Rosamond Purcell: Goddess of Wunderkammern

Peter the Great's collection of pulled teeth, probably the most influential picture, for me, ever.

Just found this slide show/article, courtesy of Slate, about my absolutely favorite artist of all time, Rosamond Purcell, a few of whose books I mention in the Christmas list, but who is also the extraordinary contributor to Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors, and the amazing Illuminations: a Bestiary, both incredible books.


Check it out - it's worth reading and looking at! And if you want to put the above two books on your list, well, I won't stop you.


Link

Also, a marvelous review by John Crowley of Purcell's work.

The Flow of Information, or: Culture, Shmulture

(Warning: Long Post Ahead)

Having been to two workshop-format writing conferences this year, I've been studying the differences, trying to put my finger on why one was so different from the other. It wasn't until I was home for a few days that I realized why.

Viable Paradise is a workshop for up and coming speculative fiction writers, designed to give you the tools you need to polish up your writing and get it published. The talks are entertaining, practical, and incredibly useful, and the faculty are amazingly available in every way. You can pick their brains, play games that make you all laugh your fool head off, or simply sit around and talk, and they participate actively in all of it. This, in itself, is a world away from the "literary" workshop I attended earlier this year, where the teachers seemed mostly to socialize with each other, not with the students (in their defense, I will say the literary conference was mu-u-uch larger than Viable Paradise, and individual teachers were teaching separate classes).

The two things that struck me most about VP were the intellectual quality of the conversation - on far-reaching topics - and the feeling that everyone was technically savvy, with a strong awareness of modern culture and its modes of communication. Everyone had laptops, email, blogs, myspace pages and so on; everyone followed the far-reaching implications of the electronic culture. Most people were, in the truest and best sense of the word, geeks. And the most interesting thing, for me, was the diversity of backgrounds, of day-jobs, of interests. Everyone there wanted to write; everyone was good at it; but writing wasn't a complete and total end in itself. It wasn't the one and only thing people wanted or knew how to do, and that was all right.

The "literary" conference on the other hand, was subtlely different. Of the writers that were invited to teach, all were accomplished authors. They mostly had MFAs and were very good at critiquing writing, good at the underlying motivations of your characters, at the techniques and metaphors in writing literary fiction. But very few of them participated in electronic culture-making. Of the agents and publishers who were brought in to talk about agenting and publishing, very few of them really looked at the Web much. Some of them didn't have email addresses. None of them understood, or had even thought about, the relevance of blogging.


The experience I had, the feeling of a slight flatness, was largely due to the unspoken agenda at the conference, which was pointed toward traditional publishing as the only way to be successful; anything else was lesser, and didn't count. In fact, I got the feeling that most people didn't even think about it. When I told people about this blog, they nodded their heads and said "Ah," and I knew if they looked at it, it would be cursory, if at all.

Cory Doctorow, of BoingBoing fame (among many other things), gave a talk at VP about writing practices, and part of his lecture was devoted to his campaign for Creative Commons and the loosening of copyright laws. He pointed out, among other things, that the electronic exchange of information is a creative endeavor, essentially a cultural exchange, and that by the "conversations" we have, the way we share our interests and discoveries, we are actually building culture, just as people used to talk to each other and pass books back and forth, or travel to culturally-rich cities to participate in the exchange of ideas. His point is that by instituting draconian copyright laws, and by enforcing them in arbitrary and pointless ways, the cultural capitalists of our time are suppressing the development of culture.

Because think about it: those culturally-significant cities can now be expressed in terms of online loci, places where people of intellectual similarity and interest gather to discuss the ideas of the day. If, like the Rennaissance man who travels to Florence with a trunk full of books he picked up in Germany, they pass around what they've found, then more people are enlightened, more people know about those books and those ideas, and it enriches the culture. The demand for those books and ideas goes up. We all evolve a little.

Around 1452, religious documents begin to be printed on a movable-type press, invented by one Johannes Gutenberg. The press was a trade secret of Gutenberg's, which he lost to Johann Fust in a lawsuit, resulting in a loss of secrecy which was to have stunning repercussions on European culture. It takes less than two years from this lawsuit for non-religious texts (not books) to begin to appear, and less than three years for another press to appear on the scene. By 1461, books are being printed in local languages; by 1469, the first printing monopoly is granted in Venice. By 1475, printing presses are cranking out books across Europe. And guess what? By 1484, Turks are prohibited from operating printing presses by their own sultan. And so it begins.


