KDight Letter THE LEWIS CARROLL SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA NUMBER 68 SPRING 2002 fix SO: fh<s DisD^y foSueace Everything's Coming Up Roses Our annual Fall gathering took place in and around Pasadena, host of the Tournament of Roses Parade and the Rose Bowl Game, which, combined with the strains of "Painting the Roses Red" from the Disney film, cast a rosy glow over our October 27th meeting. As the Disney powers-that-be were making only perfunctory gestures regarding the 50th anniversary of the release of their A W film (a few doodads are to be had), due to the concurrent foofaraw over the 100th anniversary of Walt's birth, it fell upon the LCSNA, and in particular Daniel Singer, playwright1, collector, and ex-Disney Imagineer, to garner some festivities around this significant milestone. On Friday, the Maxine Schaefer Children's Outreach Fund Reading took place, appropriately, at the Walt Disney Elementary School in Burbank. About 60 kids in two Fifth grade classes were each given a hardback A W and treated to an animated (ahem) reading of the Mad Tea Party scene by Patt Griffin and New York actor Andrew Sellon, here on his first foray into California. The Q&A session was quite lively, and proved once again how in today's society the book and the Disney movie are often confused. The first part of our Saturday gathering was at the "historic" Tarn o'Shanter Inn, a Tudor cottage with Scottish decor, including a portrait of a young Bonnie Prince Charlie, who presided over our dining room. The Inn has been the scene of many a luncheon (some actually involving food) by Disney and his animators over the eighty years it's been in existence, but most notably in the thirties and forties. We began with a seminar on the making of the film. Charles Solomon, author, critic and historian of animation; Dan Singer; and Kathryn Beaumont-Levine, who portrayed Alice in the film, were participants. Charles' British counterpart Brian Sibley was supposed to have joined us, but was prevented from traveling at the last minute, so selections from his afterword to the edition of AW illustrated with David Hall's 1939 concept drawings for the film were read instead.2 In brief: Walt Disney (1901-1966) might have seen one of the early Alice movies3 in Kansas City, but he certainly had read the books as a child. In The American Weekly (1946) he said "No story in English literature has intrigued me more than AW. It fascinated me the first time I read it as a schoolboy, and as soon as I possibly could, after I started making animated cartoons, I acquired the film rights to do it" — something of an odd comment for a work in the public domain. However, he did acquire the film rights to the Tenniel drawings in 1931. The success of the '33 Paramount film put a dam- per on his enthusiasm for a spell. Disney did not abandon the idea, however. In the early forties, he had thought of a live-action Alice in a cartoon world, in line with his early "Alice comedies" ( 1 924-1 927) 4 and had hoped to get child star Gloria Jean for the role. In 1944, the studio provided some artwork for the three-record AW album starring Ginger Rogers. At long last, after many false starts and turnarounds, 50,000 man-hours, three million dollars, and 700,000 drawings, Alice in Wonderland premiered in London on July 26, 1951, a gala event attended by Disney and Miss Beaumont in her Alice costume. Dan Singer then entertained us with his personal reminiscences of his lifetime involvement with the film, including the illustrations he did when he was eight. His box of goodies included the Laserdisc, which has a ton of 1 Did you know that Dan was a co-founder of the Reduced Shake- speare Company and co-author of the enormously successful The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (abridged)*? 2Methuen, 1986 and Simon & Schuster, 1987; containing more than a hundred of Hall's remarkable paintings and drawings, this must be counted not as an oddity (the works having languished forgotten for four decades), but one of the most remarkable suites of illustrations to the books ever made. It's also criminal that Disney chose to use the "cartoony" look of the finished film rather than these stunning, provocative, imaginative and, above all, artistic images. 3 Hepworth's 1903, Edison's 1910, or the Nonpareil's 1915 4 There were 56 titles, such as "Alice's Wonderland", a.k.a. "Alice in Slumberland", 1 926, featuring Virginia Davis. On October 16, 1998, both Disney "Alices" (Davis and Beaumont) attended the Disney Legends Ceremony. MUTTS Patrick McDonnell THIS 1^ Wr* CH£SHffc£ CAT FACB. DID JA MISS & splendid ancillary material5 regrettably not to be found anywhere else, including DVD releases. He took us through the development of an animated film, from the idea through the storyboard (another Disney invention6), the story conferences (transcripts of whose raw language and creative fires are on file in the archives), and quotes from Walt on maintaining Carroll's "screwball logic" and some rather unflattering words for Alice fans.7 Some of Disney's false starts were mentioned, including Aldous Huxley's brief involvement,8 and Walt's attempt to duplicate the technique of mixing live action and animation such as the aforementioned "Alice comedies" and The Song of the South (1946). Charles Solomon gave us a fascinating talk on the context of the film. In the 1940s Disney was nearly broke. His great work was thought to be behind him, his pictures were losing money, and the war had evaporated the European market. Peter Pan (1953), Wind in the Willows (1949) and Cinderella (1950) were all in various (and expensive) stages of production. The Disney studios were known for the free rein of the imagination granted to the animating directors and for their artistic integrity (required studies included art, anatomy, and move- ment). The "flat" style of competitors such as UPA {Gerald McBoing Boing, etc.) was far Kathryn Beaumont less expensive than Disney's rounded forms and dimensional movement, continuing a Renaissance tradition. Walt was quite personally involved with the films, and would often 5 Disney's "Exclusive Archives Collection Laser Disc Box" (6139 CS) contains an astonishing amount of supplemental materials: the complete One Hour in Wonderland TV special from Dec. 25, 1950, Disney's first foray into television, which features Kathryn as "hostess"; a 1951 promotional film. Operation Wonderland, presented as originally broadcast on Ford Star Review on June 1 4th, 1 95 1 : a lengthy excerpt from The Fred Waring Show of March 1 8, 1 95 1 . which is both a charming example of early live television and a chance to see Kathryn perform the "Alice" songs live. There's also a one-hour BBC radio dramatization based on the film; snippets from the animators' live-action reference film; and an audio recording of "Brahms' Lullaby" from August 26. 1 947, which is labeled "Kathryn Beaumont Test". Also included are song demos, among them "Beyond the Laughing Sky," which was written for Alice but which appeared — with new lyrics — as "The Second Star to the Right" in Peter Pan. 6 Most probably invented by an assistant of Ub Iwerks. 7 The full quote can be found in "Aldous in Wonderland". KL 49, p. 6. 8 ibid walk the corridors at night, rescuing drawings from wastebaskets. "Animation must show a caricature of move- ment - essence by exaggeration." Alice opened to bad reviews and in the midst of controversy — Disney was accused of deliberately keeping Lou Bunin from using the Technicolor® process in his AW (1950), which featured a live Alice moving through painted sets and pixilated puppets.9 Dan spoke again on the nature of animation (12- 24 drawings per second), how characters were created (model sheets of their construction and movements), and how timing and body motions were suggested by the "reference films" Kathryn made. He mentioned that this technique had been unsuccessfully attempted by Bela Lugosi in portraying the Chernabog monster for the "Night on Bald Mountain" sequence in Fantasia. The lovely Kathryn Beaumont (now Mrs. Allan Levine) spoke next. Miss Beaumont10 had been our honored guest once before, at the West Coast Chapter meeting of our Society in June, 1983. As an eleven- year-old girl, London- born and Wales- reared", contracted to MGM and living in Los Angeles, she came to the attention of Mr. Disney, as she charmingly called him, as a talented actress12 whose accent was English without and Dan Singer being "too British for American theater-goers". During the filming, she said she felt very much a part of the team, and was in the unusual position of both being the "action figure" for the reference films and the vocal and singing talent. These reference films, done in costume and without sets (although a frame house or teacup might be constructed) helped the animators with their timing and figure work. She shared with us many still photographs, as well as stories such as her attempts to remain upright in the teacup in the "Pool of Tears" sequence while stagehands pitched and rolled the platform. This "rotoscope" technique was used in other films - for instance, the movements of the hippos, alligators, and ostriches in Fantasia were first 9 Bunin's "Ansco" film processing has faded severely. The film is available on video. 10 A fine "tribute page" to Ms. Beaumont can be found at www.don brockway.com/kb.htm. " Bangor, North Wales, where her father, Ken Beaumont, was a musician with the BBC Variety Orchestra. He was also the voice of a "Card Painter" in the film. 12 In the 1948 Esther Williams vehicle On an Island With You. danced by stars of Diaghilev's Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo! Another tale involved animator Marc Davis, one of the many directors of the picture (each with a different scene) accompanying her to costume fittings to ensure that the fabric would move in the correct way. Her voice work was done always live (that is, with all the actors on the same soundstage) and she reminisced about working with Jerry Colonna, Sterling Holloway and Ed Wynn. She also took a promotional tour in 1951, which coincided with her summer vacation, on the Queen Mary from New York to England, a nice reflection of Alice Hargreaves' crossing in 1932.13 Miss Beaumont, of course, then played "Wendy" in Disney's Peter Pan (1953), and her ability to retain her young vocal persona has led to work throughout the years in several Alice attractions in Disney parks, the Parade of Lights, video games and so on. For most of the intervening years she has been a teacher in elementary school. It was a great thrill to be in the room with Kathryn, and it was easy to see why Mr. Disney chose her. Occa- sionally during her talk, particularly when she became excited, her hands would flutter and her voice would go up and suddenly we were inside the movie with Alice herself! Dan then shared some more stories of the animators (all male) and the inkers, painters, and "in-betweeners" (all female) at the studio in those years. The Disney studios made all their own paints, and many colors and tints are recognizably theirs and theirs alone. All the other studios went to a store called "Cartoon Colors" and so have much the same palette. After lunch, we moseyed over to the Disney Studios in Burbank. Generally closed on Saturdays, they were kind enough to open just for us. We strolled along the paths, admiring the topiaries in the shape of cartoon characters, the names of the streets (e.g. Dopey Drive), and the huge Main Animation building, whose roof seemed to be held aloft by that platoon of adjectival dwarves associated with Miss White. Permitted a few precious minutes in the main archives, we drooled over the treasures on display. We then walked by the giant multiplane camera (used in the opening Oxford sequence of the movie) and into a small theater. A sparkling new print was shown, with gorgeous, pristine colors and sound, where many nuances were visible - a great treat for those who only knew the film from its video release. After the film, Charles and Dan had an informal talk about the film. The forties were a great period of experimentation for Disney (Salvador Dali was briefly hired there). Admiration was expressed for the bizarre irreality 13 When Mrs. Hargreaves crossed the pond in 1932, it was on the Berengaria, pride of the Cunard line. (Re)named after Richard the Lionhearted's queen, it had caught fire in New York harbor in 1 938 and was sold for scrap. Cunard introduced the Queen Mary in 1 936, where it was the fleet's flagship until 1 967, when it was sold to Long Beach CA as a tourist attraction. of the final "March of the Cards" sequence. Mary Blair, one of the few women artists permitted to work at the Studio, had used a particular shade of blue in her paintings which became the hue of Alice's dress. They also went into the problems of the film - why it lost money and was really never popular as a movie (the video releases in '81 and subsequently more than made up for the $3 million fortune lavished on it in its day). First was the fact that it was a series of mini-scenes, not particularly related, rather than a coherent whole; in fact, a vaudeville review rather than a story. There was also a certain distancing from the secondary characters, all of whom were rather annoying. Alice herself suffered from the inherent problems in animating a "pretty girl" - comic characters can be exaggerated, distorted, and strike comic poses, which is not the case with a "human". Then there were the songs - insipid in the main, dismally treacly at worst ("Very Good Advice") -which pretty much served unintentionally to bring the movie to a screeching halt whenever they occurred. A movie "aimed at all ages" satisfies none. Let's not mention the title slide, which credits the story to "Lewis Carrol". A sidebar was noted to the sixties culture's adoption of this film as part of a psychedelic animated trio (the others being Fantasia and Yellow Submarine) for stoners. The Disney film also has most lamentably superceded the original text in much of our society. Analogously, who remembers the original horrifically macabre Grimm versions of Snow White and Cinderella? However, it certainly must be granted a limited success on its own terms. The voice characterizations are superb, the animation sparkles, it is somewhat faithful to the "spirit" of the book, and it is really quite entertaining in spots. Some scenes, such as the Caterpillar's, are about as good as cartoons get, which is very good indeed. The question-and-answer period brought out such tidbits as the unreleased sequence of Stan Freberg voicing the Jabberwock. That evening, the ever-amazing Dan Singer hosted us in his new arts-and-crafts digs. On display were his collections of Carrolliana and Disneyana. The front yard, set up for a tea party, was dominated by an enormous tree with a metal Disney Cheshire Cat perched high in its limbs and a little door at ground level. An entire studio in the back was given over to paraphernalia from the film and its many merchandising efforts. Inside, Carrollians mixed in with civilians - friends of Dan, often in show business - and were served drinks by a Barmouse and munched on the various "EatMe"s. The next day, Sunday, some members went to an exhibition of orginal art and booksigning for DeLoss McGraw's new illustrated Alice at the Skidmore Contemporary Art Gallery in Malibu. As we bade farewell to "beautiful downtown Burbank" and environs, we were left with a lovely bouquet of rosy memories. s^~ The White Stone Kate Lyon Charles Dodgson died of bronchitis on 14 January 1 898. On May 1 0 and 1 1 of that year, at the Holywell Music Room, Oxford, most of his most precious possessions were auctioned. Professor Frederick York Powell, who had been a colleague at Christ Church, was so upset by the auction, writes Hudson, that he was moved to write a poem about the event. The final verse is reproduced below. 