Attractions Magazine has new photos and video of the construction of The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, opening next year in Florida. The Hogwarts Express is one of the many things you’ll see in this collection.

Many of you know that Infinitus 2010, the next major Harry Potter conference, is being held there. I’m a Featured Speaker at this event, with two presentations on the schedule. I’ll also be attending as a member of the press. Make plans to be there!

A little editorializing: Something just doesn’t look right about seeing Hogwarts Castle next to popcorn stands and resort lodging. Not right at all.

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Poll is on the right.

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There’s actually a page now! That makes it really, really official.

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This chapter continues Rowling’s depiction of the Ministry of Magic under Voldemort as Nazi Germany in miniature. There is now a commission to register, interrogate, de-wand, and imprison (or worse) muggle-born witches and wizards. Muggle-born Ministry employees are denounced and purged. Indifferent workers prepare anti-muggle-born propaganda pamphlets. Everyone keeps their mouths shut and heads down. The only sign of resistance is a secret prankster causing Death Eater offices to rain.

The Commission, Umbridge, and Propaganda

The name of the The Muggle-Born Registration Commission is interesting. Why call it that and not “The Mudblood Registration Commission?” By using the term “muggle-born,” preferred by non-purebloods and others not biased against muggle-borns, the Ministry cloaks its new nature a bit longer. This enhances people’s uncertainty about what has happened and lures muggle-borns into complying with the orders to register and show up in the hope of appeasing the Ministry and showing compliance with the new laws. Similarly, Jews during the Holocaust were lured into complying with directives to show up for “relocation East” and similar blandishments that resulted in their deaths.

Umbridge is the personification of the Nazi passion for order and record-keeping, eager to get going once Mafalda Hopkirk (polyjuiced Hermione) shows up. Her pamphlet-making minions hate her as a boss but wonder indifferently if she’ll spend all day “interrogating mudbloods.” The pamphlet, entitled “Mudbloods, and the Dangers They Pose to a Peaceful Pureblood Society,” shows a simpering rose (pureblood) surrounded and threatened by nasty evil weeds (mudbloods). The pamphlet is reminiscent of Nazi propaganda depicting young ladies and children as “threatened” by Jews, who were falsely portrayed as evil and repulsive.

This demonization of the other led the Nazis to murder millions of Jews from all walks of life regardless of fame, fortune, or talent and regardless of age. Similarly the Death Eaters reduce all muggle-borns to their “blood status” regardless of their magical power or accomplishments. They care not what talents Hermione Granger or Mary Cattermole or Lily Evans or Ted Tonks or Dirk Creswell or Justin Finch-Fletchley may have, what contributions they have or could make to society, or that their children may be half-bloods. Instead “the brats of mudbloods do not concern us.” The irony is that at the very head of every pureblood family tree, at some point in the distant or not-so-distant past, the first person in the family to acquire magic was a muggle-born.

The Eyes Have It

There is a contrast of eyes in this chapter. Harry sees Mad-Eye Moody’s magic eye stuck in Umbridge’s office door, gazing “blindly upward, frozen.” Rage “reared in him like a snake” similar to his feelings in Order of the Phoenix when he feels like a snake “rose up inside” him when he briefly locks eyes with Dumbledore after Nagini’s attack on Arthur Weasley (OOTP 481). Harry rips the eye out of the door. When he opens the door, he feels like he’s stepped back in time, for Umbridge’s office looks just like her office at Hogwarts and the sticky note on her poster expresses her continuing desire to punish “Undesirable No. 1.” The flashbacks to fifth year are repeated later outside the interrogation chamber when Umbridge casually abuses her power and threatens the man interrogated prior to Mary Cattermole with the Dementor’s Kiss if he doesn’t stop struggling, just as she sent Dementors to give fourteen-year-old Harry the Kiss to get him to stop saying that Voldemort had returned.

Harry doesn’t think to create a copy of Mad-Eye’s eye to leave in its place and later its disappearance is discovered, alerting the Death Eaters that there is an intruder in the Ministry. In contrast, when Hermione steals Slytherin’s locket from around the unconscious Umbridge’s neck, she makes sure to leave a copy so Umbridge will not know that the real locket was stolen. The spell she uses, “Geminio,” means “twin” as does Tom’s name. She is making a twin of a twin, although the fake locket is not a horcrux. In an additional irony, the locket will eventually open to have two eyes, not one. The locket’s two eyes, hinted at here with the twinning of the horcrux, represent evil, whereas Mad-Eye’s single eye represents good, single, all-seeing vision. (For further discussion of the eyes of Deathly Hallows, see John Granger’s book, “The Deathly Hallows Lectures.”)

