They put the “Own” in to Cover Their Own Asses.
or is that assizes?*
*wretched puns are better than no puns at all
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Me too but worse. I had to look it up.
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That is a super-interesting take on it and an angle I hadn’t considered before!
You may enjoy (or hate) the Gregory Maguire “The Wicked Years” series, which is set in Oz, starting with Wicked (became a famous broadway musical). They’re not intended as children’s books though.
The novel is a political, social, and ethical commentary on the nature of good and evil and takes place in the Land of Oz, in the years leading to Dorothy’s arrival. The story centers on Elphaba, the misunderstood green-skinned girl who grows up to become the notorious Wicked Witch of the West.
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I read Wicked some years ago, and really enjoyed it. I didn’t realize there were more books. I might have to get them onto my reading list.
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I would argue that the Broadway musical isn’t really an adaptation of the book. They share a few character names and a couple of setting ideas, but little else.
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THANK YOU.
I loved loved loved the book, saw the musical with the friend who had recommended the book to me, and we were sooooo disappointed. Except for “Defying Gravity”, but one song did not a musical play make.
I was tempted to ask for my money back over what they did to the ending.
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Oooh, I guess I’m no longer disappointed to have missed the musical.
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Yeah, if you boil down the musical to its central message, it becomes, “The most important quality for a leader is popularity.”
Whereas the book is more along the lines of, “Well-intentioned deeds can lead to bad results if not thought through properly.”
The musical puts all of Elphaba’s failings on society: she fails because no one cares about the plight of the Animals, and an ugly green witch setting herself in opposition to the popular Wizard over the issue will naturally be labeled as “Wicked.” You can’t ever point out something she does wrong to deserve any of it.
In the book, her end is a consequence of her actions. Maybe she still didn’t deserve it, but she could have avoided it by making better choices.
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Love the term “Stonehengers” and how he apologises to them when he can’t get his pointer to sit on the model’s heel stone.
I have his book “Beyond Stonehenge”. I’m convinced it was a source for The Da Vinci Code.
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It’s been a while, but I had taken it very differently. Something along the lines of “it’s more pleasant to be loved but it’s more important to do what’s right”, as is more or less directly the theme in Defying Gravity. Elphaba doesn’t get thanks for taking the harder road, as people usually don’t, but she still comes to a better end for it.
That end is completely different from the book, and anyone who wants a faithful adaptation isn’t going to like it. But taken as something else I thought it made at least as much sense, sort of grading into Wizard of Oz instead of abruptly slewing into it. However, I admit there was probably a lot I missed from the book. I never really understood the point of the clock, even though it stood at the center of the plot.
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Yeah, but she doesn’t accomplish anything.
The lead in to “For Good” is:
I’m limited
[spoken] Just look at me
I’m limited
And just look at you, you can do all I couldn’t do
Glinda
So now it’s up to you
[Spoken] For both of us
Now it’s up to you
The implication is that all Elphaba ever managed to do was turn the country against her (and hurt a bunch of people she loved), whereas Glinda is going to be able to accomplish all that Elphaba was trying to do but failed to, because Glinda was pretty and popular and beloved and Elphaba wasn’t.
Edit to add:
It’s been a while, but I think there were prophetic forces manipulating events towards their own ends; the Dragon Clock plot within Wicked doesn’t entirely make sense because their plot spans the whole The Wicked Years series.
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And that’s Elphaba’s perspective, yes. The next verse is Glinda’s:
I can see that if she does good later, it’s partly because she is popular and beloved enough to still be standing. But so far she’s been that and not much help at all. The reason for the change is solely Elphaba’s example, turning down an explicit invitation to be loved like Glinda at the price of complicity. So maybe the point was shaded, but I don’t think I’m imagining it. Things may go easier for Glinda, but at no point did I feel like she was being held up as the hero.
The clock was definitely a prophetic force manipulating things to some end, but I couldn’t make any sense of what that could be or how things fit into it. It makes sense that it would be part of the whole series, and fair enough; but the result is that the one book taken in isolation seemed confusing to me. I’m sure mileage varies.
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By the text of the story? No (although the people of Oz certainly hold her as such). Elphaba is certainly the protagonist, and, as I said, is shown to do everything right. She doesn’t make an immoral choice (as far as I remember) in the whole play.
But when you look at the subtext…
Elphaba accomplished quite a bit over the course of the story, but of those accomplishments, which of them lasted? Which of them were really appreciated? Not many. She set some monkeys and an ungrateful Lion free, inspired Glinda… and that’s about it.
Glinda, on the other hand, single-handedly overthrows the Wizard and Madam Morrible, the two villains of the story.
And, at the end (and beginning) of the show, we’re reminded that everyone (other than Glinda) still thinks of Elphaba as the villain.
The themes of any work can exist in text or subtext. Which is why you have to be careful what you say in text, because that can easily become a theme.
