Harry Potter fill in the blanks

This is an unauthorized mash-up of two powerful brands: Mad Libs and the Harry Potter books. ®®®®®!

In the following passage, fill in the blanks with adverbs (if the blanks end in “ly”) or with adjectives or nouns that signal basic emotions and facial expressions. Then check page 458 of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (U.S. edition) to see how many you guessed.

“Did you kiss?” asked Hermione ________ly.

Ron sat up so fast that he sent his ink bottle flying all over the rug. Disregarding this _________ly he stared _________ly at Harry.

“Well?” he demanded.

Harry looked from Ron’s expression of mingled ________ and ________ to Hermione’s slight _____, and nodded.

“HA!”

Ron made a __________ gesture with his fist and went into a raucous peal of _______ that made several _____-looking second years over beside the window jump. A ________ ____ spread over Harry’s face as he watched Ron rolling around on the hearthrug. Hermione gave Ron a look of deep ________ and returned to her letter.

“Well?” Ron said _______ly, looking up at Harry. “How was it?”

Harry considered for a moment.

“Wet,” he said ________ly.

Ron made a noise that might have indicated __________ or _________, it was hard to tell.

“Because she was crying,” Harry continued __________ly.

“Oh,” said Ron, his ______ fading ________ly. “Are you that bad at kissing?”

“Dunno,” said Harry, who hadn’t considered this, and _________ly felt rather worried. “Maybe I am.”

“Of course you’re not,” said Hermione _______ly, still scribbling away at her letter.

“How do you know?” said Ron in a ______ voice.

“Because Cho spends half her time crying these days,” said Hermione ______ly. “She does it at mealtimes, in the loos, all over the place.”

“You’d think a bit of kissing would cheer her up, said Ron, grinning.

“Ron,” said Hermione in a ________ voice, dipping the point of her

My guess is that most readers will score pretty well. Not because we’ve all memorized HP5 by now, but because most of the missing adverbs and identifiers of emotions aren’t necessary for understanding the conversation. As I’ve written before about this same page, it’s a nice dramatic scene with a good feeling for adolescent psychology.

Now try to play the reverse game with pages 96-7 of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (the first U.S edition, as you can tell by the title). Circle all adverbs. There are only three! Underline all identifications of emotion. You’ll find only two, and in one case the character is clearly acting, trying to make the emotion obvious. And that’s over two pages, not just one.

What’s more, that scene in HP1 is a complex writing challenge. It’s Harry’s first experience with the Weasleys, overhearing them on the train platform. Rowling introduces a whole passel of characters at once. Her point-of-view character doesn’t know their names. He can’t see them clearly. The scene is almost all dialogue. And yet it works on the page. It works damn well.

In contrast, the HP5 scene involves the three main characters of the series. We know them intimately--if not from the first four books, then from the preceding 450 pages. But Rowling had apparently lost the confidence or the desire to cut unneeded adverbs and change some verb-adverb combinations into stronger verbs.

As the passage from HP1 shows, Rowling and her editorial team can do this. And now that the promotional juggernaut for the final book has started, let’s hope they do.

Oz movie festival to lead into 4th of July

On Monday night, 3 July, and stretching into the early morning of Independence Day, Turner Classic Movies will have an Oz movie fest, supplementing its frequent showing of MGM's Wizard of Oz with Judy Garland by airing three other versions of the story as well.

7:00 --> The evening starts with the hourlong making-of documentary about the MGM Wizard assembled in 1989 and hosted by Angela Lansbury because, well,...? She made The Court Jester, so I guess she had a better connection to fantasy movie musicals from the Hollywood studio age than any other star of 1989.

8:00 --> The MGM movie itself. Least favorite line: "Because she wouldn't have believed me. She had to learn it for herself." So Glinda kept vital knowledge from Dorothy, ensured she was away from home for longer, let her go into danger, and watched her become a killer--all so the girl could learn never to leave her own back yard again. Bitch.

10:00 --> The Wiz. I haven't actually watched this overbuilt Diana Ross vehicle all the way through. I saw the stage show on Broadway, and it was terrific, so I go just a few minutes through the movie before deciding not to spoil my memory. Director Sidney Lumet had interesting things to say about the production in his memoir, Making Movies.

