NOTEBOOK -- steve marble

Harry lives with his aunt and uncle, as mean a couple a poor boy would

chance to meet.

The aunt and uncle, along with their own nasty son Dudley, delight in

pouring misery into poor Harry’s life. The boy is forced to live in a

cupboard. He is humiliated, berated, reminded that his parents were

killed in a car crash. It is not a nice stretch of road for a young boy

to walk.

Fortunately for Harry, there’s Hogswart -- the local school of witchcraft

and wizardry, founded by the high priests of witchcraft themselves. It is

here that Harry learns from the masters. It is here he learns the power

of sorcery. It is here he learns that life indeed is a witch’s brew;

drink it up.

Harry Potter has become the darling of the grade-school set, a little

nerd of a kid whose life is one sustained adventure. The character is the

brainchild of J.K. Rowling, an English writer whose imagination and

skillful writing caught the literary world by surprise. Not until now has

a children’s book topped the New York Times Best Seller list.

But Rowling’s writings have not swept dreamily through the corridors of

all grade schools. You don’t write about witchcraft and child abuse

without strolling through the neighborhood of controversy.

In Simi Valley, for instance, a couple pulled their child out of school

rather them let him listen to a teacher read from a Harry Potter book. In

the Newport-Mesa Unified School District, Supt. Robert Barbot put

teachers on notice that they should “use the book appropriately” and one

parent publicly worried that the book traded on issues that should not be

discussed in the classroom. And, as if foreshadowing matters, the Web

site of the Harry Potter fan club beseeches browsers not to send any

“mean” mail.

Harry Potter, of course, is only the latest character to crawl from the

pages of literature and emerge as something evil, something malevolent,

something to be repelled.

Long before Harry there was Tom Sawyer, the lovable loser who conned and

stole and cheated and enjoyed life to the hilt. There was Holden

Caufield, the prep school dropout who laughingly mocked those around him

while silently contemplating suicide. And there was the nameless child in

Grimm’s Fairy Tales who committed the ultimate zero-tolerance by trudging

through the woods, carrying wine to her mother.

At one point or another, in one school district or another, the books,

along with their colorful characters, were yanked from school libraries,

deemed to be inappropriate for the young mind.

When I was in school, I was in love with the inappropriate. Or so it

seemed. How else could someone get in trouble with their English teacher

for reading a book. But I did.

The book was “On The Road,” Jack Kerouac’s frenzied hymn to the open road

in which two Beat Generation punks take lots of speed, steal cars, crash

cars, write poetry, get in trouble with the cops and -- a lot like Tom

Sawyer -- enjoy the heck out of life. I thought the book was great.

But the teacher thought the book was a corrupting influence, and poor

writing as well. I found it to be electric. Did it corrupt me? Not

particularly. The book didn’t cause me to steal cars or crash cars or

take speed or even -- let’s be honest here -- write poetry.

It did cause me to want to read. And that’s what I did. I read every last

one of Kerouac’s books, each one a little worse than the next. And then I

read my way through Steinbeck. And Hemingway. And J.D. Salinger. I even

blasted my way through William Burroughs, a writer who was so completely

mad that he once cut up his writings, flung them into a heap and then

taped them back together again, hoping their haphazard sequence would

somehow make more sense. Try reading that.

I’ve been inspired by books, I’ve been bored by books. But I’ve never

worried that books would lead to my undoing, that I would somehow be

blindsided by their evil or give in to some wicked impulse.

Harry Potter likely won’t cause our children to tumble into witchcraft or

grow up to be sorcerers. He might, though, inspire them to read.

And that’s certainly worth the price of admission.

* STEVE MARBLE is the managing editor of Times Community News and can be

reached at o7 Steve.Marble@latimes.comf7 . Beginning next week, his

column will appear on Wednesdays.