“It stings to have the creator of such an amazing universe openly mock and criticize your existence. […] How do I continue to enjoy her work? Or can I?”
Submitted question to Dear Hank & John Ep. 245
[Hank] We put a lot of stock in the creators of the things that we love and we want to listen to them and we want to appreciate them, and finding out that they have invalided you, that they have a damaging perspective, they believe things that are, frankly, from my perspective difficult to understand how one could believe…of course it is sad, and you should care.
[John] It’s not only that, Hank, it’s also that these people who have a lot of power, and have a lot of money, and have a voice that gets amplified onto national news services…when they say things that are hurtful, they are harmful. It hurts in every way. […]
[John] I don’t know how to tell you about how to feel about Harry Potter; I don’t feel like it’s my place to tell you about how to feel about [it].
[John] Part of what’s been so heartbreaking about this on a personal level for Hank and me is that the Harry Potter fan community really gave Nerdfighteria a lot of its initial energy and modeled for us what communities online could accomplish. […] It’s really sad, it’s really disheartening, it’s discouraging, and I’m sorry.
Excerpts from response to above question, Dear Hank & John Ep. 245
In addition to their heartfelt responses, brothers Hank and John Green pointed their listeners toward the 2019 book Sorted by Jackson Bird. He recently had an article in the New York Times that included this:
Anytime she or the franchise’s decisions have sparked tension with my own ideologies, I think about what the real magic of Harry Potter is to me. It’s not the theme park in Orlando or trademarked merchandise, or even the deluge of information Ms. Rowling continues to release about the fictional universe on Pottermore. Those things have never been my favorite part of Harry Potter, though now I may avoid them more intentionally.
The real magic for me is what people have created around the books and the community we have built together.
Jackson Bird, NY Times Opinion Dec. 21, 2019
The real magic is what people have created around the [work of art].
The struggle of separating the art from the artist, or from its history, is complex and deserves to be treated with complexity. I’m continuing to read aloud the Harry Potter books to my children, despite a profound disagreement with the author and despite shortcomings I find (and point out to my kids) in the books.
Similarly, I’ve been struggling of late to completely cancel the works of Stephen Foster from the repertoire I program. Some arrangements are easy to cancel, but others take more thought. I believe, as others have said, that Stephen Foster was possibly the most gifted songsmith of the 19th century. According to Wikipedia, “He has been identified as ‘the most famous songwriter of the nineteenth century’ and may be the most recognizable American composer in other countries.”
He wrote songs for Minstrel shows in the 1850s, and I hope we can all agree that the history of blackface and Minstrel shows are abhorrent and deserve as much denigration as we can muster. He also wrote songs not for Minstrel shows, and tunes such as “Hard Times Come Again No More” and “Jeanie With The Light Brown Hair” are among the most tuneful American songs you can think of from that era. Particularly in artful arrangements, such as those by Alice Parker or Gene Puerling, it’s not easy to say, let’s set aside these songs.
That’s not even mentioning what I consider among the most brilliant a cappella arrangements ever created, the Ward Swingle Americana medley “Country Dances.”
This medley includes some of Foster’s Minstrel songs. Setting aside his personal history as an abolitionist and his professed desire to write better songs, without the “trashy and really offensive words” for his Minstrel songs (see Wikipedia), it’s still really hard to imagine singing this music that comes from our country’s racist past.
Even so, I struggle to say I’ll never program “Country Dances” with a choir. I think its musical worth is beyond reproach, I am beyond proud of the recording I sang on and engineered for WMU Gold Company in 2000, and I think there is a way to study, learn, and perform this piece authentically, acknowledging the racist origins and leaving room for discussion and education in rehearsal and performance.
At the moment, I fall roughly where Jackson Bird does in the article referenced above,
I wonder now if I’ll be able to separate the author from the text, if and when I decide to read the books again — a decision I’ve yet to come to a conclusion on.
I haven’t ruled it out yet, but it will require a lot of thinking to come to a satisfying conclusion.