Fan Feud.(The Talk of the Town)(Vander Ark)

Once upon a time, a talented weaver named Arachne declared herself superior in skill to Athena, the goddess of wisdom, who also invented weaving. Whether Arachne was actually better we'll never know, for Athena, in a jealous rage, destroyed her rival's tapestry and turned her into a spider. Last summer, at a "Harry Potter" convention in Toronto, a fan named Steve Vander Ark made a similar mistake when he dared to compare himself to Joanne (J. K.) Rowling. "It is amazing where we have taken 'Harry Potter,' " he said to a crowd of dedicated "Potter" fans. Many readers dislike the epilogue in the final book; Vander Ark urged them to disregard it entirely, and even invented his own spell to do so ("expelliepilogus"). "Jo's quit, she's done," he told the audience. "We're taking over now."

Comparing yourself to a living god can be risky, and Vander Ark has suffered cruel fates, in court and in the world of "Potter" fandom. A few weeks ago, in a crowded Manhattan courtroom, Rowling's lawyers put Vander Ark through a lengthy interrogation, as part of a lawsuit provoked by his plans to publish "The Harry Potter Lexicon," a comprehensive guide to "Harry Potter," which Rowling believes infringes on her copyright. (The ruling should come sometime after May 9th.) From the witness stand, Vander Ark directed beseeching glances toward Rowling, who was sitting a few yards away, but she slowly shook her head. After several hours of intense questioning in front of his idol, Vander Ark broke down and cried.

"I really wish we had had a different kind of meeting," he said later. "There were a couple times I kind of gave her a half-smile. She didn't smile back."

Attracting the attention, and the wrath, of his hero is a surprise for Vander Ark, who at the age of fifty maintains the air of a serious child, with a mushroom-cut head of hair parted in the middle. A self-described "massive 'Star Trek' fan," he wrote a book, in the nineteen-eighties, called "The Complete Encyclopedia of Star Trek the Next Generation Season One," and sold forty copies. In the late ...