Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition ~ Martin G Export

Welcome
To our first discussion of
Classic Children's Literature Revisited
ANNOTATED ALICE: THE DEFINITIVE EDITION

The culmination of a lifetime of scholarship,Annotated Alice celebrates the remarkable career of author Martin Gardner. He was first to decode the word-play and mathematical riddles that lie embedded in Alice. The traditional and will loved Illustrations in the book are by John Tenniel.

Gardner, 1914 in Tulsa, OK; lives in North Carolina ; U. of Chicago, B.A. 1936; Mathematical Association of America (honorary life member); Contributing Editor Scientific American, writer of math games, 1957-82. Martin Gardner's skill in combining math, science, philosophy, and literature has led him to write on all these subjects. He has been called one of the great intellects produced in this country.

Illustrating Alice in Wonderland was the pinnacle of many an artist's career. Many well-known illustrators have attempted Carroll's book; it seems to be like Hamlet is for actors -- all the greats attempt it.

Focus Questions:
How do you like the book?
Is it a fairy tale? Why or why not?
Is it like Cinderella? Why or why not?
Who was your favorite character and why?
Discussion Schedule:
Feb.5 - ...ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

Your Discussion leader is
Barbara St. Aubrey

|| ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND The Millennium Fulcrum edition || ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS ||
|| Adapted To Nursery Readers by Lewis Carroll - 20 Color Tenniel Illustrations || Alice.../sketches by John Tenniel || ALICE for the busy business Parent ||
Links to Lewis Carroll
|| CARROLL'S BIOGRAPHY || LEWIS CARROLL COLLECTION || LEWIS CARROLL Centenary Exhibition ||
|| LEWIS CARROLL Home Page ||
Additional Links
|| The Social and Political Contexts of Alice || Musical Compositions Inspired by LEWIS CARROLL ||
|| Alice postcards (loads slow) || INTERACTIVE ADVENTURE || 'Alice' theme, All SEASONS HOTEL Gwynedd, Wales ||
|| Mathamatics with Alice || Interactive Mock Turtle's calculator || MaD!, write like Carroll || Picture origins that inspired Tenniel ||

by Lewis Carroll, John Tenniel (Illustrator), Martin Gardner

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Classic Children's Literature Revisited
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Welcome everyone - We're on our way!

What a day! Finally opened the discussion and true to Alice,tea party and all, I've surrounded myself with bits and pieces and my pile of Alice reading.

I had a big delivery from the mail man - some of my order came that included;

Morton N. Cohen's LEWIS CARROLL; a Biography
LEWIS CARROLL; Fragments of a Looking-Glass by Jean Gattégno, translated by Rosemary Sheed
Inventing Wonderland: Victorian Childhood as Seen Through the Lives and Fantasies of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, J.M.Barrie, Kenneth Grahame, and A.A. Milne by Jackie Wullschläger
AND my order of Tea came from Whittard. The order included; a Darjeeling first flush called Margaret Hope; a mango flavoured green tea; a leaf tea called Old English Fruits mixed with pieces of quince and crabapple and the Whittard Blend, which is a good basic waker-upper. If you like really good tea, here is the link so that you may order yours from Whittard of Chelsea London's finest speciality teas and coffees since 1886.

Our reading schedule will start November 18!
In the meantime there are wonderful links to explore. The Lewis Carroll links are especially full of information. Grab a cup of tea and immerse yourself in Victorian thinking, Charles Dodson, Alice Liddell, Mr. Duckworth and white gloves; that the real Alice lost on that rainy day, boating to Godstow with her two sisters, Duckworth and Carroll. You may even want to refresh your memory of the story. Lewis Carrol adapted Alice in the Adapted To Nursery... version with delightful, full page artwork, in colour by Tenniel.

Please share and chat, don't wait on me - I will be attending the SeniorNet Annual Book Gathering this year held in Chicago. I'll be back Sunday night November 14, the night before the books are supposed to be on sale according to Norton.

I hope you have a wonderful time in Chicago, Barbara. I only wish I were going to be there also but cannot attend now.

Pat

BARBARA - I'll see you in CHICAGO! I'll be leaving here (Oklahoma) shortly after midnight and will arrive in Chicago Wednesday.... I'm really looking forward to seeing you again.

I haven't bought the book but I'll be a lurker as the original "Alice" was always a favorite of mine.

Robby

I'll be waiting for you to get home from Chicago, Barbara!

Sounds like an interesting discussion.

Pat

My book is here - in fact, I got two copies (by mistake, I think). Now I have to decide whether to send the duplicate back or give it to someone for Christmas! Anyway, I'm ready any time.

Katie You really do have a dilemma don't you. What fun to think out what the various characters in Alice would do with the extra book.

What a lovely book it is! It even feels great just handling it. Many of the illustrations are in color in Adapted to Nursery Readers by Lewis Carroll The link is above.

--We have a preface and two introductions to Alice plus twelve chapters; A preface and twelve chapters to Looking Glass.

My thinking is, we start the first week with the preface, two introductions and only two chapters of Alice till we get a feel for the level of reading. What do you think?

