Just The Caffeine Talking

Moby Blogging: The Plot Arrives

In Chapter 36 of Moby Dick, the slow start ends abruptly when Ahab finally makes up his mind to go ahead and let everyone know how awesomely crazy he really is. He calls the crew together on the deck to hear one of the greatest insane rants in literature. Ahab begins by nailing a Spanish gold coin to the mast, the reward for whichever crewman spots the White Whale. Starbuck, the big dope, asks if that's the same whale that took off Ahab's leg.

"Aye, aye! and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out."

And that's just the beginning! Ahab goes on about how everything we see is but a pasteboard mask, but he intends to strike through the mask. It's like he's trying to start a prison riot in Plato's cave.

To win over the crew he passes around the grog-cup, but for the harpooneers there's a special toast, drunk from the steel sockets of their deadly harpoon-heads. "Now, three to three, ye stand. Commend the murderous chalices! Bestow them, ye who are now made parties to this indissoluble league. Ha! Starbuck! but the deed is done! Yon ratifying sun now waits to sit upon it. Drink, ye harpooneers! drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat's bow—Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!"

Apparently the entire crew, including Ishmael the narrator, thinks this is an absolutely swell idea. Only Starbuck is still skeptical, but he's so overawed by the force of Ahab's personality that he can only mutter objections.

Is there a scrap of realism in this? Of course not. Any real-life whaling captain who started ranting at his crew like that would have been strapped into his hammock and dropped at the nearest port. But it doesn't matter. We're hooked, by this point. This is the payoff for the slow beginning of the story: by establishing the reality of the Pequod and her crew, Melville gets us to accept Ahab's insanity. In a way, I think the boredom of the start may even be deliberate. If you've plowed through the book this far, you get your prize, a crazy obsessed captain who can take the story absolutely anywhere after this.

Ozblogging: Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, Part 4

Elemental Trouble

From the Valley of Voe our heroes climb another long staircase up to the land of the Gargoyles. Along the way they have a couple of odd encounters.

The first is when they pass a rift in the wall which looks out over another cavern, and a very strange place it is. The bottom is covered by a black sea dotted with gouts of flame, and the air above the flaming sea is filled with giant birds as big as the roc of Arabian Nights fame. In the clouds Dorothy sees some lovely Cloud Fairies.

The second random encounter is with a strange old man whose long hair and beard are all braided. He is, unsurprisingly, known as the Braided Man. He makes and sells rustles (for ladies' silk dresses) and flutters (for flags and banners). He claims to have come from the surface world, where he made holes for imitation Swiss cheese, and post holes for fences. To store his post holes, he hammered them into the ground in a long stack, creating a hole which led down to the underground world.

Unlike just about everyone else they have encountered so far, the Braided Man isn't trying to kill them, but for some reason Our Heroes don't hang around with him. The Wizard suggests he's a bit crazy. I think that's pretty unfair of the Wizard. He traveled underground in a balloon and has a pocket full of miniature talking piglets, and he's calling this guy nuts?

Beyond the Braided Man they reach the Land of the Gargoyles. Unlike proper cathedral gargoyles, these Gargoyles are made of wood, and are a pretty standard issue bunch of Baum's randomly hostile freaks. We never even find out why they're so hostile; they just are. I'm not even sure why Baum calls them Gargoyles, since they're so different from the standard depiction.

The Gargoyles shy away from noise, but once the Wizard has emptied his two revolvers (yes, the Wizard's packin' heat -- Secret Service issue, no doubt) the Gargoyles take the party prisoner and lock them in a house with no doors, only a hatch in the roof. They can do this because the Gargoyles fly everywhere, by means of hinged wooden wings.

I think this is why I assumed they were aboveground when I read this book as a child. This hardly sounds like an underground world at all. Everything they've encountered during their sojurn inside the Earth is aerial in nature. The Mangaboos can walk on air, the Voese are transparent as air, there's a cavern inhabited by birds and cloud fairies, the Braided Man makes things out of air, and the Gargoyles can fly.

