8: There is going to be a new Harry Potter television series.

There is going to be a new Harry Potter television series.

It doesn’t seem especially surprising that the same book should be adapted twice in twenty years, and it doesn’t seem surprising that a book published at the turn of the millennium is still widely read. Kids are still reading the Famous Five after eighty years, and Alice in Wonderland after an hundred and eighty.

I agree with Ursula Le Guin that the Potter books are a collection of not-very-original fantasy tropes spun around a not-very-interesting boarding school story; and I share her irritation that a lot of people who are not-very-interested in fantasy hailed them as the last word in originality. But it is also true that the earlier volumes, at least, were jolly good fun. I remember my mother, who wouldn’t have recognised a fantasy trope if you dropped one on her head, laughing out loud at the “First Years are not allowed their own broomstick” letter when it was reproduced in a feature in the Guardian Saturday supplement.

What kind of fantasy story do you like?

Do you prefer one where magic is magical—a strange, spiritual, numinous, force? Do you like stories like Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea, with its True Names and Shadows and its Taoist, Jungian underpinning? Stories which drop you without explanation into universes which operate according to their own rules and leave you to figure out what the hell is going on? Phillip Pullman may have turned into a colossal bore, but there’s a real genius to the way he takes Daemons and Dust and The Authority for granted from page one.

Or do you prefer worlds where magic and wizards are utterly normal and not very mysterious at all; where encountering a unicorn is a bit like spotting a rare breed of gazelle? There have been half a dozen TV shows in which witches, ghosts, djinn, vampires and robots are presented as a normal part of suburban life, with hilarious consequences. A kid getting detention for not doing his potions homework is fun in exactly the same way that a cowboy saloon where the cowboys are aliens and the Indians are robots is fun.

The Potter books aren’t exactly spoofs, but they are closer in spirit to Terry Pratchett than they are to George R Martin. Pratchett had done the “Tom Browns Schooldays Only Magic” schtick eight years before Rowling.

It is always a bit annoying when something is over-praised. My bugbear used to be people who had never read any comic apart from Sandman telling me that Sandman was the only comic there had ever been in the history of comics that was worth reading. Some of them wrote introductions to the collected editions. The aforementioned mother used to get similarly miffed when people who had once heard a recording of Pavarotti at a football match claimed to be devotees of the opera. But it’s not a good look. Those of us who liked fantasy before it was cool should probably resist the temptation to tell the millennials that they are not allowed to like Hogwarts because Silmarillion.

Any interest I have in the Expanded Potterverse will be purely exegetical. Rowling is good at world-building; mediocre at plots; and very, very bad at writing. The existing films gave us the bare bones of her stories, but only the slightest hint of the lore. A TV show, with twelve or sixteen hours to spend on each volume, would give the whacky Hogwartian detail space to breathe; the contrived soapy plots time to unfurl, but would free us from the odious necessity of reading JKR’s prose. It may well be that the earlier, shorter volumes will have to be padded out, but JKR is by all accounts still alive and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future, so she will presumably be available to pump more background detail into the setting.

The branding seems weird. It appears that the TV show will emulate the look and feel of the movies (which are, we are told, the “core of the franchise”): it will not “re-imagine” the books. The current party line is that the movies transmute the pictures in JKRs head directly onto the screen, and therefore any attempt to visualise the setting differently would simply be incorrect. So we are going to end up with two equally authoritative adaptations of the same text, and, presumably, decades of argument about Canon.

We live in a world where there are more interesting TV shows than anyone can reasonably be expected to watch. But I might well give the series a look. It can’t possibly be as boring as the BBC’s adaptation of His Dank Materials.

I’d even by a ticket for The Cursed Child if it toured the regions.

But notice what is happening at this very moment.

The second I mentioned Harry Potter, my readership split into two factions.

Which side are you on?

