Ntuple Indemnity

If you have yet to read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, do not read this post.

The paradox there, as you may have noticed, is that you would have to have read this post – a part of the whole, anyway – to receive that warning.

Oh, parts and wholes. I’m finding it a lot easier to commit my thoughts to print (or the digital equivalent thereof) about Book Six compared to Revenge of the Sith, which you’ll notice I still haven’t written about two months on. To this I attribute three reasons. Paramount among these is that with The Half-Blood Prince I don’t feel the obligation to be all that deep, analytical and holistic because I am dealing with a part, and microcosmic parts within that part; gut reactions will suffice. I imagine that it’s going to be a lot more difficult to write about Book Seven once I read it, as conclusions of the significance promised are never isolable. Second is the fact that the ending promises a Book Seven so different from everything that has come before it that the room for speculation has never been wider.

Third is that J.K. Rowling has demonstrated once again what a master storyteller she is. Let me explain.

No, on second thought, I shan’t need to, because you’ve read the book.

The Big Fat Kill in Chapter Twenty-Seven was, to me, a complete shock. It was doubly shocking specifically because it had no business being a surprise at all – and here, I’m not referring to the fact that it’s been on the Internet for three whole weeks, with the fact indistinguishable from jokes and hypotheses to, well, most of us. Besides, having read the book, you know that the real surprise is how it happens, and how it is that the slimy bastard gets away with it right under everyone’s noses when Rowling hands him to us in Chapter Two and even has Wormtail serving him drinks for effect.

So, on to the observations – and there may be more coming.

For the most part, the book reads like its brother by symmetry, The Chamber of Secrets – exposition galore about the younger Riddle, almost all of the action confined to school premises for the first time in awhile, and for some time nothing close to the thrill-a-chapter sucker punches in The Order of the Phoenix. After Books Four and Five, this one feels like an old-school Potter; that is, if you ignore the sudden and tragic offstage demises of numerous previously onstage alumni. The Second War fusses about in the background, and we get chapters and chapters of relationship trouble and mucking about in the Pensieve. Now, don’t get me wrong – I’m not complaining here, considering that the last few chapters deliver a Goblet-sized payoff that smacks you upside the head and runs you over with a Thestral-drawn chariot – I’m just telling it as it is.

On fate and free will: Dumbledore confirms, and Harry understands, what I always thought since my first reading of Phoenix was pretty clear: the prophecy was a catalyst for a chain of self-fulfilling events, and nothing more. On the other hand, quick as one tends to be in dismissing Divination as a bunch of jokey mumbo-jumbo, you have to wonder about Trelawney’s deck of playing cards.

Between the last book and this one, it only takes a keen eye to infer that the Hog’s Head barkeep is Dumbledore’s brother Aberforth, and I believe Rowling has confirmed as much in public. I don’t think we’ll ever see this explicitly acknowledged within the text itself.

Not that it matters, but Miss Hepzibah “Descended from Hufflepuff” Smith is almost certainly related to Zacharias Smith.

The four remaining Horcruxes: taking it for granted that Nagini’s one – though keeping in mind that after this book, you can hardly say Dumbledore is infallible – and Slytherin’s locket has not been destroyed as promised by this R.A.B. fellow, that leaves Hufflepuff’s little piece of kitchenware and one unknown artefact. That the last piece is unknown, which certifies that its identity will be one of Book Seven’s core mysteries, leads me to think that it can’t be something as (relatively) mundane as Rowena Ravenclaw’s heirloom.

Still nothing about the veil or Sirius’ mirror, and with Wormtail being reduced to serving drinks, I’m beginning to wonder if any of the three have any significant part left to play.

First-years trying out for the Quidditch house team? It’s just short of being an outright contradiction – let’s grant that rules can change from year to year, and technically the rule is that they’re not allowed their own brooms, though who’s to say they can’t use a school one – but it’s glaring.

We still don’t know jack about Lily Evans, aside from her aptitude at Potions. Or, for that matter, her sister Petunia. That smells of business for the next volume.

The Half-Blood Prince scribbles in parentheses that Sectumsempra is non-verbal, but this seems more of a recommendation than an actual restriction on how the spell is to be delivered, as Harry uses it verbally to no ill effect other than letting a certain slimy somebody get away with murder – and his inability to spellcast non-verbally under pressure does him in with all his spells, not just that one.

