Her tombstone - an echo of heartbreak etched in granite. He makes the sign of Horus’ eye. He makes the sign of the thrice-slain bull. He kisses the straw doll, lays it on the grave. In its belly – ambergris, a needle, semen, iron, a key. He says the words. He waits. He waits for a shadow to swallow the moon.

Will try for funny if I get the time.

“ERROR 808 REACHING SERVER: DREAD CANNOT BE NAMED�
by H.P. Lovecraft

Wilkins hit the Delete key again and again, without result.
His text was like granite, and would not be effaced.
“Blast!� he thought; and if the Ministry were monitoring…?
The echo of boots in the hallway hardly surprised.
Wilkins half-smiled at the Shadow Ministry’s efficiency.
His dome-door, though like granite, would melt at once.
With a minute to go, his eye searched the keyboard.
Wilkins struck the Escape key, and was gone.

There hasn’t been a zany contest around here for a while; so, for the benefit of some charity, I propose the “VERY SHORT SPOOKY STORY CONTEST”. I will donate $25 per entry for the first 10 entries (up to $250… anyone care to back the next batch?) of a very short spooky story that conforms to the following rules…

1. Each story must be in the generally-understood “spooky” genre. It can be scary, or it can be cheeky and amusing, but it has to employ typical macabre elements like haunted castles, ancient crypts, spirits, vampires, surprise endings, etc.

2. Each story must be exactly eight (8) sentences long. The sentences can be of varying length, but none are to exceed 10 words in length. (so, maximum length is 80 words.)

3. In the story, at some point or another, you must use 5 out of the following 6 words: granite, shadow, heartbreak, eye, echo, key.

4. Parodies of established writers in these genres are vigorously welcomed, but wholesale original imaginative flights are esteemed, too. Sci-fi counts as spooky, so long as it has a weird or macabre flavor.

5. Charity donation will go to either MSF/Doctors Without Borders, LP itself, or Sisters of the Road (homeless outreach). If there is a clear winner by general acclamation, the winner can decide where the money goes. If not, it’ll just be sort of muddled and confusing until one charity is picked.

Put your sorting hats on, grab your kooky pixie wands, and let ‘er rip!

For the last decade or so, I’ve mainly been getting my knowledge of Potter Inc. from the overheard gossip of real fans, and what I can glean from the movie posters and book covers. (You can actually triangulate quite a lot of info from just those sources.)

But the other day, in honor of all the latest fuss, I finally broke down and watched one of the movies: “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” just to finally get some of the inside poop on all this stuff.

The movie I thought was charming and witty, but a bit perfunctory. But not so perfunctory as to spoil the fun. But amid all the zany, cool details that I liked, I have to say that the quidditch game was not nearly as cool as I expected it to be. (Not very well-thought-out; just a silly mishmash of soccer, polo, lacrosse, and the air-bike chase scene from Return of the Jedi. As Harold Ross woulda said, “Make better.”)

People have been talking about Rowling’s cool wordplay with names. I have to say I was impressed by the name Albus Dumbledore: Albus = Albion/Alba/Alps and their cognates (it’s all the same word), with an additional hint of the historical Albertus Magnus. Very well done. Dumbledore I’m told is a dialect word for bumblebee, but that’s no matter; what the word does here is, it gives a homely mild flavor that cools some of the grandeur of Albus, a very English thing to do; furthermore, the word Dumbledore contains hints of both “humble” and “golden” (viz., “d’or”). Very tasty indeed, and worthy of Mister Joyce himself.

The other names I thought were kind of disappointing. Malfoy? Weaselly? Slithering? That’s pretty entry-level stuff. Oh well, ya cain’t win em all.

