Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

Posted on October 8, 2016 by smellincoffee

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
© 2016 Jack Thorne, J.K. Rowling, and John Tiffany
320 pages

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is the book young adults who grew up with Harry have been waiting for….though it’s not quite what they expected.   Principally featuring his  youngest son Albus’s adventures in Hogwarts, the play at is core is about family and relationships instead of magic and epic adventures.  Harry Potter isn’t the boy who lived, he’s a father trying to live through his son’s adolescence, something a fair few of his original readers probably have on their mind as their own children near that age.  

Like the prophecy that could refer to both Harry and Neville, the ‘cursed child’ seems to apply equally to Albus and his best friend, Scorpio. The son of Draco Malfoy, neither Scorpio nor Albus are made in their fathers’ image.  Scorpio is a geek, one infatuated by the daughter of Hermione Granger. Albus himself is more of a mystery; his main characteristic seems to be that he finds living under the shadow of his father to be awkwardly oppressive. (It doesn’t help that he was sorted into Slytherin….)     Scorpio is dogged by his father’s legacy, and constantly accused of being not only a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but the actual son of Voldemort.  United in their misfit status, the boys decide to go back in time and prevent Cedric Diggory from being killed — Albus will have accomplished something his father failed at, and Scorpio will have good guy credentials. Unfortunately  for these two, they’ve never seen a single time-travel movie and have no idea what an utterly bad idea monkeying about with time can be. (And naturally, there’s a confederate with a diabolical scheme manipulating these two to other ends…)

The good news for the reader is that, in their visits to the past and then to alternate realities, old characters return if only temporarily. Snape, for instance, makes an appearance, and finds the thought of his other self being killed by Voldemort ‘profoundly irritating’.  When the adults realize what their kids are up to, they’re forced to attempt to intercede, so that at one point adults and children are working together in different time frames.  The writers don’t just use the power trio, though, but create different combinations throughout the story. We see much of Draco, who has grown far beyond his petty upbringing, but is still isolated and haunted by the memory of his family’s malice. Although being a play there’s no narrative, the dialogue brought to mind some of the humor and warmth of the original books.  Albus is an interesting character only to the degree that he is a partner in banter with Scorpio and Rose (Hermione and Ron’s daughter). Although his growing distance from Harry is explained TO the reader, the early scenes jump around so much that I simply had to take his sullen rebellioness for granted. It’s a case of being told, not shown, and unfortunately this arbitrary distance is  Albus’ main attribute.

Although it’s definitely not a Harry Potter adventure in the old style, as someone who long resisted and then fell for Pottermania utterly, I found it fun. It’s fun in the sense of fanfiction, I suppose, and fleshes out that epilogue at the end of  Deathly Hallows, but it’s more serious than that. Most of the fanfiction I’ve seen has infantile premises — fetishizing Draco, making Harry a girl who knows martial arts, that sort of thing.  (I omit Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which is The Best Fanfiction Ever.)   The Cursed Child covers an adult topic — a genuinely adult topic, not a ‘let’s be gratuitous and pretend it’s mature discussion’   —   while remaining of interest to adolescent readers.   It makes me want to cozy up under a fall tree and read the books yet again!

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Imaginative Cosmopolis: A Reading

Posted on October 8, 2016 by smellincoffee

From Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran,  Fatemeh Keshavarz

In faint voices that reach us from across the globe, there is the recognition of our shared humanity. In laughing at the same joke, feeling the same pain, or admiring each other’s work of art, there is an empowering flash of recognition. Through the brilliance of that flash, a voice says, ‘I know you are more than a number in the global statistics, because your grandmother looks exactly like mine. It doesn’t matter if my Tuesday is Wednesday on your calendar. I have a little gray cat, and if you are brave enough to build a bridge, my cat and I might walk over.’  At times, it is hard to even contemplate the building of the bridge. But the excitement at the thought of a person and a gray cat from the other hemisphere walking in our direction is proof that we will never be totally self absorbed or even a nameless cog in the system. Not if we can help it.

p. 5

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Night of the Living Trekkies

Posted on October 8, 2016 by smellincoffee

Night of the Living Trekkies
© 2010 Kevin David Anderson
256 pages

Braaaains and braaaains, what is braaaaiiins?!

