Fantastic Word of the Week

From Anu Garg's venerable A.Word.A.Day at Wordsmith.org, the multiple definitions of "malkin":

1. An untidy woman; a slattern.

2. A scarecrow or a grotesque effigy.

3. A mop made of a bundle or rags fastened to a stick.

4. A cat.

5. A hare.

With several fantasy authors using real but somewhat obscure words as the names of their characters (e.g., Frances Hardinge, D. M. Cornish), it should be only a matter of time before a hard-to-believe persona gets the name Malkin. Of course, it's really just a nickname for "Mary," like "Molly," and all the dislikeable definitions above reflect our culture's old misogyny.

A Bad Adolescence and Abadazad

At the outset of the first volume of J. M. DeMatteis and Mike Ploog's Abadazad (in book form, not comic form), our heroine and usual narrator Kate describes herself as a "FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD MALCONTENT." Which seems fair.

Kate's grumpy. She's grumpy about the disappearance of her little brother, Matt, five years before. She's grumpy about her father leaving the family twelve years before. She's grumpy about her mother for what the storytellers suggest are the signs of bipolar disorder. She's grumpy about going to a psychotherapist. She's grumpy about going to school. She's grumpy at herself for letting Matt disappear. And she's even occasionally grumpy at Matt for having been a sickly-sweet child.

What does Kate like? She used to like the Abadazad books, though now she's mostly grumpy about them not being true (she thinks). She likes her diary, though she's a bit grumpy about having to call it that. She likes a rock band called the Thrashing Plague, which apparently reflects her grumpiness, but I don't recall her ever listening to music. She likes sitting in her closet--'nuff said.

But does Kate like writing? Does she like sports? The movies? Cell phones? Chinese food? Jon Stewart? The color purple? We never know. The Abadazad website includes toggles for games, computer wallpaper, and a text-messaging club, but there's no sign that Kate herself would take any pleasure in such things.

I had many moody moments in my teens, to be sure, but neither I nor any of my friends were quite so grumpy as Kate. I have no doubt that some people go through early adolescence more grumpily than others. But I suspect the real appeal of this common portrait of a teenager is that it lets readers vicariously experience their own desires to be grumpy to all people all the time. It's like having a super power, or being outside parental control. However, the result, to my tastes, is a flat and unappealing protagonist. I wouldn't have spent much time with Kate when I was a teenager, and I'm not sure I want to spent much time with her now.

Which is okay, since Kate obviously wouldn't enjoy spending time with me.

Wisest Thing I've Read Today

Ursula K. Le Guin in the New Statesman last month:

Many of us have at least one book or tale that we read as a child and come back to now and then for the rest of our lives. A child or grandchild to read aloud to provides a good excuse, or we may have the courage to return, quite alone, to Peter Rabbit, for the keen pleasure of reading language in which every word is right, the syntax is a delight in itself and the narrative pacing is miraculous. . . .

Curiously enough, most of these "lifelong" children's books are fantasies: books in which magic works, or animals speak, or the laws of physics yield to the laws of the human psyche. When there began to be such a thing as books written for children, in the mid-19th century, fiction was dominated by the realistic novel. Romance and satire were acceptable to it, but overt fantasy was not. So, for a while, fantasy found a refuge in children's books. There it flourished so brilliantly that people began to perceive imaginative fiction as being "for children".

The modernists extended this misconception by declaring fantastic narrative to be intrinsically childish. Though modernism is behind us and postmodernism may be joining it, still many critics and reviewers approach fantasy determined to keep Caliban permanently confined in the cage of Kiddie Lit. The voice of Edmund Wilson reviewing J R R Tolkien is still heard, bleating: "Oo, those awful Orcs!" There should be a word - "maturismo", like "machismo"? - for the anxious savagery of the intellectual who thinks his adulthood has been impugned.

