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."

Carroll Concordances at the Victorian Literary Studies Archive

Wondering exactly how many times the mysterious word "Boojum" appears in The Hunting of the Snark? (3). There's a pretty user-friendly and accessible concordance of seven of Lewis Carroll's most important works - Both Alices + "Under Ground", Snark, Slyvie & Bruno, The Game of Logic, and Phantasmagoria and Other Poems - at the Victorian Literary Studies Archive (in addition to searchable texts of dozens of other authors.) Thank you to the VLSA for making a useful website, and thanks to LCSNA member Lester Dickey for the tip.

http://victorian.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/concordance/carroll/

Honorable Mention for LCSNA-member Tatiana Ianovskaia

Two weeks ago we reported that paintings by LCSNA-member Tatiana Ianovskaia were appearing in "Down the Rabbit Hole," a juried art exhibition in Bakersfield, California. The good news has now reached us that her oil painting "Court" received an honorable mention, one of only three awards given out at the show. "Best in Show" went to artist Nancy Sharp for a mixed media piece entitled "A Very Cheesy Cheshire."

More of Tatiana's Alice-inspired work, including her illustrated Alice in Wonderland, can be viewed from her website.

"Down the Rabbit Hole," featuring many other interpretations of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, will remain on display until March 25th at the Younger Gallery, 1440 Truxtun Ave, downtown Bakersfield, CA.

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.

Tiny Tea Set for Tiny Tea-Parties

Sugar with your tea? One grain or two? Bas Bleu, online retailer of gifts and accessories for readers, is selling this miniature tea set decorated with quotes and illustrations from Disney's Alice in Wonderland ($55).

The teapot is 2 1/2 inches high, which is perhaps a little undersized for a truly mad tea-party, but may yet appeal to a small friend or caffeine-loving teddy bear.

Exposure Time, a play about Dodgson the Photographer, at New Jersey Rep

Tonight is the world premiere of Exposure Time by Kim Merrill at the New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch, New Jersey. Is this the first time a work of drama has centered on Charles Dodgson the photographer? Merrill's play won the 2009 Edgerton Foundation New American Plays Award. Here is some of the blurb from the press release, "Alice Through the Camera Lens":

While Johnny Depp portrays the Mad Hatter on movie screens around the world this winter, Lewis Carroll, the conflicted creator of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, will be on stage at New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch, fighting passionately to be known not as a

children’s author but as Charles Dodgson, the greatest portrait photographer in the British Empire. Standing in his way is the larger-than-life and now tragically forgotten Julia Margaret Cameron, who was the Annie Leibovitz of her day and a constant thorn in Dodgson’s side. The real Alice will be there as well, trying to sort out her complex relationship with Dodgson, along with Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the Victorian Idol of a society that worshiped its poets like rock stars. The world premiere of Exposure Time runs from February 11 through March 21, with an Opening Night performance and High Tea on Saturday, February 13.

[...]

A magical journey into the literary heart of Victorian England, Exposure Time is a perfect play for young teens and above. Schools are invited to contact NJ Rep to discuss booking special discounted matinee performances that include lesson plans and post-show discussions with the actors.

Discounted previews are Thursday and Friday, February 11 and 12 at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Regular performances are Thursdays and Fridays at 8 p.m.; Saturdays at 3 p.m. and 8 p.m.; Sundays at 2 p.m., with selected Sundays performances at 7 p.m. as well as Thursday and Friday matinees by prior arrangement for students and other groups. Tickets are $40; $35 for previews; $60, opening night; $36 for seniors and students (except opening night); with discounts for groups of ten or more.

There is a review and interview with Ms. Merrill in the Red Bank Orbit here. Tickets can be purchased online here.

Alice in the Boston Globe's daily bridge column today

Harlan Ellison's reading of Through the Looking-Glass nominated for Grammy

If you were previously unaware, there is a grammy award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children. The 2009 recording of Lewis Carroll's Though the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, read by writer Harlan Ellison, was nominated for that grammy, but lost out to Buck Howdy reading Aaaaah! Spooky, Scary Stories & Songs. Well, Mr. Ellison, a prolific and sometimes irreverent writer, has already won hundreds of awards (according to his website) including the San Francisco Chronicle's 1984 Most Attractive Male Writer, so he can afford to spread the wealth. The Blackstone Audiobooks TTLG is available on iTunes here, and where all fine Children's Spoken Word Albums are sold (list price for the audio CDs $33).

Kristian Scheiblecker's Lewis Carroll songs

A musician named Kristian Scheiblecker has written very pretty songs set to some of Lewis Carroll's 'non-nonsense' poetry. I do not know if they are to be released for sale in any format, but you can listen to a thirteen-track playlist of them (some labeled 'unfinished'), at his website journeys.se - which, even if it continues to evolve, already plays together nicely as an album. According to Jenny Woolf, he performed at the (UK) Lewis Carroll Society's December party at the Art Workers Guild in London. She reports:

This year, a couple of Swedish guys called Kristian Scheiblecker and Pontus Nilsson came specially to perform some songs based on Carroll's so-called "serious poems". They have been classically trained but the music was more like early Leonard Cohen to my ear. You could certainly imagine Kristian sitting there in his Victorian cottage in Sweden and composing the music in the dark winter nights.

To my surprise I found that Carroll's poems made terrific lyrics. Read purely as poetry, they are mostly rather banal. I was particularly impressed with "Only A Woman's Hair" which makes a most touching ballad.


"...and, as I touch that lock, strange visions throng
Upon my soul with dreamy grace-
Of woman's hair, the theme of poet's song
In every time and place. -

A child's bright tresses, by the breezes kissed
To sweet disorder as she flies,
Veiling, beneath a cloud of golden mist,
Flushed cheek and laughing eyes- -

Or fringing, like a shadow, raven-black,
The glory of a queen-like face-
Or from a gipsy's sunny brow tossed back
In wild and wanton grace...

...The eyes that loved it once no longer wake:
So lay it by with reverent care-
Touching it tenderly for sorrow's sake-
It is a woman's hair."

-quoted at length from jabberwock.co.uk/blog

Ms. Woolf compares his voice to Leonard Cohen, but it reminds me more of the Scottish Bard Robin Williamson, with fewer mordents. Scheibecker quotes Carroll scholar Edward Wakeling below the songs for an introduction to Carroll's non-nonsense poetry:

Camille Rose Garcia's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Camille Rose Garcia, an artist from L.A.'s lowbrow art movement, has illustrated Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Surely one of the most punk Alices to go underground, it was released on Groundhog Day, 2010. Below is a sketch posted on the blog Arrested Motion, but we look forward to seeing the finished product in beautiful hardcover, from Collins Design (list price $16).