Oh, reader, good times ahead.  When Jim Pike returned from Afghanistan as a psychologically scarred veteran, the last thing he wanted was responsibility. That’s the reason he took a lowly job at a hotel as a bellhop; lives weren’t on the line. Too bad his hotel and the entire Houston area are ground zero for an zombie epidemic — one that erupts most dramatically at a Star Trek convention. To protect his sister, Jim will fight side by side with a squad of redshirts, saving Princess Leia in the meantime. Night of the Living Trekkies is a glorious parody of both zombie fiction and Star Trek, grounding its invasion of the undead in science fiction. Its reanimated corpses are under the control of an invasive alien parasite, not a necromancer’s spell, but the attraction here is not the zombies or the action, but the humor.  This is a novel saturated with Trek references; every chapter  heading is drawn from the shows’ bank of episode titles, and virtually all of the characters are Trekkies who constantly argue about the shows — about whether the Animated Series is canon, for instance. Gloriously, though, the authors also have the chutzpah to include a character dressed as Princess Leia, who (as a running joke) ‘unwittingly’ drops lines from Star Wars in stressful situations.   (“Some rescue! When you came in here, didn’t you have any plan for getting out?!”) It takes chutzpah to mix Star Wars references into a Trek book, but I thought it succeeded marvelously.  This being a zombie novel, naturally there’s a body count….but even that becomes funny when so many corpses are wearing red shirts.  Similarly appropriate are the zombies still dressed as Borg, whose shamble lacks only the Borg clacking and whirring to be authentic.  I purchased this on vacation and it made my night.

Seriously the most fun I’ve had with a book this year.

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Week of Enchantment: Blinded by the White

Posted on October 8, 2016 by smellincoffee

I could see White Sands while approaching Alamogordo, a stretch beneath the mountains that gleamed like the ocean. When I arrived IN Alamogordo and saw the space museum, I wondered if somehow I’d missed the turnoff to the park itself.  Instructions from a local assured me that I was on the right road, and once outside of town signs appeared.  Soon, white hills overgrown with vegetation appeared, and behind them the entrance to the park.  The park’s sheer scale makes a driving tour most practicable, though I pulled over as soon as the pavement gave way to compressed sand. I can sing many praises of my rental, that Kia Rio, but driving on sand is not among its strengths. I felt like I had fallen into the gears of a machine.  A large parking area two miles into the drive provides a marginally elevated boardwalk into the middle of the dunes, with informational signs along the way expalining the science of the Sands’ formation, and the life that persisted there.

Beyond the boardwalk, the paved road disappeared,but a compressed path extended far out into the expanse.  I decided to hike along the road,  occasionally leaving it to wander midst the dunes themselves.  Even under a partially cloudy sky, the dunes were blindingly white; I wore sunglasses and could not see otherwise.

The sight itself was not as surreal as it might have been, because my computer’s background for months has been a sunset over White Sands.  But still, to see it in person!  The gypsum expanse seemed endless, and if a visitor dared losing sight of the road, it was possible to be completely surrounded by a field of white.

When I returned home, I discovered many photos taken of the sky; my camera’s viewfinder was so saturated with light I had no idea what I was aiming at.  I walked in for about three miles, until I realized all the cars passing me were also turning around.  I assume it was a closed loop, so I turned around. The walk was shortened by two kindly Angelenos, who were on vacation and decided that I was going to die if I walked back under the noonday sun.  They gave me a ride in their Jeep Wrangler, and even it responded to the sand poorly. (I felt slightly vindicated on my Rio’s behalf.) The man driving had done it before, though, and he knew to hug the edges of the road, near the gypsum banks; there, travel was smoother.

While this looks like solid rock from a distance, it’s only a mound of highly compressed sand. I carved “HI” into this with a stick.  Gypsum ‘rocks’, if thrown into the air, exploded on contact with the ground. 

Although I had originally planned to spend a week in Las Cruces, using it as my base, as I left White Sands for it I wasn’t terribly excited. For the past two days I had enjoyed small towns and beautiful countryside;   Las Cruces would be my first major city,  requiring actual navigation. So far, my only major route change had involved a left turn in Roswell, departing 285 for 380/70.   In Las Cruces, my road unexpectedly split, and when I found the stretch I actually wanted to be on,  it changed names going through an intersection.  When I arrived at my motel, it seemed to be in a distressed area of town, and finding any place to eat involved getting turned around again. (I wound up in Mesilla, which made visiting it the next morning much easier.) Tired of driving, and hungry — my breakfast was a dusting of oatmeal, and lunch a gas station burrito from Alamagordo —  I pulled into a truck stop and ate at….Taco Bell. And then it rained!  I retired to bed early and hoped the city would look more promising in the morning.  I’m happy to report that it did.