To conflate fantasy with immaturity is a rather sizeable error. Rational yet non-intellectual, moral yet inexplicit, symbolic not allegorical, fantasy is not primitive but primary. Many of its great texts are poetry, and its prose often approaches poetry in density of implication and imagery. The fantastic, the marvellous, the impossible rode the mainstream of literature from the epics and romances of the Middle Ages through Ariosto and Tasso and their imitators, to Rabelais and Spenser and beyond. . . .

Realism comes in three separate age categories, fully recognised by publishers. Didactic, explanatory, practical and reassuring, realistic fiction for young children hasn't much to offer people who've already learned about dump trucks, vaccinations and why Heather has two mommies. Realistic "Young Adult" novels tend to focus tightly on situations and problems of little interest to anyone outside that age group. And realistic fiction for adults, with its social and historical complexities and moral and aesthetic ambiguities, becomes accessible to adolescents only as and if they mature.

As for "genre" fiction - mystery, horror, romance, science fiction - none of it is for children; they begin to read it as they approach their teens, but not before. The only kind of fiction that is read with equal (if differing) pleasure at eight, and at 16, and at 68, seems to be the fantasy and its close relation, the animal story. . . .

The Harry Potter phenomenon, a fantasy aimed at sub-teenagers becoming a great best-seller among adults, confirmed that fantasy builds a two-way bridge across the generation gaps. Adults trying to explain their enthusiasm told me: "I haven't read anything like that since I was ten!" And I think this was simply true. Discouraged by critical prejudice, rigid segregation of books by age and genre, and unconscious maturismo, many people literally hadn't read any imaginative literature since childhood.

Thanks to Janni Lee Simner's Desert Dispatches for the push.

Why I Love the Word "Verisimilitudinous"

Last month I inveighed against the clumsy and unneeded word "excitedly." So it's only fair to discuss a word I deeply admire and enjoy. As I announced to an entire international SCBWI conference a coupla years back (a long story), one of my favorite words is "verisimilitudinous."

Just listen to it (or its root). It starts with a cascade of five soft consonants paired with five short vowels. Then there's a sonic climax in the percussive yet not at all harsh syllable TOOD: hard consonants, a long vowel, a break into the dactyllic pattern. But then the wave settles back with two more soft syllables and a trailing sibilant. Verisimilitudinous.

And the word's very useful for writers. Not for use in actual stories, mind you, especially for young readers. But its meaning is vital for us, especially when it comes to fantasy. We're trying to create a similitude of reality, a situation that feels real, rather than to recreate reality.

We don't have to write with veracity to every detail, but we do have to write with verisimilitude. The two words have the same relationship as "truth" and "truthiness," the latter being what people want to believe. We need to convince our readers to accept what we write as true--as long as the story lasts.

"You have to draw the gopher fairies!"

At various times in his writing, L. Frank Baum described animals fairies who share the shape of the creatures they look after, just as his more traditional fairies did for humans. In John Dough and the Cherub, for example, the heroes escape to the realm of the fairy beavers behind a waterfall.

Although Baum called The Discontented Gopher an "animal fairy tale," no fairies actually appear in his story. The gopher fairies who leave a special gift for Zikky remain off-stage.

However, this new edition's designer, Mark Conahan, told the artist, "You have to draw the gopher fairies!" He could offer such advice not just as the designer but also as the artist's friend and spouse. According to her KOTA radio interview, Carolyn Digby Conahan had been struggling to find the right tone for the art, and drawing those gopher fairies (as shown on her website) provided the magical touch that got the project rolling.

Likewise, Baum never mentions Zikky and his fellow gophers living and dressing like humans, but Conahan takes advantage of picture-book conventions and does some anthropomorphizing. Zikky's wealth is not simply a lifetime's supply of corn. Conahan shows how he's arranged those kernels and ears into a stately sitting room.

