#red-hen

[wordbirds]

Red-Hen

red-HEN (v.) To red-hen is to publicly confront an off-duty member of the Trump administration in a public place, usually a restaurant. (A political nonce word, like “Borkability.”) USAGE: As news spread of the Trump policy of separating children from asylum-seeking parents on the U.S.- Mexico border, citizens began confronting Trump coterie members in public, from presidential press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was ejected from the Red Hen restaurant in Virginia; to Homeland Security head Kirstjen Neilsen, and White House adviser Stephen Miller, who were both red-henned as they dined on Mexican food in at a D.C., to EPA head Scott Pruitt, who was red-henned a week later, as he ate tacos at another D.C. eatery.

[shortstoriesinenglishsblog]

https://shortstoriesinenglish.com/red-hen/

shortstoriesinenglish 

[wholesomeobsessive]

Ms Rowling now apears to have never had any intention of clearing this issue up. Which leaves us with a distinct impression that “Dark” magic is whatever she and the Ministry of Magic happen to disapprove of this week. Apparantly you are just supposed to instinctively “know” whether a given spell is Dark or Light; on alternate Tuesdays.

RedHen on Dark Magic in Harry Potter.

[wholesomeobsessive]

I did not regard “Because I say so!” as a valid explanation for anything when I was six. I am no more inclined to accept that as a valid explanation from Rowling today. And I don’t bloody care what her dittoheads think. My opinion is just as valid as theirs. ... There really was a great deal of cleverness expended on this series, but, in the end, not as much of it as first appeared of it was the Author’s. A great deal of it was the Readers’. Rowling can no longer be excused by inexperience — one would have hoped that by this time her skills would have improved from what they were a decade ago — but I swear the opening chapter of PS/SS has some better and certainly more subtle writing than you can find just about anywhere in DHs. It is also a cowardly piece of work. She has created this nasty little dystopia (which turns out to have been even worse than we had realized — and we are not imagining it, it really is there) which has spontaneously generated a looming threat, which, unsurprisingly, turns out to be merely one more of a long series of similarly looming threats. She lists the underlying causes, flaps them under our noses, and then in the end she removes the current looming threat, does nothing to address the underlying causes, and expects us to believe that everything is now as perfect as it ever needs to be. And I flatly don’t believe that. And if I cannot believe her on that, then I am not convinced that I can believe her about anything. Which runs us aground on the side issue of choices. Which really does turn out to be no more than a side issue. “Choose between what is right and what is easy”. Can anyone show me any point in the whole series up to and including this final book in which Harry has ever been offered a legitimate choice that was “easy”? I think the distraction of whether to go after the Horcruxes or the Hallows is the first time that Harry has been offered a choice of anything other than the either/or of trying to stop his enemy, or to keep trying to run away, or to simply roll over and let himself be killed. Unless you want to argue that the hard choice would have been to stay out of things when he was told to. In which case, that was the choice that he never made. And when he was given the distraction of possibly going after the Hallows instead of the Horcruxes it only really distracted him for a couple of chapters. And then he was simply handed the Hallows anyway.

Red-Hen

http://www.redhen-publications.com/PostMortem.html

[wholesomeobsessive]

Albus Dumbledore’s decision to guide and assist his BFF Gellert’s plan to rebuild society for the “greater good” turns out to be the most wrongheaded thing he ever got mixed up in, and he soon realized it. But he never managed to rid himself of the chimera of there being a “greater good”. Hermione Granger is shown to be at least equally wrongheaded in her intention to address the plight of the enslaved House Elves. The message, inside the story, almost appears to be “Even if it is broke, don’t you try to fix it.” And in the epilogue, there is absolutely not a clue that anything ever was fixed. Indeed there is every suggestion that it wasn’t. Ever. It’s the same world Harry first entered in Book 1. Rowling also seems to have entirely missed the whole point that if Harry is to be a useful member of this society, the whole society cannot be about him, even if the story was. She was better about this kind of thing earlier in the series. But by DHs, the whole universe really does apparantly revolve around Harry, without any convincing justification, and the whole thing is totally off balance. But, c’mon, if Rowling REALLY IS so clueless that she wasn’t even aware that she was trying to write a fantasy until she popped in a unicorn, what do we expect? I mean, yeah, right, it’s a story about a boy wizard who doesn’t realize he is a wizard. So what is it then? Social realism? Chick lit? Oh, of course, it’s naturalistic drama with gritty hyper-realism, obviously. How could I mistake it for anything else?

Red-Hen

http://www.redhen-publications.com/PostMortem.html

[wholesomeobsessive]