If you don’t want something to become a message that your audience takes away from it, you have to make sure to show that the character is shown to be wrong about what they believe. A good example of this is Elder Price from The Book of Mormon. He has his big, showstopping song (“I Believe”) about how anything is possible if you just believe hard enough: God will make it happen. And then that’s immediately undercut by him being violently thrown out of the camp of the warlords he was trying to convert to LDS, with the Book of Mormon itself having been placed somewhere unpleasant. That successfully makes it clear that Elder Price was wrong: belief is not enough, by itself, to defeat any adversary.
On the other hand, we have the following snippets from Wicked:
When I see depressing creatures
With unprepossessing features
I invite them on their own behalf
To think of celebrated heads of state or
Especially good communicators
Did they have brains or knowledge?
Don’t make me laugh!
They were popular!
And, later:
[Spoken]Elphaba, where I’m from, we believe all kinds of things that aren’t true. “We call it history.”
A man’s called a traitor or liberator
A rich man’s a thief, or philanthropist
Is one a crusader, or ruthless invader?
It’s all in which label is able to persist
There are precious few at-ease with moral ambiguities
And so we act as though they don’t exist
They call me “wonderful,” so I am wonderful
And, set against that we have… Elphaba failing to make the political change she was trying for, while Glinda, again, single-handedly overthrows the Wizard and Madam Morrible, the two villains of the story.
“Just look at you, you can do all I couldn’t do.”
I’m not saying this is the message they were trying to send with the show, any more than “If you ask the Lord in faith, He will always answer you: just believe in Him and have no fear” is the message that they were trying to send in The Book of Mormon. I’m just saying, the one musical put a bunch of stuff about “trusting in God being enough to face all obstacles” in the text, and the end result being shown on stage was “No, the world doesn’t really work that way.” The other put a bunch of stuff about popularity being the most important thing in the text… and it kinda looks like, yeah, that’s how the world works. The unpopular person fakes her death and exiles herself along with her burlap boyfriend, with her sister dead, her professor having been fired and losing the ability to speak, and about the only saving grace is that she and Glinda part as friends. The popular person, on the other hand, is the one who is able to bring about real, lasting change.
And yes, she’s only doing that because Elphaba inspired her to. But, in my opinion, at least, that’s not enough to counter the statement being made in the text that “it’s all in which label is able to persist.”
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"I’m hip. I’m the future, and those who hold a different view belong to the past!
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Well. Language is always evolving, anyhow.
English is weird in that most English speakers speak it as a second language. That’s led to things like people claiming Obama’s slogan “Change We Need” was grammatically incorrect, when it’s not – it’s just a sentence structure that’s not so common anymore. I know I get frustrated on Duolingo sometimes because when asked to translate something to English I sometimes get marked wrong when I know it’s right.
I’m not big on “purity” just because a) no modern language is “pure” and b) English lost that fight decisively in 1066 (though they already had several times before).
I do think there’s too much emphasis on conversational English and not enough on language history, which helps people using a given language with “outlier” constructions. That’s an education thing first though, and only secondly a language thing.
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Seems to me this is part of the larger so-called problem that “we’re losing our culture to technology/fads/kids/immigrants” (especially the latter).
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I suddenly remembered a passage in that New Yorker article about Sutton Hoo.
It’s all fascinating but thoroughly remote. Who were these aliens, and what is our connection to them now? Thinking about Britain’s deep past, I am always struck by how fluid and exotic it was. There were no English; there were Swedes and Danes, exploring rivers. Our inheritance is nothing like the banal nationalism of Johnson and the Brexiteers. In the mid-eighties, Seamus Heaney, who was born in Northern Ireland, was asked to make a new translation of Beowulf. He started, but soon got stuck. “The whole attempt to turn it into modern English seemed to me like trying to bring down a megalith with a toy hammer,” he wrote. The epic poem describes two outlandish funerals. The first, of Scyld (or “Shield,” in Heaney’s translation), takes the form of a burial at sea. “A ring-whorled prow” is loaded with the treasure and the warrior’s body and cast out on the waves. In the second, at the end of the poem, the body of Beowulf is burned in a funeral pyre, which is filled with jewels, and then covered with a great earth heap—“a marker that sailors could see from afar.” Raedwald’s burial at Sutton Hoo was a spectacular composite ritual: ship and mound. Heaney eventually published his translation, in 1999. In the introduction, he revealed that the reason he could not let Beowulf go for all those years was because he had noticed that the first poem in his first book of poetry contained lines, rhythms, and alliterations that subconsciously hewed to its metrics: “Part of me,” Heaney wrote, “had been writing Anglo-Saxon from the start.” The poem was called “Digging.”
Perhaps this misplaced nostalgia for the rhythms of old is best sated with poetry, and not with prescriptivism. For this to be effective, Alexander Pope is best avoided.
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Well, not really, unless a person believes only immigrants to English-speaking countries learn English. That discounts all the people who have no intention of emigrating anywhere but learn English for business or whatever.
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Given how much Pope has soaked into the vernacular (“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread”, “A little Learning is a dangerous Thing”, and many others, including my favourite, “Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed”)… good luck with that.
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So. In reading about Lucille Ball and why she was nice to Ann Sothern but not Joan Blondell, I found a quote from Joan Crawford:
Warning: Animated Text
https://www.datalounge.com/thread/7412382-joan-crawford-on-the-lucy-show
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