In the first half of the book Zikky wears blue overalls, like his down-to-earth brothers. But after he becomes wealthy, he switches to a three-piece suit, like any gentleman of his time (including Rat, Mole, Badger, and Toad in The Wind in the Willows). The overalls reappear on the boys who cut off Zikky's tail and on the ordinary gophers he meets at the end.

Some of Conahan's most striking illustrations convey the small gopher's point of view: looking up at a massive plowhorse, for example. Page 25 shows what must be one of the rare illustrations in children's literature of a large, angry rabbit, with little Zikky dwarfed in the background.

Conahan's work transforms Baum's hundred-year-old magazine story into a fine modern picture-storybook, adding new dimensions and appeal.

What Makes the Gopher So Discontented?

Baum's story for The Discontented Gopher is a tale with a clear, even obvious moral. It starts with three gopher brothers choosing nuts to find which one gets a special gift from the gopher fairies. The youngest brother, Zikky, lucks out, and the other two scamper away, never to appear in the tale again.

Zikky receives a choice between contentment and wealth. He chooses wealth, figuring he can therefore buy contentment. His mother sees trouble ahead but seems rather sanguine about it all; perhaps she knows him too well.

The year before Baum published "The Discontented Gopher", he finished his Marvelous Land of Oz with Princess Ozma telling the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman:

"You are both rich, my friends,...and your riches are the only riches worth having--the riches of content!"

So it's pretty clear that Zikky has chosen, as the old man at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade intones, "poooorly."

The events that follow don't make up a smooth plot, but rather a psychological portrait in discontent. They show how Zikky is never satisfied, even after the fairies have brought him great gopher wealth in the form of a lifetime supply of corn.

Zikky finds a home near one of those new places called "farms," where people with horses and machines literally spew corn onto the ground for him to pick up and store away. But of course he can't be content to remain in his safe, well-stocked burrow. He must explore the home of men, and that produces nothing but trouble. A series of painful encounters with men, dogs, and gophers' natural predators render Zikky wounded and bedraggled.

Finally, two boys find Zikky close to death and cut off his tail to earn two cents from the authorities, as this edition's introduction explains. That prompts an odd authorial intrusion:

(Two cents apiece for Gopher tails! That means a Gopher's life. Is it really worth while, I wonder, to write so much about one of God's creatures whose life is worth only two cents?)

It was much more common in magazine stories of this time, including Baum's own "Juggerjook" for St. Nicholas, to go on about the sacred value of all creatures. But here he's being bitterly ironic, and ends up reflecting Zikky's own concern with wealth.

As it happens, Zikky doesn't lose his life along with his tail. Badly wounded, he struggles back to his burrow and gradually recovers. But of course he can't recover from his original choice of wealth. He can't be content with having escaped. Ashamed of his tailless state, he never ventures outside his burrow again, and other gophers decide he's "stuck-up, and conceited!" There's no redemption in this tale, no second act for Zikky. He is, and will always be, the discontented gopher.

"The Discontented Gopher," "Juggerjook," and all of Baum's published short stories are available in a single volume from the International Wizard of Oz Club.

The Discontented Gopher in Book Form

Back in November, I described hearing about a "New Baum Picture Book" called The Discontented Gopher. Having now received a copy of the book, I realize I should recategorize it as a "picture-storybook," that hybrid form that comes up mostly when new authors don't want to cut their picture-book manuscripts. (As in, "But there's something called a 'picture-storybook,' isn't there?" "Yes, but we still need to write very concisely.")

The Discontented Gopher has the complete text of the "animal fairy tale" that L. Frank Baum originally wrote for The Delineator magazine in 1905. The style of his time was more discursive than our post-Hemingway prose, so this book has a lot more text than a typical picture book. This edition is about 7 x 8.5 inches, 32 pages long, with color art on every page spread, printed endpapers, and a nice dust jacket.

