I had written 800 brilliant, scabrous words on the rise of Harry Potter — and how adults have co-opted the franchise — but I inadvertently erased them for reasons not worth elaborating upon. Such absentminded mistakes on my part are common these days, but that’s another story.
In lieu of my Harry Hate, here’s a sampling of the chronic data stream uploading in my head, which I know readers are just dying to hear about.
•In the “How the Fuck Haven’t I Read Everything This Person Has Written Yet?” Department, I’m reading Orhan Pamuk’s “My Name Is Red.” While the novel can be slow going, it is also absolutely brilliant. I don’t know how I’ve managed to avoid Mr. Pamuk until now (though I’m not exactly well-schooled in modern Turkish writers. Mediaeval ones, either). Pamuk is a genius, a word I don’t throw around lightly with writers, and even in translation, it’s obvious why this dude won the Nobel Prize. Read this, not “Harry Potter and the Sphincter of Fire.” (More on Harry later.)
•The Chicago Cubs have decided that playing baseball was more fun than beating the snot out of each other, and have the best record in the majors since manager Lou Pinella’s head exploded in June. This is a bad thing. The Cubs are three games out of first place, and as a result, I am a stupid, love-struck teenager once more, following their every pitch and swing of the bat. They will ultimately break my heart, and yet I still watch them with blind affection. Call me stupid; call me a sports fan.
•Media Mania Over Drug Addled, DUI Hollywood Hos! I just wanted to say that.
•I am coming down with yet another cold. My throat feels like a morbidly obese union carpenter is using a power sander where my tonsils used to reside.
•Baby won’t abide his crib, despite his parents’ unstilted efforts to get him to do otherwise. We’ll put him down, asleep, and in the time it takes the pee to hit the urinal (as I have been holding it in for about 73 minutes as I hold the little bugger), his cries echo through our home; first, flaccid and weak, then increasing in volume until The End of the World is nigh. My solution for this is just let Baby cry until he loses his voice, permanently. He’ll eventually fall asleep and we won’t ever have to hear his rotten screaming ever again.
Wrigley: scene of the crime
•The number of comments on my blog as ground into a number smaller than functioning brain cells in Dick Cheney’s diseased mind. There is a fair amount of blogrolling (you comment on my blog, I’ll comment on yours) in cyberspace, and as I struggle to keep up with others’ blogs, nobody visits here, unless you count the turds who want to know if a certain violinist is gay and you know who you are and if this is how you spend your time, asking if this man is gay, then you live an impoverished intellectual and spiritual life indeed. Learn how to drink or something.
•I changed the layout, added polls, and some bizzare rating systemf at the bottom of each post, and one can see the overwhelming response. It would probably do me more good if, like, I actually wrote something more than once a fortnight.
•Speaking of viewership, I have a friend who runs a terriffic baseball blog that gets several thousand page views a day. Yes, his blog gets more page views in a month than Bookfraud has in its two-plus-years of existence. He was kind enough to have linked my rant on the Cubs’ impending sale, and, viola! there were suddenly hundreds of hits to Bookfraud. Just about nobody commented, unfortunately, and few visitors have returned, but since they were largely St. Louis Cardinals fans, it makes sense, since Cardinals fans are largely illiterate.
•Don’t send hate mail, Cardinals fans. Just a silly joke there from a pitiful Cubs follower. You suck, that’s all.
• Media Mania Over Drug Addled, DUI Hollywood Hos! Man, I love saying that.
Kids fare; for adults, fair
•“Dogfights” is the coolest guy show in the world. The show recreates classic air battles using computer animation, interviews some of the pilots involved, and analyzes tactics and strategy. Incredibly cool. If it only didn’t deal with extreme violence, and if it didn’t (essentially) celebrate young men’s deaths, it would be perfect.
•My Take on Harry: Of the 8.3 million copies of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” that flew off the shelves last weekend, my empirical observation posits that 4.15 million are being read by adults. I see people over the age of 18 reading it on buses, in parks. I see patients reading it while awaiting surgery and hookers standing around trying to pick up johns. Please, adults, read something else, too. Like Orhan Pamuk, or anything but “Harry Potter and the Boner Factory” or whatever it. It’s a book for children.
•Now let the hate mail flow.
I reckon since I already knew how great Orhan Pamuk was I get to read whatever I want.
