Alice Pop-Up Book shown on The Simpsons

The Simposons, Season 21, Episode 8, which premiered a few Sundays ago, featured Lisa reading an Alice's Adventures in Wonderland pop-up book to her baby sister Maggie. (It begins at 5:34 in the episode embedded above, available for a limited time from hulu.com.) I've got a half dozen AAIW pop-ups open in front of me to figure out which one the fabulous animation from The Simpsons was inspired from, but it seems to be their own creation using Simpsons-esque versions of the Tenniel illustrations. Is this right? (If you do not own any Alice pop-ups, I recommend the breathtaking version by Robert Sabuda, available here on amazon.com, & shown in the youtube below.)

Alice Fashion in 2010

Fashion is a weak suit at Let "Universe" Be "Books", but since Disney declared Alice is the New Black at a Las Vegas trade show back in September, Alice, and the prospect of tie-in merchandise, have been inspiring a number of fashion creations probably worth mentioning.

The Los Angeles Times reviewed the playing field on December 6th, name checking designers such as Donatella Versace, Jason Wu, and Antonio Marras, one of whom I have heard of. Mr Tom Binns is also making jewelery around the theme of absolutely smashing tea parties (New York Times photograph below).

Then there's Swarovski (pictured at top), always hot on Disney's trail; Fashion Times warns us what is to come in the 2010 Spring-Summer collection:

Rabbits, watches, cups of tea, small muffins and donuts, flowers embellish necklaces, pendants, bracelets, rings and earrings, precious and ironic.

Donuts? Anyway.

The cosmetics brand Urban Decay is coming out with a pop-up make-up box that Lewis Carroll would have been proud of, though he may have been less into the idea of little girls wearing eyeshadow with names like "muchness" (green) and "curiouser" (purple). (Thanks go to Diana Ajih from the blog Hot Beauty Health for locating sneak preview pictures.)

Vogue magazine's naturally prophetic 2003 Alice-themed photoshoot, in which "the world's most influential designers dress[ed] the original little girl lost in their own visions", is back for viewing in the blogosphere, while the French department store Printemps has announced that the world's most controversial designers will be dressing their store windows in one-off designs in time for Paris Fashion Week in February.

And for those who need that little blue dress now, Entertainment Weekly provided a short guide to "getting the look" of Syfy's Alice.

Finally, Rock 'n Roll Bride, "a little haven of kick ass weddingness in the overly poofy, pastel and often puke-worthy wedding world" posts Alice in her Wonderland, a photoshoot vision of a wedding with a difference (clue: the bride gets to eat the cake and the groom is nowhere to be seen).

Enough of fashion!

Alice in Wonderland Official Trailer #2 Released

And here it is... there's no escape!

(Watch it full screen, the resolution is great.)

>

Rumors of an Indian Alice in Wonderland Movie

There's Bollywood buzz of a big budget Indian Alice in Wonderland. The gossip from One India:

Quick Gun Murugun director Shashanka Ghosh is planning an Indian version of Alice in Wonderland. The film’s lead character will be named Alisha and it will be a modern version of the story.

The film’s script will be written by Samit Basu (writer of Simogin Prophecies). Shashanka wants the movie’s special effects to match up to international fantasy hits like The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter.

Actresses Katrina Kaif, Soha Ali Khan and Sonam Kapoor are being considered for the lead role. A character, based on that of the Alice in Wonderland writer Lewis Caroll will be added in the film.

It is Better to Give Than to Receive

Yes, we know Hanukkah is over and it's too late to mail order anything in time for Christmas, but isn't that always when you find the best presents? Let "Universe" be "Books" presents a round up of unique gifts to suit a variety of highly-specific gift-giving scenarios:

* First, is your mother, sister, or other beloved barrette-wearer a fan of Lewis Carroll and of the current Victoriana revival? How about something from Rivkasmom.com "Steampunk Wonderland" pendant and barrette collection? Rivkasmom combines antique watch gears, clock faces, tiny teapots and little brass top hats into sparkling items of wearable, affordable and fashionable literary allusion. (Sorry, images on their website are copyright, otherwise we would show you one.) $15-$95

* Or... do you know someone who has always wanted to read Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll [sic], but just can't find the time to sit upright and hold the book near his/her face? Bed Books revolutionary new sideways print edition might just be the perfect gift:

"The patent pending sideways text layout of Bed Books affords total comfort and eliminates the back and neck strain associated with the contorted body positions normally required for reading conventional books while lying down, and usually propped up, in bed."

