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The Blog of the LCSNA

Madness Returns next week! The long awaited sequel to American McGee’s Alice

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On June 14, Electronic Arts will release American McGee’s Alice: Madness Returns, the sequel to the 2000 computer game American McGee’s Alice. The new game will run on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 as well as PC. Judging from one of the trailers, the graphics are luscious and the scenarios violent. A dark-haired adult Alice at a psychotic tea party rams a knife through the giant eye of a cycloptic monster. Blood splatters on her face – and, scene!

Here’s a newer more revealing trailer:

There’s a nice article interviewing American McGee at news.com.au here. American McGee is his real name; he is the legendary game designer famous for Doom and Quake.

“I can remember the copy of the book that I had,” he said of the classic he read many times as a child, and many more as an adult.

“The size and the feel of it. I know it made an impression on me as a child.

“I think Humpty Dumpty (from Through the Looking Glass) had a pretty significant impact on me. It was a pretty dark piece of the story — this character shattering and breaking.”

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Alberto Manguel’s Return to Wonderland

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Check out the summer 2011 Threepenny Review, out of Berkeley, California. There is an article by Argentinian author Alberto Manguel called “Return to Wonderland,” which is also online as a sample of the issue. Manguel is an expert on wonderous lands, having co-writen The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (1980), as well as The Library at Night (2007) and A History of Reading (1996). His essay is full of reverence for the history and literary excellence of the Alice books:

The Reverend Duckworth recalled the excursion precisely: “I rowedstroke and he rowed bow in the famous Long Vacation voyage to Godstow, when the three Miss Liddells were our passengers, and the story was actually composed and spoken over my shoulder for the benefit of Alice Liddell, who was acting as ‘cox’ of our gig. I remember turning round and saying, ‘Dodgson, is this an extempore romance of yours?’ And he replied, ‘Yes, I’m inventing as we go along.’”

Inventing Alice’s adventures “as we go along”: the truth is unbelievable. That Alice’s fall and explorations, her encounters and her discoveries, the syllogisms and puns and wise jokes, should, in all their fantastic and coherent development, have been made up then and there, in the telling, seems almost impossible. Osip Mandelstam, commenting on the composition of Dante’s Commedia (another dreamlike journey of exploration), says that it is naive of readers to believe that the text they have in front of them was born full-fledged from the poet’s brow, without a long mess of drafts and trials in its wake. No literary composition, says Mandelstam, is the fruit of an instant of inspiration: it is an arduous process of trial and error, helped along by experienced craft. But in the case of Alice we know it wasn’t so: precisely such an impossibility seems to have been the case. No doubt Carroll, in the back of his mind, had previously composed many of the jokes and puns that pepper the story, since he loved puzzles and word games, and spent much of his time inventing them for his pleasure and that of his child friends. But a bagful of tricks is not enough to explain the strict logic and joyful avatars that govern the perfectly rounded plot.

[keep reading…]

The Threepenny Review can be ordered here.

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Carroll & Coleridge in the Year 2111

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We posted an excerpt from Adam Feldman’s excellent Jabberwockyesque panning of Broadway’s Wonderland a few weeks ago. This week, it’s Coleridge being echoed to criticize a new production called The Trial of the Mariner at Hoxton Hall in London:

It is The Trial of the Mariner,
And it occurs at Hoxton Hall,
A curious tale, told at full sail,
About the threat of plastic sprawl.

[…]

The set’s all recycled, reclaimed,
Singing and acrobatics abound.
The Junk Orchestra provides music,
Using scrap to make ingenius sound.

The Ship of Fools is rubbish too,
Volunteers and Lotos Collective made it from trash.
It navigates around the audience,
Beware: you and the crew might clash.

Because this is interactive theatre!
Accept bananas, make thunder, stay on your feet;
This isn’t for you, if you prefer to do
Theatre with an interval, three acts and red velvet seat.

-Hazel, londonist.com

The play actually seems very intriguing, maybe it just wasn’t that reviewer’s clean cup of tea. The Trial of the Mariner is “an interactive, multimedia performance looking at the future of our oceans” inspired by both The Hunting of the Snark and S.T. Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” “The year is 2111, and a group of desperate sailors embark on a voyage on the Ship of Fools. Lost at sea and mad with cabin fever, they arrive at the Plastic Continent of the Pacific Ocean Gyre, where the unhinged Mariner’s adventures come to life.” There’s still three more performances, closing on the 21st.

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Lewis Carroll articles in the Journal of the Arthur Rackham Society

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The Mad Tea Party, from Arthur Rackham's 1907 illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Arthur Rackham illustrated Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1907. Our friends over at the Arthur Rackham Society have a few articles about Carroll in the April 2011 issue, No. 45, of the Journal of the Arthur Rackham Society (JARS.)

