11 January 2012
10 January 2012
The Symbolic Weight of a Dead Munchkin
Granted, he didn’t have much of a life before then. Which is to say, he was an ordinary ten-year-old kid—nothing wrong with that. But, thanks to a bookseller who obviously hadn’t read what she or he was recommending, little Gregory went straight from Encyclopedia Brown and a few chapters of the Hardy Boys to Toby Peters, private eye at the height of the Hollywood studio system.
I'm ten, and my mother hands me this book. On the cover there's a Munchkin with a tiny knife in his chest, and he's lying on the Yellow Brick Road. There's a thin thread of blood that's escaped, and now runs between the bricks. The Munchkin lies in a puddle of light, and the Yellow Brick Road bends away, into murkier shadows. You can just see the lamp itself on the right, but barely, hinting that this isn't Oz.I’m a few years older than Rucka, and I read Kaminsky’s novels as they appeared. I don’t know if I started with Murder on the Yellow Brick Road because of my Oz interest; the first may have been Bullet for a Star, which came out when I was eleven. I was already reading at a high level, including some of my mother’s adult mysteries. I’d read a number of books about prewar Hollywood. I didn’t realize till much later how much Kaminsky played off the southern-California school of private eye novels.
I stared at that cover for a long time. The title threw me. I was ten, I was a boy, and anything smacking of Oz also reeked of "girl," so I was wary. But that cover, I look at it today - it's to my right as I type this - and I can still remember the delicious sense of menace it gave me, the double-dog-dare to come inside. . . .
The plot, in a nutshell, is this: Judy Garland hires private investigator Toby Peters to keep the murder of the Munchkin out of the papers. Toby learns that Garland's life is in danger. The bodies start stacking up.
Straightline enough. Except I'm ten, and aside from the fact that Raymond Chandler and Clark Gable also show up in the novel (I had heard of the first, had seen films of the second), what Toby uncovers isn't just dead Munchkins. No, no, see, because someone's been making porn films on the old Wizard of Oz sets.
And then Toby has sex in a dentist's chair.
But I never found the emotional connection with Kaminsky’s stories that Rucka did. In fact, in every summer of the late 1970s and early 1980s I probably drifted off in the middle of a Toby Peters mystery. The days were hot, and we didn’t have air-conditioning. I preferred Harry Kemelman and other authors. But for years I did keep trying each new Toby Peters book.
09 January 2012
A Westernized Easternized Cinematized Oz
(Hat tip to Charlotte’s Library.)
08 January 2012
Life-Sized Robin Trophy Case
Actually, that’s not from the bat-cave. As the label says, it’s one of Burt Ward’s costumes from the Batman TV show. (Another view here and a video here.) This case is in an exhibit titled “Out of This World: Extraordinary Costumes from Film and Television,” organized by Seattle’s Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame.
The costume exhibits I’ve been to seem to attract a primarily female audience, but this one is aimed at sci-fi fans, and apparently male fans at that. It includes one of the hats Margaret Hamilton wore as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz and an outfit Darryl Hannah wore in Blade Runner, but every other listed costume was made for a male star. Most, if not all, of these artifacts come from the collection of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
The exhibit has been traveling around medium-sized museums for three years. It closed in Tampa yesterday, and will open at the end of the month at the Midland Center for the Arts in Michigan. And then, the host website says, it’s available through January 2013. So with the right budget, you can host your own authentic life-sized Robin trophy case for months!
07 January 2012
“Our brain wants to turn everything into a story”
When you think about the kinds of patterns that are useful for prediction—patterns that are defined by a certain string of actions and reactions that occur within a specific set of conditions—it is easy to see that these types of patterns are, in essence, stories. Most predictive patterns are ultimately a type of narrative. Think again about how we just defined a pattern that’s useful for prediction: a certain string of actions and reactions that occur within a specific set of conditions. Aren’t those also descriptions of plot and setting? When we step back and look at how we experience our world, aren’t we always trying to turn the data from what we study and experience into a narrative pattern that we can make some sense of—and which, consequently, we might be able to make use of in the future?So far I’m with Reyes: narrative forms reduce the complexity of life into more understandable, meaningful, or emotionally fulfilling patterns.
…not only does narrative provide us with a pattern that can aid in future prediction, it first connects and arranges the data we’re consuming in order to give a comprehendible form and meaning to our experiences in the present. It’s another version of the way our eye and brain translate the tree’s raw pattern data into a macro tree. Our brain wants to turn everything into a story—the same way it wants to turn line, color, texture and light into objects that can be identified and managed by our consciousness. . . .
From this perspective, narrative no longer looks like an ancillary human intellectualizing tool, used primarily to help organize and communicate stories and events between humans. Instead, narrative looks like one of our brain’s core consciousness and universe-building tools. It’s something that we were using to assemble our understanding of existence long before we were using it to assemble the plots of our novels.
