Follow the White Rabbit to www.lewiscarroll.org/blog

Silence in the court! The Lewis Carroll Society of North America's newly revamped website, www.lewiscarroll.org, is up and running, and THIS BLOG will move to be fully integrated over there.

The mothballed history, up thru March 2010, will still remain at this blogspot address, but new posts will ONLY appear at www.lewiscarroll.org/blog, under a new name "Far-Flung Knight". We hope you continue to follow us at the new location!

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Our Twitter account will now link to the new blog as well, follow us at @AliceAmerica.

And please join the conversation by commenting. This blog is an extension of the "From our Far-Flung Correspondents" section of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America's biannual magazine, the Knight Letter. To subscribe to our fine publication, membership to the society only costs $35 a year! More information about everything at www.lewiscarroll.org. Follow the white rabbit! (or, in modern parlance, click on him.)

Alice Around Town

The New York website Woman Around Town has a series of articles about Alice this week, two quoting Lewis Carroll Society of North America president Andrew Sellon. From Charlene Giannetti's obligatory round-up of Alice movies, "Lewis Carroll’s Alice—A Favorite for Film Makers":

When Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland opens on Friday, March 5, the film will join many others that have sought to bring Lewis Carroll’s tales to the screen. “In terms of adapting [these books], it’s tricky,” says Andrew Sellon, President, Lewis Carroll Society of North America. “As written, they are not right for the medium.” Sellon explains that Carroll’s characters don’t encounter enough conflict to create the action necessary for a production on stage or in a film.

And from the same author's "Alice in Wonderland—Timeless as the White Rabbit’s Watch", which delves deeper into artistic and cultural influence:

The visual imagery as well as a cast of quirky, colorful characters, makes Alice’s story an attractive takeoff point for artists. The basic story is a familiar one: a young girl is lost far away from home and must find her way back. Along the way, Alice, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, meets some interesting personalities, uses her wits to survive, and, in the process, learns a lot about herself and what she holds dear. There’s a timelessness to that story that continues to draw people in, generation after generation.”This child enters these adult realms and sees adults behaving badly, handles herself quite well, and gains some measure of control over her life,” says Andrew Sellon, President, the Lewis Carroll Society of North America. “At some time we’ve all felt like Alice. What is this place we’re in and why are people doing this and who is making the rules? You can apply that almost anywhere.”

Mark Richards, Chairman of the Lewis Carroll Society, agrees. “Although it is easy to see [Alice in Wonderland] as a Victorian story, the conversations and characters are timeless and we can easily see them as being of our own time.” Richards adds that people are captivated by “the way in which Alice observes her surroundings and feels emotions throughout the book. The sense of wonder is very strong in the books and is felt by the reader.”

It continues with Sellon's observations about reading the book to children and the perennial drug question. (Continue Reading...)

Around the blogosphere: Burstein's Alice Film Roundup & Hero Complex's Countdown

The LCSNA's very own Mark Burstein has written a concise list of "all those awful Alice movies" (a theme that many in the media have been attempting, as reported here) for Lucas Films' Blockbusting blog. An excerpt:

The groovy Sixties found a resurgence of interest in Carroll's otherworld of mushrooms and hookah-smoking caterpillars. Hanna-Barbera's Alice in Wonderland or What's a Nice Kid Like You Doing in a Place Like This, voiced by Sammy Davis, Jr., Zsa Zsa Gabor, etc. was shown on television in 1966. Later that year, Alice Through the Looking Glass, a musical version with Jimmy Durante, The Smothers Brothers, etc., ran on television as well. Meanwhile, in Britain, the BBC produced a low-key, black-and-white Alice in Wonderland that is arguably the best, certainly the most faithful to the spirit, of all cinematic or televisual adaptations. It was directed by Jonathan Miller, and starred Sir John Gielgud, Peter Sellers, etc.

The spirit of the Sixties lasted at least until 1972, when a lavish British musical version ofWonderland starring Fiona Fullerton (later a Bond girl) as Alice, and with Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, Dudley Moore, and so on came to the big screen.

A soft-core porno-slash-musical comedy Alice in Wonderland spewed forth in 1976, produced by Bill Osco, directed by Bud Townsend, and distributed by General National Enterprises. Ah, me. It's very nearly watchable, but was the first of many subsequent erotic films "based" on the books, all of which lack even the marginal charm of this original one, and are not subject matter for this brief overview.

