There will of course be reviews of the new Tim Burton Disney Movie (knocked down by titans, dragons, and Tyler Perry, but still 5 in the box office in its fifth week, and having made already $300 million dollars!) in the forthcoming Knight Letter. Meantime, several LCSNA members have been forwarding this video around, seconding this reviewer’s sage insight:
Andrew Ogus warns us: “The delightful graphic novel Calamity Jack by Shannon and Dean Hale, sequel to Rapunzel’s Revenge, includes Jabberwocky and Bandersnatch guards around the giants’ stronghold. Bloomsbury, New York, $19.99.”
One review (at Booktrust) gives this synopsis: “The book relocates the classic tale of Jack and the Beanstalk to a Wild West populated by Native Americans, giants, ogres and a devilish creature called the Jabberwock, and turns it into a breathless crime caper full of action and suspense in the process.”
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. 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:
Our post on the controversies and pseudo-controversies surrounding Carroll’s character generated some small discussion (“teach the controversy”, as the Kansas School Board might advocate). The folks at Contrariwise continued with a longer reaction. I quote Ms. Karoline Leachat length:
from Alice in the Shadows by Maria Bodmann
[…] we send our sincere thanks to the LCSNA bloggers for so generously giving us the space. We have also linked to you.
Tangentially though, in conjunction with something a commenter here said the other day, the reference to ‘certain questions’ has got Contrariwise thinking.
Suppose you give a false alibi to a man in order to get him acquitted of a crime you know he probably commited – if it later turns out he didn’t do it after all, does that make what you did right?
I don’t think it does, does it? And that’s the weird problem at the heart of Carrollianism right now, that I think needs to be looked at.
The LCSNA blog that features us is headed “Special Report: Was Lewis Carroll a gay Mormon and were the Alice books written by J.D. Salinger?”, referencing some of the many stupid things that have been said about Carroll over the years. It’s a joke, but in its way it makes exactly the point Contrariwise is trying to make. Because those things aren’t ‘myths’ are they? They’re just loony ideas no one has ever taken seriously. The point about the myths we are concerned with (his child-obsession, his avoidance of adult society, his passion for Alice Liddell), is that they were promulgated by serious Carroll scholars and believed by everyone until very recently. The notion of the man as a pedophile arose out of these myths as an inevitable, and very reasonable conclusion. It couldn’t, and can’t be just laughed off as ridiculous, and taking that line is just Apology again. No one will take you seriously if you sell the image that has been sold for so long and simply ask people to take your word that – honestly – he wasn’t what you are obviously painting him to have been.
There’s some more interesting comments below that post, and feel free to continue the discussion in the comments here. The shadowy illustration above is from Alice in the Shadows, Maria Bodmann’s Balinese-inspired shadow puppet play.
And the winner of the 2009 Elizabeth Mrazik-Cleaver Award is…
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
By Lewis Carroll
Illustrated by Oleg Lipchenko
ISBN 978-0-88776932-0
Horray for Oleg!
“…Oleg Lipchenko has turned this classic story into a rich expression for both the youngest reader greeting Alice for the first time and those who remember reading the original Alice as children…Lipchenko’s illustrations are more than images on a page, they are a homage to the surreality and humour of Carroll’s text as well as a meticulously and brilliantly constructed vision of a longstanding tradition in children’s literature.” – Jury’s comments
The prize is awarded by the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY):
THE ELIZABETH Mrazik-Cleaver Award was established in 1985 following the death of Elizabeth Mrazik-Cleaver, one of Canada’s pre-eminent book illustrators. In her will, Cleaver left a fund of $10,000 dollars for an award to be given annually in recognition of outstanding artistic talent in a Canadian picture book. The recipient receives a cheque for $1,000 dollars and a certificate.
The Cleaver Award is administered by a committee of three members of the Canadian section of the International Board on Books for Young People. The recipient is a Canadian illustrator of a picture book published in Canada in English or French during the previous calendar year. To be eligible, the book must be a first edition and contain original illustrations. All genres are considered: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, folk and fairy tales.
This is the first time an edition of work by Lewis Carroll has won the prize.
In addition to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Oleg has illustrated Humpty Dumpty and Others: Selected Nursery Rhymes and a number of Russian children’s tales. Many of these illustrations can be viewed onhis website.
It seemed inescapable that at some point someone would compare the Tea Party movement 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.
Is it the surreal and episodic nature of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that inspires so many collage-style artistic responses, or is it just what good twenty-first century artists do? Handmade “vintage” jewelry, steampunk fashion, photo collage: it’s all very po-mo, isn’t it? However, as the following demonstrates, the results can be pretty cool.
“A Mad Tea Party” by Kenneth Rougeau
Kenneth Rougeau has created eighteen illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (enough for a new edition!) using fragments of previous illustrations, vintage photographs and other assorted photo stock. The resulting digital collages can be viewed on his Flickr photostreamor purchased from Etsy.com, where he sells under the vendor name Synchronicity 313. Though fragments of each creation are familiar, the overall effect is new and fun to explore.
“Steampunk Alice in Wonderland Plays Croquet” by Ramona Szczerba
Ramona Szczerba’s Alice is more muted but no less effective: “Hand painted, hand cut and hand assembled with vintage images on a stretched canvas, it is embellished with Thai lace paper, ivory crocheted trim, brass rivets and a single brass rose on Alice’s hat.” It’s the essence of steampunk. The collage is for sale on Etsy.com where Ramona, previously featured on this blog, sells under the name of her childhood imaginary friend Winona Cookie.
