Dan Hemmens has yet another go at JK Rowling
This is going to be short, because frankly there's not a lot to be said except "JK Rowling is so terminally stupid that she needs to purged from the gene pool for the good of humanity."
For those of you who haven't been obsessively following everything that infuriating woman does, she is currently suing the guy behind the Harry Potter Lexicon.
Now I'll try to be fair here. If the guy has genuinely reproduced text from the Potter books without attribution, then he's breaking the law and he needs to correct that, but the guy's a professional librarian and frankly I trust his ability to credit sources properly far, far more than JKR's ability to identify genuine plagiarism.
On the other hand her complaints are so utterly asinine that, well, that I'm completely unsurprised but I'm going to be rude about them anyway.
I think the most telling example of JK Rolwing's complete failure to understand anything, ever, from birth is this:
For instance, she said, the Ogre entry simply said, "Ron and Hermione think they see an ogre at Three Broomsticks." A superior entry, Ms. Rowling testified, would have pointed out that "An ogre in European folklore was a flesh-eating giant."
Say it with me now.
What the fucking fucking fucking fuck?
Seriously JK: how fucking stupid are you, you stupid, stupid woman.
The Harry Potter Lexicon is a guide to the Harry Potter books. Your proposed encyclopaedia is probably going to be a guide to the Harry Potter world. The fact that you can't tell the difference is testimony to how utterly stupid, stupid, stupid you are. It is also why your books are so very, very bad.
The only information we have about ogres in the actual text of Harry Potter (as opposed to the magical world of JK Rowling's brain, where Dumbledore is gay, and the series is a protracted plea for tolerance) is that which is provided in the lexicon: Ron and Hermione think they see an ogre at Three Broomsticks. Adding a pointless piece of trivial information would not, in fact, create a superior entry. It would create an inferior entry.
Rowling's objections to the Lexicon boil down to an inability to understand that "Harry Potter" is an artefact which exists in the world, it is a series of texts and commentaries on those texts by the author, and the purpose of the Lexicon is to catalogue and make accessible that textual information. Rowling seems to somehow expect the Harry Potter Lexicon to contain information which is not contained in the Harry Potter books, but that simply isn't its purpose.
As far as Rowling is concerned, Harry Potter is not a series of cultural artefacts existing within the world, but a world that exists in her imagination. This is why she feels so free to amend, interpret, and justify the text after its publication. As far as she's concerned (and, as other FB articles have discussed, as far as a depressingly large number of other people are concerned) the Harry Potter universe has a distinct, external reality and the process of reading about Harry Potter is a process of bringing your understanding into line with this distinct, external reality. Essentially a person's appreciation of Harry Potter (as far as Rowling is concerned) can be judged exclusively in terms of how closely it matches her own.
The Harry Potter Lexicon is something altogether different. It is a guide to the text (and also the metatext and commentary). It does not seek to define or redefine the boundaries of the Wizarding world, merely to gather together, in one place, textual information about Harry Potter. Calling this "plagiarism" (or to use Rowling's infuriatingly cutesy term "pilfering") is roughly analogous to calling Easton's Bible Dictionary blasphemy. And just like the Harry Potter Lexicon, Easton's Bible Dictionary contains some very, very short entries, for example:
Pahath-Moab: Governor of Moab, a person whose descendants returned from the Captivity and assisted in rebuilding Jerusalem (Ezra 2:6; 8:4; 10:30).
No doubt JK would suggest that a superior entry would add "Moab is a place which appears in the bible".
It gets crazier. When the counsel for the defence pointed out to Ms Rowling that actually, putting a bunch of information into alphabetical order so that it would be easily accessible is exactly what lexicons, dictionaries, and encyclopaedias are supposed to do, the exchange went something like this:
"Have you ever read a dictionary, Miss Rowling?" Mr. Hammer demanded. Alphabetical order, he continued, "is what the Encyclopedia Britannica uses, isn't that true?"
To which Ms. Rowling retorted: "What are you accessing in these A-to-Z's? Aren't you being suckered out of your hard-earned cash?"
That's right folks, she actually just said that dictionaries, encyclopaedias and reference works are a waste of money. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the champion of children's literacy, the great new hope for the education of a generation, Ms Joanne "I don't think dictionaries are useful" Rowling.
Rowling has also said that the whole business has been crushing her creativity, and she is not sure if she has "the will or the heart" now to publish her own encyclopaedia.