I don't know if this was some kind of thematic choice by Baum, or whether he just had a whole bunch of ideas for weird wayside tribes and random hostile freaks which all happened to involve air and flight somehow. If so, it's odd he used them in this book.

Another odd thing is the complete absence of Nomes. The Nome King has been described as the Ruler of the underground world, and now Dorothy and the Wizard (and the rest) are trapped underground trying to get free. Baum could have made all this an attempt at revenge by the jolly old psychopathic Nome King, which fails because he didn't anticipate the arrival of the Wizard.

Even if the earthquake isn't the Nome King's fault (fault? earthquake? geddit?) it's kind of a shame Baum passed on the opportunity to have the heroes encounter some Nomes underground -- maybe even a rebel faction or some exiles. Instead we get Cloud Fairies. Very odd. 

Rereading DATWIO as an adult who knows something about the Oz books, something else struck me about it: this book doesn't read as if it's written to be adapted to the stage. There are no armies of showgirls, no comic duos, and just about all the adventure setpieces would be impossible to stage. From that and the preceding points, I deduce that L. Frank Baum more or less threw this one together from bits and pieces, secure in the knowledge that he would satisfy his fans by bringing back the Wizard. Can't really say he was wrong, either.

Escaping the Gargoyles is pretty simple. Zeb sneaks out and steals several pairs of Gargoyle wings, which the creatures remove when they go to sleep. He and the Wizard attach the wings to Jim and the buggy, and the whole crew go flying off toward the next tunnel entrance on the far side of the Gargoyles' cavern. Naturally they are pursued, and reach the tunnel just in time.

To hold off the Gargoyles the Wizard removes the wings and douses them with lamp oil before setting them on fire. He also hopes aloud that the fire may spread and destroy the entire Gargoyle country. Given what he's been through, one can sympathize. With the blaze making the tunnel too hot, they proceed upward, and we'll catch up with them next time.

Ozblogging: Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, Part 3

Un-Player-Character-Like Behavior

The Black Pit isn't actually a pit, it's more of a tunnel. The Mangaboos wall our heroes into it with glass boulders, so Dorothy, Zeb, Jim, Eureka and the Wizard follow the tunnel to see where it leads. They go up for a long way and finally emerge in a "delightful valley" with a blue sky, green grass, and neat little farms and orchards.
   
When I read this part as a youngster, I remember thinking that the player-characters, I mean heroes, had emerged onto the Earth's surface again, but upon rereading it I find that's not the case. The "valley" is still a cavern, since there's no Sun or Moon, just indirect lighting that looks like daylight. Try not to think of this too much.

They see no people or animals -- although they hear birds singing. The mystery is solved when the Wizard's miniature performing pigs (known, inevitably, as the Nine Tiny Piglets) devour a strange fruit and vanish from sight. They're invisible, and so are all the inhabitants of this cavern, known as the Valley of Voe.

The invisibility-potion fruit is called dama-fruit, and it makes everyone who eats it invisible. Including the many ferocious bears which inhabit the valley. The invisible bears are ferocious because all their prey animals are also invisible, which means that Jim the cart-horse is like a walking McDonalds' sign for the bears.

For some reason Dorothy et al are extremely reluctant to eat any of the dama-fruit. Even the prospect of being stalked by invisible bears isn't enough to get them to try it. I wonder if Baum's original idea was for one or more of the party to eat the fruit and become invisible, but then for some reason he changed his mind. Perhaps having an invisible team member would make it difficult for him to come up with real challenges for them.

The only way out of the Valley of Voe is through another tunnel, but the Voeians (Voeites? Voelings?) never use it because it leads to the land of the Gargoyles, who are terribly dangerous. As one of the invisible people explains to Dorothy: "Our greatest Champion, Overman-Anu, once climbed the spiral stairway and fought nine days with the Gargoyles before he could escape them and come back; but he could never be induced to describe the dreadful creatures, and soon afterward a bear caught him and ate him up."

