Button Bright of Oz

From the diary: “July 18, 1981

“After the auction [Oz club secretary] Fred Meyer handed out the prizes.” Besides prizes for best costume and best art “he gave out the prizes for the story contest. Both Eric [Shanower] and I got prizes. I guess Fred didn’t want to choose between us.” The prize was a choice of Harry E. Mongold’s self-published Oz books, Button Bright of Oz or The Saw Horse of Oz. I grabbed Button Bright. But I don’t think I ever read it. I remember attempting. But I don’t remember being able to get all the way to the last page.

Eric Shanower

From the diary: “July 17, 1981

“The opening reception started a little earlier than the 6:00pm for which it was scheduled. People meandered around and talked.” A woman dressed as “Cayke the Cookie Cook” handed out cookies.

This was my second Winkie Convention. The convention was held at the Wawona Hotel in Yosemite. My mother came along, as she did for the next several years.

“Erik Shanower came late … [Don’t know why I spelled the name with a “k”.] Mom treated him to some vegetables because it was too late for him to find a place in the dining room. He wrote a story too. [The story I brought was called, “The Cowardly Lion and the Courage Pills” and had illustrations by my brother.] His is called ‘King Hank’. I started reading it tonight, but didn’t finish. It was pretty good. It was about Hank the Mule and Bettsy Bobbin taking a shortcut to the Emerald City from Glinda’s Palace. Hank encounters strange little creatures who hail him as king. Bettsy gets captured by two fat would-be Oz conquerers.” Both being hailed as king by the inhabitants of a strange little country and thwarting bumbling bad guys who are trying to conquer Oz are familiar plots from the Oz series. The story I’d brought also included nefarious invaders bent on conquest. “He plans to win the story contest with it. We’ll see. He also plans to win the Oz quiz. We’ll see about that, too.”

A piddly little five years later Eric was publishing his Oz stories professionally.

Links

I found the Taze Files via one of the blog directories. After reading a few entries I told its author that I was adding his blog to my “viewing and reviewing” links. I posted this as a comment, “I'm not so much looking for book reviews as I'm looking for people talking about their reading (or movie watching or music listening) on a personal basis, not just whether the book is good but more where it fits in the context of the reader's life. I decided to add Taze Files to my links when I read the earlier entry about Sweet Valley High. Sure, some evaluation of the book's quality but I liked the personal musing.”

If any of my readers here knows of a blog that does that do let me know. I want to check it out.

Musing on methods himself Merwyn says, “Dare I Read? is an original concept where the author focuses more on the story surrounding his book than the book itself. Summaries and critical reviews can be found just about anywhere for any published book. I'll just use Glenn's technique when the occasion calls for it.”

I have found another blog via a link at comic book galaxy that’s what I’m looking for: Daily Burn

Daily Burn focuses on superheroes, primarily comic books, with a special affection for The Hulk. I’ve been through my obsessive phases and I totally grok Mick’s musing on being a completist. “When I first started reading comics, The Incredible Hulk was all I bothered buying, UNLESS he showed up in another title. I stopped reading comics in my late teens, and when I started up again in my early twenties, I became obsessed with getting my hands on every Hulk appearance possible, no matter how unimportant it seemed to the wider story of the Green-sometimes-Gray Golitah.” Says Mick, “in a lot of cases he showed up for one or two panels.” Now that’s being a completist!

Then there’s the post where Mick reviews the evidence for a sexual relationship between two of the teen Avengers, seems it's been quite the controversy on the internet comics boards. “Hulkling and Lightning Lad compliment each other on their fighting ability. … Wow. Now that’s gay.” If “heroes” aren’t using each other as punching bags what could they be but gay?

Another blog I’ve skimmed a bit and am thinking of adding to my links: Derek Martinez

The Oz Scrapbook

from the diary: “July 3, 1981

“Becky and I listened to some music, looked at The Oz Scrapbook (much more because I wanted to than she did), and finally found our way into my bedroom where we played Black Box and Obstruction. She couldn't get the hang of Black Box, but she almost beat me at Obstruction.”

