Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
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I have never seen any of the previous Harry Potter films. I have also not read any of J.K. Rowling’s novels on which the films are based. No, I don’t live under a rock. I know what a Muggle is, the purpose of a sorting hat, and I can name he-who-must-not-be-named. I figured the books and their subsequent films were just kids stuff. I am willing to admit that I was wrong.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

begins as Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) and best pals Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint) start their sixth year at Hogwart’s School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Harry continues his training with headmaster/mentor Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) to, ultimately, fight his nemesis Voldemort. He is able to see how Voldemort became the evil wizard he is by examining the memories of Tom Riddle, Voldemort’s childhood name. He also comes across a book inscribed by the “Half-Blood Prince,” which leads him on a journey to discover who the book’s owner is. In addition to Harry’s wizardly escapades, there is romance, with Ron and Hermione and Harry and Ginny, Ron’s sister.

A large portion of the film’s audience is built in, with fans of books sure to be first in line. However, anyone with an appreciation of good film-making will enjoy it. In the opening minutes director David Yates takes us on a long, seemingly single-take ride through the streets of London. It’s an extraordinary shot that literally took my breath away. The entire film is beautiful to look at, while avoiding many of the gimmicks that might otherwise make the many flashbacks look cheesy. Yates owes a lot to the stellar work of cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel and production designer Stuart Craig, who craft a distinct but very real world.

To talk about the acting in a Harry Potter film may be missing the point. The young actors all perform admirably but, much more notably, they actually look like teenagers. This a rarity in an industry where anyone under 35 can play a high schooler. The rest of the cast reads like a Who’s Who of British acting royalty, with Jim Broadbent seemingly having the time of his life as Professor Slughorn, the new potions professor. Also, Helena Bonham Carter steals each of her scenes as Voldemort’s most loyal Death Eater.

Steve Kloves, who has adapted all of the novels for the big screen, manages to make 153 minutes feel like not long enough. Kloves’ script also provides just the right amount of exposition. There is enough information so that Potter virgins, like yours truly, aren’t lost – but diehard fans won’t be bored. The script also possesses a distinctly British sensibility, despite the worldwide fame of the books. For example, Harry is referred to as a “tosser,” and anything exciting is met with a chorus of “brilliant.” The cavalcade of actors with Sir or Dame before their name is only the icing on the incredibly English crumpet.

I liked Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, but saying that alone sells short its charms. I had fun seeing this film and fun has been in short supply at the multiplex this summer. I also fully expect to see the film clean up in the technical categories come Oscar time.

The Bottom Line: Grab the kids and go! This is a film that needs to be experienced in a theater. I promise you won’t be bored, and you’ll leave counting the days until the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (it’s 491, as of this writing.)

–Sarah Hudson

“I adore annotated editions,” admits Honoria St. Cyr in her long, loving look at a new annotated edition of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, found in the current Open Letters. And you will find that her adoration is perhaps trumped only by her deep affection for Grahame’s classic itself. As St. Cyr finds, when you are as devoted to a book as she and many millions of others are to The Wind in the Willows, you can’t get enough of the trivia that surrounds it.

Such trivia is at the forefront of Peter Parker’s review

in the TLS

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of no less than two annotated Wind in the Willows, one by Seth Lerer for Belknap Press and the second by Annie Gauger for Norton. Though Parker has plenty of nits to pick with each editor (the debating over trivia being just as fun as the trivia itself), ultimately he can’t resist the pull of simply recounting some of the grand speculation that the classic has inspired. For instance, the is the idea that

Toad is an unholy amalgam of Oscar Wilde, Horatio Bottomley and Grahame’s purblind, tantrum-prone son Alastair, for whom the book was written…. Toads by their very nature give the impression of being puffed up, and the carriage of their heads unwittingly suggests snootiness. Strutting down the steps of his country manor, stuffed into his preposterous driving togs; supplied with funds to buy the latest shiny toy, or take up and as quickly discard every passing fad; writing his appalling invitations on stationery “with ‘Toad Hall’ at the top in gold and blue”: Toad is the embodiment of nouveau riche vulgarity and bumptiousness. Ludicrously vain, utterly shameless and horribly self-pitying, he nevertheless remains endearing.

Parker goes on to agree that there is much in Toad that reminds you of Oscar Wilde, “from his aphorisms and his imprisonment to his middle-parted hair.” And he additionally suggests that the scene in which Toad is heckled as he’s transferred from the courthouse to the prison is “strongly reminiscent of the notorious occasion when Wilde was transferred by rail from Wandsworth Prison to Reading Gaol and was obliged to stand on a platform at Clapham Junction, handcuffed and in convict dress, surrounded by a jeering mob.”

