Lili Wilkinson

Dear Anonymous,

I’m writing to respond to your comment to my blog post of last week about a taxi driver that had never heard of Google.

Here was your comment:

 anonymous said…

So, two things.

1. Noam Chomsky was wrong. Or at least he is now, I’m not sure when that statement was made. As of 2007, half the population of the planet own a mobile phone (you can read more about it here), and billions more have used one (or a landline). Furthermore, the digital divide in Australia has all but ceased to exist. Some people may choose not to use computers, but almost everyone in Australia has access to one, if not at home then at schools or public libraries.

And this wasn’t the deepest depths of the outback. This was Launceston. A city. I visited a few of the public libraries in Launceston, and I assure you they had plenty of free computer terminals. With Google and everything.

The cab driver wasn’t stupid. He seemed to have a pretty good grasp of the taxi’s GPS (which is, in fact, a computer, but I didn’t really want to get into that), and could hold his end of the conversation. But he was anti-intellectual, racist and narrow-minded (I won’t repeat the things he said about the Indian family that had recently moved in near him – but they were unsavoury). That wasn’t what the post was about. Which brings me to…

2. You’re the one who inferred that my post was about “diminishing intellect”. It wasn’t. The anecdote was about how all adults who don’t know anything about children’s literature automatically and instantly compare all childrens/YA authors with Harry Potter. Even people who have never heard of Google still know about Harry Potter. And still think it’s okay to imply that you’re a failure because you don’t have a castle in Scotland.

Sorry I didn’t contact you in person to say these things, but you forgot to leave a name in your comment. But if you have any further questions/comments, you can either leave them below or email me at lili AT liliwilkinson.com.

Cheers,

Lili Wilkinson

The Scene: Four authors pile in to a taxi outside a suburban Launceston school. Lili, Penni and Kirsty squeeze into the back. James is in the front.

Taxi Driver: Are youseall teachers, then?

James: No, we’re authors.

Taxi Driver: You’re what?

James: Authors. We write books for teenagers.

Taxi Driver: *suspicious* Fair enough, then.

The conversation drifts towards issues of intellectual property (does anyone every try to pinch your ideas?) and the Fifth Beatle. James makes a comment about being able to look stuff up on Google.

Taxi Driver: What’s a Google?

James: *blinks* Google. The search engine.

Taxi Driver: Sorry, mate.

James: The internet?

Taxi Driver: Never used a computer. Is it like Windows?

James: *stunned silence*

There is a Pause, while we all look out the window and contemplate being in the presence of a true Digital Virgin.

Taxi Driver: Kids’ books, eh? Like Harry Potter? Have youse been on TV?

I MEAN, REALLY.

So it’s a year since Harry Potter mania peaked and then disappeared. We all got over it. We read the epilogue and said “ORLY, JK? Albus Severus? For cereal?”. And now a year on most of us look back on those years with a slight nostalgic confusion – what were we thinking?

Except for me. (and Hank).

I am more obsessed with Harry Potter than I ever was when HP mania was around. I’m sure you all remember my snarky comments about plotholes and adverbs. I read the books, I enjoyed the books, then I enjoyed criticising the books. It was my Thing.

So what’s the deal?

The deal, my friends, is Sarah Rees Brennan.

She’s a YA author. She has a book of her very own. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m sure it’s excellent.

She also writes Harry Potter fanfic.

And it’s AMAZING.

It is a hundred squillion times better than anything JK ever wrote. She understands the characters better than JK does. And she certainly understands romance better than JK does.

Anyway. The end of the most recent chapter made me squee like a fangirl. I WANT MORE.

(here’s chapter one, for the interested)

“The Potter books in general are a prolonged argument for tolerance,”

-JK Rowling

I find with all things Harry Potter, that I really enjoy it, until I start thinking, and then I get irritated. It was the same with Rowling’s recent announcement about Dumbledore’s sexuality.

At first I thought “awesome! positive gay characters in children’s literature!”

And then I thought 4 things.

Thing #1

“He is my character. He is what he is and I have the right to say what I say about him.”

Once your book is published, it doesn’t belong to you anymore. It belongs to your readers. Let THEM tell YOU what happens next, not the other round.

Thing #2

“If I’d known it would make you so happy, I would have announced it years ago!”

No. You should have announced it years ago anyway. You should have put it in the books. You are probably the most influential human being in the world for young people. You have more power to influence young people’s attitudes than the United Nations, Sesame Street and their parents combined. You had an opportunity to present them with a positive gay role model, and you chose not to, I assume, because you were scared of the reaction from the religious right.

Thing #3

[Rowling] didn’t feel the need to be explicit about Dumbledore’s sexual preferences because she wanted to focus on character development.

I’m going to skip over the fact that many gay people might find that sentence deeply offensive.

Dumbledore was brave. Dumbledore liked to stick it to the Man (no pun intended). Dumbledore was never afraid to tell anyone his opinion, no matter how powerful or dangerous they were.

Except no one in the Harry Potter world knew he was gay. Not Harry, or anyone else that we know of. So he was in the closet.

So if a man as open and brave as Dumbledore felt he needed to keep his sexuality a secret – exactly what kind of a world is the Potterverse? How homophobic must the world be for Dumbledore to conceal such an important part of his identity? That’s not a “positive message” at all, or a “prolonged argument for tolerance”. It’s sad and regressive and scary.

Thing #4

Seriously. Like Rita Skeeter wouldn’t have known and put it in her book.

If an editor had taken out all of the unnecessary adverbial dialogue tags and other nonsense from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, there would be 130 000 more trees in the world today.

Don’t believe me? Oz and Ends has crunched the numbers.

I have such a complicated relationship with Harry.

I approach him as a reader, a fan, a critic, a children’s literature professional and a writer.

I spent the weekend with my peeps, curled up on sofas under doonas, munching on pumpkin cupcakes and bagels and listening to Snaz read the book aloud. It was awesome. We laughed, we cried, we complained at the huge tracts of exposition. I thoroughly enjoyed myself, as I always have whenever I’ve read a HP book.

There are a lot of criticisms I could make, but I’m going to skip over most of them. You can overlook a lot of faults for a book that inspires so much hype, joy, love and enthusiasm.

BUT.

There’s just this one thing.

The muggles.

I really, really, really wanted there to be a Muggle in the final battle. I wanted, just ONCE in the entire 7 part series, for there to be a Muggle who was a Good Guy. Not someone nasty or stupid or ineffectual. Someone GOOD. I really thought that we might see the New Improved Dudley again.

And after the series railed for so long against the Slytherins and Death Eaters for their attitudes towards halfbloods and mudbloods and purebloods – what happened with the Good Guys in the end? All the wizards married wizards and had little pureblood wizard babies. No mixed marriages. No ‘squibs’. It just totally validated everything the bad guys were gunning for.

Even the single interracial relationship (Lupin and Tonks) wasn’t permitted to exist in the Happily Ever After. And tell me Dobby wasn’t totally the black guy who dies in the first half of an action movie.

Finally, I just need to share the cover of Melbourne’s right-wing tabloid propaganda machine Sunday Herald Sun, on the day when most of the English-speaking world were reading Harry Potter:
For a moment I wasn’t sure if I was seeing the Herald Sun or the Daily Prophet. Then I saw that peculiar use of the word Wizard! and wondered if there was a Harry Potter musical.