Jeremy M. Norman, in his incredibly complete timeline From Gutenberg to the Internet, based on his book of the same name, tells about events that occured at around the same time as Gutenberg was first printing his indulgences for the Church:

"1493: Using European artillery experts and European artillery, the Ottoman Turks break Constantinople's wall, and capture the city, ending the reign of Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Constantinople's roll [sic] as the capitol of the Byzantine Empire. Numerous Byzantine scholars travel westward to Europe bringing with them Greek manuscripts of the highest cultural value."

You can see what was out there, waiting to pounce on Gutenberg's invention: hundreds of scholarly works, painstakingly copied and transported, just aching to be broadcast to the thinking populace. In economic terms, the market was hot. It's hard to blame Gutenberg for wanting to keep his invention to himself (or his investor for wanting to have it himself): the thing was a gold mine.

Norman goes on to say:

"[By 1500] printing presses are established in more than 250 cities in Europe. The average print run of a book is between 400-500 copies, with as many as 1000 copies of some books being printed. By this date it is estimated that printers issued from 27,000 to 35,000 different printed works of all kinds, including pamphlets and broadsides as well as books, with a total printed output of somewhere around 15 to 20 million copies.Aldus Manutius of Venice issues an edition of Virgil in Italic type designed by Francesco Griffo. This is the first book printed in Italic type, an adaptation of the best humanist script of the time. Italic type may also have the advantage of having a higher character count, allowing more information to be printed legibly in less space than Roman or Gothic type. Aldus' edition of Virgil is the first of a series of volumes that he issues in the pocket or octavo format. This smaller format had previously been used for editions of devotional texts. Aldus is the first to use the smaller format to make non-devotional literature available in the smaller, more portable format, and at lower cost. Both the Italic type and the smaller format will be rapidly emulated by printers all over Europe."

When Trithemius became Abbot at Sponheim in 1482 there were 40 works present in the library; by 1505 he had expanded the library to 2000 volumes.

This means that within fifty years of Gutenberg's first eye-twinkle, at a time when the population of Europe was only 50 million, the number of books being printed was in the millions, with new formats developing all the time. The total flow of information was expanding exponentially. In Germany and other northern countries, the printing press was instrumental in the Protestant movement not only by the translation of the Bible into German but by transmission of controversial material (think of Martin Luther nailing a copy of his 95 Theses on the door of the church in 1517: how did everyone find out about that?).

Not surprisingly, given these fulminations, in 1538 Henry VIII issued a decree that all new books printed in England must be approved by the Privy Council before publication. He was followed within three decades by many other countries and principalities, and it's not until 1641 that Henry's decree is rescinded, at which point there is an outpouring of printed works from all across England. The government, seeing this, attempted to once again set up a censor, and instead were greeted with an outpouring of political responses, printed in newsbill or handbill form, speaking out against the new censorship. It was too late: the wellspring had begun. The underground presses were up and running: where there is perceived oppression there will always be perceived subversion.

I was interested to see how the invention of the printing press coincided with the Rennaissance and its eventual movement into later ages of exploration and intellectual advancement (and Wunderkammern, of course). The European Rennaissance is commonly held to have begun in Italy in the fourteenth century, and moved on to the rest of Europe by the fifteenth century and onwards into the 17th century, where culture underwent a sea-change with the Age of Enlightenment. "Renaissance thinkers sought out learning from ancient texts, typically written in Latin or ancient Greek. Scholars scoured Europe's monastic libraries, searching for works of antiquity which had fallen into obscurity. In such texts they found a desire to improve and perfect their worldly knowledge; an entirely different sentiment to the transcendental spirituality stressed by medieval Christianity. They did not reject Christianity; quite the contrary, many of the Renaissance's greatest works were devoted to it, and the Church patronized many works of Renaissance art. However, a subtle shift took place in the way that intellectuals approached religion that was reflected in many other areas of cultural life." [wiki]


So the Gutenberg press came in at exactly the right time, when the new way of thinking was thoroughly entrenched and books were the most important way of moving information around. Before, people were forced to either travel to where books were or get their information transmitted via letter from associates who had the book and could pass on the information. Scientific and mathematical discoveries were often limited to a locality, or even to the person who revealed them in isolation, unless it was written down in a book and the book was allowed to travel. Movement of knowledge and culture was slow, at best, and the retention of information (books and scrolls) was difficult and depended on collectors (churches and nobility) to keep them safe and copy them when needed. And yet, the movement of information has always, despite the hardships, been inexorable, part of being human. Part of our social interaction.

