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Please, J.K. Rowling, More Stories

Please, J.K. Rowling, More Stories

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The current Harry Potter moviefest that I’m enjoying with my son has inspired me to make a request of J.K. Rowling. I love these stores – we’ve read all the books multiple times – because they give me hope. It’s just that simple. They give me hope.

So, I navigated over to her website at http://www.jkrowling.com and – sure, why not? – clicked on the contact link.

The Blair Partnership represents J.K. Rowling internationally and across all media. Please direct any queries to info@theblairpartnership.com and a member of the team will be in touch directly. J.K. Rowling very rarely does interviews or public speaking, and when she does they are usually around a new project or charitable commitment. Please note that she does not undertake fee-paying public speaking engagements. Because of the huge volume of requests coming in, J.K. Rowling also regrets she is unable to…

Yada yada yada. Well, ok, fair enough. I sent the following email, but just in case there isn’t any analysis or reporting of the communications, I’m also posting it here. You never know, maybe they do some version of web analytics, social media harvest, or even a Net Promoter Score (put me in the “I would definitively recommend” bucket).

To Whom it May Concern:

I am aware that the illustrious J.K. Rowling could not possibly respond to the billions of her readers, but I am hoping that you maintain some sort of thematic statistics for her.

If so, may I add to the numbers of those who pray that she considers creating more stories that work at multiple levels for children and adults alike? I pray for very few things.

There are so very few such nourishing narratives that do (or can) burst into our mainstream cultures as they exist today. In the Potter books (and films – one must include the films) human complexity is better grasped in these contexts that show how important existential choices are (whether or not someone has quite enough information, whether or not situations are fair, whether or not you think anything you do will make a difference to yourself or anyone else). The stories allow us to feel (with the very deepest of empathy and intuition) compassion and pity and courage and friendship and trust and even alienation. That they do so with a marvelous reinvention of all the long-standing traditions of literature, fairy tale, and even institutional satire gives incredible depth to the world she crafted and creates the speculative but nuanced expansion of imagination that used to be the basis of all liberal education.

In short, the Potter stories give me hope during what I consider to be rather dark times.

My son Ben (now 12) has grown up with the Potter story. It has given us so many opportunities to discuss life’s issues and mysteries in a common language. I can tell you – definitively – that navigating the terrain of the characters and story have made a significant difference to his own evolving character and intellectual/creative/spiritual development. He understands being true to himself, and the meaning of friendship, and the gifts of love, awareness, grace, support. He has internal reference points for things that are difficult to articulate, but can be recognized. And he doesn’t simplify into simple dualities and sound bites. He learns to ask better questions. Thank you for this gift to my son, and to me, and to all the others, everywhere.

I love the woman of her personal history and of her effects in the world, but please – more stories. The world so desperately needs them.

Father’s Day – and Fathers’ Day

Father’s Day – and Fathers’ Day

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Happy Father’s Day!

Empathies and condolences to those whose dads have died or disappeared, and to those have, or had, or are, or must deal with “difficult” fathers.

If Father’s Day brings you pain, this post is for you. If it’s Father’s Day, and there’s no father, or it’s Father’s Day, but there just isn’t a card you could possibly give your father, or it’s Father’s Day, but you’re struggling to play double as a single mom, or it’s Father’s Day but… whatever emotional dynamics make this day non-celebratory for you, there are other things you can do!

For fathers as for mothers, as for humans – all of can use a very ancient method to find a path to celebration.

Try letting go of the literal. CELEBRATE the fatherly qualities that you love as they are expressed through the people you know. There are great dads and great men all around you. There are! If you don’t see any, you need to get out more!

Focus on the qualities that you really, truly, most authentically admire and find worthy when you see them. These are habits and attitudes and actions and values and all sorts of other things that you would sincerely wish to see in play more often (in your world and in the worlds of others).

Imitate those things! Start doing those things or appreciating these things when you see them! Enjoy them! Mimic them! Repeat them! Celebrate them!

This method survives in the religious paths that aim to follow/imitate the person or journey of the Christ, and even in its watered-down version, the WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) camp. But perhaps religion is part of why you’re not enjoying Father’s Day? Or perhaps the text-based, variously-interpreted Jesus doesn’t actually seem all that great either sometimes, especially through the lens of some of the uses to which it’s been put?

