HARRY VS. DUMBLEDORE ON 'THE HOGSHEAD'

It may seem a bit redundant or circular to link to a blog that links back to this blog....

Nevertheless, I'm honored that Travis Prinzi et al. of The Hogs Head saw fit to link to my "Is Dumbledore the Hero of Harry Potter?" post. If you found it remotely interesting, you should definitely click over here to catch the comments.

And besides, if you're a Harry fan, you should be reading The Hogs Head anyway!

Thanks for the repost!

2009: A YEAR OF THANKSGIVING

Some holidays deserve to be taken more seriously than others.  Yes, Groundhog Day, of course.  But also Thanksgiving.

Back in the dark ages (aka 1992), I started keeping a monthly list of things I was thankful for.  At the beginning of every month, I would sit down, number a page from 1 to 50, and start listing my way through the previous month.

Some months it was hard to come up with 50 things.  Some months it was easy.  Often, paradoxically, the months I had a lot of obvious things to be thankful for, I ended up skipping the exercise.

But over the years, I have seen the value of sitting down and saying "For this I am thankful" 50 times.  And at Thanksgiving, I like to pull randomly from the year's lists and post here.  

This year, I confess to missing a few months.  I missed January, when I was so very sick.  I missed April, when we moved.  And I missed September, right after my mom's death.  More months than I have missed in many, many years.  But that doesn't mean I wasn't thankful.

As we hit the end of this year, I have absolutely no idea what the next year holds.  I have little idea what the next week holds.  But I am thankful for what has gone before...

Isn't Thanksgiving actually a pretty cool idea for a holiday?  

Here is my utterly random gleaning from my Thanksgiving list from December 2008 through November 2009.  During that time, I was thankful for....

1.  Making our Advent wreath with Sabrina.

2.  The kids' orthodontia being almost completely covered by insurance.

3.  Cory's headmaster helping guide us through his high school applications

4.  Lee claiming that he doesn't really steal the blankets during the night, it's all caused by the rotation of the earth.

5.  Having Thanksgiving dinner with our friends Greg and Kathy

6.  Going skiing at Big Bear after Christmas.

7.  Watching girls who hadn't seen Cory in about a year going crazy ("OMG! OMG!") when they recognized him at a school interview.

8.  Reading Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" with the family

9.  Enough money for Christmas gifts.

10.  My New Year's resolutions

11.  Watching President Obama's inauguration with Sabrina

12.  Our friend Jack joining us for part of President's Day weekend skiing in Big Bear

13.  Sabrina's improvement on her volleyball team

14.  My mom's new medications keeping her calmer

15.  Our manager Jon

16.  Cory and Sabrina getting to go to winter camp

17.  Feeling like things are starting to turn around for us

18.  Seeing Susan Boyle's audition on "Britain's Got Talent"

19.  Finding Sabrina's new duvet and the bookcases we needed at Ikea

20.  Cory and Sabrina getting accepted at Harvard-Westlake

21.  My high school friend David coming to see Cory perform in "Fiddler on the Roof"

22.  Adam Lambert's performances on "American Idol"

23.  Relevé Studios, where the kids were taking music lessons

24.  Having Cory's best friend join us for Mother's Day when his mom was working

25.  My students at USC finishing their semester really well

26.  Sabrina feeling pity for rather than anger at a friend who rejected her

27.  The good-bye party for our friends Kitty and John, moving to Australia

28.  Getting really smart notes from the studio on our script

29.  Being able to entertain at our new home

30.  How beautiful Sabrina looked at her grade school graduation

31.  Reading by the pool during our week in Newport Beach

32.  Cory's great birthday party at ComedySportz

33.  Weather staying cool and cloudy into the summer

34.  Our friend Melissa D'Arabian winning "Next Food Network Star"

35.  Cory coming up with the idea of doing "Thriller" (aka "Filler") for the Family Camp Talent Show

36.  Cory starting piano lessons

37.  Getting paid by the studio quickly

38.  Lee coming up for an awesome story for a comic book we were asked to adapt

39.  Family Camp

40.  Cory and Sabrina's youth groups mobilizing to bring us dinner for a couple of weeks after my mom's death

41.  Our friend Tom bringing us an amazing dinner

42.  Listening to my MFA students' thesis ideas

43.  Listening to Dallas Willard speak at Bel Air

44.  Other HW students telling me what a good actor Cory is

45.  My students friending me on Facebook

46.  Great new idea from our producers for the next draft of our script

47.  Getting to teach my Collaboration class again next semester

48.  Sabrina's awesome "Cooking and Karaoke" birthday party (and borrowing a karaoke machine for the party!)

49.  Watching "The Amazing Race" with the family

50.  Getting 14,000 hits [at the time] on YouTube on the "church history" video I made for Mark Brewer....

...Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

IS DUMBLEDORE THE HERO OF HARRY POTTER?

