Just The Caffeine Talking

Spelling Bee After-Action Report

My talented wife Diane and I were recruited by a friend to join her team in the Northampton Education Foundation's annual spelling bee. We agreed, so last night the three of us turned up in yellow sweaters to battle the other teams. Funds were raised, somehow.

When we agreed to participate, both Diane and I thought of this as nothing more than an evening's entertainment -- like trivia night or Bingo. We forgot something: under our mild-mannered exteriors both Diane and I are highly competitive. Why else do the two of us like games so much? Because we can win. I've never "let my kids win" at board games -- when they beat me, it's for real. (When they were learning to play chess, I would give up my Queen, but that was it. How do you learn the game if the other person is trying to lose?) 

So when the day arrived, we were both pretty keyed up. We competed, and made it through the first round without missing a single word. In the playoffs, we wound up head-to-head with the reigning champions, the Hampshire Gazette's crew. (You can read their account here.) It was an epic slog through lagniappe, chlorophyll, poetaster, and a dozen more I can't remember. We almost got knocked out by weltschmerz, but the other guys also screwed up and put a t before the z just as we did. Finally I left the first e out of arrondissement, and we went down.

Next time, Hampshire Gazette.

Next time.

Why Comedians Aren't Funny

Lately I've been watching a lot of standup comedy bits on YouTube, and as a result my thoughts drifted to the question of why so few comedians are able to make the jump to film. I'm sure we all know about the Saturday Night Live curse -- where movies starring SNL cast members not named Bill Murray or Dan Ackroyd tend to be awful.

Why is that? And why do so few other standup comedians do well in film? 

I have a theory. If you watch a comedian perform, he is emotionally detached. That may seem odd to say about someone like Patton Oswalt telling humiliating stories about himself, or Sam Kinnison literally screaming with rage. But it's true: the comic, in order to succeed, has to be cool and aloof. We have to know that his rage or confession is part of the act. Contrast what happened when Michael Richards (for example) actually lost his temper and insulted some audience members: it killed his career dead.

The comedian is a benevolent dictator, a charismatic leader commanding us to be amused. (It was once said of Bob Hope that he dared his audience not to laugh at his jokes.) Like all tyrants, the comedian can't show any true vulnerability.

And that's why they don't make good movies: the hero of a story -- even a comedy -- has to show real vulnerability, and struggle and fail, and elicit our sympathy. He has to admit that he is flawed, and change himself in order to finally succeed.

That's fine for an actor, but awful for a comedian. We don't laugh at comedians for being vulnerable and flawed, we laugh at them for showing us we're vulnerable and flawed. So a comedian in a comedy either undercuts the very things that earned his reputation, or plays a static character (which means there's no story).

Now, as it happens, there is a secret way for comedians to make funny comedies. The Marx Brothers understood it, and a few others have stumbled across it. The comedian can't be the hero. In Marx Brothers movies, the ostensible hero was some forgettable lunk like Alan Jones or whoever, who probably got a forgettable musical number and ended the movie by winning the heart of the forgettable pretty girl playing the ostensible heroine. The Marx Brothers were supporting characters who just happened to get top billing and most of the screen time.

A supporting character can be static and funny, while the vulnerability and change of the hero gives us an actual story. The Marxes don't have to learn some bogus lesson about responsibility, so they can fade out being just as ridiculous as always.

Boiled down, the lesson is this: the most important character isn't always the hero. 

Ozblogging: Oz the Great and Powerful Review

I saw Oz: The Great and Powerful earlier this week with my wife and my 10-year-old son. He liked it a lot, we . . . liked it less than he did.

Oz: The Great and Powerful isn't a bad movie. It's a perfectly fun children's movie that adults can enjoy. But I'm afraid that a prequel to The Wizard of Oz needed to be great, and this movie just isn't.

I'm not going to go all Oz purist and complain that Glinda isn't supposed to be the daughter of the King of Oz, or other details about the setting. L. Frank Baum his own self was perfectly content to cut and paste story elements, make up new stuff, and ignore past continuity. I'm not even going to gripe that the story is set in 1905, which means that the Wizard doesn't even get to Oz until five years after Dorothy's been there. We can assume that the film The Wizard of Oz takes place in its release year of 1939 (and handwave the absence of any post-1900 technology as being due to Dust Bowl era poverty on the part of Uncle Henry and Aunt Em), which gives Oz a quarter-century to age from James Franco into Frank Morgan. These aren't huge problems.

No, the three main problems I had with Oz had to do with odd casting, a big hole in the plot, and technology.

First, the cast. James Franco is okay as the Wizard (though I think the film would have been better with a more energetic wiseacre as the lead actor -- someone like Vince Vaughn or even Steve Carrell would have pumped more energy into the role).

