“It is a strange story. It has a stab in it. It would hurt me if I
couldn’t look up at the big white clouds shouldering their shoulders,
rolling on the rollers of the big blue sky.” -Carl Sandburg
First of all, many
thanks to everyone who bought a copy of this ridiculous new book of
mine. It has come to my attention that there were a few minor hiccups in the form of careless typos,
which I have since cured. I hope your entirely understandable fury at receiving
a less-than-perfect product will be tempered by the knowledge that this gently
flawed edition has become an instant collector's item, someday to be
worth many times more than what you paid for it, much like that Beatles album
with the dead babies on the cover. Don't you wish you had bought one of
those? I sure do!
For those who are
interested -and I don't expect there are many of you!- here are two great essays on one of the main
inspirations for the book, namely Carl Sandburg and his Rootabaga Stories, which was published exactly 100
years ago:
My
goal wasn't to attempt to replicate Sandburg's lilting acts of verbal
anarchy (though I toy with them here and there) but to explore and
exploit the different forms of folk fantasy of the early part of the
20th Century, most of it aimed at children and most of it from the
American Midwest for some reason. Perhaps life in the wide-open emptiness of the Corn Belt was so harsh that there was a powerful need to escape into a world of unbridled imagination, much like Dorothy Gale
fleeing a bleak future in Kansas. (It's interesting to note that in the
books, Dorothy eventually moves her entire family to Oz. All that "no
place like home" business is pure Hollywood schmaltz.)
I
too used this project as an escape from all the bad news we've all been
bombarded with lately. It was comforting for me to dive into a fantasy
world populated with ridiculous people (and animals, and foodstuffs)
doing and saying ridiculous things. But lest you worry that I've become too
frivolous, rest assured that underneath its veneer of whimsy flows a dark
current of melancholy. Sandburg's work has that as well, as the above quote displays. What was meant to be a frothy confection
turned out to be one of the most revealing things I've ever written. I
hope you enjoy it, hiccups and all.
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