Dan Harmon Poops: HEY, DID I MISS ANYTHING? →
Kids:
A few hours ago, I landed in Los Angeles, turned on my phone, and confirmed what you already know. Sony Pictures Television is replacing me as showrunner on Community, with two seasoned fellows that I’m sure are quite nice - actually, I have it on good authority they’re quite nice, because…
This is the first page of a handwritten draft of Infinite Jest. Found it on the website of draft, which is a new & exciting journal about the writing process: “mechanics, techniques, approaches, triumphs, failures, concussive frustration—everything that goes into crafting a publishable piece of creative writing through revision.” More here.
Behind every great work, there is an ink-stained piece of notebook paper.
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 Voldemort 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.
— Christopher Hitchens, reviewing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
I don’t like Harry Potter whatsoever, but I still think it’s great that children are reading (which is inevitably the conclusion CH comes to, it seems).
Adrian Walsh
http://cadrianwalsh.com/
“In the Same Room” by Julia Holter