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Week of Enchantment: Through Piney Mountains Cold

Posted on October 6, 2016 by smellincoffee

On Tuesday morning, I bid a reluctant farewell to Roswell and hit the road west. A half-hour of enormous plains gave way to the hills of the Hondo Valley.

The Hondo valley’s rocky mounts gave way to much larger hills covered in pine trees, reminding me much of northern Alabama and Tennessee.

I reached Ruidoso much more quickly than I anticipated, around nine am — much too early for a free wine tasting I’d arranged at a local winery. Alas.  I was also too early for the museum of the Old West,  but the horse sculptures outside were still available for admiration. 
I continued to climb steadily but not dramatically through the Sierro Blanco mountains and the Lincoln National Forest. A sign declared me to be 8,000 feet above sea level at Apache Summit. 
I made tracks for Alamagordo. Within the town itself was the Space Museum,  which is parked landmark-like upon a hill. The glass cube and rocket  next to it made for easy navigation, though getting back to the highway required instructions from an Allsups clerk. 
We are the Borg. Resistance is futile. You will be awed.
MERCURY!
Moon rock collected by Harrison Schmitt, the only scientist to walk on the moon.
I spent most of my time outside the museum admiring the rockets and other equipment. 
…beep…beep….beep…
The space museum displays covered not only the Mercury to Apollo programs, but the shuttle and Skylab as well. It featured sundry items: Russian space suits, the actual food tins carried in the Gemini and Apollo missions, and a plate that simulated the ground during rocket thrusts.  The plate had different strengths for Atlas and Saturns, as well as for whatever launched the shuttle and the Russians. The most intense one I tried was the Saturn, of course. 
Having read so many astronaut memoirs, I mostly appreciated the museum for the Mercury capsule and other aviation equipment, as well as the rocket plate. 
And now, on to White Sands! 

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Week of Enchantment: Roswell: They Call it Home

Posted on October 5, 2016 by smellincoffee
After enjoying the Living Desert Zoo, I returned to 285 north for Roswell. Even if it were not Roswell, the city made a good camp for the night, its main street juncture providing access to Alamagordo and Las Cruces. But it was….Roswell.  I’ve mentioned here before that in middle school my best friend and I were obsessive fans of the Roswell High book series, and I later became a fan of the loosely-adapted television show based on it. It was for those books that I wanted to see the town;  it’s the same reason I used to comb California maps looking for the Palo City of California Diaries. (Just being on 285 gave me a  fanboy thrill, because an episode of the show is called…”285 South”).

The nearer I drew to Roswell, though, the more it became a real place. The road south of it is plains again, with hills far in the distance.  To my surprise, I spotted not just trees but orchards.  The Roswell I discovered was not a desert town surviving with  kitchsy alien crap;  it was a farming and mining town, a country town.  Trade the mineral mining and refining for logging, and I could have been home.  (There are even houses with a southern stamp!) As soon as I hit the downtown area, I felt at home;  it reminded me of Montevallo’s coziness. There is a relationship between street width and building height that has a sweet spot; some streets just feel right, while others feel too exposed or too cramped. Roswell often felt just right, and I regretted having to leave the next day. 
I winced to see all the alien nonsense coming into town, the goofy balloons with ‘welcome’ signs,  because I come from a tourist town and know what it’s like to be whored out. A visitor comes into town and is excitedly told about the city’s long history as an industrial power, a hub of transportation that produced a wealthy and expansive historic district…but invariably, their only object of interest is  something that merely happened around the town. 
Solidarity aside, I decided to poke my head inside the alien museum, because…well, I was there. I might not ever be again.