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More trivia abounds in both St. Cyr’s and Parker’s pieces, and of course in the new annotated books themselves—enough even to sate the most obsessive fans of Wind in the Willows. Dig in.

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In his weekly column for Slate, part-time literary critic, part-time muckraker, and part-time dime-a-dozen political pundit Christopher Hitchens shares his two cents about the crisis in Iran, and draws a particular focus on Ayatollah Khamenei’s recent paranoid invocation of the “evil” British government. Hitchens points out that while America-hating is commonplace in Iran, it’s a youthful phenomenon next to the decades of anti-British rhetoric. Hitchens then calls our attention to the great book that lampooned Iranian Anglophobia:

The best-known and best-selling satirical novel in the Persian language is My Uncle Napoleon, by Iraj Pezeshkzad, which describes the ridiculous and eventually hateful existence of a family member who subscribes to the “Brit Plot” theory of Iranian history. The novel was published in 1973 and later made into a fabulously popular Iranian TV series. Both the printed and televised versions were promptly banned by the ayatollahs after 1979 but survive in samizdat

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form. Since then, one of the leading clerics of the so-called Guardian Council, Ahmad Jannati, has announced in a nationwide broadcast that the bombings in London on July 7, 2005, were the “creation” of the British government itself.

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Hitchens goes on to recommend that we all get our own copy of My Uncle Napoleon, to which Open Letters can only agree. Recently, Bryn Haworth reviewed the book with an eye to the pre-election-crisis troubles in Iran, and found much to admire on both artistic and political levels:

The beauty of My Uncle Napoleon is that it is blissfully funny. Though it has the slapstick mayhem of many Egyptian comedies, it is more than pure farce. And although it has debts to European literature – My Uncle

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is very much like Don Quixote, or Sterne’s Uncle Toby Madhouse movie full (he even has his own Corporal Trim) – it is not a plagiarizing tribute to the classic comic novel. This is a book that manages to create memorable and believable characters while shamelessly sending them up, loading them with catchphrases and putting them in bizarre situations. Behind all its tomfoolery lie the serious issues of love, sexuality and, most importantly, paranoia on a grand scale.

Go here to read the rest of Haworth’s examination of a book given such abrupt and urgent relevance—and then, by all means, get a copy for yourself!

Elinor Lipman has written eight novels, including Then She Found Me, The Inn at Lake Devine, My Latest Grievance, and most recently The Family Man. A chapter of The Family Man appears in this month’s Open Letters, and Lipman kindly took a little time to answer questions about the book.

Open Letters Monthly: In The Boston Globe review of The Family Man, we’re matter-of-factly told, “In a Lipman novel people match, fates meet, and patience is rewarded.” Would you agree, that the world of your novels is essentially a kind one?

Elinor Lipman: 100%; can’t seem to help it.

OLM: The Family Man is set on the Upper West Side and stars a laid-back middle-aged gay man! When in your creative process, while a new novel is percolating, do topographical and casting choices like these ping? When do you become sure what your focus will be?

EL: In this case, location presents itself immediately. Even though I don’t know where the story’s going, I know where it starts, even if all I’m going on is the opening line. Details come as I move ahead, always in linear fashion. Description doesn’t come easily to me, so I have to stop, look around, home in on the salient details. As for focus, I’m working at that in every chapter, pushing the story forward as I go, making decisions, asking myself, “Why is she–often a first-person narrator–telling us this?” If it isn’t to move the story along or help characterize someone, then I cut it.

OLM: There are a couple of choice points scored on the entertainment industry in The Family Man – post traumatic echoes from having your first novel transformed into a movie, or was that experience bearable?

EL: Very bearable, eventually, though I’d given it up for dead more than once. Then She Found Me Bend It Like Beckham video was optioned in 1989, in manuscript, and came out in 2007. Yes, 19 years. As a result, I’m never sanguine about a movie deal ever reaching fruition. Having said that–I loved the result. Fans of the book complain all the time that Helen Hunt changed the novel. To which I usually say, boo-hoo. I loved it, and it brought the book back to life. The complainers seem to think that the best screenplay would have been the novel, word for word, and it’s very hard to disabuse them of that.

OLM: To put it mildly, the gentle Thackeray-style tone of your novels sets them apart from most of the contemporary fiction in bookstores these days. Why is it, do you suppose, that your characters don’t eat each other’s faces or get high and shiv people?

