Difficulties and Problems

For some unfathomable reason, I've been trying to get on Livejournal a lot today. Maybe it's that forbidden fruit thing, which is a poor analogy because I don't particularly like fruit, and there isn't some fucking snake telling me how fucking delicious Livejournal is or anything. Apparently the "datacenter" needs "power" to run, which I believe translates to "we got really moshed last night and woke up in the wrong state, excuse us but we need to find our pants and remember our names."

I am not, shall we say, a qualified translator of technical difficulties.

I have been trying to avoid the internet (read: HP7 spoilers), and so have not returned with enlightening or entertaining anecdotes. I've started the book, though. I'm enjoying it so far. Say nothing.

I meant to say something about the Order of the Phoenix movie, and it would've probably been something like this:

I liked the film, in that it kept a brisk pace and managed to make an overlong and sometimes tedious book into a taut and entertaining movie. The new casts all did a fine job, Umbridge (who wasn't exactly what I expected, but then I expected a complete cartoon and was happy with the alternative) and Luna in particular. I find there are a lot of unfortunate and unfounded complaints with the HP movies - they left this out, that person isn't right, they changed that. The movies do a very good job, I find, of matching the tone of the books, of coming close to the vision, and of hitting the right points of the story, and I believe we have to accept that it might never be exactly what was in your head.

I had a problem with the script, not in its deviation from the original story (a film is different from a book, and the story needs to change) but purely as a work of adaptation. I was in the process of rereading the fifth book when I went to see the film, and wasn't struck by the glaring inaccuracies or deviations from the story, but rather the peculiarly patchwork dialogue. Nearly every line in the film is a close variant or exact rip from characters' speech in the original book. The dialogue, as it stands, works fine on the page, where there's nearly eight-hundred pages to establish things like character and emotion and theme, but there's more of an onus on spoken language in a film. It's the responsibility of an adapter to create dialogue that illuminates the characters, and reinforces the themes, and usually this means creating and changing the text to suit the new medium. Mark Goldenberg, the writer of the fifth film, seemed content to cram Rowling's words into a hundred-and-thirty minutes, and then stand back.

The result was a strangely unbalanced film that seemed to be almost exclusively about Harry and Umbridge, and only occasionally about anyone else. And while I appreciate that those are the protagonist and antagonist, there's a rich ensemble who fall by the wayside because Goldenberg was too lazy to write them in.

Madness at Midnight

I suppose it was inevitable.

Despite my pronounced distaste for Rowling's prose (described in this somewhat scathing indictment as "toxic"), I've been rereading the fifth book in anticipation of rereading the sixth book in anticipation of the seventh. My brother and sister and I have been negotiating over who will be the first to read The Deathly Hallows, and I'm having a great time going over the stories again. Rowling can craft characters and a plot, and I've been reading the series since I was twelve - I am as anchored, emotionally, in the world of Hogwarts as I am in any fictional universe.

So it came as no surprise that I ended up at a Midnight Madness event, and have already picked up the last of the Harry Potter books. It had to happen eventually.

It happened like this:
"Hey, are you doing anything right now?"
"Not really. Reading Order of the Phoenix."
"You wanna go check out the madness at Chapters?"
"Sure."

The place was (predictably) packed, but no lines going around the block, no excess of cosplayers or peculiar, complex games or merchandising schemes. There was a suspicious, red-vested kid, standing between the in-and-out traffic near the front door when we left, who was going through a deck of cards, lifting them one at a time, facing away from him; on the cards faces were shapes - triangles, circles, squares. He was concentrating very hard, and staring determinedly into the space above the heads in the line. I suspect he had incredible psychic powers and was testing them, but no one seemed to be paying much attention to him, with the exception of an overweight, mustachioed man wearing a trucker hat, who smiled benignly at the cards, saying nothing.

When the book boxes came out of the back room, a screech went up, like a host of banshees or an all-girls primary school riding the Ghoster Coaster.

All told, we hung around for about forty-five minutes, got the book, and went home.

(A note on the article I linked above: The guy seems to be a member of that small contingent of readers who don't like the books, but are somehow incapable of understanding how anyone else could, either, and so choose to disparage the stories and those affiliated with them, rather than sort of accepting that everyone has their own tastes. He makes a couple of good points, though, especially about booksellers early on, and he's nowhere near as harsh as Harold Bloom or A.S. Byatt - you can see some of their juicier quotes in the Wikipedia article. 'Course, Harold Bloom's a dick.)

By the way: I'm not going to read the book right away, but I'm sure I will soon, and I'll want to blog about it. I imagine many of you will do the same. If you spoil anything for me, if you spoil word one, there will be a great reckoning that will end the world. A suggestion then, that will keep me spoiler free, and spare you your miserable life: if you want to blog about the book, use rot13. It's a neat little cypher engine that lets you conceal text without needing to hide it behind a jump or something. Try using it to translate this:

Naq yb! hagb gurz gurer pnzr n ivfvba, bs qnexarff naq greebe rireynfgvat, bs n Terng naq Greevoyr Ornfg jubfr anzr unq orra jbira vagb gur gncrfgel bs qbbz, naq ur fnvq gb gurz, va n ibvpr yvxr gur ubjyvat bs ybphfgf: "Lr jub unir fcbvyrq gur raqvat bs gur Qrnguyl Unyybjf jvyy arire xabj gur oyrffrq serrqbz bs qrngu!"

So just cypher your post, and put a link to rot13 in there somewhere.

(Idea stolen from Making Light)

I was going to talk about the OotP movie, and then about some other stuff, but I'll do that later. Instead, I'll leave you with the most ridiculous quote from this somewhat ridiculous, but mostly pretty cool AV Club interview with Britt Daniels:

AVC: What happened to calling [the album] Trouble Minx?

BD: Oh, you know. The whole thing about naming an album is that it's got to be something that everybody's happy with. And to be honest, I didn't really know what Trouble Minx meant after a while.

Because Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is clear as the fucking Arctic summer sky.