But Mila Kunis as Theodora (the not-yet-Wicked Witch of the West) is completely wrong. Physically she's pretty buxom and curvy, which doesn't really fit the bony, almost skeletal look we associate with the Witch. And for some reason she (and the director) chose to underplay everything. She spends the first half of her time in the movie looking like she's got a sinus headache, and the second half looking like she's got a sinus headache in green makeup. Again, a more energetic, over-the-top actress would have helped.

Second, the plot (spoilers here): there's one big hole in the story. In order to give us a story echo of The Wizard of Oz, there's a sequence in which Evanora (the other Wicked Witch) sends Oz off to defeat Glinda, after telling him she's an evil sorceress and the cause of all the kingdom's problems. But since Evanora is the actual wicked one, this makes no sense at all. I could understand if she sent Oz off to some extremely dangerous place hoping to get rid of him, but sending him straight to the one person who can disprove Evanora's story seems pretty poor planning for the arch-villain of the story. 

This may seem like I'm nitpicking, but it's actually pretty significant. Contrast the Wizard's scheme in Wizard of Oz, when he sends Dorothy after the Wicked Witch of the West. He has two problems: a Wicked Witch, and a little girl who can expose his fraudulent nature by asking for help he can't provide. It's pretty callous to send Dorothy after the Witch, but no matter who comes out on top he solves one of his two problems. Evanora's scheme looks the same on paper -- except that Glinda isn't wicked. She's not going to kill Oz if she can possibly help it. Unless Oz is going to snipe at Glinda from long range with a buffalo rifle (which is how I would tackle a powerful sorceress), the odds are good that he's going to learn about Evanora's deception. Evanora should be aware of this.

In other words, the characters are moving around the map because the action setpieces require that they be in certain places, not for any reason that makes sense within the story. That's careless writing.

Finally, the technology: there's too much of it. The movie is jam-packed with eye-popping 3D computer animation. Which means it gets almost tiresome when things keep lunging at the viewer, and the disconnect between the foreground actors and the animated backgrounds is very noticeable. The actors know they're standing in front of a green screen, and it shows. Painted backdrops like those of Wizard would have been more convincing than high-tech super-detailed animation.

Overall, I'd give this movie a gentleman's B+. It's competently made, but never really surprised me or made me wonder what was going to happen next. Younger viewers will enjoy it, but I don't think they'll be enchanted.

Where I Do It

I do most of my writing in coffeeshops. Fortunately, I live in an area with a good assortment of places. In Greenfield I can go to Greenfield Coffee, which is a dedicated coffeehouse so I don't have to feel guilty about occupying a table during lunchtime. The chief drawback is that the town of Greenfield has two-hour parking meters downtown, which means I can't stay as long as I'd like. Despite that I've probably spent more hours there in total than anyplace else.

In Montague there's the lovely Lady Killigrew Cafe, in an old mill building overlooking a waterfall. I think I'd live there but for two problems. The first is the big south-facing windows. On sunny days they make the main room very bright, which must have been great for underage textile workers spinning cotton in the 19th Century, but is actually kind of a nuisance when one is trying to read a laptop screen. So I only go to Lady Killigrew's on cloudy days -- which isn't much of a restriction in New England's climate.

The other problem with the Lady Killigrew is their lunch menu. It's too tempting. I wind up ordering a full lunch, which costs more in dollars and calories than I would wish. It also means that I can't just camp out and nurse my coffee if there are people who actually want to buy lunch.

Being too attractive and busy are problems most restaurants would love to have, but writers are strange people.

If I want to spend more time in transit I can go down to Amherst. My chief hangout there is Rao's, which is nearly perfect. The lighting levels are right, they're used to cheapskate graduate students and retirees holding down tables for hours at a time, and the baristas have pretty good taste in music.

Northampton is about the same distance, but parking there is always complicated, so I only write in Northampton if I have some other errand there -- like ferrying one or more kid to an activity, which happens at least twice a week. My favorite place in Northampton is Northampton Coffee, part of the same local caffeine empire as Greenfield Coffee. It also suffers from the drawback of metered parking. 

As a last resort there's a Starbucks in Northampton. I liked Starbucks when they first began appearing everywhere -- I lived in Chicago at the time and their coffee was better than the local standard. Then I went through a period of food-snob hipster sneering at Starbucks -- in my case the sneering was that of a New Orleanian irritated by these upstart Seattleites acting like they invented drinking coffee.