'Better by far the Northman's pyre, That burnt in one sky-soaring fire The man with all he held most dear. 'He that hath ears, now let him hear. ' Professor Powell's words, if he had but known it, already contained some truth. Many of Charles Dodgson's private papers were destroyed, some burned, almost immediately after his death. In following years, volumes of his Diaries were misplaced. In the fire died all but a shadow of the extraordinary writer and philosopher known as Charles Dodgson, but from the ashes rose the beginnings of a myth that has endured for over 100 years - the myth of Lewis Carroll. Fortunately that myth is now being challenged and as the shadow cast by its colossal form begins to waver, the first slivers of light are being cast upon the man so long obscured by this artefact. Yet very much more needs to be done, beginning with a close re-examination of the surviving evidence of his life. Of this evidence, one of the most abiding is Dodgson's 'white stone' ritual - his habit of marking those special days in his life with a white stone. This paper, therefore, is an attempt to explain what is significant about the White Stone as metaphor and to examine and bring together some of the strands of Dodgson's life that influenced his decision to adopt this symbol as his own. In doing this, it is hoped that further light will be shed on this complex and often elusive figure. THE WHITE STONE IN THE LANDSCAPE In 1765, Charles Dodgson's great grandfather, the Reverend Dodgson of Elsdon, welcomed an appointment to a living as Bishop of Ossory, in Ireland. He held this position until 1775, when he was appointed to the Bishopric of Elphin and Ossory passed to William Newcome. Elphin has an ancient history. Ono, one of the Druidic lords of Roscommon, presented to St Padraic (Patrick) his fortress Imlech-Ono, and Padraic established a bishopric there, on a pre-Christian site. In 1841, as a result of the earlier Church Temporalities Act of 1832, the Bishopric of Elphin became part of Kilmore and Ardagh. The name itself, Elphin, derives from the Irish 'Aill Finn', meaning a 'white stone' - the white stone which was to feature so strongly in Dodgson's Diaries. . . . they pointed to the groves and holy wells. . . dedicated. . . marked by upright stones, chiselled on the upper part with a cross in relief. The Ancient Stone Crosses of England Alfred Rimmer These stones marked sites where spiritual energy was particularly concentrated. Often the stones marking a centre of pre-Christian worship were buried, and Christian churches were erected on the site. The ancient Greeks knew of such a centre, the Oracle at Delphi, and referred to it as the omphalos [6ii(paX6a\ the centre of the world. In Viking Norway, these stones in sacred places were known as Hellige hivide stene (holy white stones). Such stones, says Nigel Pennick, were 'cylindrical pillars terminating with a hemisphere, made from white stone, either marble, quartzite or granite.' Pennick continues to say that it is likely that these stones were the object of worship of Yngvi-Frey, who was one of the ancient gods of the Norse pantheon. In Clackmannan, Scotland, for example, there is a similar stone which stands by the church, hallowing 'the centre-point of the land, where the spiritual essence is at its height'. In many cultures, the centre-point, or omphalos, was marked by a great tree or pole - Yggdrasil, the World Tree in Norse mythology being one example. It is the tree which gives us the symbol of the cross. Benson refers to the following: The ancient Druids. . . took as the symbol of their god a living tree, a stately oak, cutting off all its branches except two on opposite sides, forming thereby a giant cross . . . The "accursed tree, " as the early Christians designated the cross upon which Christ was crucified, a death of suffering and disgrace, has become the symbol of vicarious sacrifice and atonement. . . The meaning of the Christian Cross is clear and significant. It is the symbol of life eternal, of redemption and resurrection through faith. In Cumbria, Lutwidge country, there is a cross which illustrates this. The lower part of the Gosforth Cross, at St Mary's Church, depicts the Norse World Tree - Yggdrasil, which marked the centre of the world. The upper part of the cross shows the triquetra, the symbol of the Trinity. In Hoxne, Suffolk, there is a cross which was erected in 870 A.D., commemorating the execution of King Edmund of East Anglia, on a tree which stood there until 1848. The Celtic Cross stands in many Irish churches and churchyards, and the ancient sun wheel, which forms the background to the cross, describes well the nature of Christ as the light of the world. The sun wheel is the circle which 'entwining the cross has become a familiar Christian emblem symbolising eternal life, without beginning and without end' (Brewer's). The Celtic monks of the early Church had a simplicity and a love of nature that manifested itself in the joy of God's creation, and went a long way in converting a Druidic people to the new religion. Throughout Great Britain and Ireland are many holy wells, also sites where the faithful could petition the divine. They are now dedicated to Saints, but long ago formed a part of pre-Christian belief, and far down lie countless small, white quartz stones thrown into the waters. The faithful visiting these early shrines would drop a white stone in to the well. It was an offering, and a private communion between the suppliant and the divine. The altar at St Trillo's Chapel at Llandrillo-yn-Rhos (Rhos-on-Sea), is sited over a holy well, and outside the chapel the ground is littered with small white stones. The chapel itself was founded at the place where a saint bore testimony to a Celtic Cross of light which emanated from the ground. Alice in Wonderland includes a reference to a holy well - during the Tea Party, the Dormouse, responding to Alice's query about why Elsie, Lacie and Tillie lived at the bottom of a well, says that it is a treacle well. Alice's immediate response is that there is no such thing, but she later humbly concedes that "There may be one. " There is one, of course, the Treacle Well at Binsey in Oxfordshire - a well dedicated to St Margaret. Dodgson enjoyed walking; even in old age he insisted on undertaking long walks through the countryside - a countryside steeped in history and the myths of diverse cultures. Wherever he turned, place names evoked these myths, stirring an ever fertile imagination. In pre-Christian and early Christian society, each thing encountered by the people and each feature of the landscape had its own identity. To quote Pennick again, 'Each name reflected some inner nature, a personal quality that had meaning. In the ensouled Celtic worldview, the personality of every place and artefact was recognised to be as real as the individual personalities of human beings. This is the case with seemingly inanimate objects such as stones and crosses. Such an ensouled world can only exist when there is intimate personal contact with existence. ' Such an idea must have seemed particularly relevant to the Victorians, caught as they were in a world where increasing industrialisation was fast promising to remove the essential character of a hand-made artefact, and where the leisurely peace of the country was gradually being disturbed by the railway. To a man as filled with wonder and uncertainty as Charles Dodgson, Victorian Britain with its certainties, rationalities and its blinkered focus on progress, progress, progress, must have seemed as threatening as an onrushing, uncontrolled locomotive. Dodgson liked railways - and progress - but preferred knowing that there was a restraining and guiding presence in the cab! VIA CRUCIS - THE WAY OF THE CROSS Then do folk long to go on pilgrimage, And palmers to go seeking out strange strands, To distant shrines well known in sundry lands. ~ The Canterbury Talesf Prologue) Geoffrey Chaucer The placement of these Crosses and stones was significant. In early Church history it was the custom of the Church to grant Plenary Indulgences to those who were able to undertake a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and walk in the footsteps of Christ. Some succeeded in making the pilgrimage, but many failed - old age, war, sickness, all took their toll. The Church at Rome recognised the difficulty facing many of the faithful and permitted the Stations of the Cross to be erected, usually on a hill or mound - a decision which enabled worshippers to undertake a pilgrimage and meditate at each stopping place. Similarly, when the early Christian monks travelled about the countryside, it became their custom to erect a wooden marker, or sometimes a stone, to mark the place where they had preached to the faithful. These stones, then, became a place of worship and meditation, a stepping stone in the spiritual journey which drew one nearer to God. They can be found on the old pilgrimage roads and track ways, in churchyards, anywhere that the dead might be rested on their way to burial and their preparation for a new life within Christ; a place where prayers could be said or a weary traveller could become spiritually refreshed. Many pre- Christian monuments were re-dedicated with the Christian symbols, the fish or the Cross, sanctifying a holy place and presenting a silent testimony to the presence of God in everyone, despite differences in belief. Some were simply reconsecrated. In the early days of the Church, Masses were generally only said on a feast day, and it was customary to carry out the saying of the Mass at the tomb of the martyr or saint, which once again explains the significance of the Cross on these sites. The altar stone is a reminder of those times. These places are still commemorated in the place names of Britain - names such as Market Cross, Palmers Cross, and Whitstone (White Stone). Through the city of Guildford runs an old footpath known as the Pilgrim's Way, which led from Winchester to Canterbury. Palmer's Cross, for example, derives its name from the custom of presenting those who had completed their pilgrimage with a palm branch, long a symbol of the victorious. Brewer's explains: "To bear the palm " alludes to the Roman custom of giving the victorious gladiator a branch of the palm- tree. When the triumphant Christ entered Jerusalem, the crowd strewed the way with palm branches and leaves {John 12:12-19). As a reminder of that day, a consecrated palm branch was given to a palmer, the pilgrim who had reached the Holy Land. He carried the palm branch back to his homeland, and laid it upon the altar of his parish church as a reminder of his victory. On Palm Sunday, faithful Catholics receive a palm, which is kept by the crucifix to inspire devotion until the following year. "He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth [it]. " Revelation 2:17 The palm was the symbol of the final victory, the overcoming of the trials faced by the pilgrim on his difficult journey. The journey, as we have seen, was marked by stones or crosses, where the pilgrim could stop and rest, and become sufficiently renewed so that he could continue on his journey. In Roman times, invited guests were presented with tesserae, which were small white stones which could be broken into two parts. Each party wrote his name upon his piece, and they were exchanged as a sign of hospitality, the name remaining secret, a pledge of friendship and hospitality between the two parties. A successful Roman gladiator was awarded the tessera, which took the form of a white stone with the letters SP [L. spectatus, proven, past participle o/specto] engra- ved upon it, which also served as an admission ticket to the feasting which followed, and was a recognition of victory, and an outstanding performance in overcoming his oppo- nents. A white stone day was just cause for celebration - providing both spiritual and physical sustenance, and reward- ing the victorious. The Greeks also had their equivalent in the wreath of victory, presented to the winner in the races at the games. A pilgrim in later times had only to present a stone at certain houses, proclaiming that he was a pilgrim, and he would be taken in and given bread and drink. The end of the journey could also be physically marked by a stone, or a cross, both also symbols of final victory and eternal life. Pennick explains that The ensemble of the burial mound with a standing stone or image on top of it is the forerunner of the Celtic high crosses. . . [also in] the shape of the leachta. (These are small, altar-like structures). On top of each leacht is a stone slab. . . set into this an upright stone cross. Leachta are holy stopping places at which prayers are offered by devout people. The Greeks also erected tombstones, a standing stone or herma, constructed from one large upright stone surrounded by smaller ones. The name of Hermes ['Epp.r)s\, the Greek god who later became known as the psychopomp and led the dead from this world to the next, is connected to this word herma [ep/ia], meaning stone heap. From very early times, the custom of also using these 'stone heaps' as markers for travellers, particularly