Queen of OIP Derangement Syndrome

This week former half-term governor Sarah Palin said on Fox News:

You could hearken back to the days before the Civil War, when too many Americans believed that not all men were created equal. It was the Civil War that began the codification of the truth that here in America, yes, we are equal and we all have equal opportunities, not based on the color of our skin. You have equal opportunity to work hard and to succeed and to embrace the opportunities, the God-given opportunities, to develop resources and work extremely hard and as I say, to succeed. Now, it has taken all these years for many Americans to understand that the gravity, that mistake that took place before the Civil War and why the Civil War had to really start changing America. What Barack Obama seems to want to do is go back before those days when we were in different classes based on income, based on color of skin.

Yes, in Palin’s mind, the current President of the USA wants to return the country to its social system before the Civil War. (Though, as David A. Graham of the Atlantic pointed out, Palin wasn’t actually able to use the word “slavery” in describing the country at that time.)

All because as a law student Obama supported Prof. Derrick Bell, a former civil-rights lawyer for the US Justice Department, in his campaign for a more racially integrated faculty of the Havard Law School.

Thus, to Palin and her advisors, asking for more integration is actually the equivalent of seeking a return to black slavery and white supremacy. Half a second’s consideration might tell us that’s not what two black men were really seeking, but Palin perceives otherwise.

This is the workings of OIP Derangement Syndrome, combined with ignorance and self-righteousness on an epic scale.

Children of Hitchcock

Debbie Olson at Oklahoma State University has invited scholars and critics to submit proposals for a book of essays on Hitchcock’s Children:

Although children and youth appear in a great number of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, they are rarely the focus of critical attention. This collection seeks to remedy that oversight and aims to add to the rich and varied tradition of Hitchcock scholarship. Many of the children and youth that appear in Hitchcock films are background or minor characters, yet they often hold special importance.

From The Young and Innocent (1931), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Strangers on a Train (1951), The Trouble With Harry (1955), and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) to The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964) children and youth perform both innocence and knowingness (and so much more) within Hitchcock’s complex cinematic texts.

Though the child often plays a small part in Hitchcock’s films, their significance, both symbolically and philosophically, offers a unique opportunity to illuminate and interrogate the child presence.

It is indeed impossible to watch the crucial sequence in Sabotage (1936) when Sylvia Sidney’s little brother carries the bomb on the bus without laughing.

The volume will define children as “birth to age 12” and youth as “age 13 to 17.” Olson invites prospective contributors to send an abstract of 200-500 words, current contact information, and a brief bio or CV by 30 May 2012, to her email. Completed papers are due 31 August.

While I recognize that Hitchcock did his direct work for the cinema, can’t this volume include a ground-breaking study of the depiction of male youth in his commissioned Three Investigators series?

One Hundred Years of Sky Island

This year is the centenary of Sky Island, one of L. Frank Baum’s very best fantasy novels. It tells the further adventures of Trot and Cap’n Bill, the little girl and one-legged old sailor Baum introduced in Sea Fairies, with the addition of Button-Bright and Polychrome from The Road to Oz. Unlike those books, Sky Island has a real plot.

However, it didn’t earn Baum as much as he wanted, so for his next fantasy novel he returned to the Oz series. Eventually he merged the two series by bringing Trot, Cap’n Bill, and Button-Bright to the Emerald City, but since Sea Fairies and Sky Island don ’t have the word “Oz” in their title they’ve never attracted so many readers. In the latter case, that’s a shame.

Last May, artist Kevin Merriman posted some unusual character designs for Button-Bright and Trot. Check out the link for his take on Cap’n Bill as well.

Davy Jones, Rocker

After Davy Jones’s unexpected death on 29 February, a lot of commenters responded by citing or quoting the Monkees’ biggest chart hits—most of which he didn’t sing lead on. Micky Dolenz was the band’s most successful singer, with the best pop voice.

But Davy Jones was crucial to the band as an entertainment entity. Without him, there would have been no Monkees. There might have been a similar television show, but the combination of those performers and their personalities wouldn’t have gelled successfully.