In the “How the Fuck Have I Not Read, &c, &c” department, I recently started in with W.G. Sebald for the first time. He is much adored by Michael Silverblatt and I’ve heard him interviewed on Bookworm at least once. But anyway, I’m discovering him on my own for the first time (also in translation) with _The Rings of Saturn_. As for Harry Potter 7, I can wait till it’s in paperback and pick it up used, if I still care at some point. Also, you may enjoy this.
So, is it all children’s books read by adults that you hate? Or just Harry Potter? I mean, I still have books that I’ve loved since I was young, and see no reason to not re-read them. I mean, are the literature police going to come after me for reading “The Phantom Tollbooth”? No, they’ll probably come after me for my 9,000th romance book.
it is kind of hard to keep that bad thoughts at bay when it comes to the Cubs. Some dude reaching for a foul ball fell out of the stands at last night’s game and I had a Bartman flashback.
quinn: that buffoon who fell head first over the railing last night? too bad he didn’t cost the cubs the game instead of their inability to hit a goddamn schoolboy changeup.
mdb: i have no brief against adults reading any children’s books, especially those from their own childhood that resonate still. my problem is adults who read “harry potter” *instead* of something written,for,say, their own age.
imani: if you are already reading orhan pamuk, you are free to read “harry potter,” “the cat in the hat,” or the collected works of dan brown.
brainy: thanks for the link — very funny stuff.
sebald is another one of those “great” writers who i haven’t read yet. perhaps you’ve convinced me.
I remember my “How did I not” moment with Philip Roth. Ahh sweet memories.
BTW, I read Harry Potter in 4 days and had plenty of time the rest of the week to read some “real” literature, and the economist, a ton of blogs and etc. etc.
Lovingly yours,
Steve Bartman
I haven’t read My Name is Red yet, but Snow didn’t do it for me – and I’m on board with Dan Green’s new piece in The Quarterly Conversation that calls Pamuk’s work mostly (though not entirely) “ponderous.”
Nice blog, though!
The longest conversation I’ve had with my 12 year old son this year was about the last Harry Potter book. That was a hard conversation due to the eye watering from his smelly preteen feet.
I CAN’T have beef with Harry. My brother is nineteen and it’s the only thing he’ll read willingly other than the occasional musician or professional wrestler’s autobiography. I myself have developed a brilliant plan: in the past I tried to get in on Pottermania, but I couldn’t stand the first book. So I bought them in Spanish. 1) Practice my Spanish; 2) get in on the Potter-lovin’; 3) anything corny goes way over my head (literal translation is cake, but I have a rough time with any sort of subtlety in Spanish).
I CAN’T have beef with Harry. My brother is nineteen and it’s the only thing he’ll read willingly other than the occasional musician or professional wrestler’s autobiography. I myself have developed a brilliant plan: in the past I tried to get in on Pottermania, but I couldn’t stand the first book. So I bought them in Spanish. 1) Practice my Spanish; 2) get in on the Potter-lovin’; 3) anything corny goes way over my head (literal translation is cake, but I have a rough time with any sort of subtlety in Spanish).
phoenix bartman: burn in hell, you bastard.
richard: sorry you aren’t into pamuk, though i can understand some people finding him “ponderous:” there are times in which it’s a slog. don’t know if that’s from translation, though.
glad you like the blog.
phoenix bartman: burn in hell, you bastard.
richard: sorry you aren’t into pamuk, though i can understand some people finding him “ponderous:” there are times in which it’s a slog. don’t know if that’s from translation, though.
glad you like the blog.
phoenix bartman: burn in hell, you bastard.
richard: sorry you aren’t into pamuk, though i can understand some people finding him “ponderous:” there are times in which it’s a slog. don’t know if that’s from translation, though.
glad you like the blog.
doublebagger: behold my future. smelly feet and no conversations, except about “harry potter.” sign me up.
jordan: it’s weird, how a 19-year-old is into “harry potter;” i would have thought it entirely uncool at that age.
love the spanish tack. no hablo espanol.
Green did like My Name is Red best of all (although it was qualified). I don’t think I mind the ponderous, but we’ll see, as I have The Black Book anxiously waiting to be picked up.
I draw the line at Dan Brown. I am reading a romance right now MDB, but I think the Nabokov essays and Dostoevsky novel save me from the fires of hell? (Milton too but who likes a braggart.)
I’ve never read any of the Harry Potter novels or watched any of the movies. Doubt I ever will. I finally saw the movie version of the DaVinci Code. Yawn.