Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "Your little hopes and dreams."
¤ Usage: "Poor fellow, his little hopes and dreams have all be smashed."
¤ Origin: Quipped by a whore, or pre-op transgender man, or a sociopath, or some other lowlife who was engaged in a vicious verbal battle with another lowlife guest on the Jerry Springer show
¤ Notes: While the Jerry Springer show is generally pretty lacking in opportunities for intellectual improvement, you do tend to hear some funny jokes, of the personal insult type.  This was one of the best.  One loser was arguing with another loser, and when one said something about how she'd loved her husband, whom the other lowlife had stolen away, lowlife #1 replied, "Bitch, I don't care about your little hopes and dreams!"

You'll find it applicable to almost every situation in life.  It's the "little" that really makes it work, since that just so perfectly and cruelly diminishes whatever claim to importance the other person might previously have had. -- February 20, 2004

s my knee heals and walking grows more and more routine, I find myself less interested in talking about it.  Good health is never discussed, mediocre health is mentioned rarely, and poor health is obsessed over. Funny how that works.

In other things I don't want to discuss, the Iraqi occupation is growing worse by the day. While the news this morning is that US troops are advancing and taking back the cities the Iraqi guerillas seized, what does this level of armed uprising and the new wave of hostage taking say? Of course the US troops there will win the battle; they have vastly better equipment than the Iraqis. Tanks and body armor vs. guys in t-shirts with rifles. The issue isn't which side suffers more casualties, it's that where initially we fought and defeated Saddam's uninspired and surrender-ready army, we're now fighting civilians who hate the US presence enough that they're picking up whatever weapons they have at hand and dying for their cause.  

Don't join the simpletons in yelling how their evil acts are only going to strengthen our resolve, and how we must not be swayed from our course in fighting terror. Israel's been doing that against a far smaller and poorer enemy for decades, and where has it gotten them?  Israel has tanks and planes and the Palestinians have home-made pipe bombs and rocks; Israel can kill anyone, anywhere, at any time in the occupied territories. How much peace and security have they achieved with their tactics? At what point does someone in charge of things in Iraq look at the past history of military opposition to Islamic fundamentalists and realize that more tanks, more bombs, and more soldiers isn't working?

It all depresses me; the US soldiers and Iraqis who are killing each other for nothing, the whole US occupation is creating more terrorists and terrorist supporters in the Middle East and around the world, and meanwhile it's diverting resources from the hunt for the real 9/11 terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

I was wondering today, what if Bush and company had planned competently for the post-war occupation, prevented the looting, gotten the power back on ASAP, rebuilt the infrastructure, etc, would all/most of this have been prevented?  Could prosperity and reforms have kept the people happy, after the initial post-Saddam honeymoon ended? Or was an Islamic uprising against foreign infidels simply unavoidable no matter how the living conditions inside of Iraq improved?

I guess we'll never know, and I'm pretty pessimistic about Iraq ever being peaceful and democratic and not a terrorist-infested nation; at least not inside of 10 or 15 years, and that's only if there are some amazing modernizing changes from within in Islamic society.

I hate to say it, and I hope I'm wrong, but I can't see the Iraq situation doing anything other than continuing to deteriorate. And yes, this sort of thing is exactly what those of us who grudgingly supported the war to remove Saddam, but had major reservations about the competency of Bush's plans to do it, feared all along.

And yes part 2, the QotD today is inspired by the Iraq situation.

In happier news... oh wait, I have no other news. Oh well, read the Harry Potter stuff below and join me in escaping into escapist literature. I've certainly been writing enough of it myself, lately.

I've been talking about the series for a couple of weeks (as most of you are probably "not this again" aware of) and finally got around to giving my review of HP1 at the end of the March 30th blog. Click that and scroll down if you missed it or want a reminder. To quote my conclusion:

• Writing: 3/5, due to it being a children's book.  5/5 for that target audience.
• Plot and characters: 3/5, with a decent plot, but far too many cliché characters.
• Overall: 3/5 or possibly even a 4/5, since it's somehow greater than the sum of its parts.

That's just HP1, The Sorcerer's/Philosopher's Stone, and in retrospect it's too high a rating in several ways. I can't give it more than a 4/5 rating for kids, upon reflection, for reasons I'll elaborate on below. Today I'll discuss books 2 and 3, briefly, with some minor spoilers. They both have their strengths and weaknesses, but I enjoyed them both more than I enjoyed book 1. The basic problem with Book 1 was the superficiality of things. It introduces everything, all of the characters, explains the magical world, the aerial game of Quidditch with its ridiculous rules, Harry's backstory, the predictable HP novel structure, etc.  The majority of the book is introduction, which is a blessing and a curse.

