The long and winding Beatles-Stones debate

The Beatles' January 1969 rooftop concert of songs from Let it Be--which wouldn't be released until May 1970, after Abbey Road and the band's breakup--are up on Youtube.

I love how rock films from the 60s show how novel and exciting an idea it was to be freaking out the squares, and for no one more so than the Beatles. (I wonder if that's a core Republican-Democrat cultural difference: when you see someone freaking out the squares, do you laugh or glower?) You can see how this has changed in Spike Jonze's two Fatboy Slim videos, "Rockafella Skank" and "Praise You"--he's still freaking people out, but he's not visibly proud of putting people off and the humor comes from his intense focus on the performance.

At a party last year, Alice mentioned debating with friends which of the Beatles and Rolling Stones are the superior band. I immediately blurted out "The Beatles!", and Alice told me that would put me in the minority.

Let it Be, and the rooftop concert in particular, is some of my favorite Beatles music (according to Wikipedia, the rooftop performances of "Dig a Pony", "I've Got a Feeling" and "1 after 909" were put on the final album). My favorite Stones music also comes from the same period: Let it Bleed in 1969 and Sticky Fingers in 1971 (more than Get Yer Ya-Yas Out and Exile on Main Street). In comparison, the white album, Let it Be and Abbey Road do feel sentimental and precious.

Earnestness is much of the Beatles' charm, but it's still charm and not really rock & roll. The Beatles expanded music in many directions, but they never found the sticky adult territory of "Under my Thumb" or "Brown Sugar". To listen straight through the Red and Blue albums (the official best-ofs) is to wait for a particular sort of breakthrough that never comes. If you're willing to be counterfactual, it's not hard to imagine that if the final Beatles album had been any of the Stones' four from 1969-72, it would be held above Abbey Road and Sgt. Pepper's.

How about this: is Pearl Jam to Nirvana a good metaphor for Beatles to Stones? For simplicity, I'm talking about the best albums of each group, which makes the comparison easier because as I see it these are roughly contemporary in each case (sorry, No Code and Tattoo You fans). Ten and Vs. are syrupy next to Nirvana's three albums (it's hard to imagine Kurt Cobain crying out "Where do I stand?"), but then again I always listen to them in different ways: Pearl Jam and the Beatles by playing isolated songs, Nirvana and the Stones by playing whole albums. Hearing "The Long and Winding Road" after already hearing "Across the Universe" is a bit much, as is "Indifference" after "Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town" (even typing that makes me wince). But I'm never happier than when I play "Dissident" or "Rearview Mirror" (though preferably not in sequence), or "Dig a Pony" or "Oh! Darling". I don't feel the same way about any Stones or Nirvana songs, though I play Nevermind, In Utero and the two Stones albums I mentioned in heavier rotation than PJ or Beatles.

As for the singalong concept album stuff, I hardly ever listen to it anymore, but I'm glad it's there. Once, managing deliveries for a restaurant in the meatpacking district in Manhattan, someone started singing "Because" as a joke, and I swear that the entire delivery crew--with the exception of a few confused Dominicans--proceeded to sing the entire album side all the way through "The End".

A related memory: once, at the Columbia bar Cannon's, I put "Gimme Shelter" on the jukebox, but the volume was too low and that kills the song. As the opening wail came on, I got looks from people that said what the fuck is this? When the guitar, bass and drums came it, I started bobbing my head, thinking here we go, but no one was with me. I feel David Bowie's warning on the back of Ziggy Stardust: "To be played at maximum volume". "Dig a Pony" in particular shrivels up when played on a tinny. tiny system, but expands on a good and loud one.

Writing about forgetting

There was a neat article about amnesia in the Science Times a few weeks ago that reminded me of The Vintage Book of Amnesia, edited by Jonathan Lethem. The introduction is one of my favorite Lethem essays:

A writer sat in a featureless white room trying to remember a genre which had never existed.