Recent history left us with an impoverished outlet for this sociality. Cheap movies are disappearing fast: the theatres that once showed vintage or second rate films - where you could go with your friends, paying very little to be out checking out the scene, meeting other people, and imbibe some culture - are gone, replaced instead by videos, which people watch at home. So how do people meet each other now? Via the social networks on the Web. Cheap books and comic books, which before the 1980s were commonplace in every corner market, are now pretty much gone, so authorship now is akin to stardom; writers must brand themselves to get the much-competed for publishing spaces, which means that the unheard ones out there must look elsewhere for their recognition. Guess where they go? The Web, of course.

The Opte map of the Internet

Sometimes, information is blessed by the ruling party of the time, as for example when Ptolemy III of Egypt decreed that "all visitors to the city were required to surrender all books and scrolls in their possession; these writings were then swiftly copied by official scribes. Sometimes the copies were so precise that the originals were put into the Library, and the copies were delivered to the unsuspecting previous owners." [wiki] But for the most part, government and commerce has always had a hand in the limitations of information flow. And there have always been those who speak out against it, for which we should be grateful, because if you take away the ability of a culture to pass along the things which are important, you doom to obscurity culturally important things, while allowing short-term thinking to decide what is retained.

It is clear is that people will glom onto what is culturally important for the era, whether it is recognized by industry or not. Look at how people are now using the Internet to publish their own texts, their own music. Look how, despite the fact that businesses continue to do everything they can to make certain that any production of culture must be paid for, people continue to risk being prosecuted for the "criminal" offense of passing information about good things to their friends. Do you think they would take that risk if they didn't like the content? Unlikely. The passing of information is very much like water: it can't be compressed. Crack down hard, push on it all you want, and it will squirt out the edges.

What I am hoping for is that this new way of socializing, of creating culture, will lead in the same direction that Gutenberg was able to facilitate: the blossoming of knowledge, a new way of being creative and interacting with our fellow people. A new degree of literacy New discovery. Perhaps, like the two siblings who speak on the Net in the Ender books, a few intelligent voices will come forth on the Web to lead us out of this mess. Not only people like Cory Doctorow, who believe in the free transmission of culture, but people who are able to lead us to new ways of thinking, will show us new ways of looking at the knowledge we already have. Help us evolve.

It's certainly the reason why I'm here. I want to be here when they emerge.


Links of interest:
Wikipedia article on the spread of printing, which took me awhile to find.

Interesting website with videos talking about the origins of writing and how it spread. Click on the head of DaVinci for a short and interesting video about why the alphabet is important, how it led to Gutenberg, and so on.

A Wonderful, Eccentric, Brilliant Man (and His Book)

My father first bought this book in England in the 1950s, when he traveled to the UK to research his family tree in Scotland. My father is a Scots-Canadian, raised in Detroit, and a cartoonist at heart. He knew of Rowland Emett from Punch, and this book caught his fancy.

As a child, I found the book stuck into the bookshelf next to things like The Electric Koolaid Acid Test and Lord of the Rings (original binding, since my dad was the kind of person who was reading that stuff when it was published), and someone's cast-off version of Fear of Flying. which I suspect neither of them had read. I would read Nellie and marvel, in that way kids do at the age where they believe everything: at the wonderful elevated railway, which caught my fancy:

along with all the other wild and amazing adventures. I tried for years to make a twin-funneled paddle boat out of branches and string, like they did, but I never won any races.

The book captures some essential thing about being provincial, and English, and loving trains, particularly the small locals, which in the early 1960s Dr. Richard Beeching eviscerated, cutting nearly all the little local lines (and going down in infamy for its effect on the British way of life). Albert Funnel and Frederick Firedoor, Nellie's driver and "guard-fireman-and-porter", become upset because nobody in Cloud Cuckoo Valley or Duckwallow Marsh appreciate them, and so they get a wonderful idea: to turn Nellie into a flying machine and go somewhere else. They touch down in New York, where the members of the Philharmonic use parts of Nellie for a concert; then they look for some tracks heading South.

"They took Nellie down to the tracks, but were most upset to find she wouldn't fit and while they were wondering what ever to do they were gently scooped up by the cowcatcher of the Elmer K. Pheffenfeifer, which was just pulling out for the Deep South."

As you can see, American trains are of an entirely different order than that of small local English ones:


In the Deep South, Nellie becomes a paddle-boat for awhile to help one captain win the Grand Torchlight Race, then heads West where they rescue a damsel in distress who turns out to be part of a movie set (with a cardboard train about to run her over), and end up in the Smoky Patch Mountains, helping the tired gold-miners to mechanize their mining and their entertainment (using Nellie, of course), earning their fortunes and bringing back a miner friend to England (which they get to by buying diving gear and following the undersea telegraph cable).

These divers are repairing the undersea telegraph cable with knitting needles. Note the bag of gold dust which they exchanged to Nellie's crew for diving gear, and the curtains inside the one man's helmet, which fascinated me as a child

The drawings are marvelous, spidery and full of little odd details, and completely fanciful, playing beautifully off the English preconceptions of America at the time.

So now I come to the part that thrills me. Just on the basis of this book, in the interests of this post, I went and looked Rowland Emett (sometimes called Roland Emett) on Wikipedia. What I saw there just blew me away: the man built all kinds of amazing machines, which showed in places like the 1951 Festival of Britain (for which he made a physical model of Nellie, among other wonderful machines) - and he designed the machines for the movie of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.


His SS Pussywillow (a mind-boggling machine) was featured on Brass Goggles, which is appropriate: his mechanical creations would appeal, for good reason, to the Steampunk community. The man was a total eccentric, with a marvelous imagination, and I feel privileged to have known this little story of his all my life. I still think it might be the coolest thing he did.

And I have to wonder: did Mr. Emett see something like Beeching on the horizon? Did he hope, in that lost way we writers have, that by encouraging this little bit of wonder and love for the tiny locals, he might help to save them? I suspect even in the early 1950s there was talk of trying to make the train system more efficient. Anyone who loves trains, especially the ones that get stopped by bicycles at crossings, must be influenced by the lovely fancy of this book - must see that the loss of trains like these, that went to places like Starfish Point, could only be a loss to the world at large. And if a gentle influence could have saved them, it would have been this one, for clearly, Mr. Emett understood about wonder.


More links:
- Rowland Emett machines: photos
- All kinds of info about him, including a timeline of his works and life

Shameless Fangirl Post

I'm going to use the might of my media arm here - and I'm going to do it shamelessly. If you don't like dripping praise, skip this one.

I love Diana Wynne Jones. Simple as that.

I first discovered her about three years ago, when someone in my family bought me the whole Dalemark Quartet, in one volume, in a half-priced bookstore because, he said, he "thought he had heard of her somewhere and thought I might like it." Next thing I knew, I was bounding along like a husky through the snow, as Ann Lamott says about writing (not), and I found myself laughing aloud at how great the storytelling was. In particular, there was a magical quality to Drowned Ammet which captivated me but which I still can't put my finger on.

The best thing was, when I looked at the list in the front pages, I was gobsmacked to discover that she had written over thirty books. It was like discovering treasure. This woman was clearly a Grande Dame of British fantasy.

Since then I have read every one I could put my hands on - or read them to my kids - and while they are not all as good as Drowned Ammett was for me the first time, they are, for the most part, remarkable feats of storytelling. True, they are technically "young adult", but I don't see how they have to be only young adult, as the stories are interesting to everyone. She has a deft hand with point-of-view, letting us see things but not necessarily understand them, while the characters are frustratingly naive or unwilling to interact with adults who could explain things, but therein often lies some of the tension. Personally, I admire her sheer innovativeness, which is hard to parallel. And best of all, she manages to write fantasy without cardboard cutout characters or shorthand scenery, or all those annoying things we think of when we're feeling tired of "fantasy" as a genre; her stories are grounded in place - meaning they tend to take place in one very-carefully thought out place - and well crafted. When magic happens, it is experienced by the character: it exists not as an action, but as a feeling.

