Do I wake or sleep?

So last night I was working out and put on Lifetime on the TV (Pretty Woman was playing). And while I was there I was LUCKY enough to see several airings of the latest trailer for the Lifetime adaptation of Flowers in the Attic, which is airing next month (YAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYY). I hung out with Lori last week and we discussed this AT LENGTH--I am a huge fan of the series and know this book pretty much by heart. It is one of my treasured guilty pleasures from my teens and college years. For those who have never read it, it's about a beautiful family called the Dollangangers who go to live with the mother's parents in Virginia when the father dies. When they get there the mother, Corrine, tells the kids (a son of 14, Christopher, a daughter of 12, Cathy, and twins Cory and Carrie who are 5) that they will have to be hidden "for a little while" up in the attic until they break the news to the grandfather that the prodigal daughter has returned (she eloped with her now-dead husband who was in fact her half-uncle). The "little while" stretches on and on into years--and meanwhile the grandmother, who hates the children as products of an incestuous marriage, is violently abusive. She whips them, she puts tar into Cathy's hair as punishment for what she deems vanity, she starves them. Eventually it becomes clear that Corrine just doesn't care about them anymore, certainly not in comparison to the enormous inheritance that awaits her if she can win back her father, and they start to plan an escape. All this while Chris and Cathy are growing up, entering puberty, and the only person of the opposite sex they see is each other...

The book is usually dismissed as teenage trash, and sometimes compared to Twilight. Look, I love me some Twilight but FitA is far, FAR superior. For one thing there is actual character development--Corrine, Cathy and Chris change and grow (or devolve in Corrine's case) very much throughout the book. Chris and Cathy are scarred and changed by the end of the book--in fact Cathy reenacts the events in the attic, relives these issues again and again throughout the rest of the series. [SPOILERS IF YOU HAVEN'T READ IT: The grandmother starts poisoning them with donuts--Cory, the sickly one, ends up dying [Corrine and the grandmother's callousness is truly horrific in this scene] and Chris rapes Cathy but she forgives him. The three left alive escape at the end of the book after finding out the grandfather has been dead for a long time--therefore there was no need to keep them locked up other than to protect Corrine's inheritance.] Chris is in some ways even harder hit because he truly cannot love anyone else after they leave the attic--Cathy is the ONLY one he can love. Similarly Carrie is terribly scarred and ends up killing herself with a bite from a poisoned donut, so she can die the same way her beloved twin did. There is a tragic quality to the saga that is ignored I think because of its core audience (teenage girls) and because the narrative voice is so girly and colloquial. It's also fascinating to read how carefully Andrews charts Chris and Cathy's growing attraction to each other--it is very, very subtly done. At first they are play-parents to the twins and he is her knight in shining armor. And very, very gradually he starts to notice her and she him--because there is no one else. There's a scene after they are both whipped--Cathy passes out from the pain and she wakes up in his arms. They cuddle together and he caresses her, starts to kiss her and she stops him.

That night I went to sleep after thinking of his kiss, and not the whipping or the blows from the brush. Swelling up in both of us was a turmoil of whirling emotions. Something sleeping deep inside of me had awakened, quickened, just as Aurora until the Prince came to put on her quiet lips a long lover's kiss.

That was the way of all fairy tales--ending with the kiss, and the happy-ever-after. There had to be some other prince for me to bring about a happy ending.

I was telling Lori how my sophomore year in college we had an extended period of snow--we even had a snow day which was rare for that area. So I was stuck inside quite a bit and feeling *extremely* claustrophobic. Sweet Briar, my alma mater, is in a rural section of Virginia (LIKE FOXWORTH HALL), in the piedmont area, and there is a train nearby which I used to hear at night (LIKE CHRIS AND CATHY USED TO HEAR). One day I was so sick of snow and ice that I drew flowers--roses and tulips and so forth--onto paper and then outlined them with colored yarn and put that up on my dorm walls (JUST LIKE HOW CHRIS, CATHY AND THE TWINS DECORATED THEIR ATTIC WITH PAPER FLOWERS). It hit me--I'm in Virginia, in the country, there's a train nearby, I HAVE LONG BLONDE HAIR AND MY NAME BEGINS WITH C OH MY GOOOOOODDDDDDDDD....So yeah, I had a great affection for Catherine and her messed-up story.

