Long before the more famous Wizard of Oz starring Judy Garland, L. Frank Baum himself made a series of Oz films with his company, The Oz Film Manufacturing Company. The above film was released in 1914, and was directed by J. Farrell MacDonald. It was the first film made by his esteemed company, and after its failure, Baum found it increasingly more difficult to find distribution, and eventually his production company went under, but we can still enjoy this amusing fantastical romp with its rectangular cardboard cat, or “Lonesome Zoop”, the seductive statuette, and the loopy Patchwork Girl herself. Enjoy!

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Recently we here at Mutable were introduced to a website full of all sorts of neat goodies from the image-making world of the past. Above is an example from their collection of prints from the Russian underground, circa 1905-1906, but you can find everything from tibetan anatomical drawings to vintage matchooks. To explore their archives go here.

Ladies and gentleman, the distinguished author, Mr. Alduous Huxley, “Brave New World is a fantastic parable about the dehumanization of human beings. In the negative utopia described in my story, man has been subordinated to his own inventions.” Here is presented the CBS Radio Theatre of the Mind recording with Alduous Huxley himself narrating! Below can be downloaded the first half-hour episode. Original music is composed and conducted by Mr. Bernard Herman. “Everybody’s happy these days.”

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The size of this tome makes one think of Wallace’s Infinite Jest, or Stein’s The Making of Americans. Boyer’s iconoclastic style would seem to bear out these comparisons, yet the subject of this book does not pretend to the coherence of Stein’s or Wallace’s. There is no single consciousness bringing the work together, which may be part of the point: the second sentence of the book reads, “I am so many different sorts of people it makes me want to stick my fingers in your mouth.” The surreal, absurd non sequitur here is a consistent feature of a book that is, ultimately, a mystifying miscellany. A Survey of My Failures This Far is seven books in one volume. Each is markedly different in terms of genre as well as style and subject matter. “Chewing in the Land of the Bonobos” is written as absurdist drama in the manner of Beckett; “Shorthand with Periodic Tenderness” is a collection of poems reminiscent of Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues. Boyer’s experimental impulse occasionally yields nuggets of philosophical wisdom or narratological insight, but a large part of the appeal of this work is musical and imagistic. Much of it operates according to the logic of nonsense: even individual sentences plunge us down into a new rabbit hole. In the central book within the book, “The God Game,” Boyer gives us some sense of his method in the form of a playful instruction manual about creation itself: “[W]e are using words in a manner similar to their original meaning, while simultaneously giving a new twist for our purposes. This level of involvement is post-culture creation, or rather simultaneous with culture creation.” Got that? This is Barthian postmodernism on crack, or one man’s insistence that printed narrative may not be exhausted, but it can be exhausting.

Last month we here at Mutable attended a convention at the University of Oregon that focused on the superhero genre in comix, and specifically giving credence to these outlandish figures with their outlandish stories. Herein we hoped to give a few highlights of the weekend. It is perhaps in poor taste to point out that we were in a full-body spandex superhero costume the entire time.

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Well, it’s been fun, and now the final episode has come and gone, but you can relive the magic of Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies over and over again!

Hear Professor Archibald transform the naughty boy from down the lane into a ball of squiggly tentacles! Relive Boo Boo’s discovery of the nest of imaginary bears! Experience the bloodlust that drove Grammar Instructor Gundrun to eat that poor boy! Frolic in a world now gone! A world that never was!

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(In our on-going search for truth, we are going to mistranslate the entire Tao te Ching and below can be found our most recent installment. To read the first twenty-four chapters go here.)

25.
Something formless and complete, from before the universe was born. Silent, empty, independent and unchanging, a cautious walk yet with no danger lying in wait. This could become the mother of the universe. I don’t know her name, that character we call Tao, but the force that comes from that name is called “Great”. This Greatness is known when it departs from us, and through departure is known as a vision in the distance, and from a distance is known as its opposite.

Therefore, just as the Tao is great, the sky is great, the earth is great, human beings are also great. Within the region’s midriff can be found these four greats, yet people alone encompass all the rest.

Humans obey the law of earth. Earth obeys the law of heaven, while the Tao obeys the law of the self roasting itself like an ouroborus.

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It ends as it began, but what a changed world it is!

The end is so night it’s beyond nigh. It’s so nigh that it’s fore and then nigh again, and then fore and then nigh again. In short, this is the final episode of Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies, and Isabel and Nathaniel have found themselves within the belly of the beast! Prepare yourselves for the shocking ending, or is it?

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