This book of literary amnesia began as an observation of certain resemblances in two or three novels I admired--a passing notion, a reader's list. I had no intention of editing a book, let alone identifying a genre. But amnesia turned up more the harder I thought about it. At first it was the obvious, gaudy cases, amnesia breaking out into an overt premise or plot symptom--there were more of these than I'd ever imagined (in fact, I'd written more than one myself). Elsewhere amnesia appeared pulsing just beneath the surface, an existential syndrome that seemed to nag at fictional characters with increasing frequency, a floating metaphor very much in the air. Amnesia, it turned out when I began to pay attention, is a modern mood, and a very American one.

Not that there's any question that literary amnesia has European grandfathers: Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. If it's usually felt that every compelling novel is in some sense a mystery, the examples of Kafka and Beckett suggest that amnesia can be seen as a basic condition for characters enmeshed in fiction's web. Conjured out of the void, by a thin thread of sentences, every fictional assertion exists as a speck on a background of consummate blankness. There's a joke among writing teachers that apprentice writers, at a loss for an idea, will usually commit some version of the story that begins: "A man woke alone in a room with bare white walls," unconsciously replicating their plight before the blank page and hoping that compositional momentum will garb the naked story in identity, meaning, and plot. Our hero might have blood on his hands, or answer a ringing phone, or find himself wiggling an antenna--we'll improvise as we go along.

Here is Sophie Harrison's review (from Sunday's New York Times Book Review) of Paul Auster's new book Travels in the Scriptorium:

Paul Auster is not so much a writer’s writer as a writer for people who long to be writers. His novels have a habit of unpacking themselves as they go, showing their workings with the gentle condescension of a creative writing tutor addressing a roomful of hopeful amateurs. His frankness about technique is complemented by the modesty of his sets. All you need is a bed, a chair, a notebook, a room — or perhaps Manhattan or Brooklyn, if you prefer some slightly bigger rooms — and you’re there, a modern postmodernist, like Beckett and Kafka, only cooler.

“Travels in the Scriptorium” even sounds like the title of a workshop, and the writing-school ambience takes a while to disperse. On Page 1 a man sits on a strange bed in a strange room. He has no idea where he is. He has amnesia. (Your reviewer confesses to sneaking a look at the end at this point, checking for the sentence “It had all been a dream.”) “Who is he? What is he doing here? When did he arrive and how long will he remain?” the narrator asks, closing his inquiry (Four Questions Every Screenwriter Should Answer!) with an unpromising hook. “With any luck, time will tell us all.” With any luck, Auster will tell us all. He doesn’t, of course. This is the democratic classroom of postmodernism: teacher gives the hints, students construct the sense. “For the moment, our only task is to study the pictures as attentively as we can and refrain from drawing any premature conclusions,” the unnamed narrator informs us somewhat priggishly.

It is, in fact, difficult to draw any conclusions at all, but a study of the text will enable the reader to find out this much. The man on the bed is known as Mr. Blank. He is dressed in a pair of pajamas. The first thing he notices is that all the objects in his room are identified by labels: TABLE, on the table; LAMP, on the lamp, and so forth, in a manner that is either deeply mystifying, or deeply cute, depending on one’s interpretation of course. There is a desk or a DESK nearby, with a stack of photographs and some pages of a manuscript. There is a window, but the shade is drawn. Importantly, Mr. Blank feels too anxious and weak to investigate the DOOR.

Returning back to the Science Times article, I had this odd feeling that actually, Auster might be on to something with his schematic descriptions. Here's the data that the scientists collected:

The men, urged to fill out the scenes with imagined detail, described what they could. The researchers analyzed transcripts of their answers, carefully scoring each one for personal touches: projected emotions, sensations and actions. They found that compared with similar descriptions produced by adults without brain injuries, the five men's imagined scenes were flat, barren of personal dimension.
...
The distinctions the brain makes between loose facts and the richer, wraparound ambience of an experience are important to understanding memory, because people with healthy brain function tend to recall the gist of experience, whereas those with hippocampus damage can often recollect discrete facts with more accuracy. The difference is partly reflected in the study participants' words.

