Post True Blood conversation:

NICK: That was Michelle Forbes!
ME: Who?
NICK: The woman in the road!
ME: The pig woman? (Note: She definitely had a pig with her, whatever Nick says to the contrary.)
NICK: Yes.
ME: The pig woman?
NICK: Yes.
ME: Was Ensign Ro?
NICK: Yes.
ME: She looked fifteen years younger!
NICK: What can I say? She looks good naked.
ME: She was naked? (Note to self: pay more attention to the television.)
NICK: Yes.
ME: The naked pig woman was Ensign Ro?
NICK: Yep.
ME: Oh, that’s got to be a recurring role.

And not a proper update, either:

The moon rising over the neighbour’s garden.

Right now, I’m trying to simultaneously finalise my first years’ grades and deal with some of the bills/housekeeping from the last fortnight.

Once I’m done with that, though, I’m sure I’ll be able to find something weird on my bookshelves.

Today’s random weirdnesses (if that’s a legitimate plural) all come from a book called The Girls’ Biggest Book. I’m not sure where I found this one—though it was originally given to someone called “Bubbles,” whose mother and father didn’t date their gifts.

It contains a school story by May Wynne, though, who wrote (according to this page) 211 books between 1899 and 1954.

(Of course, that page also says she was born in 1985, but I suspect that’s a typo, although even 1885 would be rather early, if she started publishing in 1899.)

But even if this book is from what we tend to call, ironically, a “more innocent time,” these illustrations are still hilarious.

I love this one for two reasons: people falling on their faces are hilarious (except when it’s me), and they look to be playing some odd variant of hopscotch.

Or how about Prudence’s adventures?

Lucky Prudence.

This one isn’t captioned. But judging from the look on the face of the girl on the left and the fact that the girl on the right is trying to pull her friend away by the elbow . . .

. . . I think we can label it “Peer pressure in action.”

Now, I don’t mean to question the sympathetic instincts of the woman in the fetching driving cap in this next image . . .

But surely his primary concern is that both his legs seem to have disappeared? Covering the place where they used to be with a coat doesn’t really seem like sufficient first aid to me.

It’s the expression on the teacher’s face that I love in this one:

Does it look to anyone else as though she’s deliberately opened the door on those two girls? They probably sit up the back of the classroom together and talk all the way through geography, and this is her revenge.

And now, holiday advice from fifty years ago:

I’m certain that the Great Barrier Reef Preservation Society would like to point out that riding on turtles is neither fun nor legal.

I love the world-weary expression on the turtle on the left, though. How many times do you think ill-advised tourists have knelt on him, for him to greet the behaviour in such a fashion?

And, finally, a history lesson from the 1950s:

Would you be inclined to trust either of these men?

In a self-referential loop the likes of which you really only find on the Internet, I was inspired to start thinking about this as a result of a post on Smithology that was partly inspired by my own reading of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books.

It sounds complicated, but it’s not—Matt talks about a paper on cybernetics that he had been reading, which cites the Tin Woodman, otherwise known as Nick Chopper, as a precursor to the robots of 1930s’ science fiction.

And I thought, “Fair enough.”

But only briefly.

Because then I started wondering whether the piece also cites Tik-Tok, the mechanical man who makes his appearance in Ozma of Oz (1907)—Matt tells me it does—and that in turn reminded me of some exchanges between Tik-Tok and the Tin Woodman, which made me wonder whether the latter really is a robot, at all.

He could be a precursor to the robots of 1930s’ science fiction without himself being a robot, of course. But it seems to me that the situation is more complicated than that.

Tik-Tok is undoubtedly a robot: he was invented by two men in the Kingdom of Ev who were ultimately destroyed by their own artistry: one painted a river so lifelike that he fell in and drowned while trying to touch up some details on the far side, and the other built a ladder to the moon, which he found so enticing that he pulled up the ladder behind him and never returned.

He is also, he tells Dorothy, “the on-ly au-to-mati-ic me-chan-i-cal man they ev-er com-plet-ed” (Ozma of Oz, 45).

(Unfortunately, he does speak in that staccato fashion.)