Alice in Wonderland Charm Bracelet by Janine Byrom
Janine Byrom of Cherished Trinkets, makes sweet fairytale pieces out of brass and bows and, in all probability, sugar and spice. She sells from her home in Manchester, England, but has a flat rate worldwide shipping fee. Her “Alice in Wonderland Collection” contains necklaces, charm bracelets and greetings cards, all for the little girl who loves pink, however old she is.
Of course, post-modernity has its ugly babies too. How about a Disney 2010 Alice in Wonderland-theme Yahtzee dice cup? It’s certainly contemporary. We should all feel very proud of our century. Keep up the good work!
This blog doesn’t regularly deal with certain questions (italics mine, as was the rest of that sentence.) And the new lewiscarroll.org’s FAQs don’t go there. Contrariwise, Mark Burstein usually starts his question-and-answer sessions with: “The answers to the first two questions are ‘No, he wasn’t’ and ‘No, he didn’t.’”
The LCSNA doesn’t shy away from these bothersome issues even if they’re occasionally bothered by them. However, there are reputable places on the internet specializing in debunking Carroll myths. For instance CarrollMyth.com, which offers various levels of depth depending on how long your myths want to spend being debunked. That user-friendly and aesthetically-pleasing website is run by Karoline Leach, author of In the Shadow of the Dreamchild: The Myth and Reality of Lewis Carroll (Peter Owen Ltd., 1999, $29.95). There’s also a new blog: carrollmyth.wordpress.com. Here she is at work:
The respected journo Robert McCrum reviews Jenny Woolf’s book The Mystery of Lewis Carroll in the Guardian, and concludes…what exactly? That Carroll has been misunderstood and somewhat abused, as Ms Woolf suggests? That a re-assessment is overdue, as Ms Woolf suggests? That, at last, we’re getting a clearer picture of a complex man?
Nope. He concludes Dodgson was either (sigh, not again) in love with little Alice Liddell , or – this is the best bit – with her ‘ten-year old brother’!?
Here it is in his own words:
More than either of these, it is a poignant love story: the repressed yearning of a solitary man for a resolution to his inner frustrations. Was he in love with Alice’s 10-year-old brother or, with Alice Liddell herself? No one will ever know the truth of that mystery .
Ookay…
Well, ’solitary man’, ‘repressed yearnings’, this is all the standard vocab of anyone writing about Carroll for the past sixty years, but not even the most myth-bound commentator has ever suggested Carroll was gay (well, apart from Richard Wallace, but he also thought Carroll was Jack the Ripper, so, you know, enough said), and Jenny Woolf’s book does not (I know for a fact), contain any insane riffs about possible pederasty involving young male Liddells.
So, the truth of that particular ‘mystery’, Mr McC, is that you just made it up.
And as for the Far-Flung blog, we will devote more time to the farthest flung among us (there are books proving that Mark Twain and Queen Victoria wrote Alice, exegeses outlining his Orthodox Judaism, and we weren’t kidding about his being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints: Carroll has been posthumously baptized by the Mormons at least eight times.)
So… how much do you really love Disney’s “Alice in Wonderland”? Enough to get the entire movie tattooed on your body? Alice-themed tattoos are fairly common but few individuals have taken it as far as this client of Medway, MA tattoo artist Holly Azzara. Not content with a playing card or two, she wanted it all, Alice, the Mad Tea-Party, the Garden of Live Flowers, the Cheshire Cat—everything.
I would come to Holly and say “I think this would be awesome” and then two weeks later she would have it drawn up. She knew how important it was to me to have the characters look exactly like they did in the movie and she was very dedicated to my vision. I had the thickest reference folder in her filing cabinet with picture after picture of characters in the movie.
More images of the tattoo and an account of its year-long creation can be found on Holly’s blog. Holly has also created a huge back tattoo of Tenniel’s drawing of Alice and the Cheshire Cat. Apparently it was the client’s first tattoo!
Inscription reads: “Presented to H.R.H. the Princess Alice by the Author, Mar. 25, 1890.”
Inscription reads: "Presented to H.R.H. the Princess Alice by the Author, Mar. 25, 1890."
Last week we blogged about an upcoming auction with an interesting lot: ceramic plaques, hand painted by Sir John Tenniel with characters from Alice’s adventures, used as menu cards at Tenniel family dinners.
We have just heard that the same auction contains another interesting item:a presentation copy of The Nursery Alice inscribed by Carroll for Princess Alice, the granddaughter of Queen Victoria.
The inscription, written in blue ink on the half-title, reads not “Alice, meet Alice,” unfortunately, but the rather more formal: “Presented to H.R.H. the Princess Alice by the Author, Mar. 25, 1890.”
On March 25, 1890, Princess Alice Mary Victoria Augusta Pauline was exactly seven years and one month old – just one month older than Carroll’s Alice when she fell down the rabbit hole. Was this a late birthday present perhaps?
The book will be auctioned by PBA Galleries this coming Thursday in San Francisco. It is estimated to go for between $8,000 and $12,000.
Andrew Ogus warns us: “The delightful graphic novel Calamity Jack by Shannon and Dean Hale, sequel to Rapunzel’s Revenge, includes Jabberwocky and Bandersnatch guards around the giants’ stronghold. Bloomsbury, New York, $19.99.”