On one of the boards which I follow, there is a moderator who lives in Scotland and has a fairly wide acquaintance in Edinburgh. Among whom is a fellow who was involved in an educational training course at the same time that Rowling was training for her teachers’ qualification. The moderator relayed the information that when her associate had been helping to mark people’s work on a writers’ course in the early ’90s, and Rowling was doing the same, she had mentioned at that time that she was working on a book about wizards and the organizer, asked; “Is it a children’s book?” and she replied “Er — not really”, and had actually told them that her aim was to write a series which started off looking as if it was a children’s series and then got progressively darker and more adult. In a way which, according to the report, struck him and the organizer as kind-of creepy — something more than just the books growing up as the readers did. As the moderator pointed out, her friend’s anecdote may owe something to 20/20 hindsight, but it does at least raise the probability that such an intent was always there. And indeed, someone is hardly going to be raising issues like slavery in Book 2, introducing soul-eating monsters used to control the citizenry in Book 3, and unmasking a complete dismissal of due process of law in Book 4 by accident. Something of that intent probably was always there. But, if so, the follow-through was grossly inadequate to the requirements. If you are determined to raise such issues you really ought to show that something has been done to address them by the end of the story. It’s your duty. It’s enough to make you wonder whether after the burn-out of GoF she simply let half of her intentions for the series fall through the cracks. And for all that Rowling was now dealing with increasingly “serious” themes, when it came to the final book, she dealt with them (where she dealt with them at all) as if she were dealing with them in a book for much younger children than those the previous two books (indeed, the previous four books) had been written for, and none of the explanations or the reasoning used to justify anything in it were the sort of explanations that someone would have come up with who was “thinking like a grown-up”. It was a nasty shock to the system and made a complete shambles of our expectations. For an author who claims that kids can handle serious themes and that such themes ought not to be sugar-coated for their consumption, she was certainly boiling up a large vat of syrup. Because nothing in the final book was reasoned out in the manner of an adult trying to explain how the world works in a form that a child could understand it. It was reasoned out, and presented with a child’s unhesitating and narrow-minded judgement that there just are Good people and there are Bad people. And that the two are simply different, and that you don’t have to apply the same standards to both of them. Which simply isn’t true. And she is old enough to know better. She is lying to us. If the Good people aren’t perfect, she claims, it doesn’t matter. No matter what they do, they are still the Good people. If someone isn’t one of the Good people, it doesn’t matter what they do, either, even if they aren’t “un-good” enough to be truly Bad. For if you only need to care about the Good people — and these are not the Good people — then no one cares about them. And if you do care you aren’t supposed to; they aren’t the Good people. And the really Bad ones are irretrievable. You’re supposed to hate them because they are Bad. And, what is more, she will tell you which ones are which, and tell you exactly what you are supposed to think about all of them. She wasn’t encouraging the Reader to deal with a concept. She was laying down the law as to how they were supposed to deal with it. And has continued to do so in her interviews.

Red-Hen

http://www.redhen-publications.com/PostMortem.html

[wholesomeobsessive]

But the continuing omission caused me to finally stop crediting her with having ever attempted to construct a viable secondary world to set her story in. Even if she had merely done it poorly. It’s a fairy tale. A very long and involved fairy tale, to be sure, but still a fairy tale. Her social mechanics are all pasted on. They do not support the society she presents, they decorate it. She’s tossed in various broadly-recognizable trappings as set-dressing because they evoke a mood and they looked “traditional” without any consideration as to whether they made sense in the context she was using them, or even of whether she had included the tradition which produced them in her universe. There is no history here. And a functioning society does not just spring, fully-formed out of the void without one. She didn’t even take the traditional low road of postulating that her world is “just like” our world — only with magic. Because her world is NOT like our world. There are just too many indications from what she does tell us that her world couldn’t plausibly have gotten to where our world is. It didn’t start from the same point.

Red-Hen

http://www.redhen-publications.com/PostMortem.html

[wholesomeobsessive]

I’m afraid I’ve come more and more to the opinion that Rowling is the kind of author who simply doesn’t think. So to look for an analytical interpretation of anything in the series is probably an exercise in frustration. She paints what is intended as impressive word pictures, essentially vignettes, mainly on the basis of how they are supposed to push your buttons and make you feel, without ever considering how they are supposed to fit together. This sometimes produces a considerable emotional impact, if you are at all sensitive to that kind of jerking around, but it doesn’t necessarily make sense. And sometimes they just plain backfire. Such as when Snape and Yaxley meet in a dark lane, enter through the gate, cross a dark garden, are admitted into a dimly lit entry hall, and are ushered into a sitting room lit by a roaring fire, and then pause for their eyes to adjust *to the “lack of light”* WTF?! Aren't their eyes already attuned to low light? Several of these issues are still slowly coming into focus. And one of the sharpest is the awareness that the world Rowling assembled is simply a lot bigger than the narrow-focused, smug, anglo-centric view of it she gave us. Because when you come right down to it, it is clear that she never really intended to build a solid secondary world to put her story in. She simply didn’t do the groundwork. Instead, she has ended up with this weird amalgamation that she threw together — which is highly detailed in some areas, and only vaguely sketched in elsewhere with several great gaping holes where you least expect them, to fall right out of the story through. But, back when she assembled this pretend world, she used the best possible materials available. She mined folklore, and classic (written) tales that have been pretty fully absorbed by the culture, as well as ancient myth, and symbolism that has been around for centuries, she mimiced the really traditional “tropes” of how stories are put together and how they work, and she did it with a free hand. But I’m no longer convinced that she did it all consciously. I think she slung a lot of them together because they just felt right together. Sure, sometimes she tweaked them before she deployed them, or renamed them, or trivialized the hell out of them (unicorns are NOT equines, regardless of what you try to tell me. They’re monsters), but she hardly ever invented something new. Most of her elements already existed. The only thing in the Potterverse that is really original are some of her combinations. Consequently, as I say, she ended up with something that is a lot bigger than she is. And which upon first encounter comes across as a lot more etrudite than she probably really is too, because all of the elements she used came already equipped with their own baggage, and a whole pre-existing collection of associations which all originally led someplace. And most of them are so widely known and/or so universal that even with a 2nd or 3rd-rate education, you are able to recognize them, and are at least somewhat aware of what those particular elements usually mean. ... They want to explore this incomplete world, and have a go at patching some of the holes themselves. Closing off Harry’s story was as welcome as being finally rid of an irritating docent who keeps going on and on about the glories of the accomplishments of one modern splinter group when what you want to do is to examine the base that the splinter group was building upon.

Red-Hen

http://www.redhen-publications.com/PostMortem.html