[the_old_crowd] John the Baptist?

[pennylin]

Hi --

Oh, it's so good to see posts from Catherine, Mike and Steve all in one day!  <g>

Steve, below my signature is allegedly the full transcript of the article in question ...... it comes to you via: Linda McCabe (athena) writing to Professor Terry Mattingly about his mention of that specific quote in a syndicated column he writes, and his reply included a cut & paste of the entire article, which Athena then forwarded to a little H/H debate group I belong to.  So, it may not be a *perfect* transcription, but one hopes it's close.  There's no date given.  

I don't know where the John the Baptist reference might have originated.  

Mike, I would be well and truly *fascinated* to read your article.  Can you let us know how we might get a copy?  :--)

Re: John Granger.  I'm in regular contact with him; we got to be buddies in the pre-Nimbus days.  I agree with Steve that some of his theories are a tad farfetched (the name thing that Steve mentioned), but in general, I enthusiastically recommend his work to anyone interested in the subject.  Re: alchemy --- this was the subject of his talk at Nimbus, and it got him a standing ovation.  I'd be interested to hear more details about why your eyebrows stretched so skeptically at the alchemy angle, Mike, since I thought it all made perfect sense (but again, I don't necessarily know much about alchemy at all prior to reading Granger's work, so I'm *certainly* no expert!).  

Penny

 LKW WRITERS; BOOKS; YOUTH
NAME * J.K. ROWLING
HEADLINE `You can lead a fool to a book but you can't make them think':
Author has frank words for the religious right
BYLINE * Max Wyman
SOURCE Vancouver Sun



J.K. Rowling no longer wears the red tresses that became familiar to
millions when her fictional creation, Harry Potter, launched her into 
the stratosphere of international media fame. She has dyed her shortened locks a generic blond, leaving the dark roots showing.


Woman's privilege, we wonder. But no: the long red hair and bangs were
making her too recognizable, she says.


The new look frames intense, dark eyes and a pale, serious face. Here 
on one of the most lavishly hyped publicity tours in literary history, she 
has just handled a half-hour question session with a group of selected
children, and another half-hour of polite but mostly lackadaisical 
quizzing by the Vancouver media.


She's an old hand at this by now. The fourth book in the series, Harry
Potter and the Goblet of Fire, has just been launched, with hardback 
sales in Canada alone topping a million. Superstar? Of course, but there's a no-nonsense, unpretentious air about the way she handles herself.


Most of the questions have been asked a million times, but she fields 
them all with courtesy and good humour spiced with a tart British wit.


Now I'm getting 15 minutes of exclusive interview, one on one, and, 
given the constraints of time, I decide to focus on a topic that has been
becoming increasingly important as the four books have appeared: the 
moral significance of the stories, and the proper use of power.


* If you've been keeping abreast of the Rowling news, you'll recall 
that she has repeatedly come under fire from some parts of the religious 
right for writing about wizardry and witchcraft, and for portraying the 
endless conflict between good and evil through boldly etched fantastical 
characters.


Harry Potter, a student at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, 
is constantly thrown up against dark forces, particularly the ultimate 
evil, Lord Voldemort.


So far, despite all the odds, Potter and the forces of virtue and 
decency have triumphed. The moral significance seems clear.


* ``It does to you,'' says Rowling. ``And to me it's so blindingly 
obvious.  But when this first became an issue I would take an enormous amount of time to explain what I thought was so obvious.


``Now I am starting to get impatient because I feel that you can lead a
fool to a book but you can't make them think. And you can quote me,
actually, because I'm just getting impatient about it.''


It's the testiest she has been all morning. But you can hardly blame 
her.  The books can hardly be clearer about her intentions. At the end of the latest, one of the forces of good, the Hogwarts headmaster Dumbledore, laments a death that has happened and says:


``Remember, if the time should come when you have to make a choice 
between what is right and what is easy, remember what happened to a boy who was good and kind and brave, because he strayed across the path of Lord Voldemort.''


* That, says Rowling, was the key for her: the choice between what is 
right and what is easy, ``because that, that is how tyranny is started, with people being apathetic and taking the easy route and suddenly finding themselves in deep trouble.''


This, she said, was the first point at which she cried during the 
writing of the series.


Even the chapter in the first book that (she realized later) was based 
on her mother's death, ``even that didn't make me cry; I had never cried 
until I wrote that.''


That sense of moral responsibility, does she see it making Harry a 
moral figure for kids to emulate?


``I see him as a good person but with a human underbelly,'' she says. 
``He is vulnerable, he is frequently afraid, he has a very strong 
conscience, and it is my belief that with the overwhelming majority of human beings -- maybe I'm a wild optimist -- most people do try to do the right thing, by their own lights.''