It's a blessing since all of that stuff is new and fresh and interesting to the reader (unless you'd already seen the first 2 movies, as I had) and Rowling gets a lot of mileage out of just describing things for the first time. It's a curse since the book spends so much time introducing things that there's not much left for character development or plot.

Books 2 and 3 need to explain and introduce far less stuff, and while the reader misses finding out so much cool stuff, Rowling doesn't need to explain how everything works in so much detail, which leaves her more room to advance the plot and build the characters. And she does, the 2nd and 3rd books are far better than the first novel, structurally speaking.  (At least up until the endings.)

I liked #2 and read it quickly. I liked #3 more, though I couldn't really say why. Possibly just because I know the characters and world pretty well by now, and just enjoyed living there for 300+ pages. I have not yet begun #4, but Malaya read the whole thing yesterday and liked it, until the ending. She's been mumbling all day about how it was the most heartbreaking Harry Potter ever, but won't say why, since it would spoil things for me.

I'm not going to get into many specifics about books 2 and 3, since true to their page-turner form, they're already fading from my memory just a few days after completing them.  The plot of 2 worked better than it did in the movie, where the monster was just way way way too large to believe that it could be moving around so easily, and too large to believe Harry could defeat the way he did. The book also made more sense in how the crimes were occurring, and how the messages were being written. In the movie I kept wondering how the hell the person writing the messages could have reached 3 or 4 meters up the wall to write them, and where they were getting the amount of blood they needed to do the writing. Not to mention the time to write them in such a busy school. The book handled that stuff better, though the ending was less satisfying and too convenient in many ways. 

In contrast, the ending with Dobby was handled far better in the 2nd movie, with Harry really being sneaking and tricking Malfoy Sr. into giving Dobby the book, with a sock hidden inside of it. In the book he just sort of throws Harry's dirty sock away and Dobby catches it, making you wonder how that "give it clothing to free it" rule works. Why didn't Dobby lurk under a bed and catch a sock or some underwear or a towel that someone dropped at some other time in its life, and become free?  The movie made it seem a much more formal arrangement, which was more logical and therefore more satisfying when Harry outwitted Malfoy to Dobby's benefit. That aside, I enjoyed Dobby and his antics far more in the book than the movie. It's funny to read about his bashing his head into a wall, or ironing his fingers, or kicking himself in his insane self-punishment; while seeing this little CGI thing hurting itself in the movie is just unpleasant.

The movie of book 3 hasn't come out yet, so I can't compare it, but I really wonder how they'll handle the confusing, "everything explained all at once" ending, since I didn't think it worked very well in the book. It was also very convenient, with the sudden gift of effortless time travel being used to tie up every loose end, and several characters making long, long exposition-heavy speeches to explain all of the mysteries that the reader didn't have enough information to solve on their own.

But overall I found book 3 the most enjoyable yet. Harry and friends are a year older and wiser, they don't spend the entire book sneaking around under their invisibility cloak, and for once they don't seem to be the only inhabitants of the school who actually do anything towards battling monsters or solving mysteries.  I also liked the two new classes/teachers and how they were presented, and overall there was a lot of interesting magical stuff, and new twists to familiar magical stuff.  I wonder how much of the magical stuff Rowling thought up in advance, and how she decided what to reveal in book 1, then in book 2, and so on. Or if she's mostly just thinking it all up as she writes each book, and the situation demands some magic that she then imagines. (I'm much more the latter in my writing, where necessity pushes me to think up cool stuff when I need it, and greed forces me to insert it into the story as soon as I can, rather than saving it for later.)

The biggest problem with the series, up through the third book, is the lack of dynamic characters.  Almost everyone seems to be just the same as they've always been, very static in their behavior and attitude, and that makes for relatively boring reading, and rather unrealistic teenager behavior. They're all only 13 in the 3rd book, so it's not that unbelievable, but the major character children will be 14 and 15 in the next two novels, and as most of us remember, things tend to really change quite a bit at that point.  Interest in the opposite sex becomes overpowering, many kids change their interests entirely, get all sulky or rebellious, make new friends and drop old ones, etc. These changes aren't necessarily good or bad, but they are changes, and if Harry keeps on being a goody goody who only wants to do the right thing, Ron continues to be a mediocre student with no defining characteristics, and Hermoine stays an overachieving bookworm, I'll be pretty disappointed.