EL: That’s hard to answer without it sounding like a testimonial to my own big-hearted self. I do grow exceedingly fond of my characters, so I want them to behave, to love and be loved. I don’t set out with that goal, but even the villains–so I’m told–end up being a little menschy. Not Ingrid Berry, though, from The Inn at Lake Devine. I want full credit for her being a nasty piece of anti-Semitic work from beginning to end.

OLM: Care to set up this scene a little for us?

EL: My main character, Henry Archer, has just learned that his boyfriend, Todd a) still lives at home with his mother and b) hasn’t come out to her yet. Over Todd’s initial objections, they are making that first visit. Henry, a lawyer, had a brief, closeted marriage to a woman named Denise who, in fact, has fixed him up with Todd, who works none to proudly in retail at Gracious Home.

Read the chapter here!

The Pluto Files: the Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet
By Neil deGrasse Tyson
W.W. Norton, 2009

The Contract Killer divx It was a dark day for astronomy when the International Astronomical Union got together in Prague in 2006 and officially declared that Pluto was not, in fact, a real planet. The Union’s declaration talked about hydrostatic equilibrium and such arcana, but ever since hominid life first looked to the heavens, the planets have represented far more than repositories of astrophysical data. They’re embodied dreams, wandering across the night sky.

Pluto, back when it was a theorized but unseen ‘Planet X,’ captivated the dreams of a 24-year-old kid named Clyde Tombaugh, who in 1930 combed the night sky with his telescope until he found the fabled ninth planet in Earth’s solar system. Tombaugh lived long enough to hear talk of possibly upgrading large solar objects – including some in the far-distant Kuiper belt of asteroids – to planetary status. Neil deGrasse Tyson, in The Pluto Files, his utterly winning biography of a planetary underdog, tells the story:

Clyde Tombaugh was still alive in the early 1990s. He saw the Kuiper belt omens, but fought them tooth and nail with cane in hand, using his cane not only as a walking aid but also as punctuation for the aggressive arguments he would make. Tombaugh had the most to lose if Pluto were classified as anything other than a full, red-blooded planet. In a December, 1994 letter to the editor of Sky & Telescope magazine (the monthly bible for amateur astronomers), Tombaugh declared:

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I’m fascinated by the relatively small “ice balls” in the very outer part of the solar system. I have often wondered what bodies lay out there fainter than 17th magnitude, the limit of the photographic [plates] I took at Lowell Observatory. May I suggest we call this new class of object “Kuiperoids”?

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Not knowing that objects larger than Pluto awaited discovery in the Kuiper belt, Tombaugh was unwittingly suggesting that Pluto become a Kuiperoid as well. In any case, astronomers are not likely to adopt a word that sounds like a contagious skin disease.

Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, is a wonderful, witty guide for every stage of Pluto’s century of celebrity, although he’s far too indulgent of those anti-American exclusionists who’ve succeeded – temporarily – in ousting Pluto from its rightful place on millions of those concentric-circle solar system models in millions of kids’ rooms around the world. The Pluto Files is a fantastic book for enthusiasts of all ages, but I’m one person (and for obvious reasons, I suspect Mickey Mouse is another) who hopes Pluto’s final chapter has yet to be written.

–Steve Donoghue

Open Letters is proud to congratulate contributor Matthew Klane on the publication of his first full-length book, B_____Meditations [1-54]. Available now from Stockport Flats, B is a meditation on the interconnectedness of the increasingly Americanized world, its wars, broken elections, and commercialized geography. The country of B_____Meditations is “Massachechnya.” It’s T-o-p-e-k-a, “where Burroughs is buried / a hundred thousand more / still ticking but trapped.” It’s “Oregon, Smithereens,” a collection of a hundred fragmented and interconnected poems (or one long poem in fragments) like:

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The Entrance full movie These two haiku are characteristic of the book, appearing beside one another on a page bisected twice with small discrete lines (as though viewed through a rifle sight). Two companion haiku (”Career Martyrs” and “MacArthur’s Tokyo a.k.a.”) ride the page space above them. This is Klane’s word art: visual poetry as frantic and inter-slashed as the world it meditates on.

Matthew Klane has long been a friend of Open Letters and we were delighted to feature excerpts from Being Che in August 2008. Matthew’s own hand-sewn chapbooks are available through his website (just drop him a line). A hypertext presentation of the Meister-Reich Experiments is online at House Press, and excerpts from Sorrow Songs at Otoliths. You can get your own copy of the explosive B____Meditations here.

