Fun Things to do with HP books

[Aberforth's Goat / Mike Gray]

A small, off-white goat - sluggish from several long, soporific winters
in farmer Gray's barn - is startled from his slumbers by a violent
commotion over in the hen house. Quills and feathers waft through the
chilly air outside, making lovely, exciting patterns against the
steel-blue sky.

"Well, well - new animals on the farm!" murmurs the goat as a he rubs
his red eyes and trys to figure out what directions the feathers are
floating in. He wonders also: these beady eyed newcomers - are they
dangerous or just peckish?

* * * *

One way or another, I thought the lit. crit. (and related) threads were
cool in excelsis. As usual, I found myself thinking about things that
weren't really to the point (or, P.S., points which Sean has already
made much more succinctly), and immediately decided to share them with
the world. 

To wit: I thought about all the things people can do with the HP books,
and also about the things I do with them in relation to the things other
people do, particularly in the HP fandom.

Here is a very, very long list of just a few of those things. Feel free
to skip it and go to the end of the post, or simply move on to a less
abstruse email.

Still here? OK.

Just limiting myself to the things I (me, that is) have done with the HP
books: 

You can drop the fat ones on your small left toe, which is painful but
makes for a funny story; and you can use the skinny ones to prop up your
video projector. (The other way around doesn't work very well - the
story isn't nearly as funny and the projector shines straight into the
ceiling.) You can arrange the whole series on the shelf above your bed
board, adding a new, vaguely talismanic element to your interior
decorating scheme - and if you think about what your family, friends and
church members will think about this, you can use the books as a
conversation piece, not to mention stimulous to reflection on culture,
religious belief, child development, cover art and semiotics. 

(Of course, if you're still, after all these years, not quite sure what
semiotics is, you end up wondering whether you perhaps aren't thinking
about semiotics after all, or whether you were before but aren't any
more, and if so, whether there is a special cognitive category for
thinking about something you don't know you're thinking about. This is
*really* beside the point, of course - but it was the act of looking at
your HP books sitting above your bedboard that lead directly to the
thought, or quasi-thought, as the case may be.)

If you get around to looking at the black squiggles inside of the books,
you can do even more things. You can look for split infinitives while
you hunt for those waddyacallum words that mean something else if you
read them backwards. You can look for the funny patches or scarey parts
or sexy bits. 

You can estimate the average sentence length and situate the religious
references and ask yourself: "What kind of person would write this kind
of book? Do I like this person? Do I think I would like the way she
thinks about politics or religion - would I like her as a friend or a
neighbor? Would I, ceteribus paribus, fall in love with her? And if so,
would it be fun?"

While you are pondering all these things, you can also try to guess what
will happen in the sentence after the one you're currently reading - or
in the next passage, chapter or book. If you already know, because you
are reading that particular passge for the 27th time, you can try to
decide whether you ought to have been able to figure that out the first
time you read the passage. If this begins to bore you, you can even try
to guess what the author will write about if she takes a stab at a book
without school children waving magic chopsticks. 

You can imagine the people in the story doing something different from
what they do in the passage you're thinking about, and you can try to
decide whether you like your version better, or Jo's, and whether you
should write your ammendment and post it on a fanfic site.

You can also imagine what it would be like if you were part of the world
in the book - and you can think about the sort of perspective this gives
you on the world you live in (part of which is, by the way, the book you
are reading). If the world in the book is one of the few fun things
things happening in the world you live in right now, you can spend as
much time as possible thinking about the world in the book instead of
mulling over the stupid parts of your world. Sometimes doing this gives
you a new perspective on things in the rest of your life; sometimes it
just makes you more depressed than you were to begin with. (If you get
your wires crossed on this one, HP will be accused of fostering
escapism.)

You can also wonder why the world in the book is the way it is and not
something else. You can compare the world in the books with the worlds
in other books you have (or pretend to have) read, and ask yourself,
"Which of these worlds do I like better - and which *should* I like
better - and what sort of criteria do I use to to answer this question,
and is there anyone else in the world who might, or even should, use
these same criteria - and if so, would they agree about the way I have
applied them?" 

