Harry Potter again again
17.30, Friday 4 Sep 2026 Link to this post
I watched the trailer for the new Harry Potter TV series on HBO.
My overwhelming feeling is that it is so absurdly redundant to make this. Not even reimagined but to cosplay the movies so slavishly… the sets look the same, that same teacher with the same hat and the same Scottish accent…
To make the series is a bonfire of human creative effort, think of what could have been done instead.
I love it, I’m in awe at the endeavour.
Did you ever watch Teletubbies? There was always a video interlude. Then the Teletubbies would yell again again!
and we’d watch the whole thing again.
If he were still alive, Jorge Luis Borges would write about HBO.
Borges’ short story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (Wikipedia):
Menard (a French 20th century novelist), after his death, leaves fragments of his work to write an identical Don Quixote, originally authored by Miguel de Cervantes in Spanish in the early 1600s.
He did not want to compose another Quixote–which is easy–but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide–word for word and line by line–with those of Miguel de Cervantes.
But how?
The first method he conceived was relatively simple. Know Spanish well, recover the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or the Turk, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes.
He abandons that route as being “diminutive” and instead attempts (successfully) to go on being Pierre Menard and reach the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard.
(Borges then goes on to quote two identical passages, one from de Cervantes’ Quixote and the second from Menard’s Quixote, and analyse them separately.)
Menard becoming de Cervantes, to the point of writing the same book, makes me think about my long-held belief that actors are magicians:
Acting is not the acting as “pretending” that we all did at school, of course? But the difference between great acting and school acting is not merely a matter of magnitude. It is something else entirely: the true actor is a shapeshifter.
Actually what amazes me about actors is that they can come back.
Once Menard is de Cervantes, is it possible for him to evolve into being Menard once again, any more than the original de Cervantes could?
Jim Carrey’s loss of self, as previously discussed (2023): If I can put Jim Carrey aside for four months, who is Jim Carrey? Who the hell is that?
RELATED:
Emily Wilson, who translated The Odyssey in 2017, which I loved, is translating the whole thing again: It’s a complete retranslation. It’s not a revision of the old version.
Her bet is that is that it’ll be better.
What does it mean to re-derive Harry Potter in 2026 such that you end up in the same place?
I worry that it says more about our society than Harry Potter itself; that Menard, having become de Cervantes, cannot become Menard again; that next year will not be 2027 but 2002.
Again again!
If nothing else this has been a good reminder to re-read some Borges. The Aleph is good. I linked to it here.