Liddell Jokes

"Lewis Carroll and Alice Play Call Our Bluff" by Alan Lance Andersen and Rebecca Ann Edwards appears in the July issue of Games Magazine, which will be on newsstands around May 15th. This nicely illustrated piece is a feature article/puzzle in which the reader tries to solve the puzzle in the text—to determine which of the many tidbits of Alice history are true and which the authors made up—and these are based on, to quote Mr. Andersen, "quirky trivia" about Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell. [Though some Carrollians might have one or two quibbles with the information in the article.]

Call for abstracts

Call for Abstracts: Alice in Wonderland and Philosophy
Edited by Richard Davis for The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series

Abstracts and subsequent essays should be philosophically substantial but accessible, written to engage the intelligent lay reader. Contributors of accepted essays will receive an honorarium.

Possible themes and topics might include, but are not limited to, the following:
“Down the Rabbit Hole”: Perception and Reality in AiW; “A Place Where Everyone Knows Your Name – or Not!”: Alice, Names and Naming; Word Games and Long Tails: The Ambiguities of Language and Life in AiW; Cheshire Grins and Other Decaying Objects: The Status of Non-Being in AiW; “Growing Up – and Down”: Alice and the Phenomenology of Body; The Meaning of Meaning: Derrida and Rorty in Wonderland; “Who in the World Am I?”: Self-Knowledge and Mistaken Identity in AiW; A World of Animals: Alice, Talking Beasts, and Animal Rights; “I Was a Different Person Then”: Memory, Change, and Personal Identity in AiW; Sense and Nonsense: Wittgenstein, Language Games, and Wonderland; Wishing it Were Some Other Time: The Mad Hatter, Clocks, and Temporal Passage; Caterpillars and Contradictions: How Logic Fares in a World of Lunacy; How Not to Lose Your Head: Politics and Persuasion in the Queen’s Court; “Give Your Evidence”: Alice, Athens, and the Apology of Socrates; Existential Alice: Being and Nothingness in Wonderland; The Zen of Alice; “One Pill Makes You Larger …”: Alice and Drug Culture.

Submission Guidelines:
1. Submission deadline for abstracts (100-500 words) and CV(s): May 18, 2009
2. Submission deadline for accepted papers: July 3, 2009
Kindly submit by e-mail (with or without Word attachment) to
Richard Davis (rdavis@tyndale.ca).

Illustrated Alices

The February 2009 issue of Book and Magazine Collector includes a well illustrated, well researched article on illustrated editions of Alice with a bibliography, only £3.50.

Alice of ...Aquitaine?

"An amateur historian from the US believes he has discovered a connection between the court of King Henry II in Woodstock and classic children’s book Alice in Wonderland. "

www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/4041581.Historian_reveals_Wonderland_theory
Interesting that he went to Oxford to consult a historian, but doesn't seem to have talked to any Alice experts, several of whom live in his hometown of San Francisco.

Lewis Carroll's chess problem

In response to Christophe Leroy's Alice and the chess master (see http://lcsna.blogspot.com/2008/06/alice-and-chess-master.html), Arne Moll has written a very interesting article, "Lewis Carroll's chess problem" on the ChessVibes website.