12:30 AM --> The 1925 adaptation by silent-movie comedian Larry Semon. A teenaged Dorothy who turns out to be a kidnapped princess, awful racist jokes, high falls off silos, cacti in the bum, a transvestite dancer,... It's been thirty years since I first saw this silent movie at the University of Wisconsin. I've never wanted to see it again.

1:45 AM --> A fifteen-minute novelty from 1910, recently found and restored. The image above comes from a frame of this movie as Dorothy meets the Scarecrow. This is probably the second filming of The Wizard of Oz, though it may have incorporated footage from the first, commissioned by L. Frank Baum himself. There's a lot of dancing, not a lot of plot, as I recall. Practically no plot, in fact. Not worth staying up for but well worth recording. And a good reminder that people have been saying, "The book's better than the movie," almost as long as there have been movies.

Ella Enchanted: what sort of message?

Depending on which headline you read, Gail Carson Levine's Ella Enchanted is a feminist or post-feminist retelling of the "Cinderella" story. I'm not sure what the difference between "feminist" and "post-feminist" means here, but apparently it all comes down to the fact that the original Cinderella--a girl who spent all day doing chores for her stepfamily until rescued by a fairy and a prince--no longer seems like a plausible character, much less a heroine. We want our young females as well as our young males to stand up for themselves, to be plucky, to demonstrate modern human aspirations instead of just survival instinct.

Indeed, the limitations of the original character are what inspired Levine to reinvent Cinderella and her world. The publisher's webpage for teachers quotes Levine this way:

I had to write something and couldn't think of a plot, so I decided to write a Cinderella story because it already had a plot! Then, when I thought about Cinderella's character, I realized that she was too much of a goody-two-shoes for me and I would hate her before I finished ten pages. That's when I came up with the curse: she's only good because she has to be, and she's in constant rebellion.

Levine's Ella is thus cursed to be obedient, yet struggling to express her true nature. It's an interesting idea, though it seems almost tailor-made for an intro women's-studies class and the final resolution of Ella's inner conflict seems rather perfunctory. All that swirls around that conflict is much more enjoyable for me.

In her 2001 Sequential Tart essay, "Cinderella: In Search of a Heroine," Rebecca Salek focused on that fairy tale's implications:

In recent years, feminists in both the United States and around the world have attacked the story. "What sort of message are we sending our daughters?" they ask. "What message are we sending our sons?" And rightly so.

Salek concludes with praise for Levine's book, saying, "We need more heroes like Ella." Likewise, Amber LeDeit lists Ella Enchanted among her examples of "How Feminism Changed the Face of the Fairy Tale," the subtitle of her report for a YA lit class at San Jose State in 2005.

So what sort of message are we sending daughters and sons in Ella Enchanted? It's a charmant novel, but I can't help but note that almost all the antagonists and outright villains are female. The character who thoughtlessly curses Ella is a female fairy. Her childhood playmate and the stepmother and stepsisters who discover and exploit her weakness are female. The worst places for her to live are all-female households: her finishing school and her stepmother's palace. Literally, Ella has to flee to a war zone.

Among males, only one takes advantage of Ella's disability, and he's an ogre. In Levine's inventive reconceptualization, ogres can wheedle anybody who hears them into doing what they want, so he could get to her anyway. Human males in this world all tend to be pleasant but apt to disappear on quests and wars and clueless about females. The prince is truly charming, though he needs a little loosening up. All his knights and his father prove pleasant, however gruff they appear. Ella's father is as greedy and dishonest as her stepmother and stepsisters, but somehow more likable.

To be sure, there are several likable females as well, but the only truly nasty people in the book are, each and every one of them, female. Is that "post-feminist"?

going back through the Phantom Tollbooth

Peter Sagal, host of NPR's uproarious Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!, wrote a fine essay in the Chicago Tribune about reading The Phantom Tollbooth to his daughters. Such was his early love for the book that he would have named each of those female children Milo if not for the little matter of a missing Y chromosome.