We’re not done with surprises when it comes to Severus Snape. For one thing, we still don’t know Dumbledore’s unimpeachable reason for trusting him. Harry may have taken it to be Severus’ remorse at letting the prophecy slip, but that struck me as an answer Dumbledore gave in specific reference to Harry’s preceding challenge. I don’t for a moment buy that it’s the whole story. Everything in this book points to a strong conclusion that Snape is evil, but that he acts on an Unbreakable Vow casts a cloud of ambiguity as to his true motives. At the end of the day I think Draco has the measure of him as an eleventh-hour usurper, a Saruman figure if you will – a mere shadow of evil to its fullest but one who joins with it in hopes of its overthrow at his own hands.

To be honest, when I read that breaking an Unbreakable Vow results in death, I was almost expecting Snape to violate it at the critical moment and drop dead on the spot. But what he does instead… beyond how he was bound by contract to comply with the order, I entertain the suspicion that he performs it with Dumbledore’s full consent. We’ve seen our fair share of minibosses all claiming to be Voldemort’s closest pet – Lucius Malfoy (whose role in the story may be over), Barty Crouch, Bellatrix Lestrange – but Snape has now made the most convincing effort yet, and maybe that’s the leg up the good guys need even if they don’t realize it.

The whole Half-Blood Prince debacle and his actions after the Big Fat Kill, though, speak very strongly against him. At the end of the day, Snape the Usurper has a lot more going for it than theories of unfettered obedience to one side or the other. He fears Voldemort, and respects his wishes enough to keep Harry alive, but beyond that, he’s a wild card.

At this point it’s incredible that anybody could still think Severus is anything but a villain who is arguably a more dangerous man than Voldemort himself, but only a book ago almost all evidence was to the contrary, aside from his using the name “the Dark Lord” during Occlumency lessons – the same slip that was a dead giveaway moments before Crouch’s revelation in Book Four.

(For more information on what moles do after they lose the only ones who know theit true allegiance, watch the excellent Hong Kong cop thriller Infernal Affairs.)

R.A.B.: It’s not exactly fair of her to sic a new character on us this late in the game when it comes to something this critical, is it? But here’s what we know: it has to be someone Voldemort would recognize by those initials. He has to refer to Voldemort as the Dark Lord, have a motive for screwing him over with the Horcrux switcheroo and possess the skills to pull it off. Regulus Black’s initials match, but then we’d have to bank on Sirius being wrong about how he was a two-bit good-for-nothing who chickened out.

If it is Regulus, then the Black family connection and the search for lost items of dark power may lead Harry back to Grimmauld Place. And given how his inheritance of the house isn’t an angle that plays out in this book, I fully expect to see it in the next one.

On Dumbledore: well, I suppose there’s the portrait, if Harry somehow makes it back to Hogwarts next year. There’s also the Pensieve, though in the past it’s only been used as temporary storage for temporary examination, and it can only hold so much.

The kiss. Oh, the kiss. I haven’t seen the likes of it since Elliott let the frogs out in E.T.

Speaking of film, notice how from a visual standpoint the BFK at the Astronomy Tower is very similar in staging to the BFK in Revenge of the Sith. I do wonder how it will come off when the movie translation arrives. Cedric Diggory was a swift kick in the pants, I don’t think any of us had any concrete idea what was going on with Snuffles until a chapter or two after his snuffing, but this one was the most iconic and mysterious of them all. When Malfoy appeared on the scene, I was thinking: seriously, the world’s most powerful wizard done in by some punk? No way. At the end of the chapter, I was thinking: seriously, the world’s most powerful wizard done in by some punk? No way. I was wrong the second time.

Before Slughorn starts drinking his face off at Hagrid’s, notice how he mistakenly refers to Ron as Rupert. A slight nod to cinema, mayhaps?

I only have one other thing to say about the sixth movie: I not only hope that Chapter One is included, but that they can somehow hire Tony Blair to do a walk-on cameo as himself. If they can get him on The Simpsons they can certainly get him in the mother country’s pride and joy.

Chapter Two. How very clever. She hands him to us on a platter, has him spout premeditated answers that have seen plenty of ripening, and does it so early that one naturally hears the beckon of incredulous denial. We knew he was a powerful Occlumens. We’d known for two books that Dumbledore can be fooled. And yet… and yet. I’ll admit to being needlessly coy about it all, considering how “Snape kills Dumbledore” is going to be the most popular Google search string by day’s end, but to say it so plainly lends it such finality.

