Five days 'till Harry

I'm re-reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in advance of the movie release next week. So I know what's been left out, I guess. Part of the fun.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is a photograph more real than a digital image?

In the bonus documentaries that come with Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, there's a long demo of a waterfall scene that didn't make the final cut because it slowed down the action. Most of the components of the scene are digitally created, including all the water effects. The artist shows how he created the waterfall from image samples and overlays -- and then added noise and film grain. Film grain. Because the image looked too crisp and perfect. So by making a digital image look like a photograph, it becomes more "realistic" to our eyes. Isn't that interesting? Photography connotes realism. And we make this judgment -- realistic or not realistic -- when viewing an image, even though we should consciously know that photos can be staged or completely manufactured. "The medium is the message." -- Marshall McLuhan. When a digital image simulates a photo, is that two messages? Or is it just a mixed message? ;-)
Read more

Homesick in an amputated landscape

I missed the shape in the near and far distance, of mountains, what was so grotesquely absent in the Midwest. I could never shake the idea that there must have been some kind of mutilation, an amputation, to reduce a countryside to such awful flatness. The clouds over the lake could only do so much for so long in a day to masquerade as landforms.   *     *     *     *     * I wanted to know if, after all the years away, she felt the same, if she missed the comfort, the safety, of the mountains. from Disobedience , by Jane Hamilton Disobedience is a Bookcrossing book -- an exercise in serendipity and literary addiction -- when I've finished with it, either I'll give it to someone else in particular, or just leave it in a public place to find its next reader on its own. I haven't decided yet. I like Hamilton's description of the Midwestern plains as something mutilated -- as they are from the perspective of the narrator, a Vermo...
Read more