Here is an hilarious take on my beloved book:

He Ain't Sexy, He's My Brother

Okay, back to Lifetime. Now by and large I am happy with the casting--Heather Graham seems dead-on for Corrine, Ellen Burstyn is gonna knock it out of the park as the grandmother and the kid who's playing Chris looks good as well. I am a little concerned about Kiernan Shipka as Cathy though. Shipka, while a fine young actor, is a *character* actor--at least that's how she comes off to me. You need a young leading lady type for Cathy--you need that grace and coltish elegance because she is very much a younger version of her mother (this point is made many times in the book). Think young Natalie Portman (but blonde of course). Or Amanda Seyfried, if she can pull of the fiestiness (Cathy is the only one of the four who calls Corrine on her shit, Chris is far too busy working out his Oedipus complex).



And it is ESSENTIAL that Cathy have LONG BLONDE HAIR--Chris loves her hair, and when the grandmother puts tar on it, he slaves for a day to get the tar off. That's part of how they become closer! And later on they have a conversation about her hair, about how beautiful it is, how he thinks she might have on her head the most beautiful hair in the world--it's as much a character in the book as Janie's in Their Eyes Were Watching God! The four siblings look exactly alike, perfect, fair and blonde--like Dresden dolls, as they're called by the neighbors (and of course the fact that they're inbred contributes to that).



And there's a scene where Cathy sneaks into their mother's bedroom to steal money for their escape and stumbles upon their new stepfather who is dozing. She gazes upon him and then kisses him--and it transpires later that he was only half-asleep, remembered the kiss and thought he was dreaming. [And if you're going to stay faithful to the book you *have* to have this scene as it leads directly to Chris flipping out from jealousy and raping Cathy.] The stepfather remembers her as a kind of princess, looking longingly at him and from the footage I've seen, Shipka has short, light brown hair. She's adorable as Sally in Mad Men but I don't see her as Cathy--YET. I will absolutely keep an open mind because I really want this version to be great. [We're all still recovering from the 1987 debacle--that movie was so terrible, I literally forgot about huge chunks of it after seeing it. Oh GOD was it terrible.]

I've rediscovered a couple of old buddies--the Hardy Boys. I read a recent biography of Leslie McFarlane (the original ghost writer of the Hardy Boys series, hired by the Stratmeyer Syndicate to write the first 20 or so titles)--the bio itself was not that great (although well-written) but it got me to thinking again about the series, which I DEVOURED in 4th and 5th grades. A little bit in 6th grade as well. I also loved the Bobbsey Twins and I read a little Nancy Drew but my big thing was the Hardy Boys--I read every one of the original titles published by Grosset and Dunlop, and I still have many of them. Two brothers, a year apart (either 15 & 16 or 17 & 18, depending on which version). Frank was the older and had brown hair and brown eyes, and was more serious; Joe was the younger, with blue eyes and blond hair, and more impulsive. Man, now I want to go home and reread them all! I made my friends play Hardy Boys with me, and I usually insisted on being Joe. AND I wrote fanfiction--the very first I ever wrote, and sadly I do not have it. (I have almost everything I ever wrote, but not The Hardy Twins. See, this is why I'm so hard on fanfiction, I know how bad it really is--FROM EXPERIENCE.) Quite coincidentally I had a huge crush on Shaun Cassidy, and when I found out that Shaun was going to play my hero in a TV version of the books!--you can imagine my reaction. I LOVED that show. I've been catching some of the episodes on YouTube and it actually stands up quite well! Creaky '70s sets and haircuts aside, what matters most is the relationship between the two brothers, and Shaun Cassidy and Parker Stevenson are adorable together. My favorite episode was called "Sole Survivor"--Joe wakes up in a Hong Kong hospital and is told that he's been in a coma for a year and his brother and father (Fenton Hardy, who used to work for the NYPD!) were killed. Shaun acts the shit out of this, no, I am not kidding. (His mother IS an Academy Award winner after all; he's got good acting genes.) Lots of misty-water-colored flashbacks about his brother. They're just so cute together, great chemistry. Of course it turns out not to be true--he's been in the hospital for a week. the first clue should've been your hair, Joe--even with that incredibly long '70s hair, you would've noticed if it had been a foot longer!



