Just The Caffeine Talking

Moby Blogging

Lately I've been reading Moby Dick to my nearly-eight-years-old son as a bedtime story. This statement will probably produce one of three reactions:

1.  How awful to force that on him!
2.  Isn't he a little young for that?
3.  Well, I'm sure it'll put him to sleep in a hurry!

Let me tackle them in order. It was his idea, okay? He's a big fan of Jeff Smith's comic series Bone, and there's a running gag in that series about characters discussing Moby Dick while all kinds of fantasy adventure slapstick is going on around them. So he wanted to know what they're talking about. It's holding his interest so far.

Second, the book may grapple with deep topics, but there's nothing in it which is inappropriate for younger readers. The whalemen don't use the sort of language I expect real whalemen used aboard ship. Nor is my son squeamish about the idea of hunting whales. Quite the reverse, in fact. He was posing in the bow of the living room couch, brandishing his harpoon and saying "Thar she blows!" with his typical enthusiasm. I've warned him that the voyage of the Pequod isn't going to end well, but he's still on board, so to speak.

The final issue is the big one. I have a big secret which I want to share with everyone. Moby Dick is not boring. It's a big book, and its sentences are long, complex 19th-century structures, but there is plenty of incident, action, and even humor. The first few chapters, on land in New Bedford and Nantucket, are actually quite funny.

Some examples:  At the inn in New Bedford, the landlord matter-of-factly tells Ishmael that his prospective roommate is out selling human heads. When Ishmael tries to sleep on the uncomfortable bench at the inn, the landlord hospitably takes out a carpenter's plane and offers to scrape it down for him. Queequeg uses a huge razor-sharp harpoon as a table implement at breakfast. At the inn in Nantucket the only question at mealtimes is "clam or cod?" because chowder is all they serve. And that's just in the first dozen or so chapters.

Readers also complain about the chapters full of random whale facts and observations on whaling. But that's the cool stuff! The whale info is particularly interesting (and amusing) because of the tremendous disconnect it reveals between modern sensibilities and those of the Jacksonian era. Novels of the 19th century were a lot more digressive than most modern books; it was perfectly okay for Victor Hugo to stick an entirely irrelevant description of the Battle of Waterloo into Les Miserables, for instance. 

One thing which does surprise me every time I read it is how long the opening section is. The Pequod doesn't set sail until Chapter 22, and Captain Ahab makes his first appearance in Chapter 28. Perhaps some readers think this long introduction is just padding, and are drumming their fingers until the whaling voyage actually begins. I think Herman Melville wanted to show his readers some of the weird and amusing stuff on land in whaling towns -- especially since the ports themselves were almost as isolated and self-contained as ships at sea.

Touristic Digression: if you want to see an authentic 19th-century whaling village, you don't have to go to Nantucket Island or New Bedford. Instead go 120 miles up the Hudson River from Manhattan, to the town of Hudson. It was a whaling town set up on the river to allow easier transfer of the whale oil to the canal and rail networks. After the whaling era ended, Hudson was a struggling, crime-ridden place for decades. Recently, however, it has become a weekend destination and remote bedroom community for New York City -- with the result that it's suddenly bursting with boutiques, restaurants, and art galleries. It's definitely worth a visit. My wife and I spent a night at "The Inn At Hudson," a bed and breakfast in a 19th-century mansion. I kept expecting to see Gloria Swanson burying a monkey in the garden (look it up).

Anyway: I'll keep my readers posted on our progress through Moby Dick.

Ozblogging: Ozma of Oz, Part 5

Episode Five: Triumph of the Hen

Billina marches into the Nome King's palace like an action-movie hero in the final act. She spots all ten purple (Evish) items and begins reversing the enchantments. When she's done with that she starts finding green objects which are people from Oz. With her inside information to help, Billina finds all the transformed people -- except the Tin Woodman. The Nome King didn't let slip what he had become.

The newly-freed captives follow their galline (look it up!) liberator to the doors of the palace -- only to find the Nome King has decided to be a sore loser. His throne room is full of soldiers, and for once the King isn't smiling at all.

Dorothy is safe, with the Lion and Tiger to guard her -- although when the Nome King uses his magic to freeze them in place the heroic Sawhorse gives him a vicious gold-shod kick in the rear. It seems the King's magic doesn't work on wood.

This gives us a clue to the origin of the Nome King's magic belt. There's another character in fiction who owns a magic item with almost limitless power, but which can't affect things made of wood. This is, of course, Alan Scott, the original Green Lantern from the Golden Age of comic books. Scott gained his power from a "mystic flame" in the titular lantern, and after seventy years of explanations, revisions, retcons, and re-retcons, I'm not sure what his lantern "really" is. But obviously during the early years of the 20th Century, Alan Scott's "mystic flame" was in the hands of the Nome King, and provided the sorceous megawatts for his magic belt.