There! It may not be Cabinet-worthy, and you may have all heard of her before, but I wanted to do it. And now I have.

* * *

For an interesting analysis of her writing, check out this well-written review, thanks to Strange Horizons, of Farah Mendlesohn's excellent creative criticism work on DWJ, which you can buy in book form at relatively high cost (I'm asking for it for my birthday). She has a good eye, does Ms. Mendlesohn.

My personal favorites, to get newbies started:

- Chrestomancy books
- Dark Lord of Derkholm, which is screamingly funny
- Castle in the Air (a sequel to Howl's Moving Castle, which she also wrote - not to be confused with Castle in the Sky, the movie)
- The Tough Guide to Fantasyland is a "guide", to all the pitfalls of cheesy fantasy-writing. Well done, hilarious, and easy to keep by your bed or elsewhere to pick up in odd moments
- and the Dalemark Quartet, of course.

Connections: the Book

At the risk of giving away all my secrets, I want to recommend James Burke's book, Connections. It's based on this brilliant TV show he did for the BBC in the 1970's, about the history of invention. Some of you may be familiar with it.

The great thing about this series of videos, and even more so about the book, is that he doesn't take a historian's view of the sequence of events. Instead, he follows a roundabout, storyteller's route, drawing lines between this person over here having this idea and that person over there taking one aspect of that invention and running with it - in a completely different direction. There is a long and wonderful discussion of navigation and lodestones, another section discusses Guericke's work with vacuums and how this led to research into the composition of air, and eventually the investigation of light passing through gases, and thus on to the cathode ray and television.

The book draws connections between vacuums and weather, atomic energy and the Norman Conquest, ploughs and gunpowder. It discusses, among other things, water clocks, Gutenberg's printing press, Vaucanson's automated duck, and the Jacquard loom (which I plan to discuss sometime soon, so don't read the book - okay?). Clockwork, the evolution of the telescope, and the timber crisis fromt the sixteenth-century glass industry: it's all in there. In fact there are things here (and images too) that you never heard of, that will just blow you away.

Life in a silver-mining town, late 1500s - including those who are underground

I cannot recommend this book (and the video series) highly enough. The main advantage of the book is that you can leave it somewhere in your house that you frequently go to sit or lay quietly (near the toilet or the bed, for example) and it will keep you awake at night as you peruse the amazing ideas and connections laid out in it, like a particularly well-designed maze.

Strange Attractor

Many of you may already know about Strange Attractor, but I just stumbled across it in my wanderings, and I feel it my duty to mention. From what I've read, Strange Attractor began as a sort of crossroads of what they term "Unpopular Culture", and have over time become their own press, now producing an online print journal by the same name. Their blog, Further, is a worthwhile place to visit, full of posts about literature, UFO's, online access to interesting stuff, and just anything that might be odd and worthwhile.

Not only is the site beautiful but the actual journal, which I have not paid to download yet, looks really wonderful, with the latest issue covering things like a transgender spirit possession festival; the joy of zootoxins; psychonautic misadventures in time; 12th century Arab alchemists on the edge of knowledge; Joseph Williamson, Liverpool’s tunnelling philanthropist; and much, much more. Each issue is a veritable tome of "exquisite high strangeness." Marvelous.

I recommend you get your calling-card out and go for a visit.

Inner Earth

I just found this book last weekend and have been reading it, on and off, since then. It's, as a friend of mine would say, "a damned good read."

Beginning with Edmond Halley in 1691, and continuing on through Poe and Wells and on into L Frank Baum, only to take a turn into pulp with Edgar Rice Burroughs and others, this fascinating book covers the history of envisioning the earth as a hollow sphere. Such people as Halley, who edited and published (not to mention correcting proofs of) Isaac Newton's Principia, were quite serious about their proposals that the earth is not only hollow but a series of concentric spheres, in Halley's model turning independently on a north-south axis, probably with life inside and some kind of light like the sun itself.