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Showdown in Little Tokyo dvd The New Republic has a quartet of articles on what may be the death knell of print newspapers and journalism as we know it. A page 1 editorial blames a coarsening national attitude towards the press for accelerating the decline:

Just as the press has been slammed by the tides of technology, it has been hit hard by the political culture. The master narratives of both the right and left have come to include the same villan: the hypocritical biased elite media. And their combined grouching has helped foment the anti-media backlash.

Elsewhere, Joe Mathews laments the decline of investigative journalism in his old paper, the Los Angeles Times:

You can count up the journalists who have left the profession and are out of work, but much of the carnage of the ongoing media industry can’t be measured or seen: corruption undiscovered, events not witnessed, tips about problems that never reach anyone’s ears because those ears have left the newsroom…Today’s Times carries plenty of fine news stories…But there are few stories that show deep digging, that took more than a few days to put together.

This new paradigm, the shearing off of investigative reporters and editorial staff, may be glimpsed in microcosm in Gabriel Sherman’s piece on Politico

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, the upstart website that got several of last year’s biggest scoops:

Black Cloud ipod Dadnapped film [Politico CEO Robert] Allbritton is dismissive of one of the things print papers did well – long-term, long form investigative journalism – and tells me Politico is unlikely to field an investigative reporting squad. I think we have to acknowledge that the money is spent for reputational benefits and a public service play,” he says of the Times

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’ and the Post’s investment in enterprise journalism. “Why does someone have to go off and write their thesis paper while they do it?”

Finally, and most depressingly, Paul Starr turns in a huge essay Closing the Ring hd on the death of the newspapers, and what he sees as the coming era of corruption. The problems are manifold:

[Warren] Buffett’s law of the newspaper jungle, the “survival of the fattest,” favored a broad conceptin of the purview of the newspaper, attentive to a wide variety of human interests. Now the incentives are working in the opposite direction, pushing newspapers toward a more constricted view of their role…

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The predominant response in the industry to rising financial pressures has been to concentrate editorial resources close to home…the number of American newspaper correspondents abroad dropped 30 percent between 2002 and 2006…it cannot be a good thing that at a time when America’s economic and security interests are so entangled with the rest of the world, America’s news media are withdrawing from it.

So far the internet hasn’t generated the revenue to make up for the discrepancy abroad, or locally, where government at the federal, state and local level has seen a decline in assigned reporters across the country. For some background on the internet era turn to Greg Waldmann’s review of Andrew Keen’s sloppy The Cult of the Amateur, from our September 2007 issue. Then read our latest issue, where we continue our efforts to attend “to a wide variety of human interests.”

Steve Coll, perhaps the best-sourced American reporter on foreign affairs, has an excellent primer on the simmering conflict over Kashmir in the New Yorker. The situation in Pakistan is less stable than most in the West realize. In stepping down last year, Pervez Musharraf handed Pakistan’s new civilian President Asif Zardari (widower of slain opposition leader Benazir Bhutto) not only the sixty-year Kashmiri conflict in the northeast, but internal unrest that threatens to topple the government.

The violent contest for power and legitimacy between Taliban militants and Pakistan’s government is in many ways a struggle over Pakistan’s national identity – and, particularly, over whether the present government is righteously Islamic enough.

Failure here will torpedo gains anywhere else. India and Pakistan have been conducting quiet negotiations over Kashmir for much of the last decade, but “in the midst of such [an internal] contest, any agreement that made concessions to India would be harder to than ever to sell to the Pakistani public.” The Indian leadership likewise faces pressure from more militant factions to act with force. The struggle for peace reflects

a competition between two schools of radical thought: the millenarian terrorism of jihadi groups and their other supporters; and the less well-known search by sections of the Indian and Pakistani elites for a transformational peace. For both groups, Kashmir is symbolically and ideologically important. It is also, still, a territory of grinding, unfinished war.

And it is a conflict tied intimately to America’s presence in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, built up the Taliban in Afghanistan as a bulwark against Indian influence, just as they supported jihadi forces in Kashmir as proxies in their fight for territory. Weaning them off of their reliance on Islamic militants will take a combination of American pressure (the US gives billions every year in military aid to Pakistan) and a workable solution to the question of Kashmir.

For an idea of the precariousness of Pakistan’s government, see this video from the The New York Times, about the fight between the government and the Taliban for the valley of Swat, a mere 100 miles from the nation’s capitol. For more on related subjects, turn to Zac Marconi’s review of The Great Gamble, about the Soviet war in Afghanistan, from our February 2009 issue. On the wider subject of the so-called “war on terror”: Greg Waldmann’s review of Lee Harris’ The Suicide of Reason, from our October 2007 issue and his review of Michael Scheuer’s Marching Toward Hell, from our April 2008 issue.

