Sorry Stephanie

After Stephanie Meyer's initial drafts of her novel, Midnight Sun, were leaked on the Internet, she chose to just post the leaked copy on her website, rather than have fans try to obtain it illegally... sucks for her. (Sorry, I just can't manage to summon the proper amount of empathy for her, she probably should have been more judicious about the people she entrusted it to...but who am I to judge?)

Midnight Sun

Goodbye Harry *sobs*

Goodbye, Harry

by Stephen King

I'm having a day of mixed feelings: happy because I'm reading the manuscript of a novel that's full of magic, mystery, and monsters; sad because it will be finished tomorrow and on my shelf, with all its secrets told and its surviving characters set free to live their own lives (if characters have lives beyond the end of a novel — I've always felt they do). It's called The Monsters of Templeton, by Lauren Groff, and it will be published early next year.

Did you think I meant the final Harry Potter tale? Don't be a sillykins — not even your Uncle Stevie gets that one in advance (although I'm sure you agree that he should, he should). But I expect to face the same feelings, only stronger, when the pages of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows dwindle down to the final few. Hell, I had trouble saying goodbye to Tony Soprano, and let's face it — he was a turd. Harry's one of the good guys. One of the great guys, in fact, and the same holds true for his friends.

The sense of sadness I feel at the approaching end of The Monsters of Templeton isn't just because the story's going to be over; when you read a good one — and this is a very good one — those feelings are deepened by the realization that you probably won't tie into anything that much fun again for a long time. This particular melancholy deepens even more when the story is spread over multiple volumes. I felt it as I approached the end of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy, more strongly as I neared the conclusion of Frodo's quest in The Lord of the Rings, and with painful keenness when, as the writer, I got to the end of The Dark Tower, which stretched over seven volumes and a quarter century's writing time.

When it comes to Harry, part of me — a fairly large part, actually — can hardly bear to say goodbye. I'd guess that J.K. Rowling feels the same, although I'd also guess those feelings are mingled with the relief of knowing that the work is finally done, for better or worse.

And I'm a grown-up, for God's sake — a damn Muggle! Think how it must be for all the kids who were 8 when Harry debuted in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, with its cartoon jacket and modest (500 copies) first edition. Those kids are now 18, and when they close the final book, they will be in some measure closing the book on their own childhoods — magic summers spent in the porch swing, or reading under the covers at camp with flashlights in hand, or listening to Jim Dale's recordings on long drives to see Grandma in Cincinnati or Uncle Bob in Wichita. My advice to families containing Harry Potter readers: Stock up on the Kleenex. You're gonna need it. It's all made worse by one unavoidable fact: It's not just Harry. It's time to say goodbye to the whole cast, from Moaning Myrtle to Scabbers the rat (a.k.a. Wormtail). Which leads to an interesting question — will the final volume satisfy Harry's longtime (and very devoted) readers?

Although the only thing we can be sure of is that Deathly Hallows won't end in a 10-second blackout (you're going to hear that a lot in the next few weeks), my guess is that large numbers of readers will not be satisfied even if Harry survives (I'm betting he will) and Lord Voldemort is vanquished (I'm betting on this, too, although evil is never vanquished for long). I'm partly drawing on my own experience with The Dark Tower (reader satisfaction with the ending was low — tough titty, since it was the only one I had); partly on my belief that very few long works end as felicitously as Tolkien's Rings series, with its beautiful pilgrimage into the Grey Havens; but mostly on the fact that there is that sadness, that inevitable parting from characters who have been loved deeply by many. The Internet blog sites will be full of this was bad and that was wrong, but it's going to boil down to something that many will feel and few will come right out and state: No ending can be right, because it shouldn't be over at all. The magic is not supposed to go away.

Rowling will almost certainly go on to other works, and they may be terrific, but it won't be quite the same, and I'm sure she knows that. Readers will be able to go back and reread the existing books — as I've gone back to Tolkien, as my wife goes back to Patrick O'Brian's wonderful sea stories featuring Captain Aubrey and Dr. Maturin, as others do with novels featuring Travis McGee or Lord Peter Wimsey — and rereading is a great pleasure, but it's not the bated-breath, what's-gonna-happen-next suspense that Potter readers have enjoyed since 1997. And, of course, Harry's audience is different. It is, in large part, made up of children who will be experiencing these unique and rather terrible feelings for the first time.

But there's comfort. There are always more good stories, and now and then there are great stories. They come along if you wait for them. And here's something I believe in my heart: No story can be great without closure. There must be closure, because it's the human condition. And since that's how it is, I'll be in line with my money in my hand on July 21.

And, I must admit, sorrow in my heart.

