One Never Knows, Do One?

PBS’s website is displaying an interview from Scientific American with James Pennebaker, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas:

In the 1980s, my students and I discovered that if people were asked to write about emotional upheavals, their physical health improved. Apparently, putting emotional experiences into language changed the ways people thought about their upheavals. In an attempt to better understand the power of writing, we developed a computerized text analysis program to determine how language use might predict later health improvements. In other words, I wanted to find if there was a healthy way to write.

Much to my surprise, I soon discovered that the ways people used pronouns in their essays predicted whose health would improve the most. Specifically, those people who benefited the most from writing changed in their pronoun use from one essay to another. Pronouns were reflecting people's abilities to change perspective.

Of course, correlation doesn’t indicate causation—Pennebaker’s analysis suggests that changing how one uses pronouns wouldn’t lead to better health because what matters is an underlying ability. But who knows?

That first unexpected finding about pronouns and health outcomes led Pennebaker and his research team to investigate further using the same language-analysis tools. Further conclusions:

• “men use articles more than women, when you might guess there'd be no difference. . . . Across dozens and dozens of studies, women tend to talk more about other human beings. Men, on the other hand, are more interested in concrete objects and things. To talk about human relationships requires social and cognitive words. To talk about concrete objects, you need concrete nouns which typically demand the use of articles.”
• “We've compared the pronoun use of suicidal versus non-suicidal poets. Basically, poets who eventually commit suicide use I-words more than non-suicidal poets.”
• “One of the most interesting results was part of a study my students and I conducted dealing with status in email correspondence. Basically, we discovered that in any interaction, the person with the higher status uses I-words less (yes, less) than people who are low in status. The effects were quite robust and, naturally, I wanted to test this on myself. . . . When undergraduates wrote me, their emails were littered with I, me, and my. My response, although quite friendly, was remarkably detached — hardly an I-word graced the page. And then I analyzed my emails to the dean of my college. My emails looked like an I-word salad; his emails back to me were practically I-word free.”
• “Several labs, including ours, have now conducted studies to evaluate the prospect of building a linguistic lie detector. The preliminary findings are promising. In controlled studies, we can catch lying about 67 percent of the time where 50 percent is chance. Humans, reading the same transcripts, only catch lying 53 percent of the time. This is actually quite impressive unless you are a person in the judicial system.”
• “we can predict people's college performance reasonably well by simply analyzing their college admissions essays. Across four years, we analyzed the admissions essays of 25,000 students and then tracked their grade point averages (GPAs). Higher GPAs were associated with admission essays that used high rates of nouns and low rates of verbs and pronouns. The effects were surprisingly strong and lasted across all years of college, no matter what the students’ major.”

This being an interview, it doesn’t come with statistics showing how close the correlations are, or sample size and limits. Still, it gives one pause to think.

Blood, Toil, Sweat, and Tiers

Carol Burrell of Lerner Graphic Universe just offered a posting on comics page design that gave me cause to think:

• “If we compare comics to prose, I like to think of a panel as a sentence.” Okay, that makes sense: a panel and a sentence are both discrete, complete units of a whole.
• “A horizontal row of panels is called a tier. I like to think of the tier as a paragraph. Like a paragraph, it is a unifying element. The start a new paragraph is the start of new idea, it signals change. A new tier is also great opportunity to signal change.” In scripts I’ve been thinking in terms of pages; I don’t think I’ve gotten down to tiers. Burrell’s own SPQR Blues webcomic usually came in installments of a single tier each, suitable for assembling into pages, so it would be natural for her to approach those tiers as discrete and complete units, too.
• “A big panel equals a big moment.” That’s basic, but can’t be repeated enough. Burrell offers some good visual examples (particularly from Scott McCloud) of how a big panel works alongside others.
• “Creating a good page of comics, and then a good sequence of pages, is a bit like solving a puzzle.” I definitely agree with that.

In fact, envisioning a comics page seems more like doing a puzzle than telling stories in any other media I can think of. That’s because every few “sentences” and “paragraphs” have to fit together to fill a set amount of space—the page. They can’t take up less space than nearly the whole page; we feel cheated as readers if there’s too much blank. And panels can’t fill more than a page because paper doesn’t stretch. (Digital comics have more flexibility, of course.) So designing a comics page is like creating sentences and paragraphs and then playing Tetris with them.