Instructions on How to use a Bed Book can be found on their website. Paperback, $6.95

* For the Alice fan you insist on only meeting in public places, we would refer you to A. P. Miller's Beyond the Looking Glass, "Erotic Romance: Paranormal, Gothic/Horror, BDSM", as featured in our previous posting. $2.99

* and finally, what could say "you're special" and "I think ahead" more than a nice card informing your friend that you have pre-ordered for them an official Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland action figure? (Official release date July 2010). $19.99

A.P. Miller's "Beyond the Looking Glass" from Red Rose Publishing

Red Rose Publishing is an online Romance fiction site, where you can buy digital books and escape into amorous fantasy. One of these, by A.P. Miller, is a collection of fairy tale-themed shorts called Beyond the Looking Glass by A.P. Miller, downloadable in pdf and other formats for $2.99. (I don't see how "beyond" the Looking Glass is a fundamentally different preposition from going "through" it - if you're already through it, how much more additionally beyond can you go? But it's a title that has been used elsewhere by eating disorder specialist Remunda Ranch in her 1992 Beyond the Looking Glass: Daily Devotions for Overcoming Anorexia and Bulimia; for Alan Downs' 1997 Beyond the Looking Glass: Overcoming the Seductive Culture of Corporate Narcissism; for the DVD Beyond The Looking Glass- A Behind The Scenes Tour Of The Tennessee Aquarium; and on dozens of other books.)

Alongside Rhed Riding Hood and Snow White, the titular titillation of Miller's Beyond "finds Alice set in an underground world she would never expect through the very nature of it, which forces her to find her way back through Wonderland with the help of the Cheshire cat." Missy Brown's review of this at ParaNormalRomance.com says: "Each story is told with well thought out plots and twists, I kept looking forward to what came next. The love scenes are so naughty, they will have you running to find your own Big Bad Wolf, or not so Prince Charming."

Steampunk Alice Collage by Ramona Szczerba on Etsy

Artist Ramona Szczerba is selling this stylish collage inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland on Etsy.com, the online store for handmade craft. This 1 of 1 is still available for $145.

Well, you didn't think Alice WALKED all over Wonderland did you? That place is HUGE, and Alice is way too clever for that. Besides, those maryjanes pinch after a while.
No, Alice has wisely fashioned her favorite wicker chaise into a fabulous Wonderland Cruiser and can be seen motoring about, accompanied by the March Hare (who has also fashioned a means of transport), the White Rabbit, and the hookah-smoking caterpillar (she felt giving him a ride was the least she could do after pressing his mushroom into service as a parasol). With the Dormouse emerging (with a yawn) from her teapot and her small bottle of elixir following on an endtable sidecar, Alice is ready for whatever Wonderland might throw at her next.

This 5" x 7" original collage features a vintage image of Alexandra "Xie" Kitchin (one of Lewis Carroll's favorite child models) in true steampunk style and has been hand-printed, hand cut and hand assembled on a stretched hand painted gallery canvas. It features brown mulberry paper, German Dresden trim and is accented by antiqued pressed brass corners.

Ms. Szczerba and Mark Burstein were e-mailing back and forth this week about the photograph she used for the collage, which he wrote is "not the face of Alice Liddell; it is a photo of another of Carroll's favorite young models, Alexandra 'Xie' Kitchin, taken 14 May 1873." Ms. Szczerba also directed us to her Flikr site, starting here, where she has some more original illustrations for AAIW.

Keith Sheppard's Wonderland Revisited

Evertype has published a book of new Alice stories called Wonderland Revisited and the Games Alice Played There by author Keith Sheppard, with illustrations by Cynthia Brownell. At Sheppard's website, www.writerman.org.uk, you can read the first chapter of the book & also some of his other nonsense verse.

Here is the blurb from the back cover:

“Excuse me,” said Alice to a small white Mouse in red shorts. “What precisely is a custard race?”

Did Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass leave you yearning for more? Join Alice on her new journey and meet the extraordinary inhabitants of Wonderland, both familiar and new.

If your bed turned into a boat and you found yourself “drifting off” in an entirely unexpected manner how would you find your way home? The Jack of Diamonds says it’s Alice’s own fault for being fast asleep—had she slept more slowly she wouldn’t be so far from home.

The Red Queen, the Mah-jong Dragons, even the Red King’s Gamekeeper, all seem helpful enough at first—but things never quite turn out the way Alice hopes!

Brimming with wordplay, nonsense verse, and a cast of eccentric characters each with their own peculiar logic, this adventure is faithful to the style of the originals, picking up the pen where Lewis Carroll put it down. Be swept away on a torrent of humour and madness. Alice is back!

It can be purchased from Amazon.com for $12.95 or Amazon.co.uk for £8.50.

Alice's Adventures under Ground: new typeset edition with Carroll's original illustrations

Evertype has published a handsome new edition of Alice's Adventure's under Ground, Lewis Carroll's earlier version of Alice's adventures. Michael Everson, who has previously translated AAIW into Irish, is the editor, creating a book design inspired by Martin Gardiner's Annotated Alice and original elements from the facsimile. He has typeset the text, making it easier to read than the facsimiles. And this edition uses Lewis Carroll's own original illustrations (which Carroll would not have thought were professional enough to be published widely in the 1860s, but, by our modern standards, are very cool.) It is now available from amazon.com for $10.95 or amazon.co.uk for £7.95. More about this edition at Evertype.