The Oz Scrapbook gave me my first look at the covers of many of the out of print Oz books. That by itself was pretty exciting for someone who for years had only had reference to a mysterious list of titles printed in one of the paperback Baum books. I used to fantasize about those titles, even woke from dreams in which I found a cache of never-before-seen Oz books (actually, this still happens). I remember making my own lists of Oz titles, though I only had the vaguest ideas of what might happen in these imaginary books. I ran onto the list just before I moved out of my mother’s house and it included ungainly titles like The Shaggy Man of Oz in Ix. (Ix is another of Baum’s fairlylands.)

I found The Oz Scrapbook at the library. Finding it was almost as exciting as finding one of the Oz books, for it was my first window into L. Frank Baum’s life. He was a showman! He’d traveled the country performing in plays he’d written. He pitched The Wizard of Oz to Broadway producers and the musical extravaganza that resulted was the biggest thing on Broadway up to that time. (And the MGM movie was slavishly faithful to the original in comparison.) When movie cameras were invented Baum used his Oz fortune to found a studio and direct his own movies (and lost everything, but then he lost everything two or three times). Scrapbook also offered up information about the Oz illustrators W.W. Denslow and John R. Neill and later authors Ruth Plumly Thompson and Jack Snow and Rachel Cosgrove. That book seemed HUGE.

Besides, Scrapbook is a handsome book. It was designed by Dick Martin who illustrated the last book of the 40 and included much from the collection of longtime Oz club member David L. Greene.

Black Box was a puzzle game, sort of a cross between Battleship and Mastermind. Each player would hide his balls on the board’s grid and the other player would try to find the balls by firing imaginary rays across the board. It took too much work to figure out how to play, really. Obstruction (it seems to have other names, as well) is much simpler. You’ve got to get your pieces from home to the goal and there are all these little obstructions that you can move into our opponent’s way. You can come back from what looks like a hopeless situation. That’s what makes the game fun to play.

The Enchanted Island of Oz

From the diary: “July 2, 1981

“I began to feel really awful [night before last]. We had run out of vitamin C tablets so I couldn’t discreetly gobble them until my symptoms went away (as they usually do when I take lots of vitamin C), so I decided to go to bed early. I got in bed at about 11:00pm (nowadays, for me, that’s early!) It was a disaster! I went to sleep in a short time, but about two hours later I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. The documentaries I watched before I went to bed danced through my mind and corrupted themselves over and over until all I could think about was this trashy story of a male/female mountain climbing team braving the steep side of Yosemite’s Half Dome to photograph snakes and water buffalo crossing a river. What were the two documentaries? Lights! Action! Africa!, a film about two wildlife photographers (husband & wife) and what they did to get their magnificent photos. The other was Free Climb, a movie about two young men who free climbed the steep side of Half Dome.

“When I could stand this bizarre mixture … no longer and decided without a shadow of a doubt that I would get no sleep until I got my mind on something else I got up. I finished reading The Enchanted Island of Oz sitting in the rocking chair in the living room. I then lay down on the couch and got to sleep. All-in-all I suppose I got about four hours of sleep.”

The Enchanted Island of Oz is by Ruth Plumly Thompson. It was published by the International Wizard of Oz Club in 1976. L. Frank Baum’s publisher issued 40 Oz books by seven authors -- 14 by Baum, 19 by Thompson, 3 by Neill, 2 by Snow, 1 by Rachel Cosgrove, and 1 by Eloise McGraw and her daughter Lauren McGraw. The Oz Club was founded in 1957, six years before the McGraws’ book was published. After Merry-go-round in Oz Reilly & Lee decided not to do another Oz book. The Oz Club issued two new Ruth Plumly Thompson titles, Yankee in Oz (1972) and The Enchanted Island of Oz. Eventually other publishers got into the act, especially as Baum’s books passed out of copyright.

The Magical Mimics in Oz

From the diary: “June 29, 1981

“I’m reading The Magical Mimics in Oz. I’m almost done reading the series! I can’t wait to get more.”