Issue #4 of The Lifted Brow is out from far Australia, featuring four (4) Open Letters contributors in its roster. Poetry editor John Cotter, contributing editor Adam Golaski, and poets Jen Knox Transporter 2 release

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Editor Ronnie Scott designed the book’s hundred-odd stories and songs around a real fake bookshelf which had previously distinguished a hairdresser called Control HQ in Brisbane, Queensland:

The fake bookshelf is a deep-looking piece of wood. It’s painted deeply black. But as you aproach, you realise that the pice of wood is flat, and the books are merely spines, which have been pruned from complete books and wrapped around lengths of foam.

The X Files release He copied down the unlikely titles on that shelf (titles like “Sound of Murder” and “The Pain of Winning” and “Portrait of Maud”) and assigned each to a different cartoonist, musician, or storywriter.

Jennifer L. Knox makes “All Her Dreams” about the magical illusions of a crappy intervention … Caren Beilin turns “Wherever Lynn Goes” into a weird waterscape of, among other implements, “a giant sculpture of scissors, which is padded with the area’s endemic, electric moss, its blades dripping with damp life, the green hairs of waves” … In Adam Golaski’s gentle “A Rainbow Summer,” a lonely boy is told the story of Noah’s Ark, whose builder, surprisingly, does not tire of eating fish … and John Cotter draws “Cristobel,” and invents of it the history of a Mexican zombie film which is neither a zombie film, nor Mexican … Sideways dvdrip It’s a packed, portable, and very pretty book, and Open Letters offers its warm congratulations to all its makers. You can get yours here~ Untamed Heart on dvd Blink ipod The Born Losers film The Thirty Nine Steps ipod

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Jane Mayer’s reportage on the Bush administration’s detention policies has won her praise in many quarters. Greg Waldmann reviewed The Dark Side The Leon (Professional) download The Magdalene Sisters movie download

, her disturbing book on the subject, back in our December 2008 issue. Her coverage continues into the Obama Administration in the New Yorker Dolls psp .

Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri has been held at the U.S. Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, South Carolina since June of 2003, when he was on the brink of standing trial for “credit-card fraud, bank fraud, identity theft, and lying to a federal agent.” The charges stemmed from al-Marri’s 2001 arrest as a material witness in an investigation of the September 11th attacks. Al-Marri intended to plead innocent, and the F.B.I couldn’t coax any information out of him, so the Bush Administration put him in the care of the Department of Defense, hoping they would have more luck. Before agreeing to release him to the government,

the presiding judge in the case ruled that the White House would be barred from charging Marri again with the same crimes. In legal jargon, the original charges were “dismissed with prejudice,” to protect Marri’s right not to be place in “double jeopardy.” As a result, if the Obama Administration decides to charge him in the criminal system now, it has to bring a different set of charges, unless Marri’s lawyers offer a deal.

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Years of wrangling later, Al-Marri’s lawyers, hoping to secure a trial, have brought the issue all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Obama Administration must file a response by March 23rd. This response will have to address the folly of eight years of George Bush’s detention policy as much as it does the particulars of the case. Aside from wasting what federal prosecutors thought would be an easy conviction, Bush held Al-Marri without trial partly on the basis of statements made by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – statements made under torture. And al-Marri seems to have been abused during his stay there:

For the first six months, Marri was kept in an eight-foot-by-ten-foot cell with one blacked-out window, no social interaction, and nothing to do or to read…the Department of Defense ordered the removal of the mattress, pillow, and Koran…He was denied hot food, and consistently felt cold…At other points, Marri started feeling “tingles” all over, and began hallucinating…

After months of non-compliance, interrogators “chained [him] in a fetal position… [wrapped] duct tape around his mouth…tried to gag him. But as they started to tape a sock in his mouth he began to choke, causing the agents to panic and stop.” These facts are not in dispute; all of this is on tape somewhere. After a few years, the efforts of al-Marri’s lawyers secured him better treatment.

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Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrel told Mayer that “The Department of Defense treats all detainees humanely, and this is particularly true in the case of al-Marri, for whom we have taken extraordinary measures to insure his physical and mental well-being.” The first assertion is a blatant lie, the second a probable one, but what’s important is that it’s the first instance of such duplicity under Barack Obama’s Presidency. The incongruity in Morrel’s statement pertained to the policies of the last President. The upcoming Supreme Court case will show what the current President plans to do with them.