It's been much too long since I've posted anything here about Harry Potter.  Thankfully, an email from blog reader Mark in Atlanta jogged me in that direction.

Mark sent me the link to this article from The Torch Online which questions whether Harry is really the hero of the Harry Potter stories.  The article proposes that really, Dumbledore is the hero and Harry is just his hands and feet.

The article works hard to make its point, but ultimately, I think it turns into one of those English essays we all wrote at one point or another arguing a point that really can't be sustained, just because no one has made that point before.

Harry, imho, is definitely the hero of the series.  Dumbledore is a fairly classic mentor figure, a more involved mentor than, say, Obi-Wan Kenobi.  And Harry certainly couldn't succeed as hero without Dumbledore.  But Harry is the hero.

Why?  Here are some reasons -- some drawn from the books, some from the meta-context in which the books exist....

1)  Harry is the person the villain is after.  Yes, Voldemort would also like to destroy Dumbledore, but his animosity and focus is all directed at Harry from a time even before the books began.  Harry is The Boy Who Lived, and he is the one Voldemort wants to kill.   Harry is The Chosen One.  He is identified explicitly as the hero repeatedly throughout the story.

2)  Harry is the person who undergoes the classic Hero's Journey.  In fact, he undergoes it over and over -- One could easily chart Harry's Hero's Journey through each of the books, plus the overall arc of his journey across all 7 books.  He is the reluctant hero, traveling from an ordinary world (the Dursleys) to a special world (Hogwarts), encountering various tests along the way, aligning himself with allies and against enemies, and supported by a defined mentor.  He faces ordeals of increasing danger, goes through a death and resurrection in every book, coming through these ordeals more empowered to face the villain one-on-one.  Dumbledore may be in the background at all times, may be manipulating events toward a desired conclusion, but the only time he faces Voldemort is at the very end of the Battle at the Ministry in Order of the Phoenix -- and even then, he's only there because Harry needs help.  Most of the time, Dumbledore just sits in his office...  And.... continuing in the Hero's Journey...

3)  Harry defeats Voldemort.  Harry does it.  Not Dumbledore.  Back to that battle in the Ministry:  If Dumbledore could have destroyed Voldemort, there was the time.  He didn't do it.  

Yes, Dumbledore was crucial to the campaign.  Yes, he trained Harry, supported him, aided him, led the way at times.   Yes, Harry couldn't have done it without Dumbledore.  But Harry was the one who did what Dumbledore could not do.

Putting the distraction of the Hallows aside (as the hero must put aside all things that distract him from his goal) and looking at the Horcruxes:  The ultimate goal of destroying Voldemort starts to become clear in Half-Blood Prince and crystallizes in Deathly Hallows:  Destroy the Horcruxes and you destroy Voldemort.  But if the hero is the one who accomplishes the ultimate goal, then Dumbledore falls short.  He collects a lot of information on the Horcruxes, sure, but that only makes him a magical research assistant.  He destroys the Ring, but fails to destroy the Locket and in fact dies in the attempt.  Harry is the one who has to go forward and actually perform the destruction (and in some cases, the discovery) of the Horcruxes.

And Harry is the one who faces Voldemort in the Great Hall and defeats him.  Not Dumbledore.  

4)  Dumbledore falls prey to temptation that Harry overcomes.  I'm talking, of course, about the Hallows.  Perhaps Dumbledore could have destroyed Voldemort back in the days of the original Order of the Phoenix.  But his decades-long quest after the Hallows pulled him off course.  Ultimately, the Hallows are no more than a distraction.  Harry realizes this for himself as he debates Hallows vs. Horcruxes while burying Dobby.  Dumbledore fell prey to the temptation.  Harry overcame it.  Harry made the true hero's choice which his mentor had failed to make.

5)  Harry is the one who learns and grows.  Dumbledore, we realize, mostly regrets past choices and tries to compensate for his mistakes.  Harry starts off as a kid whose primary role in life is to be the victim of a bully and ends up as the person who saves an entire world.  