Are you on the side which is thinking “Why is he even talking about this TV series? Why is he even contemplating watching it? Why is he even referring to it as Harry Potter? The correct terminology is ‘Those Shitty Wizard Books’”

Or are you on the side of the line which is already bulverising (q.v) my opinion? “Andrew only thinks that JKR is a bad writer because he doesn’t like her politics. He only thinks that her plots are derivative because she has been demonised by a hard-line trans cult. He only thinks her fantasy is unimaginative because he is part of a conspiracy to abolish lesbians. He only thinks her prose is poor because he can’t define the term woman correctly.”

As a matter of fact, Andrew does think that JKR’s public pronouncements on gender exhibit a vindictive wrong-headedness which borders on monomania. But he has had considerable practice in enjoying problematic texts. He thinks that you can believe that JKR is wrong about public lavatories and simultaneously be quite interested in what Netflix does with the new Harry Potter TV show.

But he is quite aware that in this respect he is in the minority. For very many people, Those Shitty Wizard Books have the same status as rag dolls which are not penguins, marble carvings of men’s front bottoms, and posters with the word FUCK on them.

Irreducible signifiers of wrongness.

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7: I have told the story before about attending a workshop organised by a local Black writers’ collective.

 I have told the story before about attending a workshop organised by a local Black writers’ collective.

I heard a number of poems and short stories about being Black, being proud of being Black, enjoying being Black, and seeing Blackness as a positive thing; and wondering how poetry written in that style but from my own—white—point of view might sound.

I couldn’t imagine any way of writing about being white, or being proud of being white which didn’t come out sounding like Enoch Powell and Billy Brit.

All this was a long time ago, I remember, before the Right had weaponised the term woke. I understood Black and white to be neutral, descriptive terms, like fair-haired and dark-haired.. I thought that racism meant “disliking people who had dark skin”: very silly, and unpleasant, but no different in principle from disliking fat people or people with freckles. I even thought that the bad word, the word beginning with a different letter from FUCK, was a term of abuse, like Froggie or Jock or Taffy or Limey or Aussie. It certainly could be very hurtful indeed, but it might also be neutral or funny or even affectionate, depending on who said it to whom in which context and on what day of the week. Racists were horrible people, and everything could be solved if everyone was a bit nicer. Ebony and ivory lived together in perfect harmony on Paul McCartney’s keyboard.

I have also told the story of an unfortunate fancy dress costume I once wore (more than thirty years ago) which at the time I sincerely felt was harmless because I didn’t mean anything by it.

I have also told the story about how, subsequently, I discovered Martin Carthy and the Incredible String Band and especially Show of Hands, and came to believe that they offered a positive, non-offensive way of celebrating my own, white, identity. The England of English folk music, and especially of the 1960s folk revival, is certainly an imaginary England, but then the Africa of the Black diaspora is to some extent an imaginary Africa. Salman Rushdie wrote a very good book about India called Imaginary Homelands.

A fortnight after I had embraced English folk music as a possible identity, Nick Griffin appropriated it for his white supremacist British National Party, and the whole folk-against-fascism thing happened. Say what you like about Nigel Farage, he has never shown much interest in Morris Dancing.

Me and Nick Griffin were, unfortunately, both particularly fond of one particular Show of Hands track. I discussed the song at some length in this forum at that time. I thought the song was lamenting the fact that there is a living folk-tradition among some Black and Irish communities, whereas white British people tend to take the piss out of singers who say hey-nonny-no with their fingers in their ears. But some people thought that it was playing on unfortunate tropes about vibrancy and an in-built senses of rhythm. Steve Knightley himself (who wrote the song) said that it was really about the 2001 performing arts act, which would have put small folk venues out of business. The philistine arts minister Kim Howells is certainly referenced in the lyrics.

One contributor to the discussion asserted that the song, the singer and the band were irreducibly racist (“why are we even talking about this?”) while generously conceding that I was allowed to like “problematic” things. Another went as far as to say that the entire conversation was racist: here was a privileged person—a straight white male with a job in the music industry and a platform—implying that he had something to complain about, and here was I, another middle class white person, calmly discussing whether or not he had a point.

In another song by the same band a white person—a white person!—complains that he is out of work and can’t afford to live in his own village because second-home owners have priced locals out. First world, as the young people say, problem.