There are fourteen books between Giant Horse and Magical Mimics. Unless I just didn’t mention them in my diary I didn’t yet have them. Fourteen! Ruth Plumly Thompson wrote nineteen Oz books before she retired from the series. John R. Neill, who had illustrated all but the first book, then wrote three books. I didn’t have any of his and I was most curious to see how he handled Oz. Jack Snow was an old Oz fan. He wrote his books as direct sequels to Baum’s. No Thompson or Neill invented characters appeared in The Magical Mimics in Oz or The Shaggy Man of Oz. The Shaggy Man was a hobo, a wanderer who loved the road. Baum used the Shaggy Man several times. I don’t think Thompson or Neill used him at all.

The Mimics of the title are throwbacks to the sinister armies that threatened Oz in Baum’s Emerald City of Oz. A Mimic falls upon his victim and becomes him, leaving the original startled and paralyzed, staring back at himself. Jack Snow also wrote scary stories for adults, some of which have been collected in Spectral Snow, which I ought to own if I don’t.

Tintin

From the diary: “June 17, 1981

“[Yesterday] was mainly uneventful. I sat around the house and read Tintins all day.”

I remember seeing a Tintin book for the first time at the house of a friend of my mother. The book was hardcover, which surprised me – a hardcover comic? And the art was so much more precise and delicate than I was used to seeing in superhero or funny animal comics. I was fascinated by the cover of The Black Island, the black island in the distance, the somber colors of sea and sky, the youth and his white dog in the small boat – but the bright red skirt of the youth struck me. This may have been the first time I saw a kilt. The book may have been in the original French because I vaguely remember not being able to read it – not that we had the time on that visit. I do remember leafing through the pages wishing I could read it.

I don’t know how much time passed before we found Tintin in the bookstore. The Tintin website has the first American edition of The Black Island published in 1975. I think we bought our first Tintin not long after.

The Hungry Tiger of Oz

From the diary: “May 28, 1981

“I finished The Hungry Tiger of Oz. Am reading The Giant Horse of Oz.”

The Ruth Plumly Thompson Oz books were all out of print at this time but I was buying them as fast as I could find them (and could afford them). In this run of reading Oz I assume I had not yet found a copy of Grampa in Oz or The Lost King of Oz, the two books published between Cowardly Lion and Hungry Tiger. I was looking forward to Lost King because Thompson offered an explanation to what happened to Ozma’s father, King Pastoria. I had a low opinion of The Hungry Tiger of Oz as Thompson seemed to indulge her penchant for amusing little countries (usually based on puns) that seem to hurl themselves like big rubber balls in the way of the heroes who are just trying to get from point A to point B, darnit.

The story so far

On February 25th I wrote my first post to this blog. I’ve been keeping a booklog since 1989 and it seemed to me a weblog would be a good way to make use of it. I cautioned that what I’d written in my booklog was not reviews but writing as an aid to memory. In starting the booklog originally I didn’t want to announce Recommendations or critically evaluate, or anyway I didn’t want to make that a requirement for the writing. I did think about training myself to review books, as one can make money reviewing (one can’t make money with poems). But I thought I’d see if I could get myself into the habit of talking about each book I read as I went along and if I developed a critical stance that was something I might be able to take advantage of in other contexts. If not, as I said, the booklog at least would offer a prophylactic against amnesia.

My notes on books these days do tend toward the critical, the evaluative, but I still don’t try to hold them to the standards an audience would expect. I talk about the books in the context of my life and what a book means to me. It’s still private writing.

Thinking on that I decided to return to my earliest private writing, my first attempt at a daily journal, the one I wrote at for a couple months in sixth grade. Did I write about books in that? Indeed I did.

Visiting the sixth grade Glenn was surprisingly painless, especially since I wasn’t reading for his story but exploring a reference. What did Glenn read next? We don’t have written evidence from a convenient source until the diary starts up again in high school. (And if you read that post you’ll have to visit its sequel.) I’m still working my way through that high school journal. In one month of blog I’ve covered about five months of journal. At this pace it’ll be how long until I get to the 1989 booklog?

