Dorkus Malorkus

Yay!

J.K. Rowling Writes Potter Prequel – J.K. Rowling : People.com:
By Caris Davis

Within the past month, J.K. Rowling has written a prequel to Harry Potter.

And the succinct, 800-word story, written in the author’s own hand, will be auctioned off for charity in London on June 10. (The tale is so shrouded in secrecy, it’s not even clear if the boy wizard makes an appearance.)

Proceeds will go to the writers’ association English PEN and to Dyslexia Action.

Fans – who have gone almost a whole year since Rowling’s last installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – will be able to read the prequel for themselves when it’s published by Waterstone’s in August.

In her sign-off to the story (written on a piece of paper not much bigger than a postcard), Rowling said, “That was fun!”

So I finished Memoirs of a Geisha today.

I’m struck by the subtlety of the Japanese culture that I was largely ignorant of.

I was raised wholly American, which is to say that I didn’t learn my parents’ native tongues, and didn’t learn any of their traditions and cultures.

As a US Army soldier, my father heavily courted my mother while stationed in Japan. I use the word courted here, but in truth he hounded her, to hear her tell the story. It’s really quite cute and makes me smile to listen to the two of them recount it from time to time.

When they both left Japan to go to my father’s next duty station in Texas, some time between February 1964 and the following February, they found a very racially charged America. They were two young kids who barely understood one another, communicating between themselves in their own dialect of broken english. They feared that raising children who couldn’t communicate with their schoolmates would lead to a lifetime filled w/ the same kinds of horrible inhumanities they’d seen all too often in the news.

My brothers and I, sheltered from our heritage, have had the thread w/ our past severed. This book helps me repair that damage.