Tilting against trendy views of Carroll

An Alice from the fabulous pen of Mervyn Peake
wonderful illustrator and author of the Gormenghast trilogy;
see more of his work at mervynpeake.org

Two in one, three in one

As someone who fell in love with the Alice books at five, I've enjoyed the many articles of late about that precocious young miss, and about those two interesting, contradictory yet identical people, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and Lewis Carroll. I say identical because so many writers suggest that they were two, as they are frequently contradictory in manner and writings. But are we not all one with our reversed image in the mirror? A logician and mathematician who loved to present children with number and "river-crossing" puzzles, Dodgson well knew that 1 x 1 = 1.  Most important of all, how big a trick is it to be both Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and Lewis Carroll, when the man is a deacon in the Anglican Church and acknowledges with frequency in public and before God that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are one?

An ideal from which we are barred

Let's consider the wholly bizarre-to-us idea that Dodgson could enjoy tea and boating parties with little girls and photographing little Victorian girls, sometimes in the "attire of Eve," without being an incipient pedophile. Is this possible? Is it possible for a Victorian artist to enjoy the beauty of naked form without feeling even a tiny urge to ravage, ravish it?

Our own times are quite odd about the matter of childhood and sex. Our young teen models and actresses with their revealing designer clothing bind together childhood and sexuality. Revelations about the abuse of little children are commonplace. And yet we still live in a world where tiny children love to toss off their clothes and dash about in the freedom of nakedness. I remember an Irish poet telling me that men must bathe their tiny daughters to help their wives, but also because the children's bodies are so radiant--delicious and beautiful. I leave off his name because such sentiments in our post-Freud times have the power to shock many of us. The lyrical family photographs of Sally Munger Mann in her private, rural Eden of river and woods have caused dust-ups and argument in the world of museums and the fine arts.

So can we go back to and enter into an era in which the upper class of the culture held up images of children as unstained innocence and loveliness? Can we ever see through their eyes? Or is there a peculiar angel of time barring our way to that Edenic concept? Of course, things in Victorian times were not sweetness and light for children scrambling up chimneys or living in workhouses; nevertheless, a child world of sweetness and light formed an upper class, educated ideal, one that Carroll photographed.

Our culture, shocked by the celibate

Could it be that what offends the current sensibility of Western minds--our sex-and-youth-exalting media, our worship of movie celebrities and their changing lovers, our insistence on freedom in our pleasures--is the idea that someone could choose to set aside his sexuality, whatever its nature? The mistrust of Dodgson among many critics may, at least in part, be rooted in his distance from our own sensuous culture through his position as a celibate deacon in the Anglican church. Imagine that degree of renunciation and discipline; it's not only quite uncommon in our time, but frowned upon by many educated people, both in and out of the church. Can many critics in our current culture consider Dodgson-Carroll without feeling almost a disgust for his celibacy, a thing that challenges our own culture's values in multiple ways? I think not.

Alice's adventures last

Neil Gaiman on why stories last

The Bandersnatch

Drifted into a wee small nap, and woke dreaming that I was at a literary conference, staying in a marvelous hotel with sunny big rooms and wide halls that felt like home (only tidier, lacking progeny.) The place was called The Bandersnatch, and the outside was made of wood, wonderfully carved in a folk-art sort of way with the Bandersnatch itself closely surrounded by flowers and leaves and insects, all stained deep, brilliant colors with inks rather than being painted. The predominant color was a deep greeney color with a dash of turquoise blue in the mix. The sight was so wonderful that I felt disoriented on waking to realize that there is no such carved, inked hotel called The Bandersnatch in this world.

I tell you not to bore you with somebody else's dream but in order to increase the knowledge of The Bandersnatch, in hopes that some quirky, generous billionaire should be inspired to add it to the collection of marvels in our world. I believe my friend Clive could design the carved, inked Bandersnatch in his prospect of flowers and leaves. I always wanted to see a Bandersnatch, and now I have. However, all its sharp detail is disintegrating, as is the way in dreams. Like vampires, they suffer from the light.