As bare-bones as the prose was, the books were not completely devoid of literary merit--I actually learned some interesting things when I read them. For instance The Clue of the Broken Blade taught me the three different kinds of fencing blades--foil, épée and sabre. And The Clue of the Hissing Serpent taught me the Persian phrase "Shāh Māt" meaning "the King is captured" and also how hard jade is. In The Crisscross Shadow I learned about lacrosse and how it was an old Indian game, and in The Witchmaster's Key the London Blitz was referenced, so I looked that up. Very educational! :)

CoverSpy

It seems that Tina Fey's Bossypants and Ayn Rand are very popular. And I noticed one kid was reading That Was Then, This Is Now--deeeeepressing book. S.E. Hinton was pretty damn good for a teenage writer.

I clicked several pages, wondering if my recent bout with Larry McDonald's A Colossal Failure of Common Sense (finally finished it) would show up but alas, no. I'm wading back into Ulysses, maybe that'll impress them.

After the thorough defeat of the English at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, early medieval observers could be forgiven if they believed they had witnessed the demise of the infantry. Harold’s tight column of foot soldiers had ultimately proven no match for the mobility, speed, and sheer force of weight displayed by William the Conqueror’s Norman cavalry, and the 11th century nascent warrior society, which William exemplified perfectly, took notice. And so, encouraged by William of Poitiers’s panegyric portrait of the Conqueror leading his troops on horseback to overwhelming victory and the vivid, dashing imagery of the Bayeux Tapestry, the cult of Chaucer’s “verray, parfit, gentil knyght,” the elite mounted warrior guided by a moral and social code, emerged in the generations following Hastings, inspiring poet and historian, king and soldier. For over 200 years the cavalry’s invincibility in medieval warfare and the mystical righteousness of the knight were held as an article of faith—until the Battle of the Golden Spurs at Courtrai in 1302 proved the infantry was far from obsolete, and that the highly trained warrior caste could in fact be brought low by its presumed inferiors....


Whew. Banged out most of this Monday night but did some Tuesday night and Wednesday as well. This was actually kind of interesting because I used the Bayeux Tapestry as a source, and "quoted" sections of it in the paper, c&p-ing it into the body of the paper.

Even the etymology of Poitiers’s original text binds soldier to horse—William’s sobriquet of “redoubtable mounted warrior” reads as “terribilem equitem” in Latin. Appropriately the Norman horses share in their masters’ triumph: we read “[e]ven the hooves of the horses inflicted punishment on the dead as they galloped over their bodies” and the final image in the Tapestry shows William’s cavalry pursuing the fleeing English.



And my conclusion:

...[L]ater on we read “[m]ore than a thousand simple knights…fell there, and more than three thousand splendid chargers and valuable horses were stabbed during the battle.” These horses are not just valuable but splendid—the bewilderment of the anonymous Annales chronicler at this disaster is manifest and there is an elegiac quality to these passages, as though medieval chivalry itself were dying. Generations of cavaliers, nurtured on tales of the Conqueror and inspired by the imagery of the Tapestry, are now betrayed by their faith in the assumed superiority of the mounted warrior. But perhaps the knights themselves betrayed the code of chivalry—perhaps, as the cult of medieval knighthood developed and armor grew heavier, they took for granted their own invulnerability, and trusted that a cavalry charge and elite status were proof enough against the rabble. Courtrai would challenge such comfortable assumptions—and as a final insult to knightly and aristocratic privilege, we are told that “[d]uring the battle many [infantry]…who previously little thought that such a thing could happen to them, were knighted.”

I think you can tell I'm a Southerner from this passage! There is an echo of Rhett and Ashley's wistfulness for gallantry and the old days in this writing, now that I think of it, especially when Ashley looks at Scarlett and admires her gallantry (in the book, it's when she's making the dress out of the curtains). And the Southerners were crazy for medieval chivalry, they loved Sir Walter Scott.

DONE. Now, on to finals. And softball.

Last week I ordered most of my books for this semester--we have quite a few (like 6-7). Many of them arrived today, including A Knight's Own Book of Chivalry, Medieval Warfare: A History, What Were the Crusades? and Froissart's Chronicles. We also have the Penguin edition of Henry V on the list--I'm going to ask the professor if he can distribute the critical essays in .pdf format or something, since I already have at least two copies of Hank the Cinq. But--DROOL. The book on the Crusades looks delicious--I'm going to be even more of an Hermione and read it before class, as well as a few of the others.

Amazon has started a new program--Amazon Student. You give them your .edu email address, they verify that you're a student, and then for a year you can try out all the benefits of Amazon Prime (which for my purposes means faster shipping). Class doesn't start for another couple of weeks so I didn't really need the books that quickly but it's nice to have anyway.