Some of these blog postings are rather bare. Still private writing? Probably. But I’m going to let that be okay. This blog may be publicly accessible and I’m happy to have anyone come by and read it but like many blogs it’s a hybrid, public and private. I’m exploring my life in books. Come along if that amuses you.

Waving the Stick Around

I watched the Stick as it was handed around the poetry blogs. I’m not one of the popular kids so I wasn’t surprised when it didn’t pass to me. Only it did. Ginger waved it in my direction. I can’t say as I care much for the questions, nor do I care a fig for chain letters or forwarding clever stuff to all my friends, but the Stick is about what you’re reading and so is Dare I Read? so wtf. (By the way technorati shows 305 blogs have answered the questions so far. Maybe more by the time I post.)

the Stick: You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

dir: Goodnight, Moon

the Stick: Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

dir: I kept thinking I hadn’t but then I realized I have a big crush right now on Jaeger Ayers, the hero of Carla Speed McNeil’s comic series Finder. He is so dreamy. Then there was Kurt Severing of Jason Lutes’ Berlin. I was so disappointed he was straight!

the Stick: The last book you bought is:

dir: Diary of a Mosquito Abatement Man by John Porcellino

the Stick: The last book you read:

dir: Rio de Janeiro: Carnival Under Fire by Ruy Castro

the Stick: What are you currently reading?

dir: Diary of a Mosquito Abatement Man by John Porcellino, Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry edited by Paul Auster, Pulling Taffy by Matt Bernstein Sycamore, and Finder: Sin-Eater, volume 2 by Carla Speed McNeil.

the Stick: Five books you would take to a deserted island:

dir: One wonders whether one is marooned, thus these five would be the only books one will ever have resort to, or whether it’s just a nice island where there’s nothing to do but read.

If the former I’d start with a book of matches.

If the latter I’d start with Proust, include a fat Dickens, bring along Rothenberg’s 2-volume Poems for the Millennium (I’m currently halfway through volume one), choose an Oz book I’ve only read once (Handy Mandy in Oz maybe), and finish up with a good book on the constellations so I can stargaze less obliviously.

the Stick: Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons)? And Why?

dir:
Skook, because he reads a lot, too
CDPlayer, because she needs to blog more and here’s an excuse
Taze Files, I don’t know him but I like the way he writes about books

The Pearl

From the diary: “May 28, 1981

“In English we are reading The Pearl. Very short book.”

John Steinbeck. I do remember liking The Pearl. Maybe one of the reasons I chose to write a paper on Steinbeck. I thought I’d written the paper in my sophomore year but I don’t mention it in this diary and I remember this particular paper because it was a traumatic event. I had to write according to a strict formula and I’m just horrid about strict formulas. (I haven’t attempted a sonnet in years.) I expect my writing to grow and change as it grows, more like tending a plant than building an outhouse.

I save everything and I recall coming across the Steinbeck paper a couple years after graduation and reading it. It was the stiffest, ugliest writing I’ve ever produced. Somehow I got a B+. I save everything, but I threw this one away.

The Cowardly Lion of Oz

From the diary: “May 18, 1981

“It rained today. How strange. The weather forecast is getting warmer though. Jeez! I don’t know if I can stand it any warmer.

“I read The Cowardly Lion of Oz thru to the end.”

This page has thumbnails of the covers of all the Oz books. The Cowardly Lion looks really meek on the cover of The Cowardly Lion of Oz, not just meek, cowering. Typically the Cowardly Lion is depicted, both in the text and the illustrations, as proud and courageous, nonchalant at least. “Cowardly” is meant ironically.

When an Oz book was named after a familiar character I always expected the story to revolve around that character. This was not always the case. In The Scarecrow of Oz the Scarecrow himself doesn’t show up until the book is, what, 50% through? Like Tik-Tok of Oz the book named after the Scarecrow is adapted from one of Baum’s nonbook Oz efforts. In the case of Scarecrow Baum translates to the page a silent movie he directed, His Majesty, the Scarecrow.

