Now here's why I have mixed feelings about blogs: a succinct and measured remark on the recent "outing" of Hogwarts' headmaster, a mere paragraph in length, followed by 61 comments (and counting) of the most tedious nature imaginable.
In an earlier post, I remarked that there are related matters which are more plausible in the films than in JKR's text. Presumably other people have noticed this. So following this latest discussion, we can look forward to the film of Deathly Hallows being dragged into the culture wars.
Great. I'm really looking forward to that.
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UPDATE: There is an excellent reflection on this matter in the New York Times. Three cheers for the old-fashioned medium of print (which, of course, I access via the Web).
2 comments:
I was most surprised by the fact that Rowling labelled the question about Dumbledore finding love good. I thought that inthe books Dumbledore quite clearly freed the word "love" from the romantic/sexual box it is often trapped in.
Clearly the ability to respond when and only when you desire is one of the attractions of reading a blog, but probably also one of their disadvantages. I have started to wonder whether this setup not only affects the blogs themselves, but also our other conversations.
I thought that in the books Dumbledore quite clearly freed the word "love" from the romantic/sexual box it is often trapped in.
Yes, I think it's fair to claim that this statement from JKR is a descent into mere current preoccupations. For it to be an advance in the realism and complexity of the AD character --- and of course there's nothing intrinsically unbelievable about someone forever carrying a torch for a youthful love --- she would have had to, you know, shown us this sort of thing properly in the books rather than announcing it after the fact.
As for the normlessness of blog discussion affecting other conversations ... I don't know. It's tempting to speculate about this sort of thing, but I'm not sure how to test such ideas.
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