Disclaimer: This post was written last week and is not Leah Burgin’s column in today’s Daily, which, incidentally, is about the same exact thing. Sort of.

Once upon a time, I refused to read Harry Potter, and only relented because a friend had lent it to me― or pressed it upon me, rather, with a “this is really good!” of which I was skeptical (either it had not yet reached peak popularity, or I was simply oblivious)― and my mother insisted it’d be rude to not at least attempt to read it. So I read the first book, then the second, and the third, until at some arbitrary point in time, I began eagerly awaiting the publication of the next successive volume with ever-increasing fervor.

The world Rowling crafts is wide and all-encompassing, with rules and laws built into it that are illogical to reality but entirely logical within its own fictional framework, that are structured and regular but leave room for inferences and implications and the imagination to build something for itself. It separates itself from the mundane, but suggests that the magical world exists simultaneously as an ordinary one, and thus can actually exist; this, at least by my reckoning, is one of the things that makes the series so accessible to its audience― to children, to those who had read it as children, to people who just want to enjoy a nice escapist bit of fantasy. It isn’t merely the sum of the hype and the massive franchise built off seven books. It has shaped the youth of a great many people- it has certainly factored into mine. Don’t pretend you were entirely unaffected.

Harry Potter never did make it into my conscious list of favourite books, however. I preferred to state (with dignity), publicly and to myself, that on my list were the likes of Tolkien and oh, C.S. Lewis, maybe, and perhaps a bit of O. Henry tossed in there for good measure (and to balance out the fact that I enjoyed reading fantasy, etc). Which I genuinely did, of course, I did and do like them very much, but the language of Harry Potter is easier to read, its characters more easily relatable, its content more interesting. It is, for the same amount of effort expended, more enjoyable. Harry Potter is not, understandably, generally considered high literature; they are children’s books, written for enjoyment and immersion in said enjoyment, rather than an introspective discourse about the workings of societal values and the nature of intangible ideals. But what begins as a simple narrative about a boy in a tale of good and evil blossoms out into an intricate and multifaceted web of struggles and intrigues.

And this leads us to the present argument: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final installment. We spent all the space before its release rereading the previous books and hypothesizing what would occur in that momentous, precipitous conclusion that would answer all our questions and tie all the loose ends together. What happened was not entirely unexpected, but rather disappointing all the same, to be honest. Realizing that there was only so much time for all the remaining plot points to occur, Rowling must have squeezed everything else into the limited space of 700+ pages in order to bring everything to a logical conclusion. Which… it did, conclude logically, that is, after a fashion, but at least to me, the ending was too contrived, and quite unsatisfactory. The remaining protagonists seem to be all paired off neatly with one another by the end. Then comes the epilogue, in which we see said characters in their now-married couples with their multitudes of children, happy as can be in their domestic bliss. It might just be me, but there could be better and more convincing ways to end such a complex narrative. As a response to the culmination of 10 years’ emotional involvement on part of the readers? Ouch.

Least satisfactory of all is the matter of Severus Snape. The tragic antihero, who plays perhaps the most pivotal role in the entire narrative, whose entire life is one of hardship and of being loathed by everyone around him no matter what he does, does not receive the ending he deserves. He is perhaps one of the most complex characters in the entire series. Snape is caught between moral dilemmas, treads a precarious line, and yet manages to do the right thing (in addition to maintaining a stoic facade, remaining a vaunted intellectual in academia, and being Alan Rickman). And what does he get? He dies, and in a rather undignified way, to boot.

Well.

TChen will be the one sobbing all through the end of the last film.

Each little blue dot is a galaxy of stars like ours. (We are at the center of this cross-sectional splicing.) Ever since my formal education began, I was told that the light coming in from the stars was, in fact, old, stale, and thus full of sequestered, admirable charm. “You are looking into the heart of history itself,” they all would say. While delicately holding on to that fact, I always felt a magnificent desolation towards these bodies of luminescence, whistling with a blade of grass in my mouth while lying on the lawn and drinking in the marvel of it. It wasn’t until recently that I realized how geo or rather ego-centric this thought was. Taking it in reverse, light from us takes time to travel to other places and observers far away can only see us in the past. While standing at the circumference of this circle, an observer would see the earth one billion years ago. Since the beginning of modern man is estimated to be 200 000 years ago, divide this radius by 5000 and it is at this tiny circumference that an onlooker might first witness the first buddings of our civilization.

Thus, there is no useful simultaneity in such a universe; nobody can see the whole thing “now”. Our history literally spreads out around us like ripples in a pond.

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.