When asked to envision an open-air market, one brain-injured man said: ''I see people, very many people. Most of all um not many men, all I see are young ladies. And basically they are all in a hurry.''

A participant without brain injury responded: ''Right, so on either side of me I've got stalls and it's noisy. We have a person on my right who is selling fruit and veg, and they're telling us that bananas are on special offer this week, and they're shouting about that.''

In an essay published this month in the journal Nature, two Harvard researchers, Daniel L. Schacter and Donna Rose Addis, contend that this ability to richly imagine scenes, whether entirely dependent on the hippocampus or not, is perhaps the most promising frontier for memory research.

Most of the authors collected in Lethem's Vintage Book of Amnesia have imagined amnesia to be much richer than this data suggests--and of course, as readers, we wouldn't want it any other way. (One of my favorite Shirley Jackson short stories, "Nightmare," is in there.) Lethem calls attention to this discrepancy in his description of the genre, where he keeps mentioning his own acts of discovering, making connections, reconsidering, recategorizing, and so on. He had "no intention" of collecting the stories but "the harder [he] thought about it," the more obvious the connections became; then he's able to reconstruct a past history of the genre in Beckett and Kafka, which is of course exactly what an amnesiac couldn't do; then he's able to theorize it and draw more connections; then he's able to tell you what he's doing and theorize it. It's a wonderful essay. Here's the paragraph about the problem of defining a genre of amnesia writing:

Obviously, I risk spilling my precious and only-recently-distilled vial of amnesia fiction into the broad streams of dystopian writing and cultural critique, but, well, that's what genres do under study: merge and disappear into others. (Noir, dystopia, theory, metafiction: watch amnesia swirl and be lost like James Stewart in Vertigo's dream sequence.) Anyway, any good dystopian tyrant knows the use of and value of controlled collective amnesia, or he loses his job.

These lyrical description of a brain injury reminds me of Siri Hustvedt's The Blindfold (any combination of Ben, Miriam, and me in a room discussing this book gets heated very quickly). Hustvedt, Auster's wife, makes a lot out of the migraine as a descriptive and structural device--the gaps in the narrative are like the black holes that appear in the main character's field of vision, stuff like that, and maybe it gets clunky fast. And yet, I think I can outline every single bizarre twist in the novel because it's so weirdly memorable, or at least I remember arguing with Ben and Miriam about it many times. I've always thought that the first section, where the main character is hired by a sinister old man to catalogue and tape-record her descriptions of creepy items in his apartment, is like a writing workshop piece--you know, describe these items in explicit detail as an exercise--with a very loose plot attached to it.

Wikipedia and new forms of citation

The history department at Middlebury has banned citing Wikipedia as a research source in term papers and exams. This is a neat article because the author notes some of the potential problems with using Wikipedia as a cited source--the history department recognizes that it's still useful (and ubiquitous) as a source for consultation--but he also talks to professors who have asked students to prepare entries for the site as assignments so that students can learn about what it's like to present information in such a genre. Both Jimmy Wales and a professor in the Middlebury history department make the point that encyclopedias don't make for good research citations in academic writing anyway, whether they're from a wiki, Britanica, or Encarta. Wales gets a predictably inflated comparison in there: telling the kids to stop consulting Wikipedia would be like telling them, 'don’t listen to rock ’n’ roll either.'"