In the course of the discussion, I blurted out: “You are saying that all white people are racist; or, at any rate, you are defining racist as ‘what white people are’”.

To cut to the chase.

I have since come around to the position that all white people are, in fact, racist, and that “what white people are” is a pretty good definition of the word.

But of course, speaking as a woke post-modernist who has read a little Foucault, I would have to add “It all depends on what you mean by racist.” Because words mean whatever I want them to mean.

I still think Roots is an excellent song.

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6: Socratic Dialogue

 “Andrew—why have you put that toy on display in your front room?

“Because I was fond of it for the first dozen years of my life; and because, in a weird way, I still think of it as a friend, or at least the mortal remains of a friend, and I cannot quite bring myself to destroy it. It’s silly, I know, but I am a little sentimental about these things.”

“Yes; but surely you can see that as a Jewish person, the whole idea of a rag-doll with a cute felt skull-cap and a cute hook nose and little pigtails plaited out of black wool, and a cute little bag containing thirty tiny little coins—can’t you see that is insulting and upsetting to me?”

If you want Andrew to reply:

“I am sorry; the dolls were so common in my childhood that it had never occurred to me that it was connected with hurtful stereotypes, but now you have pointed them out, naturally I will not display it any more”

select Option 1.

If you want Andrew to reply:

“I think you are being hypersensitive; I think the doll is harmless and I didn’t mean anything by it. But given your heritage and your history, you have a perfect right to be hypersensitive, and out of basic human decency I will take the toy down.”

select Option 2.

If you want Andrew to reply:

“Yes, I acknowledge that, in origin if not in intention, the toy is a racist caricature. But in return, will you acknowledge that Sid The Yid was my imaginary friend when I was a child; and that my right to display symbols of my childhood trump your right not to see caricatures of your racial and religious identity?”

select Option 3.

If you want Andrew to reply:

“The figure is not remotely racist; only someone engaged in manufactured grievance could possibly find it so. It’s a stretch to see the thirty silver coins as being somehow connected with Judas; and anyway, in my childhood games, Sid the Yid used to share them with Horace the Heaffalump”

select Option 4.

If you want Andrew to reply:

“But I didn’t hate Sid the Yid: the whole reason for wanting to display him is that I loved him. You can’t call me antisemitic. Some of my favourite toys are Jewish.”

select Option 5.

If you want Andrew to reply

“You can’t imagine that I was anti-semitic when I was young enough to be playing with stuffed toys. Stop imposing adult political sensibilities on kids.”

select Option 6.

If you want Andrew to reply:

“The term Yid isn’t remotely racist. It’s an acronym for Youthful Incomer from the Diaspora.”

select Option 7.

If you think that Andrew is making heavy weather of a very obvious point, 

select Option 8.

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5: Once upon a time, Andrew was walking down the road.

Once upon a time, Andrew was walking down the road.

Outside a shop, he saw a poster with the words FUCK OFF! printed on it in large, unfriendly letters.

Immediately, he performed an exegesis.

“I think it means ‘We are closed today’”, he said. “But I wonder why they have expressed it in such a rude way? Perhaps the owner was genuinely cross when he stuck it up. Or perhaps he has such a reputation for good manners in the neighbourhood that he takes it for granted that everyone will take FUCK OFF! as a good natured joke.”

He thought a bit longer.

“Perhaps it is a message delivered to a particular customer,” he thought “One who was very rude to him yesterday, and who will know the message is directed at him.”

“Perhaps that’s his standard OPEN / SHUT notice” he thought “Maybe it says COME IN YOU WANKER on the other side. Maybe he’s making the point that he’s the kind of chap who doesn’t care about social norms and wants to attract customers who feel the same way?”

“Or maybe he’s from a different culture” he thought “Where FUCK isn’t nearly such a rude word. I remember once eating in a cafe in Germany with a waitress who kept dropping ‘fucks’ and ‘bullshits’ into the conversation—I can only suppose she was translating milder German words and didn’t know how rude she was being in English. Or perhaps she had heard that the English were exceptionally foul-mouthed. There is a funny story about how an England cricket manager in the 1950s complained to the Australian cricket manager that members of his team kept using obscene and shocking language. The Aussie turned to his players and said ‘All right—which of you bastards has been calling this bastard a bastard?’”