« Alice Still Alive » in its Thirteenth Incarnation

Every year since Lewis Carroll's centennial in 1998, French artist Guy Jacqumin has asked other "Artistes Alicéens" to collaborate on an exhibition around an Alice-related theme, like 2004's Alice à la Folie or 2003's Alice dionysienne. If you're near Paris in the next few weeks, stop by the Centre d'arts plastiques Albert Chanot, 33 rue Brissard, 92140 Clamart. Alice chez Albert et Lucie, the thirteenth Alice still alive, will show starting December 12th, 2009, thru January 3rd, 2010. Previous Alice still alives can be seen at www.alicestillalive.clan.st, which the British Lewis Carroll Society has kindly translated here. (Thanks to Mark Richards and Hugues Lebailly of the LCS for the tip.)

Free Samples from Dover Publications

Each week DoverPublications.com emails subscribers with a list of publication samples aimed at teachers. Last month's offering included both the seasonal and the fashionable: at the bottom of the list was a selection of Christmas and Hanukkah origami projects, at the top were extracts from the Dover Thrift Edition of AAIW with Tenniel's illustrations, two Alice coloring books, and a newly-released soft-cover edition of AAIW as illustrated by Willy Pogány in 1929. The latter is now available for purchase on their website.

Reading extracts of a coloring book is probably worse than reading a book with no pictures at all, but it could supply some rather nice clip art files for this year's Christmas letter.

Rare performance of Alec Wilder's original music for the 1957 LP Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

In 1957, a popular dramatized LP version of Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland was released, narrated and sung by Cyril Ritchard. It's still widely available, even on iTunes here. The music, which many children of that generation heard so many times, was written by light classical American composer Alec Wilder - (He also wrote television operas, like Miss Chicken Little [1953] for CBS, and was friends with Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett.) A piano reduction of this score, with song versions of just about every poem in AAIW, has been in print from Tro Ludlow Music since 1986. However, the original instrumental score, for woodwind quintet plus percussion, was lost.

It was lost until it was found in Gunther Schuller's attic a few years ago. (Schuller is another swing-era American popular-classical composer.) Professor John Koehn will be staging a performance at Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s College of Fine Arts this weekend and next, with the school's Dean, Michael Hood, reading from the story. 11am on Saturday, December 12th and 19th, at the Indiana Free Library in Indiana, Pennsylvania. Read more about it in the Indiana Gazette.

New York Times makes "Through the Looking Glass" reference in their headline about Bergdorf Goodman's 5th Avenue Alice-themed Window Display

Hey, kid-
Wouldn't you like to be on Broadway?
And wear some Bergdorf Goodman clothes?
Red alligator shoes, a golden anklet,
And seventeen dozen nylon hose,
Hey, kid!

-Langston Hughes

(from the Kurt Weill opera Street Scene, 1946)

Alice's New Musical Adventure won't be coming to Broadway for awhile (it's still playing counties), but she's on 5th Avenue in Bergdorf Goodman's Christmas window display. From the New York Times' article with a Carroll reference in the title:

Bergdorf Goodman’s windows beckon with a swanky sparkle. “Alice in Wonderland” is the loose inspiration, and some fancy clothes play a role, but exquisite handicraft is the star of the show.

The shine comes from a vision in mirrors: A silver lobster plays a silver violin, beneath fluted columns with mosaic animal heads, under a disco ball surrounded by a Venetian frame — all reflecting the street scene, and all echoing a dramatic Pamella Roland gown swooping down from above.

Elsewhere, a king and queen, in black and red, sit on a chess board playing cards and drinking tea. But the chessboard is standing on edge against the back wall of the display, so the view is of the top of the monarchs’ heads — a neat optical trick that makes it seem as if you are peering down from above rather than walking by on the sidewalk.

The true standout is a fantasia of white, built — literally and literarily — out of books. In a space covered top to bottom with whitewashed volumes, a dodo bird with feathers made out of pages hobbles near a turtle with a lamb’s head. A tea party spills out of the pages of an open tome like a tongue out of an open mouth. Delicate birds flutter out of another with origami pages. You could stare at it for an hour and only then notice the frog wearing a judicial wig.

“It’s everything you want from a window,” my friend said. “You basically want to feel like the Little Match Girl, with your nose pressed up against the glass. You want to be delivered from your drab existence in just the moment before you perish from the cold.”

Through the Looking Glass: Holiday Feasts for the Eyes

by Ariel Kaminer

The New York Times, December 4th, 2009

The Times website also has a slideshow with Ms. Kaminer narrating over the various New York City window displays, including Bergdorf Goodman, look for "Audio Slideshow" when you go to the full article. Thanks to Jenny Woolf for finally finding pictures of the storefront at trendhunter.com.

Alice Miniseries on the Syfy Channel, December 6th-7th

If you haven't heard the hype, Syfy is rolling out a hot new four-hour miniseries inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice books, this coming Sunday and Monday evenings starting at 9pm. (Syfy used to be called the Sci Fi Channel, and this rebranding is being boycotted by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Slate as an "unsupportable offense against orthography.") This show should should be a wild take on the Alice "myth", with Carroll listed as only one of many influences including Doctor Who and other classic genre-benders. The adult Alice (Caterina Scorsone) can do karate. You may remember Harry Dean Stanton, who plays an insurgent Caterpillar "resisting" the Queen of Hearts, as a regular from David Lynch movies and the slithery Fundamentalist Mormon prophet in Big Love. And the Dodo, also an insurgent, is played by Tim Curry, who was of course once the sweet transvestite transsexual from Transylvania. The Syfy plot sounds too complicated to recap before seeing it, involving some sort of coveted ring of power, the Gem of Wonderland, but the production and acting all sound first rate. There's trailers and other promo material at www.syfy.com/alice, and Troy Patterson's review at Slate (which I was just paraphrasing) is here. Patterson coined a delicious Carrollian portmanteau "maluscious" (luscious and malicious) to describe Kathy Bates' Queen of Hearts.

Lauren Mechling on Alice: "We are all changelings."

Lauren Mechling, the author of the Dream Girl series (starring the irritatingly named Claire Voyante), has a short essay posted today about Carroll and Alice at the Wall Street Journal's blog Speakeasy. In lieu of the high-profile Alice projects coming out, she looks at the phenomenon thru her modern Teen-Lit spectacles:

[...] Yet the weirdness for which the story is best remembered is beside the point. Trippy as the events may be, its sharpest element is the profound sense of melancholy overhanging them. “‘It was much pleasanter at home,’ thought poor Alice, ‘when one wasn’t always growing larger and smaller and being ordered about by mice and rabbits,’” wrote Carroll. Near the end of the tale, a hookah-smoking caterpillar asks her who she is. “‘I hardly know sir,’” she replies in good-mannered consternation. “At least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then.”

In addition to going it alone, Alice is stuck dealing with a body that is betraying her every step of the way. It’s a universal—and horrifically personal—condition. I defy you to find anyone who hasn’t watched on with alarm as her body grew pimples, love handles, or, with enough years, begun to curl over and shrink. Some fuss has been made over Burton’s choice to cast a 19-year-old actress rather than a child to play Alice in his film version, but the Alice experience is not constrained to the world of children. Quite the opposite.

And when Carroll writes, “‘For it might end,’ Alice said to herself, “in my going out altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?’” we feel the author’s frustration and sadness layered over Alice’s own. We are all changelings. And, all the more excruciating, so are our loved ones—a fact that Carroll knew all too well.

From Go Ask Alice, Again: In an Ever-Changing World, Wonderland Never Ceases (Essay)

by Lauren Mechling

The Wall Street Journal's blog Speakeasy

December 5th, 2009

Also, Rachel just found this amazing entry at Answers.com, a website with answers to all questions:

We should ask them why a raven is like a writing desk.

UPDATE: They already have a disappointing entry for Why is a raven like a writing desk?.

Swann Galleries to auction "Portrait of Emily Cecilia Harrison"

On December 8th, Swann Galleries in New York will be auctioning Dodgson's "Portrait of Emily Cecilia Harrison," a 6.5 by 5 inch albumen print of Emily and her doll in a comfortable-looking chair. The sale is notable, first for its seriously fancy online "3D" catalogue, and secondly for a very exciting re-telling of Mr Dodgson's biography:

Although best known for novels "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass," he also invented croquet, billiards, various forms of chess, scrabble, ways to divide certain numbers and two different form of the Arabic zero.

The estimated sale price is $4,000 to $6,000. Perhaps it should be higher?

Силви и Бруно: Sylvie & Bruno now in Bulgarian!

I believe this is the first time Lewis Carroll's Sylvie & Bruno has appeared in Bulgarian, in a new translation by Rosa Grigorova. Here's the blurb from knigagb.com:

Очарователната приказка – последното голямо произведение на Луис Карол, е триумф на човешкото въображение, каквото само човек с неговата рядка чувствителност може да създаде.
За „Силви и Бруно” литературните критици казват, че това е трудът на живота му, а книгите за Алиса са само генералната му репетиция.
Разказ за странните приключения на малки сестричка и братче в три различни места: Англия, Фейландия и Вънландия – прелестна пародия на реалния свят на Карол в Оксфорд с веселата си йерархия от ректори, заместник-ректори и ерудирани, макар и много разсеяни професори, и още десетки други, всички изобилно поръсени с типичната за Карол игра на думи, до един въвлечени в заплетени и изпълнени с напрежение приключения, пътуване във времето, несподелена любов... и гения на един от най-очарователните и изобретателни виртуози на английския език.

Or, according to Google Translate: "For Sylvie and Bruno literary critics say it is difficult of his life, and Alice books are just his general rehearsal." This goes for €10 where all fine Bulgarian books are sold.

Poet Marianne Moore & Lewis Carroll creatively combined in an exhibition by Sue Johnson at Philadelphia's Rosenbach Museum & Library

The Rosenbach Museum & Library's Artist-in-Residence Sue Johnson has an original installation called Moore Adventures in Wonderland running from September 23rd, 2009, thru June 6th, 2010. The Rosenbach collection is highlighted with large archives by both Lewis Carroll and Marianne Moore, the witty American modernist poet, so Johnson's installation sets out to explore the two writers' connections. In her own words (quoted in last Friday's Philadelphia Daily News):

Moore almost exclusively uses nature as her platform. She doesn't people her poetry very often, and I felt a resonant chord with that. With Carroll, of course, it's Alice's adventures, but it's Alice's adventures with creatures that have been anthropomorphized. So I thought that there was a good conversation that could be had there between two creative people that I felt an affinity with.

Marianne Moore willed to the Rosenbach a room from her Greenwich Village apartment, which was then recreated on site. The exhibition is downstairs from the Moore living room, so Johnson played with the house's layout and available looking-glasses above fireplace mantles: "I was thinking about going through the looking glass upstairs in the Moore room and landing downstairs in the room that I created. So it's almost like watching an old filmstrip, where there's a slippage of the film and you find yourself in another place, down the rabbit hole. I wanted people to be toggling back and forth between those spaces." (also quoted from the Daily News, where there's a further detailed description of the installation.)

The Rosenbach Museum & Library is at 2008-2010 Delancey Place, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19103. Admission is $10 for adults, $8 for seniors, $5 for students and children; closed on Mondays. Too Many Thoughts to Chew: A [Maurice] Sendak Stew is showing simultaneously.

(The Lewis Carroll Society of North America will be meeting at the Rosenbach and viewing Sue Johnson's installation on April 24, 2010. To learn more about the society, see www.lewiscarroll.org. As the meeting date gets closer, we will be posting additional information about our program that day on the society's website. - from Clare Imholtz, LCSNA Secretary)

Alice at 8,700 feet

With all the coverage of the forthcoming Tim Burton movie and Syfy channel series, Alice does seem to be getting about at bit lately. However, there must be someone out there left to be surprised at finding her 8,700 feet up a mountain in the French Alps.

The ski resort of Courchevel, favored winter playground of Russian oligarchs, Saudi Arabian princes and well to-do British families, is known for extravagance. Their decision to hold a season-long exhibition of Dali sculptures, including his "Alice in Wonderland", up and down the mountain sides is, therefore, business as usual in that surreal and expensive winter fairyland.

The video below shows the thirteen foot-tall statues of "Alice" and "Woman in Flames" being manoeuvred into place. I particularly like the part where Alice is flying between the mountains, suspended on a long cable beneath the helicopter.

Lou Bunin's 1949 animated Alice in Wonderland showing in L.A. on Saturday

Cinefamily, a "movie lover" organization in L.A., will be showing Lou Bunin's Alice in Wonderland at the Silent Movie Theatre, 611 N. Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90036. Two shows on Saturday, November 28th, at 5:00 & 7:30pm, for $12. Here's the description & musical clip from their listing:

Alice In Wonderland (1949)
This ambitious, highly faithful late-'40s Alice adaptation took years to complete, and features an abundance of impressive, meticulous and labor-intensive stop-motion work from pioneer puppeteer Lou Bunin. After a live-action prologue showing the historical inspirations for the major characters, Alice (a decidedly adult Carol Marsh) is quickly launched into surreal realms of design and color. Remarkably, the film stays true to the original novel's anarchic construction, and the inspiration of Victorian illustrator John Tenniel's Alice imaginings. Bunin's handiwork is at its peak during the musical numbers, which dunk you head-first into the film's opium-riddled dreamworld--and in addition, live-action director Dallas Bower comes up with clever, simple solutions to the FX limitations of the day. Originally suppressed by Disney for fear of its potential upstaging of their own animated Alice, Bunin's work comes to you here at the Cinefamily in a rare screening of a beautiful MOMA-restored 35mm print!
Dirs. Dallas Bower & Lou Bunin, 1949, 35mm, 76 min.

New Alice book illustrated by LCSNA member out now

At the LCSNA Spring Meeting in 2008, Oleg Lipchenko, artist, illustrator and LCSNA member, described the challenges of illustrating Alice's Adventures in Wonderland anew. "It's like illustrating "IT." You know what "IT" means, right?"

Several of you were lucky enough to be able to get hold of pre-publication editions and your reviews were delighted. Now the Oleg's rich and intricate illustrations are available to all:

Dear friends,

I'm glad to inform you all that a new edition of Alice with my illustrations published by Tundra Books is available in bookstores:

Barnes and Noble, USA

Chapters.Indigo, Canada

I am grateful to all of you who purchased a copy of the Limited Edition and helped me to move ahead with my illustrations. My next my book will be published by Tundra Books in 2010. It is Humpty Dumpty And Friends. Still several copies of the Limited Edition of Alice (Studio Treasure) are available at: www.surrealice.com

Yours,
Oleg Lipchenko, artist, illustrator

"Alice in Wonderland Syndrome": A Terrifying First-Person Account

"Alice in Wonderland Syndrome" - not the consequence of reading Alice's adventures too many times over - but rather the actual medical complaint, is not common. All the better for us and our already tried-to-the-limit physicians, and all the more interesting to read a rare first-person account of the malady, published last week in the UK newspaper, The Daily Mail.

Newcomers to this syndrome and ambitious hypochondriacs should know that sufferers of AIW syndrome, also known as Todd's syndrome, experience both macropsia (where ordinary objects appear unfathomably large, and the subject unfathomably small) and micropsia (visa versa). The Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine (Seventh Edition) describes symptoms as "Disturbance of one's view of oneself ± fast-forwarding of intrapsychic time."

Rik Hemsley, 33, was "sober and hangover-free" when he first experienced symptoms:

I stood up, reached down to pick up the TV remote control from the floor and felt my foot sink into the ground. Glancing down, I saw that my leg was plunging into the carpet. It was a disturbing sensation, but it lasted only a few seconds, so I put it down to tiredness and forgot all about it.

Then things got really weird...

Everything was now distorted all the time. Walking down the road, cars appeared the size of Corgi models, while I'd feel disproportionately tall. At work, my chair seemed enormous, while I seemed to have shrunk.

The full, strange, yet strangely familiar account can be read in the article My weird hallucinations make life seem like Alice in Wonderland, courtesy of The Daily Mail Online. For now, some final words of warning from Rik: "I'm still no wiser about what the catalyst was for me - perhaps it was too much coffee or long periods spent in a darkened room programming computers."

"The prettiest are always further": Treasure-trove of Carroll items to be auctioned December 16th

Yesterday the internet was thick with the news that Alice Liddell's own copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass were be sold at auction. What few sites mentioned was that alongside these books, the auction house catalog is advertising a veritable who's who, or what's what, list of early Alice printed collectibles:

• not one, but two editions of Alice's Adventures Under Ground, one of which is a first edition, presentation copy inscribed by the author to the mother of Edith Blakemore.

• a first edition of The Nursery "Alice", one of twelve specially bound as samples for the American market

• a first edition of the Wonderland Postage Stamp Case, inscribed to "Miss Wordsworth [great niece of William Wordsworth], from the Inventor. May, 1891." (A potential steal, listed at $1,000 -$1,500. Don't you wish you had bought one for a shilling when you had the chance?)

• An Easter Greeting to Every Child Who Loves "Alice", inscribed to Edith Blakemore from Lewis Carroll. "Four-page pamphlet written on the celebration of Easter for young readers of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland."

• and of course lot 28: "Through the Looking-Glass, First Edition, the Dedication Copy, presented to the original Alice by Lewis Carroll and signed by her ...with misprint “wade” for “wabe” on page 21."

• an original ink drawing of Edith Blakemore by Dodgson, "in a bathing costume, holding a bucket and spade, leaning against the wheel of a bathing machine."

• a letter from Dodgson sending a specimen of his stamp case "...Would you kindly furnish me with the addresses of any Stationers (doing a good amount of business) to whom it would be worth my while to send a specimen-copy of my new Stamp-Case...?"

• another first edition of Through the Looking-Glass, this one with two original pencil drawings by Tenniel on the half-title signed "Ever yours, JT".

• #743 of 1,500 copies of the 1932 Limited Editions Club print of Wonderland and Looking-Glass, signed “Alice Hargreaves”

• Eight or Nine Wise Words about Letter-Writing, inscribed by Lewis Carroll to Alice Blakemore, the mother of one of his child-friends.

• and finally, an original John Tenniel drawing of the sleeping Gryphon (list price $60,000-$80,000!)

The items are being auctioned by Profiles in History on December 16th, the same Hollywood memorabilia dealer selected to auction Michael Jackson's be-gemed and illuminated glove. Full descriptions and images of all the Alice items can be viewed in a pdf of the catalog, available on their website.

Alice in Pictureland at the Brandywine River Museum, PA

Here's a rare opportunity to compare famous visual interpretations of Alice side by side, and a must-see for all lovers of children's book illustration - if you live in Pennsylvania that is:

"Alice in Pictureland: Illustrations of Lewis Carroll's Classic Tales"

November 27 though January 10 at the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania

As the museum describes it:

Alice, the Mad Hatter, the White Rabbit and the other wonderful, fanciful figures found in Lewis Carroll's famous books have delighted people of all ages since their first appearance in Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871). This exhibition includes work by John Tenniel, the first illustrator of Carroll's Alice stories, as well as by subsequent noteworthy artist-interpreters, including Arthur Rackham, Peter Newell, Jessie Willcox Smith, and Barry Moser. The exhibition features over 40 objects, including original artwork, proofs, prints, and first edition books.

"Larry in Wonderland" & "Pearls in Wonderland" in the daily comics

Pearls Before Swine, a nationally syndicated comic strip which runs in more than 400 papers, had an Alice in Wonderland-inspired sequence at the end of October 2009. The decade-old cartoon is written & drawn by San Franciscan Stephen Pastis. (The internet home of Pearls Before Swine is at the United Feature Syndicate website here: comics.com/pearls_before_swine, where I've copied the strips below from.) They reminded me of Walt Kelly's illustrations for "Who Stole the Tarts?" using similar anthropomorphic characters from his mid-century newspaper comic Pogo. If they're too small to read, click on the image and it will redirect you to the strip at comics.com.

An interesting twist in the scenario: instead of it being "such a curious dream", the surreal wonderland adventures were the result of one of the other characters usurping the composition of the comic strip. Like the Red King's dream, was the rat drawing the cartoonist or the cartoonist drawing the rat?

Novelty Cards from Blue Barnhouse with Tenniel Illustrations & witty captions

Twenty new cards from Blue Barnhouse called "A Weekend With Alice" re-interpret Sir John Tenniel's classic Alice illustrations with irreverent captions. There's also others with the same trick using Oz and other retro illustrations. Available for $5 a pop at the Blue Barnhouse online store.

There's also four in their Drug department (not just making the obvious jokes, they're pretty left-field. The illustration of the White Rabbit with trumpet & scroll is captioned "Somebody hold my MFA so I can light this thing.")

Wonderland: Alice's New Musical Adventure - Premiers in Tampa Bay on November 24th

Frank Wildhorn is the musical theater composer who brought the world Jekyll & Hyde and The Scarlet Pimpernel at a comparatively young age. Wonderland: Alice's New Musical Adventure will be playing the counties for the next few months with aspirations of Broadway. The World Premier will be in Florida at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center on November 24th, and run thru January 3rd, 2010. It will then leap to the Alley Theater in Houston, Texas.

Here's the blurb with a synopsis from their website:

Now, they are most definitely and exactually BACK!

In this world premiere of a new musical by lyricist Jack Murphy, book writers Jack Murphy and Gregory Boyd and acclaimed composer Frank Wildhorn, Alice is a children’s book writer in Manhattan who is suffering through a creative block, estranged from her husband and alienated from her daughter. It takes a trip to a strange-yet-familiar Wonderland for her to regain her life’s balance and again find the love and everyday magic that reside in us all – if we know how to look.

Wildhorn’s score taps into numerous pop styles, and Murphy’s lyrics provide both wit and wisdom.

Be among the first to see this exciting new production.

There must be something in the zeitgeist that there's so many older-Alice-returning projects to hit simultaneously. (Or is this a perennial take on classic children's literature?) What follows is a slideshow with one of the songs, ending with an advertisement: "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..."

And here's a few more musical clips from their website:

Faryl in Wonderland

For those of you who like your pop-classical overproduced and over-enunciated, hot tweenage British singer Faryl Smith is releasing her second album (quick on the heels of her first album Faryl, which was the fastest-selling "classical" album of all time.) Wonderland, due on November 30th, is "loosely based on Lewis Carroll's novel", according to this evening's Evening Telegraph.

"[Alice's Adventures in Wonderland] is one of my favourite books," says the former Britain's Got Talent contestant. "It's so dreamy and playful."

Keep watching after the musical clip, the second video is Miss Smith personally announcing Wonderland. It's important to put all this in its proper cultural context, and remember that in the 2000s, hyper-sexualized images of underage girls in popular music was standard and should be judged against the backdrop of the norms of the times.

The Hunting of the Snark - New Short Film Premiers Saturday in Queens

Strange creepy creatures come out of your dens, and go to the world premier of The Hunting of the Snark at the Queens International Film Festival on Saturday, November 14th, 2009. The 30-minute student film is the directorial debut of Peter Pavlakis, a Brooklynite. The synopsis sounds like the plot sticks close to the Carroll poem, and the film trailer has an actor reading verbatim one of the rhymed speeches - so, we can expect a bit of fidelity, not a psycho-sexual re-imagining of the Bellman returning to sea a decade later to confront his nightmarish inner demons (ending in a car chase).

