The Sheila Variations

On the essays shelf:

Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens reviewed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final installment of J.K. Rowling’s series, for the New York Times Book Review in 2007. Recently, I’m not sure if you’re aware, but some idiot wrote a piece bemoaning the fact that adults “now” seem to be reading Young Adult fiction, and, gasp, LIKING it, and, according to this idiot, these people should feel “ashamed” of it. I won’t link to the piece, it’s easily findable, and it launched a million counter-attacks. The topic of that idiotic “think”-piece is nothing new. I remember when Harry Potter first came out, and kids, of course, flipped over it, but then adults did too, and there were a couple of pieces that I recall (and probably more) saying, essentially, What is going on here? It’s so cute when snobs get baffled by things that are popular.

Here’s my thing about commentary like that. You worry about your own damn self, and let me worry about me. There are MANY things to worry about when it comes to the behavior of our fellow humans, but what people choose to read is NOT on that list, nor should it be.

I seem to recall Maureen Dowd writing a think-piece about 10 years ago on the fact that middle-aged soccer moms were now listening to Eminem. Dowd wasn’t really worried about it, I don’t think … she’s not really a scold in that way (although she can be in other ways). You could not get away from the Eminem chatter 10 years ago. Now, obviously, when someone becomes as popular as Eminem did (and “popular” doesn’t even seem to cover it, especially not in the year following the release of The Eminem Show – which was the real tipping point, which was when he reached the Soccer Mom contingency – those of us who had been listening to him from the get-go were already on board) – but anyway, when someone in a “niche” market like hip-hop (at least it was pretty “niche” at that time) becomes as huge as Eminem, it is obviously news. It represented a gigantic cultural shift. It represented the breaking down of some major walls. It had an enormous impact; not, perhaps, to the crossover level of Elvis Presley, but it was in that realm. When Eminem started appealing to old people, women, children, a mainstream white audience, in other words … that was when people started taking notice of him and, incidentally, “worrying” about him – which was snobbery in its own way, not to mention racist, something Eminem clocked them on, most explicitly in his lyrics to “White America,” the opening song on The Eminem Show:

See the problem is, I speak to suburban kids
Who otherwise woulda never knew these words exist
Whose moms probably woulda never gave two squirts of piss
’til I created so much motherfuckin’ turbulence
Straight out the tube, right into your living rooms I came
And kids flipped, when they knew I was produced by Dre
That’s all it took, and they were instantly hooked right in
And they connected with me too because I looked like them
That’s why they put my lyrics up under this microscope
Searching with a fine tooth comb, it’s like this rope
Waiting to choke; tightening around my throat
Watchin’ me while I write this, like I don’t like this, NOPE!
All I hear is: lyrics, lyrics, constant controversy, sponsors working
Round the clock to try to stop my concerts early, surely
Hip hop was never a problem in Harlem only in Boston
After it bothered the fathers of daughters starting to blossom.

“Hip hop was never a problem in Harlem, only in Boston.” That’s it exactly.

You could say the same thing about Elvis with rhythm and blues. And Elvis understood the issue in a similar way. Mainstream America didn’t care about rhythm and blues, or at least didn’t WORRY about it, as long as it stayed on the black side of town. But when a white boy stepped onto Ed Sullivan’s stage, and wiggled his hips, and was filmed from the waist up so that white America wouldn’t have to see it … well, well, well, we all know what happened THEN. Mayhem. The world exploded. We are still picking up the pieces.

Eminem’s audience widened exponentially with The Eminem Show (and then, directly following, with the critically acclaimed 8 Mile). What did it signify? What did it mean? I’m sure there were some who bemoaned what had happened. I’m sure there were worried think-pieces about what Eminem’s crossover moment signified. Thankfully, his fans didn’t give a shit about that because they were too busy blasting “Sing for the Moment” at top volume. When the “youth culture” dictates what is cool to the adults, as opposed to the other way around, it’s a “moment”. But of course that is nothing new either. In 1956, Elvis told a reporter that it wasn’t just “girls” going crazy at his shows, it was old people, little kids, everyone. Youths dictating what is “cool” may seem to be more intense now, because of the 24/7 media and also the easy availability of ALL music now, via things like iTunes and file sharing. Your kids aren’t listening to vinyl huddled in their rooms. You can download a song easily, and get up to speed. So there’s that factor.