P. S. As this is a second post of the day, I would hate for you to miss the beau présent challenge in the first. Scroll down! Be not shy but increase the strangeness and color of the world! Love, Marly

The Dormouse Round-up

Why is a raven like a writing-desk?

People have come up with a lot of ingenious answers over the years to the Mad Hatter's nonsense question--as a child, I thought it must be "quills." I had forgotten Lewis Carroll's own, much later answer in an introduction: “Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is nevar put with the wrong end in front!” Evidently the first typesetter corrected "nevar" and spoiled the pun part of the answer. In a proper Carrollian world, Tweedledum and Tweedledee's monstrous crow would have come flapping after him.

Lady Word of Mouth: Locus

Tomcat's wonderful review of Thaliad has been picked up by Locus Blinks--so very rare to see such a thing as a long, adventurous story in verse in the realm of Locus, even as a "blink." I'm glad. Lady Word of Mouth can be kind. In his wide-ranging review, Tomcat argued that Thaliad shouldn't just belong to poetry/literary readers but should be welcomed by the science fiction and fantasy world. I thank him and Locus.

The February Lightspeed

is now available in toto as an ebook here. I have a story reprint and an interview in the issue. Both will also be available for free later in the month.

Dummy-moi

I have finally noticed the feature element at Scribd. Either I didn't know what I was doing the first time I uploaded, or things have changed considerably in a year. I think the page looks rather appealing with its new bells and whistles.

The Friday tea party

Mad Hatter says, "Nobody but the Dormouse reads posts on a Friday. Whatever are you doing here? Move three seats along the table, make a cutting (hair-cutting, preferably) personal remark, and slosh me up a cup of tea."

Alice, the Mother of Invention

Tenniel, Alice and the Dodo

HIGH DUDGEON

I am Red-Queen wroth with Richard Corliss. In Time, the much-published film critic starts out a lively article on Burton’s treatment of Alice with the question, “Did many children truly love Lewis Carroll's Alice books? Did they embrace the absurdities and antique wordplay of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass with the same rapt fervor they invested in other favorite stories, or did they find the Carroll works dry and remote? Couldn't it be that kids were listening out of politeness to the big person sitting by their bed? Martin Gardner, author of the 1960 The Annotated Alice, thought so. ‘It is only because adults — scientists and mathematicians in particular — continue to relish the Alice books,’ he wrote, ‘that they are assured of immortality.’ Make that scientists, mathematicians and '60s potheads, who saw Alice's descent into the rabbit hole, the EAT ME cake and the mushroom-borne caterpillar as evidence of the first great psychedelic trip.” He ends his feature by referring to “the kids who find this film much livelier than earlier versions and easier to warm to than the original. And is Burton's vision trippy enough to serve as a hallucinogenic blast? Go ask Alice.”

High, all right.

Very high dudgeon.

I haven’t seen Tim Burton’s movie yet. N, age 12, saw it today and liked it. R will see it tomorrow with the group of high schoolers who are doing “Alice” as the senior play--and she will no doubt be more measured and analytical than N. In the senior play, R is playing the Dodo, although I would guess that in her heart of hearts she is Alice.

No doubt the rest of us shall get around to seeing the movie some time. Of course, it would be difficult for me to like a movie better than the original.

And that leads me back to Richard Corliss. He asks, “Did many children truly love Lewis Carroll’s Alice books?”

Dear Richard Corliss, I was given a slipcased copy of the two books when I was five years old and living in Gramercy, Louisiana, a suitably down-the-rabbit-hole kind of place where our tomato plants grew up into the live oak trees and giant spiders lived in holes in the back yard and where I wore earrings that were live lizards, their throats pulsing helplessly. And yes, I “truly loved” the Alice books. If love means to read them over and over, then I loved and loved dearly. I read them under the covers. In the tub. Down the rabbit hole and up in a tree. And over many years. The Alice books taught me the fine art of re-reading, which is the very best sort of reading and should never be discouraged in children.