The semiotics of the whole thing were I thought simultaneously a bit more involved than I had expected, but also rather hokey and annoying in a sort of politically correct Tom Brown’s School Days kind of way. Colin Meloy’s hilarious song “The Sporting Life” with The Decemberists is funnier and sews the whole thing up much faster. Still, you can see the appeal to kids of all ages: the notion of idealizing your schooling years this way (and after all, every single one of us has had early-life experiences that are analogous to HP’s, in one way or another) is clearly a winner, and for the first time ever I see the appeal of boarding school: after all, your parents are flawed and fallible creatures who are in charge of raising you and giving you a moral education. But at an idealized boarding school like Hogwart (I guess no Muslim wizard kids are attending, on account of that name), those pesky adult-kid relations, and the moral education issues, are all in the hands of actual stone professionals, who don’t make the kind of annoying, human mistakes your parents would make in the messy process. Who was it that said that the greatest human pleasure is the pleasure of being really, truly understood by another person? I think in a way that’s the gift that really good teachers can give a kid at that age. No wonder all these HP-reading kids want to go to a school like that.

Which leaves me thinking: absent all the magic parts, why not try and make more schools like that?

–j_p_z, who’s had quite enough of this and is now returning to Lawrence Durrell to clean his ears out…

when does the spoiler phobia wear off and allow some good solid discussion of the book??? Surely we don’t have to wait for the whole world to finish…

They naturally concluded that this would never happen again, with popular culture naturally more fractured etc, etc. Yet I wonder how the proportion of the population absorbed in Potter this weekend stacked up - pretty well I’d imagine, and as the last post indicates there has probably been a lot more penetration outside the West.

Despite the different outcomes of Pavlov’s Cat and J_P_Z I think that part of the conflict in the world comes from the lack of a common cultural resource to communicate through. There are stories of peace processes being built on negotiators discovering a shared love of a particular sport or film. Perhaps it is too much to imagine that one day the Israeli and Palestinian leaders will get their negotiations off on a sound footing by debating the finer points of transmogriphication, but one can dream.

some kids from some western sydney public high schools who attended some shindig for a debating thang or something at the Kings School - and apparently - yep - they all thought they were in Hogwarts

Jo - I heard that story too, but in relation to St Joseph’s College, Hunter’s Hill. And I think they were schoolgirls of Middle Eastern extraction, which also says something about the broad appeal of HP I guess.

I felt that even before discovering that it was the shortest film, but based on the longest of the books.

Daughter’s sentiments exactly. She also seemed a little disappointed that the new book wasn’t longer.

Another thing - she decided a while ago that, like scepticlawyer she would read all of the previous books again in preparation for No 7. I don’t think she made it past No 1 in the end, but in her opinion, Philosopher’s Stone was quite badly written by comparison with the later tomes.

Anyway, being a well-brought up girl, I have to finish reading my current book before I allow myself to begin Deathly Hallows - reading as fast as I can.

PS I must admit I was quite taken by a description of HP that I heard somewhere - as Enid Blyton meets Lord of the Rings. Maybe that explains why it appeals to children and adults alike.

But what I actually turned up here to say was, as someone determined to read Philip Pullman ASAP, I saw the trailer for the movie of The Golden Compass before the HP movie yesterday and it looked really great. (Again, of course, only to those who get it that fantasy is about allegory and play.)

She went to see the latest movie with her friends on Friday evening (two readers, one not). The one who hadn’t read any of the books thought it was a good film, but the other three disagreed, on the basis that it left too many important things out.

If I often wonder whether I have been a good enough parent, the one thing I console myself with is that both of my daughters read and that seems to be an increasingly rare thing, these days, Harry Potter notwithstanding.

By the way, daughter’s favourite ever fantasy series is Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, which I have only recently read and enjoyed immensely.

But as for you grownups going to potters, I’m sure someone’s gonna come up with a way of blending James Branch Cabell’s philgree and phlots with the current psycho-sexual-status hum to vacuum your plastic.

Chacun à son goût, Nabs, chacun à son goût. I think Biggles is bilge, myself, though of course I’d never be rude enough to say so.