Articles in “Books”

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.)

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.

1 Kings 21: 20-23 (King James Version)

20 And Ahab said to Elijah, Hast thou found me, O mine enemy? And he answered, I have found thee: because thou hast sold thyself to work evil in the sight of the LORD.

21 Behold, I will bring evil upon thee, and will take away thy posterity, and will cut off from Ahab him that pisseth against the wall, and him that is shut up and left in Israel,

22 And will make thine house like the house of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, and like the house of Baasha the son of Ahijah, for the provocation wherewith thou hast provoked me to anger, and made Israel to sin.

23 And of Jezebel also spake the LORD, saying, The dogs shall eat Jezebel by the wall of Jezreel.

2 Kings 9: 6-10 (King James Version)

6 And he arose, and went into the house; and he poured the oil on his head, and said unto him, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, I have anointed thee king over the people of the LORD, even over Israel.

7 And thou shalt smite the house of Ahab thy master, that I may avenge the blood of my servants the prophets, and the blood of all the servants of the LORD, at the hand of Jezebel.

8 For the whole house of Ahab shall perish: and I will cut off from Ahab him that pisseth against the wall, and him that is shut up and left in Israel:

9 And I will make the house of Ahab like the house of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, and like the house of Baasha the son of Ahijah:

10 And the dogs shall eat Jezebel in the portion of Jezreel, and there shall be none to bury her. And he opened the door, and fled.

2 Kings 9: 30-37 (King James Version)

30 And when Jehu was come to Jezreel, Jezebel heard of it; and she painted her face, and tired her head, and looked out at a window.

31 And as Jehu entered in at the gate, she said, Had Zimri peace, who slew his master?

32 And he lifted up his face to the window, and said, Who is on my side? who? And there looked out to him two or three eunuchs.

33 And he said, Throw her down. So they threw her down: and some of her blood was sprinkled on the wall, and on the horses: and he trode her under foot.

34 And when he was come in, he did eat and drink, and said, Go, see now this cursed woman, and bury her: for she is a king’s daughter.

35 And they went to bury her: but they found no more of her than the skull, and the feet, and the palms of her hands.

36 Wherefore they came again, and told him. And he said, This is the word of the LORD, which he spake by his servant Elijah the Tishbite, saying, In the portion of Jezreel shall dogs eat the flesh of Jezebel:

37 And the carcase of Jezebel shall be as dung upon the face of the field in the portion of Jezreel; so that they shall not say, This is Jezebel.

I have this Gustave Dore illustration of the death of Jezebel hanging in my living room, among a number of other biblical prints, though am I myself not at all religious.

It haunts me a little, the death of Jezebel, partly from my own reading of the story and partly from Tom Robbins’s ruminations on it in Skinny Legs and All (1990).

It’s not so much the death: I can see where that fits into the brutal social structure of an earlier time.

But that her name is a byword for, in dictionary.com’s words, “a wicked, shameless woman”? Where does that come from?

Surely a king’s daughter can greet her country’s conquerers with her hair arranged and her eyelids painted without being considered shameless?

Else what hope is there for the rest of us?

From Emily’s diary:

We have The Idylls of the King in English class this term. I like some things in them, but I despise Tennyson’s Arthur. If I had been Guinevere I’d have boxed his ears—but I wouldn’t have been unfaithful to him for Lancelot, who was just as odious in a different way. As for Geraint, if I had been Enid I’d have bitten him. These ‘patient Griseldas’ deserve all they get.

L. M. Montgomery’s Emily Climbs (1925), Angus and Robertson, 1981. 228.

Well, I’m with you, Emily—except that I dislike the term “deserve all they get” almost as much as I despise the phrase “she had it coming.”

But I’m with you on the biting front, since Geraint, in Tennyson’s version, does the following things:

• sets Enid a test involving her willingness to wear her poorest dress for her trip to Camelot: they marry when she ‘passes’ the test.
• immediately assumes that she is being unfaithful when she worries that his attention to her is causing him to ignore his responsibilities.
• keeps her with him constantly on his travels but refuses to speak to her or to listen when she speaks—including becoming infuriated with her when she warns him of ambushes.
• kills so many bandits that he has Enid herding a growing number of horses while he still won’t speak a word to her.
• only believes in her fidelity when he hears the sounds of her being beaten by another man, the Earl Doorm, for refusing to marry him.

Oh, yes: someone’s a candidate for biting.

I understand Tennyson is largely basing this version on the events of “Geraint and Enid” from The Mabinogion, but presumably the protagonist in that also needed biting.

Tennyson, of course, is also a product of his time, and is drawing on such Victorian stereotypes of patient, uncomplaining wives as the Conventry Patmore-inspired “angel in the house.”