I eventually reconciled with Starbucks, chiefly as a result of noticing that persons unknown in Amherst and Northampton were vandalizing their stores. Nothing major -- just stickers for Dean's Beans or some other organic "fair trade" guilt merchandise plastered over the mermaid logo on the window. I decided that if Starbucks offends self-righteous leftist vandals, they must be doing something right. You can judge a man -- or a coffee chain -- by the quality of his enemies.* 

Why do I bother? Why not stay in my nice house? 

Well, there's three reasons. The first is stimulation. Sitting home alone is kind of dull. My brain goes into "sleep" mode like an unattended computer. Sometimes it's literal sleep, and sometimes it's just goofing off. (Interestingly, when the weather's nice and I can sit out on the porch to write, that isn't a problem. I guess listening to bird song and watching the chickens harass each other is as stimulating as sitting in a cafe full of wannabe intellectuals.)

The second reason is focus. When I'm out of the house I can't do chores, I can't play computer games (I suppose I could, but somehow it's embarassing to play Kerbal Space Program in public), and I can't hear the dog trying to get my attention. There's nothing to do but write. I may still be able to waste time, but it's wasted on things like 'blog posts or roleplaying games. Coffeeshops encourage higher-quality goofing off.

And finally there's the simple appeal of social interaction. I'm not the only person who likes to hang around in coffeeshops around the Pioneer Valley. There's a whole floating community of us. When I go to Greenfield Coffee I often take along some dog treats in case I run into the elderly deaf gentleman with the adorable service dog who turns up there. At Killigrew's I  occasionally run into local authors like Kelly Link or Mo Willems. I see the fathers of two of my daughter's friends almost every day. It makes me feel connected.

For a writer, this is actually rather important. If I don't get out of the house, the only people I interact with for days at a time are my immediate family and the dog. They're all very nice, but I know them too well. I don't learn much by observing them and overhearing their conversations. But strangers are an ever-flowing spring. I've already mentioned that I got one story out of an overheard coffeeshop conversation. It's also instructive just to hear how people speak to each other, even if they're not saying anything very interesting. 

Where do you do your best work?

*I tried to track down who said this. It's credited to Conrad, Wilde, Churchill, and Doctor Who. 

Ozblogging: The Patchwork Girl of Oz, Part 5

Beyond the Tottenhot village the team enters some rocky mountains, and immediately start seeing warning signs: "LOOK OUT FOR YOOP" and "BEWARE THE CAPTIVE YOOP." Eventually they come to a huge cage carved into a cliff, in which is imprisoned the ferocious giant  Mr. Yoop. Yoop is fierce and hungry, and longs to eat up Dorothy and Ojo, but one must take note of his dress sense: 

". . . they noticed he was dressed all in pink velvet, with silver buttons and braid. The Giant's boots were of pink leather and had tassels on them and his hat was decorated with an enormous pink ostrich feather, carefully curled." 

He's basically Elton John circa 1978, only he's 21 feet tall and hungry for human flesh. The Scarecrow (of course) comes up with a plan to get past the giant cannibal fashionista, and the travelers pass on into the country of the Hoppers and the Horners. 

I confess I expected the Hoppers and Horners to be another group of randomly hostile freaks, but I guess Mr. Yoop provided enough danger for this part of the story so instead they turn out to be wacky wayside tribes. Both groups live inside the mountain. The Hoppers are monopods who travel by hopping about (which seems like an invitation to disaster if you live in a low-ceilinged cave system). They are currently at war with the Horners, who are plump little people equipped with six-inch horns in the center of their foreheads. Just like Captain Kirk half a century later, Dorothy brings peace to the warring factions with an earnest chat. 

Having accomplished that, the heroes can look for a dark well, and happily the Horners know of one. It's down in the radium mine. What was L. Frank Baum's fascination with radium? Ozma gets a radium crown as a birthday present in The Road to Oz. I guess given how everything in Oz is made of gold and studded with jewels, Baum needed a way to show that something was really rare and valuable.

Since Oz apparently has a good-sized deposit of fissionable material, now I'm thinking about what the Wizard and Glinda would make of it, especially post-1945. (Remember, nobody dies in the fairyland of Oz, so the Wizard will still be around despite having been born circa 1840.) With Glinda's Magic Book and Ozma's Magic Picture to provide the necessary secret intelligence, and with Professor Wogglebug and Tik-Tok to run the project, we can expect Oz to become the first nuclear superpower of Nonestica. That should keep the Nome King in line. It would be particularly entertaining to sprinkle a little of Dr. Pipt's Powder of Life on an Ozian deterrent, so that using it would require a philosophical argument as in John Carpenter's Dark Star.

But I digress. The heroes now have three of the five ingredients, which is good because we're nearly at the end of the book. 

