The Fall Meeting of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America will be held on October 25th at the Fales Library, New York University, to begin at 11:00 A.M. Everyone is welcome to attend. Jon Scieszka, the Library of Congress’s first National Ambassador of Young People’s Literature, will be discussing his new witty and creative retelling of Alice with Mary Blair’s illustrations. Also speaking at the meeting will be Mahendra Singh, Snark illustrator; Peter Westergaard, composer; and Nancy Willard, Newberry award-winning author. The complete program is available online. See you there!
The Blog of the LCSNA
Burbles
The Blog of the LCSNA
Stuck in Wonderland
Nursery Alice prints
White Rabbit Press has just launched a new signed and numbered limited edition of prints from The Nursery Alice. The prints are signed by Caroline Luke (great-great- grandniece of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), Mary Jean St Clair (granddaughter of Alice Hargreaves, née Liddell), Walter Tenniel Evans (great-nephew of Sir John Tenniel), Lesley (Dalrymple) O’Neil (great-grandniece of Emily Gertrude Thomson), and Edward Wakeling (former Chairman of the Lewis Carroll Society and noted Carroll scholar and author) See www.alice-in- wonderland.biz for more information.
Seattle International Film Festival
The Seattle International Film Festival’s Bumbershoot short-film program this weekend includes two Alice-related offerings:
Jab, “A mixture of live action and 3D photo animation illustrate the weird and beautiful world of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky.”
Alice in Not So Wonderland, “From legendary stop-motion animators the Brothers Quay comes a dark and surreal variation on Alice in Wonderland, in which our puppet heroine suddenly finds herself on the other side of the looking glass, witnessing nightmarish scenes.”
Philly Fringe
Philadelphia’s Live Arts Festival & Philly Fringe this weekend includes the Nicole Canuso Dance Company’s [update: sold out] Wandering Alice: “Alice [is] a curious wanderer who leads audiences through trials, delights, and a sea of unruly memories that color her identity. Inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by surrealist novelist Haruki Murakami, Wandering Alice will transform Christ Church Neighborhood House into a dreamlike landscape where audiences will be free to watch, wander, get lost, and be found.”
Maggie Taylor Update
(c) Maggy TaylorSo by pure happenstance (forgot to schedule an appointment at the Apple store to fix the laptop’s optical drive and therefore could not get an audience with a “genius”), I wandered into Modernbook Gallery in Palo Alto yesterday. Two seconds through the door, I noticed an Alice with Maggie Taylor’s white rabbit on the cover. The one, in fact, listed as “upcoming” on the Harn Museum’s website where Ms. Taylor’s photos are on exhibit (see my Almost Alice post)! It turns out that the book has been out for several weeks and not only is Modernbook the publisher of the book, but the photographs themselves will be on exhibit there from September 5 to November 4, with Ms. Taylor present at the opening reception (contact Modernbook directly for further information about the event). Of course, the book is also available on their website.
Hedgehog Overload
Someone over at Cute Overload knows their Alice!
Amazing Chess Set
Check out Yasmin Sethi’s Alice-inspired chess set! “Inspired by [Through the Looking Glass], the chess pieces have an opaque mirror finish, when they touch the surface of the board they magically turn transparent and reveal the identity of the piece contained inside them. When removed from the board they revert to being opaque, hiding the identity of the piece. This is a comment on how a chess piece has no value unless it is in play on the board. …the White Knight only works when placed upside down, a reference to the book where the White Knight talks about how he thinks better when he is upside down.” Designed in response to a brief set by Schott UK Ltd. for final year students of Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, one hopes that it will soon be on the market!
Alice, the bar
A new bar has opened in Wellington, New Zealand: Alice is located at the back of (where else?) the Boogie Wonderland nightclub.
Almost Alice
(Image copyright (c) Maggie Taylor.)
The Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida has a new exhibit, Almost Alice: New Illustrations of Wonderland by Maggie Taylor, running from July 15 to October 19. “Taylor’s composite images usually start with an original photographic portrait—often a daguerreotype or tintype from the mid-19th century setting of Alice and its author Carroll. Her digital transformations bring out the disconcerting fantasy that is at the heart of Carroll’s playfully ironic writing.” In addition, an upcoming edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland will feature Taylor’s illustrations.