Hermoine, at least, did show some character change towards the end of the 3rd book when she became more independent and willing to take risks, but that's about it. Why can't someone from Slitherin have a conscience and try to help the heroes? Or someone from Griffindor become a scheming traitor? Why don't any of the kids ever have a nervous breakdown and hide in their room under the bed, and why is every kid so bland? No one but Harry and his friends ever do anything of any importance, and everyone is so consistent all around. Kids are either good at everything or bad at everything, the only interpersonal conflicts of any weight are between Harry and the bad guys, and somehow it's always just the few principles involved. Draco would so have some 5th or 6th year asshole from Slitherin around to kick Harry's ass, with his daddy's money to buy him protection and friends. His two fat friends are useless, and never do anything but walk around with him. Neither of them ever uses any magic that we see or distinguishes himself. Doesn't either of them have their own thoughts or goals in life? Are they just content to be suck up thugs forever?  Doesn't Draco ever resent his dad or want to do his thing in life?

I'm not writing the stories, but while the plots are relatively well done and inventive and keep you guessing, the character behaviors are utterly predictable through and through.

This might not be a bad thing, since kids generally fear change and uncertainty in their lives. They want to think of good people as always good, and bad people as always bad, with no gray areas.  The unpredictability and contrariness of characters in a well-written book for adults is not something they're real likely to enjoy. This sort of thing is why I'm likely to always rate the HP books higher for kids than adults, since after all, they are kids' books, and you have to be a bit more understanding on that front.  They're basically adventure fun books, "page-turners" rather than works of literature, and the people who compare them to epic fantasy like Lord of the Rings and find HP wanting are wasting their time.  The HP stories are just fun stories for kids and adults to enjoy reading. There's no pretension or weightiness or lofty morals or themes in them. They're just fun reads, and if you go in with that attitude and blow through them while rooting for the good guys, you'll enjoy it. If you want parables and meditations on the meaning of life and human struggle, you'll come away feeling unsatisfied.

My biggest complaint about them so far, aside from the static characters, are the endings.

The HP books are basically action mysteries, with very little mystery. Each book has some overriding mystery or threat to Harry and the school, and we know it'll be dealt with before the book/school year ends, but that's far from the main driving thing in the story. I don't think this is a real bad thing, since after all, they're for kids. Children have short attention spans and get over grief quickly, so it's entirely realistic for Harry and the others to get so into eating candy or griping about a teacher or watching Quidditch that they forget all about the roaming monster that's petrifying students, or the insane escaped murdering wizard who wants to kill Harry next. The problem, reading as an adult, is that there's never enough information given out for us to play along and try to figure things out before they happen. We get hints, and teases, and isolated events, and then finally at the end there is a showdown when everything is explained and good triumphs (at least up through book 3) despite the impossible odds.

The explanation of things has gotten more involved and less believable in each book, until in the end of book 3 it was just ridiculous, with time travel, shape changing, several giant 12 year worldwide deceptions unmasked, lycanthropy, double crosses, attacking demons, multiple time lines, and more, all converging at once, with things somehow still working out for the best. Rowling actually pulled it off pretty well, given the corner she'd painted herself into over 300 pages, but the book had structural flaws, and shouldn't have required such a hurried, contrived, crowded, and improbable ending.

My quick scores, to emulate the ones I established in the HP1 review.

• HP2:
  • Writing: 3/5, due to it being a children's book.  4/5 for that target audience.
  • Plot and characters: 3/5, with a decent plot, but mediocre ending.
  • Overall: 3/5 for adults, 4/5 for kids.
• HP3:
  • Writing: 3/5, due to it being a children's book.  4/5 for that target audience.
  • Plot and characters: 4/5 until the end, downgraded to 2.5/5 since the ending was a mess.
  • Overall: 3/5, again downgraded by the ending.

While thinking about HP yesterday, I spent some time surfing the Amazon.com reviews, and found them pretty good reading.  The "this book is evil since it's about witchcraft" ones by Christians are my favorites, but it's illustrative to read why people didn't like the novels. Most of them had unrealistic expectations, wanting another epic masterpiece along the lines of LotR. None of the HP novels are masterpieces, no matter how much most kids and many adults love them. They're enjoyable page-turners, and while there's nothing wrong with that, the books would need so much added to reach the masterpiece stage that there's no point in talking about it.

Masterpieces? Laughable concept. Modern classics?  Probably.

I also noticed a theme running through dozens of the negative reviews, and after some thought here's what I isolated it as, and how I'd reply to it, in an essay I wrote last night, when it came to me while I was preparing a snack.

Some of the HP critics, the ones who give it a low score, go on and on about how it's far less than a perfect children's book.  There's no real moral lesson (except that lying is fine if it's for a good cause or to stay out of trouble), there's no overriding theme, most of the characters are very one-dimensional and static, the books all follow a similar plot structure, etc. All of which is true, but so what? No one's arguing it for the Pulitzer Prize (or whatever the UK novel equivalent would be), they're just saying it's a fun book for kids to read.