Funny the things you find on the web. Here is a breakdown the plot of The Cowardly Lion of Oz:
Composition of Book
Descript. of chases or violence - 20%
planning/preparing, gather info, debate puzzles/motives - 20%
Feelings, relationships, character bio/development - 10%
Descript. of society, phenomena (tech), places - 50%

Tumbleweeds Express

From the diary: “May 17, 1981

“I bought the new IAsfm and Tumbleweeds Express.”

I only vaguely remember Tumbleweeds. It wasn’t a regular strip in the newspaper when I was a little kid but maybe it turned up in The Press Democrat at this time. I must’ve thought it funny, huh? The drawings are not to my taste now.

The Great American Amusement Parks

From the diary: “May 2, 1981

“We went to [the] Santa Rosa [library] and I checked out The Great American Amusement Parks by Gary Kyriazi. I’m thinking of buying it. I read the whole thing today – it was great.”

My father had invited me to go to the big air show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. I don’t think he owned a plane at the time but he used to and loved planes and flying. Me? Not so much. Still, it sounded like a bit of an adventure and I was hoping to convince him to take me to an amusement park on the trip because I loved roller coasters (still do) and my mother didn’t do amusement parks.

I’ve read several amusement park histories and guidebooks.

From the diary: “May 6, 1981

“I found an article in Campus Life called ‘Theme Parks – Scream Parks.’ It was good up until they started predicting what the future would bring. They started babbling about EPCOT, space stations, and educational parks. I did learn two things of interest from the article though. They were: 6 flags o’er teck’s ass has a new roller coaster in which the train hangs below the tracks, and Marriott’s G[reat] A[merica] in Gurnee, Ill. has a new wooden twin racer coaster called ‘The American Eagle.’”

The Teenage Survival Manual

From the diary: “April 28, 1981

“Last night I started writing another Oz story (A Tale of Oz). I was inspired after reading The Teenage Survival Manual. Dad sent it to us because it echoes some of his philosophies.”

Dad was a big one for philosophies. I remember the cover of the Manual, blue with a swirl of stars. I remember thinking it would give me some secret, some Dad secret. I went through many a self-help book over the years. It’s not that compendia of advice don’t contain helpful advice, but being able to push forth and do is far more important than the excellence of the advice. Yes, the first requirement is to have that assertive personality. Which I didn’t much have. And an ability to shrug off failure. If I had this ability it was withered and virtually paralyzed. Different now?

Dad, by the way, did not live with us. Growing up, though there were phone calls and letters, I only saw him at most twice a year. So he was more than usually mysterious, as fathers go.

Bill Hoest

From the diary: “April 26, 1981

“I went to town and bought the new IAsfm and two books by Bill Hoest: Agatha Crumm and The Lockhorns: “I See You Burned the Coldcuts Again.”

The Lockhorns? Good God. I bought a collection of Lockhorns cartoons? I bought them new? Weren’t clippings from PARADE good enough?

I do find the “burned the coldcuts” line rather funny. But a book full of variations on the theme? I don’t even remember seeing these on the shelf. Maybe I sold ‘em to the used bookstore to feed my Oz habit.

I remember catching Joan Rivers when she was filling in for Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show and she was cruel. I laughed so hard. Reading a few Lockhorns cartoons I want to laugh, sort of. This wouldn't be the first time I made choice A because I wanted to want choice A, even though choice A and I were not a good match. Eh? (Then again, maybe Bill Hoest wrote better when he was alive.)

IAsfm = Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine ... The only part of Asimov’s I read consistently was Asimov’s introductory essay. But I did like the idea of being able to read all those science fiction stories fresh and new. I read Barry B. Longyear’s “Enemy Mine” as a novella in IAsfm, long before it was made into a movie starring Lou Gossett Jr as a hermaphroditic reptilian humanoid from another planet. I was thinking I’d read the original “Ender’s Game” in IAsfm but it was in Analog, which I also bought regularly for awhile. Did I even read one story in every issue of either magazine? I think I didn’t. But they charmed me as objects.

Library book sale

From the diary: “April 25, 1981

“I went down to the library’s book sale. I’m sure they check through all the books to see if any are valuable before they put them up for sale. I bought The War Against the Rull by A.E. Van Vogt, Burnt Offerings, (both book club editions) and Elephant Bill, a book about a man who lived with elephants in Burma (wherever that is).”

