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Jun. 18th, 2004 12:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
malsperanzaHarry Potter on the Flat Screen
By PAMELA LiCALZI O'CONNELL
New Realm for Rowling
Forget the big screen. The most significant new Harry Potter development is on computer screens, with the debut of J. K. Rowling's home page last month. Previously Ms. Rowling, the author of the Potter series, had no Web presence beyond a page of links to her publishers.
As one might expect, www.jkrowling.com is smoothly executed and witty. The author is said to have written it entirely herself to help dispel rumors, share unpublished material and hint at what's ahead in Book Six, the penultimate volume of the Potter saga.
The site has tallied 76 million page views in just a few weeks, although Ms. Rowling wrote that readers "worked out all the riddles in about 10 minutes." Every revelation, however, is being parsed closely, creating yet more theories and rumors (why does she confirm that Harry's mother is dead but not mention his father?). In its way, the site is a dare.
It appears at a time when some of Harry Potter's online fans are wondering whether the books are being overanalyzed. Steve Vander Ark, editor of the influential Harry Potter Lexicon (www.hp-lexicon.org), is preparing a keynote speech on this topic for a coming fan convention in Ottawa (www.conventionalley.org). "Ever since a rat turned into a wizard in the third book, fans have been reading them differently, seeing everything as a clue," Mr. Vander Ark said. "It must be scary to write under these conditions."
And Rachel Dahl, a writer of Potter fan fiction - that is, fiction based on Ms. Rowling's characters - posted a widely read essay (www.lumosdissendium.org/essays/JKR.html) asking whether the author's site was in some ways irrelevant. "Do most of us really care to have the record set straight?" she wrote, adding: "The whole reason to discuss HP online is to discuss the what might have beens, the what could have beens, the possible pasts, and the possible futures."
From http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/17/technology/circuits/17diar.html?pagewanted=print&position=
The NYT is, in its usual stately way, behind the curve.
When worlds collide: http://watleyreview.com/2004/061504-3.html