When I've talked about Wikipedia as a source in classes in the past, I've framed it the discussion as one where we can talk what we're doing when we cite stuff and why it matters to assess the position, rhetorical stance, and limitations of sources. I'm interested in the odd cases where new sources of information do yield potentially useful directions for research. Do you cite Wikipedia on a "Works Consulted" list but not a "Works Cited" list? A few of my students have found Wikipedia entries useful for pointing to outside sources (one entry quoted a magazine article that she wouldn't have known about otherwise; it seemed important, then, to cite where she had found the reference to that article, as well as to find the magazine article and read it for a fuller context). Another student found several citations to news articles at Snopes.com, which doesn't have uniform citations but does provide outside links to online editions of print news sources sometimes. Again, that site was a good starting place--not an ending place--to look for information she wouldn't have found otherwise. Sometimes we make notes in footnotes if we've found a citation or a quotation in another print source, so how would it work with website citation?

Irving Kristol: haters strike again

Ralph Fiennes recently had a mile-high tryst (or at least attempted one) with a flight attendant, and now she's in trouble. Why? Because humorless coworkers tattled on her. Here's the one thing Ayn Rand and I would agree on: this sort of schadenfreude is despicable.

Neoconservatives like Irving Kristol--who I'm reading a book of essays by--position themselves in the Nietzshe/Rand camp of people not afraid to declare that there are great men and great books, and that we're better off revering the great than harping on them to defend what Kristol calls "joyless equality" (when describing Denmark). But would Ralph and Lisa Robertson, emerging from the bathroom, elicit a wink from Kristol, or a formal complaint? It's clear from his anger towards hippies that it would be the latter. It's similar to Kristol's hostility towards multiculturalism: if people are enjoying themselves and it's not in his traditional ways, he can't stand it. You don't need to be black to see the universal value of studying Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, but you do need to not be Irving Kristol.

I like to think that liberalism has, at its core, an uncertainty that does not die; a faith that there's always a perspective that we do not yet have, always a new world to be discovered by wading into the plurality of languages and cultures. Liberal autobiography seems marked by events that break down certainty; in Kristol's autobiographical writing, a pillar of certainty (like Kristol's early Trotskyism) is only destroyed if a castle can be built in its place (like his later anti-communism, so strong it allows suspension of constitutional protections). On balance, I prize the unpredictable over the traditional, and I love the side of liberalism that does the same. Kristol very much does the opposite.

In the recent New Yorker profile of Christopher Hitchens, someone comments that while Hitchens rightly denounced Mother Theresa's hypocrisy, there is little doubt as to which person you would be wise to come to if you were cold and hungry. Kristol and co. are right about some things, including the ills of socialism. But if you were an embarassed flight attendant who'd just been--I'll split the difference between the various accounts of what happened--making out in a bathroom with The English Patient, would you rather that the witness be Kristol or Rosa Luxemburg?

I'd like to shank the Academy

Here are the bets I'm placing on the Oscars this year at Tradesports.com. I made a killing last year shorting Brokeback and I'm looking to repeat. (Note that these were the odds at the time I placed them and have changed by the time you read this, probably in my favor.)

Best Picture: The Departed (pays 2:1) is undervalued. It's a lock, despite Scorcese's recent win for The Aviator and my lonely belief that it sucked.

Director: Clint Eastwood (pays 12:1). Scorcese leads here, but Academy voters like to split their votes, and I think Clint has a chance especially considering the impressive successive release of two Oscar-level films in 12 months.

Actress: Helen Mirren is considered a sure thing, but I'm not so sure. How many Academy voters actually saw The Queen and know who she is? I wouldn't be surprised if Meryl Streep won by default, but I think Judy Dench and Kate Winslet have a chance, and now that Penelope Cruz has finally made a great movie, I'm shorting Mirren (pays 10:1 if any of them beat her).

Supporting Actor: Mark Wahlberg (30:1 odds). Sure, Eddie Murphy and Alan Arkin are more likely to win, but Marky Mark's wacky performance in The Departed is just the sort of thing Academy voters go for. 30:1 is a steal.

Supporting Actress: behind Jennifer Hudson (4:3 odds) is Rinko Kikuchi (12:1 odds). I think Hudson will win, but I'll take Kikuchi for the long shot.

