No need to report every time a Jabberwocky word is used somewhere, but this was a good one. Alex Ross, The New Yorker’s classical music critic (and author of the excellent musical/political history of the 20th century The Rest Is Noise), in the middle of complaining about the flood of anniversary-year Chopin recordings, describes a showy pianist’s contribution thus:
Lang Lang, the other big Chinese virtuoso, galumphs through the two piano concertos on [Deutsche Grammophon].
Whether Ross means it in the sense of moving “heavily or clumsily” (Wiktionary) or in the more Carrollian sense of triumphant galloping, is up for interpretation. LCSNA blog followers, keep watching for interesting modern uses of Carroll coinages!
Back in November, Frank Wildhorn’s musical “Wonderland: A New Alice” premiered in Tampa Bay Florida. Yesterday it was announced that they are heading for Broadway and the big time. The show is set to open on April 17, 2011 and previews will begin a month before. The cast is yet to be announced.
“Journey with a modern-day Alice to Wonderland and the Looking-Glass World where she must find her daughter, defeat the Queen and learn to follow her heart…”
A synopsis, video montage, and musical clips from the 2009 production can still be enjoyed on this blog.
Writing online for the Atlantic, staff writer Niraj Chokshi yesterday noted the surprisingly poetic nonsense that is generated by Microsoft Word’s “autosummarize” feature. Appropriately, he tested the feature on Through the Looking-Glass and the result is rather striking:
Alice began. Alice asked.
Alice asked. Alice laughed. Alice laughed. Alice pleaded. Alice explained.
Alice interrupted.
Alice enquired.
Queen Alice
What this might suggest about the priorities of the 21st century office environment and the software developers who serve it, I can only begin to fathom.
The full article, Microsoft Word: A Poet in the Machine, is inspired by “New Media Artist” Jason Huff, who used Word’s “autosummarize’” feature to generate ten-sentence abstracts of the top 100 most-downloaded, out-of-copyright works. Previews of the resulting book, AutoSummarize, can be found on his website and make very entertaining reading.
Lewis Carroll and the Liddell family made the July 26th 2010 issue of the New Yorker in reference to his work on election mathematics. Anthony Gottlieb, in his article in the book review department called “Win or Lose: No voting system is flawless. But some are less democratic than others“, gives Dodgson praise for considering voting systems that are more fair than, for instance, the U.S.’s current winner-take-all method.
The history of voting math comes mainly in two chunks: the period of the French Revolution, when some members of France’s Academy of Sciences tried to deduce a rational way of conducting elections, and the nineteen-fifties onward, when economists and game theorists set out to show that this was impossible. Perched in the middle is the Reverend Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, the author of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass.”
National politics weren’t on Dodgson’s mind, it appears, when he first became interested in the theory of voting, in the early eighteen-seventies. Ostensibly, he was pondering the best way for the governing body of Christ Church, Oxford, where he was a tutor in mathematics, to decide on the design for a controversial belfry, and to pick new members of the college. As to what explained his sudden interest in college politics, some people—notably the late economist and Dodgson scholar Duncan Black—have suggested that Alice Liddell, who inspired the Wonderland tale, in 1862, was at the bottom of it. Alice’s father, the head of Christ Church, had forbidden Dodgson further contact with his daughters, and meddling in college politics may have been Dodgson’s way of getting back at him.
The whole article is pretty interesting, and concludes that one of the fairest methods of voting might be similar to how people regularly rank favorites on internet sites like Yelp (“Approval Voting”).
The Pacific Sun is the alternative paper in Marin County, California. Their Best of Marin 2010 awards and their March 26th issue are fully Alice themed this year. Mark Burstein (who can see Marin County from his house) adds this endorsement: “The background articles are actually well-researched, unusual in this day and age.” The entire issue is viewable as a virtual edition or as pdf here. Here’s a video from their Best of Marin party, unusual among 2010 tea parties for its lack of fire arms or calls to revolution:
It seemed inescapable that at some point someone would compare the teabaggers to Lewis Carroll’s famous tea party. Richard Kim’s article “The Mad Tea Party“, which will appear in the April 12th version of The Nation, never needs to mention Carroll or Alice, but it gave illustrator Drew Friedman cause for the inevitable image of Glenn Beck as the Hatter. It’s a good look for him.