Some people think that you have to project a father into the sky, but that’s only a metaphor for the divinity – one among others, even in the most patriarchic traditions. It’s a way for us to connect with the idea of God by imagining that our own idea of a father is made perfect and loving and all-knowing, to compensate, to make us feel protected and loved. It’s a great idea, and a great feeling, but the divine can also be imagined as a mother, an animal, an idea. The divine isn’t limited. Only our imagination is limited. While I love to imagine the most wonderful of fathers is watching over me and guiding me and loving me, I don’t tend to get very literal about it and then turn around and worship him. Why? Because when I do that, I also can’t help but remember some of the less wonderful stuff, the father of pride and violence and manipulations, the father of unreasonable and conflicting demands – and commands, the father that can sometimes lack kindness or fairness. And these things then get tied up into the divine as well – as we see from our mythologies, and from our social histories.

What’s beautiful here to me is that whether you view this as a spiritual method or a practical method doesn’t really matter. If we all have a spark of the divine – then it’s already within us, and we will be attuned – if we pay attention. And if we don’t have a spark of the divine, we still have a character that continues to develop via questionings and habits and experiences, and we will notice things – if we pay attention.

No-one else is you! You will not admire everything about anyone, nor should you!

Instead, find the something here, and there…

People talk about role models, but I don’t think it’s productive or realistic to imitate or “worship” a person in their entirety – that’s just idolatry or something like that. I’m also not talking about any sort of colonial or predatory form of assimilation like a slash-and-burn cyborg here, and it doesn’t work when it’s in the mode of “should-ing” all over yourself because you feel that you don’t “measure up” in some way either.

It’s much more modest than that.

Just start to incorporate (incarnate?) what you really can’t help but see as a better thing, a sweet thing, a loving thing, a beautiful thing, a true thing, and helpful thing, a wise thing.

The trick here is to really learn to notice and to feel when you just truly admire or enjoy something – however small or fleeting it might be – about another person. You can’t really plan it, or calculate how it’s going to happen, but when you pay attention, you’ll start seeing. And when you start seeing, after a while you can’t believe that you didn’t see those things before.

Learn how to sense what’s real to you, and to follow your own heart and soul, by paying attention, through recognition, and by creative reconstruction, alignment, and re-alliance.

It’s too easy to stay in the realm of ideas on this, through some vision or articulation of a universal ideal. Instead, try really to focus in and allow the force of the galvanic singularities to affect you. Notice aspects and facets of the real people in your life, their ways of being and their actions, and their stories, and the little things that make them who they are. Of these, try picking up just one detail, the very best thing you know and love about that person, the thing you’d mention at their funeral if you had to speak about who they really were.

When you invite these little gems to activate within you, guess what happens? The very thing that you mimic, and re-present, and try to assimilate – transforms! It becomes a unique thing to you, because it can never repeat in exactly the same way when it’s filtered through the YOUness. Maybe there is no “real thing” but instead a chain of variations – sameness within difference, difference within sameness. I don’t know. I wish I did.

But this I can say with some confidence: However loosely bundled your heaps of self might be, it’s always great to pull in stuff that you know (that you intuit, that you feel, that you sense) is just better, truer, and/or more beautiful! Need some inspiration for starters? Try Atticus Finch!

On Father’s Day, I hope that YOU celebrate all those wonderful fatherly sparkles that are blooming here and there, through everyone, all over.

Happy Father’s Day, you dear, wonderful fathers!
Happy Father’s Day, you who father others in spirit!
Happy Father’s Day, you who inspire better ways to be a father!
Happy Father’s Day, you children who invoke love in the hearts of fathers!
Happy Father’s Day, you mothers loving fathers!
Happy Father’s Day, you who are fathers to the next generation, and the next!
Happy Father’s Day – everyone!

We saw Spiderman 3

We saw Spiderman 3

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Spiderman 3We promised Ben we’d go see Spiderman 3. Personally, I was pushing for the latest Shrek movie, especially after getting a tirade about violence and horribleness from another mom whose slightly younger kid wanted to leave Spiderman after about 15 minutes. Of course, they saw the IMAX version, and that’s probably a bit more intense.

Granted, there is probably a bit too much marketing toward the kids for the level of of the movie, but hey, there’s a megaton of money being made on those figures. Every mom and dad in America knows that.

Action figures are better than cigarettes, anyway.

Ben is still collecting his Star Wars stuff, and Power Rangers, and Transformers, and Fantastic Four, and even Batman. He’s already got a fair number of variations of the basic Spiderman figure. He loves them, carries a couple everywhere, has very complex worlds and plots involving them. Basically, I think they are dolls for boys, but I have to say that these articulated figures sure worked to retire anything like a Ken or GI Joe. For that I am grateful. I won’t tell you what I did to the few Barbie dolls I ever had…

Anyway, the movie was a rollicking good time had by all. Any movie with this heavy dose of vaguely uncanny doppelganger fun is good with me. Two photographer nerd superguys with the same basic taste in women – a blonde is a redhead, who is a blonde – mirrored kisses and guys who just don’t get it. Bits of temptation and hell, bits of redemption and caring – very intercontagious and structural. Instead of making truly complex characters, they separated out the good and bad and mixed them up a bit in color-coded quick time.

