Serious drama is afoot in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter! We wrote about what the end of the series meant for some local HP disciples last summer, but there's a new, extremely serious rift in superfan land happening right now. It's between author J.K. Rowling and Steven Jan Vander Ark, a sweet 50-year-old librarian and who runs the obsessive Harry Potter Lexicon, a go-to HP online encylopedia. Even Rowling has used it, she has said, when writing on the road and without her own books to refer to. She even gave the Lexicon her fan site award a few years back. Recently, after Rowling learned that Vander Ark had been tapped by the tiny RDR Books to publish the Lexicon as an HP encyclopedia, she decided to sue for copyright infringement. You see, she's planning on penning her own Harry Potter glossery, and assumes nobody will care to purchase hers if they've already got Vander Ark's! Plus, the billionaire author contends the print verrsion of the site merely repackages her own work, and unlike a free site, is intended to churn out a profit.

The Leaky Cauldron, one of the top HP fan sites, has severed ties with the Lexicon -- they'd previously maintained a friendly webby allegiance grounded in HP love. But it hasn't stopped there. The Times reports on the heartbreak:

On the witness stand in Federal District Court, he [Vander Ark] portrayed the famous writer as his idol, his true literary love, who had been unaccountably bewitched by the evil, money-grubbing forces of publishing, like one of Voldemort’s vassals. One day, he testified, Ms. Rowling was singling out his Harry Potter Lexicon Web site, out of “hundreds of thousands” of Potter fan sites on the Web, for praise; the next, she was accusing him of plagiarism for wanting to turn it into a book.

“I did,” Mr. Vander Ark said, his face reddening, as he turned away from Ms. Rowling, who was sitting 10 feet away at the plaintiff’s table, listening intently.

Then he burst out crying. “Sorry,” he said, regaining his composure. “It’s been difficult because there’s been a lot of criticism, obviously, and that was never the intention.”

Rowling has a real knack toying with her fans' emotions. This is upsetting, considering some of us still aren't over Dumbledore.

4/16/2008 10:33:43 AM by Sharon Steel | Comments [0] |  

MASSAGE HERESY
10 years ago
April 3, 1998 | Sarah McNaught looked into why a local massage student was expelled from the Muscular Therapy Institute upon divulging that she was a professional dominatrix.
“Sheila, however, says there is nothing dangerous about her work, which involves various forms of erotic pain or domination. And she is adamant that she does not have sex with her clients.

“ ‘The idea is for me to establish my dominance over them in different ways,’ she explains. ‘Sometimes, for instance, putting a collar on them is enough to give them the sense of submission they seek.’ Whether the scenario involves forced cross-dressing or foot worship, she says, her profession relies on acting out other people’s fantasies. ‘Some people enjoy humiliation and being under my control as a way to escape their everyday lives for an hour,’ she says.

“But from [MTI’s executive director Mary Ann] DiRoberts’s point of view, what Sheila does is not so harmless. DiRoberts believes that potential clients’ opinion of massage therapy will suffer if the public finds out that MTI counts sex workers among its students. The consequence, she says, will be a decrease in clientele for the profession as a whole.”
 
SMACK ATTACK
20 years ago
April 1, 1988 | Ric Kahn reported on Gloucester’s serious heroin problem, finding that one out of 125 Gloucester residents was a junkie.
“Gloucester—Sir Smack blew in from Boston back in ’68...

“He was electric, charming the pants off both the guys and girlies. They’d lie and steal just to spend some time with him, their demigod, for he could stifle their pain. The outnumbered cops tried to bust up the all-night party, kick him out of their seafaring city. But he was hard to keep down. In waterfront barrooms, down on the boulevard near the famous bronze Man at the Wheel, in the bathrooms and basements of turn-of-the-century-double-deckers — he was being introduced all over town. Buddy to buddy, cousin to cousin, husband and wife, brother to sister, generation to generation, his influence spread from Gloucester and its industrial-strength family ties. The former big-city stranger became a downright Gloucester guy, a regular Jones.” Read Full Article

MEAN STREET
25 years ago
April 5, 1983 | William Bennett talked to the New England Athletics Congress chairman for “race walking” Steve Vaitones about his peculiar sport and those who heckle him for it.
“Even more discouraging than automobiles are their drivers — at least for a race walker. Race walkers do look odd, and drivers don’t let them forget it. Vaitones, who is currently spending three hours a day practicing his arm-swinging, straight-legged lope, has plenty of opportunity to collect insults. One of the standard routines goes like this; driver puts beer can in right hand, cranks down window with left. ‘Whatsa matta — your jockstrap too tight?’ Swigs. Guns accelerator.

“Occasionally, though, Vaitones overhears an onlooker reprimand a heckler: ‘Hey that’s hard work. I read about it in an airline magazine.’ “

COMING TO LIGHT
30 years ago
April 4, 1978 | Howard Litwak sifted through Franz Kafka’s Letters To Friends, Family, And Editors.
“Had Franz Kafka’s wishes been carried out, this volume of his letters would never have been published. Kafka asked Max Brod, his longtime friend...to burn his correspondence...after his death. Fortunately for us, Brod chose to ignore those instructions...