The girls enjoyed the book, but Sagal found rereading it painful:

...moments I had treasured from the book down through the decades now seemed like cheap gags. The first place he arrives is a stop in the road called "Expectations." Thus, every place he goes after that is "beyond Expectations." Get it? At one point the characters make statements unsupported by facts and suddenly fly through the air to an island called "Conclusions." They jump to Conclusions. See?

Milo's friends on his quest, whom I had once thought of as my own friends, were simple archetypes who showed up, made their speeches and vanished. Where as a child I had seen mystery and wonder, as an adult I saw smug, self-satisfied intellectual humor. . . .

But I should stress, again, that while I was sitting in our beat-up glider chair reading the book, silently, motionlessly writhing as my childhood collapsed around my ears, my kids were having a fine old time.

I suspect that Sagal would have writhed just as much if he'd gotten a look at himself at the age when he first read and loved The Phantom Tollbooth. And even more if he'd been able to see into his mind at that point. I know I would have. "Self-satisfied intellectual humor" seemed like an apogee to aspire to.

The Tollbooth seems expertly calibrated for kids breaking into the realm of abstract thought. The puns and archetypes that Sagal now finds so facile are almost all based on abstractions like "Expectations" and "Conclusions." The book's treatment of them isn't very deep, to be sure. But it's many miles wide: it takes young readers on a whirlwind tour of the new possibilities of their minds, their language, their logic and mathematics. If you read the Tollbooth at the right age, its jokes are funny because they come at you for the first time, and because they represent the delight of discovering a new way to play with the world.

Now when I say "expertly calibrated for kids," I mean not calibrated at all, by someone who never claimed to be an expert and wasn't thinking of kids. As Juster told an interviewer at Powells.com, "There was no audience but me." Eventually he was also writing for his neighbor Jules Feiffer, who had gotten the assignment of illustrating this strange book. (Similar remarks from Juster at AbsoluteWrite.com.) The Tollbooth had to come from outside the children's lit field. It's not about vivid characters or a plausible world or a tight plot. It's about exploring something more, beyond Expectations.

I think everyone should read The Phantom Tollbooth once. Life won't be the same. Rereading many years later--well, that might indeed be painful.

Worldwide Conspiracies in Oz

Because The Wizard of Oz occupies such a big place in Americans' collective imagination, it's only natural for our conspiracy theorists to decide that it means even more. And of course the World Wide Web is a wonderful forum for people to express their theories about, well, worldwide webs.

I recently sampled some of the online conspiracist essays about Oz, and see some broad patterns:

• Many of these theories trace The Wizard of Oz's role in their personal favorite conspiracy back to author L. Frank Baum, given his lively, if not detailed or consistent, opinions on religion and social movements.
• However, none of the conspiratorial connections those theorists see were detected in Baum's lifetime or shortly afterwards. All these interpretations date from well after the MGM movie was televised annually.
• Many theorists have a hard time differentiating between the book and the movie, crediting Baum with details that didn't appear until 1939 or seeing books and movie as all part of the same conspiracy.
• Racism and bigotry of other sorts is never far below the surface of these theories.
• Most enjoyably, conspiracy theorists have a wonderful way of splintering into smaller and smaller groups, each accusing others of being part of the conspiracy.

Here's one such essay, "L. Frank Baum and the Not-So-Wonderful Wizard of Oz," apparently a joint production of Dennis L. Cuddy, Ph.D., and Steve Van Nattan. The main text is said to come from Cuddy's book, the Biblical interpolations from Van Nattan.

Cuddy is an anti-New World Order crusader. His biography reassures us that he "has been a Senior Associate with the U.S. Department of Education [and]...testified before members of Congress on behalf of the U.S. Department of Justice." (No dates attached to those experiences.) Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL) inserted various Cuddy writings into the Congressional Record during debate on an education bill in 1998.

Van Nattan is a Christian pastor who's written such things as, "Nor will I approve of the pulpit being used by those who are mere do-gooders or political hucksters, such as the Gideons. I know how to hand out Bibles without the help of Episcopalians." (Those aggressive Episcopalians.) The "Not-So-Wonderful" essay also appears on Van Nattan's old website, with every appearance of the phrase "New World Order" replaced with "piano casters." The ways of the world are mysterious, but an explanation may lie in the fact that Van Nattan has a piano supplies business. And, apparently, a hacked-up website.

