mariness

1) Happy Festivus to all! Here, I am pleased to tell you that the holiday has gone quite well and according to custom with the Grey One knocking down a pole. (Well, ok, technically the Swifter, but, a pole is a pole and she liked watching it fall since her grievances, apparently, are poles that stand up and faucets that could be running water, but aren't, so, it counts as a Festivus sort of thing.)

2) For those of you not quite sick of Santa Claus yet, I chatter about L. Frank Baum's biography of the tireless toymaker over at Tor.com.

3) And, this is my favorite site of the day: Law and the Multiverse, in which two attorneys carefully explain how the law applies to superheroes and supervillains. Particularly useful for any of you who may be expecting Doomsday to throw Superman through your house this holiday season, or, in the case of at least one of my readers, expecting a certain comics writer to throw Spider-Man through your house in hopes that this may end various internet flame wars. (Memo: no internet flame war that I have been aware of has ever been improved by the throwing of a superhero through the average suburban home, but it is true that I am not aware of everything.)

Apparently, this cat has still more grievances to share, and it is Festivus, after all, so later.

Ok, I lied. (Not intentionally, but I lied.) I do have a Tor.com post up today, about L. Frank Baum's Sky Island. I also have a copy of Towers of Midnight, featuring kate_nepveu in a minor role (which is just totally geeky) rather sooner than I expected. I do not have a bathtub that can be operated without a pair of pliers yet, nor a toilet in the main bathroom (it is still sitting, cheerily enough, outdoors, and has now been gently cleaned by the rain) although tile has arrived on part of the walls (a tile I think most of you will approve of.) And the cats have their very own scratch pads so they can

Fortunately (or maybe unfortunately), I suspect you are all too riveted to the Cooks Source imbroglio, to notice any of this, since that is not only trending on Twitter now (whee!) but, the internet informs me, has now expanded to stealing from Disney, which, let me assure you, is never, ever a good idea, and by never, ever, I mean, honestly, really, never; you'd be better off lying down and having Bambi stomp on you for killing his mother before leaving you in a forest fire. Less painful, and you'll feel less guilty afterwards. Trust me.

But. Anyway. Tor.com post! L. Frank Baum!

Exhaustion is making me rather loopy. More later.

What with everything yesterday, I completely missed that the next Tor.com post is up, this one dealing with Queen Zixi of Ix.

My post on The Magical Monarch of Mo just went up at Tor.com. This was a book I'd never read in childhood, and it let me think impossible things for awhile.

Tor.com has just posted the latest Oz post, The Tin Woodman of Oz.

I didn't discuss it that much in the post, but from a disability perspective, this is one of the most fascinating of the Oz novels (The Patchwork Girl of Oz, with its happily defiant heroine, is the other). The Tin Woodman, after all, started out with a prosthetic leg, then two prosthetic legs, then a prosthetic arm, and so on...until his entire body becomes tin. As a tin person, the Tin Woodman is automatically marked as distinct and different, but the Tin Woodman embraces this distinction, and indeed, insists that the transformation into tin is an improvement. After all, as an ordinary human woodcutter, he was just that - ordinary. As the Tin Woodman, he gets to go on adventures and rule a kingdom, surrounded by happy devoted lackeys who want nothing more than to create even more creatures of tin.

Which leads me, I suppose, to the model of the "happy disabled" - you know the trope: the disabled person who becomes a kinder and gentler person who can teach us all about what Life Really Means, or What's Really Important, and who is always cheery and faces illness/disability with a smile. (In other words, Not Me.) But I don't think the Tin Woodman fits this model. In the first place, as this book notes, and other books hint, he is hardly flawless: deeply vain about his personal appearance (he spends significant time polishing his body), fussy, and a moral absolutist whose narrow mindedness often leads him to make unfair judgements, causing pain and annoyance to other characters. (See both The Patchwork Girl of Oz and The Lost Princess of Oz.) In the second place, the Tin Woodman does not regard himself as disabled - indeed, he regards himself as superior to ordinary humans. And that in itself is a deeply subversive statement.

This week, the Oz blog returns to chattering about fairy tales, poverty and Darth Vader in a discussion of Rinkitink in Oz. Enjoy!

The latest Oz post, about Tik-Tok of Oz, now up at Tor.com.

Tik-Tok of Oz did not, alas, do that well in the rereading. But the book does have a dragon in it, and I am willing to overlook many things when dragons are involved.

The last Oz post, where I get exasperated with a certain fairy calling herself the ruler of Oz, is up here.

This was actually the book that started up this series of posts. Reading the call for horror fiction based on Oz drew up the vague memory of one of the incidents of this book. The story was already in my head, itching, but before I let myself write it, I forced myself to reread this book, just to make sure I'd remembered it correctly.

Sure enough, I had remembered the Fuddles correctly. But I had not remembered the rest of the book as well, and I found myself reading it with a growing sense of stark horror. It was, and was not, the same book that I read as a child, because in the intervening years, I had changed - and so had the way I read the book.

More thoughts in the post.

I chatter about one of my favorite Oz books, Ozma of Oz, this week.