First of all, Jones was cute. So cute he could put over a song like Harry Nilsson’s “Cuddly Toy,” which has some of the most heartlessly caddish lyrics in pop:

You’re not the kind of girl to tell your mother
The kind of company you keep.
I never told you that I loved no other—
You must have dreamed it in your sleep.

You’re not the only cherry delight
That was left in the night
And gave up without a fight!
You’re not the only cuddly toy
That was ever enjoyed
By any boy.

Watch the video of that song, and you’ll see that Jones was at heart an English music-hall song-and-dance man. And at the height of the British Invasion, being English was another of his assets.

Jones was already under contract with Screen Gems when the Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider started to develop the sitcom. His manager, Ward Sylvester, was part of the search for other cast members. The show could easily have been built around Jones with the rest of the group treated as his backup band: Davy and the Three Tall Guys! Indeed, his character’s penchant for falling in love drove the plot of the pilot.

But Rafelson and Schneider had a different vision, inspired by the Beatles. They wanted four distinct, interesting personalities. They cast four talented young men. And, crucially, Jones threw himself behind that decision.

In his self-published autobiography They Made a Monkee Out of Me! [doesn’t everyone have a copy?], Jones described an awkward lunch with the other three Monkees early in their training, and how (after bursting out with criticism at Dolenz’s table manners) he broke the ice by gobbling up his salad. If he’d played the aloof Broadway star or the solo teen idol, I doubt the group would have found the chemistry to make their show so entertaining, much less to try to break out of its constraints.

All the “Reasons for Robin”

For a while I’ve felt I should collect the links for my “Reasons for Robin” postings into one handy round-up, and I’m finally getting around to it.

1. So Batman can have someone to talk to.
2. So Batman can have someone not to talk to.
3. Younger readers can identify with Robin.
4. Robin displays a broad range of emotions.
5. He slips, he falls!
6. Robin, the Boy Hostage!
7. Under age and undercover!
8. Comic relief!
9. Robin is still a kid.
10. Robin isn’t evil.

Some of those postings connect on to other essays. And eventually, I suppose, lead back to here.

Pouring Gasoline on OIP Derangement Syndrome

At a press conference on 6 March, a Fox News correspondent asked President Barack Obama about gasoline prices. (Curiously, that correspondent described in advance what Republicans in Congress were going to say. How, I wonder, would he know?) In any event, the question was:

Your critics will say on Capitol Hill that you want gas prices to go higher because you have said before that will wean the American people off fossil fuels onto renewable fuels. How do you respond to that?

In fact, President Obama has never said that higher gas prices “will wean the American people off fossil fuels,” but this is Fox News, a principal network of transmission of OIP Derangement Syndrome, which involves making claims unsupported by evidence or logic that can justify one’s visceral dislike of seeing Obama as President.

Back in 2008 Obama responded to a fast rise in gas prices by saying:

The fact that this is such a shock to American pocketbooks is not a good thing. But if we take some steps right now to help people make the adjustment, first of all by putting more money into their pockets, but also by encouraging the market to adapt to these new circumstances more quickly, particularly US automakers, then I think ultimately, we can come out of this stronger and have a more efficient energy policy than we do right now.

Nothing about “weaning.” Recently Politico did use that word in a story about Energy Secretary Steven Chu that it quickly had to correct. Chu had actually said, “We agree there is great suffering when the price of gasoline increases in the United States, and so we are very concerned about this.”

And at his news conference, Obama’s answer to Fox News began:

Ed, just from a political perspective, do you think the President of the United States going into re-election wants gas prices to go up higher? Is that—is there anybody here who thinks that makes a lot of sense? Look, here’s the bottom line with respect to gas prices: I want gas prices lower because they hurt families.

That seems clear, logical, and sympathetic. But OIP Derangement Syndrome is a powerful malady that affects even the most grandiose intellects. In fact, the more grandiose a person, the harsher the case can be.

