Categories > Books > Harry Potter > Meetings with Remarkable Muggles
This series originated as my responses to requests received through the livejournal community fan_the_vote.
This is an on-going series, so if you like it, please look for more later. I am ordering them here by date in which the drabble is set, not order in which I wrote them, just so you know. And these are drabbles in the strict sense, so each is 100 words precisely, not counting titles.
Idlerat gave this series a name; Executrix got the whole thing started by sponsoring the first to be written through the livejournal fan_the_vote; some of the muggles depicted were suggested by the people to whom the drabble is dedicated (notably, Noblerot requested Foucault). So, my deepest gratitude to all of them. And to JK Rowling of course. And to you for reading them!
Details from recent real-world events and the lives of famous muggles are as accurate as my memory, plus google, could make them -- which is to say, not very. But:
Marx really did write most of Capital (all three volumes) in the British Museum's reading room while suffering from painful boils on his ass.
Dickens really have a long-term extramarital relationship with the great actress Ellen Terry, and he really did die relatively young, of exhaustion occasioned by overwork.
Amelia Earhart did publish a book on her own career and that of other early women pilots called The Fun of It.
The chemist Rosalind Franklin really did make a key contribution to the discovery of DNA for which she was not credited at the time. The men who won the Nobel Prize for this feat really did "borrow" her work without permission in order to do so, and in their account -- notably in James Watson's book The Double Helix -- they went on to make fun of her, too. There really is a biography of Franklin entitled The Dark Lady of DNA; it may not be the best available biography of her, but it has the most lurid title.
Foucault really was a bottom who liked to visit bath-houses and leather bars, and he really did try LSD in California (after which he threw out the whole first draft of History of Sex and began again).
The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, born in 1908, really is still alive as of May 2004. He really did write a book called The Raw and the Cooked.
Margaret Atwood really has said that she thought of The Handmaid's Tale after a visit to Afghanistan.
Romania really was, until 1989, governed by the exceptionally corrupt Soviet puppet Nicolae Ceauºescu.
The Netherlands really did become the first nation anywhere to fully open the legal status of marriage to same-sex couples, in July 1997.
Sigmund Freud did not really remark "sometimes a cigar is only a cigar," but everyone believes that he did.
Eric Hobsbawm really did write a brilliant 4-volume history of Europe from the French Revolution through the end of the 20th century, the final volume of which was The Age of Extremes.
The destruction of Baghdad's museums and historical archives in the spring of 2003, and the abuse and torture practiced by the US military in an Iraqi prison which came to light in the spring of 2004, really happened.
The Draco Malfoy drabble refers to a specific frontpage article, Sunday New York Times, May 23 2004.
The first Rosa Granger-Weasley drabble was written in response to the results of the US presidential election, Nov. 2, 2004. The second was the drabble I had intended to write if the Democrats had won the election instead of the Republicans.
The Hagrid drabble emerged from the Candy Is Dandy challenge run by Scribbulus Ink; the prompt was Hagrid and Exploding Bon-bons.
Fear of Flying was a great dirty book of the 1970s; the drabble emerged from Bethbethbeth's Two Minute Fic challenge (the prompt was Fear of Flying.)
The phrase "a double life -- at least" is a quotation from ... I can't quite recall, but I think Tom Stoppard's early play "Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth." Speaking of fanfic.
This is an on-going series, so if you like it, please look for more later. I am ordering them here by date in which the drabble is set, not order in which I wrote them, just so you know. And these are drabbles in the strict sense, so each is 100 words precisely, not counting titles.
Idlerat gave this series a name; Executrix got the whole thing started by sponsoring the first to be written through the livejournal fan_the_vote; some of the muggles depicted were suggested by the people to whom the drabble is dedicated (notably, Noblerot requested Foucault). So, my deepest gratitude to all of them. And to JK Rowling of course. And to you for reading them!
Details from recent real-world events and the lives of famous muggles are as accurate as my memory, plus google, could make them -- which is to say, not very. But:
Marx really did write most of Capital (all three volumes) in the British Museum's reading room while suffering from painful boils on his ass.
Dickens really have a long-term extramarital relationship with the great actress Ellen Terry, and he really did die relatively young, of exhaustion occasioned by overwork.
Amelia Earhart did publish a book on her own career and that of other early women pilots called The Fun of It.
The chemist Rosalind Franklin really did make a key contribution to the discovery of DNA for which she was not credited at the time. The men who won the Nobel Prize for this feat really did "borrow" her work without permission in order to do so, and in their account -- notably in James Watson's book The Double Helix -- they went on to make fun of her, too. There really is a biography of Franklin entitled The Dark Lady of DNA; it may not be the best available biography of her, but it has the most lurid title.
Foucault really was a bottom who liked to visit bath-houses and leather bars, and he really did try LSD in California (after which he threw out the whole first draft of History of Sex and began again).
The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, born in 1908, really is still alive as of May 2004. He really did write a book called The Raw and the Cooked.
Margaret Atwood really has said that she thought of The Handmaid's Tale after a visit to Afghanistan.
Romania really was, until 1989, governed by the exceptionally corrupt Soviet puppet Nicolae Ceauºescu.
The Netherlands really did become the first nation anywhere to fully open the legal status of marriage to same-sex couples, in July 1997.
Sigmund Freud did not really remark "sometimes a cigar is only a cigar," but everyone believes that he did.
Eric Hobsbawm really did write a brilliant 4-volume history of Europe from the French Revolution through the end of the 20th century, the final volume of which was The Age of Extremes.
The destruction of Baghdad's museums and historical archives in the spring of 2003, and the abuse and torture practiced by the US military in an Iraqi prison which came to light in the spring of 2004, really happened.
The Draco Malfoy drabble refers to a specific frontpage article, Sunday New York Times, May 23 2004.
The first Rosa Granger-Weasley drabble was written in response to the results of the US presidential election, Nov. 2, 2004. The second was the drabble I had intended to write if the Democrats had won the election instead of the Republicans.
The Hagrid drabble emerged from the Candy Is Dandy challenge run by Scribbulus Ink; the prompt was Hagrid and Exploding Bon-bons.
Fear of Flying was a great dirty book of the 1970s; the drabble emerged from Bethbethbeth's Two Minute Fic challenge (the prompt was Fear of Flying.)
The phrase "a double life -- at least" is a quotation from ... I can't quite recall, but I think Tom Stoppard's early play "Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth." Speaking of fanfic.
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