Actor: Forest Whitaker is paying 5:4 odds, and I think that's actually a good buy, since none of the other nominees--with the possible exception of Leonardo DiCaprio--has a chance. But I think Leo is where voters' Departed fatigue will set in, and they'll skip this award for it.

By the way, Hillary is at 4:1 odds to win the presidency, and Al Gore is at 10:1 odds to win the nomination. Two overvalued possibilities; two shorting opportunities!

The bells and barbarus of Seville

When the Christian forces of Castilla y Leon invaded Seville, Spain, they tore down the city's mosque and built a cathedral. They retained just a few parts of the mosque, including its minaret, which was later outfitted with a steeple containing a belfry and topped by a gold weathervane (giralda, which gives the popular name to both the vane and the tower) that became Seville's symbol.

My girlfriend Kate and I visited Seville last month and were mesmerized by the cathedral (a surprise, since visiting the local religious buildings is so often the dullest part of visiting a European city). Partly this was because of its grand scale; it's the largest Catholic cathedral in the world, an enormous scorpion of unusual buttresses looming over the city. But more so, it was impressive through no credit of its own, but because it is lucky enough to not have replaced this mosque entirely. With the exception of some spectacular vaulting, the Gothic stonework suffers next to the elegance of the Giralda minaret and the old Mosque's one remaining gate.

Kate wondered at the demolition of a structure that, judging by its remaining parts, was surely beautiful; did anyone balk at putting their hammer to its sublime stonework? Was there any sadness at this loss among the conquerors, or is that merely a hopeful projection by observers who can't possibly know the prejudices and devotions of the past?

(And while I'm asking questions, why does English change the spelling of some foreign names and not others? Thailand and Iran and Sri Lanka are no longer called Siam and Persia and Ceylon, but China and Egypt and Greece are known only by their English exonyms and not called by their endonyms Zhongguo, Masr and Hellas. Seville is more comfortably said in English than Sevilla, but we don't insist on Columbia and didn't refuse to start saying Beijing or Mumbai, though I admit we probably say them little more accurately than before. And then there's Georgia-the-country, which calls itself by the less confusable name Sakartvelo, but whose capital Tbilisi we transliterate faithfully though few English speakers can pronounce it and the Russian colonial Tiflis is available. The word barbarian comes from the impression among Greeks, who were accomplished renamers, that foreign tongues all sounded like mindless lolling: blah, blah, blah. Surely we're beyond that tradition and ready for Deutschland and Bharat? Alice, cue Fugazi's Reclamation.)

We climbed to the top of the minaret, a pleasant process because of its internal ramps, built so Sevillanos could ascend on horseback. (I wonder when this was last done, and who the riders were--tourists or police or locals enjoying a disappearing custom?) At the top there was a surprise that had escaped mention in my guidebook: a set of enormous bells pealed by a set of exposed motors, gears and chains.

The bells rang on schedule, but that didn't prepare their visitors for the skull-cracking shock of hearing a nearby bell strike--several times one that I, lost in my camera taking the pictures below, didn't realize I was standing under.

The city was wonderful, with narrow streets inherited from the medina and Andalucian tapas typical not just in their tastiness but in their precipitate and unceasing delivery. But the bells cast a spell on us, and after we left the cathedral we stopped for a drink on a nearby rooftop and listened to them ring, and found ourselves back there at night.


View from the minaret across the top of the massive cathedral; the stone floor here is not the ground but the roof. A quote from the planning of the cathedral, probably apocryphal, has someone involved vowing that "we shall have a church... of such a kind that those who see it built will think we were mad."


17th century wood and metal clockworks on display inside the minaret.

Below, the bells and their mechanical controllers.

I want my Victorian fainting couch to look like Sigmund Freud’s

I do love this query from The New York Times Home section: I want my Victorian fainting couch to look like Sigmund Freud’s. Where can I find upholstery fabric in Persian kilim patterns?

