8 Myths About “The Wizard of Oz” (Some of Which are True?)

I copied these myths from the website

http://www.buzzfeed.com/donnad/8-myths-about-the-wizard-of-oz

Hope You Enjoy! Erika K.

8. Dorothy’s Iconic White Shirt Was Actually Pink

TRUE: Due to the idiosyncrasies of Technicolor, it was easier to film a pink shirt and make it look white then to film a white shirt and make it look white.

7. The Wicked Witch Cries Out “Fly, Fly My Pretties!”

FALSE: The oft misquoted line is, “Fly, Fly, Fly!”

6. Buddy Ebsen Was Originally Cast As The Tin Man But Was Recast When The Make-up Almost Killed Him

TRUE: With four weeks of rehearsal under his belt and all the Tin Woodsman songs recorded, Buddy Ebsen was rushed to the hospital when his lungs failed. He’d had a deadly lung infection caused by the silver aluminum dust mixed with clown paint being used as make-up. Ebsen spent two weeks in the hospital and another month recovering at home.

5. The Land Of Oz Was Named For L. Frank Balm’s Cabinet Drawer Marked O-Z

UNKNOWN: Although seemingly an open and shut case of fact since Baum himself confirmed the story in 1903, enough dissenters including his own wife and children, has left this mystery to the murky waters of time.

4. Margaret Hamilton’s Make-Up Was Life Threateningly Toxic

TRUE: The green skin Wicked Witch of the West was a copper based make-up that could be fatal if ingested, leading Hamilton to subsist on a mostly liquid diet while on set. Her face retained a green tinge weeks after shooting concluded.

3. Pink Floyd Purposely Created “Dark Side Of The Moon” To Coincide With Oz

FALSE: All members of Pink Floyd have repeatedly stated that any creation of the Dark Side of the Rainbow” is purely coincidental.

jamin.blogsome.com

2. Unbeknownst At The Time, Professor Marvel Is Wearing L. Frank Baum’s Jacket

TRUE: Stranger than fiction. For Marvel’s look, the director wanted a kind of seedy gentility, so the costume department went down to a second-hand store and picked out a bunch of coats. On set, actor Frank Morgan turned the coat pocket inside out. To his shock, “L. Frank Baum” was stitched on the inside. Later both Baum’s tailor and widow would confirm the jacket had belonged to the author.

1. Munchkin Commits Suicide By Hanging On Film

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SU32MewCung&feature=player_embeddedFALSE: This one is persistent. Despite being debunked as a bird over and over, falsified video footage continues to circulate. Even with direct rebuttals.

Georgia Douglas Johnson notes

Georgia Douglas Johnson- September 10, 1880-May 14, 1966

• Born in Atlanta, Georgia
• An American poet, playwright, song writer and part of the Harlem Renaissance
• Graduated from Atlanta University; worked as a school teacher in Marietta, GA and principle in Atlanta
• In 1902 she lived in Cleveland and attended the Oberlin Conservatory of Music
• On September 28, 1903 she married prominent Republican party member Henry Lincoln Johnson
• In 1910, her husband was appointed Recorder of Deeds under president William Howard Taft and they moved to Washington, D.C. This is where Johnson started writing poetry.
• She published her first poem in 1916 in the NAACP’s Crisis magazine.
• In 1918 she published her first volume of poetry “The Heart of a Woman”
• Her husband died in 1925 and she struggled finding temporary jobs to support herself and their two sons, both of which she sent to Ivy League schools
• After her husband died she became famous for holding “Saturday Salons”, supposedly at the insistence of Jean Toomer.
• Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Alain Locke and Angelina Weld Grimke all attended her meetings.
• All of these people were major contributors to the New Negro Movement
• During WWII Johnson found it difficult to publish writing that had a political message.

The Heart of a Woman

The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn,

as a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on,

Afar o’er life’s turrets and vales does it roam

In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home.

The heart of a woman falls back with the night,

And enters some alien cage in its plight,

And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars

While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.

-This first volume of poetry was written about themes meaningful to women. This was the introduction to the volume. In this poem, the woman is unable to find her place in the world, and becomes attracted to withdrawing from the harsh environment surrounding her. This centers around the pain and oppression surrounding women.