Jane Yolen: “The children don’t care about the politicians”

The Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, just ran an interview with author Jane Yolen, prompted by her response to news that Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) had read a picture book she wrote at a public appearance. She expressed a hope that politicians like him would do more than just read to children while the cameras are on—that they would recognize the value and virtue of funding libraries, for instance.

Though Yolen is quite clear on her dislike and distrust of the “Tea Party” movement that (with his employer’s money) helped elect Johnson over Russ Feingold, I think it’s notable that she avoids easy potshots at the man’s approach to children’s literature:

CT: Did he seem to understand the moral of your story about the dinosaur correctly? (In my article I quote him telling children that they will make their parents very happy by following the "lessons" the dinosaur teaches them about cleaning up after themselves, putting their toys in neat rows, and not shoving dirty laundry to the back of drawers.)

JY: It is a book that is not just about manners, but as they say in Britain is also taking the micky out of regular manners books. The dinos in the books are really children who can be naughty and natural and charming at one and the same time. And their parents who still love them even when they have their moments of outrageousness.

CT: Is it exciting when celebrities or politicians read your books like this? Which others have done so?

JY: Not exciting at all. I'd rather the parents were reading to the children. Or the librarian. The children don't care about the politicians. . . .

CT: The senator said that he read "Curious George" books to his three children except that when his son [Johnson’s first two children were daughters] was four or five he started reading him the Wall Street Journal. Any comment about what could happen to a four-or five-year-old child raised on the Wall Street Journal?

JY: My youngest child's favorite book at that age was "Peterson's Bird Guide." Bird-watching with his father was his most passionate interest at the time. If you have a struggling reader, you go where the child is, not push books on them in which they have no interest. He's still a passionate birder and now an award-winning nature photographer.

Of course, that generous perspective was lost on some in the right wing, who can’t abide any criticism.

Knitting Needles in Oz

The September/October 2011 issue of Piecework magazine (current link here, but it won’t last) has the theme of “needlework in literature.” Among the knitting and crochet patterns tied ever so gently to books is Joanna Johnson’s “Jinjur’s Jumper,” accompanied by an article on that character from L. Frank Baum’s The Marvelous Land of Oz.

I’m sorry to say that Johnson’s dress pattern isn’t designed like the outfit that General Jinjur and her soldiers wore in John R. Neill’s illustrations, one of which accompanies the article and another of which appears below. Nonetheless, it’s rooted in Victorian style, pretty, and impressively seamless.

The magazine’s little model for that dress wears a knitting needle in her hair, as Jinjur’s soldiers did. They used those sharp sticks to attack men who tried to stop their conquest of Oz. But knitting needles proved no match for the spears and swords of Glinda’s army.

While Baum never shows Jinjur or her soldiers actually knitting, he depicts a number of other female characters doing so:

• Mme. Grogrande in John Dough and the Cherub.
• Grandmother Gnit (of course) of the Fuddlecumjigs in The Emerald City of Oz.
• Trot’s mother in Sea Fairies and Sky Island.
• Reera the Red, a reclusive and powerful magic-worker, in Glinda of Oz.

There’s something magical about knitting and crochet—taking a cord that seems one-dimensional and producing something two- or three-dimensional out of it.

Johnson’s article provides a brief introduction to Baum, his Oz books, and his support for women’s suffrage. It unfortunately repeats a myth that he and artist W. W. Denslow struggled to find a publisher for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: “nearly every publisher in Chicago refused the book initially because of its fantastic subject matter and extensive color plates, which were very expensive to print.” Really?

In fact, as Michael Patrick Hearn traces in The Annotated Wizard of Oz, Baum completed his first draft on 9 Oct 1899; he preserved his pencil with the date. By that time, Baum and Denslow’s Father Goose was a big hit, and the Geo. M. Hill Company had an option on their next book.

That small publisher asked the team to pay for the color plates and cover dies—not uncommon terms at the time. Baum and Denslow agreed, and they signed a publishing contract on 16 November. Less than six weeks passed between complete draft and contract, and I know of no evidence that the creators even spoke to other publishers.

How Robin Saved a Life—Through Television

In one of Marc Tyler Nobleman’s interviews with people behind the Superfriends television cartoons of the 1970s and early 1980s, artist Darrell McNeil recalled a proud moment:

[A] girl in Ohio, I think, saved her sister from choking with [the Heimlich] maneuver, which she learned from watching Batman and Robin do it on All-New Super Friends. And since I did all the clean-up animation on that sequence (and took ribbing from my oversexed colleagues—especially Sandy Young; god, whatta mouth! LOL). Well, it’s one of the prouder moments of my career.

