Cheese and crackers?
Aug. 17th, 2005 12:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
persephone_koreI realized last night that I don't feel I can argue effectively in fandom anymore, because... well, I'm not really a "lit person" or much of a debater; I tend to go by intuition or feeling about a book and then look for what produced that effect, and on both scores I ended up being wrong about what JKR was doing with the Riddle/Harry parallels. (It only complicates matters that I liked what she thought I was doing.) Of course, it's probably more accurate to say that I didn't argue very effectively in the first place. :P
I can, however, tell you about weird dreams. If you're expecting logic, by the way, my dream-posts are probably not the place.
So, last night, I dreamed I was reading the seventh Harry Potter book. Except, my dreams being what they are, the line between reading and participating was a little unsteady.
First of all, the book seemed to have gone on sale as a surprise. Way before JKR said it was likely to be finished, possibly before she expected to start writing it. No advance publicity, just turned up on the shelves. I found this entertaining and rather refreshing.
It had 42 chapters, and the last page was 74. Apparently they were very short chapters. I have the vague impression that I thought the story was absolutely fantastic, a great ride, if presumably rather fast-paced. I never quite got to the end, though. It was time to get up.
In the meantime, however, I somehow got into the story. Sort of. There was an interlude involving honeybees, in which I was very upset to find that two coffee cans in which I apparently expected to find honeycomb and busy bees instead held a single empty cell and a three-inch-long, brightly-colored wasp, who had apparently eaten up all the bees as a larva and then pupated until I opened the cans. There was also a lot of open-air honeycomb and very busy bee-activity on what appeared to be a piece of wooden playground equipment.
I'm not sure what the bees had to do with it, but we were plunging toward the climactic confrontation with Voldemort. For some reason, this was going to involve trapping him in a car, which I was helping to prepare for this function by arranging cheese and crackers in it. And then I think Harry Potter and my father were going to sing. This last part may have had something to do with recently reading Stasheff's The Witch Doctor, which is part of a series where magic functions through poetry (sometimes sung) and in which one foe was defeated by a spell that inflicted a conscience on him. But that really doesn't explain the cheese and crackers.
I can, however, tell you about weird dreams. If you're expecting logic, by the way, my dream-posts are probably not the place.
So, last night, I dreamed I was reading the seventh Harry Potter book. Except, my dreams being what they are, the line between reading and participating was a little unsteady.
First of all, the book seemed to have gone on sale as a surprise. Way before JKR said it was likely to be finished, possibly before she expected to start writing it. No advance publicity, just turned up on the shelves. I found this entertaining and rather refreshing.
It had 42 chapters, and the last page was 74. Apparently they were very short chapters. I have the vague impression that I thought the story was absolutely fantastic, a great ride, if presumably rather fast-paced. I never quite got to the end, though. It was time to get up.
In the meantime, however, I somehow got into the story. Sort of. There was an interlude involving honeybees, in which I was very upset to find that two coffee cans in which I apparently expected to find honeycomb and busy bees instead held a single empty cell and a three-inch-long, brightly-colored wasp, who had apparently eaten up all the bees as a larva and then pupated until I opened the cans. There was also a lot of open-air honeycomb and very busy bee-activity on what appeared to be a piece of wooden playground equipment.
I'm not sure what the bees had to do with it, but we were plunging toward the climactic confrontation with Voldemort. For some reason, this was going to involve trapping him in a car, which I was helping to prepare for this function by arranging cheese and crackers in it. And then I think Harry Potter and my father were going to sing. This last part may have had something to do with recently reading Stasheff's The Witch Doctor, which is part of a series where magic functions through poetry (sometimes sung) and in which one foe was defeated by a spell that inflicted a conscience on him. But that really doesn't explain the cheese and crackers.
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Date: 2005-08-17 04:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-17 04:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-17 05:29 pm (UTC)When you read in your dreams, does what you're reading make sense? I can never quite seem to focus on the words, or if I see the words, they're garbled, gibberish, nonsense.
Totally off-topic, but I want an interpretation: my dream this morning was about being trapped in what looked like a normal living room with white walls, but actually it was inside a pyramid, but it was okay, because the pyramid was scheduled to fall apart that day. So we all waited, and then we could see the point starting to fall through the ceiling (we were near the top). The alarm went off at that point, but were we supposed to "ride" the pyramid down as it collapsed under us? Is there any way we would have survived it, even being at the top? It wasn't particularly scary, like "OMG we're all going to die", it was more like "I'll put this padded basket on my head so the top bits don't fall on me". WTF?!?
And your dream reminds me a bit of the Buffy episode about the first slayer, and the way they all had dreams that included a man holding a plate of sliced cheese. Maybe cheese is somehow linked to evil in the dream world.
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Date: 2005-08-17 06:26 pm (UTC)Well, it was more of an assumption than a worked-out theory, so I never really posted an elaborate defense. But JKR explicitly set up some parallels between Tom and Harry back in CoS, mentioned them in OotP, and expanded on them in HBP. Vague similarity in looks, both half-bloods (of a sort), both orphans. Both preferred Hogwarts to having to go back for the summer. For that matter, there's Harry's "could have done well in Slytherin" and Voldemort's claim that he always valued courage. :P
There are differences, too, of course, but what I thought after CoS was that the parallels being set up and Dumbledore's line about choices indicated that choice had made the difference between the two of them: that they had perhaps started out with roughly similar potential for good and evil, but Riddle had given in to his flaws and selfishness, eventually dismissing morality as irrelevant, whereas Harry tried to choose what he believed to be right. (I suspect that if Harry "fell," it would be through rage and vengefulness rather than a desire for glory, but I didn't say they were metaphysical clones. ;))
Instead, as it turns out, JKR has said Riddle is a psychopath, and the youngest glimpse of him we've had (at age 11) doesn't really indicate that he'd had any virtues or inclinations toward them at that point or for some time prior -- and I think that for what I was expecting, Riddle would have been required to have at least the level of virtue that Harry has of vice.
Anyway. Oh well. :P
As for reading in dreams -- sometimes I can. Sometimes I've spent a whole dream unable to read a book because I just can't find or get hold of it. And then, I think the HP7 in this dream had the "Harry Potter and the" part clear, but not the rest.
Can't offer an interpretation of your dream. It sounds like the kind of thing I'd end up with. Padded basket on the head, hiding large numbers of small children in a heap of stuffed animals and instructing them on how to make sure they have air pockets....
The cheese didn't seem especially evil in my dream, but I suppose it could have been treacherous cheese.
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Date: 2005-08-17 07:10 pm (UTC)There's also the theory that Harry was loved for at least a year, and Riddle never even had that, and that's what makes the essential difference between them.
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Date: 2005-08-17 07:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-17 07:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-17 07:42 pm (UTC)There still are parallels. We even had one more introduced--we were very explicitly told that both Harry and Voldemort regarded Hogwarts as the first place they really felt at home. And I think that to some degree Harry is being led to pity Voldemort -- for, as you say, not ever being loved, among other things -- instead of just feeling uncomfortable about having things in common with his enemy. (Of course, pitying his enemy isn't exactly comfortable either.)
I suppose it's challenging to explain evil -- and lead your hero to show compassion -- without seeming to excuse it.