The First Nazi Dark Wizard

In Umbridge’s office Harry gets a glimpse of Skeeter’s “The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore” and sees a picture of Dumbledore with (as he later learns) Grindelwald. Grindelwald preceded Voldemort as evil Nazi dark wizard and terrorized wizarding Europe “For the Greater Good” during the same time period as the actual Nazi Germany and World War II. It is thus appropriate that Harry first sees this photo while at the Ministry.

Both boys in the photo are teenagers. Dumbledore has “elbow-length hair” and a “tiny, wispy beard.” Grindelwald’s “golden hair fell in curls to his shoulders” and he has a “gleeful, wild look.” The boys have their “arms around each other’s shoulders” and are “laughing immoderately.” To my mind the description of the photo is suggestive of Dumbledore’s possible homosexuality (which Rowling has asserted in a talk, which I know is not canon). While this possibility is not essential to the story, it does make it easier to understand how Dumbledore’s infatuation with Grindelwald may have led him to willfully blind himself to Grindelwald’s flaws and to the evilness of his ideas. (For a more extensive essay regarding Dumbledore’s alleged gayness see Karen Kebarle’s essay in “Hog’s Head Conversations.”)

The Weasley Express

Harry leaves Umbridge’s office after reading Arthur Weasley’s secret file and hiding from Thicknesse. The elevator ride down brings him three Weasleys, first Ron, who is soaking wet (foreshadowing perhaps his wetness after rescuing Harry from the pool in the Forest of Dean), then Arthur, who gives Ron helpful advice on how to stop the rain in Yaxley’s office, and finally Percy, who gets off at the next level as soon as he sees his dad. When Harry tries to get off the elevator, however, Arthur stops him, irate that Runcorn (whom Harry is polyjuiced to impersonate) turned in Dirk Creswell for being muggle-born. It is a new experience for Harry to see Mr. Weasley glaring at him with such dislike. It (along with the earlier newspaper article saying Harry is wanted for questioning in connection with the death of Dumbledore) is parallel to what Snape experiences that year as headmaster, with the other teachers hating him for killing Dumbledore and being a Death Eater while he is unable to reveal the truth. Harry’s attempt to warn Mr. Weasley that he is being watched fails as Mr. Weasley perceives the warning as a threat.

He Brought Them Out of Darkness

Harry’s role as Savior of the wizarding world is foreshadowed in the dungeon scene. Although “the cold, and the hopelessness, and the despair of the place laid themselves upon Harry like a curse,” Harry, using only his strength of mind and no patronus, resists the dementors by thinking of Hermione and Ron who need him. It is a kind of warm-up for the darkness and despair of their camping trip soon to come and for Harry’s ultimate journey into the Forest Again.

Further in the role of Savior and perhaps evoking Psalms 23:4 (“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me”) and 107:14 (“He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and broke their bands in sunder”), Harry walks invisibly with Mary Cattermole into Umbridge and Yaxley’s interrogation chamber so that she will not be alone and, after stunning Yaxley and Umbridge, produces a brilliant stag patronus to fight off the dementors, guide Mrs. Cattermole and Hermione out, and then lead the rest of the muggle-borns to freedom. The detainees are at first dazzled by the light of the patronus but rally quickly to help each other escape.

Harry’s stag patronus guiding them out also foreshadows Snape’s doe patronus guiding Harry to the sword in the pond in the Forest of Dean.

Into the Darkness

The end of the rescue falls apart as the real Reg Cattermole arrives and Yaxley realizes that Polyjuice Potion is being used. Harry displays quick-wittedness in taking advantage of whom he is impersonating to get the fireplaces left open for escape and uses muggle dueling (punching) to shift the focus to the Ministry worker who had been trying to follow orders in the first place. Fortunately, everyone gets away. Unfortunately, Yaxley (as we learn in the next chapter) hitches a ride on Hermione’s robes and Hermione cannot shake him until after she has taken them to the front step of 12 Grimmauld Place, destroying its security. The chapter closes with them whirling away in the suffocating darkness to parts unknown.

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A guest post by Red Rocker!

A Touch of Dead is Charlaine Harris’ latest book, a collection of short stories featuring the telepathic Louisiana waitress, Sookie Stackhouse. Harris  dedicates it to all those readers who want every last sip of Sookie. It’s a double entendre, of course:  a lot of people want a sip of Sookie, many real, some fictional. I bought the book in hardcover because, frankly, I was in withdrawal and could not wait until the next installment in the saga came out.

