July 18
Harry Potter and the Order of the Golden Phoenix, J.K. Rowling (2003)

This is the fifth and most recent of the Harry Potter stories. Supposedly there will be a total of seven, but I don't think I'm the only one who questions how much motivation Ms Rowling has to finish the series.

I wrote most of this about two weeks ago in Mendocino, but I didn't get around to tidying it up and posting until now. There's going to be some minor spoilage in this discussion. I'll keep my comments generic and I won't give away any major plot secrets, so I don't think it'll really ruin the book if you read it. On the other hand, I can't really discuss it without giving away a little bit of background, so if you haven't read the book yet and you expect to, you might want to refrain from reading my reaction until you've finished.

When I picked up the book from the library, my first thought was, "Gee, it must be nice to be able to write an 870-page novel and get it published." Just about any other writer might be pressured to cut it back a bit, but who is going to say no to J.K. Rowling, who is surely one of the most successful authors in the world right now? Now that I've read it, I think maybe it's not so nice, after all. The book is too long, and if Ms Rowling's clout had something to do with forestalling anyone from pressuring her to tighten it up, that's a shame. One of the great virtues of the first three Harry Potter books is the tightness of the story. In the fourth one there was a hint of flab, and in this one there's much more than a hint.

The promotional text inside the front jacket says, "Though thick runs the plot (as well as the spine), readers will race through these pages and leave Hogwarts, like Harry, wishing only for the next train back." I'm not sure if this sentence was written by Ms Rowling or the publishers (and I find the too-cute reference to the size of the book tacky). With this fifth installment of the series, the plot does indeed thicken, but it thickens in the way that one's waist thickens as one proceeds into middle age. It's forgivable, and it certainly doesn't suggest that one's useful life is over. But it is an indication that the declining years have begun.

I'm not objecting to subplots and colorful characterizations, of course. The earlier Harry Potter books had these, and they work well. But always they served to help tell the central story, even if the nature of that help is only to be diversions to better disguise the surprise ending. With the Order of the Phoenix it goes beyond that. Some of the new characters to whom we are introduced end up doing nothing at all of interest. Some of the subplots are not germane to the main story in any way. They seem to exist only to satisfy us that other characters have their own lives and interests as well. I could be more specific, but those of you who have read the book can probably guess which parts I mean.

If you take the view that Ms Rowling has created a complete fictional world and we want to know all about it, then I suppose these extraneous persons and events deserve their place in the tale, but I don't take that view. Rowling is not Tolkien. She's not even Frank Herbert. She tells delightful stories, and she has created a charming setting for those stories, but she hasn't created a fascinating alternate world. I get the impression that Rowling is tired of just writing clever and colorful mystery stories. She now seems to want to engage the reader to contemplate deep themes like the failings of human nature, the meaning of good and evil, and the angst of being an adolescent wizard with a destiny. If that's the sort of novelist she wants to be, so be it -- I don't believe in telling artists that they're only allowed to create what I want them to create. I'm just saying that in my judgment she's not very good at it, and that's why this book fails to live up to the standards of the earlier books in the series.

That's not to say the book is bad. There's still plenty of story here. Less than in the previous books, especially relative to the length, but still about 600 pages worth. All the Harry Potter books are good, and this one is my fifth-favorite among them.

I'd have to reread them all to be sure, but off the top of my head, I think I'd rank them from best to worst: Prisoner of Azkaban (#3), Chamber of Secrets (#2), Goblet of Fire (#4), Sorcerer's Stone (#1), Order of the Phoenix (#5). The hardest call is between the top two, which are both excellent. That's when Rowling was at her peak. The first one is a little too lean -- the bit at the end where each player has his or own little puzzle to solve is kind of dopey -- and the fourth one is not quite lean enough.

As always, girly-man that I am, I thoroughly enjoyed the mini-drama of adolescent romantic anxiety -- including the unexpected way in which it is resolved at the end. A more dedicated romantic might object, but I found it satisfying and believable.

As always, the obligatory quidditch match bored me. Quidditch is the topic of the other thing in the inside-jacket text that annoyed me (besides the "spine" self-reference). As a teaser, the text says, "Here are just a few things on Harry's mind," followed by four items. One of the four reveals a certain quidditch-related plot incident. (I'll continue to be coy about it, on the off-chance that someone reading doesn't want the surprise spoiled.) It's not a major plot secret, but it is something that isn't revealed until page 271, and there's quite a bit of dancing around the topic before that. It would have been a lot more fun if I hadn't known it was coming the whole time. I'm not sure if this is unique to this book. Possibly the previous teaser texts were just as revealing and I never bothered to read one before, or perhaps the publishers are becoming insensitive in their marketing.

