The title is from the Guardian’s piece on the Harry Potter convention in Las Vegas (via Bookslut), in which the traditional naive reporter is sent out to be shocked by discovering people in costumes, slash fanfic, and pseudo-academic papers:
Lumos 2006 is not just another conference, it’s ‘a Harry Potter symposium’, and most of the audience aren’t academics at all, they’re common-or-garden fans, 1,200 of them in total, here for three days’ worth of talks, presentations and panels. Dr Blazina’s presentation is just one out of a possible six others being held in the same time slot, including ‘Not Just Good and Evil: Moral Alignment in Harry Potter’ and ‘Bloody Hell! Why Am I So Wild About Harry?’
The last time I paid attention, Harry Potter was a phenomenally successful series of children’s books. But this, I discover, is the kind of hop elessly naive viewpoint that causes my fellow Lumos attendees to gasp and shake their heads. Children are banned from the conference. Over-14s are grudgingly allowed only if they’re chaperoned at all times. I go to only one talk in which the speaker thinks of mentioning that it’s a book for children. And even as he says it, I see the audience losing interest.
Sometimes I wonder how major newspapers continue to find clueless rubes to write these articles. While I’m personally baffled by slash fiction in general, nothing else in the article should really be surprising to anyone with a passing acquaintance with SF fandom. Once you accept the trope of reportorial naivete, though, there are a few enjoyably snarky lines.
If you prefer your Harry Potter obsession without snark, here’s a more serious analysis from Lance Mannion (via somebody or another on ScienceBlogs).
On the subject of book related cutesy titles, I offer my creation for today’s official Brust release: Dzurve’s Got Nothin’ to do With It.
That is hillarious! How about Trekkie conventions?
Oh, btw, I linked to Lance a couple of days ago so perhaps that’s where you forgot you saw it….
Very amusing, at least in bits. I particularly liked the part about the one guy in the room full of slash fiction writers who declares quickly that he’s there with his girlfriend and agrees rapidly with the author’s sentiment that “I thought it was just about liking cuddly wizards…”
I knew few editors who would send a high-school-sports reporter to an economics conference, or their music critic to cover Comdex (though David Pogue could do either).
Why would you send someone who says, “The last time I paid attention, Harry Potter was a phenomenally successful series of children’s books” to a discussion of the books?
Next for the Guardian: Phlogiston proponents cover the ACS meeting.
Why would you send someone who says, “The last time I paid attention, Harry Potter was a phenomenally successful series of children’s books” to a discussion of the books?
Because that’s what anyone would say, as it’s objectively true?
A few reasonable voices have pointed out elsewhere how their words and presentations were misrepresented by the reporter, who arranged at least one interview that she (the reporter) failed to appear for.
When is it ever *not* in the journalist’s interests to make the freakshow look even more freakish? Cf. the yearly coverage of the annual medievalists’ conference in Kalamazoo, MI, or the Modern Language Association convention, both of which events have their odd aspects. Those aspects are nevertheless far more palatable to the mainstream than a Potter conference–yet they’re similarly made much of for the sake of publishing an article.