After some trouble with a reversing river, Ojo's posse arrives at the magnificent tin castle of the Tin Woodman, Emperor of the Winkies. The Woodman is of course the key to the fourth ingredient, a drop of oil from a living man's body -- he's alive in a somewhat unconventional way, and has to keep himself carefully oiled to prevent rust. Ojo catches a drop from the Woodman's knee, and that leaves only one item left.

Which the Woodman refuses to give them. The Emperor of the Winkies is of course the most tender-hearted man in Oz and absolutely won't permit them to take the left wing of a yellow butterfly (apparently even butterflies in Oz are immortal, since nobody proposes looking for the wing of a dead one). So he and the travelers all go back to the Emerald City to dump the problem in Ozma's lap. 

Ozma has been monitoring them the whole time, and has ordered the petrified Unc Nunkie and Margolotte brought to her palace, along with Dr. Pipt. She forbids the Crooked Magician from ever working magic again, and then the Wizard of Oz (using a magic spell helpfully provided by Oz's resident deux ex machina, Glinda) un-petrifies the two poor victims without any butterflies at all. Which means all of Ojo's adventures since leaving the Emerald City were just Ozma jerking her friend Dorothy around some more.

Ojo, Unc Nunkie, Scraps, the Woozy, and the Glass Cat are invited to remain in the Emerald City. Ojo realizes that he isn't unlucky after all, and the story comes to an end rather suddenly.

Ojo becomes a fairly regular recurring character in the later Oz books. I think Mr. Baum must have noticed that the Emerald City was getting crowded with little girls, and wanted to balance things out a bit. Unfortunately, Ojo never really develops much of a personality. He's no Tip, that's for sure. Compared with the determined and assertive Dorothy, or the sweetly autocratic Ozma, Ojo's just kind of there. Once the quest to save Unc Nunkie is over, he even loses his forthright contempt for mere laws and becomes just another brave, good-hearted, but ultimately colorless inhabitant of Oz.

Overall, The Patchwork Girl is what I'd describe as a middleweight Oz book. It's entertaining, we get some nice glimpses of magic, and it introduces a couple of interesting characters who will become regular cast members: Scraps and the Glass Cat. The plot is pretty much boilerplate, though: wander around Oz having random encounters until you get to the end of the book, and an entirely superfluous life lesson is learned. As I said, middleweight.

Ozblogging: The Patchwork Girl of Oz, Part 4

Our heroes have a couple of random encounters on their way out of Munchkin country -- a weird spacetime distortion, a giant porcupine, and an illusionary wall -- but with the help of the Shaggy Man they get past all of them. As in Road to Oz, these sequences strongly suggest that Baum was thinking of staging this book as a play. Most of the things that have happened so far in the story are well within the resources of a small-town vaudeville theater. The Woozy could be knocked together by any competent cabinetmaker, the Patchwork Girl would be nothing more than a cool costume and some makeup, and even the giant carnivorous plants could be done with ropes and cloth.

The only element in The Patchwork Girl of Oz which would not be easy to stage -- or to film, either -- would be Bungle, the Glass Cat. Until the development of modern computer-generated animation, it would be almost impossible to make a moving, talking, transparent cat. I expect Mr. Baum planned to switch in a different character for the stage version, just as he replaced the little dog Toto with Dorothy's pet cow for the play The Wizard of Oz.

Once in the territory around the Emerald City, Ojo starts looking for a six-leafed clover, as per instructions, but the Shaggy Man informs him that the law expressly forbids it. Damned EPA. They also run into the Scarecrow and the famous Sawhorse. The Scarecrow and Scraps immediately begin a comic romance, but the Sawhorse and the Woozy start bickering. The Scarecrow is bound on an errand of his own -- getting his painted ear renewed by, of all people, ex-General Jinjur -- so he doesn't join the group, which is good because they'd need their own area code at this rate. 

Just before they reach the Emerald City, Ojo spots a six-leafed clover and picks it at once, despite Ozma's pointless feel-good regulations. However, the regime has eyes everywhere, and as soon as the party reaches the gates of the Emerald City, the Soldier With Green Whiskers summarily arrests Ojo for his crime. He drapes the unlucky Munchkin lad in a hooded white robe with eye-holes (not unlike the garb of Spanish capirotes) and hauls him off to jail.

One generation's absurd humor is another generation's nightmare. When Baum was writing The Patchwork Girl of Oz, the notion of being arrested and jailed for picking a plant was comic nonsense. Modern readers remembering the ocean of blood resulting from 20th Century Utopian schemes may find the whole sequence considerably less funny.