The King threatens the restored Oz people, taking refuge in a legal loophole in his original bargain: he said they could leave his palace safely, but as soon as they step out he can have them thrown into dungeons full of molten lava. The single enlisted man of the Army of Oz bravely charges the Nomes, but is overwhelmed by numbers. And then the Scarecrow throws an egg at the Nome King. (You were paying attention to the eggs, right?)

The Nomes flee in terror from the poisonous egg, especially when the Scarecrow pulls another from his pocket. The King is paralyzed with terror, and Dorothy takes the opportunity to steal his magic belt. (Dorothy is obviously a roleplaying game character, as she never forgets to grab the magical loot off defeated foes.

Faced with the loss of his belt and the threat of more eggs, the Nome King surrenders. There's some plot-padding about his inability to locate the transformed Tin Woodman, and for a time our heroes are afraid their friend is forever lost. Green Lantern Dorothy leads the Oz/Ev contingent to safety. It turns out one of the little princes of Ev has a mild case of kleptomania, and pocketed a tin whistle in the Nome King's palace, which turns out to be the missing Woodman.

Prince Evardo takes the throne of Ev, with great rejoicing from the citizens who are no doubt relieved to have their first non-psychopathic ruler in decades. The Oz Crew return across the Deadly Desert to Oz. On the way to the Emerald City they meet General Jinjur, now dedicating her time to dairy farming and spousal abuse (because it's funny when husbands get injured).

They also pass the new institute of higher education, the College of Art and Athletic Perfection, run by (of course) Professor H.M. Wogglebug, T.E. Ozma explains: "It keeps him busy, and the young men who attend the college are no worse off than they were before. You see, in this country are a number of youths who do not like to work, and the college is an excellent place for them."

Bear in mind that when L.Frank Baum wrote this he was living in Chicago, which was home to the brand-new (and lavishly-funded) University of Chicago. The University had quickly established itself as a powerhouse in college athletics, and was racking up Big Ten championships under the coaching of the legendary Amos Alonzo Stagg. The Wogglebug's College seems like a not-so-subtle dig at the new school.

(Eventually the University of Chicago decided education actually was more important than sports, and dropped out of the Big Ten conference in 1946. Without the U. of C. to keep the average up, the Big Ten colleges have since forgotten even basic arithmetic, as there are now twelve schools in the conference.)

Dorothy stays with Ozma in her palace for a time, until she happens to notice Ozma's Magic Picture, a sort of mystical television which can show Ozma what is happening anywhere in the world, blessedly free of gabbling voiceovers. Dorothy has a look at her Uncle Henry, who looks very depressed and ill, perhaps because he is still in Australia.

Since the magic belt won't work in a non-fairy country, Ozma uses it to wish Dorothy to her uncle, and promises to use the picture to check up on Dorothy once a week. Dorothy materializes in Sydney and apparently nobody bothers to ask where she's been or how she survived getting swept overboard in a typhoon.

Thus concludes Ozma of Oz. I'll pick up in a few weeks with the next book in the series, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz. That's right, Agent Diggs returns!

Ozblogging: Ozma of Oz, Part 4

Episode Four: Extreme Makeover Edition

Ozma goes into the Nome King's palace to find the transformed royal family of Ev, and immediately makes a terrifying discovery. The Nome King apparently hired Liberace as his interior decorator. Read the description and tremble:

"The ceilings were composed of great arches that rose far above her head, and all the walls and floors were of polished marble exquisitely tinted in many colors. Thick velvet carpets were on the floor and heavy silken draperies covered the arches leading to the various rooms of the palace. The furniture was made of rare old woods richly carved and covered with delicate satins, and the entire palace was lighted by a mysterious rosy glow that seemed to come from no particular place but flooded each apartment with its soft and pleasing radiance. . .

"Upon the mantels, and on many shelves and brackets and tables, were clustered ornaments of every description, seemingly made out of all sorts of metals, glass, china, stones and marbles. There were vases, and figures of men and animals, and graven platters and bowls, and mosaics of precious gems, and many other things. Pictures, too, were on the walls, and the underground palace was quite a museum of rare and curious and costly objects."

Ordinary mortals would drop dead from sheer sensory overload, but Ozma herself lives in a palace encrusted with emeralds, so she can withstand the Nome King's Vegas-on-steroids aesthetic. However, she also starts to realize that the sheer number of objects on display makes it unlikely that any of her eleven guesses will be hits. She tries logic, picking items that might have something to do with the Queen of Ev or her children, but it doesn't work. Finally she just closes her eyes and guesses at random. Nada. Ozma has failed, and the Nome King's magic turns her into an emerald grasshopper.