After diligent Googling, I found a passage from New Times magazine in 1978 which mentioned some footage about this topic:

In it there was an interview with a Minneapolis fourth-grader who had saved the life of a girlfriend choking on a piece of candy by employing something called the Heinlich [sic] maneuver. She testified that she had seen the technique on ABC’s Saturday morning cartoon show “Super-friends,” where Robin demonstrated it on Batman. The narrator mentioned many other examples of ABC’s educational and instructional value to children.

This is notable for two reasons.

First, the Heimlich maneuver, or abdominal thrust, was a new thing then—which is why New Times misspelled its advocate’s name. Dr. Henry Heimlich had published instructions in Emergency Medicine only in 1974. Until 1985, the American Heart Association and American Red Cross still recommended helping a person who’s choking by first slapping him on the back. (In 2006, the AHA returned to recommending backblows before abdominal thrusts.)

These days most Americans have been exposed to the Heimlich maneuver, but back in 1978 millions of people had probably never seen it before Superfriends. (I don’t recall this clip, but to this day I have a vivid memory of seeing Aquaman show how to get something out of your eye without rubbing.) So that clip might have contributed to saving more lives in the years that followed.

Second, ABC highlighted that story of a life being saved because back in 1978 the network was under pressure to increase the educational content of its programs for kids. That was around the high-water mark in American culture for the idea that the highest purpose of government was to help the unfortunate and vulnerable instead of to protect people’s existing advantages.

Under pressure from groups like Action for Children’s Television, the networks’ National Association of Broadcasters adopted limits on commercials and some content. They created short educational bits to slip in between the adventure cartoons, such as Schoolhouse Rock and, yes, Batman and Robin demonstrating the Heimlich maneuver. To fend off calls for stricter regulation, the network made a film highlighting “examples of ABC’s educational and instructional value,” as New Times reported.

Then Ronald Reagan was elected President, reflecting and accelerating a new view of government, as Daniel T. Rodgers discusses in The Age of Fracture. Rules were out; markets are in. The Superfriends stopped giving health advice, Schoolhouse Rock went off the air in 1985, and the Fairness Doctrine was abolished in 1987. In 1990, Congress passed the Children’s Television Act, but without public pressure the networks didn’t try to seed educational content everywhere.

“The gates of magic were open to everyone…”

This afternoon I happened to be thinking about how L. Frank Baum portrayed Dorothy in his Oz books as an “ordinary little girl,” not inherently magical or unlike her readers. Of course, if she got her hands on the Magic Belt, watch out!

That presents a world of possibility fundamentally different from what’s proffered in series like Susan Cooper’s Dark Is Rising, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, and Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson. Those portray an innate, unbreachable divide between people who can work magic and those who can’t.

Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus books depict a situation in between, a world where some people are have natural magical aptitude but—to the magicians’ dismay—“ordinary” humans can break the barrier.

This evening I found that novelist David Liss has been pondering the same issues in an essay at io9:

In my research, what I found most interesting was how common and ordinary magic was to people in the past. There was also dark and mysterious magic, which was part of a hidden world populated by unknowable beings, but mostly there was ordinary, routine magic that was incorporated into everyday life. It was part of this world and part of nature, and most people didn't trouble themselves too much with how or why it worked. That it did work was taken for granted.

In the past, people generally believed they could acquire magic in two ways: through learning the craft, either from another practitioner or from books; or through obtaining magic from a powerful being-think Faust or the classic, demonized witch, both of whom get their mojo from Satan. Anyone could learn magic as long as he or she had access to the knowledge or could make a connection with the right supernatural entity. The important point is that in theory, the gates of magic were open to everyone, and what I find most interesting is how that has changed in popular culture. . . .

Magic has gone from being an open system to a closed one. Their massive popularity make the Harry Potter novels and films the most glaring example, but it's everywhere, and has been for decades now: TV shows like Charmed and Wizards of Waverly Place, books like those of Laurell K. Hamilton and Charlaine Harris. More often than not, magical practitioners are born, not made. Magic is an exclusive club. You can watch and be envious, but you can't join.

I can't prove it, but I strongly suspect the turning point is the TV show Bewitched.

Of course, that show was inspired by the 1942 film I Married a Witch, itself adapted from the novel The Passionate Witch, and the 1958 film Bell, Book, and Candle. All three use innate magic as a metaphor for the power a woman might sacrifice in marrying. The theme of innate, unobtainable powers has been around for a long time. What may be new is the dominance of one approach over others.