This will be at noon tomorrow at the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts Charter Room, 35-12 35th Avenue, Queens, NY 11106.

Also coming out this week with the same title, the transatlantic "cosmopolitan post-bop" group NYNDK released "The Hunting of the Snark" on the label Jazzheads. The album includes hip versions of Charles Ives, Edward Grieg, and Carl Nielsen. The titular track (which can be heard online here) begins with some snarky outgribations on trombone, but I couldn't find any explanation for the use of the Carroll poem's title beyond catchy inspiration.

AliceAmerica & other Carrollians on the tweetosphere

In the opening preamble for the forthcoming Fall 2009 Knight Letter, Mark Burstein says that my "first act as co-FF-editor was to create a Twitter stream at http://twitter.com/AliceAmerica as an alternate way to follow the blog..." While I'm slightly embarrassed that this was my inaugural motion, it is true that, if you use Twitter's services, you can now follow @AliceAmerica for alerts from this blog and other notices.

If you are confused about why Twitter exists, and why the mainstream media seems so obsessed with mentioning it as often as possible, there is no reason for you to worry or change anything about your life. (I personally see the service neutrally, between the extreme loves and hates it has generated.) Twitter is basically a global text-messaging service, for posting public or private 140-character messages, and following the messages of your friends or celebrities, politicians and pundits. One of my favorite tweeters is 17th century London diarist Samuel Pepys, who recently wrote "My wife is mighty fine, and with a new fair pair of locks, which vex me, though like a foole I helped her the other night to buy them." If you desired, you could set it up to receive @AliceAmerica's messages on your mobile phone in hundreds of countries. I've also just created a twitter list of Carrollians at @AliceAmerica/carrollians - which I've embedded in the lefthand sidebar of this blog - to follow the various Carroll & Alice-related twitterings. Please e-mail us or comment below if you have any suggestions of more Carrollians that list should follow.

The Lewis Carroll Society of Brazil all over this series of tubes

Attention Portuguese-speaking Lewis Carroll readers! The Lewis Carroll Society of Brazil has several colorful blogs and websites with a bottomless rabbithole of books, links, art, tudo Alice. Look at all of these edições Brasileiras de Alice no país das Maravilha listed on the dizzying alicenations.blogspot.com. (The groovy cover to the left is from a 1974 edition with ilustrações by Brazilian artist Oswaldo Storni.)

Their second blog, for "deeper research with more articles and images", is at brasillewiscarroll.blogspot.com. This one is also expansive, and both sites have some English (always demarcated by stylish italic pink text). I've long been a fan of reading websites in translation using the various cyborg cyberspace interpreters at our disposal, and the Sociedade has provided an occasional easy link to do so. For instance, if you desired to read Myriam Ávila's Alice e Macunaíma, you could feed it thru Google Translate like so. This occasionally creates interesting sentences like: "Such people, the girl significantly calls 'obnoxious' (meaning 'antipodal'), are Anglophones, even though they walk 'upside down'." (Both websites, unfortunately, include all or most of their posts on their homepage, so they can take a long time to load on slower computers.) There is also an impressive cache of art and illustrations on these two blogs, like the large one that I'm putting at the foot of this post, which comes with the following pink italicized explanation:

Marina Peliano once was my little sister. But she ate any strange cookie and so suddenly she grew turning trapeze artist, sweet maker and art student, artist growing too. I asked her to do some drawings inspired on Alice and she followed the adventure. I found really beautiful her Alices who look like her. I remember now the letter of the writer Paulo Mendes Campos to his daughter when she was fifteen: "This book is crazy. The meaning is in you."

Mark Godburn's Nineteenth Century Dust Jackets Blog

Mark Godburn's website about early dust jackets has been reinvented in blog format, at earlydustjackets.blogspot.com. He will chronicle about all manner of early dust jacket topics, "including precursors to publishers' jackets and early 20th century jackets; also publishers' boxes, slipcases and sheaths." Godburn's upcoming book is called Nineteenth Century Dust Jackets: An Illustrated History.

In his blog's sprawling inaugural post, he prints Dodgson's letter to his publisher Macmillan in re the "paper wrapper" for The Hunting of the Snark. Mr. Godburn says this is the earliest written reference he knows to 19th century dust jackets. "I should like the same thing done for Alice and the Looking-Glass for the future," writes the Reverend, "--and even those on hand, which are already wrapped in plain paper, might be transferred into printed covers." And speaking of peculiar creatures that won't be caught in a commonplace way, here's the skinny from Godburn on the state of Carroll dust jackets:

At least eight or ten copies of the 1876 Snark are known to survive in jacket, but no copies of Alice or Looking-Glass from the 1860s or '70s are known to survive in either plain or printed jackets. (If a first English edition of Alice in Wonderland ever does turn up in an original publisher's jacket, it will certainly be a $100,000 book, perhaps half a million.)