.KEYWORD cebookmonth0999
.FLYINGHEAD WINDOWS CE POWER MAGAZINE BOOK CLUB
.TITLE Back to the school of Oz
.DEPT
.SUMMARY It’s time when parents celebrate and students whine: back to school. This month, in our Windows CE Power Magazine Book Club report, Book Club Editor Judith Tabron waxes poetic on Congress, juicy page-turners, "mathematics reform" (but fortunately only about three words), and The Emerald City of Oz.
.AUTHOR Judith Tabron
It’s September, and teachers’ hearts everywhere are speeding up at the thought of catching up on copies of Education Newsletter, available in .DOC format from Memoware. (Well, some teachers’ hearts, anyway.) Teachers can select from such juicy page-turners as "Supports and Impediments to Mathematics Reform" and "Classroom Discussions Can Enhance Student Writing". Meanwhile soon-to-be students are flooding Bed, Bath & Beyond trying to decide which knit jersey sheets would look coolest under the pile of "Widespread Panic" and "South Park" T-shirts that will actually serve as their bedding for the next nine months.
.CALLOUT It’s kind of like learning the name of the Cigarette-Smoking Man in The X-Files; it removes some of the mystique
I’d like to review some reading material for students so you’ll have something to do after you pick out those sheets. After all, many of you just graduated from high school. According to sales statistics, every single one of you received at least four copies of Dr. Seuss’ Oh, The Places You’ll Go, a fine literary work; but one that tends to grate on the nerves the fiftieth or sixtieth time you hear it. Also, while Dr. Seuss has much wisdom to offer on the endings of things, September is a time for the beginnings of things-. Not just school, but also really important things, like fall flower beds and the realization that the fiscal budget your company started in July isn’t going to make it to January, much less next June.
So it is that I’d like to recommend a rather different text for back-to-school, especially for you first-year college-bound types out there. I want to offer something the rest of you will enjoy, too, no matter what starts for you in September.
.H1 The Emerald City of Oz
Starting off on a new journey is a popular topic in the texts that schools like to assign for summer reading or for your first year. After all, whether you’re traveling around the world to a big university or down the street to a small school, you’re going somewhere where the rules and people and expectations will all be new. Your school might give you the Aeneid or the Odyssey, but if I had to pick a tale of travel and adventure and new worlds I’d offer you The Emerald City of Oz. You can download it from Mary Jo’s E-texts at http://www.dogpatch.org/etext.html.
What you miss in losing John R. Neill’s wonderful illustrations (in the Palm format) you will more than make up in the joy of rediscovering this classic, if you, like me, read this as a child and haven’t read it for a long, long time. L. Frank Baum’s just-the-facts style of description and deceptively simple dilemmas and characters are oddly engrossing for any reader of any age. Like the Odyssey and the Aeneid and the Faerie Queene and other epics, there are monsters and magic and good and evil and the whole marvelous mix is reported in the same I’m-just-telling-you-what-happened sort of style.
There is a certain delight to seeing bad characters wallowing in being thoroughly bad, and in this book the many enemies who come together to help the Nome King destroy Oz are thoroughly evil in a businesslike fashion. It’s not just their vocation, it’s their avocation. There’s nothing they’d rather do than make others miserable. One encounters this type of person from time to time in life, but rarely does one see it depicted with such honesty in literature.
The Nome King (previously defeated in Ozma of Oz) makes a reappearance, determined to conquer Oz. We find out his name: it’s Roquat the Red. It’s kind of like learning the name of the Cigarette-Smoking Man in The X-Files; it removes some of the mystique. Roquat is, after all, just a power-hungry war-mongering Nixon sort of dude and this time he sends his General Guph out to be Kissinger and get the rest of the bad-guy nations on board for his New World Order of Evil. There’s the Whimsies, the Growleywogs, and the Phanfasms, and as we follow Guph through his travels we learn many valuable lessons for ourselves through learning about them: be who you are, might doesn’t make right, and the beautiful, educated, powerful people are not always on the side of the angels.
In the parallel story, Dorothy finally gives up her secret-identity thing and decides to become a full-time Oz princess when the bank forecloses on Aunt Em and Uncle Henry’s mortgage. Being a loving and responsible little girl, she also provides for her aging relatives by arranging for them to come live with her in the Land of Oz. They have a little trouble… adjusting.
.CALLOUT A great many bad puns can be made about talking cookware.