 Oh, on the way back I watched the Sex and the City sequel.  I don't get at all the clutching of pearls over how terrible this movie supposedly was.  It's a comedy, guys.  Yes, it's over the top.  Yes, there are lame puns.  Did any of the reviewers ever even watch the show?  At its heart the movie is about being a woman--working, mothering, partnering--and more importantly, female friendship.  I mean, some of these reviews are...unbelievable.  Really, openly misogynistic--the Salon review actually muses that it would be "kinder" for SJP et al. to be "shot in the head or skinned alive by Arkansas rednecks," complete with a graphic of SJP being stabbed.  The posters responding to the reviews just slamming, savaging the appearances of these women.  They're not just "ugly," they're an offense to human eyesight everywhere.  They're all too old, too hideous.  One poster actually quoted her 15 year old son saying "false advertising--not in the city and not sexy."  (Oh, well, if some 15 year old BOY doesn't think four women 40 years and old and over isn't sexy, hand me the razor blades now!)  They're "degenerate," "bitches" (they're called this a lot), "desperate," "frantic." Another poster "forsees" a murder-suicide pact between SJP & Matthew Broderick.  Really pretty creepy.  Disturbing.  I see some of this over-the-top hatred for the Twilight series as well--(I'm not talking legit criticism--I am the last person to defend Twilight's actual literary merit--they're not well-written, but they are FUN.  I'm talking about non-stop ranting).  If you don't like it, DON'T WATCH IT.  See how easy that is?  Do you think spend my time watching and trashing Transformers or whatever fanboy franchise there is out there?  I could care less what someone else watches, if it's just mindless fun--which both Twilight and SATC are.  Oh, but wait, there's another element in here--as one poster on Salon put it:

And for many of the commenters here, piss off, you sexist, misogynistic pricks who can't stand that after 60 plus years of television there's FINALLY a show in which you are NOT the center of attention.

And that is really the crux of the overreaction to Twilight and SATC, IMO.

So, Rachel's post reminded me that I haven't yet posted this news on LJ--my middlest brother, Erik, and his wife are now the proud parents of twins!  YAAAAAAAAY!  Twins!  A girl and a boy, Erik, Jr. and Emily.  So, so, so flipping adorable!  It's all kinds of perfect because Erik and I are the two siblings who are closest in age, only 18 months apart, and we used to pass ourselves off as twins all the time.  The hilarious thing is, we're not even blood related--Erik is adopted--but we both had blonde hair, freckles and blue eyes, and people bought it.  (Until they found out we were two grades apart, then we just blithely said "oh, he was held back and I skipped a grade." Heh.)  Even now Erik will teasingly call me his "twin," you'll see this on FB sometimes.  Even better, when we were kids I LOVED the Bobbsey Twins books--I read all of them, the original editions and the rewrites--and we used to play Bobbsey Twins all the time.  I loved that both sets of Bobbsey Twins were boy and girl, like a perfect little matched set, and within both sets each one looked like the other. Bert and Nan had straight brown hair and brown eyes, and the younger set, Freddie and Flossie, had curly blonde hair and blue eyes.  Something for everyone!  I just loved the matchiness of it.  So I am loving that my niece and nephew have alliterative names, and they'd BETTER look alike!

So, it's been a little scary so far--they've had some problems with the babies--but it looks as though everything is coming together and they're going to be fine. I'm so happy for them both.

So, among other things, I'm reading Seymour Hersh's The Dark Side of Camelot right now.  Can someone tell me, did JFK run over Hersh's dog or something?  It's just so one-sided--unrelentingly muck-raking, one long laundry list of how terrible JFK and all the male Kennedys were.  (On the other hand, he does seem to have a soft spot for Jackie and Marilyn.  It's rather touching.)  Lots of salacious details, lots of anonymous interviews (if you claim to have had a long-term affair with Kennedy and you still refuse to identify yourself after nearly 50 years, it's difficult for me to take you too seriously) and some really shoddy journalism--unsupported conclusions, perfunctory documentary evidence.  It's actually pretty terrible, I find it hard to credit this guy's a Pulitzer winner but he broke the My Lai story so he must have some journalistic skills.  I think that's part of the problem (he's a journalist)--he doesn't really write a good book, there's no arc to the book, even within the chapters.  I'm actually not going to finish it, which is rare for me--I even finished The Daughter of Time and Atlas Shrugged, as dreadful as they both were (hey, at least Atlas Shrugged had some hottt sex scenes ;)

And as fascinating as I find the Kennedys (as I've said before, they remind me greatly of my own family--large, wealthy and lots of teeth), I'm not blind to the faults of any of them.  Jack was a terrible philanderer, a truly entitled man who treated women like props.  My mother and I have discussed it from time to time--she said that my grandmother thought it might have to do with the medication he was on for the Addison's disease, that it made him hyper-sexual.  I'm sure that's part of it, but his disgusting father probably had something to do with it as well.  Joe Kennedy was a remarkable man in many ways, and definitely a better parent than Rose, but he was a P-I-G pig with regards to women--he used to hit on his teenage daughters' friends, UGH!