In response to Liss’s essay, Alyssa Rosenberg at Think Progress writes, “I wonder if a sense of biological magic also correlates to a sense of unease about how much power we have to impact our lives and to change the world”—by which she means how little power. Of course, kids fantasize about getting the call to Hogwarts or Camp Half-Breed, not being left behind.

Does Your Book Have Enough Motion?

I was struck by this GalleyCat report on a web service called BookLamp that tries to do for reading what Pandora does for music: suggest what else you’d like based on what you’ve chosen in the past.

Pandora analyzes music according to what it calls “genes,” about 400 of them. What variables does BookLamp look at? According to GalleyCat, they’re:

1. Motion: “Motion refers to the level of physical motion in a scene or book”.
2. Description: “Description refers to the level of descriptive language that the author uses in his or her writing.”
3. Pacing: “Pacing refers to the layout of the text on the page. A scene with high Pacing will have characteristics that quickly move the reader’s eye down the page.”
4. Density: “Density refers to the complexity of the text. Text with high Density will take longer to read than a text of equal length with low density.”
5. Dialog: “Dialog refers to the amount of spoken text between two or more characters in a scene.”

This reminds me of the old joke about the man looking for his keys under a lamppost not because he dropped them there but because the light was better. Are these really the metrics we use to choose books? Or are they just what a computer can easily measure?

When I checked out the BookLamp site and its underlying Book Genome project, I realized that there are a lot more variables involved. The five above seem to be part of what the creators call LanguageDNA. So the system seemed more promising.

I tried typing in Billy Bathgate as a novel I’ve liked. BookLamp suggested…another historical novel by E. L. Doctorow. I don’t think I needed software for that suggestion.

Discovering Illustrator Frank Kramer

The latest issue of The Baum Bugle, the research journal of the International Wizard of Oz Club, is very impressive. Most of the content is former editor Atticus Gannaway’s study of Frank Kramer, illustrator of Jack Snow’s The Magical Mimics in Oz (1946) and The Shaggy Man of Oz (1949).

I won’t deny that this is a specialized topic: the work-for-hire illustrator of two of the least beloved later sequels in the Oz series, whose other art appeared mostly in pulp magazines and sports novels. But Atticus’s research is especially impressive because:

• Very little was documented about Kramer before, even within fan circles. Basically, all the information we had came from Snow’s Who’s Who in Oz; though Snow was in the best position to know about Kramer’s career, he wasn’t thorough or reliable.
• The articles assemble findings from many different approaches: archival research, interviews, analysis of illustrations, round-up of critical commentary. 

I was particularly struck by some behind-the-scenes details about how Kramer worked on his two Oz books. I hadn’t known that Magical Mimics was ready for publication a year or two before it appeared; wartime shortages caused the publisher, Reilly & Lee, to postpone it. That meant it took Snow even longer than I’d thought to finish a sequel (which he eventually did by borrowing a lot from L. Frank Baum’s John Dough and the Cherub, then out of print).

Jack Snow evidently found Kramer through the pulp magazines, a market both men were working. Snow thought Kramer’s line style and experience with out-of-this-world subjects meant he could stand in for longtime Oz illustrator John R. Neill, who had died in 1943. I think Kramer manages some impressive effects in his books (Atticus quotes my praise for one illustration), though I agree he didn’t give Snow’s child heroes any more life than Snow did.

Most surprising, the article shows that Reilly & Lee gave Snow instructions to pass on to Kramer. I’d never heard of a publisher working that way—usually they try to insulate the author and artist from each other. I guess that shows how pitifully Reilly & Lee was scraping along by the late 1940s.

Some people don’t like to know the commercial stories behind their favorite books, any more than they like watching laws or sausage being made. At least in my adulthood, I find that topic almost endlessly fascinating.

Weekly Robin Super Friends Special

Over at Noblemania, Marc Tyler Nobleman has started to share a long series of interviews with people involved in the Super Friends (spellings vary) Saturday morning cartoons of the 1970s and early 1980s. Here’s the introduction.

I remember watching Challenge of the Super Friends with my brother, but it didn’t make a big impression on me. I saw a few episodes last summer with Godson and family, and realized why. It’s not a good show. The characterizations are flat, the action repetitive. Still, my brother and I watched it every Saturday, and so did the kids last summer.

