truth to Power play; I often told my cast in Korea how moved I was by this part:

"One of the extraordinary things is how many of those who have suffered most grievously have been ready to forgive—people who you thought might be consumed by bitterness, by a lust for revenge. A massacre occurred in which soldiers had opened fire on a demonstration by the ANC (African National Congress), and about twenty people were killed and many wounded. We had a hearing chock-a-block full with people who had lost loved ones, or been injured. Four officers came up, one white and three black. The white said: 'We gave the orders for the soldiers to open fire'—in this room, where the tension could be cut with a knife, it was so palpable. Then he turned to the audience and said, 'Please, forgive us. And please receive these, my colleagues, back into the community.' And that very angry audience broke out into quite deafening applause. It was an incredible moment. I said, 'Let’s keep quiet, because we are in the presence of something holy.'"

Those words gave me the chills, and I often told my Desmond Tutu actor that. (But hey, no pressure!) Actually, at one rehearsal we all got in a lengthy discussion about it. My cast expressed an overall surprise, mixed with a fair amount of resistance, to my emphasis on forgiveness as an overriding theme of this play. I see it as one of the crucial elements of how the human rights defenders are able to do the amazing work they do.

Forgiveness is so often about the forgiver, not the forgivee, anyway. It is also not synonymous with "forget." I think forgiveness is way misunderstood. But it is good stuff.

Tsotsi won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for 2005. I was in Korea at that time, and don't think I saw any of the foreign film category noms that Oscar season.

It's incredible. Hie thee to Netflix.

Sunshine Sunshine Sunshine Sunshine SUNSHINE!!!

I've done a bunch of fun and lovely things since I last posted but easily one of the most exquisite experiences was going to see the movie Sunshine. I don't even know if I want to talk about it. I just want to see it again. It totally blew my mind. It is definitely one of the best film experiences I have had in a while. You are just totally, viscerally there. The music, the visuals, and the emotions grab hold and don't let go, and all the while you are intellectually processing and calculating as this space ship and crew head toward the dying sun to drop a nuclear bomb in it.

Questions of philosophy, questions of the meaning of life, questions of who is in charge of the universe...as if anything but the universe could be in control of the universe.

And while I could see it being categorized as science fiction, it really isn't. I mean, it's such gritty realism. No aliens, unheard of technology, or superpowers; no alternate universe; no futuristic mumbo-jumbo. It's kind of The X-Files brand of science fiction (which I love). Rather than offering up some irrational explanation for things we just sit around trying to come to grips with the rational ones, and that gives us quite enough to ponder.

All I wanted to do after seeing it was 1. see it again and 2. take a physics class.

Coming soon: my Official Literary Snob Report!

Take this job and snort it

Before this week, I never really thought of this blog as a place to go for the latest pop culture gossip. With the exception of my foray into the sweet and cheesy goodness that is Carrie Underwood. I mean, hello. This is me we're talking about, Ms. Kill-Your-Television who can count on one hand the number of episodes of any (by the way that's not actually) reality show I've seen, ever. But at my writing group today it was pointed out to me after a couple of us spent the first 15 minutes or more skewering Harry Potter that we were just participating in the phenomenon, and this was followed by another member of the group saying, "Geez, I thought at least we'd talk about Lindsay Lohan" which elicited from me an "Oh my gosh I know!" followed by a few minutes blathering about my fascination with her latest story. Which is:

What's up with the fleeing personal assistant? Seriously?! How does everyone not find that the most fascinating part of the story? I mean, I'm dutifully impressed by the scary picture (which one of my Facebook friends changed his profile pic to, nice) and that having and transporting the cocaine are felonies and all, but seriously? The personal assistant, who quit just a few hours before, is being driven off by her mother and Lindsay is chasing them? I so wanted to know more about that. Like, how much did that job suck, being Ms Thang's personal assistant? Did Lindsay make this girl go get the coke for her and she's like, "OK but it's the last thing I'll do?" Was Lindsay afraid of being ratted out for breaking sobriety? Or did the girl just not throw a good enough 21st birthday bash? Which, if I were in charge of her 21st birthday bash I'd be like, listen lady, you've already had your 21st birthday, many times over.

So, yeah. I was totally fasincated by this. I freely admit it.

I'd beter go slink off to read some Willa Cather now...