If you're in a particularly abstracted frame of mind you can even wonder
about the way in which reading these particular books moved you to pose
these general questions and wonder whether different books tend to pose
the same aesthetic questions in different terms or maybe different
aesthetic questions in different terms (not to mention whether the
difference even makes a difference). (Vive la difference.)

Also, never forget reflexivity: compare the world in the books with the
world in the books - ie, you can look for internal fractures. If you
find one, you can start a roaring fight about it on HPfGU. This (and
guessing things, see above) seems to be the most popular thing to do
with the HP books, which leads to interesting questions about the nature
of the books and the nature of the people who post about them in
cyberspace. 

But of course, you can also wonder: assuming the fracture is even there,
is this inconsistency a Good Thing, because life itself is inconsistent,
or a Bad Thing, because life isn't inconsistent (at least not in this
way) - or isn't supposed to be, even if it is. Once you start using the
books to do things like this, you'll quickly find yourself thinking
about Life Itself, and that too is a very fine thing to use the HP book
for.

If you are feeling practically minded, you can even wonder what sort of
role the world in the book plays in various worlds outside of the books.
Politics, for instance, or child literacy, or the resurgence of the sort
of people who propound the resurgence of pint sized Satanists sacrifying
small white goats.

Finally, depending on your lines of work and play, you can think of
things to say about any of or all the above that might potentially make
friends and enemies, influence people, get tenure, get into a fight or
at least get invited to join the old crowd or just get ordered to walk
the plank of someone's SHIP.

* * * *

These are all things I have done with the HP books. (Well, I don't
actually think I ever looked for sexy bits in the proper sense, but I
*did* spend a lot of time looking for bits I could *pretend* were sexy
bits, which is even more fun.) 

The point?

I think a lot of disagreements in HP fandom (perhaps even a lot of
disagreements in the homo sapien fandom) boil down to people who are
doing different things with the same thing (in this instance, book) and
either (a) don't notice or articulate the difference, (b) have
reservations about the thing the other person is doing, or (c) feel that
the perpetrator is doing something which cannot be done reasonably
without having put some effort into doing something else first. (Like
discussing a book's literary value before hvaing read it.) 

"Meta-" discussions (that is, discussions in which the books are viewed
in a context broader than the books themselves) tend to get snarled up
in this area. And when you consider how hard it is to agree about simple
factual issues (ie, "How many students does/did Jo think are at
Hogwarts?") it's understandable that "meta-" discussion can turn arcane
and nasty on a sixpence.

OTOH, it's worth considering that fiction itself is, from the standpoint
of life itself, a meta- pursuit. That is, it is not merely a part of
life - it is a part of life that requires and stimulates reflection on
life. (A shopping list or snow shovel does this to some extent, but not
the way a book does.) If you were to completely erase its connections to
its own meta-level - that is, life in its entirety - it would be,
literally, meaningless. 

Also, even a discussion of the purely "factual" questions (like the
number of students at Hogwarts) entails a pre-understanding (and
hopefully stimulates thought) about this meta-level. For instance, does
a text mean (a) what the author was thinking about when she wrote it,
(b) what the author said it meant later on, (c) what the reader thinks
it means, (d) what the reader thinks it ought to mean or (e) what a
canonical set of semantic and syntactical rules indicate that it means
and/or meant? The way you answer questions like this turns out to be
related to very basic things in the way you think about Life in General
- not to mention the Kind of Person you are.

So I think the meta-level is as important as it is difficult. It's the
meta-level that makes books meaningful - and what's more *fun.* 

* * * *

Anyway, once you have figured which of the things in the list above are
the correct, fun and virtuous things to do and figured out the correct,
fun and viruous order and manner in which to do them, the whole problem
is solved. (But then what exactly is the problem? Oh well. At least we
have already been informed that the correct answer is 42.)

So there.

I'm done waffling.

Any questions?

Anyone still left?

<sigh>

* * * * 

And with that, the small white goat staggered back toward the cozy,
sleepy part of barn, weighing the costs and benefits of an excursion
though the hemp patch on his way there.

Baaaaaa!

Aberforth's Goat (a.k.a. Mike Gray, who for the record, has never
partaken of anything more potent than two glasses of red wine and a shot
glass of Hungarian vodka, which is called palinka, but tastes just as
vile.)
_______________________

"Of course, I'm not entirely sure he can read, 
so that may not have been bravery...."