The book starts with a three-page introduction on L. Frank Baum's life in Aberdeen, South Dakota, and the struggle between the region's farmers and gophers in the early 1890s. There's no name signed to this introduction, but I suspect it was written by Nancy Tystad Koupal, editor of this series for the South Dakota State Historical Society and also compiler of Baum's Our Landlady columns and the articles in Baum's Road to Oz.

That introduction is quite impressive: it's written at a kid's level yet offers historical background valuable for readers of any age, starting with how the arrival of European farmers in South Dakota changed the environment for gophers and other local fauna. Baum's son Robert was among the many Plains boys who recalled collecting gopher tails for the two-cent bounty, which figures in the story.

The last page of the book is also useful: a glossary of words that appear in Baum's text, some unfamiliar simply because nobody talks like that anymore ("anigh," "smote," "illumined"), and some because he was really writing for mothers and children together ("vainglory," "spasmodic," "tenacity").

In my next posting I'll discuss Baum's text, and after that Carolyn Digby Conahan's illustrations for this edition. Folks wanting to hear more about the genesis of this book can check out KOTA's radio interview with Conahan and Koupal.

An Oaf Is an Elf's Embarrassing Relative

From Michael Quinion's most excellent World Wide Words website comes this eye-opening article about the origin of the word "oaf":

There's an intimate connection between oafs and elves. In ancient legend, elves weren't the noble creatures portrayed in Tolkien's stories but powerful and dangerous supernatural beings more likely to harm humans than to help them.

Their name says so: it comes from an ancient Germanic term for a nightmare, a close relative of the first element of the modern German "Albdruck" with the same sense. Among other nasty habits, elves were thought to bring humans bad dreams and to steal their children, leaving changelings in their place.

It's from that belief that "oaf" first appeared in English, in the seventeenth century. Originally an oaf was an elf's child, one that had been left in a poor exchange for a stolen human one. In popular superstition, such children were assumed to be ugly or stupid. The first forms to appear were "ouphe" and "auf", the former turning up several times in Shakespeare's plays, though he used it to mean an elf or goblin. "Auf" appears in 1621 in the Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton: "A very monster, an aufe imperfect".

By the end of the seventeenth century it had settled to the modern spelling and "oaf" had moved to mean "idiot child" or "halfwit", then later took on the senses of a large and clumsy or a rude and boorish man.

But "Oh, you great clumsy elf!" doesn't have the same ring, does it?

Cybils Shortlist for Fantasy and Science Fiction

The Cybils shortlists were announced this morning, and the nominees for the Fantasy and Science Fiction category are, in alphabetical order:

• Beka Cooper: Terrier, by Tamora Pierce
• The Last Dragon, by Silvana de Mari
• Ptolemy’s Gate, by Jonathan Stroud
• Pucker, by Melanie Gideon
• Silver City, by Cliff McNish

Further descriptions of each book have been provided by the Cybils Fantasy and Science Fiction nomination committee, who generously read nearly 90 submissions in this category. Many thanks to Sheila Ruth, Michele at A Scholar's Blog, Gail Gauthier, Miss Erin, and Kim Bacciella.

In addition, there are fantasies nominated in some other Cybils categories, such as Linda Medley's Castle Waiting (graphic novels, age 13+) and Markus Zuzak's The Book Thief (young adult fiction)--and I count all those picture books about anthropomorphic animals as fantasies as well.

And now to bed (with a nominated book).

Studio 360 Goes to Oz

The Public Radio International program Studio 360 reran its examination of The Wizard of Oz in many forms last weekend. I caught some familiar voices from Oz fandom, as well as some new observations from writers. The show's website has a resource page on each of its segments, along with a RealPlayer download, and the episode can be downloaded for a fee from Audible.com.

Shown above are the Russian equivalents of Dorothy and her friends. In Alexander Volkov's translation of L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy became Elli; the Tin Woodman became the Iron Woodman (the better to rust); and the Scarecrow, named Strasheela, is only as large as the Munchkins whose clothes make up his body.