“No, I’m overthinking this” he concluded. “It’s much more likely to be an advert for a local punk gig, or a political advert from a local anarchist collective.”

And then Andrew had a brain wave. He decided to ask the shopkeeper what the poster meant.

“Excuse me” he said “Why have you stuck such a rude poster on your door?”

“I am sure I don’t know what you mean,” said the shopkeeper. “There is absolutely nothing rude about the word FUCK. It’s just an acronym for Fornication Under Consent of The King. I intended it to mean ‘Please be advised that I am not taking visitors today’ and if you found it offensive, that is your problem; it is rude only in your head. Now be a good wanker and bugger off.”

As a matter of fact, the word FUCK is not, in itself, particularly rude.

It kind of represents rudeness: everyone knows that it is the King of Swears, the one word you must never, ever say: but in fact nearly everyone uses it all the time. In a conversational context “Fuck off...!” very often means “That is very surprising and I can hardly believe it.” I myself occasionally use it to mean “I acknowledge that you have told a joke at my expense, and, while at one level being a little bit annoyed, at another level, I acknowledge that it was a little bit funny.”

There is an old saying that expletives are okay when used as exclamation marks, but not when used as commas. For some fucking people, they are the actual fucking font.

I believe that the law currently takes the view that the true meaning of a text resides in the intention of the author.

If I intended my pirate cartoon strip to produce sexual excitement, then it counts as pornography (even if no-one is particularly turned on by it) but if I honestly didn’t mean it to be sexy, then it isn’t porn even if loads of people get off on looking at it. A person skinny dipping on a public beach might be charged with public order offences or causing a disturbance, but he isn’t committing a sexual offence unless you can prove that he took his clothes off for specifically kinky reasons.

This is quite sensible. But there is a problem with it.

I know that some people find bodies sexy. Not my body, necessarily, but bodies in general. I know that some people are embarrassed by them. It may be that in your nudist colony, no-one pays the slightest attention to anyone else’s skin; and it may be that that is a more sensible way of going about things, but when I decided to walk round Sainsbury’s in my birthday suit, I knew that I was doing something that other people would find (at the very least) odd. I can’t not have known.

The shop keeper knew that some people consider FUCK to be a very rude word when he stuck up the poster. He can’t possibly not have known. You can’t isolate the meaning of the word from the act of putting the poster up. The true meaning of the poster is “I am the sort of person who would display this sort of poster in my shop window.”

We aren’t really talking about the F-word. We are talking about a different word. Which begins with a different letter of the alphabet. Which is even ruder and more shocking. And which brings us back to penguins. 

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4: Many thousands of fountain pens must have been made in the eighteenth century.

Many thousands of fountain pens must have been made in the eighteenth century.

But one particular pen resides in a museum because that particular pen is the one with which Thomas Jefferson signed the Declaration of Independence.

But surely, Captain Picard could use teleportation and replication technology to make a replica of the fountain pen, identical to the original at a sub-atomic level. Do you now have two instances of Jefferson’s pen? Could you in principle have thousands of iterations of that one pen? And would they all now be the pen with which Jefferson signed the Declaration of Independence? Over the last two millennia, billions of tons and trillions of gallons of the actual body and blood of Christ have been consumed by pious Catholics.

Even those of us who are not that interested in rare books can see that a mint condition copy of the first edition of Lord of the Rings with an intact dust jacket is worth more than a mint condition copy of the first edition of Lord of the Rings without a dust jacket. But it might sometimes happen that a particular collector has kept his dust jacket pristine but inadvertently spilled tea on the interior pages of the book; while another might have kept the book in good condition but scrunched up the dust jacket. But it turns out that if you take the undamaged dust jacket and put it around the undamaged book, you do not have a mint condition first edition of Lord of the Rings. You have actually committed a kind of artistic fraud. The rest of us wonder what difference it could possibly make.