at crossroads, existed in Crete and the Greek areas. "And the Gentiles shall see thy righteousness, and all kings thy glory: and thou shalt be called by a new name, which the mouth of the Lord shall name. Thou shalt also be a crown of glory in the hand of the Lord, and a royal diadem in the hand of thy God. " Isaiah 62:2-3 The white stone or cross, the palm branch and the crown, or wreath of victory, were interchangeable symbols of the victor, the pilgrim who has overcome adversity at the end of the journey, and gained spiritual sustenance along the way by stopping at the smaller markers which marked the religious and physical stages of the journey. One can see, therefore, that to Dodgson, the White Stone harboured deep spiritual and emotional significance. It was a form of spiritual marker, a reminder that life is indeed a journey along which one passes just the once and that to succeed in this journey, one must divest oneself of such unnecessary and debilitating burdens as pride and sloth. At all cost, one must also remember that the quest requires adherence to a purity of spirit, an innocence which Dodgson, throughout his life, saw most vividly expressed in his relationships with children. He found within their presence that lack of artifice and that simplicity which the monks of old had sought - and found - and which suggested to him the presence of the sacred. Many times in the Diaries appears the reference to the white stone day, albo lapillo notare diem, as it was known in Latin. The first reference appears in his Diary of 4 September, 1855, and says simply "Mark this day, o Annalist, with a white stone. " Wakeling's annotation to the Diary entry records this as being " Dodgson s method of indicating a special day which had given him great personal pleasure. " It was a common enough term in Victorian times, but to Dodgson it meant more than merely a 'red-letter day'. Numerous similar entries are to be found in his published Diaries during the years 1855 to 1867. These white stone references occur on days when he was inspired or uplifted in some way, perhaps by art or music, as in the entry of 18 March, 1856, when he heard the beautiful words of Handel's Messiah, sung by Jenny Lind. But by far the majority of references occur on days when he was in the company of children. He found that "Their innocent unconsciousness is very beautiful, and gives one a feeling of reverence, as at the presence of something sacred." Dodgson had a constant struggle to overcome earthly temptations, and gain the tessera on which was written the name, which was a reminder of the covenant which existed between each man and his God. It was a constant battle, but along the way there was help, white stones which marked a day which had made the journey easier. In Stolen Waters, it is the pure and chaste child who provides salvation. "And a little child shall lead them. " (Isaiah 11.6). It is she who provides the manna, the spiritual bread of the pilgrim, and reminds him of the garland still to be won, whose silent presence turns him away from the path of folly and inspires him to seek "The garland waiting for my brow, That must be won with tears, With pain-with death-1 care not how. " For Dodgson, the presence of the childlike and innocent must have seemed like angelic intervention. The need to live a pure life was paramount to Dodgson. At any time could come the call to fight the last fight, and the need to be constantly prepared was always there. Never, even for a moment, could he cease to be vigilant. And vigilant he was. He ate and drank sparingly, and took long walks, through a countryside which was filled with constant reminders of the sacred. Be sure the safest rule is that we should not dare to live in any scene in which we dare not die. But, once realise what the true object is in life - that it is not pleasure, not knowledge, not even fame itself, "that last infirmity of noble minds" - but that it is the development of character, the rising to a higher, nobler, purer standard, the building up of the perfect Man - and then, so long as we feel that this is going on, and will (we trust) go on forever more, death has for us no terror; it is not a shadow, but a light; not an end, but a beginning! Sylvie and Bruno (Preface) This, then, is the significance of the white stone in the life of Charles Dodgson. Like the original white stones throughout Britain which marked the presence of the sacred, the White Stone Day to Dodgson also marked a day when he had experienced the sacred, in children whose 'innocent unconsciousness is very beautiful, and gives one a feeling of reverence', in music, or in art, or in the words of the Bible. Like the white stones and crosses which marked the way of the pilgrim, Dodgson's marked the shrines on his own road. They brought hope that one day he would feel worthy to preach the words of Christ; and he was inspired by these moments, as he drew towards the end of the pilgrimage, when he would receive the new name and eternal life. Dodgson wrote a set of Directions regarding my Funeral, etc., in which the last line requested that 'there be no expensive monument. I should prefer a small, plain head- stone, but will leave this detail to their judgement.' Even then, he disliked artifice. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson is buried in the Mount Cemetary, Guildford. His monument is not the small, plain stone which he sought, but a white marble cross, on which are inscribed the words 'Thy Will be Done.' The pilgrimage was over, the white stone attained. A Nameless Epitaph Ask not my name, O friend! That Being only, which hath known each man From the beginning, can Remember each unto the end Matthew Arnold (1867) pn jzmoriam Works cited: Hudson, D. Lewis Carroll An Illustrated Biography. Constable. 1976(1954) Pennick,N. The Celtic Cross. Blandford. 1977 Benson, G. W. The Cross: Its History and Symbolism. Hacker Art Books. 1976(1935) Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Cassell. 1988 (1870) Cohen, M. Lewis Carroll. A Biography. London: MacMillan. 1995 Wakeling E., ed. Lewis Carroll's Diaries . Lewis Carroll Society (U.K.) Vol 1, 1993. B.BJTo6aHOB Vasily Vasil'evich Lobanov Jan. 8, 1926 -Dec. 6, 2001 The distinguished Russian librarian and Lewis Carroll bibliographer, Vasily Vasil'evich Lobanov, died in Tomsk, Siberia, on Dec. 6, 2001. Mr. Lobanov received the Soviet "Medal for Bravery" for his efforts during the fight against the Germans in the Second World War. He was a 1962 graduate of the Philological Department of Tomsk State University and the author of many books, including a catalog of incunabula and a bibliography of Slavonic books published in the Cyrillic alphabet from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. His meticulous bibliography of Russian editions of Lewis Carroll's works was issued in privately printed fascicles over several years and then collected in an edition published by Moscow State University in a special number of its journal Folia Anglistica in Autumn 2000 [KL 66 pp. 4-5]. I had the honor of corresponding with Vasily Lobanov for the past four years and counted him as a friend. ~ August Imholtz I tried those self-whitening toothpastes, but actually it was the dental strips that did the trick for me." cartoon by Casey Shaw Leaves from the Deanery Garden Now and then Knight Letter drops like a thunderbolt from' its usual superior cruising altitude into sheer profundity, and to me, Issue 67 is one of those moments. I was proud to be thar, as we say in Appalachia. I enjoy being jolted till I frizzle. Two unlikely stars happened to collide, and the explosion is still brilliant. The first I noticed was in "Of Books and Things" (p. 2 1 ), where an Amazon.com reviewer of AW is (maybe, but maybe not) deservedly slammed for the following astonishing excerpt. Of course, the comments in brackets are mine. I put them in mainly to show ecstatic frenzy. "Maybe the author has English back round... A lot of her {Alice's} decision during the book make no sense. . .And why would she follow the rabbit to an unknown land to begin with? {Yes, why?} One thing of the book 1 did not understand was the theme. {Me neither.} One other thing I didn't see in the book was a plot {nor do I}. In my opinion this book. ..had no meaning {ditto, if you add 'single' after 'no'}. It had no moral, and nothing to learn from it. {Refuses to let one on the premises.} So I think the book was very pointless. {And proud of it.}" Look again; there are gems here — oddly cut, I grant you. Cumulatively, it is an ingenuous summary of what is arguably Carroll's greatest invention — the anti-narrative, so richly functioning and still so lacking in essential features. It was a time when novelistic bent for both adult and children's work drove in the direction of indomitable con- struction— as in most of the classic Victorian/Edwardian fiction writers between James Barrie and George Elliot. Yet Dodgson, this pedant/ divine whose personal life was one long compelling rubric, concluded that in fiction less is more, and not only that, but a springboard to even less, and then, even less again. This was opening the way for literary modernism. Yet he makes it stick, no mean task, especially for a pioneer. Alice, which doesn't show even string and glue holding it together, is so much more seaworthy than, for example, the bolted-and-caulked Peter Pan. Peter, despite musical success, is on the decline, but Alice's popularity keeps growing by its own power. If you can stop yourself wondering whether the Amazon reviewer thinks Carroll is a butcher specializing in odd cuts of meat — "English back round" — or possibly suffering from an exclusively British spinal affliction, notice how effortlessly this thinker isolates and separates ultra-inherent narrative elements — theme, plot, motivation — from the whole. It is as if Carroll were present to the writer in a form like one of those pre-sliced hams so easy to serve up because it only looks whole. It sounds as if the reviewer has not so much discovered as assimilated, in what might be called the "Alice process", how to have jam and no jam at the same time — an operating story with most of the story stuff absent. This rare effect is not unknown in literature. Both Shakespeare and Spenser display it now and then. Reading that review, I got the feeling that a child, probably an older child, was writing. Such children have stumbled on the tombs of Pharoahs and on the cave mouths which conceal the Dead Sea Scrolls. Maybe more children should become critics. Put it this way. Of the quoted sentences above, which would your critical sense of AW allow you outright to deny? Second: on page 1 5 a very careful and precise adult, Karoline Leach, comes to much the same conclusion as the Amazon reviewer. That is, she jostles into it during an exasperated attempt to reify conclusions of John Docherty's about Charles Dodgson, based, as she sees it, on logical fallacies and no extra-textual evidence. It's just a little general observation at the head of a paragraph. She probably doesn't give it much thought, as she is in the press of an important argument about what constitutes valid evi- dence (and good manners). "In that sense {Docherty's inter- pretive method} Alice is no more than an ink blot test — we find what we want to see there. If you... are convinced ...{of a particular interpreta- tion } then that is what you will find." By me, Leach has got it in one — whatever she was aiming at. Alice is what you make her. (This point is a valuable contribution to our studies by poet Stephanie Bolster.) AW surpasses any other do-it- yourself text I ever read for completion and ease of execution. The inkblot is also a mirror; you see what you bring. Bear with me while I carry the metaphor a bit further. If authors authoring were painters painting, with Carroll standing among them, and all using the same tools and brushes — Carroll would be the one turning out not natural scenes or people, but a seamless mirror. Casually, and with no different tools. We are dealing with a construction as deliberately empty as the Bellman's blank sea chart. It is emptied. Carroll keeps us in Flatland by refusing to create depth. In a way we ourselves are erased. As poet Alan Tate says, we become "function, depth and mass / Without figure, a mathematical shroud / Hurled at the air." Why? How? Carroll has a thousand tricks for making his work impenetrable. Verisimilitude never left an author colder. He won't let us escape the moving line of words — even of letters. Yet Carroll scholars seem as a group strangely uninterested in the production of the entrapping surface. How many scholars examine AW purely as constructed narrative? Whether scholars begin with the text and then turn outward from it, like Leach, to investigate history and biography, or inward, like Docherty, to establish meaning, far too few examine the mechanism, the workmanship. We look for meaning when we should be looking for method. Carroll, the author, is always in control — ferociously so. His precision is far beyond average, even for a "great" author. It is not surprising. He had inherited skills from his father, honed them through a productive boyhood, and never, apparently, experienced any dramatic shift in style or purpose. To me, the author-reader relationship with him is always slightly controlling — beneath the antic persona he cultivates. Perhaps this is one satisfaction he gained from child-friendships — the child follows a leader. But it is doubtful whether critics removed by experience and time should allow him still to control them — to drive them off with his ferocious expertise and predilection for privacy. We must not be intimidated by a fascinating surface. Beneath it, there is a brilliant, absolutely unique, construction to be investigated. It is like a pretty little bomb perhaps activated inside a Faberge egg. The time comes to break the shell, let the pearls roll where they may, and figure out what's ticking in there. Otherwise, the next Amazon.com review may have to do it for us. Finally, Carroll study is particularly vulnerable to what might be called the streetlight syndrome. Remember the joke about the drunk who drops his watch at night in the middle of the block? He looks for it on the corner because he can see so much better under the streetlight. The big questions don't go away because they go begging. Why is characterization so fluid? What is the theme — or, if the work is allegorical, what is the process analogized? Why do characters whom the author has