Often when I scan the Home section, I think, who writes in questions about home decor to The New York Times? They must be made up. But I can sort of imagine at least five people I know asking this question. The whole article is set up around this inevitable line: "Almost any Middle Eastern rug with a geometric pattern could serve as a Freudian slip."

Long Now: the future of scientific methods

Kevin Kelly, editor-at-large of Wired, former publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog, was invited by Stewart Brand's Long Now Foundation last year to give a talk in San Francisco. Brand, creator of Whole Earth and MIT Media Lab groupie, started Long Now in an effort to shift humanity's thinking to consider the impact of our actions now will have on the next 10,000 years. (It's Isaac Asimov's overrated Foundation series made real.)

From the talk, in which Kelly predicts changes in scientific methods we will see in the next hundred years [emphasis added]:

I'm willing to bet the scientific method 400 years from now will differ from today's understanding of science more than today's science method differs from the proto-science used 400 years ago... I offer the following as possible near-term advances in the evolution of the scientific method.

Triple Blind Experiments – In a double blind experiment neither researcher nor subject are aware of the controls, but both are aware of the experiment. In a triple blind experiment all participants are blind to the controls and to the very fact of the experiment itself.
...
Multiple Hypothesis Matrix – Instead of proposing a series of single hypothesis, in which each hypothesis is falsified and discarded until one theory finally passes and is verified, a matrix of many hypothesis scenarios are proposed and managed simultaneously. An experiment travels through the matrix of multiple hypothesis, some of which are partially right and partially wrong.
...
Wiki-Science – The average number of authors per paper continues to rise. With massive collaborations, the numbers will boom. Experiments involving thousands of investigators collaborating on a "paper" will commonplace. The paper is ongoing, and never finished... Responsibilities for errors will be hard to pin down. Wiki-science will often be the first word on a new area. Some researchers will specialize in refining ideas first proposed by wiki-science.

Ideas for the Drew Faust burger

Out with the Larry Summers burger at Harvard Square's Bartley's Burger Cottage, in with the Drew Faust burger. Both names are friendly to chefs looking for metaphor; Summers was served with honey mustard, which is both sweet--appropriate for his namesake season--and sour. Faust is less easily translated to food, but holds great potential. A few ideas:

1. Burger is served with a sage reduction, in honor of Faust's Bryn Mawr, and presumably Wiccan, roots
   
   
2. Faust is known at Harvard for her cost-cutting, and earned the nickname "Chainsaw Drew" when she brutally murdered one-quarter of the Radcliffe staff. (Other reports have her firing them instead.) Burger is served with extra ketchup, with one quarter chopped off.


3. Burger is free, but if you ever cry out in pleasure at its taste, you are condemned to a PhD program where expectations for your thesis double each month
   
   
4. A normal burger, but male diners who wish to order it must first calculate and recite the first seventeen digits of the Thue-Morse Sequence and explain the importance of the Higgs boson

A statue that would kick ass

An advertisement in the New York Review of Books this week reads:

He wrestled with Hemmingway. He wrote poems with Muhammed Ali. He took second place in an Apollo Theater talent show. [In headline type:] Where will we put the statue?

Should a statue of George Plimpton be erected? Yes, every good reader, Lions fan, and fireworks aficionado agrees that this singular man, who left us just over three years ago, merits a nice bronze statue complete with plaque and a solid stone pedestal (granite is fine; marble, too showy). Somewhere on the island of Manhattan we believe.
...
Is this a pressing matter? Yes. Time works in a funny way and people have a tendency to forget. Just look at Martin Tyler. Who is Martin Tyler, you ask? Good question.

Back to the statue, there is the awkward matter of exactly who will pay for it. As the editor of a small struggling literary review, George would have appreciated this dilemma. We imagine he would have thrown a party. So, as soon as we can rustle up a venue and get a sense of the guest list, we will howt a joyful celebration of George's excellent life. It will be a good time.