Meanwhile the Shaggy Man and the other guests call upon Dorothy in her rooms at Ozma's palace. They explain the situation, and we have an unexpected development: with Ojo in jail, neither Scraps nor the Glass Cat has much interest in continuing the quest. The cat's heart is a cold ruby, and Scraps has nothing but stuffing in her chest. As the Patchwork Girl herself put it, "A heart must be a great annoyance to one. It makes a person feel sad or sorry or devoted or sympathetic—all of which sensations interfere with one's happiness."

One might call this cod-Objectivism, except that little Alisa Rosenbaum was still in grade school in St. Petersburg at the time this was written. 

It's the Woozy who shows real heroism. "I have never seen those unfortunate people you are speaking of, and yet I am sorry for them, having at times been unfortunate myself. When I was shut up in that forest I longed for some one to help me, and by and by Ojo came and did help me. So I'm willing to help his uncle. I'm only a stupid beast, Dorothy, but I can't help that, and if you'll tell me what to do to help Ojo and his uncle, I'll gladly do it."

Dorothy takes an immediate liking to the beast, as did I upon re-reading this passage.

Ojo's hard time is cut short when Ozma pardons him, though not before hauling him before her royal court and letting him denounce himself for his crimes. (Reading this whole section of the book really does give me the totalitarian creeps. It's all perfectly innocent and well-meaning, but you can see the germ of Stalin and Pol Pot in the heart of Baum's earnest turn-of-the-century Progressivism. It's just too easy to shift from "wouldn't it be nice if everyone did this . . . " to "we must make everyone do this . . . " to finally "we must execute everyone who doesn't do this . . . ")

Anyway. With Ojo rehabilitated and no longer compelled to dress like Robert Byrd, he can resume his quest for the magic ingredients. He still needs a gill of water from a dark well, the left wing of a yellow butterfly, and a drop of oil from the body of a living man.

But now Ojo's got some heavyweights on his team. Dorothy and the Scarecrow are joining the party, although the Glass Cat prefers to remain at Ozma's palace. They stop for a visit with Jack Pumpkinhead, so that the three animated constructs of Oz -- the Scarecrow, Jack, and the Patchwork Girl -- can hold a little private summit and trade wordplay. I have to give L. Frank Baum credit here. He manages to make the three of them distinct characters, despite all having the same basic concept. Jack is naive, the Scarecrow is witty, and Scraps is whimsical. A fool, a joker, and a clown.

Their next encounter is with the Tottenhots, strange little "dusky" people with scarlet hair that stands straight up like wires, who live in pot-shaped houses. They are mischievous almost to the point of sociopathy, and are nocturnal. After tossing the Scarecrow and Scraps around -- which neither one minds very much, as it gives their stuffing a good shaking out -- they eventually agree to let the travelers stay in their houses during the night while they bounce around like six-year-olds dosed with Jolt Cola and amphetamines.

Again, one is struck by how Baum is writing for the stage. Some kid actors or midgets, a little greasepaint, and voila! Tottenhots. The scene just cries out for a musical number and Baum even helpfully provides some lyrics.

"Tottenhots" is of course an anagram of "Hottentots" -- a real-world tribe inhabiting South Africa and Namibia, known to themselves as the Khoikhoi. At the time Baum was writing, they were much in the news, because of the extremely brutal war the Germans were waging against them. Germany had claimed Southwest Africa during the "scramble for Africa" at the Berlin Conference, only to discover that the territory was mostly desert, without much in the way of rubber groves, diamond mines, or even farmland. German settlers preferred Texas and Argentina. The Kaiser's colonial office apparently decided that a massacre-based economy was the best way to develop Southwest Africa, and engaged in bloody campaigns during the early years of the 20th Century. 

It's kind of . . . odd . . . that Baum was able to turn a tribe best known for being on the receiving end of some pretty awful treatment into jolly mischievous little imps. (At this point one can put on some hip waders and start deconstructing the racial whatsit of Baum's whatever, but to heck with that. He probably just thought the name sounded funny.) 

Next time: YOOP!

Ozblogging: The Patchwork Girl of Oz, Part 3

We have a chapter of blatant filler in which the travelers seek advice from a Foolish Owl and a Wise Donkey. The Wise Donkey is apparently an immigrant from one of Baum's other books, and provides the opportunity for some wordplay while the Owl recites nonsense verse. I haven't seen anyone try to claim that the Owl and Donkey are political satires or anything -- in hindsight one could describe Woodrow Wilson as a Foolish Owl, but it sounds like a stretch to me.