sensitively humanized then behave so un- humanly? Charting conflict is one of the biggest challenges in the book. Why are we unsure of every main character's motive? Does Alice experience any revelation at all during the climax? It's a mistake to shrug off questions because they have no answers. I don't say all this critically, but to caution. I wish somebody would write a book exclusively about Carroll's narrative strategies and constructs, however tentative. Maybe somebody has. I'm new around here. Tell me if you know one. In the meantime, Kenneth Burke can put all this in perspective: "what we want is not terms that avoid ambiguity, but terms that clearly reveal the strategic spots at which ambiguities necessarily arise." (A Grammar of Motives, U.C. Press, 1 969) To realize how slithy Carroll's ambiguities remain, is to begin at least to survey the tasks that I describe. Chloe Nichols On New Year's Day a float called "Wonderland of Imagination" won the President's Trophy at the annual Rose Bowl Parade in Pasadena. This was a fabulous rolling display of the Alice landscape and characters, made from many kinds of flowers, split peas, rolled oats, and corn husks (all surfaces on floats must be covered with plants). The Cheshire Cat hung near the back, rolling his head and wagging his tail. "Look at the animation on that tigerl" urged the announcer on HGTV (Home & Garden TV network). Yours for more English literature classes, Angelica Carpenter More details on the float are in Car roll ian Notes, p. 15. In "Tracking down the Jabberwock" {Knight Letter, Issue 67), Alan Martin wonders if the Arabic words "al-Jabr w'al- muQabalah" influenced the naming of Carroll's poem "Jabberwocky." The Arabic is the title of a mathematical book published in 825 a.d. by al-Khowarizmi and means "the art of bringing together unknowns to match a known quantity". As Martin notes, the words already gave English the term algebra and the author's name the word algorithm. Understanding that the article was abridged, I was wondering if the author attempted to peruse the dictionaries and the mathematical books Carroll owned. One of the mathematical books could have made some minor reference to the Arabic title and certainly one of his dictionaries could have had the etymology for algebra listed. Checking just three of these dictionaries at The New York Public Library, I found that Worester's (noted in CLD's diary for April 4, 1867) and Richardson's (listed in the auction sales) mention only alginbarat and jubr roots without mention of w'al- muqabalah. Another dictionary Carroll owned, Cole's, had no etymology and another, Webster's, had too many to choose from. The other dictionaries he was known to have owned upon his death were either unidentified or not available. Despite Martin's well-researched paper, I believe Carroll, in naming his poem "Jabberwocky," was influenced by the fabricated words in the pre-existing first stanza: brillig, slithy, toves, gyre, gimble, wabe, mimsy, borogoves, mome, raths, outgrabe — all but one appearing with a red wavy underline as I write. He was obviously influenced by the word "jabber", defined as "to talk rapidly, unintelligibly, or idly" — a certain feeling one gets from reading the stanza. Carroll's title has even entered our language as a word, meaning "nonsensical speech or writing." Perhaps its entrance was facilitated not only by jabber's meaning but also by its onomatopoeic b sound, a plosive consonant with an expressive lip movement. So many words with similar definitions, no mere coincidence, employ the letter: babble, gibber, blather, gabble, gab, gibble-gabble, blabber, blab, blether, burble, blatter and, of course, jabber itself. Naming the poem after a concept — the ^-ending — rather than the beast — "The Jabberwock" — probably aided its entrance as well. 10 Jabber's appearance in Jabberwock is surely not' coincidental. Perhaps due to the obviousness, the point does not even necessitate a comment in Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice. Most, but not all, of the first stanza's made up words have etymologies from basic English words, supporting my somewhat bland assumption of Carroll's intentions. Since so many words in English are curiously similar, sometimes even the same, and have separate meanings, the concept Alan Martin suggests should probably be labeled "expected coincidence" — for odds are coincidences should occur from time to time. In point of fact, the wordjabber is the only babble word with a possible double meaning of some relevance to a fighting creature, that is, jabber: "one who jabs, punches." Think "the claws that catch." If Carroll thought hard on the issue — Babblewock?, Gibberwock? — he certainly chose wisely. Further, two words that are often thought to be nonsense but are not — burble and whiffle — have a similar meaning with jabber. In the poem, these two words, by no mere coincidence, specifically refer to the Jabberwock who "Came whiffling through the tulgey wood / And burbled as he came!" Due to other English words and the context of the poem, one can hardly miss an oral definition for burble — a word Carroll likely thought he made up. Despite its proposed "burst" and "bubble" etymology and its legitimacy, he wrote to Maud Standen (Letters, December 18, 1877): if you take the 3 verbs "bleat," "murmur," and "warble," and select the bits I have underlined, it certainly makes "burble"; though I'm afraid I can't distinctly remember having made it in that way. Note that Carroll's three words are all vocal descriptions. Clearly, the creature is named after the jabbering sound of the nonsense words. Besides these arguments, what reason would Carroll have to allude to or be influenced by such an unconnected concept as this mathematical work? Part of the Arabic does mean "to oppose, compare, or set one thing against another" — a connection between "Jabberwocky" and the mathematical work Martin fails to notice. But still, the two concepts seem too disconnected. So what's cookin' in Carroll's "-wock"? Whether con- sciously or simply using a subconscious poetic feeling, Car- roll could have been influenced by the related words roc and cockatrice, and the less likely wyvern, the only related word beginning with a w. But, with the jabber beginning, the first two letters of the word word and the near rhyme word talk — Jabberwords, Jabbertalk — also come to mind. Cockatrice is defined as "a mythical serpent reputed to be hatched from a cock's egg and supposed to have the power of killing by its glance". Think "eyes of flame." Roc is defined as "a legendary bird of prey of enormous size and strength". Perhaps Mr. Martin won't be surprised that it derives from Arabic. Carroll himself addressed the meaning of the word Jabberwock. When a Boston school wrote him requesting to name their magazine after the beast, he responded (Letters, February 6, 1! Mr. Lewis Carroll has much pleasure in giving to the editresses of the proposed magazine permission to use the title they wish for. He finds that the Anglo-Saxon word "wocer" or "wocor" signifies "offspring" or "fruit." Taking "jabber" in its ordinary acceptation of "excited and voluble discussion," this would give the meaning of "the result of much excited discussion." Due to Carroll's tone and present-tense research, one should not take him too seriously here, nor interpret this as a declaration of the word's true etymology 20 years before. Though I happen to believe his meaning of jabber, I doubt Carroll had wocer in mind when creating the poem. There is a son in the poem, of course, but he is the Jabberwock's slayer. Matt Demakos I'm hoping that the LCSNA might like the opportunity of accommodating academics, researchers or simply visitors to London connected with your Society, in a house frequently visited, though never owned, by Lewis Carroll. I have recently finished restoring the unique, Gothic-looking, three-bedroom town house in Camden Town/Mornington Crescent that used to be the home of George MacDonald, author and great friend of Lewis Carroll's. MacDonald lived there for many years with his family and the house became the hangout of several other important literary and artistic figures of the time; John Ruskin and Ford Maddox-Brown to name but two. I'm fairly sure that George MacDonald's children were the first to hear read out loud the story that was eventually published as "Alice in Wonderland", and there is no doubt in the minds of historians and researchers that I have spoken to that the reading would have taken place in the self-same house. I have had an application in with English Heritage for a blue plaque to George MacDonald for nearly three years now so my case is bound to come up for consideration fairly soon. The house has been beautifully restored, if I may say so myself, and in my mind, still retains the magic that might have inspired the writers and artists of the time. The house itself was designed and built by an artist, Charles Lucy, in 1843, and contains a exact plaster cast copy, of which there are only three in existence, of Michelangelo's "Madonna and Child", set into the wall of the entrance hall. It is currently on the market to let for £900 per week. Should you like to know any more about the house, please do contact me. I assure you the house and the willow tree that stands in front of it make an absolute picture, and I've no doubt it would be a great asset to your Society, as well as a pleasure for Lewis Carroll lovers to stay there. Sebastian D. Tennant sdtennant@telinco.co.uk 11 What a fine name for a landlord! However, further inquiries revealed that it can only be let for a year or more, as it is unfurnished, so a shorter time period would be considered impractical. I enjoyed Ruth Berman's article "Reflections on a Week of Wednesdays" in Knight Letter 68, especially the part about "Knot X" in A Tangled Tale. Ruth questions whether the "Knot" was influenced by the International Prime Meridian Conference in Washington, DC which began October 1, 1884. Carroll's "Knot" appeared a month later in the November issue of the Monthly Packet and deals in part with his "where does the day begin" puzzle of old. Wondering when the public was informed of the conference, I checked Palmer's Index for The Times, available online at The New York Public Library. The first mention appeared on September 22 under the umbrella headline "The United States (By Anglo-American Cables.)" The entire paragraph reads: "The International Conference to fix a prime meridian meets in Washington on October 1 ; arrangements are now making for the sessions in the State Department. Almost every country of Europe and America will send repre- sentatives." The conference received its first headline in the October 4 issue. Though the conference was mentioned twelve times between October 1 and 22, and once on November 3, these mostly consist of only a few sentences. A long commentary (lacking a headline as was the practice of the time) and a separate news report appeared in the October 15 edition. Below is a chart showing all the knots for which we have some hint of a composition date. (The lag days were figured from the dates Ruth sent to the Lewis Carroll eGroup after her article appeared and assume a first-of-the-month publication date for each issue). Date Month Lag Days Feb 20 Apr 1880 40 May 30 Jul 1880 31 Feb 19 Apr 1882 41 Nov 22 Jan 1883 39 Vm Finished Jan 21 Aug 1883 191 ♦Carroll acknowledges the acceptance. Since 40 days seems to be a mean average, though based on slightly different occurrences, the September 22 date of The Times notice and the November appearance of the Knot curiously fit: Knot Occurrence I Accepted* m Mailed vn Finished DC Finished Month Lag Days Nov 1884 39 Knot Occurrence Date X The Times Sep 22 I do not mean to suggest that Carroll was influenced directly by any given newspaper or even this specific newspaper, though the possibility remains. Regardless, more newspapers need to be checked to confirm exactly when the conference was "in the air". Sadly, the New York Public Library is not the best facility for researching old British periodicals. However, The New York Times, dated just two days after its British namesake, did print a half-column notice of the event. The proximity of these two dates supports a possible world-wide news "leak" sometime after mid September — the time Carroll is recorded to have finished previous Knots. If Carroll was not influenced by this conference, it remains a terrific coincidence. In all his letters to telegraph companies trying to solve his own "Knot", and even in his failed Monthly Packet answer, he never mentioned the conference or an International Dateline. Lastly, Ruth mentions that in 1882, Samoa decided to have two Fourths of July to coincide with America's calendar instead of Australia's. Well, the 4th of July for that year was a Tuesday!!! So the question is what day of the week were these "fourths". If the 3rd were a Monday (all around the world — which I am not sure about), then they must have had two Tuesdays in a row — a small part of Looking-Glass coming true. At the end of her piece, Ruth thanks me for suggesting Blaise's book Time Lord; but I wish to go on record that I did not enjoy it. If interested in the topic, please try any other source she lists. Matt Demakos [Time Lord was recently awarded the Pearson Writers ' Trust Non-Fiction Prize.] I'm grateful to Matt Demakos for showing that Carroll would have had time to add the day-beginning riddle to "Knot X" after news about the Prime Meridian Conference had started to appear in the general papers. Information about the upcoming Conference had gone out to the scientific community about a year earlier, and I had assumed that Carroll would have heard about it through his academic contacts and would have begun thinking then about the possibility of presenting his riddle again. But the first announcements in the general newspapers would have reminded him that the subject was about to be topical and that he should hurry up and send his material on it to the Monthly Packet. I suspect that the reason Carroll did not mention the Conference in his discussions of the answers to "Knot X" was that he was disappointed that it did not, after all, make any formal recommendation for adopting an International Dateline. Ruth Berman [Ruth is responding to MatPs letter, above, which she was sent before publication.] Hear about the gryphon that tried to board a flight with two dormice in his beak, but they wouldn't let him on? New rule: only one carrion allowed. Alan Tannenbaum 12 <©jr Fits of Peake 8c ...'