The Great and Powerful Oz Blog

So, over the last six months I read the fourteen Oz books written by L. Frank Baum. I bought them all for .99 on a whim (a cheap whim) because they've now entered public domain. (Which I assume is why this travesty was brought into existence. Patrick Stewart, for shame.)  

Remember, originally the Emerald City was green because of
those goggles they wore...

As a kid, I read (nearly) all of the Oz books, found at my local library in rather crumbling hardback editions. I watched the movie religiously when it came on at holidays (hello, life before VCRs!) and my Mom would regale me of tales of how scared her sister was of those flying monkeys. I was a member of the Official Oz Fan Club. My Mom and I even visited the inspiration for the Emerald City, Hotel del Coronado in San Diego.

My childhood copy,
 illustrated wonderfully by Michael Hague

Reading all of these books (again) deserved some sort of commemoration, I decided, and thus I bring you the definitive ranking of Baum's Oz books, from worst to best. While I study Children's and Young Adult lit, I'm not an Oz scholar, so this is all just thoughts and highlights/lowlights, not serious scholarly analysis. There are, as I said, fourteen books. I'm trying to keep my comments for each short.

Clearly, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz exists on its own turf. One of the things that I'll remark upon here though is how some of the conventions change between the initial depiction of Baum's Fairy Land and the subsequent books. As mentioned above, Oz has merely forced everyone in the Emerald City to wear green goggles for so long, "most of them think it really is an Emerald City," a convention which changes once Ozma takes over. Additionally, eventually we learn that no one can die in Oz, but clearly our two wicked witches meet ugly ends at Dorothy's hands in this book. Did you know Munchkins (of Munchkin County) aren't little people? Dorothy's first observation of them: "They were not as big as the grown folk she had always been used to; but neither were they very small." And, of course, there's lots of other cool stuff in WWoO that doesn't make it into the movie, so you should all go read this book if nothing else.

So, onto the rankings. I decided on worst to best because I want everyone to hold their breath to find out what the best Oz book is. No scrolling ahead and cheating.

Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908)
The Wizard is at his flim-flammy best in this book. While he later becomes a legit magic user (one of the few in Oz), here he's just playing tricks with nine tiny pigs (which we will come back to later). This book is notable for the first appearance of one of my favorite phrases: meat people. In subsequent books the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman make all kinds of disparaging remarks about the needs of "meat people's" bodies. While there are invisible bears to fight, and some angry vegetable people, the climax of this book is the trial of Eureka, the pink kitten. Eurkea is accused of eating one of the Wizard's tiny pigs and must stand trial. Really, that's the climax.

The Emerald City of Oz (1910)
Baum was well and truly fed up with Oz in this book. He attempts to wrap things up by bringing Aunt Em and Uncle Henry to Oz (would Dorothy have left them behind to lose the farm? Maybe.) While there's a cool double-narrative with the major Oz antagonist, the Gnome King, it can's save the book. Dorothy and Ozma do defeat him in classic trickster non-violent fashion, but overall the "fairy" elements fall flat. The magical lands they wander into are entirely held together by bad puns, something Baum mercilessly mocked in earlier books. Here we have Utensia where the Captain of the Spoons is "getting rusty" and prefers "stirring times." *groan* The book ends with an epilogue telling readers "YOU WILL NEVER HEAR ANYTHING MORE ABOUT OZ BECAUSE WE ARE NOW CUT OFF FOREVER FROM ALL THE REST OF THE WORLD." Clearly, Baum was feeling done, but only until he needed the money a few years later.


The Road to Oz (1909)
Here we meet Button Bright, Polychrome, and the Shaggy Man for the first time. Button Bright is one of our few (human) male reoccurring characters. He isn't a character with much agency, however, as his main talent is getting lost and being lucky. I find the gender politics of Oz to be pretty progressive, as our heroines really only call on other women in times of trouble, there's never a standard "dude to the rescue" plotline. Things to dislike about this book: the Love Magnet (ugh, what a lazy plot device) and a birthday party for Ozma. Why does the lady need so many birthday parties? She doesn't age, and she has unimaginable wealth. Really, it's downright rude to have a party where people bring you presents in her position. I have to admit, the Scoodler's removing their heads and throwing them at the party of adventurers has echoes of one of my least favorite parts of the film Labyrinth.


The Scarecrow of Oz (1915)

This is what the Scarecrow
always looked like for me.
Again, thanks to Michael Hague.

Wikipedia tells me this was Baum's favorite Oz book. Huh. Well, it's in my bottom third. Another of our female heroines shows up here: Trot (and her sidekick Cap'n Bill). Trot and Cap'n Bill are pleasant enough, but the overall plot is just pretty boring. Button Bright is lost and found again, there's some flying around, and then a cruel king/princess/prince/witch plot that works it's way out. One of the most horrifying features of Oz comes to light here, as the aptly named King Krewel traps garden boy/prince Pon's father: "It is impossible to kill anyone in this land, as perhaps you know, but when my father was pressed down into the mud at the bottom of the deep pool and the stones held him so he could never escape, he was of no more use to himself or the world than if he had died." Trapped in the mud, living, for all eternity. The notion of eternal life in Oz is generally more horrifying than pleasant.


Glinda of Oz (1920) This is the final Oz book, published after Baum's death in 1919. This is also one of the two "original fourteen" books that I hadn't read as a child. As far as gender politics go, this one is a win, as Dorothy and Ozma head off to solve a conflict in a remote region of Oz, and call in reinforcements in the form of Glinda when necessary. This book highlights one of the odd features of the "utopian" land of Oz. While Oz is a magic Fairy Land, the only people officially allowed to use magic are Ozma, Glinda, and the Wizard (having been taught magic by Glinda and left the life of a conman far behind). Seriously, though, a magic land where magic is all but outlawed? It seems awfully dictatorial for the beloved girl ruler of Oz to keep all the fun for herself. Best conceit of this book is, by far, the canned brains of the Flatheads (heads too flat for brains, what's a Flathead to do?)

Glinda's Magic Book: recording every event as it happens.
Everywhere. 

The Magic of Oz (1919)
Oh, for heaven's sake. Another birthday party for Ozma. Now everyone needs to go on a quest to find the perfect present. Naturally, the Gnome King is stirring up some trouble, this time trying to get the talking animals to rise up and enslave the population of Oz. There's a magic flower which is pretty cool, the glass cat's pink brains can be seen working, and they tame some tiny monkeys.

You've made it halfway through the books! Read on!

Tik Tok: Original Steampunk

Tik Tok of Oz (1914)
For being one of my favorite characters, Tik Tok's book doesn't make it too high on my list. Really, it's much more focused on the Shaggy Man and the introduction of another human heroine: Betsy Bobbin and her mule Hank. It's saving grace (from the fairly dreadful plot of Queen Ann Soforth trying to conquer Oz) is the tunnel to the other side of the world where the characters (including the Shaggy Man and Polychrome) meet a dragon. Now, that's fun. What isn't fun, again, is the downside of eternal life, seen here: "If the Rak catches us, and chews us up into small pieces, and swallows us--what will happen then?" The response, naturally, in a land where no one ever dies is "Then each small piece will still be alive." See? Horrifying.




Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913)

Radium chocolate? Why not?

This marks the triumphant return of the Oz books after Emerald City of Oz declared the land of Oz as cut off from the world forevermore. Or, for several years, at any rate. Luckily Baum seems to have come back refreshed from a few years off and produced Patchwork Girl. What I like most about this book is the hero, Ojo, and his refusal to allow the Patchwork Girl to be created as a dumb slave. When no one is looking he adds heaps of extra stuff to her brains, making her into a full blown character instead of a stuffed slave. You go, Ojo. The same wizard has brought a glass cat to life and this cat has one of the best catchphrases of all time: "I have the handsomest brains in the world. They're pink, and you can see 'em work." (The random Munchkin wizard is using more illegal magic use that Ozma has to go put a stop to eventually). The thing that got the biggest exclamation from me was the use of radium in this book. We enter another strange corner of Oz to find "All the furniture was made of the same gloriuos metal, and Scraps [Patchwork Girl] asked what it was. 'That's radium,' answered the Chief. 'We Horners spend all our time digging radium from the mines under this mountain and we use it to decorate our homes and make them pretty and cosy. It is a medicine, too, and no one can ever be sick who lives near radium." So there you go then!

Is there nothing radium can't do? Kills lice and favors beverages!

What's that? TWO tin men? 