Seven Things About Listening To People Talk AboutHarry Potter (hey! that's one for each book)

(Still no Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows spoilers, although this entry does contain Citizen Kane spoilers. And that, in fact, is part of the point.) So I've been thinking about how nearly every blogging friend I have has posted about Harry Potter in the last couple days, either assuring that their entry contains no spoilers or imploring others not to spoil or both. Even I have posted about Harry Potter, and I don't even read it. The only thing I remember resonating this much in my little corner of the blogosphere was the the death of Kurt Vonnegut. (Wait, sphere? Corner? Well, you know what I mean.) Of course, I suppose HP blogs are better than the alternative, which right now is apparently posting a link to the prisoners in the Philippines who reenacted the "Thriller" video. Ugh. (Have I mentioned I don't get all the fuss about Michael Jackson either? Yeah. And I don't feel a speck of guilt about that one, unlike The Simpsons, or even an intellectual curiosity as to why, as with our good friend Harry.) It started me thinking about how long the spoiler grace period is. For example, JK Rowling will appear on the Today show I believe tomorrow and Entertainment Weekly's comment was, "Who cares if she tells Meredith Vieira how it ends? You finished it two days ago, didn't you?" Ha ha. But seriously...when does something pass from the realm of "Oh my god, don't tell me!" into the realm where it is proper to allude or refer to it? The Citizen Kane spoiler is in this paragraph.---> I was thinking about the movie Playing By Heart that came out a few years ago. I really liked it; it seems to have missed a lot of people's radar but the cast alone was fantastic. Anyway, at one point in one couple's fighting after one has ruined the ending of something for the other the ruinee says, "Geez, you might as well run into a theater showing Citizen Kane and yell, 'Rosebud is a sled!'" Interestingly, I had seen Citizen Kane before watching that movie, but only shortly before. Somehow I never got around to watching "the greatest film of all time" (ahem) in my childhood and only watched it after the original AFI Top 100 Movies list came out. I thought, there must be people watching Playing By Heart who haven't seen Kane yet. Possibly some who even, as I did, knew "Rosebud" was this big secret mysterious thing in the film and would not want it ruined. But was that spoiling line justified, since fifty plus years had passed? (END OF CITIZEN KANE SPOILERS) But this isn't what I came here today to talk about. I actually came here to address the burning question that so many have been asking me: why is it, exactly, that I don't care for the little wizard phenomenon? Why the Harry Potter hate? I'm sure this is different for people who have not worked full time in a big bookstore for most of the exact years of the HP phenomenon and just the general annoyingness of, well, people when you work with them and their weird needs every day, but... there's also the mad craze of it all. I'm not sure I can come up with an exhaustive list, but here off the top of my head are some... Reasons I hate listening to people talk about Harry Potter:

• The whole "kids reading again" thing drives me batty. Especially the way people say it. The way they say it is as if a.)kids really weren't reading at all for some indeterminate number of years b.)that was somehow the fault of the children's books that were out there and not, say, the parents...or, hey, the children themselves c.)now every kid in the world has seen the error of his/her ways and become a reader. I reject all three of those notions.
• JK's "writer's block." This was one of the top 2 most ridiculous statements by a person of influence on the bookselling/publishing world during my Borders career (the other being Oprah's ending her first book club because she just couldn't find enough good, inspiring new literature). JK's alleged writer's block was in between books 4 and 5, I think. The publication date of the next one was delayed or something, and then the rumor surfaced in the bookselling world that J.K. Rowling had writer's block. I was like, are you kidding me? We are waiting around for the next HP book because she has writer's block? And then I made lots of sardonic cracks about, doesn't she get it? It *doesn't matter* what she writes. Salivating fans will buy the book by the millions and then come back for more. It was no longer a hard sell, or even an easy sell, but simply a fact.       And people taking this "writer's block" thing seriously surprised me, because I realized they were viewing it as some inspired work of art, whereas the bookseller in me saw it instead as the crafting of a commodity. I don't even think it's wrong to have something become an entertainment commodity. It can still be creative and fun to work on and a satisfying finished product (example: the third Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End). But writer's block? I was highly amused by this. Don't know if she ever even said she had writer's block, though. 
• The vast bookselling/publishing conspiracy to create false demand. At best it's corporate money-grubbing; at worst it's psychological warfare. There is no reason on this planet that they can't print far more than enough copies for release day, but we still have to go through this nonsense of fans reserving a copy and bookstores selling out. Furthermore, the bookstores are in on it, too, for their own hype purposes. There is no reason on the planet for them not to order far more than enough copies. They're going to get another shipment in a matter of days. Why all this pretending that the initial few thousand is all they could get? This actually disgusts me. Because it is a lie. And a capitalist lie at that. (I prefer well-meaning Communist lies, I suppose.) Also, recall that I was around when there were only three books out. That's when I started working for Borders, right when this series was getting hugely popular and we were anticipating Goblet. ALL THREE of the hardcovers were on the bestseller list (this was before the NY Times finally just gave in and created a children's bestseller list, probably because other authors were like, "Screw this! I'm angling for one of seven given spots now instead of ten?") And yet we would sell out, just here and there, of one of the books for a little while. Now, never mind the pain in the neck that was my life as a merchandising supervisor when we were sold out of a bestseller. There was just no reason for it. Oh, today we have Chamber of Secrets in paperback but not hardcover. Oh, no Azkaban for you this weekend. Ugh. I watched the "on hand" numbers dwindle in our computer, and I watched them not be promptly replenished. I'm pretty sure we blamed the publisher, which is a bit like Bush making Rumsfeld the sole scapegoat for the debacle that is the Iraq war. (You'll notice that didn't work, either.)
• Changing vocabulary for the U.S. editions. The books are English. Apparently, however, it is too much to ask of all those United Statesian children who are "reading again" to read any vocabulary from across the pond. Seriously? How many England-based books did I read growing up--we are never flummoxed by a "lift" or a "boot" or a whatever. It's educational. Most egregious of all, and this one has actually bugged others, I know, is the changing of the first book's title from the "Philosopher's Stone" to the "Sorcerer's Stone." I say, so what if we don't have the same meaning/connotation for the word "philosopher" and people here don't know what the legend of the philosopher's stone is all about? Let them read and find out. No one previously knew what an "Azkaban" was either. Good god.
• Sycophant writers. My dumb Writer's Digest newsletter, an issue or two ago, reran a 2000 interview with Ms. Rowling. Shamelessly. "Oh, this was from before she stopped giving interviews, but it certainly gives some insight into the process..." blah blah blah. I rolled my eyes and deleted. Nothing? You had nothing better to put in this issue? Even the writers of the world are supposed to be waiting with bated breath for whatever glorious wisdom she deigns to shed in an interview from years ago? Come on, we've all heard the story: girlfriend needed money, she was raising her children (who may, even now, be "reading again"),  and she went to a coffee shop and wrote. That's the trick. Now run a new interview, for god's sake. (At least Oprah can get reclusive authors who don't give interviews to capitulate and talk to her.)
• They're really not all that original/amazing/nothing-like-it-under-the-sun. Of course, you'd never know it now, because some talking heads have put it out there, and now it's what all the lemmings think they think about these books. But those of us capable of thinking a critical thought might just remember that we've always had imaginative children's books whisking us away to fantastic worlds where gifted children triumph over evil forces, such as insipid and cruel adults. And a lot of those books have been British, as recently pointed out by Le Monde. I'm sick of people saying J.K. Rowling invented all this. It's just such a dumb thing to say. 
• Those little wizards didn't hold my interest. What can I say? I read the first 150 pages of the first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Philosopher's Stone. Twice. There they were sorting themselves into Hogwarts dorms and I was just like, "Yawn. What's on the telly?" No one at my Borders could believe I didn't finish it. Later I thought I'd try again by reading it in Spanish, to kill two birds with one stone. I like to read books in Spanish and French from time to time, to practice my languages. But I got to around the same place and realized I still didn't care. I moved on to Isabel Allende's excellent young adult series and read that in Spanish instead. Which I highly recommend, by the way.

To end on a positive note, however, I will now share with you the Thing I Like About Harry Potter. Because it has been flung around the globe and forced down the throats of all those children who previously "hated to read" I had the makings of an excellent vocabulary lesson one day in Korea. I had an evening adolescent class with about half a dozen remarkably fluent students, and we loved to chat about this and that. One day Harry Potter came up. They had all read the books in Korean, of course, and I challenged them by making them try to come up with the titles in English. It was awesome. They could get "prisoner" and some others, but it was fun watching them strain for "goblet." They'd make a lot of frantic hand motions and say, "Teacher, it is the cup that goes like this." Good times.

I would also like to point out that when I arrived over there HP and the Half-Blood Prince was out in English (and U.S. English) but the Korean translation had not yet been published. However, this same group of adolescents told me all about what happens in it. "Did you read it in English?" I asked, knowing they could (a few of them, anyway) but doubting very much that they did. "No, teacher," they said, amused at the thought. "We look for what happens on the internet."

Aha. I wonder what the Korean word is for "spoiler."