6)  Dumbledore dies.  Now, sometimes a hero can die in face-to-face confrontation with the villain, can die so that his people can live.  But Dumbledore dies through his own failure, dies because he underestimated a teenager (from one point of view), dies because he underestimated the power of one of Voldemort's Horcruxes (from a deeper point of view).  Harry has to destroy all the other Horcruxes (well, Neville, who also could have been The Chosen One, the answer to the prophecy, gets the privilege of destroying one without Harry present), and he survives -- something Dumbledore failed to do.

Classically, of course, the mentor often has to die so that the hero can go forward alone.  Dumbledore's death only cements his status as mentor, not as hero.

....And a couple of other reasons Harry must be the hero, drawn from outside the content of the books themselves, but I think significant:

7)  Harry is the title character.  I'd love to read the story of the original Order of the Phoenix, in which Dumbledore may very well have been the hero.  But this is not that story.

8) The Harry Potter books are children's books.  Thus, the hero will be a child.  Not an adult.  

....So, interesting as the premise of the Torch Online article may have been, I think it just doesn't hold up.  Harry is the hero.

Dumbledore, of course, may have been the hero of another, closely related story.  Perhaps it would be better to say that he had his chance to be a hero, and didn't live up to the demands of being a hero.... Perhaps, given what we learn in Deathly Hallows, we would end up calling him a tragic hero...  That's a story, as I said above, that I would love to read.  But I think that story probably would not be a children's book.

But Harry Potter is the hero of Harry Potter.

Your thoughts?

ANIMAL FARM: THE VIDEO

I wasn't that surprised when Cory started making little movies.  By last school year, he pretty much made a movie every time he had a big class project looming in front of him (resulting in such classics as "Newton's Laws of Motion" and "U.N. Peacekeeping Forces").

So I don't know why I was surprised when Sabrina announced that she needed to do a "creative" project for English class about George Orwell's Animal Farm, and she was going to make a movie.

It only had to be 30 seconds long, and she already knew what she wanted to do, so it seemed okay to me.  I booted up Final Cut and got her started... and she ran with it from there.  All I had to do was show her how to do a specific task once (e.g., how to insert a "flash" transition), and she caught on right away and sped through the whole thing.

Which means, apparently, that we now have four filmmakers, of various sorts, in the family.  I'm fine with that.

So here is Sabrina's epic video....

"BURN IT DOWN"

As a writer, I have a great love for my characters.  I coddle them, I admit it.  I give them character flaws, sure, but sometimes I don't want them to be too flawed.  And when I have goodies to hand out, I like to spread them around.  A fight scene, you say?  Well, let's let everyone have a piece of the action!  And if they should fall in love, well, yeah, the course of true love never did run smooth, somebody said that once, but can't I just pick the rocks out of the path for them?

I am wrong, of course.  My characters are not my children.  And every script I write, I have to remind myself of this, remind myself that everything that can go wrong, must go wrong.  Or, as screenwriter John August just said (on his blog which every single writer out there should be reading regularly):

"Burn it down."

We're in the middle of developing two new stories.  First pass for one of them, about the third pass for the other.  And in both cases, this is the advice we need to hear.  We need to be ruthless about making things rough -- very rough -- for our characters, even those we truly love.  (Let me just say parenthetically that God seems to have no problem about burning things down in my own life, so how can I be squeamish about doing the same for my characters.)

With all due respect to the late Blake Snyder and his famous "Save the cat" mantra (which has always seemed a tad manipulative to me, though I understand and sort of agree with the basic concept)... "Burn it down" is a much better dictum to sticky onto your computer or pin onto your cork board.  If you're a writer, go click on that link and start reading. 

I'm about to dive back into the plots of two very different adventures.  And I guarantee things are about to get much, much worse for everyone involved.

BUILDING A KINDERGARTEN... AND A COMMUNITY

A funny thing happened over on another part of the Internet this week.  And I'm just glad I was there to see it

A few years ago, a friend of mine proclaimed rather authoritatively that real relationships had to be face to face.  No real relationships could be fostered on the Internet without a face-to-face component.  His prime example, and it was a good one, was the match.com or eharmony.com relationships that need to "go live" to become real.

He made a good case for the need for personal, real interaction.  He argued well that community must involve living, breathing beings in proximity to each other, loving each other in person, meeting each other's needs in person.  But I wasn't convinced.  I have too many relationships that I consider "real" that began and have pretty much their entire existence on the Internet.  I'm thinking of you, Regina, and of you, Scott, and of you, John... and many more.

