“That's impossible! Even for a computer.”

A couple years back, the White House moved our First Amendment right to petition the government onto the web, setting up a site for people to file petitions. I peeked in on the site in November 2011, and already it was becoming a bit of a joke.

After last year’s election, thousands of people who would normally describe themselves as American patriots discovered the site and petitioned for their states to secede from the US. OIP Derangement Syndrome is strong with those. Because the White House promised an answer to every petition signed by 20,000 or more people, its staff has had to explain to people that the Articles of Confederation and Constitution have no exit clauses.

More than 34,000 people petitioned for the government to start a Death Star program by the end of President Obama’s second term. Paul Shawcross, Chief of the Science and Space Branch at the Office of Management and Budget, demonstrated command of the issues with his reply:

The Administration shares your desire for job creation and a strong national defense, but a Death Star isn't on the horizon. Here are a few reasons:

• The construction of the Death Star has been estimated to cost more than $850,000,000,000,000,000. We're working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it.
• The Administration does not support blowing up planets.
• Why would we spend countless taxpayer dollars on a Death Star with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship?

“Most Partisan” Complaint Reveals OIP Derangement Syndrome

One of the memes that Republicans have repeated about President Barack Obama is that he’s “the most partisan President ever.” For example, we heard those words in early 2010 from Rep. Candice Miller of Michigan, in late 2010 from political organizer Karl Rove, and during last year’s campaign from Rep. Paul Ryan.

The Washington Post pointed out a year ago that in fact President George W. Bush had a bigger split in his approval/disapproval from Americans in the two parties during his second term. But actual data doesn’t matter to people with OIP Derangement Syndrome.

Just before last fall’s election Republican speechwriter Peggy Noonan wrote of the President:

He misread his Republican opponents from day one. If he had been large-spirited and conciliatory he would have effectively undercut them, and kept them from uniting. (If he'd been large-spirited with Mr. Romney, he would have undercut him, too.) Instead he was toughly partisan, he shut them out, and positions hardened.

As a reader on Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish remembered, Noonan was among the conservatives Obama met with in January 2009 in an attempt at political outreach and reconciliation. But somehow it’s his fault that her party’s “positions hardened.”

At the end of last year President Obama had his former opponent Mitt Romney to lunch at the White House. He did the same with Sen. John McCain after the election in 2008. And that conciliatory tradition goes all the way back to…2008. No one remembers George W. Bush doing that right after the election. Yet people with OIP Derangement Syndrome see this President as “the most partisan.”

Right now the right wing in Washington is upset about President Obama’s nomination of former Senator Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense. That supposedly ultra-partisan politician wants to appoint a Republican to his cabinet, a man whom fellow Republicans praised in the past as Vice Presidential material, a “respected leader in America,” and a “leading voice in foreign affairs.” Regardless of Hagel’s merits, he’s not evidence of Obama being the “most partisan President ever.”

Indeed, it’s valuable to look back at the beginning of 2009 when President Obama was assembling his first cabinet. He offered posts to three Republicans: Robert Gates as a holdover Defense Secretary, Rep. Ray LaHood as Transportation Secretary, and Sen. Judd Gregg as Commerce Secretary. Gregg first accepted the offer, then turned it down after an outcry from fellow Republicans.

Who was the last U.S. President to try to bring three members of the opposing party into his first cabinet? That had never happened since the birth of the modern party system. In other words, Obama was trying to be the least partisan new President in memory. But many Republicans project their own partisanship, fear, and hatred onto this President.

“Nothing but the great gray prairie on every side”

This year’s Modern Languages Association meeting is barely over, and it’s already time to start planning for next year’s. This call for papers came across the Child_Lit list:

“Deliver Us to Normal: Children’s Literature and the Midwest”

This panel will consider the ways Midwestern children’s literature both reproduces recognizable tropes associated with the region and subverts or challenges them, often within the same text. Like the Midwest itself, child characters and child readers are highly contested constructions, in a state of continual oscillation between adult desires for them and their own developing agencies. Located in a geographic and discursive middle, sometimes outwardly simple and often deceptively complex, the Midwest finds a fitting home in its children’s literature, which mirrors its critical concerns.

Topics prospective panelists might wish to address include, but are not limited to:

• children’s literature and competing definitions of the Midwest
• the roles of Chicago, Detroit, and other Midwestern urban centers in works for children
• children’s authors who live or lived in the Midwest
• the Midwest as a colony and/or racial and cultural contact zone
• the relationship between written text and pictures about/of the Midwest in children’s literature
• museums and other tourist sites in the Midwest with a relationship to children’s literature, such as the Laura Ingalls Wilder museums in Missouri, Kansas, South Dakota, and Wisconsin [There are a lot of ’em, aren’t there?]
• depictions of agriculture, farming, and rural life for children

Please send 500-word abstracts by March 15, 2013 to Kate Slater.

The 2014 MLA will take place in Chicago, capital of the Midwest, 9-12 January.

Oz from Oz

You’ll be pleased to know you can get this cartoon as a t-shirt from Mike Jacobsen’s Neato Shop.

