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Vacationing in Oz

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Original Covers of Three of L. Frank Baum’s Oz Books

It’s all well and good to read serious literature, but every once in a while it is good to return to the land of childhood. Why? It is a place where imagination rules, and we can all use a little childlike imagination to see us through the consequences of our bad decisions.

After reading a serious Russian novel (Eugene Vodolazkin’s The Aviator), I decided to read the sequel to L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, namely: The Marvelous Land of Oz. In all, Baum wrote some fourteen books set in the Land of Oz, and I intend to read all of them—even the ones I have read some decades ago.

In this second book of the series, there is no Wizard, no Dorothy, no Toto, and no Kansas. We do, however, encounter the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodsman and even the Good Witch Glinda. As Baum was no slave to precedent, he introduces several new characters: the boy Tip, Jack Pumpkinhead, an animated sawhorse, and others. There are in addition the moderately bad witch Mombi, the feminist General Jinjur, the Gump (an animated flying machine made of inanimate spare parts), and H. M. Woggle-Bug, T. E. (The H. M. is short for Highly Magnified, and T. E. refers to his being Thoroughly Educated.)

The closest thing to a villain is Mombi, who is allied with General Jinjur and his all-girl army to rule Oz after the Scarecrow and his friends are driven out. Jinjur’s army does not come across as much of a threat, as they are armed only with knitting needles.

I plan to read one Oz book per month until I have finished the series, which I have complete on my Kindle.

Throwing Down the Glove

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Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris

As I read today for the first time a play by French Writer Honoré de Balzac, I was reminded of the last scene in his great novel Père Goriot as Eugène de Rastignac attended the poor funeral of his old neighbor Goriot..

But just as the coffin was put in the hearse, two empty carriages, with the armorial bearings of the Comte de Restaud and the Baron de Nucingen, arrived and followed in the procession to Pere-Lachaise. At six o’clock Goriot’s coffin was lowered into the grave, his daughters’ servants standing round the while. The ecclesiastic recited the short prayer that the students could afford to pay for, and then both priest and lackeys disappeared at once. The two grave diggers flung in several spadefuls of earth, and then stopped and asked Rastignac for their fee. Eugene felt in vain in his pocket, and was obliged to borrow five francs of Christophe. This thing, so trifling in itself, gave Rastignac a terrible pang of distress. It was growing dusk, the damp twilight fretted his nerves; he gazed down into the grave and the tears he shed were drawn from him by the sacred emotion, a single-hearted sorrow. When such tears fall on earth, their radiance reaches heaven. And with that tear that fell on Father Goriot’s grave, Eugene Rastignac’s youth ended. He folded his arms and gazed at the clouded sky; and Christophe, after a glance at him, turned and went—Rastignac was left alone.

He went a few paces further, to the highest point of the cemetery, and looked out over Paris and the windings of the Seine; the lamps were beginning to shine on either side of the river. His eyes turned almost eagerly to the space between the column of the Place Vendome and the cupola of the Invalides; there lay the shining world that he had wished to reach. He glanced over that humming hive, seeming to draw a foretaste of its honey, and said magniloquently:

“Henceforth there is war between us.”

And by way of throwing down the glove to Society, Rastignac went to dine with Mme. de Nucingen.

My Halloween Reading

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At the end of September, I set myself a program for reading several appropriate ghoulish, ghastly, and horrifying titles in honor of my favorite holiday, Halloween. You can read about my intentions here.

Of the ten books I ended up reading last month, five were appropriate for the season:

  • Ann Radcliffe: The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents
  • Joyce Carol Oates: Cardiff, by the Sea
  • Thomas Ligotti: The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Other Gothic Tales
  • Edgar Allan Poe: The Portable Poe
  • Ray Bradbury: The Halloween Tree

They were all pretty good. Not surprisingly, I thought the Poe was best, followed by the Bradbury. That was a surprise, as it was written for the juvenile market, but I enjoyed every minute of it. The Ann Radcliffe was a hoot, as the British tended to think that nothing was spookier than Catholicism, (Maybe it was that thing about the Holy Ghost.)

I liked the Ligotti book because it was a fun way to revisit all the high points of the genre. Cardiff, by the Sea wasn’t technically a Halloween novel, except for the fact that everything Joyce Carol Oates is a bit on the spooky side.

Notorious

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Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

As part of my Halloween reading, I am reading Penguin Books’ The Portable Edgar Allan Poe. After having read numerous popular editions of Poe, I decided to concentrate on an edition that took him seriously as one of the greatest literary figures of the young Republic.