"The wanderers were rather discouraged by this gloomy report," Baum says drily. But Dorothy's lunatic optimism and self-confidence can't be dampened for long. She reasons that no Gargoyles could possibly be worse than the Wicked Witch or the Nome King, so she's ready to tackle them -- with Zeb and the Wizard to do the fighting. Amazingly, the others agree with this suggestion.

So off they go. A helpful invisible passer-by shows them a magic plant which allows Jim and the buggy to walk on water, which will let them avoid the bears by traveling on the surface of a convenient river. They barely make it to the water in time, and the Wizard has to stab an invisible bear with his sword to get away.

How does the magical leaf let our heroes walk on water? The best explanation is that it locally changes the surface tension of water, so that it can support the weight of a horse and buggy. There are creatures which do walk on water, even without magic leaves. Insects and spiders are the most familiar, but there's even a species of basilisk lizard which can manage the trick. Naturally, it's known as the "Jesus lizard."

While small, lightweight organisms like insects can support themselves on surface tension alone, the Jesus lizard is actually slapping the water like a judo fighter using a hand-slap to break the force of a fall, balancing the downward force of its feet against its weight.

For a creature to actually walk and stand on water, it needs a "Jesus number" greater than 1. The "Jesus number" is a term coined by biomechanics guru Steve Vogel, and it's the dimensionless ratio between the surface tension of water times the perimeter length of the creature's feet, and the force of gravity on the creature. If the creature's density times length squared times 10 meters per second squared is less than the surface tension, it can stroll around on the water quite easily.

Now since the leaves don't seem to make the buggy or Jim less dense, we must assume the surface tension changes instead. And since surface tension is the result of the electromagnetic force, that means those leaves are capable of altering one of the fundamental forces of the universe! Pretty potent stuff! Since dama-fruit can alter the refractive index of any creature which eats them, and that's also an electromagnetic effect, evidently the native flora of the Valley of Voe have evolved some means of manipulating electromagnetic fields. The applications are endless!

And yet . . . even Dorothy doesn't think to bring some of the leaves, or the dama-fruit, along with them. It would be mighty useful to be able to walk on water or turn invisible, but once they deal with the immediate danger, both she and the Wizard forget all about these miraculous plants.

This is an example of what is sometimes called the "Star Trek effect" -- a tendency in serial fiction for the writers to come up with some deus ex machina which resolves the plot of the current episode, but which then gets forgotten completely in future episodes, even when there's a similar problem. On the old Star Trek series, examples included the contaminated water which makes you super-fast, the hormone injections which give you telekinesis, the time-warp technique which should let the heroes undo any event they don't like, and some others I'm too lazy to look up.

Of course, if the writers don't conveniently forget the amazing powers they made up at the last minute, then the heroes suffer from "power creep" as they gain new abilities every time they have to overcome a menace. That was how Superman went from being basically a really strong, tough, fast guy to being someone who could push planets around and freeze oceans by blowing on them.

Anyway: ignoring the potentially world-shaking powers of the plants they've seen, our heroes arrive at the stairway leading out of the Valley of Voe, and begin the long climb up. We'll meet them at the top next time.

More Moby Blogging

My son and I have gotten up to about Chapter 35 of Moby Dick; he's still interested, although Melville's language sometimes mystifies him completely.

I had forgotten how much of a slice-of-life realistic novel Moby Dick is. We remember Captain Ahab's mad quest and the high-school English essay allegories, but we forget how much of the book is just the prosaic details of life aboard a whaling ship. The odd little social niceties of the mates dining with the captain and how cheerless their meal is, while the harpooneers eat at the same table afterwards and have a grand old time harassing the steward.

I also have to say that Herman Melville is absolutely shameless about padding his text. There's really no other explanation for including a chapter blatantly lifted from his reference books (Chapter 32: "Cetology") and a whole chapter (Chapter 35) devoted to stretching a whimsical comparison (between sailors standing watch on the mast-head with statues atop pillars) far, far beyond the breaking point. I don't mind the author taking time to let us get to know the ship and the characters in order to give us a baseline of normality for Ahab's mad obsession (and Melville's own personal observations of sea life are acute and fascinating) -- but throwing in stuff from other people's books is really too much.