Jacobsen is also the creator of this Superman brilliance.

And this warning about the dangers of science going too far.

Jacobsen shares new work regularly from Australia at See Mike Draw.

Prince Bobo’s Place in Nature

This is the frontispiece from Thomas Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863). It shows the skeletons of four apes and a human being.

Huxley’s point was that these skeletons had so much in common that they showed a common ancestry. However, it was easy for Englishmen, reading left to right, to view this lineup as the track of evolution itself rather than the present state of five parallel species. (In other words, to come away with the understanding that the human was supposed to have evolved from the gorilla rather than the human and gorilla having a common ancestor in the past.)

For an article in progress, I’m wondering whether I can make the case that that illustration inspired this lineup of characters drawn by John R. Neill in Rinkitink in Oz (1916).

.
These drawings show the series of transformations that Glinda performs to ***SPOILER*** turn Bilbil the Goat back into his rightful form as Prince Bobo of Boboland.

In that scene L. Frank Baum defined the Tottenhot as “a lower form of man,” closest to animals, echoing a racist western belief about the “Hottentots” almost two centuries old by that point. That idea connects to the medieval concept of the Great Chain of Being. But did it also link, perhaps by parody, to the late Victorian understanding of human evolution?

My Authority Record

Last week I received a nice note from a university library:

I’m cataloging your George Washington's headquarters and home. I wish to create an authority record for your name to distinguish it from the other J. L. Bells in our catalog. Would you be willing to provide me with some piece of personal information, such as a birth year (preferably), or what your initials J.L. stand for?

Thank you for considering this odd request.

I was already familiar with that system because it came up when I published my first book nearly twenty years ago. The cataloguing-in-publication system doesn’t like the semi-anonymity of author initials.

I replied:

Thanks for your email. I was born in 1965. I might show up in your system already as the author of SOAP SCIENCE. Yes, that's me.

That’s a collection of science experiments for kids aged 8 to 12 originally published by Kids Can Press.

And the cataloguer replied:

Thanks so much for your reply! Yes, your name has already be set up as “Bell, J. L. (John Leonard), 1965-” . I made the guess that you were not the same person as the author of Soap science, so this information is very much appreciated. I will add the George Washington info to your authority record.

It wasn’t the request that was unusual, you see; it’s my writing output.

I noticed that the cataloguer formats all book titles in the library way, with capital letters only at the start and for proper nouns. How cute.

Anyway, I now have an expanded authority record.

When Batman and Robin Went Sci-Fi

“The Isle That Time Forgot,” from Batman, #10, is one of the first Batman stories that definitely borrowed from science fiction. Earlier tales of the Caped Crusader had touched on the fantastic, but through the genres of Gothic horror and even fairy tales rather than science-inspired tropes.

That story from April-May 1942 showed the Dynamic Duo landing Dick’s new miniature batplane on an island that appears—to the Boy Wonder at least—to be infested with living dinosaurs. Robin keeps saying he’s seen the giant creatures; Batman keeps telling him to stop talking nonsense. (More specifically, he snaps, “Don’t get gay!”) As shown above, Robin also falls down a bit. I’m not spoiling a good story when I ***SPOILER*** this one: there really are dinosaurs on the island, but they’re mechanical.

In Batman, #24 (Aug-Sept 1944), the Dynamic Duo had their first real time-travel adventure. That is, if we accept that Prof. Carter Nichols could actually send Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson back to ancient Rome through nothing but hypnosis. That story has lately been credited to Dr. Joe Samachson. The Nichols character appeared in several more Batman time-travel adventures as recently as this decade’s “Time and the Batman.”

Joseph Greene is credited with scripting “The Year 3000” in Batman, #26 (Dec 1944–Jan 1945). This is an unabashedly futuristic adventure featuring Bruce Wayne’s distant descendant (and his young pal Ricky!) fighting an invasion from Saturn.

Finally, Batman, #41 (June-July 1947), went all out with Batman and Robin running into real extraterrestrial visitors, and on the cover yet. Gardner Fox is usually credited with writing “Batman, Interplanetary Policeman!” He wrote some of the earliest Batman scripts and continued to work for DC Comics until 1968.

Thus, within a decade of his invention, Batman was involved in science-fiction adventures on top of his usual crime-fighting. The idea of Batman in space is usually associated with the “Silver Age” of DC Comics, starting in 1956. And indeed Pat Curley at Silver Age Comics has mapped the peak of stories in which Batman and Robin meet aliens (not including Superman himself) as from 1958 to 1963. But the tradition goes back to the 1940s.

At that peak time, Julius Schwartz was reinventing DC’s superhero universe with new sci-fi versions of old trademarks like the Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, and the Atom. Superman editor Mort Weisinger was reportedly leaning on Batman editor Jack Schiff to shift toward science fiction. When Schwartz took over the Batman books in 1964 with the “New Look,” he reversed course back to goofy crime stories, but he also integrated Batman and Robin into the larger, now sci-fi-driven DC Universe.