And now we get to see just how great a villain the Nome King really is:

"In the throne room just beyond the palace the Nome King suddenly looked up and smiled. 'Next!' he said, in his pleasant voice."

The Nome King offers the next person twelve guesses, to include Ozma. Most of us would realize at this point that the game was rigged, and beat a hasty retreat -- maybe go get Glinda or General Jinjur or somebody. But no, the Tin Woodman feels duty-bound as the commander of Oz's Army to go look for Ozma. You'll never guess what happens to him. Actually you will -- he winds up an ornament just as she did.

One of the two Generals of Oz's Army is next up, but he declines to go -- until the Nome King threatens to have him tossed into one of the fiery furnaces if he won't play. That's right, this jolly fat monarch has devised a game they can't win and must play.

Did I mention the Nome King is L. Frank Baum's greatest villain? The Wicked Witch of the West (book version) was cruel and mean, but ultimately rational. The Nome King is a sadistic madman with nearly unlimited powers. He's like the bad guy in Saw, only slightly more hygienic.

But he's perfectly pleasant to his victims. His steward serves coffee and cake while the remaining officers and the lone private in the Army of Oz go into the palace and fail. The private takes so long at his guesses that the Nome King is too tired to continue and decides to knock off for the night and resume toying with his captives in the morning. Dorothy and the others get lovely rooms for the night.

Billina finds a convenient hollow under the Nome King's throne and falls asleep. Pay attention to the chicken. She overhears the Nome King and his steward chatting about the King's little game. In the course of it the Nome King goes all Bond Villain and spills his sinister plan. Billina overhears everything.

What would fictional heroes do if the bad guys weren't egotistical lunatics who insist on explaining what they're up to? It seems totally ridiculous and contrived . . . except that it really happens. Hitler spelled out his plans in Mein Kampf. Ted "Unabomber" Kaczynski sent a long typed manifesto to the press. Jeffrey Dahmer kept photos and "souvenirs" of his victims in his apartment. (Compare this to the behavior of, say, bank robbers or jewel thieves -- they may slip up but they don't deliberately create incriminating evidence.)

There's a common bit of advice to writers about creating evil characters -- the idea is that no one thinks they are a villain; we are all the heroes of our own stories. But the way real-life villains go out of the way to record and boast of their crimes makes me wonder if this is really true. I think there are people in the world who are evil, who know they are evil, and seem to take pride in it. Once again, the real world is less realistic than fiction.

Anyway. Tiktok fails, but Dorothy lucks out and picks one ornament which actually is a member of the Ev Dynasty -- a purple kitten which turns into little Prince Evring. She can't find any others, but her success means she can leave the palace without being transformed. As always, Dorothy is unstoppable.

However, while she's guessing, Billina lays her morning egg under the King's throne and the Nome King absolutely freaks out. He reveals that eggs are poison to Nomes (or at least Nomes think they are poison). Billina won't let the Scarecrow take the egg away until the Nome King agrees to let her enter the palace and guess. He agrees, rather ungracefully.

The Scarecrow fails, and the Nome King has enjoyed himself so much he's willing to let the rest of them go. But Billina insists, and marches into the palace. Pay attention to the chicken.

Ozblogging: Ozma of Oz, Part 3

Episode Three: The Nome King!

The Army of Oz marches north, toward the entrance to the Nome King's dominions. Along the way there's a bit of a delay as Billina has to stop to lay an egg, which the Scarecrow stashes in his pocket when nobody else has a use for it. Pay attention to this egg.
   
Eventually they come to the outer defenses of the Nome empire: a mechanical giant endlessly pounding the narrow mountain path with a huge hammer. Intruders risk being flattened. Tiktok proudly identifies the giant as another piece of Smith & Tinker engineering.
   
The Scarecrow figures out how to get past it -- note that his excellent brains have become such a fixture of the Oz books that now everyone expects the Scarecrow to come up with a plan. The Scarecrow notices that there's a safe interval between hammer-blows as the giant raises his giant mallet for the next stroke.
   
The Cowardly Lion volunteers to go first, with Ozma on his back, and the Tiger follows with Dorothy. The Sawhorse brings the Scarecrow across, and Tiktok walks calmly under the hammer, timing his passage with mechanical precision. The Tin Woodman manages the same feat, but the Army of Oz are all too scared to try it. So the Lion and the Tiger have to ferry the twenty-four officers across, and the Sawhorse carries the lone private.
   