I guess there's an upside to everything then.
For those of you who haven't been obsessively following everything that infuriating woman does, she is currently suing the guy behind the Harry Potter Lexicon.
Now I'll try to be fair here. If the guy has genuinely reproduced text from the Potter books without attribution, then he's breaking the law and he needs to correct that, but the guy's a professional librarian and frankly I trust his ability to credit sources properly far, far more than JKR's ability to identify genuine plagiarism.
On the other hand her complaints are so utterly asinine that, well, that I'm completely unsurprised but I'm going to be rude about them anyway.
I think the most telling example of JK Rolwing's complete failure to understand anything, ever, from birth is this:
For instance, she said, the Ogre entry simply said, "Ron and Hermione think they see an ogre at Three Broomsticks." A superior entry, Ms. Rowling testified, would have pointed out that "An ogre in European folklore was a flesh-eating giant."
Say it with me now.
What the fucking fucking fucking fuck?
Seriously JK: how fucking stupid are you, you stupid, stupid woman.
The Harry Potter Lexicon is a guide to the Harry Potter books. Your proposed encyclopaedia is probably going to be a guide to the Harry Potter world. The fact that you can't tell the difference is testimony to how utterly stupid, stupid, stupid you are. It is also why your books are so very, very bad.
The only information we have about ogres in the actual text of Harry Potter (as opposed to the magical world of JK Rowling's brain, where Dumbledore is gay, and the series is a protracted plea for tolerance) is that which is provided in the lexicon: Ron and Hermione think they see an ogre at Three Broomsticks. Adding a pointless piece of trivial information would not, in fact, create a superior entry. It would create an inferior entry.
Rowling's objections to the Lexicon boil down to an inability to understand that "Harry Potter" is an artefact which exists in the world, it is a series of texts and commentaries on those texts by the author, and the purpose of the Lexicon is to catalogue and make accessible that textual information. Rowling seems to somehow expect the Harry Potter Lexicon to contain information which is not contained in the Harry Potter books, but that simply isn't its purpose.
As far as Rowling is concerned, Harry Potter is not a series of cultural artefacts existing within the world, but a world that exists in her imagination. This is why she feels so free to amend, interpret, and justify the text after its publication. As far as she's concerned (and, as other FB articles have discussed, as far as a depressingly large number of other people are concerned) the Harry Potter universe has a distinct, external reality and the process of reading about Harry Potter is a process of bringing your understanding into line with this distinct, external reality. Essentially a person's appreciation of Harry Potter (as far as Rowling is concerned) can be judged exclusively in terms of how closely it matches her own.
The Harry Potter Lexicon is something altogether different. It is a guide to the text (and also the metatext and commentary). It does not seek to define or redefine the boundaries of the Wizarding world, merely to gather together, in one place, textual information about Harry Potter. Calling this "plagiarism" (or to use Rowling's infuriatingly cutesy term "pilfering") is roughly analogous to calling Easton's Bible Dictionary blasphemy. And just like the Harry Potter Lexicon, Easton's Bible Dictionary contains some very, very short entries, for example:
Pahath-Moab: Governor of Moab, a person whose descendants returned from the Captivity and assisted in rebuilding Jerusalem (Ezra 2:6; 8:4; 10:30).
No doubt JK would suggest that a superior entry would add "Moab is a place which appears in the bible".
It gets crazier. When the counsel for the defence pointed out to Ms Rowling that actually, putting a bunch of information into alphabetical order so that it would be easily accessible is exactly what lexicons, dictionaries, and encyclopaedias are supposed to do, the exchange went something like this:
"Have you ever read a dictionary, Miss Rowling?" Mr. Hammer demanded. Alphabetical order, he continued, "is what the Encyclopedia Britannica uses, isn't that true?"
To which Ms. Rowling retorted: "What are you accessing in these A-to-Z's? Aren't you being suckered out of your hard-earned cash?"
That's right folks, she actually just said that dictionaries, encyclopaedias and reference works are a waste of money. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the champion of children's literacy, the great new hope for the education of a generation, Ms Joanne "I don't think dictionaries are useful" Rowling.
Rowling has also said that the whole business has been crushing her creativity, and she is not sure if she has "the will or the heart" now to publish her own encyclopaedia.
I guess there's an upside to everything then.