What did I get for my impatience? Five stories, and some interesting black and white interior art  by Lisa Desimini, who also does the  cover art for the books.

With one exception, the five stories are not central to the ongoing saga. If you don’t read them, you won’t be missing any major revelations. The exception is One Word Answer, which chronologically takes place shortly before Definitely Dead and answers a lot of the questions about the events that lead up to that story. But those questions are answered de facto in Definitely Dead anyways.

So what will you miss if you don’t read these stories?

They are all mystery stories; two of them are murder mysteries. Fairy Dust is a classic locked room whodunit: the murder takes place in a night club, there are only three possible suspects, and the murder could only have occurred within a fixed time frame. The answer to whodunit depends on the fact that there are only a limited number of ways of murdering a fairy.

The other murder mystery is One Word Answer. This one is more in the style of The Usual Suspects: what you think is happening is not what’s actually happening; what’s actually happening is a game of wits between two clever women, one of whom happens to be the Queen of Louisiana. It also has one of the best opening lines to a story I’ve read in a long time:

Bubba the Vampire and I were raking up clippings from my newly trimmed bushes about midnight when the long black car pulled up.

And of course it also manages to give a hilarious answer to the eternal question: where’s Waldo?

Lucky presents a dilemma which is familiar to Harry Potter readers: how exactly does magic alter luck?  With Rowling, magic intensifies the luck within an individual, at least for a brief period of time. Harris writes about luck as a limited commodity: if one person uses magic to take more than their share of luck, there isn’t enough left over for others. Lucky has a darker side: a sub-plot is based on the after effects of Hurricane Katrina on the vampire population of New Orleans. The revelation that the Red Cross would make provision for vampires left homeless and destitute by the storm is logical, in a bizarre sort of way. The fact that vampires are as vulnerable to natural disasters as “breathers” is a more jarring discovery.

Then there’s the Christmas tale, Gift Wrap. Alone at Christmas, Sookie encounters a werewolf desperately in need of help. She helps him, of course, with backup from the Benelli, the same shotgun that saved the day in Dead to the World, and which broke the witch’s spell over Eric in From Dead to Worse. And once the bad guys are dispatched, Sookie and her werewolf celebrate. The story has an O Henry ending, and it’s easy to read it at that level. But it goes to a level beyond that; this story is self-aware. It recognizes the familiar elements which figure in most of the books in the saga, and assembles them with great economy to give Sookie a personalized Christmas present.

The final story is  Dracula Night, which also brings together familiar stories. In one corner we have Vlad the Impaler, in spangly black jumpsuit. In the other corner we have his unexpected fanboy, Eric Northman. In the background you can almost hear the soundtrack from It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown. And invited to the party as Linus’ companion at the pumpkin patch vigil, but inevitably taking on the role of the pragmatic Lucy van Pelt, is Sookie. It’s very, very funny, and very sweet and worth the price of admission.

Enjoy.

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My apologies for the delay, but I had no time today to record the video of the drawing for the giveaway. I will try to find time tomorrow.

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A new book releases today which I recommend so highly, I’m on the back of the book cover: The Intersection of Fantasy and Native America, edited by Amy H. Sturgis and David D. Oberhelman. Here’s my endorsement:

With excellent and accessible scholarship, this book opens wide the door of Native American mythology and fantasy by connecting it with the fantasy many of us already know and love. I’m now convinced there’s a vast treasure store of fantasy I haven’t even begun to experience, and there’s nothing more exciting than that for the lover of fantasy fiction!

This is really great stuff – but being big fans of Dr. Sturgis here at The Hog’s Head, we knew it would be.  This book does a great job of finding common ground between Native American stories and those we already know, like Lewis’s, Tolkien’s, Rowling’s, and Gaiman’s. Order from the Mythopoeic Society or Amazon.com!

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Just a reminder that tonight at midnight EST is the deadline for entering the giveaway contest for a chance to win Where the Wild Things Are or H.P. Lovecraft: The Fiction.

I’ll record a video of the drawing and post it tomorrow!

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We can’t go back to the time when we wondered what was going to happen next. But one blogger – Jess – is at the point, and she’s blogging through, chapter by chapter, as she discovers the series for the first time.

This is a fantastic idea, and I’ve often thought of running blogs with the same idea with other works of literature. Should be fun for those of us who know what happened to watch someone discover it for the first time.

She’s working through Half-Blood Prince right now. Visit and subscribe to The Last Muggle to Read Harry Potter. And whatever you do, don’t spoil her!

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