---------------------------

Harry's Spell
Families reading together all over the world

This weekend may well be the last time that children all over the planet- and many of their parents- are reading the same book at exactly the same time. This weekend, the world truly is a global village.
It's happened several times before, each time a new Harry Potter book was published. And each time in the last 10 years, more children and adults have joined in the literary marathon. "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" is the last mile, and by the time you read this editorial, some intrepid readers will have already reached the finish line at Page 759. They know what happends to Harry, Ron, Hermione, Lord Voldemort, Snape, Hagrid and everyone else.
Other readers will be more patient, savoring everyword because they don't want this final tale to end.
You might notice the unusual quiet in your house and in your neighborhood.
Kids are reading. Teenagers are reading. Adults are reading. They're reading alone or together or taking turns reading the same book. In many houses, one copy won't be enough. Animated discussions about plot and character, good and evil, love and hate, life and death are taking place across the dinner table, across the back fence and across the continent.
All those telivisions, computers, cellphones, iPods and video games are turned off, and whole families are engrossed in a book and talking to each other about it.
It must be magic.

Avatar misc.

Excerpts From The Diary of Princess Ursa

Also, this made me poop my pants. (Code word: koh)

Haha, Jane Austen!

http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=The%20Beautiful%20Cassandra

A "novel" from the juvenilia of Jane Austen, and one of the funniest things she ever wrote. I find it utterly surreal and cannot believe that anyone was writing such brilliant nonsense in around 1790. It is about her elder sister Cassandra Austen and dedicated to her. This is also one of the best dedications ever written. She was something like fifteen when she wrote this.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE BEAUTIFUL CASSANDRA

A Novel in Twelve Chapters,
dedicated by permission to Miss Austen.

Dedication

Madam:
You are a phoenix. Your taste is refined, your sentiments are noble, and your virtues innumerable. Your person is lovely, your figure elegant, and your form majestic. Your manners are polished, your conversation is rational, and your appearance is singular. If, therefore, the following tale will afford one moment's amusement to you, every wish will be gratified of

Your most obedient
humble servant,
the Author.

CHAPTER THE FIRST

Cassandra was the daughter and the only daughter of a celebrated milliner in Bond Street. Her father was of noble birth, being the near relation of the Duke of ---'s butler.

CHAPTER THE SECOND

When Cassandra had attained her sixteenth year, she was lovely and amiable, and chancing to fall in love with an elegant bonnet her mother had just completed, bespoke by the Countess of ---, she placed it on her gentle head and walked from her mother's shop to make her fortune.

CHAPTER THE THIRD

The first person she met was the Viscount of ---, a young man no less celebrated for his accomplishments and virtues than for his elegance and beauty. She curtseyed and walked on.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

She then proceeded to a pastry-cook's, where she devoured six ices, refused to pay for them, knocked down the pastry cook, and walked away.

CHAPTER THE FIFTH

She next ascended a hackney coach and ordered it to Hampstead, where she was no sooner arrived than she ordered the coachman to turn round and drive her back again.

CHAPTER THE SIXTH

Being returned to the same spot of the same street she had set out from, the coachman demanded his pay.

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH

She searched her pockets again and again; but every search was unsuccessful. No money could she find. The man grew peremptory. She placed her bonnet on his head and ran away.

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH

Through many a street she then proceeded and met in none the least adventure, till on turning a corner of Bloomsbury Square, she met Maria.

CHAPTER THE NINTH

Cassandra started and Maria seemed surprised; they trembled, blushed, turned pale, and passed each other in a mutual silence.

CHAPTER THE TENTH

Cassandra was next accosted by her friend the widow, who, squeezing out her little head through her less window, asked her how she did? Cassandra curtseyed and went on.

CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH

A quarter of a mile brought her to her paternal roof in Bond Street, from which she had now been absent nearly seven hours.

CHAPTER THE TWELFTH

She entered it and was pressed to her mother's bosom by that worthy woman. Cassandra smiled and whispered to herself, 'This is a day well spent.'

Finis

Finally, something decent

Sarah Palin: it's go west, towards the future of conservatism

by Gerard Baker

The best line I heard about Sarah Palin during the frenzied orgy of chauvinist condescension and gutter-crawling journalistic intrusion that greeted her nomination for vice-president a week ago came from a correspondent who knows a thing or two about Alaska.

“What's the difference between Sarah Palin and Barack Obama?”

“One is a well turned-out, good-looking, and let's be honest, pretty sexy piece of eye-candy.

“The other kills her own food.”

Now we know, thanks to her triumphant debut at the Republican convention on Wednesday, that Mrs Palin not only slaughters her prey. She impales its head on a stick and parades it around for her followers to jeer at. For half an hour she eviscerated Mr Obama in that hall and did it all without dropping her sweet schoolmarm smile, as if she were handing out chocolates at the end of a history lesson.