A little comic relief here and there, a couple of snappy insulting lines (nothing as good as “this is so not Spandex). All the women were great, although none of them got to be superheros. I loved the scenes between Peter Parker and his aunt May (Rosemary Harris) in particular. I don’t know if they pulled a Natalie Wood on this one or not, but if she was doing her own singing Kirsten Dunst has a very pleasant voice.

Sandman showed up, although he seemed a bit more like a sandstorm. I thought he was a sympathetic figure, actually. Nobody ever gives his daughter and ex a darned thing (big of you to “forgive him” though).

Let’s get Swamp Thing and Concrete into the action – what, they don’t count for anything? They’d rock.

Note for Spiderman 4, Spiderman Continues, and Spiderman meets Scooby-Doo: Never spend a lot of camera time on crying guys with bulgy eyes, especially if they do funny things with their mouths too. Tobey Maguire should not be allowed to cry on camera – he does not do it well. A death scene was almost ruined for me when I had to stifle my laughter for a second. Stick with the Goblin guy, and Sandman, for the crying parts. They both have better faces for it.

I think Tobey (Spiderman/Peter Parker) got a bit ripped off in this movie. Everybody else had better lines. The interesting part for his role was when he was briefly “wrestling” with the internal evil displaced onto the black meteorcrud-crystal lube-symbiote-thing. I liked the dancing, and many of his expressions were actually more appealing (to me) but no matter how they muss his hair or add mascara, Billie Joe Armstrong he’s not.He was starting to remind me of that guy that played Frodo, Elijah Wood. Ok for a hobbit, not so much for a superhero. I liked most of the other characters more.

Tofer youngI had seen Topher Grace (Christopher John Grace, b.1978) several times before I recognized him at all, and that was only because of a fleeting expression on his face. My, the gawky boy (Eric Foreman) from “That 70’s Show” sure turned out well. I’m guessing that, except for the costume, it must have been fun for him to play Eddie Brock/Venom. Tofer as Eddie BrockI wouldn’t have thought he could have done it. You can’t tell from the available stills from the movie, but he had a serious yum factor going. Well, he did until he became Venom – the teeth and little snaky black bits of symbiotic goo were fantastically scary and wonderful. And so was the Spock/Austin Powers raised eyebrow action, although the makeup was just that tad too heavy.Eyebrow action

I’m picky, huh? Well, I actually enjoyed the film very much. Two movies in two days. We haven’t done that in a long time. I think the last movie we went to before that was Superman. Oh yeah, that reminds me. The flag moment was a bit gratuitous, wasn’t it? At least they didn’t go all Captain America on us for this one.

Final message: You always have the choice to do the right thing.

Actually, you don’t always have that choice, because sometimes you don’t have enough information.
Sometimes you don’t have a good way of making a decision.
Sometimes there is no right thing to do.
Sometimes you know the right thing to do, but it is not within your power.

But I know what they mean. It’s a little streamlined for clarity. And we need the reminder that we can make choices.

The choices you make create the character that you are, which affects the way you think, which affects the way you make decisions and judgments, and the way you start to habitually make the same kinds of choices, etc. etc. When you have a choice, do the very best you can to think it through, and feel it through, and consider everything you possibly can – and then do what you judge to be the best thing, the right thing, in that context. All of that wouldn’t do very well at the end of a movie…

Just remember, even if you think you’re doing the right thing, you might still be wrong, and life isn’t fair.

Joe Frank has pointed out rather persuasively that while the truth may be slippery and elusive, you are always the author of your own lie.

But that’s a whole ‘nuther kind of movie.

Ahh, yeah. Time to sleep. ‘Night.

Leonardo Da Vinci

Leonardo Da Vinci

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Many have made a trade of delusions and false miracles, deceiving the stupid multitude.

There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.

Blinding ignorance does mislead us. O! Wretched mortals, open your eyes!

Nothing can be love or hated unless it is first known.

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence he is just using his memory.

The depth and strength of a human character are defined by its moral reserves. People reveal themselves completely only when they are thrown out of the customary conditions of their life, for only then do they have to fall back on their reserves.

Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs.

Wisdom is the daughter of experience.

All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

Learning never exhausts the mind.

The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.

The smallest feline is a masterpiece.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.

You can have no dominion greater or less than that over yourself.

I have offended God and mankind because my work didn’t reach the quality it should have.