Beyond the giant Our Heroes encounter their first Nomes -- "rock fairies" who blend into the surface of the stone and scuttle along the cliff faces like big insects. I don't know why L. Frank Baum chose his unique spelling for their name; he may have been influenced by the town in Alaska, which would have been much in the news as a result of the whole Klondike gold rush a few years earlier.
   
Nomes/Gnomes can trace their pedigree back to the alchemist/physician/self-promoting con man Paracelsus, who apparently made up the word to refer to elemental spirits of earth (along with sylphs for air, undines for water, and salamanders for fire). Later on the term got adopted into fairy lore to describe little men living underground. And of course more recently in 1977 the Dutch team of Rien Poortvliet and Wil Huygen had a runaway best seller with their art book Gnomes, depicting them as miniature humanoids living an irritatingly harmonious existence.

Baum's Nomes are sort of halfway between fairies and Paracelsus's elementals. They look like they're made of rock, are immune to extremes of heat, and don't eat the same kind of food that surface-dwellers do. But they do dig tunnels, so they aren't swimming through solid rock like elementals.
   
John R. Neill did a great job illustrating the Nomes. They're lithe, bug-eyed and creepy, almost insectile. Not at all the typical lumpy rock-men or fat little hippies in pointed hats. He managed to make them comic and threatening at the same time.
   
And in charge of the whole shebang is the Nome King. Ozma first demands that he show himself, but he won't. She then entreats him to appear; no dice. Ozma won't plead with him. She's a Girl Ruler, after all. Dorothy has no such pretensions, and says "PLEASE, Mr. Nome King, come here and see us." The rocks open and Our Heroes descend into the underworld.
   
After all the buildup he's been given, at first appearance the Nome King is a huge relief. He's a fat little man with a busy beard, dressed in plain clothes with only a jeweled belt for decoration. His face is merry, and Dorothy thinks he looks just like Santa Claus.
   
Dorothy and Ozma sit down for a pleasant chat with their jolly host, and discover that being jolly isn't the same as being good. No, he's not going to release the Queen of Ev and her children. He bought them fair and square from King Evoldo and they belong to him. He even insists he's treating them well, because he transformed them into ornaments in his palace rather than put them to work.
   
Ozma tries to bargain for them, offering to replace the ornaments ten times over, but the Nome King politely refuses. Then she threatens him with the might of the Oz Expeditionary Force, and the Nome King nearly passes out from laughing. He shows off his army, which is bigger than that of any surface-dwelling ruler's. At the time, the world's biggest army was that of the Russian Empire, with a strength of about 500,000. Let's give the Nome King twice that.
   
How can he have such a big army? Actually, the question is how can he have such a small one. The Nome King is the ruler of the entire underground world -- in other words, the whole interior of the Earth. That's a volume of about 268 billion cubic miles. If we assume that the King's people have excavated only one one-millionth of that, he still rules an area of 134 million square miles (with a generous 10-foot ceiling height). That's more than twice the land area of the planet's surface! Even with a fairly sparse population density of only 100 per square mile, the Nome King has 13 billion subjects, or about twice the current population of the Earth. He could easily field an army of a hundred million Nomes.
   
Suddenly Ozma's twenty-four officers and lone private aren't so impressive.
   
But the Oz force have obviously read Machiavelli: any highly-centralized state like the Nome King's is very vulnerable to a "decapitation" attack against the ruler. The Cowardly Lion threatens to tear the King to pieces unless he agrees with Ozma's demands, but the King's magic keeps the Lion from approaching his throne. Impasse.
   
The Scarecrow suggests wheedling the Nome King into giving up his slaves, a suggestion the King himself endorses. So Ozma asks him what he wants in exchange for freeing the royal family of Ev.

The King proposes a little contest. Ozma can go into the rooms of the palace and try to find which ornaments are the transformed Queen and her children. To reverse the spell, all Ozma has to do is touch something she thinks is an Evian (Evite?) and say the word "Ev." If she's right, that captive is restored. Ozma gets eleven tries, and the King is such a good-natured fellow that he's willing to let all the other members of the Oz Expeditionary Force have a turn as well.

BUT: there's a catch. If anyone makes eleven guesses and can't even find one transformed Ev person, then they, too, become an ornament in the King's palace.

Ozma, who is still positively drunk with overconfidence, agrees to the Nome King's terms. The King opens the rock doors into the rest of his palace, and Ozma goes in. We'll find out what happens to her next time.

Ozblogging: Ozma of Oz, Part 2

Episode Two: Operation Ev Freedom

Dorothy, Tiktok, and Billina make their way to the royal palace of Ev, where they meet the current ruler, Princess Langwidere.

