Link to Daily News Article on Wand Order Problem

[Penny & Bryce Linsenmayer]

No: HPFGUIDX 9734

Hi --

Amy wrote:

> Penny, you're my listmom and I love you, but I disagree with you on the
> correction.

That's okay -- goodness knows, I get disagreed with plenty of times around
here.  <g>

> First, it isn't just a pronoun swap.  There are the usual physical
> descriptions plus, more significantly, the omission of the line "She
> wants to see you," an omission I disagree with but it does
> show some editorial thought.

Well, yes, they swapped up the physical descriptions somewhat, but it's
still basically (IMO) just a swap of pronouns & proper names.  The thing I
disagree most strongly with is that they just left it as though he'd been
thinking about his mum that night.  That's the part that doesn't make much
sense as rewritten.  To me anyway.  But, maybe that's because I see a
definite shift in Harry starting at the end of PoA.  The focus in SS/PS is
on his mother's sacrifice & the layer of protection, and of course, he
invokes his muggle-born mum in his confrontation with Riddle in CoS.  But,
beginning in PoA, as he learns more & more about his father & forges a
relationship with his father's closest friends (other than Pettigrew of
course!), I think he starts to identify more & more with his Dad.

My favorite quote in the entire series is a signature tag I still use
occasionally from Dumbledore's chat with Harry at the end of PoA: "Your
father is alive in you, Harry, and shows himself most plainly when you
have need of him."  Then, you read the GoF scene, and he's thinking to
himself that he wants to defend himself against Voldemort the way his
father did, upright & proud, not "crouching like a child playing
hide-and-seek."  This says to me that psychologically Harry is shifting
away from being a child (who might think of his Mum first) to an
adolescent male who might more likely think of his father & how his father
would react or handle a given situation.  And, as rewritten, they didn't
go back & add him thinking about his Mum and eliminate the bit about
wanting to defend himself like his father did.  So .... to me, the
rewritten scene makes no sense from that standpoint.

> (As for the recent question of whether it *should* be James, more than
> Lily, who "he'd thought of more than any other tonight": that is
> unchanged.  The text now reads "the woman appearing was the one he'd
> thought of more than any other tonight," not "the person appearing."  So
> James can still be the person most on his mind, if we insist on
> knowing.)

But, as I said above, he hadn't had *any* thoughts of his mother that are
directly communicated to the reader.  His direct thoughts are about his
father.

> Until we've read them all, we won't be able to judge whether this
> correction was really necessary, but the author thinks it was and that's
> good enough for me (even if she doesn't even know how many students go
> to Hogwarts <g>).  I think it's a bit unfair when people say "she
> should've worked her way out of it."

I agree with you that JKR is best able to say whether the gaffe should be
corrected or not. If it's an error, it's an error.  I do think that it
would have been more fun (and "face-saving" for her & her editors) if she
had just worked out another creative solution in a later book, but I don't
begrudge her the overall call to fix it now instead.  My issue(s) are: (a)
CNN reported the original "error" months ago and then the publishers set
about to silently correct it without any notice to the public (who bought
over 10 million copies of GoF before the correction was made), and (b)
IMO, they corrected it strangely (as I explained above).  It still doesn't
read to me as though JKR wrote or approved the revised wording.  I think
she might have done a more expansive rewrite .... and I can't help
wondering if the page layout/printing costs prompted the publishers to go
for this "quick & easy fix."  That's all.

Also -- I might add that just like Neil who got a bit misquoted in the
salon.com article, I too said lots of things to the Daily News reporter
that didn't make it into the overall published piece.  She obviously had
space constraints.  The NY Times guy already warned me also that he's
doing a "small" piece, so it's possible that what I told him may also come
off not quite as I would have intended it.  <g>

Penny