The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918)
This one makes it in the top third by sheer weirdness. Did you know the Tin Woodman (who is, by the way, an incredibly vain guy) was once engaged to a woman named Nimmie Amee? That he was in love when his axe was enchanted to chop away his body bit by bit? And, you may recall, that the Tin Woodman wanted a heart most of all from the Wizard. What we didn't know, until 1918, was that he was given a kind heart, not a loving heart. Thus, fiancee forgotten he
off to be Emperor of the Winkies. This book finds him on a quest to rediscover his lost love, which might not actually be the kindest thing to do. Vanity, thy name is Woodman. Along the way we find a Yookoohoo (is this a real thing? Baum certainly uses it more than once) named Mrs. Yoop who reminds me a lot of the giant from Lewis' The Silver Chair. We also discover that another man once fell in love with Nimmie Amee and was similarly enchanted to chop off all of his own limbs and became a Tin Soldier. Now, I know what you're thinking. What happened to those still living limbs? After all, each little piece of you is still alive in a country where you can never die. Well, I'm not going to spoil it. But it reminds me quite a bit of that terrifying taxidermist in John Connolly's Book of Lost Things. One more thing. Remember those nine tiny pigs the Wizard used in his flim-flams? Well, turns out "like all other children in the Land of Oz, they will always remain children, and in the case of the tiny piglets that is a good thing, because they would not be nearly so cute and cunning if they were bigger." Seriously, eternal childhood? Can you imagine if you were a parent of a baby when that fairy flew over the land, "blessing" everyone with the gift of no age and no death? To have a three month old forever? Don't worry though, "Everyone in the Emerald city is happy," said the Tin Woodman. "They can't help it."

You're almost there! You're such a trooper if you've read this far!

The Lost Princess of Oz (1917)
This is actually, factually a worthwhile quest book. No silly pursuit of birthday presents, here Ozma, Glinda's Magic Book, the Wizard's black bag, and Cayke the Cookie Cook's golden dishpan have gone missing. In fact, all the magic in Oz has vanished and it's up to Dorothy and company (Button Bright, the Wizard, Patchwork Girl) to save them. Maybe if they started a wizard school instead of just outlawing magic these problems wouldn't keep cropping up. Anyway, notable mention for the merry-go-round hills and the fact that Toto is finally getting some plot elements (lost growl!) and talking for once.

Classic Ozma. 

Ozma of Oz (1907)
Two words: interchangable heads. Those of us lucky (?) enough to have seen the 1985 film Return to Oz (and had it scar our childhoods) will remember the Princess Langwidere (Mombi in the movie) and the hall of women's heads. Return to Oz is a mashup of a few different books, but some of the main elements come from this installment (and really, Oz the Great and Powerful deserves it's own gender-politics blog post). At any rate, this is our first introduction to a few really important characters: Tik Tok, Ozma in her female form (more on that in a minute) and Ruggedero, the Gnome King. The Gnome King is the primary antagonist for the series, and I haven't really spent much time on him. However, yes, he does have a problem with eggs and yes, he does turn people into knicknacks. He also gathers armies multiple times to attack Oz, traps the Shaggy Man's brother, and is greedy in exile. Few books pass without the Gnome King getting up to no good (even, somehow, when the much nicer Kaliko takes over for Ruggedero). There are also lunchpail trees! How badly do I want a lunchpail tree? Pretty badly. Overall, Ozma of Oz wins the Bronze Medal of Oz sequels.

The Gnome King, Ruggedero.

Rinkitink in Oz (1916)
This was definitely a surprise to me, and proof that nostalgia doesn't always carry the day. I hadn't read Rinkitink before and was pleasantly surprised when I found it. Rinkitink has a nice classic fairy tale vibe with three magic pearls, a displaced heir, an enchanted goat, and a quest to regain one's homeland. It was rather nice to find a wholly "other" story here, at least until the Gnome King shows up! Gnome King! *shakes fist* Oh, also, a major instance of casual racism from the books (transformation goat-to-lamb-to-ostrich-to tottenhot--which is a lower form of a man). Hm, maybe I shouldn't have placed it so high in my list? Well, that unfortunate moment aside, I like Rinkitink. Racism tarnished silver medal for you, my friend.

Finally! The one! The only! The best Oz sequel!