1)      “Rackham’s Mice and a Few Rats – Part 5” by Dorothy Gibbs,  pp. 6-8. Covers Rackham’s Pool of Tears, Caucus Race and Trial Scene.

2)      “Illustrators of Alice” by Chris Tomaszewski, pp. 18-25, reprinted from the Jan. 2008 Newsletter of Stella and Rose’s Books; 23 illustrations.

I believe you have to be a member of the society to get the Journal, and membership is $20 a year for Americans.

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Lynne Truss on Lewis Carroll on BBC Radio 4

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Lynne Truss

Lynne Truss

Lynne Truss, author of the best-selling grammar-romp Eats, Shoots and Leaves, recently appeared on the BBC Radio 4 program “Great Lives” to discuss her fascination with Lewis Carroll. You can listen to the half-hour program at leisure on the BBC iPlayer.

Interviewed by British author Matthew Parris, Truss discusses her life-long fondness for Lewis Carroll – fondness that led her to include him as a character in her 2010 novel Tennyson’s Gift.  The interview also features Robin Wilson, author of Lewis Carroll in Numberland and together the trio address questions such as “Dodgson the Mathematician: Was he any good?”. They also do a good-spirited rendition of Alice being introduced to the banquet in Through the Looking-Glass. Matthew Parris plays the pudding.

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Watch the LCSNA Spring 2011 Meeting online

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The Internet Archive, San Francisco

All the thrills of the LCSNA Spring 2011 Meeting in the privacy of your own home!

Thanks to our host Brewster Kahle and the magnificent Internet Archive, last month’s San Francisco/Petaluma meeting is now available online. If you missed the event, or would like to relive the highlights, you can download any or all of the meeting segments here.

The mission of the Internet Archive is to offer permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. We encourage you to watch founder Brewster Kahle’s address to the meeting to learn how the Lewis Carroll Society of North America could, like the Grateful Dead, be at the forefront of media preservation – ensuring the immortality of Alice for future generations.

The Internet Archive, San Francisco
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David del Tredici’s Final Alice at Pittsburgh Symphony

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If you’re in Pittsburgh this weekend, the symphony will perform Final Alice (1972) by David Del Tredici, the Pulizer-winning American composer who spent much of his earlier career being inspired by Carroll’s writings. Final Alice is “an opera in concert form for soprano, folk ensemble, and orchestra.” Leonard Slatkin conducts and Hila Pitmann sings the Soprano Alice part at the Heinz Hall, tonight and Sunday. There’s a nice profile on Del Tredici and the piece in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette today: ‘Wonderland’ led composer through looking glass preview by Andrew Druckenbrod.

Soprano Hila Plitmann as Alice in "Final Alice"

As Mr. Del Tredici started to traverse the fantastical world of Carroll (the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832-98), he slowly began to shift from 12-tone music to the lush tonal style that occasionally recalled the Romantic sound of the 19th century.

“I did it very gradually,” he said. “My first ‘Alice’ work — ‘Jabberwocky’ (from ‘Pop-Pourri’ of 1968) — was atonal. It was a monster and it could be atonal, but there was a chorale in it; I was using found tonal objects.”

“An Alice Symphony” (1969) cast tonality “like a visitor from another planet.” “Vintage Alice” (1972) went further — it is tonal, but with different keys competing with each other. It was only in “Final Alice” (1976), which the Pittsburgh Symphony will perform in its rare full version this weekend, that Mr. Del Tredici took his biggest step. Written for soprano-narrator, folk group and orchestra, he felt “it had to be really Romantic and tonal.”

It was “Final Alice” that really jolted the orchestral community in the United States. No less than the Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiered it in 1976.

The 1980 recording with Sir George Solti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is on Amazon here. There are some extensive program notes here by Slatkin about the piece when he performed it at the Kennedy Center.

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Happy Birthday Alice

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Happy Birthday Alice! – 159 years an inspiration on this earth or under it today. LCSNA member Bob Mitchell has sent us this birthday musing:

Let me ask the two of you a curious question: Lewis Carroll was born in 1832 and Alice was born in 1852. Since 1842 is exactly half way between those two numbers did that peak his interest in the #42?

The question was caused by an extremely odd dream I had a few weeks ago.

Most excitingly, this is the very first non-spam response to the question I posed back in October 2010: Why were both Lewis Carroll and Douglas Adams so interested in the number 42? As a non-mathematician it seems to me quite random. Let me mark the occasion of Alice’s birthday by reopening the question: What is so cool about the number 42? Explanations drawn from mathematical theory, literary studies or odd dreams are all welcome (particularly the latter).

May the 4th be with you.

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