But I don’t see anything in any of it as worrisome. It’s just the culture operating as it should. Or, as it does. Business as usual, in other words.

Worrying about the fact that adults sometimes read and enjoy books/music meant for tweens seems to be a complete and utter waste of the beautiful brain and its analytical capabilities that God has given you.

For whatever reason, I am impervious to being shamed for my personal taste. I don’t know why that has happened, but it has, and it has aided me enormously in writing criticism. I have had this imperviousness since I was a kid, a practiced and intense FAN of things from before I can even remember. My taste has an impermeable bullet-proof vest around it. Sometimes people say hurtful things, and I’m human, I feel hurt, but it doesn’t make me alter what I’m doing. I don’t second-guess my own taste. Ever. I love what I love. There have been some interesting moments when I first realized how other people react to an individual’s specific taste. A film critic on Facebook, who admired me, said he was “disappointed” in one of my “favorite films” list – but, he assured me, “it’s okay, I still like you!” It was such a weird response. You’re “disappointed”? Really? You “still like me”? Wow, thanks. Some guy said he was “worried” about the fact that I thought What’s Up Doc was the funniest movie ever. Worried?? You’re actually worried? I don’t relate to other people’s tastes like that. Look, you could tell me your favorite movie was Herbie the Love Bug and I wouldn’t blink an eye. As a matter of fact, I would say, “Tell me why immediately. I need to hear you discuss it.” I think it’s definitely worth people’s while, especially if they consider themselves cinephiles (a word I don’t like – I prefer “film fan”) – to educate themselves on the history of the craft they profess to adore. That’s just being a responsible fan. If you write about movies for a (semi)-living, and you have no understanding of what 1930s cinema is about, or what foreign film is about, if your frame of reference comes from a 20-year period tops – that’s a huge problem. It limits your perspective. But besides that consideration: loving what you love? Go for it.

The flip side has been true for me as well. Before I did what I refer to as the “Stalinist purge” of the readership I acquired early on in my blog, my yearly Bloomsday posts were greeted with dismay, eye-rolls, sneers about “elitism”, and downright hostility. This from people who had never read the book. “When are you gonna devote a day to Tom Clancy?” quipped one asshole. Never, sir. I can promise you that. Never. Sorry my posts on James Joyce are pushing your buttons. Or, no, my real reaction was:

These people felt “left out” by my love of James Joyce, had no interest in actually reading the man, and instead resorted to sneers about how Michael Crichton or Tom Clancy was “good enough” for them. I am not exaggerating.

I have gotten it from all sides, and I could fill a warehouse with the fucks I do not give.

This goes along with my firm belief that there is no such thing as a Guilty Pleasure. The only reason to feel guilty about any pleasure is if it harms others. You know, if you get pleasure from boiling puppies, then yes, you should feel guilty as hell. But the movies I love, or the books I love … if they give me pleasure, I acknowledge that pleasure, and there is zero guilt involved. G.I. Jane is not a “guilty pleasure.” That’s Pleasure, End-Stop. I cover all that a little bit here. It’s actually extremely relaxing once you let go of the “guilty pleasure” concept.

My Elvis pieces were referred to as “fanfic” by some douche on Twitter (he meant it as an insult). He wasn’t being overtly hostile, just kind of cutting me down to size, you know. It’s annoying, and indicative of deeper issues in the critical world (like: why is blatant enjoyment seen as suspect?? How has THAT occurred?), but it doesn’t impact my desire to share, OR (most important) how I write about the things I love. As a matter of fact, the opposite occurs. Being made fun of (however gently) for being a “fangirl” has NEVER shamed me. On the contrary, it makes me realize that I am on the right path.