The Gump 

The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904)
This is the second Oz book and has some of the most interesting gender politics. The book starts as General Jinjur and her army of girls come and capture the Emerald City from the Scarecrow who has been ruling since Dorothy left. (But wait, you say, where's Ozma? We'll get to that). While the girl army is mocked for being...girly, their knitting needles effectively conquer the city. General Jinjur's rule doesn't last, but when the city is liberated Baum offers us this tidbit: "I'm glad you have decided to come back and restore order, for doing housework and minding the children is wearing out the strength of every man in the Emerald City." When the Scarecrow questions why the women do it so easily the man sighs and says "Perhaps the women are made of castiron." That's right, gents, housework is work. The second interesting thing here is the character of Tip. Tip lives with Mombi, a wicked sorceress (but not yookoohoo, if anyone knows the disctinction). He steals her magic powder and runs off before she can turn him into a statue instead of merely a slave. Along the way he brings to life Pumpkinhead Jack (notorious for worrying about spoilage) and the Sawhorse (the only horse in Oz, as it turns out), and eventually the Gump, pictured above. The Gump is the best, btw. However, at the end of the book we learn that Tip himself has been transformed by Mombi and is...in fact...a girl! Tada! And not any girl either, but the ruler of Oz herself (transformed with the help of the Wizard, back when he was not such a great guy as he becomes later. Continuity-schmontinuity). Tip is anxious about his transformation, but everyone assures him that girls are just as nice and smart as boys. As, indeed, Ozma is. Gold medal for progressive gender politics and sentient furniture that asks to be disassembled.

So, that was a long blog post, and congrats if you hung in until the end. I shan't be reading any of the other canonical Oz books in the near future, I don't think. I may have some thoughts on Oz the Great and Powerful as a follow up, but for now, we've reached

On Monuments and Men

It's been too long since I touched this blog. As I told my friends recently, I'm too busy applying for jobs to do my job! This post on THE MONUMENTS MEN (2014) is too good to pass up, however, especially as it can work nicely in conjunction with my post on memorials (monuments, memorials, you see the connection).

I was excited about the release of THE MONUMENTS MEN because I'm a sucker for films about art (and art in general, as you can see in my last post), Matt Damon (BOURNE IDENTITY 4-evah), and Cate Blanchette (no clever aside, she's just fabulous). We watched it over the weekend at, appropriately enough, Midtown Art Cinema. I'm actually not at all a sucker for films about Nazis because they're (obviously) largely war films and that just isn't my genre. This may be a surprise considering how much I write about the Holocaust on this blog, but I really don't spend a lot of my personal entertainment time consuming Holocaust texts. Truth be told, I'll pretty much watch a cartoon over anything else if given the chance. Anyway, despite all of that, this post and my next one should both be about contemporary films that feature Nazis in some way. MM here followed by a post on 2011's THIS MUST BE THE PLACE which I really enjoyed and can't wait to talk about. However! MM is fresher in my mind and harder to rewatch since it's still in the theater so we'll tackle that one first.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the film, here's a trailer that sums things up pretty well: 

The film was fairly poorly reviewed, with a 34% on Rotten Tomatoes. LA Times critic Kenneth Turan says, "the film never finds a consistent tone and ends up lacking in all areas" while The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis believes it "slices off a sliver of a great World War II story and turns it into a lightweight entertainment that doesn’t ask you to think too hard." However, I found myself thinking only too hard about what remains largely unsaid in this film about eight men who go to save the great treasures of Europe from the Nazis.

Frank Stokes, played by director George Clooney, has a voice over which states "If you destroy an entire generation of people's culture it's as if they never existed...That's what Hitler wants." Yet the culture that's being destroyed here is curiously nondescript. Hitler, after all, wasn't aiming to destroy European culture in general. While there's an acknowledgement of the importance of the arts to "our" identity, the statement remains a fairly hollow one. 

Stokes' claim in this first preview seems to attempt to engage with one of the central elements of genocide itself: the concept of social death, without actually asking with the difficult questions of whose culture is being destroyed or why that even matters. ("Because it just does" isn't an acceptable answer for me.) Claudia Card's article, which I've linked to above, is a great analysis of culture, genocide, and their relationship to feminism, and I recommend reading it. Her summary of social death is the following:

Social death, central to the evil of genocide (whether the genocide is homicidal or
primarily cultural), distinguishes genocide from other mass murders. Loss of social
vitality is loss of identity and thereby of meaning for one’s existence. Seeing social
death at the center of genocide takes our focus off body counts and loss of individual
talents, directing us instead to mourn losses of relationships that create community
and give meaning to the development of talents.