As always, one thing I dearly love about the Harry Potter books is that they don't shy from using a large vocabulary. I like to imagine kids keeping a list of all the unfamiliar words they encounter, to be looked up in the dictionary, just as I did when I was a boy. As I still do today, in fact. This time my list was long because I also included all the uniquely British terms (plus a few which I suspected were British but wasn't really sure). It seemed like there were more of these than usual. Perhaps the editors aren't as determined as they once were to purge the American edition of its British flavor. If so, that's a good thing.

The list is too long to discuss each one, but here's what I've got written down. Many of them are familiar words in American English, too, but used in a different context in British, such as calling a stupid person a "cow", or denigrating something by using "rubbish" as an adjective. A few really common ones I didn't even write down (eg, "mate").

• kerfuffle (a to-do)
• codswallop (nonsense)
• goggle (To stare, as in disbelief. I've seen this before, but never nearly as often as it appears in this book. Is it British?)
• peaky (tired?)
• going spare (I think this means "going crazy", but I'm really not sure.)
• snogging (I think I've heard this to mean making out, as in kissing, but here it was a house elf "snogging" an article of clothing, whatever the heck that is supposed to imply.)
• "Oh, I'm all of a dither!" (Yes, Mrs Weasley actually says that.)
• wotcher (I honestly don't know what this is. It seems to be a greeting. My guess it's an accented contraction of "what're you doing?", along the lines of "watcha doin'?" -- sort of like how "sup?" is a fairly common greeting in Oakland, a shortened Ebonic version of "What's up?")
• cow
• taking the mickey (No idea what this means. Someone who is laughing hard is asked if she is "taking the mickey".)
• rubbish (adjective)
• titchy (No idea. Possibly a variant of "tetchy", but that doesn't make much sense in context.)
• a load of waffle (describing a pretentious speech that doesn't really say much)
• prat
• sitting an examination (In America, we'd say "taking".)
• biscuit (In the dialogue, the character offers a "biscuit", but in the same sentence the author calls them cookies.)
• pur-lease (expressing disbelief. I assume this is the exaggerated pronunciation of "please" which we would spell "puh-lease". Presumably in British the "r" is silent, so it sounds about the same.)
• chuffed (pleased, satisfied)
• fancy (like, in a romantic way)
• chunter (mutter)
• skive (skip class)
• sodden (a generic denigrating adjective?)
• mental (crazy)
• thick (stupid)
• dozy (sleepy)
• Happy Christmas (In America, we always say "Merry Christmas".)
• insensitive wart (used as a mild derogatory epithet)
• whey-faced (A few paragraphs earlier, the same person is "white-faced".)
• Catherine wheels (Apparently some sort of firework. I'm not familiar with the term.)
• arrogant little berks (another mild derogatory epithet. I have no idea what a berk is.)
• ruddy (colorful synonym for very)
• blimey
• fussed (Hermione is alarmed at something, but Harry says that he is "not that fussed" about it.)

I'm not researching these as much as I like to, it being less convenient and less satisfying (less chuffing?) to do online than with real dictionaries. (They say this place has all the amenities. No doubt I'm an unusual case, but I would find a dictionary far more amenable than any of the ~80 books, ~30 videotapes or ~20 CDs here, not to mention the eight paintings, six pairs of binoculars, and I don't know how many abalone shells.) I'm not really sure which words are truly Britishisms and which are just colorful vocabulary I don't see very often. Some of those above maybe don't belong in the British list, and some below maybe do.

[That's what I wrote at my little oceanside retreat in Mendocino. I could do further research now that I'm home with my books, but with one exception I'm not. Also, there were a lot more than eight paintings. I realized later that there were four in the closet kitchenette, a couple in the closet closet, and a few more in the bathroom.]

Other words that sent me to the (online) dictionary, or otherwise caught my interest:

Budgerigar is the full name of the little bird more often called just a "budgie". I think I knew that, but it still surprised me to see the word spelled out.

I've known nonplussed for a while, but it was only fairly recently that I learned it derives from French non plus, meaning "no more". Knowing that helps one to use the word with greater nuance, I think.

Galumphing I know from Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, but unlike chortle, it's not a word I recall having seen anywhere else. It felt natural, though, which certainly wouldn't be the case for uffish or frabjous.

I thought I remembered taradiddle as a sort of drum riff, but Merriam-Webster Online says nothing about drums. Here, Harry is describing a recent experience to an adult who doesn't believe him, and that adult says he doesn't have time to listen to "any more taradiddles".

On a strange, winged horse-like creature, the wither is the part of the body where the wing is attached. MW Online isn't showing me anything that makes sense for this one. [This is the one that I've looked up since coming back, because I encountered the same word in an article in the Economist about horse culture. According to MW Offline, withers does indeed indicate the ridge between a horse's shoulder blades. The word is listed only as a plural construction, though, and I think using it in singular, as Rowling does, is a back-formation.]