The whole round-up, once again, is here. Elsewhere on the blogosphere, we've been following the LA Times' Hero Complex (which still hasn't corrected their mistake, in their list of awful Alice movies, that the 1903 silent version was "just 68 years after Lewis Carroll first published his fantasy Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland." Mr. Burstein prefers to note that 1903 is "just five years after Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson)'s death in 1898.") Anyway, they are doing a daily countdown to the movie premiere, and today's entrée is about John Tenniel:

"If you go back to Tenniel, so much of his work is what stays in your mind about Alice and about Wonderland," Burton said. "Alice and the characters have been done so many times and in so many ways. but Tenniel's art really lasts there in your memory."

Tenniel was already a major name in political cartooning (and, unfortunately, blinded in one eye from a fencing wound) when he took on the illustrations for Carroll's strange fantasy. The job was a frustrating one due to the intense detail work and specifications that came from Carroll (whose real name, by the way, was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), but Tenniel had a passion for drawing animals, and Wonderland gave him a singular opportunity for creatures of the fantastic. Tenniel was also a meticulous soul and a demanding artist -- the first run of 2,000 copies of "Alice" in 1865, for instance, did not meet his standards and were pulled back. The project was well worth the trouble, however, when the book became an instant literary sensation.

It's nice of them to quote Burton discussing Tenniel, because, earlier when they had quoted him discussing his Red Queen's huge head, it struck me as odd that he didn't acknowledge Tenniel as the origin of that phenomenon. ("In lots of illustrations and incarnations of Carroll’s work through the years, it always seems like she had a big head," he noted vaguely.)

More Tim Burton movie hype at the LA Times blog Hero Complex

It's now only two weeks from opening night of the Tim Burton Disney 3D Spectacular. There's posters all over bus stops in the East Bay Area, California. The LCSNA is preparing for the plunge (in lieu of the macropsiacal interest in Carroll) by revamping its website, which will integrate this blog (that's right, we're moving! so watch for a White Rabbit), all of this pretty soon.

The Winter 2009 edition of the Knight Letter (no. 83) featured an article by Daniel Singer called "Off With Their Heads! Those Awful Alice Movies." (The Knight Letter is the LCSNA's magazine, sent to subscribers for the membership fee of $35.) Of course, this theme is being taken up now all over, retrospectives of the century-plus of mediocre Alice in Wonderland movies. Susan King at the Los Angeles Times blog Hero Complex took a stab at the topic, beginning her article: "The first known 'Alice in Wonderland' film ... was made in 1903, just 68 years after Lewis Carroll first published his fantasy 'Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.'" Perhaps she's onto advanced rabbithole mathematics, and that works in base 17 or something. We recommend the Daniel Singer article if you can dig up a Knight Letter.

Elsewhere at Hero Complex, they quote Tim Burton discussing his Red Queen (played by his partner Helena Bonham Carter):

"In lots of illustrations and incarnations of Carroll's work through the years, it always seems like she had a big head. It was an interesting challenge for us to find the right size and weight and proportions. One of the things we wanted to do was to use the actors and their performances -- to use the real them -- and then make them different. It's still their performance but it's just made weird. We wanted to achieve this blend. That was an important dynamic."

"In a lot of children's literature and other literature it's kind of the same thing over and over -- there's good queens and bad queens, and here you have that but the elements are a bit blurred," Burton said. "Everybody's weird and has weird qualities to them. She's kind of a mixture. When I look at her now, she reminds me of pictures I've seen of Leona Helmsley. There's a tiny bit of elements of my mother in there too, for some strange reason. And Helena brings her own things to it too."

The Mystery of Lewis Carroll book giveaway at Alice 2010 Fan Club website

You could win a free copy of Jenny Woolf's excellent new biography, The Mystery of Lewis Carroll, by leaving a comment on this post at alice2010.blogspot.com. This Alice fan club blog centers around the Tim Burton movie but also chronicles many other Carroll-related products and things-of-interest.

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.)

Jenny Woolf's Jabberwock.co.uk

UK author Jenny Woolf maintains a website which is our close cousin in the blogosphere - Jabberwock.co.uk/blog. Previously, she has transcribed and annotated Lewis Carroll's bank account - as Lewis Carroll in his Own Account. Her forthcoming book, The Mystery of Lewis Carroll, promises the following:

The book uses new information to unravel the reason why Carroll's friendship with Alice Liddell's family came to an end.

* It shows that Alice Liddell was not the "Alice" of the books, although she was the reason that they were written.
* It gives clues to a secret which dominated (and in some ways ruined) Carroll's personal life.
* It shows how a supposedly minor acquaintance got Carroll into major trouble - trouble which never appeared into his diaries.
* It explains how Carroll's love of little girls, though unusual, was not paedophiliac.

Her site's blog, From Somewhere in Time, has interesting insights into the rigmarole of publishing a Lewis Carroll book. Like, the most recent post is a discussion on what color the clouds on the cover will be:

I'd prefer a pink or blue background- grey looks too gloomy.


Still what do authors know about selling books?