The interviews help to explain. The writers had to work within rules that strictly limited action. Not just no hitting because of network content guidelines, but no more than one movement per shot—more would break the budget. The scripts showed practically no conflict within the Super Friends, and no glimpses of the heroes’ unmasked lives, leaving no interpersonal drama. It’s pretty impressive they were able to come up with stories at all.

Of all the voice actors cast in Super Friends, the one who became most famous was Casey Kasem, later host of a nationwide Top 40 countdown. He, of course, played Robin. The photo at top shows Kasem at a table read; it comes from Sydney Croskery, daughter of the late Danny Dark (one of the actors who voiced Superman), and was first published at Noblemania.

Kasem was a Hanna-Barbera regular, already playing Shaggy on Scooby Doo—quite a different personality. All the other voice actors interviewed so far remember him as a fun, friendly colleague.

How did Kasem get the job of Boy Wonder? Born in 1932, he was no longer young. Indeed, one of Marc’s recent interviewees, Mark L. Taylor, stated, “I remember always thinking how funny it was that Casey Kasem (Robin) was just as old or older than Adam West (Batman [or one of them]).”

So what made Hanna-Barbera look at their regular troupe and say, “Casey’s our Robin!”

My theory? The sweater vest.

These Super Friends postings are in turn a mere subset of Marc’s stock of upcoming interviews with people involved in other adaptations of DC comic books in popular entertainment [and I use that term loosely] of that decade. For example, Marc’s logged forty-four conversations with people involved in a superhero water-ski show at Sea World.

Marc Tyler Nobleman is the author of Boys of Steel: The Creators of Superman and a book on comics scripter Bill Finger scheduled for publication in 2012.

It’s Birds! It’s Planes! It’s…Supermen!

Supermen!: The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes, 1936-1941 promises to fill gaps in “the origins and early development of superheroes and the comic book form.” Editor Greg Sadwoski has assembled an eye-catching collection of stories, magazine covers, and house ads showing unfamiliar faces from the first years of American adventures comics.

There are many familiar names, however. Sadowski appears to have sought out stories by creators who eventually found success with other characters: Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Jack Cole, Will Eisner, Bill Everett, Joe Simon, and Jack Kirby, among others. The collection includes two stories by the execrable Fletcher Hanks, who’s on his way to being the least deserving artist to have his entire oeuvre reprinted. My favorite item is the cover of Fantastic Comics, #3, by Eisner and Lou Fine.

Along the way there are a few landmarks in the development of the American superhero. We see the first caped flying hero (Zator, 1936), the first masked comic-book hero (the Clock, 1936), the first adolescent hero in cape and shorts (Dirk the Demon, 1938—two years before Robin).

But Supermen! is most interesting for what didn’t lead anywhere. All these comics are in the public domain, which of course makes them cheaper to republish. The book is thus a collection of failures—characters and storylines that didn’t attract enough readers to survive. There’s nothing from the firms that became DC and Marvel, and only a couple of items from M.L.J. before it found Archie. In the evolution of the American comic book, these are dead ends.

Seeing what didn’t work or become the norm can be as illuminating as seeing what did. For example, the field was already on its way to male domination when Al Bryant used the pen name “Allison Brant” for a horror story about “Fero, Planet Detective” in May 1940.

We can see publishers figuring out what sells. Silver Streak Comics’s first covers in late 1939 featured a villain—a sort of superhuman Fu Manchu named the Claw. By issue #3 the magazine showed off a hero named Silver Streak instead, and by issue #7 another new hero called Daredevil was fighting the Claw.

Several stories in this volume, especially the earliest, are space-opera science fiction, inspired by Buck Rogers (1928) and Flash Gordon (1934). Their heroes aren’t costumed crime-fighters, but square-jawed men with ordinary abilities in futuristic settings.

The earliest are chapters within continuing stories: the adventures of Dr. Mystic (1936), Dan Hastings (1937), and Cosmic Carson (1940) break off at cliffhangers rather than conclude with triumphs. Clearly, early comic-book publishers and creators were taking their cues from newspaper comics, with their ongoing adventures. But families had newspaper subscriptions, and municipal distribution networks were solid. In contrast, fledgling comic-book publishers probably couldn’t deliver the next installments so reliably, so readers gravitated toward magazines that told complete stories.

Now the industry’s gone back to stretching storylines out over several issues, a form of storytelling possible only because their readership has fallen and their distribution though comic-book shops is narrow but reliable.