The odd thing to me is that the harsh critics seem to act almost as if kids are only going to read one or two books in their lives, and that they shouldn't waste their reading on fun but ultimately pointless page-turners like the Harry Potter books. This angle never even occurred to me, since I figure kids will read these, enjoy them for what they are, and read lots of other books too, some of which are probably a lot better for their minds, if less fun to plow through.

I suppose that my view of how much kids are likely to read is skewed by my own childhood, when I watched too much TV and played video games and skateboarded and played soccer... but also read a lot of books and started reading novels regularly by the time I was 5 or 6, and continued all through school. The only other person I've talked to about childhood reading habits is... Malaya, and she was a far bigger bookworm than even I was. To me a 300-400 page novel is something you read for an hour or two a go, and finish in 2 or 3 days. Shorter books or ones that move fast, like the HP novels, are things you read in 3 or 4 hours total.  I'm not bragging about my speed reading or anything; that's just how fast I read when I'm trying to enjoy a literary work.  When I skim fluff, like Entertainment Weekly articles or online movie reviews I skim and blow right through them, but with fiction I always take more time, since I like to analyze how the author has structured her work, how the prose is constructed, etc.

Therefore, I'm probably underestimating the potential importance of any one book, since I figure kids will be like I was, and read a lot of books. Who cares if they spend some time on fluffy fun stuff like Harry Potter when they'll have plenty of time to read other novels?

In contrast, the harsh HP critics seem to be people who didn't read much as kids, or who think kids today don't read much (which they don't, as far as I know) and therefore they overestimate the importance of every book, since they think (or know) that it's the only one their kid will ever read.  That may be true, but it seems like it puts unrealistic pressure on a book to be perfect; interesting, fun, easy to read, intelligent, morally uplifting, etc. You'll never be happy with any book your kid wants to read if you're holding it up to that high of a standard.

Also, isn't it better that they read something fun that they'll plow through and enjoy than reading nothing at all?  Or forcing some book that they're not going to enjoy on them, thus driving them back to the TV, or their video games, or sneaking out at night to engage in minor acts of vandalism?  Give them something fun and easy to read and they'll enjoy it and want to read more, and as they get used to reading and get faster at it and enjoy it more, you can steer them towards other works you find more morally or ethically substantial.

And yes, it's very easy for me to make these pronouncements and recommendations having never even babysat a child, must less raised my own.

A related recollection. I remember playing some sort of board game with my dad and my best friend Matt when I lived in Arlington Texas in the early 80s. I was there for 6th and 7th grade, so I was 12 or 13 at the time, and already into my high school pattern of getting poor grades entirely through indifference. I read a lot though, and just sort of assumed everyone else did too. I mean why wouldn't they?

So anyway, we were playing a game that involved some reading aloud. I don't remember exactly which game; I want to say Trivial Pursuit, but I don't think it had that much reading.  Anyway, I read some, dad read some, and finally it came Matt's turn to read something... and it was like Horton Hears a Who time. He read aloud, but very slowly, very haltingly, etc. He wasn't exactly taking time to sound out the words, at least not audibly, but it was like listening to an old person try to tell a story, where you want to kill yourself by the time they're halfway into it, in the time that you could have told it twice and gone to get donuts.

I remember thinking he was joking at first, since after all, he wasn't brilliant, but he was a nice kid, able to talk and think and function normally in society.  How could anyone read more slowly than they talked? Even back then I didn't like reading aloud or waiting for something to be read to me, since my eyes would read it so much faster than anyone could speak it comprehensibly. I always hated when some teacher insisted on reading out the entire test directions, or read what they were writing on the board, since it was just such a waste of time.  After all, everyone had long since finished reading it with their eyes while the teacher was still monotoning it out, right?

It wasn't until years later that I realized that no, a lot of the people hadn't already read it all out, and that there were people who actually read so slowly or so poorly that they actually needed someone to speak it all out for them to understand it.  That simply never occurred to me at the time though.

And in fact, listening to Matt read that paragraph out loud was simply incomprehensible to me. How could someone read so slowly?  Was it like that when he read without speaking?  Were there other kids who read like that?  Was that why they all groaned and complained when we had one of those ridiculous little short story-length reading assignments that I skimmed through right in class, when I got bored with listening to the teacher drone on and on, answering one stupid question after another?

Of course none of that epiphany-level realization trickled through immediately, and in typically-sensitive and caring 12y/o boy fashion, I said something like, "Jesus you read slow. Did you fail English or what?"

My dad was, of course, horrified by my lack of manners, especially when Matt replied, "No. I got a 'D'." to which I promptly replied, "I can see why!"

Malaya and I often hypothetically discuss child rearing techniques, with me disagreeing with her "Our child doesn't need any friends." comments. Yet the more I remember how I acted back in those days, and how my friends and their psycho parents acted, the less I find to disagree with her about.

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