A Muggle Draws Blood

Perhaps when Leonard Nimoy penned his book "I Am Not Spock," in which he distanced himself from Star Trek and ridiculed the show's legion of fans, he might've gotten a more intense geekoid backlash than Joel Stein, whose LA Times jeremiad this weekend took no prisoners in skewering devotees of BlogPulse's perennial top man, Harry Potter. (Then again, George Lucas has been known to provoke some pretty acrid, frothing reactions from the world's nerds.) Mostly Stein points out that whereas Harry's exploits might make fine bedtime material for children, he can't quite agree they're worth the praise and time adults seem to lavish on them. "I'm sure the Potter books are fun. I bet a night of Fun Dip, piñatas and Sit N Spin would be great too," he writes. Predictably, the Pottersphere (as the blogosphere sometimes ought to be known) has never been so insulted: "All of this, of course, just goes to show that Joel Stein doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. The Harry Potter books are, in the guise of children’s literature, serious examinations of character, morality, politics, and culture," writes Alex Knapp. Elise the Insane thinks it's unfair to single out the Potterheads for such scorn: "Is it rather stupid for a 32 year-old woman to be looking forward to sitting in line for six hours for a children's book? Maybe. That is one way of putting it; but that stupid tag can be applied to nearly every single pop culture event. NASCAR fans having massive orgasms while watching people make left turns all day - seems pretty stupid to me." What about children flying around on brooms playing a made-up game nobody understands?

Posted by Philip Ewing at July 11, 2005 11:43 AM

Category: The Dead-Tree Scene