So deadly serious were these people that one man, Captain John Cleves Symmes, handed out printed circulars of his own composition in 1818, stating that if anyone would fund him, he would go to an opening he (by unknown means) postulated lay near the poles, and lay his life on the line to prove to the world there were other places within. Symmes took his request for funds and sponsorship to congress, and was repeatedly turned down. He continued with this obsession until the end of his life, lecturing and writing articles for the papers. When he died his son took up his cause, and a book was written about his theories.

The stories go on and on, including Jules Verne's idea that the Aurora Borealis was really light coming out of a hole in the earth in the arctic; Cyrus Teed, the man who was known as Koresh, who claimed he discovered the Philosopher's Stone and who started a cult based on his ideas for saving humanity by "moving inside"; and innumerable utopias, romances and other fiction that began more and more to use the hollow earth idea as a pasteboard for the authors to communicate their ideas.

Richly illustrated with images that we would all love to have large to hang on our walls, the book is worth a look; I keep it by my bed and read bits of it before I go to sleep, in the hopes that it will bring me interesting dreams.

Magical Thinking

Warning: philosophizing ahead

One of the things I find most exciting about the 1600s and early 1700s was the lack of understanding about what science is supposed to be, at least in the modern sense. So many things hadn't been worked out yet; the world was taxonomically flexible, cosmologically open-ended; there were whole societies of people trying all kinds of strange experiments to find out how it worked. The "scientific process" was tipped on its end: you tried a lot of stuff and then made a theory based on the results. This made for some really interesting theories, such as the idea that when something died, maggots were (magically) born of the stuff that had once been living tissue. Or that frogs were created out of damp conditions. Or that being bitten by a tarantula meant a lifelong need to dance once a month.

The era was one of discovery: people were traveling the world as they had never done before, and tales and odd artifacts were coming back from so many strange and exotic places. Wunderkammern were an expression of this fascination with the exotic and the unexplored. People collected things, out of interest and to be fashionable, and arranged them in personal taxonomies based on perceived or desired groupings. It was out of these collections that modern museums were born, with their scientific taxonomy: a parallel evolution - alchemy to science and wunderkammer to museum.

I'm reading Quicksilver right now, part of Neil Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, and it captures perfectly the sort of observation and experimentation that people like Isaac Newton were doing (and the thrashing around that lesser minds were doing in the name of discovery). Best of all it describes the complete open-mindedness of these people as they struggle to organize the Universe: Newton speaks of trying to see the order that God put into things, and the emphasis is on the beauty of Creation. I think we've lost a lot of that open-mindedness, that joy in the beauty of Creation (whatever version of it you like, it is as beautiful and complex as ever), as science has begun to believe itself more and more. Everything is worked out (except higher physics, which the average person simply can't follow), there is nothing left to discover. We are, in the postmodern sense, pushed back onto endlessly repeating ourselves.

Wouldn't it be nice to discover something new, something that changed the world as we know it, and discover we were completely wrong about everything? I think the present love of alternate realities is a human wish for the unknown to be, once again, unknown; for the Universe to stop being so infernally well-thought-out. Perhaps infernal is the perfect word; perhaps, after all, we are living in a species of Hell. From science to advertisers, they are every where, these people who want to tell us what is so. The more we know about things, the smaller our Universe gets. The only people allowed by present-day science to make new discoveries are experts in very narrow fields.


When I was a kid, I used to read the Oz books - over and over. My favorite one was Ozma of Oz, not so much because the story was so great (let's face it, the Oz books all have rather odd, meandering plots), but because there were all these amazing little details that led off in other directions - things that hinted at the other stuff happening offstage, either in history or in other parts of the strange world you were occupying momentarily. L. Frank Baum was brilliant at coming up with whole strings of wonderful ideas that captured children's imaginations, and it really didn't matter whether his books were exciting or the characters compelling: they were stimulating to the imagination. They gave kids these great, juicy hooks to hang their fantasies on. Because they were outside the box of the story, they helped you to get outside the box with your pretend-time.

