{"id":1538,"date":"2005-08-06T14:55:00","date_gmt":"2005-08-06T22:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=1538"},"modified":"2005-08-06T14:55:00","modified_gmt":"2005-08-06T22:55:00","slug":"1538","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=1538","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of links from the New York Times<\/i> I’ve been holding on to for some reason. (As always, registration or something like BugMeNot<\/a> required.)<\/p>\n

First, a this article<\/a> in which A.O. Scott makes the following interesting observation:<\/p>\n

Movie stars are glamorous creatures we dream of meeting someday, while superheroes are the people we secretly believe we really are.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And this review<\/a> of the most recent Harry Potter<\/i> book, in which Liesl Schillinger writes:<\/p>\n

The first four volumes of the series, written before 2000, gave children a thrilling escape into fantasy. But the last two, written after Sept. 11, 2001, provide the opposite release: an escape from a reality that can now seem scarier than the prison of Azkaban.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s some validity to that, but I do think it ignores the very real darkness that’s been present since the beginning<\/i> of the series. It’s a darkness that’s grown and (in some ways) matured along with Rowling’s characters. Certainly, the third and fourth books are tinged with a fair share of both the scary and the bittersweet, and I think it can argued that only the first novel is nothing but stand-alone escapist fantasy. I haven’t yet read more than a chapter of The Half Blood Prince<\/i>, but I think tossing around September 11th in this context is to simultaneously give Rowling more credit than she probably deserves, while not giving her enough credit for what she’s already done with the books. I think it’s reading<\/i> these books in a post-September 11th world that makes them seem darker; and, if Schillinger re<\/i>-read the first four now, I think she’d find they were plenty dark, too.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of links from the New York Times I’ve been holding on to for some reason. (As always, registration or something like BugMeNot required.) First, a this article in which A.O. Scott makes the following interesting observation: Movie stars are glamorous creatures we dream of meeting someday, while superheroes are the people we secretly … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[238],"class_list":["post-1538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1538"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1538"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1538\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}