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversation?' [sic!!]. So begins the Bloomsbury edition graced with the restored 1945 Mervyn Peake drawings and featured in the last issue. What has come to light since is that Bloomsbury's printing was a trade edition and there exist spectacular fine press volumes by Libanus, who also did the restoration work on the illustrations. The Libanus edition is much larger (320 * 218 mm), letterpress and bound in full cloth, and consists of: 60 copies of the books and a set of prints (all at the original size of Peake's drawings), boxed and numbered (£300 - [sold out]); 120 standard copies (£150); and 100 sets of the prints (£110) and all include a four-page color supplement. Their sumptuous edition has the relevant quotations with the drawings, not the full text of the book. An article in The Times (London), December 12, 2001, describes the genesis of the original illustrations, immediately following WWII and at a time when Peake was in bad emotional shape. Returning to England, he got to know the Norton family, who kept a kind of artistic salon in bombed-out Chelsea. He often dropped in, talking about his projects and delighting 11 -year-old Caroline with his storytelling. Realizing that she would be a fine model for his Alice, he asked her to sit for him, which she did. Fifty-five years later, Michael Mitchell of the Libanus Press happened to be sitting next to a lady at a dinner who asked him what his press was working on. "Restoring Mervyn Peake's Alice drawings," he said. "Oh, I sat for those," she replied to his astonishment. For the limited edition she has also written a short recollection of Peake, whose "volatile face and expressions were a joy to watch". Contact the Libanus Press, Rose Tree House, Silverless Street, Marlborough, Wiltshire sn8 ijq, U.K.; +1672. 515378, -511041 fax;. susan@libanuspress.co.uk. And by-the-bye, the many textual errors have been corrected in the second edition of the Bloomsbury printing. Psittaciformes Atramentum Polish-born British illustrator Francizka Themerson ran the Gaberbochus [L. Jabberwock] Press from 1948 to 1979. Her illustrations to TTLG were completed in 1946, but never published. Now her niece Jasia Reichardt has rectified that by publishing a fine press edition through Inky Parrot Press: 48 special copies, bound in quarter leather, with six initialed and numbered prints, in a slipcase (£168) and 372 ordinary copies, signed by Reichardt and Graham Ovenden, £62. Inky Parrot Press, The Foundry, Church Hanborough, Witney near Oxford ox29 8ab, U.K. +1993.881260; -883080 fax. A Blackstone day indeed A news story of 28 November, 2001 described "a temporary export bar" from the U.K. on a rare set of photographs of Alice Liddell. Arts Minister Baroness Tessa Blackstone made the order amid fears a foreign collector could whisk the glass negatives and photographs, taken by Carroll himself, out of the country. The photos were sold at the Sotheby's auction in June to an "if not nameless, herein unnamed" U.S. collector, who promised to display them at Oxford University. However, as foreign buyers have since expressed interest in the pictures, a consortium involving the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television (NMPFT), the National Portrait Gallery, the Museum of Oxford and the Victoria & Albert is currently trying to raise the £600,000 ($850,000) to repurchase the pictures and put them on permanent display at Christ Church. As we go to press, the British government has extended the export bar until the end of May. Politically Correct The Pamphlets of Lewis Carroll: Volume III: The Political Pamphlets and Letters of Charles L. Dodgson and Related Pieces, compiled and edited by Francine F. Abeles, published by the L.C.S.N.A. Not only does this volume provide the reader with access to rare materials, most of which have never previously been reprinted, Dr. Abeles' commentary contributes an unparal- leled look at Dodgson's involvement in the spheres of politics and voting theory. The book is divided into four sections, each with its own introductory essay. "Fairness in Elections" reprints Dodgson's pamphlets on voting procedure. The next section, "Rationality in Sports," contains Dodgson's writing on tennis tournaments and on betting. In some cases, Dodgson's letters to the editor of the St. James s Gazette mention the opinions of other correspondents, and Abeles has included these other letters as well, giving the reader a complete view of Dodgson's work in context and of the response to it. "Proportional Representation" also includes letters by his contemporaries that respond to and elaborate upon his arguments. This section also contains Dodgson's major work Principles of Parliamentary Representation. A short section of "Political Humor" finishes the book, but previous sections are not without their drollery as well. Many of the pieces reprinted here show that Dodgson could use his Carrollian wit even on a seemingly dry topic. Prof. Abeles' general introduction is a serious reconsid- 13 eration of Dodgson as a political scientist, considers his activism, and puts his theories in the context of the history of poli-sci. An outstanding scholarly contribution to the fields of Victorian political theory and Carrollian studies, this will be an important addition to libraries from the largest university to the most modest Lewis Carroll enthusiast. List Price: $70; Member Price: $55 + shipping @ $2 per volume. Send orders to LCSNA c/o Stan Bershod, 58 Crittendon Way, Rochester, NY 14623. Carrollian Notes Things we wouldn't bank on International Money Marketing begins its Dec. 6, 2001 article on the adventures of Do It Yourself portfolios with the following sentence: "Lewis Carroll is most widely known for penning the Disney adaptation of his story Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, eclipsing his other works..." Frankly, My Dear Alan Frank in the Daily Star of Jan. 4, 2002, commenting on the Disney 1951 "Alice" film says: "The animation is inventive, the tuneful songs include 'A Very Merry Unbirthday to You' and 'I'm Late' and although the ail- American voices aren't exactly what Carroll had in mind, the film is delightful." Italics added. That judgment will be new to Kathryn Beaumont. They sought it with Stegdetect... Take a good look. Can you unravel the secret code in this picture? University of Maryland graduate student Niels Provos and other CITI (Center for Information Technology Integration) researchers embedded, appropriately enough, the entire first Fit of The Hunting of the Snark into this image. Chances are you don't see a thing. That's the key to steganography: delivering a secret message in an existing image without altering the original content. It's the stuff spy novels are made of and according to some published reports, could be the means of communication for many terrorists around the world. Steganography, Greek for "hidden writing" {oreyavoypa- cpid) from stego (areyco), to conceal, is "the art and science of secret communication", says Peter Honeyman, scientific director at CITI. It's the ability for people to communicate without anyone else knowing that communication is taking place. It's different from cryptography, which carries an encrypted or coded message. In cryptography, people see the means of communication and know the message is taking place, but don't know how to decipher it. The whole basis of steganography is to conceal that the communication is even taking place. The digital world has opened the door for this type of coded communication, meaning e-mails, CD-ROMS, photos, even compressed music files. "Any digital representation of information offers an opportunity for steganography," says Honeyman. "It doesn't require any special equipment, just someone who knows their way around a computer and can use a mouse." (Obviously, the picture as prined at right contains no hidden messages: only the digital online version does!) A few extra spaces, dots or dashes to any original program or file are all that's needed to create a steganographic mes- sage. These additions don't disturb the original content but do embed a secret note. A simple computer program can break the code. "About 10 percent of an image or file can be used to hide a message," says Niels Provos. "Beyond that, you run the risk of altering the original content. But 10 percent is enough to get the word out." For example, a message might be hidden within an image by changing the least significant bits to be the message bits. Spurred by these reports, Provos developed a stega- nographic detection framework. He analyzed two million images from the Internet auction site eBay using several computer tools, including a crawler that downloads images from the Web; Stegdetect, which identifies images that might contain hidden messages; Stegbreak, which then tries to conjure up a key to break the code; and a distributing computer framework that runs multiple instances of Stegbreak on a cluster of workstations. Despite all the hype, Provos came up empty-handed. What did you expect, a Boojum? 14 Avon Calling Charles Lovett The mobs of uniformed schoolchildren descending from coaches in Stratford should have been enough to warn me that the recent production of Alice in Wonderland by the Royal Shakespeare Company was intended more for children accustomed to Christmas pantomimes than for adult students of Mr. Dodgson. Alice is not an inherently dramatic vehicle, and for this reason stage versions in general are ultimately doomed. Though the book contains some elements of drama, in particular the brilliant dialogue between Alice and the creatures she encounters, it lacks what Stanislavsky would call a "through line of action." The essential elements of drama — conflict, plot, and resolution — are missing in Alice, and this is part of what makes the book so revolutionary; however, Carroll's freeform dream-tale will always be less than perfect on the stage. This is not to say that an evening with Alice (in this case at the RSC) is an evening wasted. There are opportunities for wonderful stage moments here, and this new production, dramatized by Adrian Mitchell and directed by Rachel Kavanaugh, gives us many such moments. The evening begins with Dodgson, Duckworth, and the Liddell girls rowing onstage as the Victorian skyline of Oxford (no tower on Christ Church Hall, an authentic 1 862 touch) drifts past. ^Catherine Heath, as Alice, immediately establishes her fine ability to take the stage, as well as demonstrating a remarkable resemblance to Alice Liddell. Here is where the resemblance to actual figures ends, however. Daniel Flynn's redheaded Dodgson has all the slickness of a used car salesman — more R T Barnum than C.L. Dodgson. Alice's fall down the rabbit-hole, in which she spends part of her time wonderfully sprawled in a wing chair that sways to and fro a few yards above the stage, was remarkably rendered, as were a number of other effects. Her growing and shrinking were accomplished by flashing across the stage a series of doors of different heights — simple but effective. The musical numbers, by Terry Davies and Stephen Warbeck, were remarkably forgettable, the exception being the setting of "All in the Golden Afternoon," which was memorable not for being good, but simply for being better than the rest of the score. Especially ill-conceived was a Music Hall rendition of "Father William" in which the third line of each verse (where the joke usually appears) was sung to a completely different (and much faster) rhythm from the rest of the song. Such experimentation may have its place, but not in a production meant to appeal to children. The audience sat silent throughout the number, as no one could understand the funny bits. A similar digression, the Tweedles' recitation of "The Walrus and The Carpenter" was, in contrast, one of the highlights of the show. The Oysters were presented as puppets, the Walrus and the Carpenter as wonderfully sly and comic, and the rarely heard extra verses written by Dodgson for the 1886 stage version of Alice were included. Act I ended rather abruptly with Alice waking up not on the riverbank where she had fallen asleep, but in the chair by the fireplace with snow falling outside. To be sure this prepared us for going through the looking-glass in Act 2, but we were left wondering what happened to the river. At the end of Act 2 we returned to the riverbank — perhaps it was all a single dream. In his notes in the programme, Adrian Mitchell says that he "wrote this play" to please seven children he loved, but to call him the author would be a gross exaggeration. He sticks largely to Dodgson's words, for which he should be thanked, and the few jokes of his own he throws in only serve to show how perfect Dodgson's own humor was. Though many scenes are necessarily omitted, Mitchell sticks to the proper progression of episodes, and does not mix characters from the two books — a refreshing change from so many hodge- podge productions created by those who seem to think that, because there is no dramatic structure to the works, the episodes can be presented in any order. Reign on My Parade Congratulations to FTD, Inc., whose Alician float "The Wonderland of Imagination" won the President's Award for the Best Overall Floral Display at the 2002 Rose Parade. Some pictures can be found at www.ftdi.com/pr/float.htm. "Alice's hair is fixed with individual strands of raffia, while walnut shell, cornmeal, and paprika will blend together to make her skin. Alice's friend, the spectacular caterpillar, came to life with orchid carnations and Madame Pompadour, while orchid florets carefully accent the yellow button chrysanthemums. The White Rabbit found himself escorted down the parade route with fur made of white carnations and shredded coconut flakes. Also, around Alice and friends, you'll see mushrooms made of natural lunaria pods, dehydrated oranges, limes and lemons with spots of solid hot pink Preve roses,oversized Canterbury Bells of yellow strawflower petals and sculptured thistles, consisting of over 7,000 stems of liatris which sit amid old-fashioned English country gardens of delphiniums, snapdragons, larkspur, peony, lilies and cabbage roses. Of course the entire float 15 has more than 30,000 flowers of 14 varieties intermingled throughout the gardens, while rambling rose vines complete the gardens in this whimsical storybook setting." A propos de rien, the National Geographic for June 1954 has a photo of that year's Alice float in that year's Tournament of Roses parade. The Grinning Cheshire Cat: But this puss was no Lewis Carroll creation Mark Be van Reprinted in full with the kind permission of "The Cheshire Magazine" at www.cheshiremagazine.com/. "It vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone." Lewis Carroll did not invent the enigmatic Cheshire Cat. Sorry! Please don't feel disillusioned, for the truth of the origin of the Cheshire Cat pays a greater tribute to the scholarship of the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson than to the imagination of his alter ego, the children's writer. Born in 1 832, Charles grew up in what was then the isolated small country village of Daresbury, where his father began his career as curate. The elder Dodgson was himself no mean scholar, becoming in later life Archdeacon of Richmond and a Canon of Ripon. As the eldest son of a family of eleven, Charles showed an early aptitude for amusing small children. He devised games, and edited a series of family magazines to which all his brothers and sisters were expected to contribute. Painfully shy, with a stammer, deaf in one ear, and with few friends outside his family, the young Dodgson was a voracious reader and academically brilliant. Picture this quiet, studious, but fun-loving boy devouring the ancient books in his father's library. Was it here that he first became familiar with the tale of the disappearing Cheshire Cat? The story begins with the eleventh century Earl of Chester, Hugh Lupus, a nephew of William the Conqueror, Hugh 'the Wolf, a very big man, was also known as Hugh 'the fat'. Hugh Lupus bore as his coat of arms a wolf's head, jaws open and teeth bared. He had this symbol of authority, given to him by his royal uncle as a reward for his services, NONSEQUITUR Wiley Miller TlAe >=URNG-N To CPNQOEPaNG» NbOR FEW? oF Ue-l&WS HN£> To &£ TkVCG-N WITH 6rt\(\LL 4>T£P4> CAf^i feTWRT ©•< JUf>T ^\TT\[\IG? OKI Ps WM_L... displayed all over the conquered Cheshire countryside. Medieval provincial artists had a somewhat primitive drawing technique, and his noble emblem soon debased to a pale imitation of the original. The snarl of the wolf began to resemble a grin. Defeated Saxon peasants were quick to call their new master's badge 'Fat Hugh's Cat.' Fat Hugh the Wolf had no son. Both his Cheshire estates and the family tendency to obesity were inherited by his nephew Gilbert, also known by a nickname - Le Gros Veneur, 'the Fat Hunter'. Gilbert Le Grosvenor took as his arms the devise azure a bend or. That is a gold diagonal stripe on a blue background, a fairly simple badge, as were most early examples of heraldry. It was quite common then for two or more families to have very similar coats of arms but, providing they lived some distance from each other, no confusion would arise. As heraldry became more complicated and more people became entitled to display their own devices the system was formalised and regulated by the Court of Chivalry. It was in 1389 that Sir Robert Grosvenor of Hulme fell foul of the Court of Chivalry when Sir Richard Scrope, Baron of Bolton, won the exclusive rights to the arms azure a bend or. The Grosvenors were required to find an alternative. "I have just the thing," says Sir Robert (or words to that effect). "I shall take as my arms those of my illustrious ancestors the Earls of Chester, the Grasvenor family." Spelling, you will notice, was another medieval art still to be perfected. Indeed that is what Sir Robert did. He took as his arms the golden wheatsheaf, not the wolf's head, 'Fat Hugh's Cat'. And so it was, because our ancestors could neither draw nor spell, the embodied grin of the Cheshire cat finally, accidentally, disappeared 600 years ago. A Godley Crew The following is a letter to the editor of the Times Literary Supplement which appeared in the June '01 issue, and is reprinted with the kind permission of its author. Sir, — Pauline Hunter Blair's article ("The Baker's tale", March 2) on a possible source for The Hunting of the Snark, and for the Walrus in Through the Looking-Glass, by Lewis Carroll, is entirely plausible [reported in KL 66, p.21]. The young Charles Lutwidge Dodgson would surely have known m 2 «-5 vJ\i^ieioot4-*«ao*ToP Mo Kovn Xqu i 16 about the career of his distant uncle Admiral Skeffington Lutwidge — a portrait of whom by the American painter Gilbert Stuart ( 1 755- 1 828) hangs in the Ponce Art Museum, Puerto Rico — and may very well have examined papers or a log of his illustrious forebear's Arctic voyage. It is unlikely, however, that Carroll published Lieutenant Floyd's log of the voyage, as Ms Hunter Blair suggests he might have done. We have no record in Carroll's diaries or letters of such a publication, and it was not Carroll's practice to conceal any serious publication he was involved in. Other influences on The Hunting of the Snark, moreover, present themselves, and Mavis Batey called a likely one to my attention recently. This tale begins with John Robert Godley, born in Ireland in 1814 and educated at Harrow and Christ Church, Oxford. Early on he became interested in colonial emigration and, during his Oxford years, dreamed of establishing a colonial settlement based not on refugee or convict labour but on a plan for a community of emigrants with developed skills and a strong Anglican motivation. Creating a college was an integral part of the scheme. Later, together with another expert on colonial emigration, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, he did in fact establish and, for a number of years, ran a Church of England settlement for emigrants at New Canterbury in New Zealand. He named the New Canterbury settlement Christ Church, after his Oxford college. The Canterbury Association, the name taken by the organization backing the venture, enlisted fifty-three distinguished persons to support the project, thirty from Oxford, no fewer than seventeen of them from Christ Church. Among them was Charles Thomas Longley, Bishop of Ripon, an old friend and fellow student of Lewis Carroll's father, then serving as examining chaplain to Longley. On July 30, 1850, the Canterbury Association gave a breakfast, celebrating the Canterbury Pilgrims, as the emigrants were called, aboard the Randolph, one of the ships they would sail on, at East India Dock, Blackwall. The breakfast was attended by "from 200 to 300 ladies and gentlemen", and the "London Tavern" and the Coldstream Guards provided "elegant entertainment", which was followed by "speeches full of hope and promise". On September 1, an "immense body of persons" attended a special service at St Paul's Cathedral in honour of the Pilgrims and heard a sermon by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Two days later, the Association gave a leave- taking dinner at Gravesend, and on the following day, "at about half-past six o'clock" in the morning, the colonists set sail on their perilous journey from Plymouth. The Pilgrims included a well-known Oxford printer, twenty teachers, a surveyor, carpenters, farmers, mechanics, dressmakers, "graduates", a bishop designate and healthy labourers. The ships they sailed carried the elements of a college, the contents of a public library, the machinery for a bank and plans for a constitutional government. The settlement was established, flourished; within a year it had its own newspaper and could boast a visit from the Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, who went out to celebrate the successful founding and progress of the settlement (The Times, July 31, September 2, 3 and 5, 1850). Three and a half months before the pilgrims left England, on May 23, Lewis Carroll, aged eighteen, matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford. In 1873, the year before he wrote The Hunting of the Snark, he was serving on the Governing Body of his college when it celebrated the completion of a cathedral college at New Canterbury. It is surely not far- fetched to believe that the reports of this remarkable group and their journey to New Zealand contributed something to Carroll's eccentric crew and the voyage to Snarkland. Sources and influences are elusive birds, seldom amenable to capture. Both Pauline Hunter Blair's Arctic voyage and the New Zealand Pilgrims very possibly played their part in shaping the Snark. But we can be no more certain of the true sources of the longest nonsense poem in the English language than we can be of that last line that popped into Carroll's mind as he walked over the Surrey Downs. For the Snark was a Boojum. You see? Morton N. Cohen For further information, see an "Overview of the Canterbury Settlement, Colonists, Emigrants and the Canterbury Association 's First Four Ships ", which can be found at www.tp2000.org.nz/groups/heritage/ 1 50th Celebrations/Overview, htm. &mmm Nothing is yet cast in stone/ but it looks as if our Fall 2002 meeting will be in "Everybody's Favorite City", San Francisco, and will feature a visit to SFMoMA where the "Symbolic Logic: The Photographs of Lewis Carroll" exhibit will be on. The curator, Doug Nickel, will also be one of our speakers. 17 Ravings from the Writing Desk Of Stephanie Lovett The LCSNA has never had a home of its own. Our mailing address has always been the home of the then-current secretary, and though we have looked into having a permanent address, it seems that would cause more problems than it would solve. These days we can be said to live at www.lewiscarroll.org, which has been wonderful for routing news and information, and has made it much easier for the rest of the world to contact us. Still, we do also exist as an organization in three dimensions — our members, our books, our Knight Letters, and all the artifacts of our 28 years. As a group of members, the organization might be said to flicker into existence like Brigadoon twice a year. As a legacy of publications, files, and artifacts, though, the LCSNA lives in attics, file cabinets, bookshelves, and various dusty corners all over the world. Now, however, we have a home, a landmark development for the LCSNA. It's not an office for doing the business of the society — that will always be the desks of the many officers, editors, and chairpersons who give so much of their time. It will be a place you can actually visit, though, which is part of the point. New York University (downtown) has agreed to accept our archives and to accession, catalogue, and store them. Thanks to the efforts of August Imholtz, the records of our business, copies of our publications, correspondence, and documents from our various doings will no longer be scattered, incognito and inaccessible, but will be catalogued and available for anyone to use. As was the case with our twentieth-anniversary booklet of 1999, this is an ideal time in the life of the Society to capture these things, before so much time has passed that they become irretrievable, lost among people's personal papers. Once the archive is established, we will have a precedent for what to keep track of and add in the future. August will be soliciting those he thinks might have the necessary papers and so on languishing in their files and under their beds, but our archives will be all the more comprehensive if all of the membership will pause in their spring cleaning to rummage in the backs of desk drawers and look for things that represent important doings of the LCSNA, such as correspondence about the development of a publication, drafts of documents, letters to and from speakers at meetings, and so on. Contact August (imholtz99@atlantech.net) about your materials, and with questions about what is suitable for the archives. NYU has been a gracious host to us for meetings and private research in the Berol Collection, and Fales Librarian Marvin Taylor has been most welcoming and supportive of this effort. The other candidate for being thought of as the home of the LCSNA is Princeton University, because it was there that the society had its founding meeting in 1974. We have returned several times since, including our tenth- and twentieth-anniversary meetings. I hope that you will all give consideration to joining us in Princeton this April 13th for the Spring meeting, when we will hearing from a composer inspired by Memoria Technica, at least one distinguished scholar, and the team at Princeton University Press who just produced Lewis Carroll: Photographer. You will enjoy seeing the town and campus, and you will be present for the donation of a rare book from the LCSNA to the Parrish Collection in honor of our longtime friend there, the late Alexander Wainwright. Since our last visit there in 1994, the Firestone Library now also houses the Cotsen Children's Library, and curator Andrea Immel, who has been our host in arranging this meeting, will be bringing our day in Princeton to a close with a reception for us. All in all, a day for remembering old friends along Memory Lane, and for learning new things and making new Princetonian friends. Serendipity Lo, like a Cheshire cat our court will grin. Peter Pindar Pair of Lyric Epistles (1795) Where other trav'lers, fraught with terror, roam Lo! Bruce in Wonder-land is quite at home. ditto "Complete Epistle" to James Bruce (1812) [The satirist John Wolcott (1 738-1819) wrote under the nom de plume of Peter Pindar. James Bruce (1730-1794) of Kinnaird was known for his sojourns in Abyssinia.] For it is here that Fantasy with her mystic wonderland plays into the small prose domain of Sense, and becomes incorporated therewith. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh(l83l) I always thought even as a child that Wonderland and Looking-Glass Land were not the same place but neighbouring kingdoms which share a common boarder. Deborah Caputo in the Yahoo Lewis Carroll eGroup [Though unintentionally "uttered", Deb has shown her customary sense of humour in allowing us to reprint it.] 18 From Dor ratc-fiom<}< Books Great Comic Cats (revised edition) by Malcolm Whyte, Pomegranate Press, contains several chapters on Victorian book and magazine illustrations, and features Cheshire Puss prominently. 0- 7649-1737-4. $25 paper; $45 signed limited edition hardcover, available at www.word-play.com/books/cats.html. The distinguished Dutch translator and critic Nicolaas Matsier has published Journaal van een reis naar Rusland in 1867, the first Dutch translation of CLD's journal of his trip to Russia. Hoogland & Van Klaveren. 90 76347 1 31. Another Dutch Snark has just appeared in print: Henri Ruizenaar, De jacht op de Snark: Een doodsstrijd in 8 stuip- trekkingen. Includes annotations by Mr. Ruizenaar and illustrations by Jan te Wierik. 90 76837 03 1. Markus Lang's Finnish Carroll anthology Kirjeitd lapsiystdville ja muita kirjoituksia, EUR 6. Unusual material: letters, the Russian journal, etc. Contact the publisher, loki- kirjat@lokikirjat.com; www.lokikirjat. com/carrkirj.html. What seems at first an odd idea, Stamp- ing Through Mathematics: An Illus- trated History of Mathematics Through Stamps by Robin J. Wilson (Springer, 2001), 0387989 498, takes its name from Ernest Rutherford's quotation "All science is either physics or stamp collecting". The chapter on "The Liberation of Algebra" mentions Dodgson's contribution and displays the Mali postage stamp. Apparently the pairing is not such an unpopular one: Philomath: A Journal of Mathe- matical Philately is published quarterly by a society devoted to the cause! See www.math.ttu.edu/msu/ generalinfo.html. Lisbeth Zwerger's illustrated The Wizard ofOz and Alice in Wonderland have been combined into a boxed set. $30. North South Books; 0735813426. Regrettable. Corregponclenfe Quotable Alice, compiled and edited by David W. Barber, Quotable Books (Canada), $15 paperback. A compendium of the best-known lines from the canon. 0-920151-52-3. Into the Looking-Glass Wood: Essays on books, reading, and the world by Alberto Manguel, Harcourt, 0-15- 601265-0. A collection of articles with all-Alician chapter-heading quotes, but mainly of interest is the title essay, on his experiences reading and re-reading the Alice books. Byron Sewell's latest publication Alina's Adventures under the Land of Enchantment, Storkling Press, 2001, "a Christmas fable... equally derived from A W and another story I wrote a number of years ago, entitled Tucumcari [NM] Dreams. The latter was a fanciful retelling of family history and legend." Available only on floppy disk, with permission to print two hardcopies. R.J. Trudeau in his book The Non- Euclidean Revolution, 1987, reprin- ted by Birkhauser, 2001, includes and comments on work by Lewis Carroll. "Trudeau's assessments are very positive." ~ Fran Abeles. Alice in Blunderland by Scott Adams is a miniature book of Dilbert cartoons featuring Alice, who works in his office. Andrews and McMeel. $5. 0836274792. Understanding 'Alice', from the minimag press, $1, 814 Robinson Road, Topanga CA 90290. Sarah Ellis' From Reader to Writer: Teaching Writing Through Classic Children s Books, Groundwood, 200 1 . '"...Librarians will be thrilled with the connections that can be made from the books cited and unique ways to introduce their authors' including Lewis Carroll. I'm ordering this for the Arne Nixon Center." ~ Angelica Carpenter. $15. 0888994400. 19 Dr. B. Ekbal, Professor of Neuro- surgery and Vice-Chancellor of Kerala University in India, is writing a book on migraine in literature in which he devotes a chapter to "Alice's growing, shrinking, and finding distorted body parts — all classic symptoms of non- classic migraine." Jostein Gaarder's 1997 bestseller Sophia's World, A Novel About the History of Philosophy, tr. from the Norwegian by Paulette Moller, was described by Time as "a modern TTLG" and she literally (literarily?) visits Alice et al. in the chapter devoted to Soren Kierkegaard. Monica Edinger noted several books for younger readers involving productions of AW plays: the series "The Kids in Ms. Colman's Class" by Ann M. Martin contains #3 Class Play (1996); her series "The Baby-Sitters Club" has #121 Abby in Wonderland (1998); also Alice Whipple in Wonderland (1989) by Laurie Adams and Allison Coudert. Uncle Albert and the Quantum Quest by Russell Stannard (1994) In the third installment of this series explaining physics to 10-15 year olds, Uncle Albert (loosely, Einstein) transports his niece Gedanken via a Thought Bubble into a quantum Wonderland where Alice and the White Rabbit set her straight. Faber & Faber, 057117 3446. Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet? by John Sutherland, Oxford University Press (0-19-283884-9) contains a set of 34 puzzles regarding details in classic 19* century novels, including the title mystery (from Pride and Prejudice) and "How long is Alice in Wonderland for?", in which she believes (owing to clues about seasonal changes) that Alice has actually slept some three months into autumn and wakened an adolescent instead of the child who went to sleep. ~ Ruth Berman In the latest work published by Yale polymath Professor Harold Bloom, Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children (Scribner, $27.50), Lewis Carroll has the largest number of selections, eight, of any single author. Furthermore, Harold's latest crusade is against J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels in favor of literature like Alice. See also the item in Media, below. Kirsten Boie's Der durch den Spiegel kommt, published by Otinger, Hamburg, presents a new Looking-Glass-based narrative of a girl who goes through a mirror to new, somewhat unsettling adventures. For children. 3789131458. Articles Nina M. Demurova's brilliant article "On the Degrees of Freedom: Translations of Lewis Carroll's Poem The Hunting of the Snark" [title translated from the Russian] appears in AjibManax nepeeodnuxa (Almanach Perevodchika) Moscow: Russian State Humanistic University, 2001. 5-7281- 0306-5. She compares several trans- lators' versions of identical Snark passages and astutely evaluates their success, www.mkniga.msk.su/nk/nk99- 12.htm. The Lion and the Unicorn, Vol. 15 No. 3, September '01, reviews Robin Allan's Walt Disney and Europe, Joseph Zornado's Inventing the Child, and Bjorn Sundmark's Alice's Adventures in the Oral-Literary Continuum, all of which feature AW. The New York Times, 30 September '01 "From a Child of Tradition, A New Ap- proach to Ibsen" discusses actress Kate Burton's life and work, including her AW on Broadway with her father, Richard. In Paper Collectors ' Marketplace, January '02, Vol. 20 No.l, the cover feature "The Remarkable World of AW reviews the collectibles, sou- venirs, novelties, "momentos" [sic], ephemera, and memorabilia associated with the works. The October issue of Book Source Monthly has a rarely reproduced photograph of Alice, Ina and Edith on the cover. The picture is often attributed to CLD, but may not be his work. "Welcome to Wonderland: From Alice to Scarlett O'Hara, millions of masterpieces reside at UT" in the Austin [TX] American-Statesman, February 17, 2002, the first of a three installments discussing the Harry Ransom Center at U.T.Austin, opens with our own Alan Tannenbaum lusting after the "India Alice". Narrative Analysis of a Fairy Tale in Application to Relational Psycho- therapy: A Critical Review is a fairly recent, 2000, dissertation by Cheryl Ann Raczynski in which she analyzes AW and several other texts according to narrative analysis theory, narrative therapy approach, and narrative- constructionist theory. The therapist, she argues, through use of the metaphorical, allegorical, or analog- ical, can pierce defenses and explore patterns problematic to the clients. The therapist thus becomes a co-con- structor fashioning a more helpful version of reality. Like Wonderland. "Sindrome de Alicia en el Pais de las Maravillas asociado a infeccion por el virus de Epstein-Barr" (AW syn- drome due to Epstein-Barr) by C. Perez Mendez et al. in Anales Espah- oles de Pediatrica, June 2001, vol. 54, no. 6, recommends that children pre- senting a clinical picture consistent with the syndrome should undergo serological testing for Epstein-Barr virus infection. Katie Roiphe, defending her depiction of Carroll in her novel Still She Haunts Me, says in The Guardian, Oct. 29, 2001, says that "there is a nobility in (Carroll's) self-restraint so forceful that it spews out stuttering tortoises and talking chess pieces." One perhaps wishes there had been a bit more restraint in her novel. Online at http:// books.guardian.co.uk/departments/ classics/story/0, 6000, 582828, 00. html. According to a Nov. 4, 2001 report in the Providence Journal-Bul- letin, it was while teaching Victorian children's literature at Princeton that Roiphe became interested in Dodg- son's complicated relationship with Alice Liddell. Parrish the thought. 20 A fascinating article bringing modern mathematical thinking to bear on one of Carroll's problems is "Lewis Carroll's Obtuse Problem" by R. Falk and E. Samuel-Cahn in Teaching Statistics, 2001, vol. 23, no. 3. Not for the obtuse. Sanjay Sircar reviews Ronald Reichertz's The Making of the Alice Books: Lewis Carroll's Uses of Earlier Children 's Literature in the Children's Literature Association Quarterly, 2001, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 101-103. In the same issue, Jan Susina offers a new construction to the famous riddle in his article "Why Is a Raven Like a Writing-Desk? : The Play of Letters in Lewis Carroll's Alice Books". Carolyn Sigler reviews the biographies of Lewis Carroll in her article "Was the Snark a Boojum: One Hundred Years of Lewis Carroll Biographies" in Children's Literature, 2001, vol. 29. An attempt to place Carroll's classic work in the tradition of the search for a lost paradise is made by H. Graf in iilHier sind alle verruckV: Lewis Carroll oder die Suche nach dem verlorenen Parodies" in Merkur, 2000, vol. 54, no. 12. In a long article in The Guardian, Nov. 30, 2001, British critic Francis Spofford picks the ten best children's stories ever written. The two Alice books together come in second after E. Nesbit's The Story of the Amulet. Why second place? Spofford says "The idea of childhood here is dead as a doornail, the disquieting undertones are quite real, and the parody poems have all outlasted their originals. But still Alice's adventures transport readers as no other books can to the strange borderland where logic and dream meet, and leave minds altered, stretched, enlarged and stocked forever with our culture's touchstone moments of surrealism." The "Grammar Lady" column of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Nov. 30, 2001, on "portmanteau words" has the following observation: "portmanteau words, a term coined by ^-century mathematician and author of children's books Lewis Carroll. He has Humpty Dumpty defined as 'two words in one bag.'" [sic. Humpty may be portly but hardly a portmanteau, unless of course he wanted to be one. ] A profile in the San Francisco Chronicle, March 8, 2002, of "The Mad Hatter", who makes those up-to- eleven-foot-tall hats for the long- running hit show "Beach Blanket Babylon" and also collects hats, reveals his real name to be. ..Alan Greenspan. Which might explain the present state of the economy. The Rev. David Stuart-Smith claims in The Times of Dec. 1, 2001, that John Bunyan's Pilgrim 's Progress rather than AW is the most widely translated work after the Bible and Shakespeare. The Bunyan Museum in Bedford holds translations in 167 different languages. How many are still read, we wonder? Cyberspace "Casebook: Jack the Ripper" lists CLD as a suspect, www.casebook.org/ suspects/carroll.html. "In fact all Wallace really succeeds in demon- strating is that Dodgson used the same alphabet as everyone else in the western world, and that, therefore, his words can be rearranged to make other words - including rather rude ones about ripping ladies open." Meanwhile, best- selling crime novelist Patricia Cornwall has been promoting her new theory that Jack the Ripper was not CLD, but rather the German-born British painter Walter Sickert (1860- 1 942). http://books.guardian.co.uk/ news/articles/0,6 1 09,6 1 5448,00.html. Jim Buch at www.angelfire.com/art2/ wonderland has some nice freeware — Alice screensavers and wallpaper, mostly Tenniel-based, but some rather different — and, for sale, personalized hardbound Tenniel-illustrated editions of AW. "Personalized" means you can get your edition of Lucy's Adventures in Wonderland based on the name of a girl. Accessible from the above or www.youralicebook.com. Lauren Harman's fine site on the illus- trators (over 100!) has moved again: http://laurenharman.tripod.com/alice. Deke Rivers, a rather unmannerly plonker, has put up "The World's Big- gest AW Site" at http://groups. yahoo, com/group/alicewonderland/. There's a site devoted to soup, with our hero quoted on the home page and a recipe for Mock Turtle Soup at www. soupsong.com. "'Alice' is a functional programming language based on Standard ML, extended with support for concurrent, distributed, and constraint program- ming...'Alice' programs can therefore interoperate with Oz." www.ps.uni- sb.de/alice/. A new online encyclopedia, which is composed of reader submissions of material — editable and expandable by anyone — called Wikipedia (www. wikipedia.com). You might want to correct or expand the CLD entries. Karoline Leach's article "The Real Scandal: Lewis Carroll's Friendships with Adult Women" published in the (London) Times Literary Supplement on 7 Feb '02. Angelica Carpenter's home page at http: //zimmer. csufresno.edu/~angelica/ discusses her forthcoming bio of Carroll for children. "The Snarking of the Hunt" by George Kenealy at www.snarking.co.uk is "a mathematical diversion for all who delight in problem-solving!" A bunch of nekkid hippies cavorting on the Alice statue in Central Park in 1968, a photo by Yayoi Kusama, at www.bombsite.com/archive/kusama/ portfolio/image 1 8.htm. www.concordance.com/carroll.htm contains searchable concordances of AW and TTLG, as well as "Lewis Carroll's Commentary on Victorian English Society: Alice, Anti-Hero on a Failed Quest" by Rachel Lawton. Also fun stuff: the top 100 words by frequency (A W: SAID, ALICE, VERY, LITTLE, OUT, DOWN, UP, ABOUT, KNOW, LIKE, WENT, HERSELF, AGAIN, THOUGHT, OFF, TIME,. . .); a thesaurus, completion words, etc. Gilbert Heatherwick's "Dreams for Alice" musical and CD [KL 63, p.2] has a website at www.gilberthetherwick. com/alice.php. Need to know how to fold a "press hat" (such as the Carpenter's) out of a newspaper? See the Minnesota News- paper Museum at www.mnnewspaper net.org/MNFMuseum/presshat.htm. Our webmaster Joel Birenbaum has seeded the "Lewis Carroll and His Religion" site on the LC Home Page (www.lewiscarroll.org/carroll.html) with a subset of comments made by persons on the Yahoo eGroup "Lewis Carroll" list, and some helpful links. William Osborne's Alice Through the Looking-Glass, a "family opera for chamber orchestra and singers" at www.osborne-conant.org/alice.htm. A "moving" version of a verse from the "Walrus & Carpenter" at www.home. zonnet.nl/AAvanZwol/walrus/towalrus. htm# plays visual games with the text and has a sonic background of a seashore. An unabridged, dramatic audio production of AW in RealAudio™ from Ohio U, featuring the "Wired for Books Players" at http://wiredfor books.org/alice/. An invisible Red Queen and God as a donut: http://users.erinet.com/355 1 II jqueen.htm. A list of Japanese books inspired by Lewis Carroll: www.hp-alice.com/lce/ alicebook.html. In English. "Lemmawocky" at www.jaworski.co. uk/m 13/ 13_lemmawocky.html seems to be proving something. But what? A bookplate for the Cleveland Public Library's LC room was designed by Paul Kucharyson under the WPA: www.cwru.edu/UL/preserve/WPA/ KuchBookAl.htm. A fine portal for Disney's "Alice Comedies" with valuable links on the subject: www.multiliteracy.com/ persist/28. html. An Aussie gal's collection is on view at http://alicedu.tripod.com/. 