To someone who writes fiction, it is interesting to look at the continuing popularity of the Oz books. What is it about these pretty weird stories which, as adults, we find less appealing? I would be willing to say it is their very hairiness, the way all those exciting loose ends stick out, all those details which don't need to be there but have been stuck in anyway and which capture us (if we're children). Children love to revisit things, worry at them, figure them out (much like the Natural Philosophers in the 1600s). I spent a lot of time thinking about that stovepipe coming out of the moon in the picture above. The story of Mr. Tinker, while extraneous to the plot, was terribly compelling to me:

"Mis-ter Tin-ker," continued Tiktok, "made a lad-der so tall that he could rest the end of it a-gainst the moon, while he stood on the high-est rung and picked the lit-tle stars to set in the points of the king's crown. But when he got to the moon Mis-ter Tin-ker found it such a love-ly place that he de-cid-ed to live there, so he pulled up the lad-der after him and we have nev-er seen him since."


Speaking of which, what about Tiktok, one of the first robots? In 1907, L. Frank Baum is imagining a clockwork man, with clockwork speech, a clockwork brain, and clockwork body - all wound separately, mind you - who is unswervingly faithful and honest, and because he is a machine he has no emotions. Hmm.

And who on earth could get excited about genetic engineering after being weaned to the concept of a lunchbox tree? Check this out:

The little girl stood on tip-toe and picked one of the nicest and biggest lunch-boxes, and then she sat down upon the ground and eagerly opened it. Inside she found, nicely wrapped in white papers, a ham sandwich, a piece of sponge-cake, a pickle, a slice of new cheese and an apple. Each thing had a separate stem, and so had to be picked off the side of the box; but Dorothy found them all to be delicious...


My dreams, during the time I was reading the Oz books, were unparalleled in my life before or since. I had a dream about skating through the telephone wires into Oz. I dreamt of a whole world I found inside a golpher hole across the street from my house. I met exotic creatures who ate glass but dreamed of water because it looked like glass but was so soft. And on and on.

The truth is, in today's prepackaged world, children's fiction must be slicked down so as to cater to the perceived need for clarity and functionality in story delivery. Extraneous details, like Mr. Tinker, are seen as unnecessary and distracting from the product being sold, ie, plot and characters. The oral history, once a messy, meandering and complicated style of delivery, has been replaced by television and movies, and people can't see or don't understand the benefit of hairy plotlines. Similarly, science eshews hairiness. Theories and proofs must be complete, self-contained packages which stand alone on their facts, adding onto the known construct of the world.



I would advocate a reality that is more flexible than that. Without descending into the arenas of either New Age Mysticism, Theosophy, Spiritualism, or the like, I'd like to propose a reality that expands further. How do we do that? I'm not certain.

Perhaps we need a different paradigm of reality. Perhaps we need to move into Magical Realism, Magical Scientism, Magical Logic. Perhaps we should allow our imaginations to run away with us, and look again into the beauty of that most complex mechanism, the invisible clockwork of the Universe.

Here are two definitions of Magical Realism, the roots of which stand in Latin American literature but which could stand for a more overarching truth:

"Magical realism turns out to be part of a twentieth-century preoccupation with how our ways of being in the world resist capture by the traditional logic of the waking mind's reason."
- Derek Walcott and Alejo Carpentier: Nature, History, and the Caribbean Writer

"realism is a kind of premeditated literature that offers too static and exclusive a vision of reality. However good or bad they may be, they are books which finish on the last page. Disproportion is part of our reality too. Our reality is in itself all out of proportion. In other words, Garcia Marquez suggests that the magic text is, paradoxically, more realistic than the realist text."
- Scott Simpkins paraphrasing Gabiel Garcia Marquez, Sources of Magic Realism/Supplements to Realism in Contemporary Latin American Literature

Perhaps, after all, imagination is the only thing lacking. Perhaps, if we can only find that door, that glimpse into how to do it, we can make the transformation, switch realities, open the world back up.



What do you think? Is the paradigm too big to shift? How do we get out of this big, reasonable, slick-sided hole? I welcome comments on this rant.

Thanks to Jon R. Neill for his inspiring illustrations and to Georges Melies, for his excellent vision of a trip to the moon, and all its wonderful details.
PS. check out the little toad in the picture above, waving the flag with the "O" on it.