Compare, for example, Enid’s tramping around in the wake of her sulking husband with the advice given to a correspondent who signs herself “Hopeless Polly.” Writing what sounds like a desperate letter to The London Journal (which didn’t republish the original letter) in 1863, she is met with the response that “[i]t is a sad case, but the old story of a drunken husband and a patient, meek, and enduring wife. Make another effort, and if that fails, another, and another after that” (cited in Andrew King’s The London Journal, 1845-83: Periodicals, Production and Gender, Ashgate, 2004. 203).

Or you could bite him.

So, no, I don’t have much patience with chivalric romances, always excluding the perpetually joyous passage in Chretien de Troyes’s “The Knight of the Cart” in which Lancelot, trying to keep in sight the window from which Guinevere is watching him, to draw inspiration from her face, tries to fight with his back to his opponent:

When Lancelot heard his name, he turned around promptly. And when he did so, up in the tower galleries he saw seated the one he most desired to see in the entire world. From the moment he caught sight of her, he did not turn or take his eyes or his face from her, but defended himself from the back. Meleagant pursued him as closely as he was able, pleased at the thought that his enemy could never now withstand him.

The maiden then again shouted from the window. “Oh Lancelot, how can you act so foolishly? You once were the epitome of all valor and excellence. I do not think or believe God ever made a knight equal to you in courage and renown. Now we see you at such a loss. Turn round to the other side where you may always see this tower. Sight of it will help you.”

Lancelot was so ashamed and disgusted that he despised himself. He knew well, as did all the men and women there, that he had been receiving the worst of the combat for some time.

From Chretien de Troyes’s “The Knight of the Cart.” In The Complete Romances of Chretien de Troyes. Trans. David Staines. Indiana UP, 1993. 215.

You prat, Lancelot.

Nor do I care for the type of mainstream Victorian texts that position women as helpless, fragile flowers.

Thankfully, many Victorian texts are radical on the subject of gender roles, including many of the canonical works.

Tennyson, though, is not much of a feminist.

L. M. Montgomery, on the other hand, had a broader approach to women’s intelligence and desire to be financially independent than is evident simply in Anne’s later life.

Much as I love Anne of Green Gables and think it may be Montgomery’s most accomplished novel, I remain unconvinced that it is her most interesting.

I keep coming across the phrase “kittle-cattle.”

I remember seeing it in Anne of the Island, the fourth Anne book, in which Anne attends Redmond College to gain her B. A. (before marrying a country doctor, having seven children, and never using her education again): when Anne publishes her first piece of fiction, her housemate describes authors as “kittle-cattle.”

I came across it again in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Murder Must Advertise, when Wimsey intends to use it in a margarine advertisement, but the account manager tells him he can’t call the customers “cows.” (Or was that another advertisement? Was the “kittle-cattle” slogan the one where the margarine manager was obscurely worried that it was “Scottish”? I can’t recall now, and it’s too early to look it up.)

And I’ve just come across it again in a Georgette Heyer murder mystery (which I’m re-reading, because I’m strangely exhausted and can’t concentrate on new fiction for my late night reading).

It’s never occurred to me to actually look up what the phrase means, until I read it in Heyer this morning and thought, “Sod it. I have no idea what that phrase means. Where’s my Brewer’s hiding?”

Apparently, though, Brewer’s can’t help me. I’ve looked under “kittle” and I’ve looked under “cattle”—given the book’s odd indexing system—and I can’t see anything.

It’s not like Brewer’s to let me down—except on the indexing front.

It’s even rarer that Benet’s lets me down, but there’s nothing in there, either.

How odd. Maybe I did try to look it up, couldn’t find it in either of my mainstays, and forgot about the entire attempt, because it’s an intensely boring story not worthy of a paragraph on the blog?

Still, the Internet will help me.

According to this site, it’s an adjective, archaic, meaning “difficult to deal with.”

That would never have occurred to me, but it fits with the way in which I’ve seen it used in various texts.

(I would have assumed it was a noun, before looking it up, but I can see it’s an adjective if I think of the Anne of the Island example: “Authors are kittle-cattle.” Sorry: slipped into marking mode for a minute there, impelled by the reproachful looks from the enormous pile of marking on my right hand, which thinks I should be paying attention to it. Which I should.)

Apparently, it has a sixteenth-century origin, from “kittle” (now chiefly Scottish and dialectical) meaning “to tickle.”

So, essentially, if something or someone is “kittle-cattle,” it’s a ticklish situation. That is interesting.

(And that, in a nutshell, is why I usually blog in the evenings. Not a morning person, me.)

“Why, that’s Cruella de Vil,” said Mrs Dearly. “We were at school together. She was expelled for drinking ink.”

I don’t remember that bit from the Disney movie.

(Nor am I quite sure why that’s an expellable offense—but, then again, it never happened in any of the school stories I’ve read.)

From Dodie Smith’s The Hundred and One Dalmations. Illustrated by Janet and Anne Grahame-Johnstone. Penguin (1956), 1968. 14 (quote), 16 (illustration).

I’ve never read any of Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries (though I might now, if I can ever find a bookshop that stocks the first volume, rather than just, say, volumes three and seven), but I am loving the Alan Ball adaptation currently screening on HBO.

Loving it.

I made something of a parade in the early days of the blog of my general distaste for vampire-themed fiction—and then promptly had to eat my words when I looked at my copies of Hellsing (not Van Hellsing, but the different and vastly superior Japanese anime), Blade, Buffy and Angel, and . . . well, that’s sufficient, I think (and that’s only the DVDs).

But my essential point remains valid: I am not a vampire groupie. Vampires are prevalent enough in popular culture that it would be a miracle if absolutely everything written about them was rubbish, but much of it, frankly, is.

But not True Blood. And my thorough enjoyment of it can only be efficiently expressed in list form.

1. It’s an HBO programme. The vast majority of really superb American television drama in the last decade has been developed for premium cable: Dexter on Showtime, The Sopranos, Deadwood, and Six Feet Under for HBO.

I was never a fan of Six Feet Under, though I’m tempted to catch up on DVD, now I see what Alan Ball can do with vampires. But I adored Deadwood—I bought it for my brother for Christmas, figuring the violence and swearing was his cup of tea. He bullied me into watching it with him, I fell desperately in love with it, and then did my best to force everyone I knew to watch it, though some really didn’t take to it.

It never eases to amaze me how much money these companies are willing to spend on quality script writing, when so many films labour under the well-meaning but disconnected efforts of half-a-dozen different writers. Really, why spend so many millions on actors and then baulk at the idea of a decent writer? Makes no sense to me.

(Of course, this point leads to the one problem I have with True Blood: HBO-style sex. If you’ve seen any HBO programme, you know what I mean by that. Seriously, HBO, some of us are both squeamish and a little bit prudish, you know? And when the HBO-style sex largely involves someone who was in Home and Away for years? Well, I never watched Home and Away, but I’ve read enough TV Week magazines at my mother-in-law’s to find that extra squicky.)

2. It exploits the Louisiana setting in extraordinary ways. There’s an interesting history of Southern Gothic, which was, I suppose, re-vamped (ha! I’m hilarious) by Anne Rice in the 1970s, as was the vampire genre in general.

But it goes back to the nineteenth century, though apparently the two writers I want to mention—Charles Brockden Brown and Edgar Allan Poe—were born respectively in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.

Huh.

Please excuse my ignorance of formative American literature.

But Louisiana is the ideal setting for this kind of work: the heat and humidity, the swampiness and decay, the massive cemeteries with their marble mausoleums—it all leads plausibly into questions of what death actually means and how it might be subverted.

Especially when you factor in voodoo.

(On that note, apparently there’s a specific branch of Louisiana voodoo that is “often confused with – but is not completely separable from – Haitian Vodou and southeastern U.S. hoodoo,” but places a greater emphasis on folk magic than Haitian vodou does. I had no idea.)

3. But the Louisiana setting is not just about death, decay, and rich, lush life. There’s also the question of race relations, and True Blood doesn’t shy away from that.

It’s not just the gatherings of people who trace their descent back to the Civil War and call themselves Descendants of the Glorious Dead, or the churches festooned with the confederate flag.

It’s also the vampires.

Vampires in this universe—and this is a mild spoiler, but made clear early in the first episode—have recently “come out of the coffin”—and, oh, the gender politics are an entirely different and equally complex issue in this programme. All of a sudden, creatures who have lived for a hundred years or more are walking around admitting to the fact.

Including those who, in life, were antebellum, slave-owning, plantation owners.

The Television Without Pity recapper mentioned, in terms of this issue, that the vampires are time travellers. But they aren’t. Time travellers are taken out of time: they leap forwards or backwards from their own time, but there’s no continuity.

The vampires here are living, breathing (well, they don’t breathe. But metaphorically . . .) slave owners, walking back into states such as Louisiana to reclaim ancestral properties in light of the coming Vampire Rights Amendment.

And that just opens up a whole new set of problems, activating existing racial inequality—who do you react, as an African American, when you’re confronted with someone who personally owned slaves?—and starting new ones. After all, vampires aren’t like us, are they? As one character says, when her son points out how pale a vampire is, “No, honey: we’re white. He’s dead.”

Oh, yes: I want to see where this is going.

4. Stephen Moyer.

Stephen Moyer was vampire Jack Beresford—the jerk who kicked everything off in Joe Ahearne’s Ultraviolet, back in 1998—and here he is as Vampire Bill. But he’s great fun, shifting easily between a little creepy and downright charming—and if his eyes have always been that colour, I don’t know why I haven’t noticed before.

5. The show acknowledges that vampires are, basically, a bit naff. There’s more than one example of this, but my favourite is still the fact that the vampire club in Shreveport is called Fangtasia. Bill, in charming mode, tries to justify this on the grounds that many vampires are extremely old and that puns used to be the highest form of humour—but we all know that vampires are just a bit naff.

6. The show plays with the notion of addiction: with the idea that vampirism is an addiction, and with human addiction to every substance under the sun, including vampires.

Do you know? At this point it occurs to me that if I go much further, I’ll be giving away spoilers.

And I don’t want to do that—I want people to enjoy this programme in their own right.

(Oh, dear lord. They’re playing Will and Grace on weeknights? Fantastic. Yet another reason to watch True Blood: a gay character who isn’t celibate or a eunuch. Well, another character—there’s always Captain Jack Harkness.)

But, really—you may not trust me on this. But I wish you would. You won’t regret it.

(I’m going to run out of modifiers if I keep posting random bookshelf weirdness: so far, I’ve used “more,” “yet more,” and “further.” Hmm—I might need to find a thesaurus.)

And I’m blatantly recycling material, here, because I mentioned these Dragonfall 5 covers last time I did random bookshelf weirdness. But I didn’t post pictures, and these covers really deserve immortality.

But I’m going to start with a pretty one: the later ones are all 1980s’ covers (not a great time for the illustrating of children’s science-fiction novels), but this one is a 1970s’ edition, with a gorgeous cartoony cover. It’s only a pity that the paperback is so battered:

Look how fabulous that spaceship is:

Alas, that degree of pretty didn’t last into the next decade. Look, for example, at Dragonfall 5 and the Super Horse:

That is one terrifying super-intelligent cyborg-horse. (Which begs the question of whether there is such a thing as a benign super-intelligent cyborg-horse.)

And the cover to Dragonfall 5 and the Haunted World bemuses me:

Now, I could say that science is not my strong point, but it would be something of an understatement. Nevertheless, I have a haunting suspicion that that rocket-powered hang-glider is actually attempting to travel in two directions at once.

Certainly, it looks as though those engines are going to send it flying backwards, not matter how intensely the pilot stares forwards.

But this? This is hands down my favourite cover of the four, even including the lovely 1970s’ one:

There’s a cow at the end of that rope but, oddly, the cow’s not what I’m interested in here.

In fact, I doubt anyone walking into a bookshop in 1985 and coming face to face with this cover would care about the cow.

And, no, I’m not trying to tiptoe around a crass joke.

I just can’t figure out whether man is a space cowboy or a space rodeo clown. Perhaps in the depths of space there exists a civilisation that has streamlined the two occupations?

That doesn’t explain why he has a weathervane on his head, though.

I’ve been pondering that title since I first came up with the idea for this post (yesterday, though I’ve made it sound as though this is a magnum opus I’ve been working on for a decade) and I’m not entirely happy with it now. It sounds patronising.

But what I’ve been thinking about are books that we think we know all about because of the film adaptations, and I can’t think of a better way of putting it.

I’ve mentioned this idea before, back when I was excited about Steven Moffat’s Jekyll, and I still maintain that those are the big three: Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

It’s not surprising, really: the Wikipedia page for Stevenson’s novella lists thirty-six stage plays, movies, musicals, television programmes, and video games based on the work (though it would never have occurred to me that Jerry Lewis’s The Nutty Professor is based on Stevenson’s work. Then again, I’ve never seen either it or the Eddie Murphy remake).

The page for Dracula shows at least sixty-three adaptations (unless anyone wants to double-check my desultory counting), including Bouncy Castle Dracula, performed entirely in a bouncy castle, at the 2008 Edinburgh Fringe Festival and a film described as a “softcore lesbian pornographic semi-parodical film.” (Now that’s quite the number of adjectives. On the other hand, that should bring stragglers in from Google.)

The Frankenstein page lists forty-six movies, and I didn’t even count through the parodies and the television adaptations. The only one I remember is Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (which it really wasn’t), and I didn’t care for that one at all.

But, really, with at least 145 movies, stage plays, and television adaptations between them (not to mention countless books), is it any wonder that we all tend to think we know exactly what’s going to happen when we read the books?

This is, I suspect, an area where Pierre Bayard’s argument in How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read could be misapplied: someone drawing their knowledge of Dracula and Frankenstein exclusively from the “cultural library” is just as likely—maybe more likely—to end up with an entirely skewed perspective on the novels.

Mind, it’s not that I think these films are a bad thing.

Okay, I did think that the recent BBC adaptation of Dracula with Marc Warren and Sophia Myles was a bad thing. A very, very bad thing. But my general point stands: having texts that have so thoroughly soaked into the general culture that they can be performed in bouncy castles at a fringe festival is a wonderful thing.

(That these canonical texts of English literature were written by a woman, a Scotsman, and an Irishman is a bonus.)

But they remain for me the standard of texts whose adaptations are more pervasive than the originals and yet don’t give a fair account of the original.

(Okay, I acknowledge that “fair account” is subject to change depending on the reader, and that my idea of an accurate adaptation—or an adaptation that it, at least, faithful in spirit to the original—is not going to be the same as that of other people. But I’m sticking with that solipsistic phrasing.)

They’re not unique, though.

I’ve mentioned before—in the middle of an Oz kick as I am—that I’m no great fan of the original film. And Katharine M. Rogers makes two excellent points in L. Frank Baum, Creator of Oz about ways in which the film shifted the spirit of the book. She points out, firstly, that Judy Garland is too mature to play Baum’s conception of Dorothy: “She is not a small child who is accidentally transported to a strange land and longs for the security of home, but a dissatisfied teenager who is so critical of home that she runs away and has to learn [. . .] a moral lesson” (253). Secondly, she argues that presenting Dorothy’s adventure as a dream is a falsification (253), and I would agree with that wholeheartedly: Baum’s Oz is distinctly part of the geography of our world.

Rogers also emphasises that much of the Oz mythology can be traced to the film rather than the books, such as the extremely small stature of the Munchkins and the consequent adoption of the word into English as meaning an extremely short person (they are the same size as the child Dorothy in the books) and in the extreme witchiness of the Wicked Witch of the West (253).

Nick also mentioned, when we were discussing this last night, Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, which—to the best of our combined knowledge—was the first text to present Catwoman as a supernatural being, rather than a cat burglar. (I understand the recent Halle Berry film follows this pattern, but I’ve not seen it.)

Sherlock Holmes is another example, and I’m not even thinking of the recent adaptation with Richard Roxburgh, which showed Holmes injecting cocaine in a railway station on the way to Baskerville Hall, where the real Holmes would never have used cocaine in the middle of a case—he only used it as a mental stimulant when he had no cases on hand. The Basil Rathbone films, lovely as Basil Rathbone is (especially when he’s celebrating “pirate fashion”), bore little if any resemblance to the originals—especially since the final twelve, of fourteen, were set during World War Two and involved Nazis.

Will we never be free from inappropriate Nazis?

Even The Princess Bride, adapted by the same man who wrote the original novel, is a lighter, brighter version of itself. A fabulous film, but distinct from the book—and how could it not be, when the books is so heavily concerned with process of writing prose?

It’s not that these films are bad films. They’re not.

And it’s not that I somehow harbour resentment against people for enjoying films instead of reading the original books. I don’t.

But these are fascinating to me: films that owe their existence to books and, for all that the books in each of these cases (except maybe The Princess Bride) are widely reprinted, set on school and university syllabuses, and still read, the films have an extraordinary currency that makes them more potent than their progenitors.

Now I put it like that, Frankenstein doesn’t seem like such an odd choice to head the list.

But have I missed anything?

I’m been on something of an Oz kick, lately, re-reading some of the later books (well, later than The Wizard of Oz and The Marvellous Land of Oz, anyway).

And it’s reminded me how much I enjoy the work of the later Oz illustrator, John. R. Neill.

L. Frank Baum allegedly quarrelled with the original illustrator, W. W. Denslow, after completing the first book; Denslow’s lovely original evocation of Dorothy and her three friends can be seen here, and it is gorgeous. The film version owes more to Denslow’s conception than it does to Neill’s, though Neill illustrated many more books than did Denslow—and despite the fact that Dorothy in the film is apparently ten years older than the six-year-old girl (or so) girl pictured here.

Denslow’s illustrations were also immensely popular, and Neill’s early illustrations show a degree of continuity, especially in the presentation of Dorothy’s closest companions: the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman.

But I was reading, last night, the eleventh book in the series, The Lost Princess of Oz. After this one, Baum wrote only three more Oz books, so by this point the conception of Oz is both fairly complete and relatively stable. Dorothy is no longer moving between America and Oz, but living in the palace with Ozma. Auntie Em and Uncle Henry have been brought in to live in a small cottage outside the Emerald City. Button-Bright, Trot, Betsy, Cap’n Bill, Hank the Mule, Scraps the Patchwork Girl, Tik-Tok, Ojo and Unc Nunkie, the Nome King, the Sawhorse—all the primary characters are established within the boundaries of the fairy kingdom by this point.

But an essential aspect of the Oz universe is the clash between the mundane and the fairylike. This lessens in later books, once all the primary characters are drawn to the Emerald City and Oz itself is cut off from the greater world. But it’s still part of the essential world-building. Dorothy—while brave, clever, and adventurous—is essentially an ordinary little girl who has extraordinary adventures.

Denslow’s illustrations don’t, for me, quite capture this aspect of the books, because of their cartoony nature. They do capture the whimsical feel of Oz, but not the clash of cultures.

But Neill’s do, as an illustration I found in The Lost Princess of Oz made me realise.

Scraps, as I mentioned before, is the Patchwork Girl, created from an old patchwork quilt by Margolotte, wife of the Crooked Magician, Dr Pipt, to act as a servant. Entirely unwilling to serve, she ends up living in Ozma’s castle.

She’s not a realistic figure and, like the Scarecrow who admires her, she isn’t presented realistically:

But there’s a scene in the beginning of The Lost Princess of Oz where Scraps, having fought with the Woozy and had her suspender-button eyes scratched off, is dragged by Button-Bright to Auntie Em for some restorative stitching, and Neill provides this illustration:

This, to me, is an extraordinary encapsulation of the clash of our world and Oz. Denslow’s world of heavy outlines and solid colours is not suited to such an evocation of the way in which Oz embraces the extraordinary, in the sentient, cotton-stuffed Scraps, and the ordinary, in the worn housewife, formerly of Kansas, and somehow manages to make them operate as part of a single kingdom.

This is the post that I’d originally intended to write last night, before I became distracted and a little cranky.

This, though, is less ranty. This is a disconnected (though slightly less disconnected than last night’s effort) run through some of my favourite children’s books—only some, but there isn’t room for all of them.

Some of them, though, are not books that I re-read regularly. This one, for example, I haven’t read in years:

Looking the author up on Wikipedia, I discovered he apparently writes “acclaimed spy thrillers,” which makes this book—a strange fantasy in which a boy living in Cornwall begins to experience memories of living in the advanced, subterranean world of Egon—an even odder addition to his oeuvre.

When I did read, though, I loved it. The Egonians are significantly advanced, physically and mentally, compared to humans, but sometimes bring humans down into their world. When they return them, they replace their memories of Egon with false ones, so when the protagonist’s memories start resurfacing, he can initially make no sense of them.

I remember, too, a strange streak running under the story: the Egonians—whose awareness of their bodies is such that they can immediately sense when something is ceasing to work effectively—cannot feel pain, and their reactions to the inherent fragility of humans disturbed me somewhat as a child.

Perhaps I should re-read this one; it has been quite some years.

Or perhaps Lewis Carroll? But I’ve not included Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass here, though—as a good fantasy fangirl and researcher in Victorian fiction, I love them both.

But this is a far more anarchic work than either:

This, alas, is a cut-down version of Carroll’s original two volumes, Sylvie and Bruno (1889) and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893).

The novels take place partly in a fairyland called Outland—where a revolution is underway to oust the Warden, Sylvie and Bruno’s father, and replace him with the tyrannical Sub-Warden—and partly in England, where the highly moral young doctor Arthur Forester is more or less successfully wooing Lady Muriel, daughter of the Earl of Ainslie. The two parts are linked by an unnamed narrator, suffering from an unidentified illness that Wikipedia suggests might be narcolepsy. (They don’t give their source, but it’s an interesting idea, given that the narrator regularly drops into dozes, in which he sees the fairy children.)

This cut-down edition only includes the Outland material, which seems distinctly counter to Carroll’s intentions. Unfortunately, the two novels are rarely reprinted, and this seemed a better cover to include than my Complete Works of Lewis Carroll, where I have the two novels in their complete form. Plus, I love the Harry Furness illustration on the front there.

The novels are odd ones; Carroll himself called them “litterature” (no, that’s not a typing error), according to this fascinating article from Tom Christensen’s Right Reading site. The temporal, physical, and narrative shifting from Outland to England; the long, intruded, moralising passages on inherited wealth, the affectations of High Church practice, or alternative ways of organising the animal kingdom; the highly sentimental plot with Arthur and Lady Muriel, their brief marriage, and Arthur’s eventual fate—all these confused me as a child-reader.

But I was fascinated by the books, nevertheless. And I remain fascinated with them, especially now I have a more thorough understanding of how Victorian literature shifts and develops.

Or L. Frank Baum?

I’ve only bought this edition recently, actually, and now want to collect all of them in these facsimile hardbacks: I also have The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918) in this edition.

Ozma of Oz (1907) fascinates me: I’ve heard The Wizard of Oz (1900) called the first American fairytale (though I can’t remember where I heard that: if anyone knows, let me know so I can attribute it correctly), but the books seem to me to be analogous to Carroll’s Alice books, in one significant way: both books take a distinct step back from the standard Victorian model of immature femininity, of the angelic child, Dickens’s Little Nell or Stowe’s Little Eva.

Dorothy Gale—and, gradually, the other child-characters who are shifted from America to Oz, like Button-Bright, Trot, and Betsy—is, like Alice, unwilling to accept adult authority simply because it is adult authority, especially when the Wizard, like so many of the other authority figures, turns out to be a humbug.

Ozma of Oz was one of the books that inspired the 1985 film, Return to Oz and, while I know so many people hold the Judy Garland film dear, I much prefer the sequel, which seems to me truer to the nature of the books: terrifying, often cruel and arbitrary, and ultimately centred on the bravery, intelligence, and tenacity of a young girl.

Ditto George MacDonald:

There’s little, I suspect, that I can say about MacDonald that isn’t covered by the fact that his devotees include C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Madeleine L’Engle.

(Sadly, I haven’t included A Wrinkle in Time in this list, though I should have. Or the Narnia books. Or The Hobbit. There simply isn’t room for everything.)

At the Back of the North Wind seems to be the most frequently reprinted—and perhaps most frequently cited—of MacDonald’s fantasies, where others—such as The Day Boy and Night Girl (1882) or “The Light Princess” from Adela Cathcart (1864)—are rarely reprinted or re-read. But The Princess and the Goblin (1872) is by far and away my favourite, even more so than the sequel, The Princess and Curdie (1883).

On a slightly unrelated note, the other thing that intrigues me about George MacDonald is how much he looked like Rasputin. That’s one intense-looking writer of whimsical Scottish fantasy stories for children.

Do people still read Mary Stewart?

I have another of hers in the same series of reprints: The Little Broomstick (1971). Apparently, this, Ludo and the Star Horse (1974), and A Walk in Wolf Wood (1980) are her only children’s novels. I’ve never read the latter, but I adored the other two, especially Ludo, which tells the story of a young boy living in the Tyrol, who follows the family’s old horse (on which their livelihood depends) out into the snow one night, and ends up travelling with him through the land of the Zodiac.

Nick didn’t care for this book, at all, because it does have a melancholic ending. I still maintain, though, that it’s one of the most unusual fantasies I’ve ever read. (And, yet, part of the reason why I’m so fascinated specifically by children’s fantasy is because it’s often so innovative compared to fantasy novels written for adults.)

But I can’t end without this book:

This picture doesn’t do justice to how battered my poor copy of The Land of Green Ginger is. According to the Wikipedia page, it’s rarely been out of print since it was published in 1937, which doesn’t surprise me, except that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a copy in a bookstore or a booksale. If I had, I would certainly have bought one to sit alongside this beloved paperback, which is more sellotape than anything else.

No one’s bookshelf is complete without the adventures of Abu Ali (son of Aladdin, but too nice to be a satisfactory heir), Silver Bud, Mouse, Boomalaka Wee, and, of course, the Friend of the Master of the Horse.

I wish I had more room here. I haven’t mentioned Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll books, or Lucy M. Boston’s Green Knowe series, or Diana Wynne Jones (though no convincing is required there, surely?), or Mary Poppins, or the Wombles, or Helen Cresswell’s Bagthorpe Saga, or any of a hundred other fabulous children’s books.

But I have talked myself out of the cranky mood that Harold Bloom and A. S. Byatt put me in yesterday.

After all, I have all these lovely books. And no one can actually prevent me from reading them as often as I wish, whatever opinion they might subsequently entertain about my intelligence or my maturity.

(I’d intended this as a piece on some of my favourite children’s books, but I’m a little cranky, and it ended up a long rant. It also became a little disconnected and rambling, but that’s nothing new. Add in the book pictures, and it would have been longer than the live-blogging posts. So I’m doing this in two parts, with a much calmer piece, with lovely illustrations, to follow this.)

I’m not sure what made me think of this at this moment, but it’s always annoyed me when the discussion about what adults gain from reading children’s books starts up again.

The keenest example of this recently has been the Harry Potter series, of course: Harold Bloom and A. S. Byatt both criticised these books, and both articles irritated me immensely.