If you woud like to come to the party (do come!), let us know at www.plimptonproject.org. ...and then come to the party and meet us. We'll be easy to spot, we're the ones with 38 bottles of scotch, one bottle of white wine and a bottle of Dubonnet.

At the bottom of the page, there is a quote from Hunter S. Thompson that begins "George Plimpton kicked ass."

Bruce Kayton, the excellent tour guide of radical New York history, points out that most statues in New York City are of men famous for killing people. In Tbilisi, Georgia, there are plenty of those, but also wonderful statues of writers, artists and actors installed around the central part of town: memoirists in overcoats, poets sitting in thought, and one memorably svelte dandy next to the opera house, dressed to the nines and ready for a night on the town. We could use a little of that mojo.

Translating Harry Potter

My father turned me on to an enjoyable way to improve at a foreign language: read Harry Potter in translation. I've read Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal and Harry Potter et le Prisonier D'Azkaban, and I got a lot of painless French and Spanish out of them. The plots and scenarios are familiar enough that I can pick up the gist of what is going on even if the grammar and vocabulary escape me; but after a few times reading about the impatient lechuza in Harry's room, I can't help but gather that it is not lettuce but an owl.

The most difficult part of reading these books, though, is figuring out which of the many unfamiliar words are made up (this usually means consulting several dictionaries before I realize my error), though the Spanish translators tend to stick closer to the spellings of the original.

Is that a better approach than the refashioning of J. K. Rowling's world of invented vocabulary? Daniel Hahn, writing in The Guardian on translating Harry Potter, doesn't think so:

Spanish readers will find most names and invented words unchanged ("¿Hagrid, qué es el quidditch?"), or translated literally. So the Spanish is faithful in one obvious sense - but while the names may be unchanged, does the name Quirrell really sound as nervous, stammery, querulous in Spanish? Does Hufflepuff sound as ineffectual, dumb and huggable as it does to English ears?

...

And then there's the wordplay, the prophecies and rhymes (like those of the sorting hat - the sombrero seleccionador). There are also the spells and the anagrams. (Tom Marvolo Riddle may be an anagram of "I am Lord Voldemort"; but it's not an anagram of "Je suis Voldemort", so in France he's Tom Elvis Jedusor.)

The article also mentions the extraordinary pressure imposed by the secrecy that keeps each new book under wraps until the moment sales begin, compounded by the presence of bootleg versions:

It's a race against publishers' deadlines, of course; in certain countries, where the quality of second-language English is very high, it's a race to get the book published in (say) Norwegian, or Danish, before your entire market decides not to bother waiting for the translation, and you find that you're trying to sell it to people who've already read the book in the original.

In some cases it's a race against unofficial translators, too; in China, where enforcement of international copyright law leaves something to be desired, IPR parasites churn out their quick and shoddy renegade versions more or less with impunity. These range from fan-produced translations published online, to brand-new books in the HP series sold on street corners, like the rather peculiar attempt at a book five that appeared while Rowling was in fact still hard at work in Edinburgh writing it (Rowling shares this distinction with Cervantes, who was understandably taken aback to find the second part of Don Quixote published unofficially before he'd had the chance to get round to writing it).

There's also a mention of a product of translation I have never considered: that each translation offers a glimpse from a new angle into the forces behind its choices:

Other fans have found that when they scour their translations they turn up valuable plot clues. Book six has a note mysteriously signed with the initials "RAB", which many readers have speculated may refer to someone in the Black family, a relative of Sirius Black (most likely his younger brother Regulus); the Dutch translation gives the initials on the note as RAZ - and if you know that in Dutch Harry's godfather is called Sirius Zwarts, this change suggests some interesting intelligence.

(Let me take this moment, by the way, to announce my faith in Severus Snape. He did what he did to earn standing and save Draco from committing a horrible crime himself. He will be vindicated!)