I would have been a lot more prepared for the surprises that The Half-Blood Prince springs on the reader if it were the last book and not the penultimate one. Most of this comes from the expectation that some key events wouldn’t come until much closer to the end. But it’s very clear after this volume that Book Seven has a heck of a lot of ground to cover on its own terms. This one was a backgrounder, setting the stage for a whole book of trials to come.

I think that’s all for now. I don’t think I’ve come across anything too remarkable that wouldn’t be caught by one astute Potter fan or another, considering how many of them are out there, but this meander in the woods was never meant to be a testament to eloquence.

Now that the summer movie season has been over for almost two weeks, with Spielberg’s War of the Worlds being the last major release of any significance, and the next (Gilliam’s Brothers Grimm) not arriving until late August, it is time to turn back to literary pursuits encoded in language alone.

If you’ve been paying any attention to things that matter, you are already aware that this is the week that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is being released. I, for one, will welcome our new half-blood overlord at the stroke of midnight that bridges Friday and Saturday at the Strathcona Chapters on Whyte Avenue. All are welcome, as if it were at all my authority to decide such things.

And so here we are, at much the same position as two years and a month ago, wondering what to expect from Jo Rowling before she beaned us all with the 700-page curveball that was The Order of the Phoenix. We have before us three questions of identity that may not be answerable: the major death, the new Defence Against the Dark Arts professor and the titular royal (assuming Rowling hasn’t been pulling our leg and it was actually You-Know-Who all along). After a lot of thought, if I were at all a betting man, I would think it most probable the second and third are new characters, perhaps the same character. I would also conjecturally doubt that the Half-Blood Prince is a student.

As for who croaks in this one, it’s much easier to take a stand on who won’t. I don’t believe it will be Dumbledore, though I’m fully aware I could be eating my words half a week from now. While the cover art alone implies he’ll be playing a bigger role in this one, whereas one of the big mysteries posed and answered in Phoenix was why he was hardly onstage, I get the sense that he still has a lot to do in the seventh book as the conclusion approaches, not least because he is and always has been Harry’s most direct source of testimonial exposition.

If you’ve read much Potter discussion online you are probably familiar with the Lexicon by now, as it remains the best repository of known knowns, known unknowns and a few unknown knowns for good measure. I’ve also found an excellent collection of essays on the Potterverse here, which delve into the kind of detail I endorse and would have engaged in myself did I have the time or the dedication. The writer is knee-deep in the convolutions of the online Potter community and its wildflowers of rampant fanfiction good and ill that flourish around Rowling’s canon and threaten its boundaries with myriad assumptions, and the Potterverse is honestly a lot more straightforward than he makes it out to be, but the site makes for an interesting read if you want to get those speculative juices flowing.

This is a very exciting time.

I’m aware that today is a national holiday in a little country I actually like quite a lot, replete with festivities commemorating tea parties and dangling modifiers. I still fondly recall the last time I spent the Fourth of July down south: it involved a visit to an ice cream parlour in historic Princeton with the founding fathers of my old stomping grounds at the Entmoot forums, which you’ll note was a lot more interesting than what I did last year (watching digital fireworks with virtual furry animals in Animal Crossing so Tortimer would come by and award me a piece of furniture). I don’t remember much about the ice cream parlour itself, but it’s still the best one I’ve found east of MacKay’s.

Aside from an obligatory tea party, a double waffle cone of peanut butter and chocolate and discovering that first-printing hardcovers of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire are still on shelves with the Priori Incantatem continuity goof on page 579 intact, there wasn’t so much to celebrate today up here in the land of absent hockey, misty giants and wacky marriage legislation about which some people out there apparently harbour opinions.

We had our party of patriots three days ago, when I chanced upon a free public performance by a fantastic a cappella quartet on Banff Avenue right across the street from the Grizzly House, capitol of the carnivorous connoisseur. They caught my attention with “Use the Force”, a complete retelling of the original Star Wars featuring mock lightsabre duels onstage and Darth Vader breathing, and held it until after their set when I walked out with two of their albums and autographs to boot.