But he is clearly a machine, and sentient only when fully wound (since he operates by clockwork). When imprisoned by the King of Ev, for example:

I shout-ed for help un-til my voice ran down; and then I walked back and forth in this lit-tle room un-til my ac-tion ran down; and then I stood still and thought un-til my thoughts ran down. Af-ter that I re-member noth-ing un-til you wound me up a-gain. (Ozma of Oz, 39)

For Tik-Tok, there is no clash here between science fiction and fantasy. In fact, he sees his existence as indicative of the latter, not the former, telling Dorothy, who has been speculating as to whether Ev is a fairy kingdom, “I do not sup-pose such a per-fect ma-chine as I am could be made in an-y place but a fair-y land” (Ozma of Oz, 40).

And he denies being alive. When the Scarecrow asks him point blank, he responds, “I am on-ly a ma-chine. But I can think and speak and act, when I am pro-per-ly wound up” (Ozma of Oz, 68).

And here’s the fascinating part: the Tin Woodman, who is a party to this conversation, immediately weighs in and rejects any comparison between himself and Tik-Tok:

I regret to say that you are greatly inferior to my friend the Scarecrow, and to myself. For we are both alive, and he has brains which do not need to be wound up, while I have an excellent heart that is continually beating in my bosom. (Ozma of Oz, 68-69)

The Tin Woodman does not see himself as mechanical? And his heart—the heart that we’re told in The Wizard of Oz is “a pretty heart, made entirely of silk and stuffed with sawdust” (155)—actually beats in his chest?

Of course, the idea of the heart beating might be exaggeration or imagination on the Tin Woodman’s part; he and the Scarecrow never do accept, as Dorothy does, that the Wizard is a humbug—and, indeed, they’re ultimately vindicated, when he returns to Oz to learn magic from Glinda the Good.

But I’m inclined to believe that his heart does beat, because it’s in keeping with his extraordinary origin story.

Nick Chopper, of course, starts life as a perfectly ordinary Munchkin man, whose love for a Munchkin maiden—whose name, revealed in The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918), is Nimmie Amee—attracts the ire of the witch to whom Nimmie Amee is in servitude. The witch enchants Nick’s axe, which “slips” as he works and chops off various limbs.

In each case, Nick replaces the limb with a tin prosthetic. When his head is removed, “at first I thought that was the end of me” (The Wizard of Oz, 42), but he is fortunate enough that the tinsmith who has been working on him is passing, and “he made me a new head out of tin” (The Wizard of Oz, 42).

This is where the ambiguities slip in.

There’s nothing more to the description than this: the Tin Woodman never explains whether he is aware while his head is lying separate from his body, whether there is a period of death before his metal head is reattached, or whether, in the latter case, the tinsmith has to transfer his brain from his first head to his second one.

The Tin Woodman himself has no qualm or concern about this: it is only the final stage of his alteration that concerns him, when his axe slips a final time and cuts his torso in half. Although this is replaced with a tin one, he loses his heart and, thus, his love for Nimmie Amee is also lost (until The Tin Woodman of Oz, when, as it turns out, she hasn’t been waiting for him to return, as he fondly hopes).

But he’s alive all the way through this experience; he is alive as a Munchkin wood chopper, and he is alive as a Tin Woodman—with no apparent delineation between the two states.

The Tin Woodman is not unique. Many other inhabitants of Oz are alive without being human—or, perhaps, “Munchkin” would be a better term than “human” here.

The clearest examples are the four people brought to life with the Powder of Life created by the Crooked Magician, Dr Pipt (though Dr Pipt’s involvement is ambiguous until The Patchwork Girl of Oz): Jack Pumpkinhead; the Gump; Scraps, The Patchwork Girl; and Bungle, the Glass Cat.

The Gump—as a composite creature created from sofas, palm leaves, a broomstick, and the head of a Gump, shot and mounted as a trophy on the wall—doesn’t last long before he begs to be restored to his former state. But when the head is remounted on Ozma’s palace wall, it remains alive and speaks randomly to visitors.

But Jack Pumpkinhead is an odd case; created in The Marvellous Land of Oz (1904), he spends the entire book crippled by the terror of his approaching death: with a body constructed of hardwood but a jack o’lantern head, he is devastated by his awareness that pumpkins eventually spoil. Though the Powder of Life is sprinkled evenly along his body as well as his head, it is the eventual spoilation of his head that he fears.

It is not until The Road to Oz (1909) that Jack learns he can carve himself a new face when he feels that his old one is spoiling.

Jack Pumpkinhead is alive—as are Scraps, Bungle, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman, where Tik-Tok is not.

So is the Tin Woodman—entirely made from tin, though later plated in nickel—a robot?

Many of the classic science-fiction novels and films that deal with the clash between humans and robots question whether robots are alive or not.

The Tin Woodman is certainly alive, for all that he is made from metal (barring his silk and sawdust heart)—with the ambiguity of his origin, the continuity of his memories of his early life, and his later attempts to track down the woman he loved when he was a Munchkin.

The Tin Woodman may be a progenitor of 1930s’ science fiction robots, but I’m not convinced he’s a robot himself.

(All the quotes from Ozma of Oz are taken from the 1985 Puffin paperback reprint.
All quotes from The Wizard of Oz are taken from the 1977 printing of the 1956 Grosset & Dunlap hardback.)

Since I’m still marking, have in place of an update a photograph of a frangipani bud in this afternoon’s rain:

Nothing to do with books or television, of course.

But pretty.

The frangipani in the back garden—the yellowy-white one—is finally beginning to flower more heavily.

I took a series of photographs at about 10.30 p.m. from the back verandah with the zoom—because all the flowers are still quite high on the plant—and with the flash enabled.

I’d love to try and take some photographs that show the softness of the flowers in low light, but I’d need a proper tripod; my hands are too unsteady to take photographs in low-light conditions, when the shutter needs to remain open for longer, without having some way to steady the camera.

Have I mentioned recently that I love the zoom function on this camera?

I think the humidity—or eight hours’ marking in a west-facing study—has softened my brain:

ME: It’s so muggy!
NICK: I know, it’s horrible.
ME: Stupid Brisbane.
NICK: It’s supposed to be cooler tomorrow.
ME: But it’s like the carrot and the stick! Only you don’t know what the stick’s for, so you’re just shouting, “Stop hitting me!” Because Brisbane doesn’t actually want anything from you.
(Pause)
ME: Was that metaphor too much?
NICK: No. (Pause) No.

Five minutes after Nick walks in the door:

ME: I haven’t updated the blog today.
NICK: You’ve been busy.
ME: It’s been mark, mark, mark, mark.
NICK: That’s okay—soon you’ll be able to update with a brief, informative history of Fallout 3 and how your partner’s completely disappeared to play it.
ME: Right.
NICK: It will be very interesting. You’ll be able to talk about the pit boy. [Which, Nick tells me, I should have heard as PIPBOY.] And the vault system. And the power armour. And the fact that when you get a big plasma gun, you shoot people with it and they melt and go (sound effect).
ME: You shoot people with a plasma gun and they melt and go (sound effect)?
NICK: Well, sometimes you shoot them and they turn into ash and go (different sound effect).
ME: Great.
NICK: They’ve always been violent games.
(Pause)
NICK: Right, I’m off.

And that’ll be all I see of him this weekend.

Although I suppose this is more “world weary” than “arrogant.”

I also love this one:

From this angle, he seems to be wearing chain mail.

Someone came across the blog this morning by Googling “Dorothy + Ozma + lesbians,” which I’m fairly certain is not a topic that I’ve ever covered on the blog.

I imagine there’s a fair degree of fan fiction out there along those lines.

I never read their relationship as sexual, but, then, I’m not really looking for sexual relationships between characters when I read children’s fantasy.

For the record, though, here’s John R. Neill’s depiction of their “rapturous” meeting in The Road to Oz:

The Road to Oz (1909). Rand Mcnally, n.d. 205.

Read that as you will.

(On another note, I took all of these photos from the same book, so I have no idea how they turned out to be such radically different colours. Odd.)

Partway through The Road to Oz, Dorothy—on her third visit to Oz—arrives at the castle of her old friend Nick Chopper, the Tin Woodman, Emperor of the Winkies.

She comes face to face with tin statues of herself and her companions on her original journey to Oz.

And John R. Neill comes face to face with his predecessor, W. W. Denslow:

After all, as Baum says, the statue was “life-size and showed her in her sunbonnet with her basket on her arm, just as she had first appeared in the Land of Oz” (The Road to Oz, Rand McNally, n.d. 162), and it was Denslow who decided how Dorothy first appeared.

It’s so charming, this illustration—despite the fact that Toto appears to be a psychopathic chihuahua in this instance. But the homage to Denslow; the sharp clash between the original illustrator’s heavily stylised and blocky work and Neill’s Art Nouveau magazine style; the shift from the turn-of-the-century Dorothy, more Victorian than twentieth-century child, to the smartly dressed 1909 girl, still fin de siecle but leaving Victorian restrictions behind—all these draw the reader into the illustration, giving depth and complexity to a world that was really only starting to leave its mark on the broader culture.

