Category Archive 'J.K. Rowling'
06 Jul 2024
Read The Free Press today and you’ll find that everything old is new again.
We’ve gone back to the prim “Banned in Boston” Puritan regime of the pre-1960s. No, actually, we’ve gone well beyond all that to a modern hellscape combining the sanctimony of the Puritan prig with the thuggish eliminationist inclinations of the totalitarian Stalinist.
As is often the case these days, the courageous J.K. Rowling has stood up Liberty and Reason and thereby provoked the mob.
Vladimir Nabokov’s most famous novel, featuring the memoirs of an unrepentant pedophile named Humbert Humbert, has often been a flashpoint for controversy—including at the time of its 1955 publication, when the only outfit that would touch it was a French press best known for publishing literal porn. But however foolish or prudish the mid-century imbroglio surrounding Lolita might have been, it pales in comparison to the one now raging on the internet, where a sizable crowd has been moralistically shrieking about the book for three straight days.
Like so many other digital-age absurdities, this one originates with a millennial who is mad at J.K. Rowling. Here’s what happened: in the year 2000, in an interview with BBC Radio 4, Rowling praised the novel, saying, “[A] plot that could have been the most worthless pornography becomes, in Nabokov’s hands, a great and tragic love story.” Rowling’s sentiments about Lolita are not unique; Stanley Kubrick and Dorothy Parker famously felt the same, and my own copy even has a blurb on it from Vanity Fair, calling it “the only convincing love story of our century.” But nearly 25 years later, an actress named Sooz Kempner unearthed the interview and was shocked, shocked!
“JK Rowling doesn’t understand Lolita,” she wrote on X. “It is not a great and tragic love story, it is terrifying book [sic] written from the POV of a peadophile [sic], a very obviously unreliable narrator, and at no point are you meant to say ‘this is so romantic.’ She’s 12, Joanne. What the FUCK, Joanne.” Her sentiments were echoed by countless others, including novelist Ryan Ruby, who sniped, “Lolita is a moral test. Kempner passes it. Rowling does not.”
On the one hand, this is very much a tempest in a terminally online teapot. On the other hand, the wild virality of Kempner’s post (which has 5.2 million views and over 9,000 reposts) does unfortunately tell us something about the cultural discourse in the year 2024: namely, that people, in their fervor for recreational hatred, are rendering themselves functionally illiterate.
RTWT
29 Dec 2021
Breitbart:
An online poll conducted by the staunchly left Guardian newspaper seeking nominations for “Person of the Year” has been turned off, sparking speculation it was shut down when author J.K. Rowling took the lead.
The poll was launched on December 15 and posed a simple question: “Who would be your 2021 person of the year, and why?” It can be found here.
As of Wednesday it was no longer live, launching conjecture from a number of sources that the fact author J.K. Rowling was such a dominating choice the outlet had no option left other than to stop accepting nominations.
It still exists but comes with the caveat This form has been deactivated and is closed to any further submissions.
Reactions online have been straight to the point.
JK Rowling was voted Guardian’s person of the year. Rather than acknowledge this, Guardian killed the competition. What utter cowardice, Guardian.
— Magdalen Berns Dr. HollydreamerXX🕸️ (@cubedreamer) December 28, 2021
BREAKING: Guardian deactivated the poll on ‘Person of the Year 2021’ because JK Rowling was in the lead.
Pathetic!
— Art TakingBack 🇺🇸 (@ArtValley818_) December 28, 2021
It was you closing your poll for Person of the Year because all the votes were for @jk_rowling https://t.co/slIKq4pdFh
— ☃️❄️Jane Frost❄️☃️ (@52degreesN) December 28, 2021
Can I just say congratulations to @jk_rowling on winning @guardian Person of the Year Award 2021! #IStandWithJKRowling
— Gordon (@bluesbroken) December 28, 2021
Funniest thing I saw on the Internet in 2021?