The next encounter is a huge stroke of luck for Ojo the Unlucky: he and his companions stumble across a fenced enclosure containing the Woozy -- three hairs from the tail of which are required for the counter-petrification potion. The Woozy (there's only one, apparently) is an entirely square animal. Its head is a cube, its body is a box, and its legs are rectilinear. Fortunately, it's a good-natured beast. Very fortunately, because the Woozy is more or less Superman: it is completely invulnerable, shoots fire from its eyes when annoyed, and can run fast enough to catch bees on the wing. The only thing it can't do is jump.

The Woozy's invulnerable hide turns out to be a problem: when Ojo tries to pluck the three hairs from the tip of its tail (the only hairs the Woozy has, it turns out), he can't do it. Even with Scraps helping and the Woozy gripping a tree trunk, they can't remove the hairs. Finally the Woozy agrees to join the quest, so that they can bring Dr. Pipt the three hairs and the rest of the Woozy they are attached to.

With a new addition to the party, the group now heads for the Emerald City along the famous Yellow Brick Road. Where they are almost immediately snapped up by giant carnivorous plants. Dorothy didn't run into those on her journey. These plants have giant sticky leaves, and catch unwary passers-by by enfolding them. When Ojo is caught, he struggles but can't free himself. 

And now we get one of the more nightmarish lines in Baum's canon: "The minutes passed and became hours. Ojo wondered how long one could live in such a condition and if the leaf would gradually sap his strength and even his life, in order to feed itself. The little Munchkin boy had never heard of any person dying in the Land of Oz, but he knew one could suffer a great deal of pain. His greatest fear at this time was that he would always remain imprisoned in the beautiful leaf and never see the light of day again."

Great. You can't die in the magical fairyland of Oz, but you can suffer an eternity of pain. Somehow that isn't reassuring Fortunately for Ojo et al, they are rescued a short time later by the Shaggy Man, who knows the way to control the deadly plants: music. Whistling or singing makes them give up their captives.

There's some pretty strong foreshadowing here, of another well-known fantasy work. Tolkein fans may recall the scene in The Fellowship of the Ring in which Frodo and his traveling companions are caught by a horrible animated plant -- in their case, the sinister Old Man Willow. And, just like Ojo and his companions, Frodo and the other Hobbits are rescued by a wandering hippie character using music. 

I've always said that Tolkein's Tom Bombadil seems like an L. Frank Baum character who wandered into the middle of the War of the Ring -- but what if the reverse is true? We know Tolkein intended his epic novel as a kind of "secret prehistory" taking place around 4000 B.C. We know the character Tom Bombadil is ageless and (presumably) undying. Was he still wandering around, living in his carefree way, six millennia later? 

It's significant, I think, that the Shaggy Man is never given a name by L. Frank Baum. If he were an ordinary Kansas hobo, presumably he'd have a name. Bill "Shaggy Man" Smith, or Benjamin Briggs, or Ludwig of Bavaria. But he doesn't. Hmmm. And even before he enters the fairyland of Oz the Shaggy Man seems well-acquainted with magic and supernatural goings-on. Hmmm . . .

Anyway, Tom Bombadil or the Shaggy Man rescues Ojo, and offers to accompany the little band to the Emerald City. He takes the opportunity to show off the amazing condensed square meal tablets, invented by Professor Wogglebug. Each one is an entire meal including soup, fish, roast, salad, apple dumplings, ice cream, and chocolate candy.

This is an old gag in science fiction, but this is about the earliest use of the trope I've seen. Interestingly, whenever "food pills" are depicted in fiction, it's always with mockery. It is a fictional trope which exists only as a parody. Apparently writers love to make fun of the ridiculous idea of food pills, but never realize that nobody has ever depicted the idea as anything but ridiculous.

At this point the animated phonograph catches up with Our Heroes once again, and we get a little more music criticism from Baum. The phonograph has a new record to play, a popular song. And what is a popular song?: "One that the feeble-minded can remember the words of and those ignorant of music can whistle or sing. That makes a popular song popular, and the time is coming when it will take the place of all other songs."

Prescient fellow, that L. Frank Baum. 

Ozblogging: The Patchwork Girl of Oz, Part 2

The three heroic questers set off searching for the plot coupons, and discover a problem which the Crooked Magician really should have thought of: none of them has the faintest idea where they're going. Ojo has lived his entire life in a remote cabin in the woods with a man who says about two words per day, the Patchwork Girl is a day old, and the Glass Cat only knows what she's seen and heard around Dr. Pipt's place.

Still, they trot along merrily enough. The Patchwork Girl, in particular, is still just glad to be alive and finds the world a delightful place. As we get to know her, Scraps is a pretty entertaining character. She's relentlessly cheerful, combining a sort of "wise fool" naivete reminiscent of Jack Pumpkinhead with an intellect comparable to the Scarecrow. Her only irritating trait is a habit of bursting out into verse, which mostly serves to indicate that L. Frank Baum wasn't as good a poet as he thought he was.