Asperity is one of those words I've seen a lot but don't really have a good grip on. It means harshness, but by derivation the metaphoric suggestion is a rough surface.

Some windows are described as mullioned. I now see that mullions are the little pane-like dividers that separate the window into several smaller panels.

Placatory is easy enough to recognize as describing something which placates, but I can't recall seeing that form before.

Punting is used to mean ferrying people from one side of a small body of water to another. I remember a raft or small boat being called a punt in Watership Down, but this is the first time I've seen it as a verb. Was Richard Adams British? I don't think so.

A haversack is like a knapsack but carried over one shoulder. A kneazle seems to be a sort of weapon, but MW Online doesn't list it. [OK, so I lied. As I proofread I can't resist looking this one up. Alas, neither the MW Collegiate nor even the Third New International lists it, so I'm still in the dark.]

A certain large creature's feet are "large as sledges". I knew what a sledgehammer is, but not a sledge. But now MW Online tells me they are synonymous, and the "hammer" part is superfluous.

Slipstream I remember from an episode of Star Trek (I forget which series), in which a new and faster form of space travel is called "slipstream technology". I now see that it's a real word, a low-pressure zone behind a fast-moving object. In the book the slipstreams are created by flying creatures the kids are riding on.

Viktor Krum, a character in the last book, gets mentioned as a "pen pal". That's the term I know, but in the last book, it was penfriend.

Hearthrug appears a couple of times. On reflection, it's clear enough that this is a rug by the hearth, but my eye keeps wanting to parse it as "hear-thrug" or "heart-hrug".

At one point, fiasco is hyphenated as "fi-asco". That doesn't seem wrong at all. I mention it only because it's a pretty good analog to "Machi-avelli", which bothered me in the last book I reported on here.

On the other hand, it does seem wrong to hyphenate really as "re-ally", which happens twice in this book. Does anyone pronounce the word so that this makes sense? To me, it looks like two entities made an alliance, were estranged, and then ally again. I'm tempted to say this is simply a mistake, but I vaguely remember Darcy asking me about how to hyphenate "really" (in a vocal music context). Are there some places where "really" is pronounced with three syllables?

One more hyphenation faux pas: Dumbledore, a main character, has his name hyphenated "Dumb-ledore", which suggests that he has the French-sounding name of LeDore, and he is dumb. Elsewhere, he is "Dum-ble-dore", which is surely the correct division.

That's as much as I wrote in Mendocino, but I have a note about one more incident from the book. The kids are in class, and the professor tells them: "The Vanishing Spell becomes more difficult with the complexity of the animal to be vanished. The snail, as an invertebrate, does not present much of a challenge; the mouse, as a mammal, offers a much greater one."

This is an interesting claim. Is a mouse really more "complex" than a snail? I'm honestly not sure. But I certainly would dispute the implication that all invertebrates are simpler than all vertebrates. I suppose it depends on how one defines complexity. I can't help wondering if our idea of complexity isn't anthropocentric. We're accustomed to thinking about bones and skin and hair, so when some other animal has similar parts we think there's a lot there to study. But a bug ... enh, that's just a bug.

This is where I'd launch into my soapbox speech about evolution, but I'll skip it this time -- many of you have heard it before anyway -- and just jump to the punch line: The vast majority of those who profess to believe in the theory of evolution don't actually understand it. They believe it only because they have heard experts pronounce it as true, and they trust the judgment of those experts. Nothing wrong with that. We can't expect everyone to study every science and there's nothing wrong with trusting experts. Unfortunately, what they believe isn't what science teaches at all, but an grossly inaccurate caricature of it.

In other words, people who believe in the scientific theory of evolution are pretty much the same as people who believe in the biblical theory of creation. They don't understand, they accept it on faith, and they get it wrong anyway.

8:54:31 PM  [permalink]  comment []  

There are some (much) older letters in the box which might get printed here some day. But not today. Instead, I'll jump ahead to this recent one from Mykey:

Me:

I vaguely recall Condoleezza Rice announcing explicitly that they would not delay the election even if there were a major terrorist attack on Election Day or shortly before. Of course, Ms Rice has made other pronouncements which later turned out to be inaccurate.

I think the whole thing was a trial balloon put out by the Bush team to get a sense of whether they could get away with it, and the answer they got was no. I don't think they'll try to cancel the election. I do think they'll do what they can to manipulate registration and turnout in Florida -- not with outright fraud, but just pushing the limits on all the margins where the state government has authority over election procedure.

I gave up on Atrios long ago. I haven't even looked at the site in at least a month.

