The Twilight Cornfield

Oh god, not him. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

One of my favorite comments by Granger:

What on earth Jo killed Fred for is beyond me. To newcomers to the group: the Weasleys symbolise the chakras, and certainly there are still seven of them now, only George has to do all the work for the navel chakra on his own now. Perhaps there is some highly arcane fact I’m not aware of in the liberation of the chakras, for example perhaps the colour changes from red and green to one colour. I just don’t know.

Chris and I have been discussing the death of Vincent Crabbe. He creates a fire and dies in it. I guess that’s an alchemical fire. Vincent: victorious; Gregory: watchful. If you look back at the old posts you’ll see that the two strings are feminine and masculine. In the Bible they’re referred to as Ananias and Sapphira, and in the ancient Indian traditions as Ida and Pinggala. Our guess at the moment is that the alchemical fire created by Vincent fused the masculine/feminine into one androgynous force.

Other predictions that didn’t come true are very minor. For example Olympe didn’t come to Bill and Fleur’s wedding. Hardly a tragedy. (She could have come but not been mentioned. ha ha).

I’m very happy about Neville. His role at the end was vital to Harry’s quest. Without it Harry couldn’t have returned to Hogwarts. His act of killing ‘the old serpent’ is extremely significant! It symbolises the death of the old serpent fire in the spinal cord by the entrance of the Holy Spirit. And, as Bill pointed out, wearing the burning sorting hat evoked the image of the fiery tongues around the heads of the apostles at Pentecost.

This reminds me of TWOP, where they over-analyze everything. (Don't get me started on the pretentous wacko that looks for deep life meanings from Supernatural--he/she critics the show like its up for Oscar nominations.) Some people don't seem to understand--there is nothing wrong with mindless entertainment.

You would probably appreciate this.

See, I like overanalyzing the shit out of stuff, mostly for my own amusement. But I don't pretend that a deep examination of the portrayal of sexuality and marriage in "Hogan's Heroes" is actually worth the internet it's printed on.

Big STAR WARS fan here, and I've had to admit this several times (especially after the prequels came out).

You're talking to someone whose favorite show is The Hills.

Maybe I should start tl;dring about how watching a bunch of rich girls being catty is a deep and moving study of the human condition?

You would think, reading John Granger (or Harold Bloom, or any of the other critics he adores), that reading is SRS BZNS, and that if you choose to read silly stuff simply for escape and/or entertainment you're shallow, brainless, ill-educated, and a sterling example of the decline of Western Civilization.

One mistake critics like Bloom make (and AS Byatt did it too, when sneering at HP) is that they fail to recognize that many people who read "crap" read and enjoy and understand the classics, too. All of the Austen enthusiasts I've met in HP fandom? They don't--they cannot--exist.

Granger's got his ego completely wrapped up in being seen as an "expert" on the deeper meanings of wildly popular books. But since he wants to be taken seriously, he's in a bind--the books he chooses have to be taken seriously, as well. God forbid John Granger, Serious Scholar, be caught reading trash and loving it! So it must be proven worthy through rigorous analysis, which Granger provides. Only not.

(FWIW, I don't believe for a moment that Granger loves Twilight so much as he loves its popularity. Analyzing SMeyer's work thus provides a fresh audience for his ludicrous writings, at a time when interest in HP is waning.)

So he'll go to ridiculous lengths to analyze Twilight's "deeper" meanings (as he's imagined them), and defend it against all critics--but Stephen King's The Stand, or the Dark Tower series, are rubbish produced by a hack writer who is unqualified to give his opinions on popular fiction. Yeah.

I find all of this hilarious, myself. And I confess there's also pathos to be found in watching a poor little mediocrity like John Granger scrambling for another 15 minutes of dubious fame.

[makes popcorn]