Modern readers tend to forget how much of 19th century literature has simply dropped out of the canon. Does anyone outside a college English program read Trollope any more? Or anything past the first line of Bulwer-Lytton's novels? The shift in prose style that began in the late 19th century was a profound shift in how people read. Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling still sound fresh and contemporary, but earlier writers are work.

 

Ozblogging: Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, Part 2

Humbugs and Humanoid Plants

The Sorcerer of the Mangaboos is named Gwig, and unlike the rest of those people he's not eerily handsome. In fact, he's all covered with thorns.

Gwig, it seems, is a bit of a humbug, because after the first Rain of Stones he promised there would be no more. He gets out of this by pointing out that the second was a Rain of Stones-and-Horse-and-Buggy, which is almost good enough to get him a job as Press Secretary.

Unfortunately for Gwig, a greater humbug arrives, as a balloon descends from the roof of the cavern, carrying in its basket none other than the Wonderful Wizard of Oz himself! According to the Great And Powerful Oz, his balloon happened to touch down just as an earthquake split open the ground, and he wound up descending into the underground world of the Mangaboos. This, to me, sounds like more humbug. I can just barely believe that a whole horse and buggy can fall into a crack in the earth, but a balloon?

This seems to confirm my theory. The Wizard (and Dorothy) both have the ability to teleport themselves from our world into the Oz Continuum, or whatever you care to call it. And while Dorothy's power is stress-activated, the Wizard apparently can only make the shift while airborne.

There follows a spectacular magical duel between Gwig the Sorcerer and the Wizard of Oz. You'd think Oz was the underdog in this contest, since he's a mere humbug pitted against a thorn-covered freak who can actually do real magic. But you'd be wrong, because Oz is a great humbug. His stage illusions are every bit as impressive as Gwig's sorcery.

Finally Gwig loses patience and gets vicious. He uses his magic to stop the Wizard's breath. Oz, never one to let oxygen deprivation keep him down, uses his last few seconds of consciousness to pull several knives from his sleeve and assemble them into a sharp sword, with which he cuts Gwig in half, thereby winning the contest and saving himself from suffocation.

Cutting Gwig in half does reveal something important about him and the rest of the Mangaboos: they are vegetables. Gwig's corpse is solid inside like a turnip, so there is no distressing torrent of blood and viscera.

The leader of the Mangaboos takes the surface folk on a little tour, showing them the garden where new Mangaboos grow on bushes. They start out as babies, and when fully grown are ready to be picked. (And fully-dressed: the Mangaboos' clothing is actually part of their bodies. It's rather odd to see a book, even one for children, in which nudity is absolutely impossible but people get cut in half without much fuss.)

This means the Mangaboos are fruits, and it's actually a pretty ingenious method of plant propagation. The plants evidently pollinate, for while there are men and women Mangaboos that seems to be nothing but a superficial appearance. Once fertilized, the Mangaboo plant creates mobile, intelligent fruit which can spread far and wide, consciously tending and planting the bushes and destroying rival species and predators. It's a great system. They live for five years, and don't eat -- which makes perfect sense, since they have no digestive organs. (How they speak is an interesting question.)

Incidentally, this means Mangaboo must be an extremely good source of nutrition. If an adult Mangaboo can live five years off of stored reserves, their bodies must be simply packed with calories. Assume that half a Mangaboo's weight at picking-time is used for food storage (the other half is neural tissue, muscles, etc.). They probably aren't warm-blooded, so they can get by on, say, 1000 calories per day. That means Mangaboo flesh contains about 40 calories per gram. That's five times the calorie content of butter! Forget about ethanol and switchgrass; we could solve all our energy problems overnight by planting Mangaboos!

The Mangaboo leader (known only as "the man with the star") may be aware of this, because he announces the visitors must be destroyed shortly.

This man doesn't know who he's dealing with, does he?

Dorothy and the Wizard promptly do what they do best: they mount an instant coup d'état against the Man With The Star by picking a fresh Mangaboo princess from the Royal Bush to replace him. He hands over the star emblem and goes off to be planted (or possibly converted into sustainable biofuels).