The museum proved to be in the shape of a U, with this exhibit perched at the turnaround. The walls were lined with different presentations;  photos of Walker Air Field, now a municipal airport; newspapers from the incident itself; military equipment, pictures of UFOs; models of various scenarios, including one that involved a Nazi flying saucer; a horse covered in newspapers, science fiction movie posters,  ancient art with purported extraterrestrials, and of course a few aliens being dissected.  More interesting is the research library attached to the museum. 
This photograph is only one small part of their selection. It uses the Dewey decimal system and includes actual science books and science fiction in with the UFO and aliens-among-us material. Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and Contact were both on the shelves.
Another room contained an entire wall full of science journals and magazine, and a wall filled with mysterious documents, NASA technical reports.  
It  would be interesting to learn when Roswell became a town that became an object of interest to tourists, and embraced it. The girl I spoke with in the UFO museum confirmed that many townsfolk were very tired of it, but main street is lined with places selling trade to tourists.
The abundance of material — statues, plaques, murals — hailing Roswell’s founding and prospering as a cattle town indicate that people wish to be appreciated for something else for a change.  I’d like to think I did, because I felt very comfortable here. 
As dusk approached, I retreated to my motel room. My plans for eating at the Mexican place next door were dashed when it closed at five (?!), and so I visited a chain restaurant across the street that I’d never seen before. 
I took a picture of it not because it was new, but because of the trees. Usually, this kind of modern development is surrounded by a parking lot apron and looks ghastly, but here the trees kept faith with the trees lining much of the main street and made it look attractive. 
A final note: based on the amount of Trump signs I saw, Roswellians’ embrace of aliens is inconsistent. 
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Azazel

Posted on October 5, 2016 by smellincoffee

Azazel: Fantasy Stories
© 1988 Isaac Asimov
221 pages

George isn’t an ordinary fellow, for in times past his ancestors possessed the arcane knowledge required to summon creatures — demons? aliens? — from another plane of existence.  The best George can manage personally is a tiny little fellow named Azazel, who — demonic appearance aside — conscientiously refuses to use his great powers to help George out.  Azazel will do favors for other people at George’s request, purely for philanthropic reasons. Too bad these favors always result in extraordinary trouble for the beneficiaries!   Azazel collects twelve stories featuring the attempts of George to help his friends out,  all of which backfire — either for George’s friend or George himself, since he invariably has an angle for putting his ethereal pocket pal to work.

The misfires are never predictable;  sometimes they’re simplistic, caused by George not phrasing his request wisely enough;   other times, the fulfilled wishes simply produce unexpected results.  One woman who wishes to become more beautiful destroys her engagement after the transformation renders her vain and less interested in her homely finance;  one man’s favorite singer gives a performance so incredible that all other music is ruined for him forever.  Other times, the wish succeeds brilliantly but it is George’s covert desires that are stymied. To a friend suffering from writers’ block on a novel, George promises him boundless creativity…if the friend will sign over 50% of his future novel earnings. The wish comes true and the man writes brilliantly — but not novels, and thus no revenue for George!

 This is light fiction, mere amusement — but I find Asimov a very companionable writer, one whose offhand comments match my taste for humorous storytelling, and for that reason I hunted a copy of this book down and brought it with me on my weeklong tour of New Mexico.

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Week of Enchantment: the Living Desert

Posted on October 5, 2016 by smellincoffee

High on a hill north of Carlsbad is the Living Desert Zoo, a nature preserve with some animal exhibits. The zoo is unusual in its coherence; instead of gathering random animals from all over the world, the Living Desert focuses exclusively on the flora and fauna of the Chihuahuan desert.

Although it appears natural, the preserve is carefully sculpted. It’s a desert garden, I would say, with interspersed animal exhibits. 
.
I visited this in the afternoon, after climbing out of the Caverns, and the wind was still ferocious at times. 
The view of the town far below us, and the wind, made even placid scenes like this feel almost intense.
Dozens of these little guys, all munching on watermelon and digging little holes as shelter from the wind.
The Living Desert also featured a greenhouse of ‘succulent greens’, with signs posted warning visitors to use their own judgment about entering. Being from Alabama, the heat and humidity felt perfectly normal to me — just a June day!
As much as I enjoyed the peaceful scenery, and the occasional sight of foxes, it was time for me to move on to another town.  A town…called Roswell. 
…here we go. 
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Week of Enchantment: Into the Hole He Goes

Posted on October 5, 2016 by smellincoffee

My first morning in the west opened to a glorious sunrise. I was up with the dawn, for after a ride into town to eat breakfast, I intended to drive the twenty miles out to the Caverns to be there at their opening.

After a hearty breakfast of sausage and waffles, I returned to the wide-open plains south of the town, very much enjoying the 75 MPH speedlimit.  After close to two hundred miles of open horizons, the turn off into the national park area brought a staggeringly impressive change.

  A winding path carved into a rocky hill took me further and further up; this was not a path cut into dirt, but one which surrounded me with walls of rock.  As I neared the top I could feel my small car buffeted by something,  and realized upon parking that I was standing in the strongest wind I’ve felt since Hurricane Ivan. The grass growing alongside the road was virtually flattened, and I could not decide which was more impressive: that steady and exhilarating, force…or the view.