Scraps is almost an archetype: the artificial person (magical or technological) who is a better person than most people. This kind of character mostly shows up in science fiction: Adam Link, Robby the Robot, and Data the Android are examples. Isaac Asimov used to claim that he invented his "Three Laws of Robotics" as a reaction to the old Frankenstein's Monster trope of the created being which turns on its creator. But L. Frank Baum had already dismantled that trope in children's fantasies half a century earlier! I can't actually think of any "artificial" characters in the Oz books who are villains.

During a meal stop on their trip, the Glass Cat does manage to get in a little transhumanist gloating when she observes that Ojo must have food to stay alive. "Can't you understand that you and I are superior people and not made like these poor humans?" she asks the Patchwork Girl. But Scraps is too busy making puns and rhymes to bother.

Their first encounter with the greater Ozian civilization comes in the shape of Munchkin woodchopper who lives at the edge of the forest. He warns them that magic is a closely-guarded monopoly in Oz, and that Dr. Pipt's unlicensed experiments could mean the Patchwork Girl and the Glass Cat might get arrested if they go to the Emerald City.

The woodcutter also tells them about his old colleague Nick Chopper, whose body was eventually replaced with tin, making him the famous Tin Woodman. Ojo, who is currently traveling with a girl made of cloth and a cat made of glass, finds the idea strange. Despite the woodcutter's kind invitation to spend the night, the three decide to press on.

This leads to an exceedingly weird encounter when night falls: they take refuge in an apparently empty house, which turns out to be inhabited by an invisible presence. The invisible entity gives them beds to sleep in -- but also throws Scraps out of the house when she's impertinent. Unlike most sane people, Ojo doesn't run like hell from this temperamental unseen host. He sleeps through the night in the bed.

In the morning a breakfast appears for him, which he eats. Then he and the Glass Cat set out once more. They find the Patchwork Girl waiting outside. She spent the night looking at the stars and the Moon (which she has never seen before) -- oh, and at the big gray wolf which came to the door three times during the night.

And that is the end of the whole incident! We never find out who or what the invisible presence in the house is, or its connection (if any) to the wolf in the night. Ojo doesn't have to pay any price for eating the magical food, there's no payoff later in the story -- the travelers spend the night in what looks like the premise for a horror story, or at least one of the nastier fairy tales, and then check out in the morning without a hitch. It's as if someone were to stop off in Innsmouth or Hill House and then leave bright and early the next morning.  

Just then Dr. Pipt's animated phonograph catches up with them. The Crooked Magician apparently got sick of hearing it and threatened to smash it up, so the phonograph fled and wants to join the expedition. We get a little music criticism from Mr. Baum here. The phonograph describes its first record as follows: "It is classical music, and is considered the best and most puzzling ever manufactured. You're supposed to like it, whether you do or not, and if you don't, the proper thing is to look as if you did. Understand?"

When that proves unsatisfactory, they try the flip side, a ragtime tune, and that's no better. The three adventurers chase away the phonograph and proceed. I've already mentioned in my account of The Road to Oz that Baum was writing at the dawn of the age of musical reproduction, when music was no longer a rare treat but something one might sometimes wish to avoid. From his treatment of the phonograph I think it's safe to assume that L. Frank Baum was not the kind of man who could put up with other people's taste in music.

Next time: feeling Woozy!

Ozblogging: The Patchwork Girl of Oz, Part 1

At the end of his previous novel, The Emerald City of Oz, L. Frank Baum brought the series to what he thought was its end. Threatened by the possibility of discovery by aeronauts, the kingdom of Oz had been cut off from the rest of the world by a powerful magic spell, and there could be no more bulletins from Dorothy to the Royal Historian of Oz.

Three years later, the Royal Historian needed money. Necessity being the mother of invention, Mr. Baum came up with the brilliant rationalization that even if Oz was sealed off from the rest of the world, he might still be able to communicate via wireless. (Since the Wonderful Wizard of Oz has already established an electrical power system in Oz, there'd be no trouble in putting up a transmitting tower in the Emerald City, and Baum informs us that the Shaggy Man is a skilled Morse operator.) 

All of this handwaving seems completely unnecessary to me. I don't think many of Baum's readers actually believed he was spending his nights sitting at the giant Marconi station on Cape Cod, feverishly transcribing the news from Oz as a wireless operator tuned in on the Shaggy Man's Morse Code transmissions. They knew it was fiction.