Thus, it was only a matter of time before Dick Grayson would have a hot alien girlfriend.

Fastest Game in Chestnut Hill

This is a retrospective posting about what I did on Friday. Godson and family were in town, so we all went to the Yale–Boston College hockey game. Godson’s mother took the photo of the rink above. I’m on the left and Godson’s Uncle is on the right.

Toward the back you can see the glow of the Jumbotron. At one point Godson, Godson’s Brother, and their cousins were all on the big screen, jumping around to be noticed—a highlight of the evening.

The Jumbotron also figured into the introduction of Boston College’s team. At the start of the season, it appears, all the varsity players were videotaped in their uniforms, voguing for the cameras with their sticks across their shoulders. I kept thinking that the choreography was developed with the expectation that they would be shirtless. “Big baggy maroon and gold jerseys? Oh, honey, you should have told me! I was thinking little bow ties. Well, it’s too late now.”

Anyhow, Yale won 3-3. Which is to say, the Bulldogs were ranked lower going into the game but dominated the play and outshot the Eagles more than two-to-one. Excellent goalkeeping by BC’s Parker Milner and successful penalty killing meant that the home team lead for most of the way. Then Yale rolled off three straight goals before getting into their own penalty trouble. But in the end, even the BC Hockey Blog agrees, the Eagles were lucky to come out with a tie.

Who Wrote “The Isle That Time Forgot”?

While researching the last weekly Robin posting, I stumbled across a curious dispute over the question of who wrote “The Isle That Time Forgot,” the story in Batman, #10 (April-May 1942), that showed Dick Grayson turning either eight or thirteen or fourteen, depending on which panel you read and how.

Of course the story was credited to Bob Kane, the artist who had brought Batman to DC Comics and tried to take full credit for the character for years. But by that point DC had hired Kane’s original studio team of Bill Finger, Jerry Robinson, and George Roussos, and employed other freelancers as well. The company didn’t keep records from that period, so it’s hard to link particular stories with their creators.

Both Robinson and Roussos reportedly identified “The Isle That Time Forgot” as their work. For other stories and other details, fans have tried to fill in the gaps, but identifying artists by their visual styles is easier than fingering writers.

In DC’s recent reprints and the Grand Comics Database, “The Isle That Time Forgot” is credited to Joseph Greene. That identification appears to rest on the judgment of Martin O’Hearn, apparently based on “comparing textual styles.” That would make this story Greene’s very first published comics script.

However, in 2002 writer Alvin Schwartz has queried whether some of the Batman stories from that period credited to Greene should really be credited to himself. He definitely wrote for DC at the time, couldn’t recall hearing of Joseph Greene, and spotted some details he didn’t think any other writer (except his own erstwhile writing partner Charley Greene) could have come up with.

Complicating matters, other sources say that Greene later wrote under Grosset’s in-house pen name of “Alvin Schwartz.” As a man actually named Alvin Schwartz, Alvin Schwartz was surprised by that. He was more aware than anybody how mid-century American publishing wanted him to use a name more like, well, “Bob Kane” (born Robert Kahn).

But Schwartz also notes that comics historians defending his place in the early comics industry have credited him with stories he never wrote. It’s all very tangled, and if all we have to go on is subjective judgments of “textual styles,” we must learn to live with uncertainty.

“Nothing for Dorothy”?

The Daily Ozmapolitan tipped me to this recent profile of Andrew Lloyd Webber in the Toronto Globe and Mail. The occasion was the Toronto opening of Lloyd Webber’s reworking of the MGM Wizard of Oz for the stage as it creeps closer and closer to direct competition with Wicked on Broadway.

The Globe and Mail states:

He’s teamed up with his old writing partner [Tim] Rice to pen a number of new songs to add into this stage version of the 1939 movie, which he admires for having “arguably one of the best songs ever written” but he does not think works as well in the theatre: “It has nothing to set up Dorothy in Kansas; it has nothing for the Wizard; and there’s nothing for either of the witches.”

And here I thought Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg’s “Over the Rainbow” did set up Dorothy in Kansas. But the article goes on to quote Lloyd Webber explaining: “There’s nothing for Dorothy – she’s supposed to be this feisty little girl who wants to get out of Kansas and we don’t have anything that suggests [this].”

Indeed, that’s not how the MGM moviemakers dared to depict her. When their Dorothy does try to “get out of Kansas,” she’s punished with the cyclone and her nightmare journey to Oz. She ends up promising Glinda that she’ll never look for her heart’s desire any farther than her yard. MGM didn’t want Dorothy to be “feisty” or to be rewarded for being adventurous.

L. Frank Baum’s original Dorothy got carried off to Oz not because she’d been running away but just by chance. While there she learned about her own strengths. And although she finished that book telling Aunt Em it’s good to be home again, the next time we see her she’s on a ship to Australia during a storm. That’s feisty.

The paper also quotes Lloyd Webber as saying Avril Lavigne “would be good. Very, very good” as Dorothy. It’s a sign of my age that I have no idea what that implies.