* He sounds, I tell her, like a definition of Rowling herself, though 
she usually tells interviewers she's most like Harry's chum Hermione. 
``Yes,'' she admits, ``there's an awful lot of me in Harry, but probably me as I am older. Harry is an old soul, and you meet children like that.''


Harry, of course, is able to battle supernatural evil with * 
supernatural forces of his own, and Rowling is quite clear that she doesn't personally believe in that kind of magic -- ``not at all.'' Is she a Christian?


``Yes, I am,'' she says. ``Which seems to offend the religious right 
far worse than if I said I thought there was no God. Every time I've been 
asked if I believe in God, I've said yes, because I do, but no one ever 
really has gone any more deeply into it than that, and I have to say that does suit me, because if I talk too freely about that I think the 
intelligent reader, whether 10 or 60, will be able to guess what's coming in the books.''


* A plank in the Rowling mythology is the fact that outlines for all 
seven books planned for the series have been firmly laid down since she began to write the first; she has even written the last chapter of book seven. Why spoil the fun?


So we talk about power, which seems to be at the basis of the tales: 
magic power, the power of parents over kids, the struggle between the power of good and the power of evil -- ``yes,'' she says excitedly, ``abuse of power, why people would seek power.''


And I ask her a personal question: given that in our society money 
equals power, and serious money (Harry has made her the highest-earning woman in Britain) equals serious power, how does she want to use that power?


``I've started using it,'' she says, referring to the $1.14 million Cdn 
she recently gave to an English charity for single parents. ``And fame also can equate with power. So I've started using both where I feel I can make a difference.''


Single parenthood is an issue close to her heart; since the collapse of 
her marriage in the early `90s, she has raised her daughter Jessica, now seven, alone.


``It's something that cuts across every walk of life and every kind of
background -- ethnic, socio-economic. . . let's be frank, it's mostly 
women who find themselves in that position. And I used to wonder when someone would stand up and tell it like it was: Say `No, actually, we're not all feckless teenagers who didn't know how to use contraception,' -- a view which was very prevalent in the media at the time, partly because we in Britain had a right-wing government that was very fond of scapegoating single parents . . .


``Most of us are people in committed relationships that went wrong. We 
also have to include all the people who have been bereaved who are tarred with the same very negative brush. The next heir to the throne is a single parent.''


She was reluctant to take on the advocacy task (``in all honesty I'm
fighting for writing time right now, and I'm just wanting, number one, 
to see my daughter'') but she thought, well, ``someone's got to do it, so 
it's you.''


Although she has the kind of money these days that would allow her to
consign her child to all kinds of comfortable care, she looks after her
herself, taking her to school each day, though a nanny collects her in 
the afternoon and looks after her until 5 p.m., ``which gives me a full 
writing day.''


* Jessica has read all the Potter books, says Rowling, ``and she read 
the latest all by herself . . . until chapter 30.'' That's when the * book
turns dark and violent, and Rowling decided she would read it to her: 
``She needed support through that ending. It's the darkest book yet.''


Next in line from the Potter mill is the Harry Potter movie, and (I'm
getting wind-up signals now from the publicity folk: I've already 
stretched the 15 minutes to 20) I ask her a question my 13-year-old nephew Tom e-mailed from England: ``Do you think the new film could ruin children's images of Harry and Hogwarts and make the next books less enjoyable because of the definite image of both characters and the school?''


The answer is a definite no, and at the same time a strong affirmation 
of her belief in her readers.


``If people have already invented Harry in their imagination, I would 
be very surprised if the film could disturb that. No film has ever ruined 
a favourite book for me, ever. It is my belief that my readers will be 
able to differentiate between the film Harry and real Harry and I think they
will be in no doubt about who is the real Harry. People greatly
underestimate children.''


She has occasionally come under fire from parents questioning the use 
of Potter books in classrooms, on the grounds that they are based on (as one South Carolina group of protesters put it) ``a serious tone of death, hate, lack of respect and sheer evil.''


* Rowling's response was one of resignation. ``My feeling about that is
that if we're going to ban all the books that mention witches,'' she 
said, ``we're going to be getting rid of a lot of classics.


``I've met thousands of children now, and I haven't met a single one 
who's told me that they've developed an interest in witchcraft because of my books ... It's an imaginary world, and I think a very moral world. And 
the bottom line is, if people don't want to read it, they don't have to 
read it, you know?''


At Vancouver's Kidsbooks, president Phyllis Simon says only one 
customer has protested about the books' emphasis on wizardry and magic. ``I thanked her for her opinion and we left it at that. I'm not here to pass judgment on people. We're here to promote literacy and make sure kids have a pleasurable reading experience.'' 

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