Phillip K Dick’s frivolous suggestion (in the Man in the High Castle) is that Thomas Jefferson’s pen must contain a sub-atomic particle—call it Historium if you like—which the matter replicator cannot reproduce.

He is being silly. But it does seem that a very large number of people believe that pictures and books and words contain sub-atomic particles called Obscenium, Pornographium, Racisium and Wokium.

In the Star Wars prequels, it turns out that spirituality is not a subjective, ineffable state: a Jedi Knight can be scanned for Midichlorians and discovered to be either Strong or Weak in the Force.

Perhaps we could in principle create a detector that could isolate the amount of Smuttium in Michelangelo’s David and the amount of Racistium in my beloved rag-doll.

We have mentioned Simon Heffer before. His unintentionally comedic grammar book, Strictly English, maintains that the meaning of all English words was irrevocably fixed when the Oxford English Dictionary was completed.

He acknowledges that new words like “television” and “internet” may occasionally have to be coined; but any usage of a pre-existing word which deviates from the 1928 definition is simply wrong (and barbaric, and a threat to the future of civilisation).

Christian fundamentalists believe that the true meaning of the Bible was in flux until the creation of a unique and perfect English version in 1611, which can never be improved on. I do not know if Heffer envisaged seventeen cloistered Rabbis producing seventeen textually identical copies of the Oxford English Dictionary under divine supervision. It would not greatly surprise me if he did.

I once had an argument with an internet pedant who strongly objected to use of electrocute to mean “to receive an electric shock”. The word, he opined, irreducibly meant “to be killed with electricity”.

Interestingly, he deprecated “he was electrocuted while trying to fix the light and had to be treated for burns” but permitted “he recklessly climbed a pylon and was electrocuted.” But so far as I can see, this is not the original meaning of the word. Electrocute is a vile portmanteau of “execution” and “electricity”, coined by Thomas Eddison to refer to his new system of judicial torture. (He had previously considered calling it “dynamort”.) You can’t say someone stuck his fingers in a plug socket and was electrocuted, any more than you can say that someone stepped out in front of a fast-moving car and was guillotined. 

Except, I suppose, as a colourful metaphor.

But then, if we believe in essential meanings, we have no right to say that a murderer was executed. You don’t execute people, you execute sentences, in the same way you execute wills and real estate contracts. And come to that, electricity didn’t originally mean a force, a charge, or a current. It originally meant “the quality of being attractive”, and before that (according to Wikipedia) “pertaining to amber”.

People who have vaguely heard that there is such a thing as Critical Theory believe that English Literature Departments teach that texts mean exactly what you want them to mean. Books like Strictly English are more or less conscious attempts to slay the imaginary Post-Modern foe. I suppose that was what Jordan Peterson has in mind when he insists that “brown” is always and only a description of skin-tone and never a label of ethnic heritage, even when the speaker is quite clearly using it in the latter sense.

But no-one has ever argued that texts mean whatever you want them to mean. No-one has ever argued that when Propsero says “Pluck my magic garment from me”, pluck means “hold a referendum”, magic means “a common market in goods and services” and garment means “free movement.” But any fool can see that two different people might read the Tempest and come away with different impressions about how wicked Prospero is, how hard-done-by Caliban is, and how completely unfunny Trincolo is.

Tolkien said that he disliked allegory. Cordially.

But mark what followed. He did not say “The Lord of the Rings is not allegory: it’s just a story, a piece of light entertainment, stop reading stuff into it.”

He said that the Lord of the Rings meant whatever any individual reader thought that it meant: and that you shouldn’t necessarily give special status to what he thought it meant just because he wrote it. Allegory, on his definition, was not critics reading things into books: it was authors trying to insist that their meanings were the only ones.

“I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”

This doesn’t mean that “three rings for the elven kings under the sky” means, or might mean, “seventeen pairs of sneakers for the seventeen delegates from the department of trade and industry.”

But it does mean that although Tolkien thought that the elves’ magic lembas bread was like the holy wafer in the Catholic Mass; and even though Tolkien consciously edited the book to make the likeness more obvious, readers aren’t obliged to think of the body of Jesus every time anyone reaches for some elf-bread.

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