Later that same day, Newt Gingrich stated:

I thought today, in one of the most shallow and self-serving comments by a president I’ve heard in a long time, he was candid in his press conference. He said, you know, I’m really worried about higher gas prices because it will make it harder for me to get re-elected. I did not make this up. It was just nice to know that the president once again has managed to take the pain of the American people and turn it into his own personal problem.

Of course, Gingrich did make that up. He projected his own psychological demons onto a stereotype of the President, and thus made clear who’s really “shallow and self-serving,” willing to “take the pain of the American people and turn it into his own personal problem,” and in thrall to OIP Derangement Syndrome.

Mark Waid and the Evolution in Digital Comics

Mark Waid is one of the best superhero comics scripters around, and has created interesting comics in other genres as well. As a hungry freelancer and occasional editor, he’s very concerned about how digitization is affecting that storytelling form.

Two years ago Waid gave a speech at the Harvey Awards about file-sharing’s effect on the comics business that went over so badly he felt a need to rearrange his notes into an essay on Comic Book Resources. It called for innovation, concluding:

We are the smartest, most creative medium in America. We put out ideas on a periodical basis bam, bam, bam. We don’t put out a screenplay every three years. We don’t invent a TV show every ten years. There are more ideas in one Wednesday in one comic shop than in three years of Hollywood. We’re notoriously bad businessmen, but we are unmatched for creativity and inventiveness, and there are ways to make filesharing work for us rather than cower in fear that it’s going to destroy us.

Of course, the sort of creativity that involves ray guns and retroactive continuity is different from the sort that comes up with successful new business models.

A few months later Waid went into greater length about copyrights and digital comics in a long interview after leaving BOOM! Studios to become a freelancer once again. And late last month Waid previewed a new format for digital comics with this short demo film.

Currently digital adaptations of printed comics struggle to adapt art created for the aspect ratio of a magazine page to the various screen sizes of our devices. The most popular software, such as that from ComiXology, can offer a full-page view (readable only on iPads and similar large tablets, and sometimes not even then), but their main format involves showing each panel or part of a panel in sequence. This can be awkward.

Waid and his artists started with a smartphone screen, using a horizontal aspect ratio, as their basic page or canvas. A space that size can show one to three panels at a time. A “swipe” or tap can bring on the next set of panels, like a traditional page turn, or add elements to the current page, including:

• an additional panel, not shown to readers before.
• more of a panel image, which can produce the effect of a camera pulling back.
• new details within a panel image, which produces the effect of time passing.
• changing “showing the invisible” elements of the comics form, such as a caption or word balloon.

The result adds the dimension of time to the comics storytelling process while stopping well short of expensive full animation. It does seem innovative, both in format and in narrative possibilities. Whether it will be a successful business model is another question.

Aspect Ratio Ratiocination

Receiving an iPad for the holidays and seeing Mark Waid’s experiment with digital comics started me thinking about the aspect ratio of books. Why are most books square or taller than they are wide?

This pattern goes back to some of the earliest surviving codexes, and crosses cultural boundaries.

I think the answer rests in the technology itself. A codex was stronger if the pages were stitched up along one of their longer sides. Furthermore, readers quickly found it was easier to hold and use a book if that line of stitching was vertical, supporting the pages and providing a symmetric reading surface.

That format carried over to printed books, which in the West settled into standard sizes (folio, quarto, octavo) based on standard sheets of paper. Even publications that aren’t bound, such as newspapers, usually have a vertical aspect ratio.

Among the exceptions are many picture books, especially from mid-20th-century America: The Little House, The Runaway Bunny, Where the Wild Things Are, and so on. Those share the horizontal aspect ratio of cinema, selected to fill our binocular vision. In fact, when picture books present single images on full spreads, as they’ve increasingly come to do, they almost all have horizontal aspect ratios.

While some trim sizes are more expensive than others, book publishers can choose from an infinite range of aspect ratios. In contrast, an electronic device offers a screen of one defined size. Its proportions might differ from one device to the next. A device might be flippable to offer two ratios (say, 3:2 or 2:3). But if creators or publishers want to take advantage of the full screen, they have to adapt to its dimensions.