Meet Julian Beever.  He can make things come to life magically from the sidewalk.

You think I’m kidding?  I’m not.  He really can.  It may not be “magic” in its purest sense of the word, but the sidewalk art that he sculpts becomes a magical illusion that really can boggle your mind.

All of these works of art are created with chalk and a camera.  Beever sets up a camera at a specific spot on the sidewalk, which he uses as his reference point.  As he draws his art on the sidewalk, he walks back and forth from his work to the camera, looking through the viewfinder to see if his perspective is turning out correctly.  Looked at from any other angle that is not face-on, the drawing does look skewed.  But if seen from the exact angle for which it was created, the viewer gets a surprising 3-D shock.

Beever goes around the world making these 3-D creations and offering delightful surprises for those lucky enough to encounter them.  Has anyone of you seen them?  Or do you know of any other works by other artists that is equally innovative and inspiring on the street?

“No pun intended,” and  “Pardon the pun” are two phrases that most of us have heard several times. Why do we apologize for making puns? There seems to be a general, vague impression that puns are a low and unintelligent type of humor, but I cannot help but disagree with this assessment.  Rather than lending a sense of foolishness to a sentence, a well used pun gives a delightful mental burst of simultaneous complexity and understanding.

Recently, thanks to a friend, I was introduced to the Pillsbury Doughboy’s obituary. This little work of fiction is a pun filled piece of writing that can’t help but put a smile on it’s readers’ faces. If you feel like being amused at the expense of the poor Pillsbury Doughboy’s untimely demise, I encourage you to click on the link above and read his obituary.

I have been drawn to art (no pun intended) since I was in preschool.  I remember I decorated a wood tree that made my teacher think I was some child prodigy.  My Mom still has it, and by the looks of it, I think my teacher was simply trying to boost my self-esteem because my parents had recently gone through a divorce.  Whether it was amazing or not, this signified the moment that I felt like creating and knowing art was my thing.  At five I knew what I wanted to be an artist.  I wish I were as confident now as I was then about my future career.

After a year in the art school at UofM, I decided that was not the path I wanted to follow.  My interest in art led me then to Art History, where I am quite content.  Recently though, I have a great interest Public Health.  When I enter the real world in six short months I hope to participate in some service work that blends these interests.  I believe the battles our generation must conquer are environmental and health issues.  So, I want to get involved as soon as I can to make my difference.

I see myself playing out this tandem through the integration of art in urban settings.  The art can be of any kind; graffiti, urban gardens, and installations, anything to spruce up the environment and to integrate natural and unnatural materials into the landscape.  Art in urban setting makes so much sense; I’m not sure why there is not more of it across this country.  It decorates our world in a meaningful and powerful manner.  Now, I understand how some may see public art as clutter, but these materials would clutter another space, a landfill, so why not integrate them into our society for a purpose?  Public art generates self-expression, illuminates an area that was once shaded and inspires others.  In the upcoming weeks I hope to write about some places in the US that are merging art and landscape.  Look forward to it!

There was a time when the luminous sound of a choral performance was defined solely by the certain resonance of voices in an acoustically-fitting space– a cathedral, perhaps, a high-ceilinged hall with columns of stone soaring into the air and wrapping the sound within its spacious confines. And this is still important, still a staple image, still an ideal rooted in tradition, but it is not the only definition.

The Virtual Choir may be a relatively well-known phenomenon by now, and has probably already been thoroughly discussed by others. This fact, however, does not diminish its impact. Eric Whitacre, who coordinated (and still coordinates) the project, posts sheet music and an instructional video of his silently conducting it on the internet. And the internet, in response, performs his music, as individuals who upload their respective parts onto Youtube. These are then assembled into a multi-track work, the likes of which have never been seen before.

The goal of the project, says Whitacre, was to “not just sing our parts separately and cut them together; I wanted to see if we could actually make music.” And he did. They did.

Aside from the aesthetic, auditory wonder of the music itself, there is also the fact that the shape and nature of what constitutes a community, what constitutes a shared understanding and a shared experience, has been expanded to accommodate this, the Virtual Choir. No longer are those who wish to create music together restricted by geography or personal circumstances or who one is.

A singular idea, the one piece of music, is merely an amorphous concept until it is realized. Under normal [choral] circumstances, a number of people come together, make their individual sounds fit together, and perform. The Virtual Choir, however, breaks that concept into small pieces and disperses them all around the world. Here and there, individuals pick up the pieces, nourish them, and then they are fed back into the system and reassembled once again into a whole, but an entire, fleshed-out, fully realized whole.

This, good people, could very well be the sound of humanity.