There is little doubt in my mind that Poe is a genius. At the same time, there is little doubt in my mind that Poe was anything but warm and fuzzy as a person. He admitted as much in his story “MS. Found in a Bottle” (1832): “Of my country and of my family I have little to say. Ill usage and length of years have driven me from the one, and estranged me from the other.”

Later in the same paragraph:

I have often been reproached with the aridity of my genius; a deficiency of imagination has been imputed to me as a crime; and the Pyrrhonism of my opinions has at all times rendered me notorious.

Looking back at Poe’s life, one can see him constantly produce brilliant stories and poems, yet struggle to earn a living or find happiness in marriage or family. He was orphaned at the age of two and had a tempestuous relationship with his stepfather John Allan, whose last name he adopted as his middle name.

Over and over again, we find that the characters in life died young of consumption. Poe did not react well: He took to the bottle. In fact, he died of alcohol poisoning at the age of forty, though the newspapers of the time blamed “congestion of the brain” or “cerebral inflammation.”

It requires some extra discipline for me to forget Poe’s unhappy life and concentrate on his works. Let’s face it: some very unhappy people have created works of such vivid imagination that made him ever so much more than the lunatic that critic Rufus Wilmot Griswold described as walking “the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses, or with eyes upturned in passionate prayers, (never for himself, for he felt, or professed to feel, that he was already damned).”

Poe’s life is a closed book, but his works will live on forever.

Preparing for Halloween

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British Gothic Novelist Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823)

Usually, I spend much of the month of October each year reading gothic or horror fiction. I have already started reading Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797), after which she quietly stopped writing and spent the last twenty-six years of her life as a private person. I have fond memories of reading her novels The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794).

Also, I will inevitably read one of Joyce Carol Oates’s underrated gothic novels or collections of short fiction. Other possibles are Thomas Ligotti and Robert Aickman. And I will certainly re-read some of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories.

In November, I will write a post detailing with gothic/supernatural/horror titles I have read.

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

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Soviet Writers Arkady (1925-1991) and Boris (1933-2012) Strugatsky

They were by far the greatest science fiction authors who ever lived. The two brothers produced a string of masterpieces (the greatest being Roadside Picnic, or Пикник на обочине) that are unlikely to be surpassed, ever!

I am currently reading two of their novels whose chapters are artfully interleaved. They wrote Ugly Swans (Гадкие лебеди) in 1972; in 1986, they wrote Lame Fate (Хромая судьба) and shuffled the chapters together. Reading it is an amazing experience. I’ve finished about 40% of the nested novels at this point. I haven’t even encountered the science fiction yet, though I feel it is lurking and waiting to pounce.

Among the brothers’ works I have read are:

  • Space Apprentice (1962)
  • Far Rainbow (1963)
  • Hard to Be a God (1964)
  • The Final Circle of Paradise (1965)
  • The Second Invasion from Mars (1967)
  • Prisoners of Power (1969)
  • The Dead Mountaineers’ Hotel (1970)
  • Roadside Picnic (1972)
  • Definitely Maybe (1977)
  • Beetle in the Anthill (1980)
  • The Time Wanderers (1986)

Many of the Strugatskys’ titles have never been translated into English. I think that, ultimately, they will all be. I can think of few Soviet writers working in any genre that have such a large and consistently excellent body of work.

There are only a handful of science fiction writers I admire. After the Strugatsky brothers, there are Stanislaw Lem from Poland and, in the United States, Philip K. Dick and Clifford D. Simak.

The Oldest Book in My Collection

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It was September 1962. I was 13½ years old, and newly enrolled as a freshman at Chanel High School in Bedford, Ohio. The school was a Catholic school and taught by the Marist Fathers, who lived in a community on the top floor of the high school building.

Probably the strangest (to me) course in my first year was Latin 1, in which we studied Julius Caesar’s The Gallic Wars in the original Latin.

Most of the kids from wealthier families picked up a copy of Cassell’s Latin-English dictionary, but I chose instead to get the Collins Latin Gem Dictionary, which could fit in my shirt pocket. (Eventually, I also got the White’s Latin Dictionary, which looked to have been originally published in the 1800s.)

My Collins Latin Gem Dictionary is still in good condition and still eminently usable. The nice thing about Latin is that books in and about the Latin language never go out of date.

Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est.

The Most Influential Books in My Life

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I Read All These Books Multiple Times, Starting at Least Thirty Years Ago

The following is a re-post from ten years ago. I still feel the same way about all these titles.