Genocide is, at its core, an eradication of not only individuals but of identity and culture. Card, like Judith Butler in Precarious Life, asks us to reframe our understanding of genocide so it allows us to mourn not abstract numbers, but instead, reminders of what we all share. Relationships. Community. Culture. Seen in this way genocide or mass murder becomes less about the moment a life is extinguished and more about the process of removing all cultural signifiers from one's life. It is a violence against the symbolic, before the violence against the physical being, and each are equally important when conceptualizing genocide.

So, let's turn back to THE MONUMENTS MEN. Whose social death does Clooney as Frank Stokes seem to fear in this trailer?

He warns us of the "high price that will be paid if the very foundation of modern society is destroyed." What is that price? What comprises the foundation of modern society? The film fails to answer these questions. Just briefly in this trailer you can see one of the film's few references to Jewish victims: around 1:30 Cate Blanchette answers Matt Damon's question: "What is this?" with "People's lives." Surrounded by furniture, packed crates, and nicely arranged tea sets we see the tidy way that social vitality can be removed, inventoried, and stored away. This process mirrors the physical violence that is being enacted elsewhere: removal of bodies to camps, records of arrivals and deaths, and mass graves or crematoria. Yet this scene in the film is hardly longer than the one we see in the trailer itself. The movie rushes on without allowing us a moment to reflect and ask ourselves: wait, whose culture are we saving?

Now, MONUMENTS MEN never purports to be a story of Jewish culture, and perhaps I'm being too hard on it. Yet all we seem to come away with a sort of sense of smugness. Modern society hasn't been destroyed, after all! While greedy Hitler wants it all, and will destroy everything like a 2-year old if he can't have it, he really only wants certain parts of modern society. The non-Jewish parts. As does the film itself. There's a brief reference to the number of Torahs found and saved at the end of the film, and Clooney puts the smack down on a typically cold-as-ice Nazi in the film's closing moments. Mostly, however, this film is a celebration of some indomitable spirit of western culture--a sanitized, dehistoricized version of what Card would call social vitality. This leads me to my second criticism of MONUMENTS MEN. It fails to engage us on the subject of why art matters in the first place.


Anyone who has spent an afternoon wandering an art museum (particularly the modern art area with the Picassos and their demise that we're supposed to feel so troubled about in the film) is familiar with the following statements: "That's art?" "I could have made that" and the dreaded "I don't get it." For MONUMENTS MEN art is "the exact reason why we're fighting. For a culture, for a way of life." Yet the film never answers the crucial question of why art matters. It matters....because it matters! Now lets watch beautiful people run around for a bit. 

Is it so unreasonable to ask one art (film) to support and explain a bit why another art (painting/sculpture/architecture) matters? What do "we" (that troublesome, nebulous word in this film) risk if "we" lose our artistic heritage? I wanted this movie to sell me more on why art matters, to inspire me to see fine art as a viable part of my contemporary cultural identity. I wanted it to ask me to think how art makes an us out of a group of disparate individuals.

At the film's close, an older version of Frank Stokes looks at one particularly important statue from the movie with what we're to assume is his grandson. There's some awesome 70s hair, and an indication of Stokes' satisfaction with a job well done. It is another moment that fails to ask viewers to consider how or why art itself is worth saving as Stokes leads his grandson away suggesting ice cream. The final moment underscoring those ideas of social vitality (vs. the social death that characterizes genocide) is asking us to think about the power of ice cream to bring a family together, not art. I love ice cream, don't get me wrong. It's a foundational part of my childhood, in fact. However, it doesn't answer the question: why save this art? How does saving it, perhaps, save modern society itself? Do we get it, now? Maybe we should have just rescued the ice cream trucks and called it a day. Another artist happens to agree with me:

"Nazi lite." An inelegant way of dealing with such a complex story, one that should acknowledge the problems inherent in the very mission of the film itself: to save what "we" value, not the already tattered and torn European Jewish culture.

Cate Blanchette, by the way, is the best thing about this movie. Check out our "lone heroine" which isn't a problematic marketing tactic at all.

If you want more information on this topic you can look towards Lynn Nicholas' The Rape of Europa and the PBS documentary of the same name.  Also of interest, particularly in its examination of Herman Goering, is Edward Dolnick's The Forger's Spell, a book about how Europe (and the Nazis) were taken in by Vermeer forgeries.