Jan 18
I was having a mental conversation with myself this morning, contemplating how to teach Joseph Campbell’s writing style to my students. The trajectory of my thoughts led me to the almost-cliché Hero’s Journey. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell images the Journey thusly:
One key point of the Hero’s Journey is that it is a circle. The Hero leaves, the Hero must return. If… Continue reading
Jul 29
James and Lily Potter represent for their orphaned son, Harry, the ideal Father and Mother. They died in a surprise attack protecting Harry from Lord Voldemort when he was only one year old. Throughout J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Harry learns about his parents, facts that threaten to abolish his ideal, while having to learn to identify the Mother and Father as archetypes in his life. In her book, The… Continue reading
Jul 28
When J.K. Rowling gave Harry Potter to the world, she had little to no idea how far the fan phenomenon would go. With the release of each book, the fandom grew experientially, and still continues to grow. For example, a couple years ago, Wizard Rock, a genre of grassroots music written, performed, and inspired by the books, was defined only by Harry and the Potters, Draco and the Malfoys, and… Continue reading
Jul 28
One of the dominant themes of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series is love: romantic love between two characters, platonic love between two friends, parental love between an elder and a child, and inter-species love between a human and a creature or being from another species. Throughout the series, Rowling treats love as a force beyond all others that will always triumph over evil. Within the alchemical process, key stages of… Continue reading
Jul 16
*Warning: Contains Spoilers.* 
In the purest use of the term, in cinematic parlance, none of the Harry Potter films are particularly “good.” Sure, they are filled with eye candy (visual effects and actors alike), but the acting is often dry or forced, and the scripts too often make assumptions based on readers’ prior knowledge of the books. This is more… Continue reading
Jul 10
I like watching movies. I like watching movies all day. But the longest I have ever gone is the LOTR extended editions, and that was a marathon in and of itself. But the idea of an all-day Harry Potter marathon proved irresistible, especially in light of the prohibitive expense of doing the Alamo Drafthouse feast. So the day started at 8:00am CST with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and… Continue reading
Jun 16
Summer 2007 was a really fun summer. I attended a Potter Con, stood in the Austin heat at Book People for the midnight book release, and was getting ready to start my new life as a Pacifica student. The previous fall, I had just completed my Master’s Thesis, Searching for the Golden Snitch, addressing some then-unformulated theories about the relationship between literature and American myth, which I was energized to… Continue reading
Mar 3
There’s been a lot in the news recently about teachers: Some outspoken individual has claimed that teachers have a cushy job and are overpaid for the amount of work that they do, which is essentially just baby-sitting, and many states are calling for cuts in teaching positions to help reconcile budgetary shortfalls. Many of the people and media channels I follow on Facebook and Twitter are a-twitter about all of… Continue reading
Oct 19
Those stories we hold especially close are those that often have some connection with our personal myth at the time we encounter them. It’s not just a happy accident that we fall in love with something. It’s something far deeper than that. Something has been triggered psychologically.
As an undergraduate and throughout a portion of my graduate studies, my myth revolved around all things Harry Potter. Like so many… Continue reading
Jul 17
The Con is coming to an end, which means I’m taking it easy tonight and packing and leaving bright and early tomorrow. I’m going to post the transcript for my talk when I get home, but in the mean time, I thought I’d wrap up the Con. This is really just an excuse to post the pictures I took of the Park.
The Con itself is a little disappointing… Continue reading