“The letters...reveal other aspects of his personality: his forthright and perceptive criticism of the works-in-progress of his friends,... his dissatisfaction with his own writing (to Brod: ‘I am not enclosing the novels (referring to The Trial and Amerika.) Why stir up the old struggles? Only because I haven’t burned them yet?’), his self-loathing (to Klopstock: ‘Must you always be reproving me? Don’t I do that enough myself?’ and later ‘You must simply keep in mind that you are writing to a wretched little person possessed by all sorts of evil spirits.’) Yet he never lost the biting wit also evident in his works. Writing to Brod of trying to housebreak a cat:
 
“How hard it is to arrive at an understanding with an animal on this question. There seem to be only misunderstandings, for the cat knows, through blows and other explanation, that there is something undesirable about taking care of her needs of nature, and that the place for it has to be carefully chosen. So what does she do? Well, for example she chooses a spot that is dark, that will in addition show me her affection...But from the human side this spot happens to be inside my bedroom slipper.”

4/4/2008 10:40:14 AM by Ian Sands | Comments [0] |  

12/6/2007 3:00:22 PM by Ryan Stewart | Comments [0] |  

Game 5 of the ALCS was about an hour from start-time when Nick Hornby took the stage at the Devotion School in Brookline last night. The first question from the floor concerned, not surprisingly, Hornby's take on the current Red Sox series -- given that Hornby's Fever Pitch, a book about English soccer fanatics, had been magically turned into a Farrelly Bros film about Red Sox obsessives, which in turn was famously forced to undergo several last-second rewrites as the real-life Sox miraculously won their first World Series in 81 years.

Given that experience, you'd think Nick Hornby would understand that making even idle, humorous remarks about the Sox' prospects would not be taken lightly by the famously superstitious Fenway faithful. We're not sure if this rises to the level of the Curse of the Bambino, but it's damn well close. (Click above to see what we're talking about, and listen for the audience's audible gasp.) FOR GOD'S SAKE, MAN, THEY WERE DOWN 3-1. The Sox' subsequent drubbing of the Indians notwithstanding, we reserve the right to hold a book-burning on Yawkey Way should Our Boys fail to take two at home.

More from the Hornby appearance, including a reading from his fantastic new "young adult" novel Slam, coming over on Word Up on Thursday of next week. Thanks to Brookline Booksmith for hosting the reading.

10/19/2007 4:28:27 PM by Carly Carioli | Comments [0] |  

One of the traditions at The New Yorker that has continued unabated by tables of contents, photographs, bylined Talks of the Town, and other heady incursions of late-20th-century magazining is the "newsbreak" -- the wry, lightly condescending filler blurbs at the tail end of select New Yorker stories in which the magazine's copy-editing staff, having plowed through its 3,000-word feature for the afternoon and availed of no better way to entertain itself, takes to excerpting the copy-editing malapropisms of lesser publications. E.B. White once said, "I still regard newsbreaks as the thing I came to earth for." White even edited a book-length collection of newsbreaks; in later years, the tradition spawned an entire genre of shitty late-night comedy bits (see "Jaywalking").

The newsbreak is such a New Yorker hallmark that, when we came across page 63 of frequent New Yorker contributor Jeffrey Toobin's Supreme Court tome The Nine, we wondered whether Toobin hadn't edited in a newsbreak just to get another mention of the book wedged into his magazine's hallowed pages. If so, it would be the meta-est newsbreak of all time: a New Yorker writer caught in a malaprop involving The New Yorker. (Remember, all, that italics are reserved for publication names, albums, and the titles of creative works.) In the style, then, of a New Yorker newsbreak, we give you the Newsbreak of the Century:

HOOPLA DEPT.

"[In picking a list of potential Supreme Court nominees] the names of several nonjudges came up, but it quickly became clear that [Bill] Clinton was most interested in one of them -- Mario Cuomo, then governor of New York.

Clinton and Cuomo had a complicated relationship. Clinton admired The New Yorker's way with words but found his indecisiveness maddening."

We never liked him either, Bill.

For all you bookworms, Toobin discusses The Nine on Wednesday evening at the Brattle Theater, in conversation with local lega-eagle Alan Dershowitz. Tickets available through Harvard Book Store.

10/8/2007 3:05:03 PM by Carly Carioli | Comments [0] |  

In case the text above is too tiny for your squinting, Friday morning after a late Thursday night, pre-coffee eyes, get the larger version here.  Even then, it'll most likely seem too good to be true.  Dave Eggers? Of Montreal?  Eugene Merman? At one event?  Yep, our friends at 826 Boston are rocking out (in the karmic-ly correct, humanitarian way) as usual - in case you aren't in the loop about 826's awesome mission, consult Nina's piece from last March here.  Here's the info on the event, from our inbox:

"826 Boston is pleased to announce its Revenge of the Book Eaters fundraiser, featuring an eclectic lineup of writers, actors, and comedians including Kevin Barnes and Bryan Poole from the band Of Montreal (performing an acoustic set), as well as Dave Eggers (co-founder of the 826 National program, Pulitzer Prize-nominee author of What is the What), Eugene Mirman (comedian and actor, Flight of the Conchords), Davy Rothbart (creator of Found magazine) and Rodney Rothman (Emmy nominee and author of Early Bird) and the band Via Audio.

Berklee Performance Center, 1140 Boylston Street (Hynes Green Line stop), Boston Wednesday, September 26, 7 PM. Doors open at 6 PM.Tickets: General $25, VIP $100+. Tickets available through Ticketmaster and Berklee Box Office. All proceeds go toward 826 Boston’s free student programming."

-- Caitlin Curran

8/17/2007 10:41:26 AM by Carly Carioli | Comments [0] |  

7/26/2007 3:08:35 PM by Ryan Stewart | Comments [0] |