“Did they embrace the absurdities and antique wordplay of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass with the same rapt fervor they invested in other favorite stories, or did they find the Carroll works dry and remote?”

a.) Yes, this “they” did—and with the fervor of a March Hare in intoxicating spring grass or a Mad Hatter spinning in a mercury hat.

b.) Dry and remote? Dry and remote?

Despite all of your charm and all of your fame as a movie critic, Richard Corliss, I am in the highest of dudgeons.

These are fertile books. Little boys and girls have grown up to draw and paint and write and compose who drank at the sparkling fount of Wonderland. Have any other books intended for children given birth to so astonishingly many illustrators? Or to so much opera, fiction, and art of all sorts?

“Couldn't it be that kids were listening out of politeness to the big person sitting by their bed?”

This is a very odd conception of children and is entirely too coy, Richard Corliss. Children do not listen to “the big person” out of a desire not to be rude. They just don’t. Any book that doesn’t hold its own is quickly jettisoned, either by being clearly rejected (verbally or by tossings) or by the child tumbling into that other Wonderland, slumber.

Mr. Corliss, I want to tell you in all confidence that there is something rather creepy about “the big person” you imagine sitting by the child’s bed. Perhaps “the big person” has crawled out of that horror zone under the bed with the dropped books, socks, and dust bunnies: the lair of monsters. To your imagined “big person,” I say to keep altogether out of my children’s rooms!

On a side note regarding rejections, it is wrong to think that any book can be the right book for every child, just as it is wrong to think that any book can be the right book for every “big person.”

I am not a “big person.” For once, I am relieved and satisfied to be 5’3”. And maybe a tad over that mark? But not more than a tad.

“Martin Gardner, author of the 1960 The Annotated Alice, thought . . . ‘It is only because adults —scientists and mathematicians in particular — continue to relish the Alice books,’ he wrote, ‘that they are assured of immortality.’”

And now I must go head-to-head with Martin Gardner, it seems . . . This is wrong-headed. What assures the immortality of the Alice books is that they are wonderfully, impossibly fecund! They give birth to new works of art and have done so over many years. That is, Richard Corliss, why you are writing a review about a movie sprung from Alice for Time: because a little girl called Alice is the mother of invention.

So there, dear Mr. Richard Corliss.

It’s a rather nice name, Richard Corliss.

I wonder if he would let me borrow it for a whirl of adventure . . .

Falling toward Easter

CARROLL AT EASTER

As it is a busy week in the snowdrifts of upstate New York, I shall just wish friends and passers-by a happy and blessed Easter-to-be.

And if you are in need of some writing advice while I am out-of-the-palace, please take this: "'Begin at the beginning,' the King said, very gravely, 'and go on till you come to the end: then stop.'"

That is, of course, from the immortal nib of a pen held by Lewis Carroll or Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the kaleidoscopic, the myriad-talented, and the Reverend. Ah, to be born under the tilted grin of a Cheshire moon, caught in the branches of the Daresbury parsonage tree!

I am glad of his tenderness for little girls because he gave me a gift at an early age that has served me all my life and given me much joy.

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HOMOMONOJOT

Here's an on-line poem of mine that just popped up today: "Homomonojot" at The Round Table Review (U. K.) If you're wondering where the name came from, it is a portmanteau word (thank you again, Lewis Carroll) that puts together bits of "homonym" + "monometer" + "jot." Does that sound a little smart-alecky? Blame it on the one-stress lines. Thanks to Jon Stone for suggesting that I submit to The Great Monometer Challenge.

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ILLUSTRATION CREDIT

The contemporary Alice falling into a marvelous rabbit hole can be found on DeviantArt; it is by "Tahra" or Kyoung Hwan Kim of South Korea. Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.