I’ve gazed down from mountains before, but the view from Chattanooga’s rocky tops was nothing like this. There, the view was hemmed in by other hills, by the abundant forests, by the city itself. Here, I looked across a seemingly infinite landscape. I was riveted, and the view was made all the more spectacular by the vault of the heavens. Far above me the sky threatened with dark gloom, but at one point the sun was breaking through; a half-dozen beams of light pierced it and created a radiant fan. Reluctantly, I broke off from staring into eternity to enter the park. It had just opened, and only a middle-aged couple entered the trail downward before I did. A park ranger briefed us on the rules before our descent into ‘the big hole’.

Where is Virgil when you need him?

 The entrance smelled, faintly; I couldn’t put a finger on it but it had the smell of damp, rot, and possibly bat waste.  That aroma disappeared as we followed the hairpin turns into the cave — though it’s more likely we simply grew used to it. The natural hike takes nearly an hour to complete, and is a spectacle in itself. The cave lighting is spare and tasteful, providing as little illumination as possible while giving the place a strange atmosphere. The lights are there, but hidden.  Our party grew larger, including a pair of younger couples and another middle aged set, this one from Taiwan. I spent most of my time in the caverns traveling with the Taiwanese, who proved very friendly.  The path down was often dark, and we used the faint gleam of the metal handrails to locate it;   although signage urged travelers to use the rails to steady themselves on the damp path, the rails themselves were moist.   If all was still — if treading steps and beeping cameras were silenced — the water can still be heard dripping, and in one area we could see the water falling upon the tip of a stalagmite.

Neither my phone nor my camera were up to the task of turning the dim light of the trail or the Big Room into many good pictures, but I will share a few snatches. One memorable sight wasn’t captured at all; this was the Iceberg, an enormous rock the size of a small house, which had fallen from the cathedral-like ceiling above us.  There were moments on the trail when even the petite pair I was keeping company with had to duck: personally, I had to crouch-watch.

The two most memorable spots in the Big Room for me were the Hall of Giants, filled with massive round formations which stand column like, and ‘fairy land’.  The cavernous aspect of the caverns can’t be captured by a photograph, though. One woman I walked with remarked that the place was like a cathedral, and that may convey some aspect of the size. But a cathedral nave is one space, and your eye can create an outline of it, can frame it to ponder. It isn’t possible  to do that in the caverns, because the spaces stretch out and vanish in darkness, only to reappear as you draw closer — and they go off at odd angles. One area is known as “The Top of the Cross”, because that part of the room is roughly in the shape of a cross or a large X. In the light, though, that shape isn’t discernible from the ground.

Needless to say, going from the top of that hill to deep within the heart of the Earth, to a place where geology isn’t something in books but something happening  audibly, visibly, was extraordinary. 
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Week of Enchantment: Go West, Young Man!

Posted on October 5, 2016 by smellincoffee

My journey west began last Saturday, when I rode with family to the Birmingham Airport. There, after saying my farewells and tripping my way through my first TSA checkpoint,  What would flying be like?   Kind of awesome, as it turned out.

The look on my face as we rose into the air and I watched the interstate and cars shrink in size was utter boyish glee, and it didn’t stop until I heard the shocking announcement that the jet was preparing for final descent into Dallas. I hadn’t even seen the Mississippi yet!

Dallas is an enormous airport, with a Skytrain trolley linking the six terminals. You can imagine my glee to ride an actual electric trolley! I was soon in El Paso, where I claimed my reserved rental (a Kia Rio of which I would grow increasingly fond), and then on my way.

160 miles of this, with a brief mountainous interlude

The road from El Paso to Carlsbad concerned me more than anything, because it appeared on the map to be a hundred and sixty miles of nothing. Combing GoogleMaps, all I found was a small cafe called Cornudas, and a border patrol station. Who would traveling this empty road? Who would help if I broke down? As it turns out,  as empty as this road is, it’s also a solid traffic corridor.  While never busy,  I always had company.  Radio stations were sketchy, but fortunately I have a large repertoire of geographically appropriate songs, from “Don’t Fence Me In” to “Should’ve Been a Cowboy”.  I warbled happily.

The Guadalupe mountains, featuring beautiful views and watchful police.

The approaching New Mexico border made me laugh, because it seemed as though whoever drew the Texas state lines had said “We’ll take as far north as the grass grows.” The seemingly-approaching desert quickly changed to plains, though, and in no time at all I was in Carlsbad.

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