This week, my friend was definitively proven wrong.

Over on the blog Stuff Christians Like, the blog writer, Jon, issued a challenge to his readers this Monday:  He challenged them to become a real community, not just a bunch of people reading a blog, by pitching in to build a kindergarten in Vietnam.  (Click here to read the whole story.)  His hope was to raise $30,000 by the end of December.

They raised the entire amount in 18 hours.

Hundreds of people jumped in to donate.  Many donations were only $5, because that's all the giver could afford (and for some of them, even that much hurt).  Many were much larger.

So now the goal is $30,000, to build a second kindergarten -- and the donations are almost at $50K already.

It has been an amazing thing to watch, an amazing thing to read the comments.  It made me cry.  Not so much for the kids in Vietnam who will now have a school to go to, but for the realization that sometimes, when we're just sitting around clicking away on our computers, sometimes there is so much more going on than that.  For the realization that community comes in many forms, sometimes in forms that couldn't possibly have existed only a few years ago.  For the realization that there's so little I can do about so many needs in the world, but if my "little" is combined with the "little" of hundreds of other like-minded people, maybe something bigger can happen.

Real community is possible on the Internet, apparently.  And sometimes it can do great things.

THIS IS IT -- MOVIE THOUGHTS

With an actual free Saturday morning, we decided to go see This Is It.  Or, to give it its proper title, Michael Jackson's This Is It.  

(Which made me wonder:  Is the use of MJ's name because "This Is It" is already registered as a title -- a rather banal one?  Or is it because Michael just had to put his name on everything, and his people decided to keep that going even after his death?....  I decided on the former, because otherwise it would probably be "Michael Jackson The King of Pop's This Is It.")

The movie was, of course, cobbled together from backstage and rehearsal footage taped before MJ's death in June.  The result is something in between a documentary and an electronic press kit.

Parts of it were magical -- "The Way You Make Me Feel," in particular, with its dancers spread across a scaffolded cityscape.  Parts of it were fascinating -- the little snippets of Michael working with the musicians.  Parts of it were a bit sad -- the fact that no one said no to Michael during the entire movie.

"This Is It" doesn't give any real insights into the "real" Michael Jackson -- something that I have to believe Michael would never have allowed.  What it gives us is a front row seat, not at the final show, where all the rough spots would have been worked out, but at the final dress rehearsal, where the effects are in place and the performers are (mostly) playing up to full energy.

It also tells us that Michael was not a sick or dying man.  I don't know where he stored up the energy in that incredibly skinny body, but he was dancing at a fully professional level, impressive indeed for a 50-year-old.  And he was fully engaged in his work.  

Ultimately, the movie leaves us with the music.  The growl of the bass line opening "Beat It."  The "Billie Jean" riff that commands us onto the dance floor....  

And it leaves us with the memories.  For me, one of the best moments of the movie was the section devoted to "Thriller" -- not the 3D movie they were shooting to update/replace the original John Landis video (though that was pretty cool).  But watching MJ walk through the Thriller dance -- not putting full energy into it, but just marking the steps, as if he'd done it a thousand times before... And then turning to look at Cory watching the movie, grinning... because of course he learned the Thriller dance for Family Camp this summer (knowledge which came in useful recently on a wedding reception dance floor!)....

Music and memories.  More than enough reason to go see This Is It on the big screen.  And if you end up snapping your fingers, no one will mind.

FOUR PAWS FROM HEAVEN -- THE WEBSITE

Our good friend Marion Wells has been writing devotionals for dog and cat lovers for a few years now, but she's finally got her website up here.  (And props to Andrea for creating the site!)  

If you're a dog or cat lover, you'll want to take a look!  (No dogs in our family due to allergies, but we donated a story about one of our cats to Marion's cat book!)

Check it out!

A HALLOWEEN TO REMEMBER

I'm not a big fan of Halloween. Especially of what Halloween has become, with so much over-the-top horror and even torture on display all over. I've described myself as the Halloween Grinch. But this year, unexpectedly, was a lovely Halloween.

In part, that was because my kids came up with their own costumes, and the costumes were cheap and easy. After the years of agonizing over what would considered cool at school, the searches at (often horrific) costume and Halloween stores and on eBay, and even (long ago) the meltdown when suddenly SpongeBob became unacceptable on Halloween morning as we were trying to get out the door to the school Halloween parade... well, let's just say that "easy" has long been my favorite word to describe a Halloween costume.

