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Harry
Potter and the Cultural Meme
I am pop-culture illiterate. Ask any one who worked with me
at Metroland, anyone who’s expected me to recognize
the snatch of an ’80s tune they were humming, or any of the
several people who have threatened to lock me in a room until
I’ve actually watched Star Wars.
This state has roots as far back as my awkward middle-school
years, when the music I listened to consisted of my parents’
Beatles records, classical music, and some holdover children’s
albums. It’s only marginally better in my adult manifestation
as a folkie without a TV who watches only those movies that
come to the Spectrum. The only differences are that I have
a better idea of what I don’t know and the Internet serves
as the CliffsNotes for some of the more important things I
miss—key segments of The Daily Show or The Colbert
Report, for example.
I do not think never having watched a reality TV show makes
me particularly noble, but neither does it trouble me much.
It does make some conversations awkward, as I miss references
to both the names of contestants on American Idol and
lead actors in cinematic classics. Still, in the current world
of niche marketing it’s more expected and accepted to have
surrounded yourself with your own particular, specialized
palette of culture. Most people assume, to a greater or lesser
degree of accuracy, that I’m a veritable font of knowledge
on some other topic.
This is one of the things that made anticipating, and then
reading, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (No spoilers
contained herein, I promise) particularly neat for me: I found
myself voluntarily and enthusiastically (if not uncritically)
part of a cultural trend. It was like a global “Big Read”
(where someone tries to get a whole town to read the same
book and discuss it), with no need for organizers.
While certainly not everyone I know has read the series, a
majority have. They’re the only books that my mother, younger
brother, and I have all read since we read books out-loud
together as a family when we were kids. (My father doesn’t
do fiction.) As my partners and I were in the process of reading
Deathly Hallows (out-loud, as we’ve done the whole
series), wherever we went there was someone to ask us what
point we were at, to nod sagely, or to sympathize that we’d
had to leave off at such-and-such a cliffhanger.
Perhaps to people who ride the waves of pop-culture more often,
or who at least keep a toe dipped in that pool, experiencing
this wasn’t such a revelation. Maybe it was only so neat to
me because I have generally abstained from other things that
would provide such a sense of common ground, such a cultural
passport. (I’m reminded of a former colleague who said he
primarily followed sports because it gave him something he
could use to strike up conversations with strangers about.)
Still, I’d wager this was a particularly dramatic example.
For one thing, I can think of very few cultural phenomena
that have been experienced by such a wide age range at the
same time, from very young kids through adults. There have
always been some of us who appreciated and continued to read
well-written novels aimed at kids. But the fact that there
was a separate set of “adult” covers for the Harry Potter
series (where “adult” in this case means less interesting
and less colorful), silly as that was, was a clear sign that
adults who were neither fantasy buffs nor parents were among
the devoted.
I was grateful for the wizarding world’s generation-bridging
power during my publishing class at the Summer Academy at
the College of Saint Rose this July. I don’t generally work
with teens, and I found myself quickly and acutely aware of
how very different their worlds and mine were. Though they
were an interested and well-behaved bunch, I frequently felt
old, awkward or just at a loss for the right example or comment
to use to connect to them. Their ages also ranged from 11
to 16, a monumentally wide spread.
Luckily, my class ran the week before the last Harry Potter
book came out in July and it was one of the favorite topics
of conversation on breaks. It offered a common ground not
just for them and me, but among the students themselves. The
shyest student was ready to weigh in when it came to topics
like how well the movie versions represented the books or
whether Snape was really evil or not. They all knew how and
when they would be getting their copy of the final book. And
on all counts, I was able, with none of the phoniness that
adults usually exhibit when trying to be hip to the kids’
way, to join in.
It’s great to be happily different, not a slave to convention,
and all that. I’m guessing more of my generation thinks of
itself that way than not. It’s also nice, however, to be reminded
that occasionally something besides the most basic human needs
and responses can unite us.
—Miriam
Axel-Lute
www.mjoy.org
metroland.typepad.com/the_big_questions
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