Unfortunately, their meddling in Mangaboo internal politics blows up in their faces when the Princess eventually decides that her predecessor was right and the surface people must, indeed, be destroyed. The Wizard keeps the Mangaboos at bay with burning kerosene -- and given what we've seen about their energy content, Mangaboos should go up like bombs if they catch fire.

But the Mangaboos are persistent and determined, and in spite of the threat of flaming oil and kicks from Jim the cart-horse, they eventually drive our heroes into the Black Pit, where we shall find them all next time.

Ozblogging: Dorothy And The Wizard In Oz, Part 1

In the Introduction to Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, L. Frank Baum good-naturedly complains that "The children won't let me stop telling tales of the Land of Oz. I know lots of other stories, and I hope to tell them, some time or another; but just now my loving tyrants won't allow me."

Every time he thinks he's getting out they pull him back in.

Our story begins in California. Dorothy and her Uncle Henry have survived their trip to Australia and are now on their way back to Kansas, but they've stopped off to visit some relatives. Since this is California and the year is 1908 (two years after the great quake that leveled San Francisco), the place is utterly plagued by earthquakes. Dorothy can't even ride the train to her cousins' ranch without being delayed by tremors.

Her cousin Zeb is waiting at the depot with a buggy drawn by the bony old horse Jim. They set out for the ranch, and you'll never guess what happens. Actually, you probably will: a natural disaster casts them into a fantastic realm of magic. Happens all the time when Dorothy is around.

This suggests an interesting possibility: rather than the gateway to Oz being located in a particular place, maybe certain people have the ability to reach Oz. Dorothy, the Wizard, Button-Bright, and perhaps some others simply have the Gift. Stress and fear seem to be the most common triggers -- Dorothy shifts to Oz in a cyclone, a storm at sea, and an earthquake. Button-Bright apparently does it unconsciously, "getting lost" without noticing. The Wizard's ability may be like Dorothy's -- unless he has a way to consciously control it.

Note that Dorothy's power is able to bring along nearby people and objects -- the Kansas cabin, a chicken coop, and now a horse and buggy. Because she can't control this ability, she can't really "target" where it takes her, either. Instead of materializing safely in Ozma's courtyard, she tends to wind up in odd places in and around Oz. Still, it beats getting killed by some natural catastrophe.

In this case, the trigger for Dorothy is an earthquake. It's fortunate that she and Zeb are in a remote part of rural California because the quake is insanely powerful, at least Richter 9 or worse. It doesn't just shake the ground, it actually splits open a gigantic rift miles deep, into which the buggy falls. Zeb, Dorothy, Jim the horse, and Dorothy's pet kitten Eureka go falling into the darkness, with only the canopy of the buggy to act as a parachute and prevent them from smashing to bits on landing.

They fall for a long time. Evidently the atmosphere down in the rift is quite dense, because they don't seem to be falling very quickly. Even allowing for the parachute effect of the buggy canopy, they should still be moving at close to terminal velocity -- and they aren't. Still, they descend a heck of a long way. Assuming a falling speed of only 100 kilometers per hour (half of terminal velocity above the surface of the Earth), and that what seems like a long time to Dorothy is only five minutes, they still descend a good eight kilometers. That's not enough to pass through the crust, but it's still deeper than any humans have ever gone.

Instead of very hot basalt, as one would expect to find five miles underground, they see a strange country inside a gigantic cave. The cave is lit by six multicolored miniature suns, and at the bottom is a city made of glass. For a moment there's some concern that they're going to land on one of the many sharp pointed glass spires of the city and be spitted like oysters en brochette.

The children make another interesting discovery as they fall: the animals can talk. This comes as a surprise to everyone except Dorothy, who is getting a bit jaded about magical happenings by now. Eureka the kitten is also permanently colored pink by the light of the miniature suns, so that in all subsequent books she is known as the Pink Kitten, capitalized.