ANYWAY.  So my point is that even a critical work about the Kennedy family should be interesting--I reread Peter Collier and David Borowitz's The Kennedys every now and then, and Lord knows Hersh's reputation is much better than Borowitz's, who is a total creepy ranter, IMO.  But the book is very interesting.  I think The Kennedys is where I first read the hilarious story about the long-suffering cook/housekeeper/something like that at Hickory Hill, who heard out a long list of Ethel demands and told her flatly "Mrs. Kennedy, you can wish in one hand and shit in the other, and see which one fills up first."  You have to admire that kind of salt of the earth fearlessness.  (Especially toward Ethel, whom I can't stand.  I can't remember who it was who referred to her as "more-Kennedy-than-thou" but it is dead on.)

So I'm reading several very interesting books right now.  One is about the Lehman Brothers collapse in '08, called A Colossal Failure of Common Sense.  It is really very dense going so after getting a concentrated lesson on convertible bonds and securitization, I literally have to stop reading for a little while to let it sink in.  But I am following most of it thanks to the book's readibility.  Ghost-written or not, it's still fascinating, although apparently somewhat polarizing among the cogniscenti. 

Also, via the ever-helpful Columbia library system (A Thing of Beauty), I got my hot little historian hands on a copy of James W. Silver's Mississippi: The Closed Society.  I read this book back in college--Silver was a professor of history at Ole Miss and personally witnessed the riot the night James Meredith (the first black student at Ole Miss) arrived on campus.  He wrote this book in response, a book-length treatment of a speech he made when stepping down from Ole Miss.  And so (like the Michener book below) it's very much of the time, which is fantastic.  When he wrote it, the Civil Rights bill hadn't yet been passed so he didn't yet know how things would turn out.  This is why I love reading contemporary accounts--it's great to read people's thoughtful analysis of what HAS happened, and very useful, but it is genuinely thrilling to read a running account of what IS happening.  Some fascinating, and relevant, analysis of the political insanity and the lengths to which people will go to justify their positions.  Of course we see some of the same thing today, only it's more coded and covert.

It occurs to me that Silver must've been at Ole Miss when Florence King was there, and I think her Master's was in history.  I wonder if she worked with him?

I also bought a great copy of James Michener's Kent State: What Happened and Why on Amazon Marketplace.  Such an excellent book--this is another book I read back in college that sparked my interest in Kent State.  KS is one of those historical incidents that, as shocking as it was, people seem to have closed the door on.  And this was indeed truly shocking--four students were murdered, shot dead during a peaceful protest (and two of them weren't even involved in the protest, they were walking to class).  My theory is that it was so terrible and unexpected, there was a kind of sea change of consciousness--students and activists decided that if that was the potential price for activism, it wasn't worth it.  So terribly sad. I find the opinions posted on Amazon interesting--most people who are still interested in KS tend to be (in my experience) liberal, probably because of what I said above, that KS hasn't been meaningfully addressed in our national history, it is still unresolved.  And a great many Amazon posters see the Michener book is conservative and therefore biased--I'm not sure I agree.  He sure doesn't have much regard for the SDS but the last part of his book is taken up by a kind of "where do we go from here?" manifesto and it is very sympathetic to the counter-culture. He also lists numerous examples of how badly the "other side" (non-hippies, conservatives) acted in the wake of the massacre, spreading all sorts of terrible stories about the dead, and sending "you should've died" cards to the wounded and even saying things like "the score is four/and next time more."  Just unbelievable.  Reading that book radicalized me to some extent (well, as far as Kent State is concerned--radical is always a relative term with me!); I don't see it as particularly conservative.  One thing I'm enjoying is the historically coded language--early on in the book he talks about people who'd appeared in the KS campus, non-students (in the contemporary lingo, outside agitators--no one's son or daughter ever came up with anything bad on their own, it was always blamed on outside agitators).  He describes them, and says something kind of throwaway about how they resembled "those monsters in California."  And that's it.  Of course he was talking about the Manson murderers--that casual reference, which apparently needed no explanation, tells how much the Manson killings two years before terrified the nation.  They killed the counter-culture as much as anybody.