There's a powerful danger in the sheer thrill that has followed her astonishing performance that we could get carried away with John McCain's running-mate. Some of the coverage has a hyperbolic tone to it. Not since Paris handed that apple to Aphrodite has a man's selection of a woman had such implications for the future of our civilisation.

So let's stipulate one obvious and important piece of wisdom about US elections. The choice of a vice-presidential candidate rarely makes much of a difference. The pundit class waxes historical in the excitement of the moment but usually the vice-presidential choices go back to playing second banana. However mawkishly we dwell on the mortality of the presidential contenders, it is they who determine the voters' decision.

This one, to be fair, could be different. For at least the next few weeks the press will follow Mrs Palin's present and dig deeper into her past, still hoping for some morsel of stupidity or evidence of cupidity to doom her. But in the end, barring such a discovery, this is still an Obama-McCain contest.

But let me try to explain why Mrs Palin, whatever impact she might have in November, may be a figure of real consequence in our lives.

It's partly about what she represents and partly about what she has already done, but mostly about where she and her ilk might take the Republicans - and possibly America.

It never ceases to amaze me how the Left falls again and again into the old trap of underestimating politicians whom they don't understand. From Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to George Bush and Mrs Palin, they do it every time. Because these characters talk a bit funny and have ridiculously antiquated views about faith, family and nation, because they haven't spent time bending the knee to the intellectual metropolitan elites, they can't be taken seriously.

So the general expectation was that Mrs Palin would stumble on to the stage in high heels, clutching her sprawling, slightly odd family (five children! how weird), mispronounce the name of the Russian Prime Minister, mutter a few platitudes about God, and disappear for ever to a deafening chorus of sniggers.

No one paid much attention to the fact that she had been elected governor of a state. Or that she got to that office not because, unlike some politicians I could mention, her husband had been there before her, or because she bleated continuously about glass ceilings, but by challenging the entrenched interests in her own party and beating them. In almost two years as Governor she has cleaned out the Augean stables of Alaskan Government. You don't win a statewide election and enjoy approval ratings of more than 80 per cent without real political talent.

Never mind all that. She didn't have a passport! She was a former beauty queen! It was so axiomatic that she was a disaster that I was told by lots of savvy men - with deliciously unconscious sexism - that the real problem was what the choice said about Mr McCain and his judgment: cynical, irresponsible, clueless. It was as if Mrs Palin wasn't really a human being at all, but an article of Mr McCain's clothing that showed his poor taste, like wearing brown shoes with a charcoal suit.

So here's why she matters.

First of all she offers an opportunity for an ailing Republican party to reconnect with ordinary Americans. She's conservative, but her conservatism is not that of the intolerant, uncomprehending white male sort that has so hurt the party in recent years. She is much closer to a model of the lives of ordinary Americans - working mother, plainspoken everywoman juggling home and office - than any Republican leader in memory.

The contrast with Mr Obama is especially powerful. The very fact that Mrs Palin didn't go to elite schools but succeeded nonetheless - the very ordinariness with which she so piquantly jabbed Mr Obama on Wednesday - is what will make her so appealing to Americans. And as a pro-life conservative she debunks in one swoop the enduring myth that all women subscribe to the obligatory nostrums of radical feminism.

But there's more to it than that.

The Republicans have decided that they are not going to make the mistake Hillary Clinton made and run against the effervescent Mr Obama on the premise of experience.

Experience hasn't got Americans into a very comfortable place. They want change. Before he signed up to some of the less attractive Republican attitudes this year, Mr McCain's career had embodied that change - the anti-establishment candidate running against his own party. Now he is joined by a woman who, in her short career, has done the same thing.

Democrats think that Mr McCain, with the social conservative Mrs Palin, will launch an old-fashioned culture war at them, using her appealing manner to drive a populist assault on the familiar Republican issues of God, guns and gays.

Perhaps this Manichean interpretation will prove true. But I suspect that it misses the real appeal of the Republican team. The opportunity for McCain-Palin is not reaction, but reform - a reform rooted in a distant conservatism that could be due for a comeback

Hailing from Arizona and Alaska, the Republican ticket has a chance to rekindle a western conservatism different from the old Yankee paternalist sort or the Bible Belt version. They like their guns out there (some still kill their own food) and they are pro-life and deeply pro-America, of course. But at a time of grave challenges, the themes of economic freedom and opportunity, the resistance to the idea that government holds all the answers, could resonate with voters.

This is an election, as the Democrats have realised all along, about an America on the cusp of change. With the moose-hunting, establishment-taunting Mrs Palin at his side, Mr McCain might represent a bigger change than the one that his opponents are offering.