-Savanna Beach

Static

The characters of Yonnondio seem strangely static to me. After the scare when Mazie is almost murdered, there is no progression in the development of characters. Mazie and Will and Jimmie and Ben are stuck in time, unable to mature, stuck in a ceaseless rut of shirking and arguing and crying, in shame of their lack of wealth and desires for things unattainable. For all the years that pass, none of them shows signs of aging other than questionable portrayals of Mazie and Will becoming ever so slightly more intractable.
Even the parents show the same immutability: The mother argues ceaselessly with her husband over money, but both use it to their own ends. Anna remains victim to her constant desire for control, spending her days endlessly sweeping and mopping and canning and whining about education, her end all cure all for their lowest class subsistence although she herself seems to have already obtained the education she desires for her children yet cannot overcome her miserable existence.
The father, on the other hand, is doomed to repeat the same problems – he will work, he will be startled into action by something uncontrollable (the attempted murder, the loss of the farm, the near death of Anna), but these attempts are all abortive. In the end he is becomes a caricature, endlessly suffering from revelation and backsliding into alcoholism and abuse and rape of his wife.
Does this lack of progress signify anything, or is it simply mere lack of skill on the author’s part?

-Luke

More Dorthea Lange photography

Culm

The Great Depression Archive

 

 

 

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/depression/depression.htm

Check out this amazing resource for images and information on the Great Depression. The photo essay is especially intriguing.

 

 

Tillie Olsen

Cane: Is Toomer an Atheist?

One of my biggest questions in reading Cane, especially in the last section “Kabnis”, is what stance on religion Toomer is trying to convey. As we have discussed, there are obviously a considerable number of conflicting ideas within the prose, this being one of them; however, I would like to pose the question of whether Toomer gives any evidence that would provide the reader with a suggestion of his religious beliefs. To help us analyze this topic, I have included two passages: one that shows Ralph Kabnis dismissing the idea of God and another depicting him seemingly holding onto religion with a desperate longing…

“God, he does not exist, but nevertheless He is ugly. Hence, what comes from him is ugly. Lynchers and business men, and that cockroach Hanby, especially.” (114)

“God is a profligate red-nosed man about town. Bastardy; me. A bastard son has a right to curse his maker. God…” (113)

 

Zach Torp

In reading Cane, one thing I always noticed was how the structure of the novel often felt disjointed.  This characteristic of the novel coincides with many themes of modernist literature and art, in general.  I often thought of his style of writing as the literary counterpart to modernist visual art such as cubism, with all of its strange intersections and multiple points of view.  However, the structure of the novel is actually a full circle.  In what ways, if any, do you think this circular form can be linked to modernism?

-Melanie

Scottsboro Boys

Sorry it took me so long to get this up here. I couldn’t get the pictures to paste in the box…Savanna B

Scottsboro Boys

-9 black teenage boys were accused of rape in Alabama in 1931.

-On March 25, 1931 several people were hoboing on a freight train between Chattanooga and Memphis, TN. There was a fight, several white boys jumped off the train and reported to the local sheriff they had been attacked by a group of black boys.

– The sheriff stopped and searched the train at Paint Rock, AL and arrested the boys. Meanwhile, two girls came forward and said they had been raped by the boys.

-The case was first heard in Scottsboro, AL.

 

-Ruby Bates and Victoria Price were the two girls who said the boys had raped her.

-The boys charged with rape were: Olen Montgomery (17), Clarence Norris (19), Haywood Patterson (18), Ozie Powell (16), Willie Roberson (16), Charlie Weems (16), Eugene Williams (13), Andy Wright (19) and Roy Wright (12).

-In the first trial, all but Roy Wright was convicted of rape and sentenced to death.

-A lynch mob gathered and tried to break the boys out of jail.

 

-Governor Benjamin Miller called in the National guard to protect the jail.

-The prisoners were brought to court by 118 guardsmen armed with machine guns.

-With help from the American Communist Party, the case was appealed.

-The Alabama Supreme Court affirmed 7 of the 8 convictions, but granted Eugene Williams a new trial because he was a juvenile at 13.

-Chief Justice John C. Anderson ruled the defendants had been denied an impartial jury, fair trial, fair sentencing, and effective counsel.

– The trial was then moved to Decatur, AL

-After an examination of Price, they found no vaginal tearing but there was semen inside her that had been there for several hours.

-Bates testified that there was no rape, that Victoria Price had told her to say those things because they didn’t want to be arrested for prostitution.

-The case was trialed three more times, charges were dropped for 4 defendants, the others were sentenced from 75 years in prison to death.

-All but 2 of the boys served prison sentences.

-Clarence Norris, the oldest defendant and the only one sentenced to death, escaped parole and went into hiding in 1946. He was pardoned by George Wallace in 1976 after he was found.

-The last surviving defendant died in 1989.

-There is now a marker in Scottsboro, AL commemorating the trial.