The Democratic convention coincided with the last day of my recent California trip, two days on the road, and my first day back in Seattle, so I missed almost all of it. It's questionable whether I'd have paid much attention anyway. I find that I learn a lot more from the lower-profile events.

I did turn on the VCR to record Kerry on C-Span on the last day, and I noticed that I also got Wes Clark after that (presumably a rerun), but I haven't gotten around to watching it yet. Come to think of it, I'm not even sure what happened to that tape; I might have accidentally covered it up with something else.

The only bit of convention I saw was about half of Bill Clinton's speech on Monday night, which was being watched in the household where I was visiting. I was struck by one comment by Clinton. He was criticizing Bush for responding to the wartime mood after 9/11 not by asking for sacrifice but by handing out money. The punch line was something about opening the envelope when the "tax cut arrives in the mail".

The distinction between cutting taxes and cutting spending has become so blurred in recent years that it's hardly remarkable, but this is the most pointed I have ever heard it. How can a "cut" arrive in the mail? It is a measure of how inured we are to marketing of political initiatives like consumer products that hardly anyone even paused to consider this. We're talking about a check here -- a check from the government. Isn't that pretty much the same thing that Reagan called "welfare"?

Yes, yes, I know. The law was structured so that it was indeed a decrease in tax rates, and that decrease was then applied retroactively with the difference being rebated to the payer. Still, there are plenty of other ways the same thing could have been implemented, many of which would have been more efficient. I think we all know why it was done the way it was. They like to say "tax cut", but from a marketing point of view what really sells the program is getting that check in the mail.

It's ironic how tax policy has completely turned around since Reagan. In the 1980s when Republicans talked about tax cuts the basic concept was that a large and complicated tax system reduced the efficiency of the market and thus harmed the economy. It was common to hear Reagan Republicans speak disparagingly of the idea that billions of dollars are sent into Washington only to turn around and be distributed again, just so that whoever is in power can claim credit for handing out the goodies. Why not cut out the middle man? That's what the Reagan Republicans said. Bush Republicans just want to be the middle man.

Meanwhile tax simplification is also being reversed. One of the great accomplishments of the Reagan era was the 1986 Tax Reform Act, in which Congress managed to remove a large collection of tax loopholes in order to lower the overall rate while simplifying the system and preserving revenue. Today's Congress is busy doing the reverse with the corporate tax bill currently under consideration. The House version is titled "American Jobs Creation Act of 2004". Another difference between now and then is that now no piece of legislation can ever be called what it really is.

I haven't been following closely enough to know where the legislation is now. The last I heard the House and Senate had each passed a version and the two were headed for conference committee. According to what I learned in high school, the conference committee will now settle on a compromise between the two versions, but in the Bush era as often as not it means the bill will simply be rewritten with no conferring at all. In this case, that might be an improvement, or it might not. Both versions of the bill are terrible, loaded up with porkbarrel which undoubtedly will be characterized by the press as "tax cuts" rather than the special interest handouts that they surely are.

The genesis of the current bill was America's export subsidy. In spite of the fact that every U.S. President since Reagan has claimed to favor free trade, the actual policy of our government has been to subsidize American businesses which export. But of course, "subsidy" is a bad word, so instead these subsidies have taken the form of -- you guess it -- tax breaks. The way it works is that corporations are allowed to deduct a large chunk of their profits from foreign sales so that it doesn't count as taxable income. This is essentially a government handout to corporations that export, but it can be claimed as a tax cut (good) rather than corporate welfare (bad).

The World Trade Organization was not fooled. It recognizes the subsidy for what it is, and since such subsidies are illegal by WTO rules, the United States was declared to be in violation. When it became clear that the U.S. wasn't going to repeal its subsidy without pressure, the WTO authorized its members to imposed retaliatory tariff sanctions against us. Those sanctions are now taking effect, and that's why Congress is eager to repeal the subsidy.

But because the subsidy is a tax break, to simply abolish it -- which is what we ought to do -- might be characterized as a "tax increase". Therefore, Congress will only repeal the subsidy if it part of an entire tax package which is revenue neutral. That is, the "tax increase" must be accompanied by offsetting tax cuts.

The sensible way to achieve that would be to abolish the subsidy while lowering the corporate tax rate across the board, which is surely what Reagan or Clinton would have recommended. The current Republican Congress, however, cannot resist an opportunity to hand out more pork, so instead of using this opportunity to repeal an odious bit of corporate welfare to lower rates or -- heaven forbid -- reduce the budget deficit, they are using it as an opportunity to stink up the tax code with a whole bunch of little industry-specific tax loopholes of the sort that their predecessors worked so hard to eliminate in 1986.

6:13:24 PM  [permalink]  comment []