CA / Dream / Choice / Obsessions

[catlady_de_los_angeles]

Terry, there's a group http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HP4GU-California/ 
altho' no one has posted to it since December. Its Photo section has
a group pic of the Los Angeles Movie Outing.

I had a dream related to the Potterverse this morning: I was looking 
at a book of illustrations of JKR stories (canon), each drawing had a 
caption telling what book and chapter it was depicting, and some of 
them were from a short story titled "Severia" (By JKR!) which had 
been published only in some limited edition collection of one story 
each from several different writers, and I was furious that I had 
never heard of this addition to canon before, and desperate to find a 
copy to read. 

David Frankis wrote:

> How does choice work? If there is an element of causation to 
> choice, in what sense is it choice? If not, in what sense is it
> not random?

Martin Gardner, who used to write the Mathematical Recreations column 
in Scientific American, wrote a book titled WHYS OF A PHILOSOPHICAL 
SCRIVENER. (amazon.com: 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312206828/qid=1015734035/sr=1-
1/ref=sr_1_1/104-0359764-0840716 ) 

When it was new, I stumbled across it in a bookstore (my recollection 
was 1982, but the above says (c) 1983 -- I'm pleased I remember so 
close!), I bought a copy, read it about a million times over the next 
two years, and talked about it constantly. I disagree with a lot of 
his answers, but Gardner gives very clear explanations of several of 
the great unanswerable questions of philosophy. My own obsession is 
The Problem of Evil, but the one you ask about is The Question of 
Free Will. The reason I didn't reply to your post until now was that 
I was too lazy to seek the book from the bookcases in the living room.

Chapter 6 is "FREE WILL: Why I am not a Determinist or a 
Haphazardist". He says: "The thesis of this chapter, although 
extremely simple and therefore annoying to most contemporary 
thinkers, is that the free will problem cannot be solved because we 
do not know exactly how to put the question.... "

More quotation: "Yet when we try to put it into words, to define 
human consciousness and its incredible ability to make choices, we 
come up against one of Immanuel Kant's most notorious antinomies. Our 
attempt to capture the essence of that freedom either slides off into 
determinism, another name for destiny, or it tumbles over to the side 
of sheer caprice.... When we try to define it within a context of 
determinism, it becomes a delusion, something we think we have but 
don't really. When we try to define it within a context of 
indeterminism, it becomes equally illusory, a choice made by some 
obscure randomizer in the brain which functions like the flip of a 
coin. It is here, I am convinced, that we run into a transcendent 
mystery -- a mystery bound up, how we do not know, with the 
transcendent mystery of time."

David Frankis wrote:

> I think this cultural difference is probably more significant than 
> that across the Atlantic (or Pacific, Tabouli?), or between liberal
> and conservative, for our discussions. As scientists here, we are 
> guests in the natural territory of the artists/humanitarians, and 
       It's 'humanists' not 'humanitarians'
> sometimes struggle to cope with the habits of thought assumed 
> natural. This is particularly the case when we discuss the 
> processes that are involved in reading and interpreting the books. 
> IMO, the scientists view it as mostly passive, sitting at JKR's 
> feet to understand her world, so to speak, while the artists see it
       and 'art critics' or 'art historians' not artists
> as active, where the readers use canon to invent their own world.
> In consequence those with a scientific background tend to make a 
> sharp distinction between interpreting canon and writing fanfic; 
> those with a humanities background don't and indeed can't.

Erm, David, I consider myself to be on the Science side of The Two 
Cultures (I am No Good at Math, having passed Calculus on the *third* 
try but not having *understood* it any better than the first two, but 
I majored in Biology and became a programmer, and I am No Good at 
Humanities and Arts either) and my role in HPfGU is what you ascribe 
to the Humanities types. Surely *real* Humanities types would be 
psychoanalyzing the author from the work, explaining how the novel is 
a model of class warfare or patriarchy, unravelling little strings of 
the text that can be proclaimed as influences from past literature or 
current pop culture... 

Two bits of Real Lit that I recall from the main list are when IIRC 
Lumos Dei asserted that the Expecto Patronus incantation has the 
symbolic meaning of I confidently await my father and is the key to 
the whole Potter phenomenom which is about our fatherless culture, 
and the mention of book author Elizabeth Schafer saying that Harry 
misses his mom and dad but *has* them in the form of MoM and DADA. 
IMHO and IIRC the list created both those suggestions with a contempt 
that they did NOT deserve: part of what makes a book rich is what 
readers can take out of it, even things that the author never put in 
it. Not that it seems too big a reach to imagine that a new single 
mother might be influenced by ideas of fatherlessness.

Ali Hewison wrote:

> Is the HP obsession new to others as well, or have you experienced 
> this with other books, bands/ Star Trek etc. Is there a cure? 

I was constantly obsessed with stories from books when I was a child, 
and in my daydreams I inserted myself into them. I cannot remember 
them all, but LOTR was one. I fell in love with a Prince of Rohan 
when I was 10, and now I can't even remember  his name, or anything 
attractive about him except that I rode into battle with him. I was 
interested in the Middle Ages, Classical Greece, and Ancient Egypt. I 
was probably 12 when  I fell in love with Richard Coeur de Leon, as 
the more chivalric character in fiction rather than the dishonest 
oafish bully of real history, and I read in biographies about his 
'homosexuality' ('gay' was not yet a word) and editted my daydreams 
so that I was a page *boy* he took an interest in, but I was very 
ignorant and naive at that age in that era and had trouble figuring 
out how two males could have sex together. (I mentioned the latter 
before, for a question about how I became interested in slash.)

I became a trekkie in junior high (second season of the Original 
Trek). I wrote fanfic before I ever knew it was called fanfic, but 
really I was MORE into the social part, sharing the obsession with my 
junior high girl friends, than into Strek itself. Then I discovered 
Strek conventions and fanzines, then SF conventions and fanzines, 
joined LASFS (Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society) and devoted the 
next twenty years of my life to the social aspects of sf fandom. At a 
certain time, I just got bored and drifted away and now I only go to 
LASFS once or twice a year... and I don't know whether it was them or 
me that changed. 

I try to remember if I have been as obsessed with any other work of 
fiction in my adult life as I am with HP, and (admittedly my memory 
is failing on me) all I can think of one of the RPGs I'm in, where I 
got so interested in one of my PCs that I wrote the saga of his whole 
genealogy, including an entire story about his uncle, who went Viking 
before my PC was ever born, and never came back... but travelled off 
having adventures with magical beings from Byzantium through Araby 
all the way to China and Japan.

More of my obsessions in adult life have been about NON-FICTION 
books. Does high school count? If yes, that is when I stumbled across 
the (first edition) REAL MAGIC by Isaac Bonewitz. Next, POWERS OF 
MIND by 'Adam Smith'. Later, WHYS OF A PHILOSOPHICAL SCRIVENER 
(above). I am very ashamed to admit that I inflicted constant talk 
about Wicca on all my associates when I first joined a Wiccan study 
group. A temporary obsession with Tarot cards, which started when I 
became Central Mailer of a Tarot m2m on a dare, and ended when I 
handed over the m2m to a new CM. Probably others that don't spring to 
mind just yet.