With his seventh novel, Baum abandons the formula that had served him so well for all but one of the preceding six. Now that travel between Oz and the outside world is impossible, he can't have some kid from a prairie state just drop in. Instead, Patchwork Girl -- like the second book, The Land of Oz -- is entirely contained within Oz itself. The American characters hardly show up at all.

Our story begins in an extremely remote corner of the Munchkin sector of Oz, where a boy named Ojo the Unlucky and his laconic uncle Unc Nunkie live in extreme poverty. Their only source of food is a bread tree, and that isn't bearing much any more. Ojo's circumstances are very much like Dorothy's back before her adventures began -- orphan, living with uncle, dirt-poor. 

With nothing left to eat, Ojo and Unc Nunkie leave their remote home and head off to impose themselves on their nearest neighbors: Dr. Pipt and his wife Margolotte. Dr. Pipt is a Crooked Magician, and he must be something special because he rates Capitalization. After a meal with Margolotte, Ojo and his uncle look in on Dr. Pipt himself in his workshop. Pipt is fantastically busy making the amazing Powder of Life.

Anyone who remembers The Marvellous Land of Oz may recall that the witch Mombi acquired her Powder of Life from a Crooked Magician, and now, five books later, we finally meet him in person. He isn't crooked in the criminal sense, he's just deformed. Turns out he's also pretty gullible, because apparently Mombi traded him a bogus Powder of Perpetual Youth for his previous run of the Powder of Life.

He's making this batch of Powder so that Margolotte can animate the Patchwork Girl she has made -- a girl sewn of cloth scraps and stuffed with cotton, with yarn for hair and buttons for eyes. Margolotte wants the girl brought to life so she can be a servant and do all the housework, and so she doesn't want to put too much brains into the girl's cotton-stuffed head. Just obedience, amiability, and truthfulness.

But while everyone is distracted by Dr. Pipt finally completing the Powder of Life after six years of labor, Ojo takes the opportunity to dump a whole lot of other powdered intellectual qualities into the Patchwork Girl's head: cleverness, judgement, courage, ingenuity, learning, poesy, and self-reliance. 

It almost seems like Mr. Baum is trying to send us a message here: a girl needs more than servile virtues. His mother-in-law Matilda Joslyn Gage was a leading suffragette of the time, and in his newspaper days Baum had written in favor of votes for women. Maybe in Patchwork Girl he was trying to make up for his lampoon of the women's movement in Land of Oz. 

The Powder of Life has to cool overnight, and to while away the time Dr. Pipt brags about some of his other magical marvels, including the Liquid of Petrification, which turns anything it touches into stone.

We're also introduced to one of Dr. Pipt's less successful creations: Bungle the Glass Cat. She's a cat made of glass, animated by the Powder of Life. She's entirely glass, except for some pink marbles which serve as brains, and a ruby which serves as her heart. Because she doesn't need to eat (being made of glass) and has a cold jewel for a heart, Bungle is vain, selfish, and lazy. In short, she acts just like a live cat, except that she also spends a lot of time mouthing off to Dr. Pipt.

In the morning, to the accompaniment of some music from Dr. Pipt's phonograph, the great experiment goes ahead: Pipt pours the Powder of Life onto the Patchwork Girl. Sadly there's no Jacob's Ladder or Tesla coil buzzing away in the background, and Dr. Pipt resists the urge to shout "She's alive!" but the Powder does its work and the Patchwork Girl springs to life.

In fact, she's a little too lively: her arm jerks as soon as the Powder is applied, causing Unc Nunkie and Margolotte to flinch back and knock the Liquid of Petrification off the shelf onto them both. The two of them are instantly turned to stone!

Worse yet, all the remaining Powder of Life has been spilled on the phonograph, so that poor Dr. Pipt has an animated record player and a live Patchwork Girl, but his wife and closest neighbor are stuck as statues.

Making a new batch of Powder of Life will take the Crooked Magician another six years of constant work, but he does know of a compound which will reverse the effects of the Liquid of Petrification, and that takes considerably less time to make. However, the antidote does need several hard-to-find ingredients: a six-leaved clover from the fields around the Emerald City, the left wing of a yellow butterfly from Winkie Country, a gill of water from a dark well (which must never have been touched by light), three hairs from the tip of a Woozy's tail, and a drop of oil from a live man's body.

Dr. Pipt assigns the task of gathering the ingredients to Ojo the Unlucky. Ojo can scour Oz for them while the Crooked Magician gets started on a new batch of the Powder of Life. He sends the Patchwork Girl along with Ojo, and the Glass Cat insists on joining them.

And so our three adventurers set out on their quest while the magician heaves a big sigh and starts another six-year course of work.