Illustration by Sophia Martineck on the New York Times Opinion Page, Sunday March 7th, 2010
I’m curious what members of the LCSNA think of this article on the Sunday New York Times Opinion Page, “Algebra in Wonderland” by Melanie Bayley. The author is a “doctoral candidate in English literature at Oxford University.” The article goes thru the various vignettes of AAiW explaining declaratively how each scene stands as a parody of the new mathematics emerging in the 19th century. After a scene-by-scene breakdown of the book (the pig baby is a comment on topology, naturally), she wraps up:
Alice will go on to meet the Queen of Hearts, a “blind and aimless Fury,” who probably represents an irrational number. (Her keenness to execute everyone comes from a ghastly pun on axes — the plural of axis on a graph.)
How do we know for sure that “Alice” was making fun of the new math? The author never explained the symbolism in his story. But Dodgson rarely wrote amusing nonsense for children: his best humor was directed at adults. In addition to the “Alice” stories, he produced two hilarious pamphlets for colleagues, both in the style of mathematical papers, ridiculing life at Oxford.
It’s a good article to alert the newspaper reading public that Carroll was also a mathematician, but I’m nervous about all of this “probably represents” business, as if she finally figured out the true meanings in Carroll’s book. And what’s with statements like “Dodgson rarely wrote amusing nonsense for children”?
In regards to what we wrote below, that many writers have taken on the theme of “all those awful Alice movies” in anticipation of the imminent Tim Burton 3D one (in seven days!), The Onion’s A.V. Club lists Lewis Carroll’s Alice books in a series on movies that have been adapted to death. Allow me to quote liberally from “Put the book back on the shelf: Literary works that should never be adapted to film or TV again” (February 17th, 2010):
[...] The world doesn’t need a fifth Indiana Jones movie, or any more big-screen retreads of ’80s cartoons that weren’t that great to begin with. And it especially doesn’t need yet another weak reconceptualization of Romeo And Juliet, or yet another stuffy screen version of Pride And Prejudice to join the wave of them that started back in 1938. In fact, here’s a list of just a few of the literary works that have officially been done to death—and some recommendations for where to find newer, fresher stories just waiting on the page.
Book: Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland and Through The Looking-Glass
Adaptations to date: More than three dozen, notably including the 1951 animated Disney musical version and big-event 1985 and 1999 TV miniseries. Other countries have released their own versions as well; there’s a 24-episode Japanese animated adaptation, an Argentinean mime version, and nationalist versions like 1966’s Alice Of Wonderland In Paris and 1979’sAlice In Spanish Wonderland. Plus, of course, the upcoming Tim Burton sequel to Carroll’s original stories.
Definitive version: The Disney version is probably best known. While it has its own charms, though, it liberally diverges from Carroll’s text, like most Disney adaptations.
Why steer clear? The Alice books are simultaneously two of the most-adapted novels in history, and among the most habitually worst-adapted. Film and TV versions necessarily tend to elide over the original books’ densely packed puns and references, and instead concentrate on spectacle or on drearily plodding through a series of events that should be sprightly and disorienting, yet somehow not manic. It’s a difficult balance, and one that directors rarely seem to get right. What’s left behind is a bunch of creative, fun ideas that have had the creativity and fun leached out through repetition. How many times can we watch Alice grow, shrink, and boggle at it all?
What to adapt instead? Other Carroll works, including his novel Sylvie And Bruno and his poem “The Hunting Of The Snark,” bring in as much clever nonsense, wordplay, and episodic adventure, but are less line-by-line familiar.
Sylvie & Bruno!! How about that? The list continues with A Christmas Carol, The Bible, and other books that will by no means stop inspiring filmmakers in our lifetimes.
