Figure skater Adam Rippon, the first U.S. athlete to medal at a Winter Olympics while being out as gay, has released a memoir called Beautiful on the Outside. I’ve been following gay issues in figure skating since the 1990s, and once ran a website called Rainbow Ice (1998-2006) that was the first to be dedicated to
I didn’t intend to see Snape parallels when I picked up this book, but they’re plentiful. The narration alternates between a middle-school Korean girl, Sun-hee, and her young adult brother as they live with their parents through Japan’s colonization of Korea during World War II. The story is set a decade or two after the
This book was thrill after thrill. It gave me something I have not often encountered: ancient Greek mythological stories that were new to me. I did not know what happened after the Odyssey and its strangely unsated ending. As I learned the story in this book bit by bit, I felt elated. I felt rightness
Third blog post about Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. The first two posts: “Closer Than Brothers” and “Your brother seeks to destroy you.” Who is Credence Barebone? He’s not Credence Barebone. That name was given to him by the Puritanical adoptive mother he killed. He had a story before he had that name. He’s not
Spoiler alert! If you haven’t yet seen Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, be warned that the following blog post contains spoilers. When a hostile Ministry official accuses Dumbledore of once being “as close as brothers” with Grindelwald, Dumbledore corrects him: “We were closer than brothers.” What did that mean? Possibly over 99% of the theater
Seventh and final blog post spurred by reading The Life and Lies of Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore by Irvin Khaytman. The final chapter of Irvin’s book addresses the similarity between Dumbledore’s storyline and Snape’s. In the chapter of Deathly Hallows called “The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore,” Harry and Hermione lay out the terms of the debate.
Further reflections spurred by reading The Life and Lies of Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore by Irvin Khaytman. In the Half-Blood Prince chapter, Irvin starts with the moment that Dumbledore is injured by the ring Horcrux and then branches out into complex speculation about what Dumbledore might have been thinking during his final year, as he prepared Harry to
Further reflections spurred by reading The Life and Lies of Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore by Irvin Khaytman. The Order of the Phoenix chapter of Irvin Khaytman’s Dumbledore book is the one that opened my eyes the most. Even though the clues had always been there, and there had even been explicit pointers to the clues,
Further reflections spurred by reading The Life and Lies of Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore by Irvin Khaytman. In the Goblet of Fire chapter of Irvin Khaytman’s Dumbledore book, he writes that there is a rift between Dumbledore and Snape, following the events of Prisoner of Azkaban, so severe that they are not even speaking to
Further reflections spurred by reading The Life and Lies of Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore by Irvin Khaytman. The Prisoner of Azkaban chapter, especially the section called “The Matter of Buckbeak” (pp 40-46), led me to a host of new thoughts that had never occurred to me in years of reading HP. Irvin devotes that section to an in-depth consideration
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