Another book, also a contemporary piece--The Summer That Didn't End: The Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Project of 1964.  This is a first-hand account of Freedom Summer, when a large group of trained activists, black and white, went down to the Magnolia State for a multi-pronged offensive:  to register more blacks to vote, to educate black kids and generally to raise consciousness--all without protection from the federal givernment.  This is of course the setting for the notorious murders in Neshoba County, when the sheriff and his hee haw thug deputy and their ilk, arrested three civil rights workers, jailed them and beat them, set them loose and then followed them out of town and murdered them and hid the bodies.  Undoubtedly because two of them were white, the case aroused an enormous amount of attention and the Feds came down (FINALLY), combed the area, finally found the bodies due to a tipster, and prosecuted the case.  The case inspired the (somewhat romanticized) movie Mississippi Burning and also a poster (this image is from their trial) with the sardonic slogan "Support Your Local Sheriff."

As you can see by the books, I've really been immersing myself in the history of the '50s/'60s/'70s.  It's riveting.  We post-Civil Rights babies take for granted what an amazing thing took place--when you read about pre-civil rights Missiissippi and Alabama, how utterly hostile and awful those societies were towards blacks and anyone who wasn't absolutely conformist to a specific orthodoxy, how literally savagely they behaved towards those who challenged the orthodoxy in any way--you start to comprehend what an incredible sea change happened--and in less than a generation.

So I finished Wicked a few days ago. Um...hmmm. Color me somewhat underwhelmed. I love the premise, and the weird, carnival-mirror version of Oz is a great idea and fun to explore. But I do not find Elphaba a satisfactory protagonist. It took me a little while to figure out why and it's this--she doesn't do that much, and what little she does do is never carried to its dramatic conclusion. In college she carries on Dr. Dillamond's research--does this go anywhere? Other than teaching Chister how to mimic, not really. In the Emerald City she does one fully realized thing--she has the affair with Fyero (I guess you could say she falls in love, allows herself to be vulnerable). But the dramatic conclusion to that, the apology to Sarima--piddles off into nowhere. She lives there for years and never apologizes and makes her own peace with what she did--yes, I realize that Sarima wouldn't let her but you have to develop that, you have to raise the stakes. If she couldn't do the thing that brought her to the Vinkus, why did she live there for so many years then? Did her feelings change then, did she somehow come to terms with what she did? You can't just have her plop down and then not raise the tension, develop it further. Getting back to her time in the Emerald City, she most noticeably doesn't do something--she fails to kill Madame Morrible. Of course later on she does--or does she? He tries to make it a big mystery--did she or didn't she kill Morrible at the end--but her pathetically bragging about it, while still unsure of what she actually did, just undermined the whole thing and I didn't care in the end. I shouldn't feel that way about the protagonist confronting a major villain.

She really doesn't do much magic at all, and doesn't seem very devoted to or even interested in its practice or study. In fact other than Animal rights, I'm not sure what she stood for.

The lack of decisive action is really noticeable when Dorothy enters the picture. All she does is track her and wait for her! She doesn't do SHIT to confront her, stop her, talk to her--that whole subplot was a major disappointment. I found myself much more interested in Dorothy than in Elphaba. (I will say, I thought the whole section where she sends the dogs, the crows and the bees gripping--like her destiny was inevitably approaching. Of course this was helped by everyone's knowing how the Witch ends up.)

She's really not a terribly likable or admirable character, IMO. Maguire's elliptical writing style doesn't help that much--sure, Baum was WAY in the other direction as a writer (but of course he wrote for kids), rarely did Baum write anything particularly witty or clever. But Maguire seems to be opaque for the sake of being opaque. It's kind of annoying, there's no payoff. Why did Morrible enchant the three girls and why didn't they end up carrying out her plans? What was the point of the Philosophy Club sequence and how did it affect the participants? Why did her friendship with Glinda peter out? And why am I supposed to care about Sarima and her sisters and the children?

Although reading the synopsis of the musical--wow. They really DID change a lot! It's interesting, at first I thought "why the hell did Maguire allow that?" then I thought "well, they aren't his characters to begin with!" I did think the aftermath of the Witch's murder was beautifully depicted, and it's a shame that was changed.