Well I saw it but one case is not likely to build a discipline.
On Sun, Mar 8, 2020 at 4:17 AM Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
*Hi Ursula,*
*In regard to your statement “Those middle school years when you’re taking
steps towards who you think you might want to be or find it right to be,
lead you, if you’re a reader at all, towards some more serious literature.”
. . . *
*I recall another important event when I was about five (besides seeing
the Wizard of Oz). I was in Sunday school and the lesson was about
Solomon. He was told by God that he could have anything he asked for and
he asked for Wisdom. Walking home from church I prayed, but maybe I didn’t
understand the term Wisdom at age five and was working with someone’s
definition. I prayed “for knowledge – ‘to know’” and ever since then I
have, off and on, pursued that. *
*When I told my family that I intended to leave the Marine Corps and go to
college, my stepfather thought that a wise idea and advised me to major in
Engineering. He was a truck driver and that was his conception of a worthy
goal. As it turned out, after I graduated, I needed to go to work to pay
some bills & so went to an Employment Agency, Bliss and Sons, and had them
find me a job; which they did: At Douglas Aircraft Company, in
Engineering. **J*
*Apart from what I had inadvertently become, and further in the direction
of seeking who it is that I am, when I am writing poetry, I think that I’m
a poet. *
*At the moment I’m back to reading all sorts of things and not writing any
poetry; so I don’t feel very much like a poet. But I hope that in the
not-too-distant future I’ll be one again.*
*Lawrence*
*From:* lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:
lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] *On Behalf Of *Ursula Stange
*Sent:* Saturday, March 07, 2020 6:06 PM
*To:* lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
*Subject:* [lit-ideas] Re: On reading Baum's Oz novels
Thank you for this, Lawrence. I haven’t read Frank Baum at all, but my
husband had a fondness for him. His mother read ‘The Wizard of Oz’ to him
several times in his early years, along with ”Pinnochio” and “The Wind in
the Willows.” I’m not sure that we ever had a conversation (and now never
will) about his thoughts or fears or hopes about the Oz land and
mindscape. I only know the Judy Garland film version and didn’t see it at
a very young age, so, again, nothing much to share.
I still want to reply also to your earlier post, but have not found the
leisure or time for it yet. I was referring, perhaps, to a slightly later
age, often referred to as ’young adult’ these days. Those middle school
years when you’re taking steps towards who you think you might want to be
or find it right to be, lead you, if you’re a reader at all, towards some
more serious literature. Some of it changes you, sometimes profoundly. Or
it finds the part of you that wants to be changed. It has always seemed to
ma a bit of chemical magic, like ionic and covalent bonding or something.
Time to drink my Sleepytime Tea and set my clocks ahead.
Keep well,
Ursula
On Mar 7, 2020, at 4:50 PM, Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
*Further in the spirit of the “early readings” thread, I just read the
article “The Oddness of Oz” by Alison Lurie. This article appears in the
12/21/2000 issue of the NYROB. I was surprised to learn that L. F. Baum
wrote a number of Oz books, none of which I read when I was young, and
Lurie mentions that “in the 1930s and 1940s they [Baum’s Oz books] were
actually removed from many schools and libraries.” *
*In 1941 I was seven just two months before Pearl Harbor and since the Oz
books were intended for children, and I was doing my best to read books for
the more-mature, perhaps I chose not to read them. Or perhaps my
grandmother steered me away from them. *
*Also, my parents took me to see the movie, “The Wizard of Oz” in 1939
when I was five and I was empathetically terrified when the tornado took
Dorothy away from her home in Kansas. I was appalled, or I assumed that
she wouldn’t be able to find her way home again. I certainly wouldn’t have
been able to if a tornado swept me away. I have had a very poor sense of
direction my entire life and was apparently very aware of my limitations
while sitting in the Grenada Theater with my parents at age five.*
*Of course in reading Lurie’s articles I now learn that Baum didn’t intend
Dorothy’s adventures to be bad things. Also, she did later find her way
back to Kansas, but she didn’t stay there. Furthermore, after the bank
repossessed the family farm, she moved her Aunt and Uncle to Oz; which
would have helped me a lot watching the movie, had I been told that by my
parents – or maybe they did tell me and I didn’t believe them. *
*Also, Lurie writes, “Though the Oz books have always been read by
children of both sexes, they have been especially popular with girls, and
it is not hard to see why. Besides being a world in which women and girls
rule, it is also, as Joel Chaston has pointed out, a world in which none of
the major characters has a traditional family. Instead, most of them live
alone or with friends of the same sex. The Scarecrow stays with the Tin
Woodman in his castle for months at a time, while Ozma, Dorothy, Betsy, and
Trot all of rooms in the palace of the Emerald City, and Glinda lives in a
castle with a hundred of the most beautiful girls of the Fairyland of Oz.”
*
*Well, now, if Lurie had ended her comment with the word “rule,” I
wouldn’t have questioned it, but the rest of it seems a feminist
assumption, but none of the girls I grew up with seemed to be. I had a
girl-friend when I was five. Her name was Arlene Cooper and she made a
tremendous impression of me. I can recall asking her if she liked me, and
she replied, “I don’t like you. I love you.” I recall missing her when,
probably, her family moved away and she had to go to school elsewhere, but
I suspect that whatever became of her, she preferred a world in which there
were boys, and then later on men. And, it would seem, so does Alison
Lurie. She was born in 1926, married her first husband in 1948, had three
children, divorced in 1985 but married again in I think 1989. She seems to
be living happily with her second husband today, and would have been
married to him when she wrote the above paragraph in 2000. *
*Lawrence*