21 Portuguese ceramicist Elisabete Gomes fine AW and other work for Disney at www.the-magic-carpet.net/ gomes/. Lore Fitzgerald Sjoberg has humor- ously rated all the Alice characters at www.brunching.com/ratings/rate- alice.html. If you remember "MadLibs" you might enjoy the Alice "CrazyLib" at http:// rinkworks.eom/crazylibs/c/c3.shtml. A gorgeous guitar with over 80 inlays of the Alice characters at www.bloom ington.in.us/~wolfie/alice.html. Anyone seeking a nice simple expla- nation of the solution of the "Red Shift Code" (KL 56 p. 8-9) can see one at http://members.ozemail.com.au/~xeno phon/code.html. "Advice from an Arthropod", a fantas- tic sand sculpture http://indigo.ie/~am monite/Advice.htm. An art exhibition "Alice in Wild Land" by Israeli liana Raviv at www.israelart guide.co.il/raviv/exhibition/invita tionl.html. Media National Public Radio's Renee Mon- tagne talked with Harold Bloom about his new book Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages, on December 27th, '01 and discussed AW. You can get a cassette or transcript from www.npr.org. Antiques Roadshow UK broadcast on Oct. 6 (show #101) was from the Victoria and Albert Museum and was reputed to have some CLD letters. Aerosmith's recent video for the song "Sunshine" uses an AW theme. The NBC show "Providence" which aired on May 12, 2000 was called "Syd in Wonderland" and made good on its title. North Korea, on its state-run Central Broadcasting Station, began showing for the first time a series of cartoons from the West. On Oct. 27, 2001, the series began with the Disney AW. The Korea Times in the South observed on Nov. 6 that "it is not known via which channel North Korea imported the rights to air the books." The American Museum of the Moving Image, located in Queens, New York, presented a series of Alice films Dec. 22-3 1 , 200 1 . Beginning with the 1 933 Paramount AW, the series included: Disney's 1923-26 Alice cartoons - "Alice's Wonderland," "Alice Gets Stung," "Alice's Fishy Story," "Alice's Wild West Show," "Alice's Spooky Adventure," "Alice's Mysterious Mystery," "Alice Stage Struck," and "Alice Chops the Suey", all of which, in the words of the program announce- ment, were "more inspired by rival animators Max Fleischer and Otto Mesmer than by Lewis Carroll". Both 1951 films, the Lou Bunin and the Disney, were also shown as were the Svankmajer and "Dreamchild." Your present KL editor was quoted in a New York Times article on Dec. 9, 2001 on the then-upcoming film festival. Performances Noted The Lantern Theatre Company of Philadelphia performed a new interpretation of TTLG at St. Stephen's Theater, Oct. 1 2 through Nov. 1 1 , 200 1 , adapted for the stage and directed by Dugald MacArthur. American composer Lorraine Levender Whittlesey's intriguing com- position on Lewis Carroll's "Memoria Technica" was performed at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland, on Nov. 5,2001. A performance of "Jabberwocky" opened the holiday season on Nov. 23, 2001, in Hartford, Connecticut. The Marriott Theatre for Young Audiences presented a lavish new adaptation of AW with music and lyrics by Dyanne Early and Phil Orem, in Lin- colnshire IL, Nov. 28 through Dec. 29, 2001. Southeastern Louisiana University's Department of Music and Dramatic Arts presented AW in early December, 200 1 , in an adaptation by Anne Coulter Martens. The Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association of North Jersey 22 presented in Bergen, New Jersey on Dec. 16, 2001, a musical adaptation of Alice called "Winter Wonderland" in which a modern-day Alice cannot accept the fact that some of her friends celebrate other holidays such as Hanukkah and Kwaanza. Puppetwork's AW Jan 5 - March 12, '02, weekends in Brooklyn, NY. In the Starr Foster Dance Project's Alice, "the King of Hearts is a nerd, complete with a pocket protector, the White Rabbit is black, and the caterpillar is oily and sleazy and wears fishnet from neck to ankle". Grace Street Theatre, Richmond, VA. Feb. 28- Mar. 2. AW, through March 10. Theatre Com- pany at Hubbard Hall, Cambridge, NY. Exhibitions "Symbolic Logic: The Photographs of Lewis Carroll" will be up at San Francisco MoMA from August 3rd to November 10th, 2002. It then goes to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston (Feb. 22nd - May 26th, '03), the Inter- national Center for Photography in New York (June 16th to Sept. 7th) then perhaps to the Art Institute of Chicago. "Alice's Wonderland" at the Children's Discovery Museum in San Jose (www. cdm.org) opened 02/02/02 (one hopes at 02:02:02 p.m.!). Partially sponsored by the National Science Foundation, it "makes science exploration fun for kids" while they study shadows in a Pool of Tears, experiment with densities at a Tea Party, and so on. The exhibit will travel, and is booked through 2006. The stained glass window of Alice and the Duchess at Yale University's Sterling Memorial Library is visible at www.library.yale.edu/humanities/ english/glass.html. The statue of Alice stepping out of a book at the Carthage (MO) public library can be seen at http://carthage. lib.mo.us/alice.jpg. North Hollywood artist Mahara T. Sinclaire's AW murals were on display at Mt. San Jacinto College Fine Art Gallery, San Jacinto, CA through Feb. 23, 2002. Auctions The prototype of James Bissel- Thomas' Alice globe [KL 67 p. 24] sold at Christies for £3,000. At an auction held on Nov. 20 and 21, 2001, at Burgersdijk & Niermans in Leiden, The Netherlands, a collection of Dutch and other Alices brought Fl 650,000. www.b-n.nl, catalog 314. On Dec. 13, 2001, a previously un- known seven-page Carroll letter to Ethel Moberly Bell was expected to bring £20,000 to 30,000. Dr. Peter Beal of Sotheby's said the letter contained Carroll's "most explicit expression of his sense of the loss of innocence entailed in what elsewhere he called 'the transition.'" Places Alice's Tea Cup, "a whimsical new tea salon and emporium" in the words of the New York Times of Dec. 19, 2001, recently opened at 102 West 73rd Street in New York. More than 100 varieties of tea are offered along with soups, salads, sandwiches, snacks, and an assortment of "theme-gifts", as they are now called, including "Drink Me" salt and pepper shakers, Mad Hatter tea pots, etc. Member Janet Jurist pronounced it "delightful" on a recent visit. Warning: if you order coffee, it will be served in a mug with the word "loser" on it. In a recent visit to the Weaver Collection at the wonderful Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, August Imholtz learned that Weaver kept on his desk two volumes from Lewis Carroll's library: Carroll's copy of the Greek New Testament and his Book of Common Prayer. Things "The Crazy AW Game" from Price Stern Sloan $6, 0-8431-7499-4, is a picture-matching puzzle for the six- and-up crowd. Mimi's Furniture Creations carries custom-made AW finery, including a treasure box ($325), a Humpty Dumpty lamp ($58-$78), bookends ($42) and are happy to customize other items. www.mimisfurniture.com; 623.566. 2725; 20329 N. 59th Ave, A2; Glen- dale, AZ 85308; mimi@mimisfurni ture.com. Disney "Storybook Ornament Sets" include AW, $32. Griffin Rogers or Roger Griffin reads "Nonsense Stories" by LC on CD from "CDBaby". $13. www.cdbaby.com/cd/ jabberwocky; cdbaby@cdbaby.com; 800.448.6369; 5925 NE 80th Ave, Portland, OR 97218. The "Someplace In Time: Purveyors of Victorian Wares" catalog offers much AW, including some nice tea sets. www.someplaceintime.com; 800.366. 0600. Terry Gilliam's first solo directing effort "Jabberwocky" (1977) has been released on DVD, as has Richard Bur- ton's 1983 Broadway revival of Eva Le Gallienne's adaptation. U.K. expat Sas Christian's painting of Alice and the WR "Amandaland" can be seen at www.hotboxdesigns.com/ NewFiles/Arto f_Sas_Christian.html. Although the original has been sold, you can order digital prints for $20. Young folksinger Maria Papadopolou's new CD "In A Secret World" (in Greek) from Warner Music, WEA 8573 88737 2, features AW artwork by Antony Glikos. British actress Patricia Routledge reads an unabridged AW, Cover to Cover books, 1 85549 278. £7 on cassette, www.covertocover.co.uk. Danny Kaye's rendition of Disney's song "I'm Late" is available on the CD "The Best of Danny Kaye". There are several CDs with this title; you'll want the MCA one. Hantel's hand-painted pewter miniatures "with novel movement" at £28 apiece from Greenwich Collectibles at www.greenwichcollect abIes.com/shop/page23.htm or 3/4 Nelson Road, Greenwich, London SE10 9JB, U.K.; 01 1 44 20 8858 33 1 1 ; info@greenwichcollectables.com. A soft plaid one-of-a-kind vest of the Queen of Hearts ($350) BJ's Studio, 17305 Monterey Road, Morgan Hill, CA 95037; 408.778.7550; brucebj@ webtv.net. Great Jabberwock quilt at www.susan chapman.com/quilts/jabberwock/jab berwock.html. Hand-sculpted Mad Hatter teapot ($400) www.ezzellstudios.com/ ceramics/mhatl.htm or Ezzell Studios, Hood River, OR 97031; 541.387. 5371; Kent@EzzellStudios. com. Matted prints, gift enclosure cards, note cards, notepads, trading cards, bookplates, bookmarks, party invitations, stationery, envelopes and postcards of non-Tenniel Alice illustrators. Story-Lovers 877.996. 7007; bubbul@vom.com; www.story- lovers.com/alicecategory.html Stained glass Cheshire Cat "SunCatcher", 5" x 7", $30; www. stainedglassmagic.com/sun_catchers _cheshire.html; 800.218.6185; Con- tois Reynolds Studio, 1501 Trace Creek Road, Hamlin WV 25523; conreyn@stained glassmagic.com; 800.218.6185 Orders; 304.824.5651 Inquiries. Hand sewn, soft-form sculptures, set of five, $315; www.puppetartists.com/ story book_htm/al ice_2.htm; 6930 Nez Perce Road, Darby MT 59829; 888.746.2438; puppets@puppet artists.com. Timeworks 13" AW clock with pendulum, from Kings River Gifts, 39421 RD. 36, Kingsburg, CA 93631; sales@kingsrivermall.com; www.kingsrivermall.com/storytime/ alicein.htm; 559.260.0776. Many Tenniel needlepoint patterns (£7) from "SewAndSew"; www.sewandso. co.uk/ran591-0.html; 1453.752022; salesteam@sewandso.co.uk. Kirk's Folly has AW-themed picture frames ($60, $156), a watch ($103), earrings ($9), necklace ($45), bracelet ($40). 401.941.4300. 236 Chapman St., Providence, RJ 02905. www.kirks folly.com; customerservice@kirks folly.com. Or the QVC channel! 23 Five different Mary Myers nutcrackers, roughly $150 apiece. 800.244.2197. kris@christmasinternational.com; www.christmasinternational.com/nut cracker/marymyers.html (scroll down to bottom of page for "Wonderland"). Mezco toys' "Scary Tales" series has a rather grown-up Alice (both Caucasian and Afro-American versions are avail- able), a creepy White Rabbit, and a frighteningly mad Hatter; www. mezco.net; wherever action figures are sold. Australian artist Meg Brooks' unique sculptures of "Alice and the Cook", and others ($860 in terra-cotta; $320 in hydrocal [gypsum]) www.coralcoast. com/art/Meg.Brooks/; Coral Coast Art Gallery, 1 9 Memory Boulevarde, Innes Park, Bundaberg, Queensland, Australia 4670. (253)390-2519; artgallery@ coralcoast.com. Kiki Smith's limited edition print of the "Pool of Tears", intaglio and chine colle, $2,000. Greg Kucera Gallery, 212 Third Avenue South, Seattle, WA 98104; 206.624.0770; info@gregku cera.com; www.gregkucera.com/ smith.htm. Valerie Schwader's hyper Cheshire Cat is available as a postcard, notecard, or iron-on transfer from dargenhara@ hotmail.com; http://dargenhara.tripod. com/art.html; 1003 Jennings Street, Bethlehem PA, 18017. Printed canvas "re-creations" of Arthur Rackham's suite of illos ($150) from www.artmasterworks.com/g-alice.htm; artist@artmasterworks.com This one you need! A nine-foot tall, 550 lb. garden sculpture of Alice by Bruce Friedle for $20,000. www.artdirectory. com/featuredart/. Prints of the White Rabbit and the Gryphon (5"*8", $30). www.galaxy mall.com/art/prints/gallery.html; pbx market@yahoo.com; 310.322.2276; PBX Marketing, 908 Lomita Street, El Segundo, CA 90245. Ann Cushing Gantz's portrait of Alice, $1200 from www.artexasgallery.com/ Artists/Gantz/alice-liddell.htm; Bill Cheek, 7802 Cornerstone Parkway, Dallas, TX 75225; BillCheek@ ARTexasGallery.com; 214.750.9723. "Alice Gets Her Kicks in Wonderland" is a song, described as "bizarre but pretty brilliant," on the most recent CD from the band Entropy. It contains the lyric "It's nice to see she's giving me/ her undivided mockery." Contact Glenn Alexander - glenn@glenn53.fsnet. co.uk. ^^aJrii.1? ..^■mn.w^,'.,,! .... rWn -,«,;• .„.. J- ^'a^-^j...^,.'... ^■^amw -iL 'Neo-surrealist" Norman Parker, a retired biology teacher, has been painting for nearly a half-century and often uses Alician imagery. See www.normanparker.com. For help in preparing this issue thanks are due to: Earl Abbe, Fran Abeles, Clark Allen, Ruth Berman, Joel Birenbaum, Llisa Demetrios Burstein, Sandor Burstein, Angelica Carpenter, Monica Edinger, Devra Kunin, Alien Grossman, Lauren Harman, August Imholtz, Clare Imholtz, Stephanie Lovett, Lucille Posner, Charles Stats, Alan Tannenbaum, Alison Tannenbaum, Edward Wakeling, Cindy, Charlotte, and Nick Watter. Knight Letter is the official newsletter of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America. It is published several times a year and is distributed free to all members. Subscriptions, business correspondence, and inquiries should be addres- sed to the Secretary, P.O.Box 204, Napa CA 94559. Annual membership dues are U.S. $20 (regular) and $50 (sustain- ing). Submissions and editorial correspondence should be sent to the Editor, Box 2006, Mill Valley CA 94942. President: Stephanie Lovett, uffish@earthlink.net Secretary: Cindy Watter, hedgehog@napanet.net Vice-President and Knight Letter Editor: Mark Burstein, wrabbit@worldpassage.net Lewis Carroll Society of North America Home Page: www.lewiscarroll.org 24