So no. I am not worried that grown-ups loved Harry Potter. I read the Harry Potter books. I liked some better than others. Definitely not as deep as, say, the Narnia books, or Tolkien’s tales, there was something very surface-y about Harry Potter, but the books were definitely entertaining. I read the Twilight books, too. It was during the darkest period in the history of my family, when my family sat around in my parents’ house on a death vigil that lasted for a month. Snow piled up outside. Hospice nurses came and went. We waited. We watched over. We cried. We loved. We did nothing but watch and wait. Neighbors left pans of lasagna covered in foil on the front stoop. I read the Twilight books during that death vigil. I couldn’t keep my focus on anything more substantial. The books were absolutely ridiculous, terribly written, and also strangely compelling. I have forgotten most of them. But they were a very pleasurable distraction during a terrible terrible time. There are countless examples. Amazingly, I am also able to read and enjoy Tolstoy and Joseph Heller and Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot.

Then there was the worried chatter about the re-issuing of books referenced in the Twilight books (like Wuthering Heights) with sexy Twilight-ized covers to appeal to the teenage market. Some literary critics and bloggers were “appalled.” I think those literary bloggers should be ashamed of themselves. 14-year-old girls were racing out to read Wuthering Heights because it is talked about so extensively in Twilight, and it just seems like smart marketing to give the book a sexy cover that would appeal, and who knows how many girls were turned on to Emily Bronte because of that? Who knows how many of those voracious young girls then went on to Jane Eyre? Or whatever. Only a douche would think re-issuing Wuthering Heights with a Twilight-ish cover design was a bad thing. These folks seem to PREFER literature as an elitist pursuit, and THEY want to be the gatekeepers, not some horrible writer like Stephanie Mayer. You know. This is how people spend their time when they WORRY about what others are doing.

Life is short, kids. Love what you love. No apology.

In my forays into Tumblr, I see a ton of angst about having your particular “ship” criticized. There’s a lot of drama. A lot of screaming along the lines of: I AM ALLOWED TO SHIP WHAT I WANT TO SHIP.

The phrase “No shit, Sherlock” comes to mind.

Stop wanting others to validate your fantasy life. If your fantasy is fragile enough that you are completely thrown by others criticizing it, then stop sharing your fantasy online, and let that fantasy live offline where it is safe. Do what your Fan Ancestors did before the Internet. Let your Freak Flag fly in private. Share with a trusted few. Stop looking for others to “approve” of … your own goddamn fantasy life! Good Lord! Be free, for God’s sake.

Clearly I have strong feelings.

Hitchens had read all of the Harry Potter books, mainly because his daughter was reading them, and also it was obviously a cultural phenomenon and he wanted to investigate it. (He provides an image of his small daughter, holding the gigantic hard-cover book open with her elbow – a touching image, and one that happened in our family too – I remember looking over and seeing Cashel, age 7 or 8, with an 800 page book open on his lap, his elbow holding down the sides.) Hitchens starts off the piece with an interesting observation, that there is something endlessly attractive about the “boarding school narrative.” Perhaps especially to American children who don’t, on the whole, go to boarding school, at least not in the same numbers as British children do. I know that when I was a kid, boarding school stories were among my favorite types of stories, along with “orphan” stories. If a book was set in a boarding school, I was automatically interested. Many of the stories I wrote as a kid took place in boarding schools. As a British person, who experienced first-hand the awful-ness of boarding school, its sadism and lack of privacy and all that, Hitchens finds the phenomenon very interesting and starts out the whole essay referencing George Orwell (what a shock), but Orwell, of course, wrote the gold standard of British boarding school essays, one that every English author imitates in their own memoirs. It’s almost standard at this point.

There’s a lot more in the review, and Hitchens is obviously a fan of the series, although he clocks some of its more noticeable flaws. Hitchens, without being a worrywart, wonders about the phenomenon of the books, and how they tap into these common tropes around for a long time (boarding school stories, orphan hero stories), and how the stories seem to work.

Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens, ‘Harry Potter: The Boy Who Lived’, by Christopher Hitchens

I would give a lot to understand this phenomenon better. Part of it must have to do with the extreme banality and conformity of school life as it is experienced today, with everything oriented toward safety on the one hand and correctness on the other. But this on its own would not explain my youngest daughter a few years ago, sitting hours on end with her tiny elbow flattening the pages of a fat book, and occasionally laughing out loud at the appearance of Scabbers the rat. (One hears that not all children retain the affection for reading that the Harry Potter books have inculcated: This isn’t true in my house at least.)

Scabbers turns out to mutate into something a bit worse than a rat, and the ancient charm of metamorphosis is one that J.K. Rowling has exploited to the uttermost. Another well-tested appeal, that of the orphan hero, has also been given an intensive workout with the Copperfield-like privations of the eponymous hero. For Orwell, the English school story from Tom Brown to Kipling’s Stalky and Co. was instantly bound up with dreams of wealth and class and snobbery, yet Rowling has succeeded in unmooring it from these considerations and giving us a world of youthful democracy and diversity, in which the humble leading figure has a name that – though it was given to a Shakespearean martial hero and king – could as well belong to an English labor union official. Perhaps Anglophilia continues to play its part, but if I were one of the few surviving teachers of Anglo-Saxon I would rejoice at the way in which such terms as “muggle” and “Wizengamot,” and such names as Godric, Wulfric, and Dumbledore, had become common currency. At this rate, the teaching of Beowulf could be revived. The many Latin incantations and imprecations could also help rekindle interest in the study of a “dead” language.

In other respects, too, one recognizes the school story formula. If a French or German or other “foreign” character appears in the Harry Potter novels, it is always as a cliche: Fleur and Krum both speak as if to be from “the Continent” is a joke in itself. The ban on sexual matters is also observed fairly pedantically, though as time has elapsed Rowling has probably acquired male readers who find themselves having vaguely impure thoughts about Hermione Granger (if not, because the thing seems somehow impossible, about Ginny Weasley). Most interesting of all, perhaps, and as noted by Orwell, “religion is also taboo.” The schoolchildren appear to know nothing of Christianity; in this latest novel Harry and even Hermione are ignorant of two well-known biblical verses encountered in a churchyard. That the main characters nonetheless have a strong moral code and a solid ethical commitment will be a mystery to some – like His Holiness the Pope and other clerical authorities who have denounced the series – while seeming unexceptionable to many others. As Hermione phrases it, sounding convincingly Kantian or even Russellian about something called the Resurrection Stone:

How can I possibly prove it doesn’t exist? Do you expect me to get hold of – of all the pebbles in the world and test them? I mean, you could claim that anything’s real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody’s proved it doesn’t exist.

For all this apparently staunch secularism, it is ontology that ultimately slackens the tension that ought to have kept these tales vivid and alive. Theologians have never been able to answer the challenge that contrasts God’s claims to simultaneous omnipotence and benevolence: Whence then cometh evil? The question is the same if inverted in a Manichean form: How can Voldemore and his wicked forces have such power and yet be unable to destroy a mild-mannered and rather disorganized schoolboy? In a short story this discrepancy might be handled and also swiftly resolved in favor of one outcome or another, but over the course of seven full-length books the mystery, at least for this reader, loses its ability to compel, and in this culminating episode the enterprise actually becomes tedious. Is there really no Death Eater or dementor who is able to grasp the simple advantage of surprise?

The repeated tactic of deus ex machina (without a deus) has a deplorable effect on both the plot and the dialogue. The need for Rowling to play catch-up with her many convolutions infects her characters as well. Here is Harry trying to straighten things out with a servile house-elf:

“I don’t understand you, Kreacher,” he said finally. “Voldemort tried to kill you, Regulus died to bring Voldemort down, but you were still happy to betray Sirius to Voldemort? You were happy to go to Narcissa and Bellatrix, and pass information to Voldemort through them …”

Yes, well, one sees why he is confused.