This year, Sabrina announced she was going to wear a Snuggie and carry a remote control and a bag of popcorn, and go as a couch potato. (Personally, I think that was her ploy to get a Snuggie!) And Cory took a white t-shirt, wrote "Bless you" on it, donned a pair of sunglasses, and went as a blessing in disguise.

$17 for both costumes, and virtually no work required on my part. What's not to love?!

But that's not what made Halloween special this year. Halloween was lovely this year because we went to a memorial service.

Okay, that sounds odd. And I thought it was odd when I first learned of the date. But this was a memorial service held for a woman who especially loved Halloween, and her children chose that date on purpose.

Jean, who died the day of my own mom's funeral, was sort of a mom-away-from-mom to both Lee and me... and to many hundreds of others. We met her long after her own children were up and out of the house, and knowing her changed the direction of our lives.

I moved up to L.A. to go to school at UCLA. It was a discombobulating move for me in many ways, and I ended up feeling a little grouchy about church. But when I learned of a group for people in their 20s that met in an actual home, rather than at a church, that seemed like something I could do.

The home it met in that of Jean and her husband Ted. They hosted not only this young adult group, but also the Bel Air Pres college group, both of which met weekly. That meant they had easily 100 people tromping through their house every week. I'm sure we broke things. We must have destroyed their carpets and probably their upholstery as well. But every week, there was Jean, beaming as she welcomed us in. Looking around her house now, I can't believe we all fit inside. We crammed into every inch of the living room, and filled the entry hall and stairway as well (there was a mirror strategically placed just so people in one room could see people in the other).

It was in that living room that I met Lee.

And I wasn't the only one. Over the nine years that group met, there were 42 marriages of people who had met in Jean's living room. 84 people whose lives changed radically, and well over 100 kids born, because a retired housewife decided to open her front door. How do I know the number? Jean kept a list. Our friends Dell and Molly were the first couple on the list. Lee and I were around #18 or so.

Why so many marriages? Maybe we were just at the age, and it's so hard to meet someone decent in L.A., and here was a safe, welcoming environment in which to do so. Maybe it was because we weren't a singles group, so people didn't come on the prowl. Maybe it was a little nudging from Jean, who often pulled me into the kitchen to ask if a particular guy liked a particular girl, and were they dating? Maybe it was just because we were so very crammed together.

We didn't realize then what it meant for Jean and Ted to be so welcoming. Didn't know what it meant to give up a couple of nights of your life every single weekend just so you could be there to open the door. Or to give up a couple of weekends a year to take a yacht-load of young people to Catalina or the Channel Islands. To make sure you had cookies and juice always available. We took it all for granted.

Fast-forward to the present day. When Lee and I moved into our current home, which is bigger than we need and nicer than we deserve, we decided we needed to follow Jean's example and just throw open the doors, pretty much to anyone who might need it. So we've hosted the high schoolers from Bel Air (they're coming again this Wednesday), and the middle schoolers, and committee meetings, and various parties (bon voyage, baby shower, etc.), and more. And things have gotten broken (most notably the pool filter). And I'm sure our carpets will eventually get thrashed.

And maybe I gave myself just a bit of a pat on the back for being so nice. Just like Jean.

Until her memorial service on Halloween. Jean's daughter asked me to speak about those days, and about our decision to emulate Jean in opening up our doors. I was honored. And I figured someone else might be there to speak about the college group she had hosted. And yes, there was.

But we were far from the only ones. No, we were just part of a long line of people asked to speak. Each person brought out a new area of Jean's involvement, many I had never known about. Girl Scouts. Bible study groups. Family Camp. International students. Native Americans. Everyone telling essentially the same story about a woman who never "did" anything that anyone would pay attention to (in the "What do you do?" sense), but who affected thousands of people's lives in warm, wonderful, and important ways.

The reception in Jean's backyard, all decked out for Halloween, was lovely. Some people donned costumes in her honor, and everyone had a memory of some barbecue or party they'd experienced there. And suddenly Halloween seemed absolutely appropriate as a way to honor Jean. Because Halloween is, of course, also All Saints' Eve... and Jean was certainly a saint. And it's the night before the Day of the Dead... also appropriate.

So I did have a happy Halloween. My kids had fun, and I came away from it realizing how much more I can do for other people... and more inspired than ever to be just like Jean.

Happy November, everyone!