Generally the default setting for digital books is still based on a vertical aspect ratio, and that for digital videos on a horizontal aspect ratio. Adaptations of illustrated books seem to be caught in the middle, some going one way and some the other, some trying to offer both. Eventually we’ll probably have a standardized aspect ratio for screens, and designers will start with those dimensions in mind.

Baum and Burroughs

Publicity for the upcoming John Carter movie has brought a little new attention to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s friendship with L. Frank Baum. Yesterday the New York Times stated:

The Barsoom novels are a little like the Oz novels of Burroughs’s friend and eventual California neighbor L. Frank Baum, whose estate, Ozcot, was not far from Burroughs’s Tarzana. Both are partly reflections of how the authors saw the United States at the time. But even more, they’re escapes from it, written by relatively late bloomers who found in writing a fulfillment that had earlier been denied them.

Baum and Burroughs did have a lot in common, including an upper-class upbringing and education, a series of jobs and moves in early adulthood, and sudden and lucrative success in writing popular fiction. They probably even knew the same neighborhoods in Burroughs’s home town of Chicago; Baum’s publisher for Father Goose and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the Geo. M. Hill Company, was on the same block as one of Burroughs’s apartments.

At the same time, Baum was nearly twenty years older, so he probably saw himself as a mentor for this newcomer to the literary world and to California. They met late in 1916, sixteen years after Baum’s biggest hit had come out and four years after Burroughs’s appeared in magazine form. (Tarzan was first published as a novel in 1914.) Thus, the two authors probably had little literary influence on each other.

Baum introduced the young writer to a gentlemen’s lunch club he’d co-founded called the Uplifters, which Burroughs described as a “select group of millionaires, clerks, and other celebrities, all members of the Los Angeles Athletic Club.”

Baum became seriously ill in 1918, which curtailed his social activity, and he died in 1919. Thus, the two authors weren’t friends for long. Burroughs bought his Tarzana estate, much larger than Baum’s Ozcot house and garden, a few months later. By then he was earning large amounts from both press and the movies.

Publishers and the DPLA

On Friday I attended the event at Harvard about the Digital Public Library of America. I ended up asking the last question of the session, which was about publisher support—or lack of it—for the venture.

Earlier that week, the news broke that Random House was planning to charge libraries up to three times the consumer price for digital books. As the speakers had pointed out, only one of the six major US commercial publishers was offering libraries terms on ebooks close to what readers can pay. Meanwhile, there’s a whole ’nother set of issues over scientific, medical, and technical publishers and what they charge to research libraries for access to papers.

In reply, Prof. Richard Darnton pointed out that publishers have legitimate reasons to be worried about digital public libraries damaging their sales. Prof. John Palfrey said that some publishers were observing the DPLA work with interest. Still, it didn’t sound like such companies were ready to jump in, and that left me wondering how that limited the DPLA’s potential.

Mike Shatzkin discussed just that issue in an essay titled “Libraries and publishers don’t have symmetrical interest in a conversation”:

Because libraries are, at most 5% of a general trade publisher’s business and far less of the ebook business, and because the market is changing so rapidly and because every retailer except Amazon can be said to be struggling to carve out a sustainable position in the global ebook marketplace, there are many legitimate reasons for the biggest publishers to take a wait-and-see attitude about libraries and ebooks. . . .

Of course, libraries view this differently because the big books from the big publishers are a lot more than 5% of their patrons’ interest.

Libraries need the big books more than the big commercial publishers now need libraries. Plus, when government budgets are being slashed and people are questioning the value of public services, libraries don’t have the same economic leverage they’ve had at other times in publishing history.

None of that came as a surprise to me, of course. In fact, I was sitting next to a gentleman who’s made much of his living publishing a local guidebook, and I pointed out that a digital copy of that book available to anyone could conceivably wipe out his business, or at least hurt it badly.

Shatzkin’s essay goes further to suggest that the divergent interests of big publishers and public libraries are further complicated by the industry’s longer game of trying to ensure that there’s enough competition for Amazon not to become a monopoly. Would cooperating with libraries mean hurting Barnes & Noble and other non-Kindle sources of ebooks?