In his third outing as the amnesiac agent Jason Bourne, Matt Damon maintains the low-drag efficiency he established in the first two installments - David Denby in the New Yorker even compares him to a bullet - as he relentlessly backtracks the genesis of his former secret identity to its source. As appropriate for the endcap to an informal trilogy, the knobs are all ratcheted up - chases are notably extended, nominal allies within the CIA themselves are put at risk, and Bourne’s counterespionage chops put to ever greater challenges. Yet somewhere in the process, we lose some of the balance that was previously maintained between cat and mouse, and thus some of the critical tension that came from it. Before we get to that, however, let’s revisit how we got to this point in the story.

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To put aside the obvious, Stardust the movie is not Stardust the book. This is as important as it is tautological aka trivially self-evident, since we the adoring fans of the latter are often prone to forget when sitting down to watch the former. This was immaculately captured in a brief blogging exchange between William Gibson and Cory Doctorow over the subject of the perenially imminent film adapation of Neuromancer. Gibson’s initial consternation, not at the perpetual delay (or in his words, the liminality) but at the presumption that “feature films are the ultimate stage of novelistic creation, thereby relegating the book to the status of dull gray chrysalis,” in turn fueled Doctorow’s observation:

Books, by and large, don’t make very good movies (how many great film adaptations of novels can you think of that were true to the original that were worth seeing? How many total, utter disappointments can you recall?) Yet people who meet novelists inevitably ask, “anything of yours been made into a movie yet?”

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Albums added since last update: 8146.

I really need to work at doing these updates more often; 543 pages of album listings is a killer even without Harry Potter Week (this has been sitting around awhile while certain other posts took priority). Also worth noting is that the rollover date for your subscription is not the same day each month, and that the reset happens on Pacific time at the beginning of the day shown, not at the end.

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[spoiler warning: The book is discussed in total, and particularly focuses on those things which were not already known from prior books as well as the implications of the ending. If you have not yet finished reading it, I highly recommend you do so first.]

This has been a few days in coming, for a variety of reasons - wanting the book to settle a bit, giving others a chance to finish reading it for themselves, and recovering from the side effects of Harry Potter Week. I had originally envisioned a full week embargo for spoiler avoidance, but I believe everyone I know that was reading it is now finished. Moreover, I really need to start thinking about other things, and instead I keep finding partial analyses of the book rattling around upstairs.

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[spoiler alert: I have finally read some, but by no means all of Deathly Hallows, by this point. While I will take great pains to keep my impressions to events thus far as elliptical as possible, if like me you have been cutting yourself off from the outside world since its release to maintain a pure sphere of discovery, you may wish to read no further. And if you should need to check up on a character's name or background, on Wikipedia say, be warned that even as early as yesterday afternoon entries had been updated with details from book 7.]

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A quick status update: Book 7 is out, and indeed was before I could finish the previous post. K’s copy arrived without fanfare, announced only by the heavy thump in the front mailbox, at 1:55pm CDT - right around the time I finished the crucial chapter “Horcruxes” in Half-Blood Prince. At 4pm, I finished re-reading book 6. And now I must wait for K. to finish the first reading of Deathly Hallows (for I cannot now imagine her stopping midway), which means I am partly tempted to drag out the process of analyzing book 6 and posting my predictions only before beginning book 7 for myself. So those of you who received your copies at midnight, or even by afternoon post, may be well along or finished before I begin. Ah well, we shall see how I manage.

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Before we return to the themes and clues scattered liberally throughout OOTP, a few brief administrative notices. First, KWMU’s Cityscape this morning covered “the Harry Potter phenomenon and activities surrounding the release of the final book” with an owner of Left Bank Books and a teacher. The show will repeat this evening, and it also available via mp3. Second, mentioned during the segment is a release street party for Deathly Hallows starting at 9pm along Euclid in the Central West End and running through at least 1am. Some of the events mentioned include a costume contest, trivia contest at the Coffee Cartel, and Herbology lessons put on by the Botanical Garden. Left Bank will put book 7 on sale starting at midnight. A list of other release parties at local bookstores and libraries is at STLToday. For my part, I will doubtless still be deep in book 6 by that time, working diligently to prepare both for the subsequent post on it and then my predictions while waiting for K’s pre-order to arrive.

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Like Dudley’s birthday, the fifth book seems compelled to bring us more than the last - more pages, more chapters, and more questions than ever before. Order of the Phoenix is so massive and complex that at times it can be difficult to decide just what it is ultimately about. Prior books have kept more or less to the subject emblazoned on their covers - the quest for the philosopher’s stone, for the Chamber of Secrets, for the prisoner of Azkaban, even (more obliquely) the Goblet of Fire in representing the Triwizard Tournament. But book 5 is not strictly about the Order of the Phoenix, although we certainly learn much about them. It is also not entirely about the trials at Hogwarts under the lash of Undersecretary Dolores Umbridge. The almost ubiquitous showdown with Voldemort is inconclusive (as it must be). Yet while the book cannot be easily summarized, it contains a wealth of important character development, revealing aspects of the wizarding world, and critical new clues about what we can expect from the final conflict.

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First, some HP news. (more…)

Another summer, another dreadful return to the privations of 4 Privet Drive. (more…)