Van Nattan has apparently angered another conspiracy theorist, Edward Hendrie, on the question of interracial marriage. Meanwhile, Hendrie and Cuddy and a lot of others are in agreement that the U.S. government knew about the September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York in advance--but it's quite possible each has different explanations and therefore opposes the other.

But where in the Oz legend, you must be asking, are the Illuminati? According to "Wizard of Oz and Illuminati Mind Control", they were involved, too. That essay seems to come from Fritz Springmeier and Cisco Wheeler's book The Illuminati Formula to Create an Undetectable Total Mind Controlled Slave, and Deeper Insights. (Insights even deeper than undetectable mind control?) That book reveals, among so much more, that "At the Kennedy Space Center...Mind control testing is done, and base programming such as the Wizard of Oz programming is done here." Well, some people do think Oz is on another planet.

Springmeier presents himself as a minister, and Wheeler states that she is from "an Illuminati family." This webpage links them to other identities. In March 2001, the Portland Oregonian reported that Springmeier had been arrested on drug charges and found with "white supremacist literature." He replied by starting the charges were--what else?--a conspiracy. But in late 2003 Springmeier was sentenced to nine years in prison for helping to rob a bank in 1997.

Ken Vardon, maintainer of the webpage reprinting Springmeier and Wheeler's Wizard of Oz essay, has his own opponents among the conspiracy crowd who regard him with suspicion because of his military background.

Also reprinting material from Springmeier and Wheeler is this page from the "New Covenant Church of God" in Sweden, whose website tells us:

The theme inside the MGM is the Wizard of Oz which is for Monarch programming. (To understand the Wizard of Oz mind control programming the reader needs to get this author’s various writings on the Monarch Programming, which includes an Illustrated Guide To Monarch Programming and other writings.) Bob Hope, an MI-6 agent who was used extensively in W.W. II to trigger mind-controlled military men with the proper hypnotically embedded trigger words, received his own mind-controlled sex slaves after the war. . . .

Secret agents, word-triggered hypnosis, sex slaves--that definitely sounds like a Bob Hope movie from the early 1960s. Somewhere between Bachelor in Paradise and I'll Take Sweden. Pity it exists only in some fevered imaginations.

Bats at the Beach takes off

Daniel Pinkwater and Scott Simon maintained their role as the Oprah Winfrey of picture books this weekend, producing top sales with one rave review broadcast to millions.

The Saturday-morning pair focused their sonar on Brian Lies's Bats at the Beach. Before the day was out, the book was #3 at Amazon. All of us Lies fans here in New England are thrilled for him.

You can hear the radio segment here. Here's Brian's website.

Bats at the Beach also gives the lie to a "rule" of writing picture books that a lot of newcomers think they've heard: "Don't write in rhyme." BatB is in verse, as are many other successful picture books, new and old. Verse requires both rhyme and rhythm. Rhyme seems easy, but rhythm is hard.

So I think newcomers should interpret "Don't write in rhyme" as:

• Don't write in rhyme just because you think all picture books have to be written that way.
• Don't write in rhyme unless you can manage the rhythm as well.
• Don't expect writing in rhyme to make up for a weak story, flat characters, wordiness, cliches, or other problems.

Brian's text actually shifts from iambic to anapestic rhythm for some couplets, which might trip up readers until they realize the pattern. Stick with it!

Septina Nash and the Order of the Penguins

Septina Nash is lamenting her publisher's concern that the working title of the upcoming chronicle about her, Septina Nash and the Penguins of Doom, sounds too much like certain thick books by J. K. Rowling.

As someone who's been in a scores of title meetings, I have to go with the publisher on this one. Sounding like a certain series could obscure the book's originality. And with only one volume left, said series is going to be yesterday's news the day after tomorrow. (I write metaphorically, of course.)

I'd say to young Miss Nash, "Honey, you know no one knows your first name yet. Every September you have to teach your school administrator how to spell it and your teacher how to pronounce it. How will potential fans find your book in digital databases if they're not sure how the first word of the title is spelled?

"Yes, I know Harry Potter gets his name in his titles. But his name is ludicrously easy to spell. It's Anglo-Saxon and salt-of-the-earth (not like those aristocratic French and Latin names that attach themselves to villains, such as Voldemort and Draco--but that's another story).

"So what's better for a Septina Nash adventure than a title starting Septina Nash...? Well, look at what happened when your penguin friends waddled onto your MySpace page: 1,200 friends! Yes, I know they were just coming off a hit movie. But we're talking about your chance for break-out here. People like penguins. People know how to spell 'penguin.' So think about something like..."

Penguins of Doom: The Lost-and-Found Letters of Septina Nash

Did Penguins Steal My Sister?: A Septina Nash Mystery

Penguin Peril: Septina Nash's Epistolary Adventures, Volume 4 (starting with volume 1 is so old-fashioned, so...Pottery)

Of course, the book's publisher might then decide that Penguins of Doom sounds too much like a certain adventure by M. T. Anderson.

authorless events at Wild Rumpus

The American Booksellers Association website carries an article about "authorless author events" at Wild Rumpus, a children's bookstore in Minneapolis.

What gets children more excited than authors? Well, potato chips, for one thing. Sometimes just one potato chip. Or a scrap of a potato chip that hasn't been lying on the floor too long.

But if you're a bookstore, potato chips would get the covers all greasy. Instead, Wild Rumpus offers...doll mutilation!

"Mummify Your Barbie" is one of Wild Rumpus' most popular events. An archaeologist discusses and demonstrates the mummification process, and attendees each practice on their own Barbie. "The highlight is cutting off her hair. Every little girl wants to cut the hair off her Barbie," said Morgan. "The appeal of the workshop is not only curiosity about the whole mummification process. There's something deeply satisfying about mutilating a Barbie."

It's true. Forbes says so.

Wild Rumpus provides the Barbie dolls, which it buys in bulk, and does not charge for the event.

Well, that's no fun--mummifying a Barbie that doesn't belong to anyone! Isn't the real appeal of Valley of the Kings Barbie playing with your sister's doll?

To find an archaeologist, she recommended approaching the archaeology department of a local university. "People are usually pretty excited to [visit the bookstore] because it's a chance to connect with a totally different population than they see every day. . . . And if someone tells you no, don't take it personally. What the hell, just find another archaeologist."

They're always hanging around, after all. Unlike authors.

non-fantasy book warning

Since I expect more children's librarians will see this page than will find their way to my other blog, Boston 1775, I'm adding this link to a series of messages I posted there on inaccuracies in A Travel Guide to Colonial Boston (Lucent Books, 2004). Now I feel better.

looking for Leapholes

According to legend, Joseph Kennedy got out of the stock market just before the Crash of 1929 because he heard his chauffeur and other menials talking about stocks and decided that the market had peaked. He figured that these investors were too uninformed to value properties accurately, and there was no one left to buy stocks at an even higher price.

My proposed sign that the recent bull market in children's fantasy has peaked: The American Bar Association is publishing a fantasy novel for young readers. It's called Leapholes, and it's the first children's book by thriller writer James Grippando. "Harry Potter meets John Grisham," the book's editor told Publishers Weekly. "It's time travel with a legal twist."

The premise that PW describes seems to come out of one of Evil Editor's query specimens:

With the aid of a lawyer with magical powers, Leapholes's hero, young Ryan Coolidge, literally zips in and out of law books, meeting historical characters who figured in some of the most famous legal cases in American history.

"Oh, no, a magistrate has issued a bench warrant for John Peter Zenger! Thank goodness I've retained a lawyer with magical powers!"

According to the BookSpan press release, young Ryan is "a boy who hates middle school and who is in the worst kind of trouble--trouble with the law." He must wish that he merely had, say, medical trouble. Ryan's mentor is "a mysterious old, African-American lawyer named Hezekiah"--another "magic Negro" part for Morgan Freeman.

The volume ends with essays by prominent lawyers--Baldacci, Scottoline, Boies & Alia--describing how they came to the profession. (BookSpan calls this an "Afterward." Sic.) Let's not tell those high-powered attorneys that kids rarely read prologues, forewords, introductions, afterwords, or other extras. If we did tell, we might get into the worst kind of trouble.