Langwidere is extremely vain, and takes fashion obsession to a new level. Instead of changing outfits or hats, Langwidere has a collection of thirty heads and wears a different one every day. All are quite beautiful, but some of them are bad-tempered, like her Number Seventeen head, which she selects to greet her strange visitors.

Personal identity in Oz (and environs) is very odd. Langwidere can change heads -- change personalities -- but still remains Langwidere. Much the same is true of Jack Pumpkinhead, who replaces his heads every few months as they spoil. I suppose L. Frank Baum takes it as a given that the true seat of personal identity isn't the body or the mind, but the soul. Your body can be replaced with tin, you can switch heads or replace your brains with bran, but your soul remains.

The meeting between Dorothy and Langwidere does not go well. The Princess is vain and rude to her guests, and isn't charmed by Dorothy's good-natured chatter. However, she does think Dorothy is pretty in an exotic prairie way, so she offers to swap her Number Twenty-Six head for Dorothy's.

The reply is worthy of General McAuliffe: "Well, I b'lieve you won't!" says Dorothy.

Since Dorothy won't accept the trade, Langwidere orders her locked in the tower. At first, Tik-Tok holds off the Army of Ev, but then his action runs down and is left standing helpless. Dorothy is carried off to the tower and Billina to the chicken house.

From her tower room Dorothy has a good view of Ev, from the eastern coastline to the west, where it borders the Deadly Desert. As Dorothy watches, she becomes aware that something is crossing the desert. It's a magical carpet which unrolls in front and rolls up in back to protect its passengers from the lethal sand of the desert.

And marching upon that carpet is . . . the Oz Expeditionary Force! Ozma, riding a chariot drawn by the Cowardly Lion and the Hungery Tiger; the Scarecrow riding the Saw-Horse; the Tin Woodman; and all twenty-seven officers and men of the Army of Oz.

Dorothy thinks they've come to rescue her, but they didn't even know she was in Ev. No, Ozma's evidently got things sorted out back home and has decided to start throwing her weight around geopolitically. With the whole Royal Family of Ev either dead or enslaved by the Nome King, and the throne in the hands of a head-collecting lunatic, the situation is definitely ripe for intervention.

We get a sense of how Oz stacks up against its neighboring kingdoms when Langwidere tries a little bluff and bluster on the new arrivals. Ozma very sweetly points out that she is powerful enough to destroy all Ev if she chooses. Langwidere gets the hint and agrees to pack up her heads and retire gracefully.

While the two Princesses have their pissing contest, the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman meet Tiktok. Their conversation is wildly surreal, as the man made of tin and the man stuffed with straw brag about how much better it is to be living beings than to be an unliving machine. Tiktok has no vanity, however, and humbly agrees with them. He is under no illusions about having free will, either: "When I am wound up I do my du-ty by go-ing just as my ma-chin-er-y is made to go."

We also get introduced to another highly entertaining character, who quickly becomes a fixture in Oz: the Hungry Tiger. He's a tiger as big as the Cowardly Lion -- which is to say, Real Big -- and he freely admits he's a savage beast who hungers for fat babies. However, he has a very strong conscience and so he doesn't eat them, which means he's always very very Hungry.

As he points out, that means he's a very good beast, but a "disgracefully bad" tiger, since it is the nature of tigers to be fierce predators and he refuses to do so. Alert readers may see an echo here of the Wizard of Oz, who was a perfectly good man, just a very bad wizard.

Ozma's mission in Ev is to rescue the wife and ten children of the late King Evoldo from the clutches of the Nome King. Tiktok points out, logically, that the Nome King has done nothing wrong, as he bought them fair and square from the King of Ev. This doesn't change Ozma's mind. She will go to the Nome King's realm and demand he release the captives.

It's a dangerous job, but Ozma is determined. Dorothy is willing to go for the sake of the prisoners. The Tin Woodman is willing to risk underground heat that can melt tin. The Scarecrow is willing to risk sparks that could ignite straw. Langwidere . . . will stay home and wish them all good luck on their journey.

Before they set out, the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman fill Dorothy in on recent events in Oz. And for the first time we notice the Royal Historian is starting to contradict himself. In Land of Oz it's clear that the Wizard of Oz stole Princess Ozma and had Mombi disguise her as Tip. But now the Wizard is entirely absent from the story, and all the blame falls on the "wicked old witch." The process of "rehabilitation" has begun.

With Dorothy, Tiktok, and Billina now added to the ranks, the Oz Expeditionary Force heads north from Ev to the mountain which marks the entrance to the Nome King's dominions. We'll pick up there next time.