The ensemble was none other than the Heebee-Jeebees, a Calgarian foursome I first heard of years ago (thanks to their accomplishment of concocting the world’s most boring song, appropriately entitled “The Boring Song”) but never had the pleasure to see in person. It turns out they hit Banff every Canada Day, when admission to the National Park comes at no cost, and I highly recommend seeing them. They also perform at the Stampede in a week’s time, for those of you spending the summer in Alberta’s better city.

This was also when I discovered that their bass singer, who has a remarkable talent for reaching depths lower than das boot in Das Boot, is none other than former Rose Bowl-winning clarinetist Cedric Blary, who was first known to me (although we did not meet per se) over a decade ago as we shared a composition instructor at Mount Royal College back when I hadn’t moved beyond scribbling fat major triads in basic triple time, and I saw him perform his own piece in a student recital. This was years before I started playing the clarinet myself, but it was an important stepping stone in verifying that it was indeed what I intended to pursue as a second instrument. Last I heard, Mr. Blary had taken up the position of being the clarinet clinician at this staple of local musical education.

Somewhere in all this is a segue to a point about the value of celebrating a national holiday, but I am going to forgo a seamless transition in favour of what the calculus-literate refer to as a jump discontinuity.

I’m going to do something unorthodox here and, in an obliquely politico-avoidant manner, reply to what Steve Smith wrote in his entry dated 1 July and the comment box therein.

Mr. Smith has a proven record of thinking national pride is silly, so it comes as no surprise that he doesn’t give a Carlos’ jackass about feeling all whoop-dee-doo when it comes to observing the birthday of the political entity to which he may or may not pay his taxes. He then proceeds to draw the salient distinction between nations and states, the timeworn semantic trademark of those with at least a freshman’s understanding of political theory who respectfully don’t want anything to do with those without the same.

I would contend that Canada’s history of not being and never having been a Westphalian nation-state is precisely why among its class of holidays, Canada Day is something unique and worth applauding.

Over the past few decades, Canada has retooled itself as a most admirable experiment in permitting the divorce of cultural identity from ethnic origin, and encouraging the severance of political allegiance from both. In this sense, separatist movements in both Quebec and to a lesser extent Alberta are a reaction to this project, not a progression.

We’re too good for homogeneous cultural isolation walled behind the borders on a map. While national self-determination is a stabilizing destination in the pre-national world, Canada is a post-national country, and that’s where the state is relevant to its citizens on an individual level. The fact that it has survived this way for yet another year is worth a cheer and a beer.

It’s usually dangerous to claim an immeasurable first unless the activity in question involved the creation of something wacky and original derived from your own warped consciousness, often something that nobody would dare touch. The world is sufficiently large so as to render true originality almost unachievable – or if achieved, unverifiable. The flipside of this is that one could also stumble upon an unanticipated conjectural finish line, be the first to do so, and not know it. Either way, I will make no claim to having done anything special of late. Speciality kneels to probability.

That said, I would find it unlikely that very many others have underscored a formal Catholic wedding with music from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past for Super Nintendo.

The signing of the registry is unpredictable when it comes to timing, you see. So not only do you need something sweet, romantic and unintrusive – it needs to be extensible, yet easy to conclude on cue. For the latter requirements, turning to classic video games should be the obvious solution, though not one that a lot of mercenary musicians will spot. And to be fair, there aren’t a lot of old Nintendo anthems that make good tearjerkers.

An ounce apiece of “Kakariko Town” and “Zelda’s Lullaby” turned out to be the perfect melodic cocktail for the occasion. The music was very well received, and the source went by unnoticed and strolled off on its innocent little way. It keeps things in perspective that the standards of the game music in-the-know that everyone recognizes and everyone plays – the Kakariko theme, for one, or “Terra”, or “Corridors of Time” – are pretty enough in their own right that they don’t connote frantic button-pushing to the casual observer, unlike, say, anything from Super Mario Bros.

The whole kerfuffle validates one and only one hypothesis: a Koji Kondo melody is a beautiful thing. In a way, I think he will go down as the great lost composer of the late twentieth century, someone who took finite sequences of beeps and whistles in infinite repetition and found art, and receded into the shadows of his accomplishments. Nobuo Uematsu’s already getting his due with the legitimation of game music; the American synchronized swimming team performed to music from Final Fantasy VIII. Zelda aside, though, Kondo and his associates haven’t done a whole lot that translates directly to the realm of the symphonic. For someone who’s written themes that everybody knows, he remains comparably obscure.