And, of course, it leaves Neill free to explore his own ideas about the fluidity and excess that can be brought to Oz illustrations, as in the elaborate furniture and the swirling draperies of Polychrome, the Rainbow’s Daughter, in this illustration (167):

Or how to put his own stamp on recognisable characters, as in this illustration of Dorothy greeting the Cowardly Lion (183):

For the modern reader, I suspect that Judy Garland is a more pervasive image in the mind’s eye than Denslow’s Dorothy. But in 1909, Neill seems to have recognised that he needed the two images to co-exist in the reader’s mind—even if one was tin and one was flesh.

Okay, this rant is a clash between two of my current obsessions: Bones and sentence-level punctuation and grammar errors.

I’m not concerned about my obsession with Bones: it’s one of the few shows that we actually watch on telly, rather than waiting for the DVDs to come out, so it’s not much of an obsession. But the show is simultaneously grotesque and frequently hilarious, and I’ve always enjoyed David Boreanaz much more in comic roles.

(Angelus, for example, was much more fun than Angel—not that Angelus was funny. Well, in an incredibly dark sense, he was.)

The obsession with punctuation is not something I’ve kept secret.

I don’t claim for an instant that my writing is perfect at the sentence level. In fact, I know it’s not. Sometimes, when I look back over the past entries on the blog, I have to silently correct embarrassing mistakes that I should have spotted the first time around—especially in the live-blogging, though I tend to leave anything that’s not a factual error, to maintain the authenticity of the process.

But I maintain that it is at least competent.

And for five years or more, I’ve been teaching writing courses that rarely extend beyond the paragraph level, so I’ve become more and more attuned to spotting sentence-level errors—largely, of course, the more common errors.

And today those two obsessions clashed horribly, when I was looking up the details on a forthcoming episode of Bones on Your TV:

Bones
The Pain in the Heart
9.30pm – 10.30pm Seven
Monday 10 November 2008
In an episode that will rock the lab to it’s core, a well known serial killer strikes again and when crutial evidence mysteriously goes missing, every Jeffersonian employee becomes a suspect.

The odd thing is that I’ve never noticed this quantity of errors on the site before.

I could let the absence of a hyphen in the compound adjective slide.

But that mistake with “its”? That’s basic—and it’s not that difficult to distinguish between the two uses. Though we all type the wrong one occasionally, it’s not too tricky to correct any errors on a read-through.

And the misspelling of “crucial”? Oh, lord.

In the courses that I teach, we have a draconian attitude towards spelling errors because, as we emphasise each semester, nothing will ruin your credibility with a reader faster than a spelling error.

That’s certainly true here—especially since any computer-based spell checker would have picked that one up.

Partly a strange conversation and partly a terribly geeky conversation, held while Nick was making a post-prandial cup of coffee and I was sitting out having a cigarette.

NICK: Now I’m going to pour the milk into the cups.
ME: It’s Twitter, isn’t it?
NICK: Pardon?
ME: This tendency you’ve developed to tell me everything you’re doing in minute detail.
NICK: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
(Pause)
NICK: Now I’m going to go into the living room and sit on the sofa.

Yet another Harvey Birdman: Attorney At Law-inspired conversation:

ME: And what’s Avenger going to do now? Who needs a giant purple eagle who can type and do the filing?
NICK: Well, I do.
ME: Yes, but we don’t exist in the same dimensions. We’d have a two-dimensional giant purple eagle, and what use would we have for that?
NICK: True. (Pause) I’d say Avenger was blue.
ME: He’s purple.
NICK: Well, jacaranda blue.
ME: Jacarandas are purple.
NICK: The way I see it, it’s a continuum (with hand gestures). There’s blue down here and purple down the other end, and jacarandas are closer to the blue end.
ME: They’re purple.
NICK: Can you actually offer any evidence, rather than just saying it?
ME: Everyone knows jacarandas are purple.
NICK: Well, that’s not exactly evidence now, is is, Treena?
ME: Would you like me to look it up on Wikipedia?

(For the record, Wikipedia says that each flower has “a five-lobed blue to purple-blue corolla.” But, honestly: they’re purple!)