(On a sidenote, I’m also bewildered by this comment in Bloom’s article: “It is much better to see the movie, ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ than to read the book upon which it was based, but even the book possessed an authentic imaginative vision.” I wish he had qualified this statement. The Wizard of Oz, the book, is a gorgeous fantasy, as are most of the sequels, though some, notably the fourth book, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, are somewhat mean-spirited. This statement, positioned as an inarguable fact, thoroughly confuses me: I can’t find the justification for it.)

I’m partly irritated, of course, by the way in which criticism of these books in these articles is collapsed into a distaste for cultural studies: Bloom casually employs the term “dumbing down” in discussion of “the ideological cheerleaders who have so destroyed humanistic study,” while Byatt talks about “the days before dumbing down and cultural studies.” I’m not even a cultural-studies practitioner, and this frustrates me. I don’t see the necessity for anger when, firstly, cultural studies is a well-established discipline that, like every other discipline, produces extraordinary and insightful criticism and, secondly, when cultural studies exists alongside literary studies, rather than being the latter’s replacement. But that’s another argument for another time.

Do I think the Harry Potter series is flawless? Of course not. But I enjoyed them.

And I recognised, as I read them, that they were written for children. J. K. Rowling has never claimed to be writing for adults, nor has she claimed that the books works on more than one level as, for example, Alice in Wonderland and The Simpsons are often described as doing.

But this entry isn’t about Rowling. I’ve mentioned before—probably ad nauseum, if I know myself—how my own appreciation of the Harry Potter books is filtered through the experience of giving them to a group of children highly uninterested in reading at all. No amount of criticism (no matter how cogent) can influence me more than that group of absorbed children.

No, my response here is to whether adults who read Rowling—and, by extension, other children’s fiction—are “childish adults,” as Byatt’s article puts it.

Well, I wouldn’t have thought so. But I’m not a disinterested party here.

I have shelves crammed with children’s books, and I buy more regularly. Some of them, admittedly, are books that I read as a child, so my reading of them now is a re-reading, with all the nostalgia that such a process implies. But I also regularly buy new children’s books. Gath Nix, for example, I didn’t discover until I was an adult and, in fact, his first book—excluding the Very Clever Baby series, which is too young even for me—wasn’t published until I was fourteen.

And Garth Nix is coded “young adult.” The books are shelved in the “young adult” section of bookstores and libraries, and the assumption is that they will be read by young adults—and, apparently, I no longer count as one, now I’m in my thirties.

(And that’s fair enough. I suppose. I should never have admitted to turning thirty.)

I bought my sister—six years my senior—two young adult fantasy novels for her birthday last year, having them sent to her directly through Dymocks. One of them, Garth Nix, was fine. But the other—I’ve forgotten the title, now—wasn’t available, and the lovely girl in the store rang me to suggest some alternatives, which led to the following conversation:

LOVELY SALES ASSISTANT: Well, I’ve heard good things about this book [also now forgotten], but it might be a little younger than the Nix. It’s aimed at seven to eight year olds.
ME: Oh, yes, that might be a little young.
LOVELY SALES ASSISTANT: How old is your sister?
ME: Thirty-seven.
LOVELY SALES ASSISTANT: Pardon?

I can understand the lovely sales assistant’s confusion: she legitimately assumed, given my selection, that I was buying for a younger sister.

But I don’t understand the disdain and, sometimes, outright scorn and anger that often accompanies diatribes about adults enjoying children’s books, or the same diatribes that always arise about genre fiction.

I don’t understand the rebranding of the Potter books in “adult” covers. I just bought the colourful children’s ones.

I don’t understand Byatt’s assumption that to enjoy children’s books, one must have a childish brain or be immature.

And, above all, I don’t understand why it matters.

I understand why books are coded “children’s” or “young adult.” (I’m less certain by the bookstore distinction between “literature” and “literary fiction.”)

But I don’t understand why people should feel pressured into saying, “Oh, I know it’s a children’s book [detective novel, romance, fantasy novel], but . . .”

Several years ago, now, but alas, not in a trivia competition:

SLIGHTLY INTOXICATED GENTLEMAN AT BAR: You celebrating something, love?
ME: Yep.
SLIGHTLY INTOXICATED GENTLEMAN AT BAR: What’s that?
ME: Oh, I just graduated with my Honours degree.
SLIGHTLY INTOXICATED GENTLEMAN AT BAR: What in?
ME: English Literature.
SLIGHTLY INTOXICATED GENTLEMAN AT BAR: Great! Can you give me a synopsis of James Joyce’s Ulysses in a single sentence?
ME: I . . . can try.

True story.