Indeed I discovered that members of the Friends of the Library had an evening to pick over the donations before they were offered to the general public. There was rarely much that interested me. The pickings are better here in Berkeley than they ever were in Sebastopol or Santa Rosa. It helps to live in a city and one with a big university, too.

I never did read the Van Vogt novel (do I still have it?), though I did get to the other two.

Kabumpo in Oz

From the diary: “April 15, 1981

“I’m stuck on Kabumpo in Oz. Since we’ve been in Easter vacation I should get back to reading.”

Kabumpo is an elephant, one of new Oz author Ruth Plumly Thompson’s strongest originals. Thompson’s Oz is quite different from Baum’s. I didn’t like it at first. Thompson is much more about action and wordplay than the more leisurely Baum, and she favors boy protagonists (Baum’s were nearly all girls). But she can be funny and clever; her stories will plunge ahead ever anxious to keep moving.

On a grammar note: I always wondered why the title has Kabumpo in Oz when Kabumpo seems to be a native of Oz and is never anywhere but Oz. In the titles of most other Oz books when the individual is from or of Oz that’s reflected in the title, viz. Tik-Tok of Oz or Glinda of Oz. When a character isn’t a native but merely visiting they’re given the “in”, examples being Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (this was before either had moved to Oz permanently, although the Wizard is invited to stay at the end of the story), Rinkitink in Oz (although, oddly, Rinkitink never actually sets foot in Oz so this may not be a particularly helpful example), and Pirates in Oz. Saying Kabumpo was in Oz, it’s always seemed to me, was redundant for where else would he be?

As an aside, I’ve pledged I shall never write a letter to the editor about such a trivial matter. Should I go to the trouble I shall address something worth the energy -- torture, say, or destruction of habitat.

The Royal Book of Oz

From the diary: “March 16, 1981

“I started reading The Royal Book of Oz today.”

The Royal Book of Oz is the first non-Baum Oz book. The publishers recruited Ruth Plumly Thompson, a newspaper writer, to produce new Oz books. She turned out an Oz book a year for nineteen years. In Royal Book the Scarecrow returns to his “family tree,” the stick in the cornfield from which Dorothy helped him down in The Wizard of Oz. The Scarecrow wants to know how he came to be alive. Other non-meat creatures have origin stories – the Tin Woodman was a meat person but a wicked witch enchanted his ax causing it to cut off parts of his body, the missing parts were replaced with tin until the woodman was entirely tin; the Patchwork Girl was a dummy sewn out of a patchwork quilt until the Powder of Life was sprinkled on her. But the Scarecrow was alive when Dorothy met him and new Oz historian Thompson decided to provide an explanation. It seems the Scarecrow is the reincarnation of Chang Wang Woe of the Silver Islands which lie deep beneath the land of Oz, Chang’s spirit having fled up the pole to animate the Scarecrow.

It still strikes me as an odd idea. The Scarecrow is a pseudo-Chinese emperor?

The Royal Book of Oz is the last book mentioned in the diary, 1/1/81 thru 4/14/81.

HOTLINE!

From the diary: “March 10, 1981

“We did oral reports in English today and yesterday based on our nonfiction book reports. I did mine on HOTLINE! by Margaret O. Hyde. I got an A.”

I just did a google search for HOTLINE! as the title means nothing to me now. Margaret O. Hyde has written such books as Mind Drugs and Living with Asthma and Know About Gays and Lesbians, among other possibly useful books for young people.

I found a description for HOTLINE!: “Describes a social service through which people in need of help receive advice and encouragement over the telephone from trained personnel. Includes a chapter on runaways and suggestions for setting up such a service.”

I remember a childhood friend who would call a sex info hotline in San Francisco. It creeped me out that he was so obsessed with sex, particularly homosexual sex. “They told me that a gay guy’s colon will fall out if he has a lot of sex.” Who knows what the hotline actually told him? Anyway, when I spotted him at a gay bar several years later he said, “What are you doing here!” I shrugged. “Dancing,” I said.