I’d say the Guardian deactivating their “Person of the Year” survey because JK Rowling was going to win. https://t.co/BlLYexJ1q1
— Isaac de Tormes, VII Marqués de Vichón (@Isaac_de_Tormes) December 28, 2021
Congratulations to @jk_rowling for winning the @guardian Person of the Year Award 2021. And congratulations to The Guardian for being the spineless melts that they are for not publishing it! Shameful! https://t.co/YuS0qNryKh
— Belstaffie (@Belstaffie) December 28, 2021
Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, once beloved by leftists for her huge donations to the UK Labour Party and support of the European Union, is no longer tolerated, given her strong views on a range of things Guardian readers might assume to be theirs and their alone.
As Breitbart News reported, last year she was targeted by trans activists for warning children believed to be “trans” should not necessarily be “shunted towards hormones and surgery.”
She was previously denounced as a “TERF” — “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist” — for defending a woman’s right to decline to describe someone who is not biologically female as a woman.
Daring to suggest biological sex differences retain a degree of significance regardless of “gender identity” has also drawn ire from the left.
RTWT
25 Apr 2018
Tranny Phaylen Fairchild has not actually even read the Harry Potter books, but he/she/it somehow knows what they are really all about.
[T]he world of Harry Potter parallels our own. You have those bad guys with power and prestige versus the underdogs, those whose freedoms and civil rights are at risk. In every form and fashion, Harry Potter is an allegory, and perhaps more relevant today than when it was published two decades ago. There is a reason that many Harry potter fans identify as LGBT… it is one of the few pieces of literary fiction that provides us access and underscores the emotional and psychological trials of being an undesirable, an outcast.
And he/she/it is on top of every minute expression of opinion on Rowling’s part relevant to his/her/its politics of identity, and it seems that J.K. Rowling, more than once, indulged in politically-unbecoming female solidarity, “liking” some tweets on Twitter denying that real femininity can be achieved through personal choice in defiance of biological reality.
Oh, my god!
I do know who Rowling is, though, and I admired her as an artist; As a purveyor of all things good; A proverbial speck of light in an encroaching political darkness that she could have very well written about. As a writer myself, she was a beacon of hope. As a Trans person, I admired her decision to use her platform to reach across the boundaries of the Have and Have-Nots and provide us a line of defense that’s not typical of celebrities. Most are terrified of ruffling feathers or polarizing their fan base. I believed that Rowling had a distinct appreciation for the struggles we face here on the ground, and when she spoke it was not simple word-candy, but from an authentic place. Rowling had once been down here with rest of us who do the doggy paddle to stay afloat, all the while pleading for acceptance, inclusion and basic survival, lest we are swept away by the current of indifference.
It’s not the first time that someone has exhibited outspoken allegiance with women, people of color and gay men, but felt that embracing the Transgender community was stepping too far outside their comfort zone. We see it in politics all the time. There are those who supported the legalization of gay marriage, but those same people also feel Transgender individuals shouldn’t be allowed in public bathrooms. I didn’t expect to see J.K. Rowling reveal herself to be one of them.
Spokesmen for the writer were soon apologizing and crawfishing, but you know how it is: Hell hath no fury like a Social Justice Warrior with a grievance. And he/she/it is unforgiving and determined to lower the boom, concluding: J.K. Rowling is a “TERF- A Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist.”
It’s fun watching lefties fight.
RTWT
21 Mar 2013
Bookshelves featuring this term’s reading for members of each of the four Hogwarts houses.
13 Apr 2012
J.K. Rowling
J.K. Rowling’s publisher revealed yesterday the title and release date of her new non-Harry-Potter, adult novel.
The title is The Casual Vacancy , and it will be going on sale September 27, 2012.
Her publisher, Little, Brown Book Group describes the new book as “blackly comic, thought-provoking and constantly surprising.”
The plot:
When Barry Fairweather dies unexpectedly in his early forties, the little town of Pagford is left in shock.
Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war.
Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils…Pagford is not what it first seems.
And the empty seat left by Barry on the parish council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen. Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion, duplicity and unexpected revelations?
29 Aug 2006
J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, and John Irving read from their books, and answered audience questions, in two benefit performances for Doctors Without Borders and The Haven Foundation at Radio City Music Hall in New York City on August 1st and 2nd.
J.K. Rowling (note her shoes) reads from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
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Rowling is very cute, but I would not have linked any of this, except for the Question & Answer session, in which her questioner proves to be Salman Rushdie, who asks a very good one.
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