This clash between the hard, realist Kansas farming couple and the fairyland of Oz provides some of the best dialogue I can remember from an Oz book. Auntie Em and Uncle Henry and Dorothy talk like regular folks, while the rest of Oz’ citizens tend toward the formal or philosophical; the mix is very funny. At the same time, these encounters provide a lot of lessons valuable to students of any age. For instance: there is more water in the world than land; sometimes settling a quarrel is less fun than having the quarrel; and a great many bad puns can be made about talking cookware.
.H1 Cannibalism is bad
Auntie Em has the most trouble adjusting to this brave new world and her experiences are ones that any first-year college student can empathize with. She learns to take people as you find them, and also not to discusscooking or eating anyone that might be a relative of one of your traveling companions.
In fact, like an early modern explorer’s narrative, the issue of cannibalism keeps coming up throughout the book. Billina, the talking hen, is shocked that anyone might think of any of her babies as broilers or fryers; however, they do permit their eggs to be eaten — a fine philosophical distinction. Dorothy, hungry and lost, winds up in Bunbury, a town populated by baked goods — and doesn’t really blame Toto when he loses his head and eats several of the Crumpet children (by all accounts rather unpleasant children) and a Salt-Rising Biscuit who has apparently committed no crime. Dorothy and Billina, discussing their abrupt ejection from the town, seem more annoyed that the Bunburians didn’t give them more to eat than they are chagrined about the little doggy murderer in their midst. And Jack Pumpkinhead, serving the travelers a feast of pumpkin pie in his pumpkin mansion, points out that he refrains from eating the pie not only because he isn’t made to eat but also because that would make him a cannibal.
Aside from everyone agreeing in general that cannibalism is bad, it’s very much a do-your-own-thing kind of world. Auntie Em and the rest of the travelers have to learn to live and let live when they meet several tribes of Oz that appear to exist for no purpose understandable to us plain folks. Perhaps the most culturally impenetrable are the residents of Fuddlecumjig, who are puzzles who scatter themselves whenever anyone comes near so that you have to put them together before you can talk to them or indeed get some lunch. The Fuddles do this, apparently, because it’s what they do, and the neither the narrator nor the travelers need much more justification than this in the end. They realize that the Fuddles have provided them, the travelers, with hours of amusement as they have been forced to put together anyone they wanted to talk to. While your anthropology classes might want more in the way of in-depth analysis it’s a interesting theory about the way we interpret other people: that it’s largely based on our own thoughts and needs rather than anything intrinsic about themselves.
Ultimately Dorothy and her traveling companions head home and encounter the news of the impending invasion, which of course Ozma has discovered in their absence through means of the Magic Picture. (Ozma, a conscientious ruler, spends a good deal of energy keeping apprised of the state of the nation through various magic means that I wish we could make available to Congress, who never seem to know anything about anything really important that’s going on.) Ozma makes an important decision as the head of state: she refuses to fight to save her kingdom. Interestingly, almost all of the other citizens of Oz within her circle of friends disagree with her on this and yet support her right to make the decision because they see the moral underpinning to her argument (that it is wrong to destroy any living creature). More fine philosophical distinctions. Discuss among yourselves.
Ozma is also the kind of ruler who can take a good suggestion.When the Scarecrow finds a nonviolent solution to the problem, she implements it immediately, and none of the bad people so determined to enslave and destroy wind up with so much as a scratch on them, and most of them are painlessly rehabilitated. The worst that happens to the Emerald City is that some of the flowers in the palace gardens get trampled.
It’s a book about culture clash and the message, in the end, is that while it isn’t simple and it isn’t easy, even enemy nations can coexist peacefully if there’s even one party involved willing to enforce peace by peaceful means. This isn’t a popular message today, but it is a point of view I think it is necessary for all of us to remember still does exist. I hope that on a global scale we can put it into play someday even as we ourselves deploy it on a local scale in our towns and suburbs and farms.
Even those of us who aren’t as educated as the Shaggy Man (who has been "to Mexico and Boston and several other foreign countries") or Professor Wogglebug (who distributes knowledge in pill form to his students so they’ll have more time for sports) can see that the issues raised in the book are still, after eighty-nine years, important and difficult ones. We would do well to discuss them with one another — in our college dorm rooms, for instance.
.H1 How do I get Doc files into my Windows CE device?
Plain text (ASCII) files may be imported into Windows CE devices in a number of ways that are documented in your device’s instruction manual. Doc format files can be read on Windows CE devices using the DOCview application, available at Mike’s Palm-Sized PCs website (at http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Lab/3533/palm_sw.html), which also includes directions on using that piece of software.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
Download Emerald City of Oz from Mary Jo’s E-texts at http://www.dogpatch.org/etext.html.
You can get the Education Newsletter from http://www.memoware.com.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO
