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2 Mendel, 34 A.T. (Jun. 23, 2003) - 1:08 a.m. I see a red doorI see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes As conversations go, it started easily enough. But it left me with feelings that wouldn't let me get to sleep. So I decided to get up and type them out, and in the process, I came to a conclusion on what they were really about. It may be a completely wrong-headed conclusion, but it's the only one that really makes sense to me. In the course of a phone conversation with CB, I happened to mention that I still entertain thoughts of working on an alternate version of Harry Potter and the Flack-Jacket Mafia � one that tells the entire story from Harry's point of view, what he was doing during scenes when the camera was elsewhere. I thought that we had discussed this recently and she had warmed to the idea. I thought wrong. To me, this was just a form of auctorial exercise, no different from my plan to write the story of Harry's schooldays entirely from the viewpoint of Severus Snape. To the Canadibrit, on the other hand, it was meta-fic � letting someone else write her characters � a phenomenon on which she got burned once before and which she has no intention of ever allowing again. No matter how many times I repeated that anything with Lynn or AP in it would have to go past her eyes for approval before seeing any other set of eyes, my protestations cut as much ice as the proverbial soap hacksaw. She felt the need (or it felt like she felt the need) to remind me of how wrong it was for me to even contemplate writing new material for her characters, over and over and over and over and OVER and OVER and OVER and OVER and OVER and OVER and In his email to me, the Manhunter spoke of my self-loathing. I'd say he didn't know the meaning of the word, but it's possible he did. Sometimes, what resonates most in us about someone else is our similarities to em. Other times, it's our differences from em. Others still, we think it's one when it's actually the other. Still, I doubted anybody who hasn't actually been on suicide watch can understand the depths to which my self-loathing can sink, any more than you can fit the Pacific Ocean into a thimble. I see people turn their heads and quickly look away It was only when I sat down to write this that the tears came, the tears I hadn't even realized I was keeping bottled up for the last thirty-some hours. I was looking for lyrics to the song named below, so I could use them as an alt-tag to the image, and found one page playing a piano MIDI of it. I found myself singing along with it. I felt the tears come, felt my voice choke up on the word "never". And I realized what I was really feeling. In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, as much of the Western world presumably knows by now (and the rest doesn't care about spoiler warnings), somebody dies. Not a major character; his death is purely a signal that this is not a "children's story" in the way cute names like "Albus Dumbledore" might lead a casual or uninterested reader to believe. This is what Neal Stephenson, in The Diamond Age, has his characters call "unreconstructed Brothers Grimm". In the new book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, as a number of reviews have mentioned, death comes closer to Harry. This time, it strikes someone the reader has presumably come to care about. Certainly, judging by the treatment of this character in fan-fiction up to now, a great many of the individual readers who make up the abstract propositional function "the reader" had certain understandable ideas about how the character's future should and would go. No more will my green sea go turn a deeper blue There's a page in Jim Starlin's graphic novel The Death of Captain Marvel that's basically one giant cry of UNFAIR! |