These are not necessarily the greatest books I have ever read. They are, however, the ones that have most influenced me. Each of them, I have read multiple times, and I first read them all before 1985. I have presented them here in alphabetical order by author:

  1. Anonymous. Njals Saga. Why haven’t more Americans read this book? It tells of a time when Iceland was governed by clans, and justice was crude but effective. It’s one of two Icelandic sagas that have a museum dedicated to them. The Njals Saga museum is in Hvöllsvollur, and I have visited it twice. The other honors Egils Saga and is located in Borgarnes.
  2. Balzac, Honoré de. Old Goriot. How does a young man make his way through life? Balzac’s hero, Eugène de Rastignac, is one of the great heroes in fiction.
  3. Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. Borges has been one of my teachers, having turned me on to so many of the books, people, and places that have mattered in my life. I am re-reading it now for the fifth time.
  4. Chatwin, Bruce. In Patagonia. Maybe not every word that Chatwin writes is true, but even his fictions have lured me to the southern tip of Argentina twice, and soon, for the third time.
  5. Chesterton, G. K. The Man Who Was Thursday. Learn with Gabriel Syme how to see the lamppost from the light of the tree instead of vice versa. Here we are in the world of paradox.
  6. García Marquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. This is a book I bought at a souvenir stand at the ruins of Chichén Itzá in Yucatán. It showed me that life was magical.
  7. Highet, Gilbert. The Art of Teaching. Originally, I wanted to become a college professor. I never quite made it, but Highet made me wish I had. I first read this book while I was in high school.
  8. Orwell, George. Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Another high school read: How does one tread the fine line between genteel poverty and selling out?
  9. Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time. I am reading this now for the third time. I hope to live to read it several times more. Generally, it takes me a decade to re-read all seven novels in the series. When reading it, I am totally absorbed in the world of Marcel.
  10. Strunk, William and White, E. B. The Elements of Style. Strunk & White showed me that good writing is essentially simple and direct. Another classic from my teen years.

I could easily add more titles, but these titles keep swirling around in my head and influencing me.

A Writer Like No Other

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Uruguayan Writer Felisberto Hernández (1902-1964)

I have just begun reading Piano Stories by the late Uruguayan writer Felisberto Hernández. It is very clearly unlike anything else I have ever read. He was an author admired by Italo Calvino, Julio Cortázar, and Francine Prose. According to Italo Calvino:

Hernández’s most typical stories are those that are centered on a rather complicated mise-en-scène, a spectacular ritual that unfolds within the depths of an elegant house: a flooded patio in which lighted candles float; a little theatre of dolls large as real women striking enigmatic poses; a dark gallery in which one is supposed to recognize by touch objects that elicit associations of images and thoughts.

His translator, Luis Harss, provides some rather odd biographical details:

He married four times; was a great eater and raconteur at literary soirees; had a passion for fat women; loved to improvise on the piano in the styles of various classical composers; once toured Argentina with his own trio, other times with a flamboyantly bearded impresario called Venus González. He preferred to write in shuttered rooms or basements; suffered a life-long emotional dependence on his mother; was haunted by morbid vanity and a sense of failure; became ill-humored and reactionary in middle age; and died of leukemia, his body so bloated it had to be removed through the window of the funeral home in a box as large as a piano.

Pain(e)sville

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Writer Harlan Ellison (1934-2018)

He’s from the same part of the world from which I hail. Painesville, the county seat of Lake County, is some 30 miles northeast of Cleveland. He has been called a science fiction writer, a designation which he (rightfully) hates. It’s more speculative fiction, with an emphasis on the short story form.

The man from Painesville was known for being something of a pain. His obituary in the Los Angeles Times remarks:

Over the years, Ellison has been described as fiercely independent, vengeful, sardonic, opinionated, confrontational, foul-mouthed, petulant, infuriating, defiant and a general all-around nuisance—as well as engaging, gregarious, funny, fastidiously organized and generous to his friends.

By his own measure, he was “a hard pill to swallow.”

He is gone, with all his objectionable behavior, but his stories remain. And they are well worth reading. I suggest you try one of the following collections:

  • I have No Mouth and I Must Scream (1967)
  • The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World (1969)
  • Approaching Oblivion (1974)
  • Deathbird Stories (1975)
  • Shatterday (1980)

You might also want to try reading the sci-fi story collection he edited in 1967 entitled Dangerous Visions.

Although he will be remembered as much for being a prickly character as a brilliant writer, I think that over time the latter will replace the former in the estimation of readers.