Finally the buggy and its occupants comes down quite slowly and safely atop a big glass building in the city. The whole place is disturbingly silent, and the children wonder if it's abandoned, until finally a man appears to greet them. He's very handsome, very calm -- and he can walk on the air. Turns out everyone can walk on the air in this cavern; we never do find out why. What with the talking animals I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's magic.

The people of this strange underground country are the Mangaboos, and they are all extremely handsome -- yet creepy-looking. Dorothy can't quite put her finger on why. Apparently L. Frank Baum came up with the idea of the Uncanny Valley about a century before it became a common concept. (Quick summary: if you draw an imaginary graph of how realistic a face is and how attractive it is, the attractiveness generally rises as the realism increases -- until you reach a zone just before perfect realism, at which the attractiveness takes a nosedive before recovering. That region in which something is almost realistic, but not quite, is the Uncanny Valley.)

The Mangaboos are upset because Dorothy & co. were accompanied as they fell by a rain of stones (sorry, a Rain of Stones) which did a lot of damage to the glass houses of their town. They're looking for someone to blame, and the surface-dwellers are prime candidates. When Dorothy insists they're not to blame, the Mangaboos decide to take the interlopers to see the Sorcerer. And that's where we'll come in next time.

Copyrights and Schadenfreude

Apologies for the long hiatus. Among other issues, we took a family vacation and my internet access was limited. Anyway, I'm back.

Yesterday I happened to read a posting on the usually interesting io9 blog (the science fiction branch of the Gawker Media empire) -- this one, about the tension between expansiveness and self-referentiality in serial media. Solid stuff.

And then I read the comments, which veered off into a discussion of copyrights, including a fair amount of gloating about the prospects of iconic media characters like Mickey Mouse or Superman falling into the public domain. There was also some booing and hissing about how the giant media companies have been lobbying for longer and longer copyright terms.

There's plenty of room to argue about the merits of limited vs. perpetual copyrights (full disclosure: I'm with Mark Twain on this one), and I won't go into that. However, I am kind of puzzled about the glee with which people contemplate the idea of Disney no longer owning exclusive rights to Mickey Mouse.

Is it just envy, tricked out as fashionable anti-corporate sentiment? Or are there people out there who actually feel injured somehow by Disney's copyrights? How could that be?

Let's look at some possibilities.

Suppose I'm burning to create my own Mickey Mouse story. Perhaps I have a cool idea for a Mickey comic or film. Well -- if the idea is really good, or if I'm really dedicated and make my own short film -- it just so happens there's a huge media company which really likes Mickey Mouse. I can parlay my Mickey story into a career working for Disney or some of its many, many licensed publishers.

This isn't hypothetical, either. Cartoonist Don Rosa was a huge fan of Carl Barks's Scrooge McDuck comics, and eventually wound up working for comics publishers doing licensed Disney comics. In other media, Paramount's Star Trek franchise was pretty much taken over by former Trekkies.

Okay, you say. What if my "vision" for Mickey doesn't agree with Disney's? What if I want to do a darker and edgier Mickey, or explore his relationship with Minnie in explicit detail?

Well, I can draw my own funny animals and have them do whatever freakish acts I want. Call them Mike and Millie Mouse. There's a whole genre of "furry erotica" comics, and I can probably get them published. "But that's not Mickey!" you say. "Your freedom to show Mickey Mouse doing kinky sex is curtailed by Disney's copyrights!"

True -- but if the only reason to do kinky Mickey is the frisson of turning a child-friendly corporate icon into a pervert, then that thrill is destroyed as soon as anyone can do it! When Mickey enters the public domain, there will probably be a whole rush of attempts to do just that, and they'll all fall flat because it won't be transgressive anymore.

And note that I can write my own Pervert Mickey comic, or even make a film -- I just can't sell it and make money at it. Which means the beef about copyrights isn't that it infringes artistic freedom at all. The problem is that those greedheads at Disney are preventing other greedheads from making money off of Mickey.

If anyone has any ideas about how copyright actually inhibits creativity, please comment and explain. I'm serious; this is a big issue nowadays and I'd love to hear other viewpoints.