The Blog of the LCSNA

Burbles

Page 90 of 121

The Blog of the LCSNA

“All over a rattle”: Tweedle poem in The Benevolent Otherhood

Posted on

Volume 1 of a new zine from Oakland and Berkeley writers, The Benevolent Otherhood, contains a nonsense poem by S. Sandrigon mentioning Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum. The new “chapbook” was released this week at a reading at Oakland’s Mama Buzz before a packed house. A limited number of the zines are available, but there is a free digital version (embedded below.) The poem in question, “Sacred Massacre”, took some inspiration from Jon A. Lindseth’s article in Knight Letter Number 83, “A Tale of Two Tweedles.”  Lindseth traced the etymology of ‘tweedle’ and ‘dum/dub’ back to poems referencing “the sound of the bagpipe” and “the roll of drums”. “Sacred Massacre” uses these military sounds in every stanza, and compares the dangerous biblical feud between “a king & a baby” to Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee’s argument, “All over a rattle”. (Full disclosure: the poet is also an editor of this blog.) “Sacred Massacre” is on page 32:

Share

Alice’s New Musical Adventure heads for Broadway

Posted on

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.

Share

Hallowe’en in Wonderland scrapbook supplies

Posted on
Graphic 45

Hallowe’en is only three months away and scrapbook and paper crafting company Graphic 45 is ready with a new “Hallowe’en in Wonderland” paper collection. The illustrations are Tenniel “spookified” –  Alice wear’s a witch’s hat, the Mad Hatter’s tie has pumpkins on it, and the Red Queen has a devil’s tail.

You seem to need a wholesale account to order from the site, but I am sure the paper can be requested from a crafting supply store near you.

(Click on either image to see larger versions on the Graphic 45 website.)

"Through the Looking Glass" Graphic 45
"Wonderland Classifieds" Graphic 45
Share

Alice Illustrations at the Veluws Museum Nairac (Barneveld, Netherlands)

Posted on
Camille Rose Garcia: ‘De hertogin zat op een krukje in het midden, met een baby op schoot’, 2010

There’s an exhibit at the Veluws Museum Nairac in Barneveld, Netherlands, from June 12th till October 30th. It celebrates the many looks of Alice, featuring illustrations from Tenniel through Camille Rose Garcia. They also claim to have “een bijzondere Aboriginal uitgave” (special edition Aboriginal?) In addition to the art, visitors “make a journey through Wonderland, where a number of themes and life-size figures are depicted. See yourself in the strange mirrors, sliding in to the perpetual tea party celebration with the Mad Hatter and the March Hare and take a look at the animal room.” (Text google-translated from their blurb.) The museum is at Langstraat 13, 3771 BA Barneveld.

Share

Alice laughed: Amusing auto-abbreviations in yesterday’s Atlantic

Posted on

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.

Share

Mongoose Press Anthology of Chess Fiction reviewed

Posted on
Masters of Technique, Mongoose Press
Masters of Technique, Mongoose Press

In April this year, Mongoose Press released the “first ever” anthology of contemporary chess fiction. Subscribers to our Yahoo news group will already know that one of the stories was written by LCSNA-member and novelist Katherine Neville. Neville’s story featuring Alice Liddell and Charles Dodgson sits alongside other stories diverse in genre and inspiration. Other contributors include Steven Carter, author of the New York Times best-seller Emperor of Ocean Park, and Paul Eggers, former United States Chess Federation master.

A lengthy review of the book, written by Sean Gonsalves, is now available on ChessCafe.com. In Howard’s Gambit, Gonsalves provides some interesting back story to the book and its editor Howard Goldowsky. He also reviews some of the contributions. For serious chess aficionados, let down in the past by implausible fictional chess, Gonsalves offers the following reassurance:

… for all you expert chess players out there, the icing on the cake with MOT is the realistic description of actual chess moves in each of the twelve stories, unlike the impossible positions found in lots of pulp chess fiction.

To wit, from Patrick Somerville’s short story, The Game I Once Enjoyed:

“There was a fork on his next turn – king and bishop – but I had to get my queen out of the way of the long diagonal he’d opened up in his last turn, another little something I had missed. He’d be up a piece, whichever way I went to save my queen. So be it, I thought. Been here before. I reached forward to move, but stopped.” More…

Masters of Technique: Mongoose Chess Anthology of Chess Fiction (Hardcover) can be purchased from the Mongoose Press ($24.95) or from Amazon ($17.96). Proceeds from the book will go to support chess schools and clubs.

Share

Alice in Wonderland Invitational at The Tinman Gallery, Spokane

Posted on
Detail of Kay O’Rourke’s Mock Turtle
Detail of Kay O'Rourke's Mock Turtle

The Tinman Gallery in Spokane, Washington is hosting an Alice in Wonderland Invitational from July 30 to August 21, 2010. The event, which features paintings, drawings and sculptures inspired by portrayals of Alice 1865 through 2010, was reviewed by the Pacific Northwest Inlander last Wednesday:

While much of the exhibit artwork pulls directly from literature, others explore Alice in Wonderland’s more adult themes. Ric Gendron’s Feed Your Head is a provocative triptych complete with pot leaves and hookah. Is he pro-drug use? Against? Curiouser and curiouser.

Bernadette Vielbig asks a similar question with her Lewis Carroll Understood the Future of Modern Medicine, a refined aesthetic piece using weathered maple, eerily accurate cast plaster face and hands and a bottle of Kentucky bourbon. More…

The exhibition will be formally opened this evening with an Artist’s Reception from 5-9pm.

Alice in Wonderland Invitational
Tinman Gallery, 811 West Garland Avenue, Spokane, WA 99205
Free and open to the public, July 30 to August 21, 2010

Share

Campfire adaptation of Alice in Wonderland

Posted on

Campfire Graphic Novels, a publishing house out of New Dehli, India, released their Alice in Wonderland this week, as part of their large and expanding series of comic versions of classics, biographies, mythology, and originals. The adaptation (72 pages, full color) is by Lewis Helfand with art by Rajesh Nagulakonda (who has previously illustrated their Joan of Arc, The Time Machine, and Oliver Twist.) Campfire’s mission statement: “It is night-time in the forest. A campfire is crackling, and the storytelling has begun. In the warm, cheerful radiance of the campfire, the storyteller’s audience is captivated. Inspired by this enduring relationship between a campfire and gripping storytelling, we bring you four series of Campfire Graphic Novels…” A noble cause, but isn’t reading comic books by firelight a bit hard on the eyes?

Campfire’s Alice in Wonderland is for sale on their website for $9.99 with free shipping worldwide!

Share

“Like Alice, I have eaten eggs, certainly”: Wonderland-referencing poems in Asimov’s Science Fiction

Posted on

The September 2010 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction hits newsstands today. The two poems in this issue both use Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland themes as their central metaphors. “The Now We Almost Inhabit” by Roger Dutcher and Robert Frazier uses the Cheshire Cat and Alice’s changing size “as images of changable realities”, and Ruth Berman’s poem “Egg Protection” (mistakenly called “Egg Production” in the table of contents) uses “the pigeon’s opinion of long-necked Alice as a predatory serpent as the opinion of birds in general regarding humans.” (Quotes describing the poems from Ruth Berman.) Here’s an excerpt from “Egg Protection”:

For about two weeks, two robins
Kept yelling at me
Every time I appeared outside the door
In (apparently) a cloud
Of flames and brimstone
Visible to birdseyes,
To grab the paper or the mail.

[…]

Like Alice, I have eaten eggs, certainly,
But I don’t want theirs.
Birds consider only the first bit.
They don’t take a human’s word for the rest.

To read the whole poem, please consider purchasing September’s Asimov’s Science Fiction, where all fine magazines are sold!

Share