But why do we keep seeking out new stories, especially those in modes like fantasy or historical fiction which don’t seem to have much value to our biological survival? Reyes suggests that’s because our narrative-seeking brain is also wired to seek out new stories to make sure it experiences everything useful:
The more unique a pattern is, the greater its potential usefulness. Keep in mind that our pattern junkie is a collector, he’s out to gather and hoard every different kind of pattern he can get his hands on. But like any maniacal hobbyist, he’s always looking for the pieces that he doesn’t already have in his collection.Actually, unique and even impossible stories would seem to have less potential usefulness than mundane ones. This strikes me as a place to argue for an evolutionary adaptation that goes beyond what’s necessary. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Reyes throws out capitalized terms like Literary Darwinism and Story Theory, and goes into more detail on the “Narrative Complexity” part of his own website.
05 January 2012
The Best Movie Adaptation from a Children’s Book
To judge simply by the artistic distance from the written source to the cinematic reworking, my top choice is The Black Stallion. The novel by Walter Farley was serviceable. Written when Farley was in high school and college, it’s a standard boy’s adventure with ordinary prose and better-than-average horsemanship.
In contrast, Carroll Ballard’s movie looks gorgeous, thanks to Ballard and cinematographer Caleb Deschanel. The plot is pretty much the same, and very basic it is. But there are real feelings of loss and risk, giving the triumphal story more layers. And the performances by Kelly Reno, Mickey Rooney, Teri Garr, and Hoyt Axton are wonderfully natural.
04 January 2012
Judging MGM’s Wizard of Oz as an Adaptation
Gregory Maguire, author lately of Out of Oz:
I would insist that the 1939 film of “The Wizard of Oz” is better constructed than the 1900 novel on which it is based, and that “Return to Oz” is an overlooked masterpiece much better than the several Baum novels upon which it is based.(More to come on the contrast between Baum’s and Maguire’s approaches to Oz. I need to get my notes together.)
Jane Yolen, author of so much:
I think the Judy Garland “Wizard of Oz” is better than the book, which, while wildly inventive, has such flat affect and overly simplistic prose that it makes my teeth ache.(More of Yolen’s thoughts on the book, and my response to that assessment, back here.)
Daniel Nayeri, editor and author:
I don’t think “The Wizard of Oz” can rightly be called a “good” adaptation. It might be a good movie, but it didn’t do the world of Oz any favors (aside from keeping it in print for so long).While the MGM Wizard of Oz does a lot of things right, it also gets a lot about Oz wrong. The need to add a valuable lesson about life to the story—“She had to learn it for herself”—both brings absolute jibberjabber out of Judy Garland’s mouth and turns her whole trip to Oz into a punishment. I think that’s even more off the mark than making Dorothy a wimp and making Oz a dream.
03 January 2012
Musical of Last Month: The Wizard of Oz
A huge and influential hit when it appeared, the show prompted L. Frank Baum to write sequels to his novel. It provided Dorothy with the surname Gale, the Tin Woodman with his original name Nick Chopper, and Oz with a former king named Pastoria. For fans of the MGM movie, the snowstorm that saves Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion from the poppies was borrowed directly from this show. But hardly anyone remembers the show itself.
As organized by Doug Reside, Digital Curator at the NYPL’s Library for the Performing Arts, the website offers four essays on the show:
- Reside with an overview and a downloadable script of the show, based on what was deposited with the Library of Congress for copyright. Shows of the time evolved greatly over their run, so this was probably not what most of the audience enjoyed.
- David Maxine, proprietor of Hungry Tiger Press and producer of a CD of the show’s music, on how it evolved under many hands.
- Reside on Baum’s attempts at follow-up hits, including an adaptation of Ozma of Oz that eventually came to the stage as The Tik-Tok Man of Oz, and thence inspired the novel Tik-Tok of Oz. Once again, there’s a script to download, this time the libretto from an early draft of that show in the NYPL’s collection.
- Prof. William Everett on how The Wizard of Oz pushed along the career of Victor Herbert, whose Babes in Toyland was the next fantasy extravaganza to open in Chicago, and is much better remembered.
02 January 2012
Cybils for 2011
The Cybils Award shortlists for 2011 have been announced, representing blogging volunteers’ judgments of what children’s books offer the best combination of quality and kid appeal.
There’s a new category this year of Book Apps. Nominees include three brand names established for decades (Harold and the Purple Crayon, Pat the Bunny, and The Monster at the End of This Book) and what look like four originals:
01 January 2012
Definitely Un-round, part 2
Also last month, I stumbled across the fact that in 2010 the University of Queensland accepted an undergraduate thesis in the Film and Media Studies honours program titled “Robin the Boy Hostage: The Evolution of the Superhero Sidekick”.
Unfortunately, access to this work is limited beyond this abstract:The superhero's youth sidekick has become a mainstay within superhero narratives since their introduction in the late 1930s [sic]. This research will attempt to illustrate the change within the sidekick archetype, from their origins within mythology through changes within youth culture and the comic book industry. This Dissertation will also view how these changes have been implemented with the relationship of the most popular superhero and sidekick partnership, Batman and Robin, and view how the characters[’] popularity has halted changes seen within other sidekick characters.The entry says this item is “Anonymous” but placed in the repository by Mrs. Isabel Bentley—perhaps a university administrator. If anyone has access to the Queensland file, it would be interesting to know more.
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