Oh, and the honorarium was generous.

At some point in your life you’ve probably heard some controversy about this thing called “love at first sight,” which to me is neither that compelling an issue nor at all fair to blind people. It even arises in the hypothetical reality embedded in literature, as do most debates that circle around the kind of representational silliness that abounds when misattributing to fiction the false responsibility of corresponding to the human condition.

You don’t hear so much about love at first listen, probably because it’s systematically demonstrable and there is no reason to doubt its operation whatsoever. To take someone at face-value is subject to being considered shallow, but to take someone at voice-value is a different matter entirely, because the voice says something. And this ambiguous something is not limited to the words and utterances it produces; consider someone who speaks in another language, where that is not at all a factor. This is a “how” property that lies in tone and melody. I venture I am not the only one who never understood all the hype about Marilyn Monroe until that scene in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot where she punctuates “I Wanna Be Loved By You” with that meaningless little poo-poo bee-doo. That – not the Coca-Cola pin-up look or the Kennedy affair – that’s what made Miss Norma Jeane a legend.

A quick scan of Google’s 3,630 results for “love at first listen” reveals that it is almost exclusively used in reference to recording artists, from whom one can be detached in all other respects, and for whom melody is what feeds the kids. While I do think the possibility of the concept transcends this medium of delivery and is active in day-to-day personal interaction, I am not going to deviate from this pattern.

This most prolific of strains is the kind of FALAFEL (Far-Away Love At First Enchanting Listen) where listening to a certain vocalist for the first time – it might only be a track, though a fraction thereof is occasionally sufficient – sells you on their albums on the spot. Let’s call the most extreme case the Ella Effect, not because this immediate rush was what accompanied my first encounter with Ella Fitzgerald, but because if you didn’t react the same way the first time you heard her sing, you’re deaf.

The Ella Effect manifests an aural holiness of the highest and most elusive order. It’s a rare gem. In nerdier terms than I dare manage, we’re talking Alpha Edition Black Lotus rare. Lady Ella herself aside, you’re about as likely to be washed over by this whopper of a falafel as you are to stumble upon the Chris Houlihan room on a hot summer’s day. Hear it once, and that’s a songbird you’ll be listening to for the rest of your life.

And I think I’ve found the Ella Effect once more.

Meet Emilie-Claire Barlow. A few weeks ago I awoke to a CBC broadcast of her take on “The Things We Did Last Summer” from her superb new self-arranged album Like A Lover, which was released this month. The setup was about as minimalistic as you could get – just ECB singing over a walking upright bass, already of interest by itself given that writing bass lines and playing them on a so-so Clavinova sample is something I’ve been trying to pick up for some time. But the track title is a bit of a misnomer, because far from being that old Cahn/Styne jingle by its lonely little self, it’s a framing device for a vocalese trip around the sun, a scatty-wah collage of about a dozen standards of a seasonal bent.

It’s the kind of chart that makes you want to shell out for the record right now – which I couldn’t at the time, because it wasn’t released yet. But now I’ve acquired the disc along with her 2003 release Happy Feet, and she’s phenomenal.

The written word fails to provide an adequately lossless isomorphism that captures her sound, but I’ll do my best and describe her tone as… open, cheerful, happy. Lady may sing the blues, but boy, will they ever bring a smile to your face. She channels that excitable flavour of brightness that veers a sharp left on the cute-sexy spectrum, and this day in age when Canada flies the flags of Diana Krall’s moody alto and Molly Johnson’s, uh, being Billie Holiday, Emilie-Claire’s is the road less travelled. She also uses little or no piano, so the albums are pleasant to comp over if like yours truly, you’re an ivoryman who fancies to pretend that a chanteuse of her calibre would have anything to do with you.

Of all the jazz singers recording today, I think she’s my new favourite. It’s unfortunate that her upcoming performance schedule is limited to Ontario and Quebec, and makes nary a mention of us alienated provinces.

Ms. Barlow also keeps a blog. Here we return to what I said earlier about how voice-value says something: after listening to her recordings, her fruity, lighthearted bubblegum writing style should come as a surprise to nobody. And if a weblog isn’t a metric of personal disposition, then what is?