With the holidays on us, we only have five weeks till Christmas week and six weeks till the millenium. Let's make our decission at the end of the first week of reading and sharing if we would prefer to finish the read by the year 2000 or if we would prefer a slower pace.

Sounds good to me, Barbara, although I do have to quibble just a bit ... it is actually 58 weeks until the millennium. The year 2000 is the last year of the twentieth century and the second millennium. The twenty-first century, and the third millennium, will begin January 1, 2001, just as the first century and the first millennium began on January 1, Year 1. There was no Year Zero.

Yes, I know, everyone is going to celebrate the end of the millennium this year. But a few of us diehards (and I bet Lewis Carroll, mathematician that he was, would be with us -- and I KNOW Martin Gardner will be, heaven preserve him to see it) will wait until midnight on December 31, 2000 to blow the millennial horn!!

ah Haha OK --that is great Katie! Your right, it would be a correction our friend Charles Dodgson would make. Well we can nickname ourselves the AA2K bunch and deside next week, on Thanksgiving eve if we prefer to read the remaining 22 chapters plus the one remaining preface in the following 5 weeks, finishing December 31, 1999 or give ourselves say another two weeks and finish January 15, 2000.

Nothing we deside is cut in stone so that after several weeks if we find we are just gobbling this up we can always change to a shorter schedule. It is nice though, especially near the holidays, to set aside a reasonable amount of time to read and post without feeling lost because others are posting their thoughts based on their more aggressive reading schedule. I will really leave the timing up to y'all so please let me know your thoughts!

Here's a Martin Gardner story, not from my friend who knew him slightly years ago, but from a recent book on mathematics (title and author not on the tip of my tongue, but if I find the book, I'll let you know).

You may have heard of the Laffer Curve, derived from an economist's theory of the relationship between tax rates and revenue. Imagine a line graph with tax rates from 0% to 100% on the X axis, and revenues from zero to some theoretical number on the Y axis. The Laffer Curve starts at zero (at a zero tax rate, revenue = zero) and rises as rates rise to a certain point (of course, no one in real life knows where that point is), and thereafter drops down again until it meets the X axis at 100% (if the tax rate were 100%, everybody would figure out how NOT to have any taxable income or property or whatever, so the revenue would be zero). Much of the argument for tax cuts in the form of rate reduction in the past 15 years or so has been based on the Laffer analysis, i.e., the government can get more revenue by LOWERING rather than by RAISING tax rates or leaving them the same. It was an important part of the impetus for the 1986 Tax Reform Act.

Martin Gardner drew his own version of the Laffer Curve. It starts at zero revenue at zero rate, and goes back to zero revenue at 100% rate. But in the middle, instead of rising and falling back in a nice smooth curve, it is all squiggles. Looks like an Afro hairdo. Gardner's point, of course, is that there are so many variables involved in determining the amount of tax revenue, other than the tax rate, that no one will ever know where we are on that curve at any given time. Therefore it is impossible to use the curve as a planning tool.

The story illustrates Gardner's propensity for exposing mathematical fallacies and having fun doing it!

This is it! November 18 Do you have your book? Have you started to read? This is going to be so much fun to actually have someone decipher and explain a book written after an outing in 1862!

Today seems to be a coffee rather then tea day for me and so I will take my lovely book and start my read with a pot of coffee on the table next to me. In fact it is so pretty out I may just start this sitting on the Patio.

My fantasy world is on overload as I'm imaging a group of us reading to each other, busily chirping in our thoughts along the way.

Katie Your discription of Gardner's propensity for exposing mathematical fallacies is saying to me, 'This is a man after my own heart.'

Most of us in the Real Estate world saw the change in the 1986 tax laws as the direct link to the bank failures. Most average folks hung onto their first home as rent property and they could deduct their negative cash flow from their taxes. With that change the average family could no longer afford the negative and started to dump their rent houses causing a glut on the market that later, because of too many and not enought investors picking them up, they let go into foreclosure. The reduced value of Real Estate directly affected the amount of a Bank's portfolio and that reduction, if declaired, did not allow the local bank to get their funds from the Federal Reserve Banks at a favorable rate so that they could laon at a competitive rate in order to stay in business.

One of Gardner's wavy line graph incidents, not thought through by Congress and in keeping with, our Modernist thinking of Chaos rather then, the Victorian thinking of everything in it's place with black and white simple solutions.

Oh wow, the math talk is causing my eyes to glaze over...

I'm not a "mather" - but for some reason I was the homework person all those years...and sons #3&#4 were not "mathers" either! It fell to me to decipher things like y=mx + b and the like...I do remember that is the formula for the "slope of a line", but for the life of me I can't remember what it means!!! Lots of stuff like that in my old head...and I would rather not think of all the grey matter it uselessly occupies.

So, when the talk turns to the MATH, I'll listen because the story fascinates me - but don't ask me to solve any word problems...I just learned the formulae!!!

Remember how I was the only one who got my copy of the book weeks ago? It turns out that I had the right author, the right illustrator, but the WRONG edition!!! I brought it all the way to Chicago for Barb to see, as hers had not yet arrived!

Well, I knew today was the start date...so I just went up to the local B&N and told them I needed the new edition. Of course they didn't have the old one in the store - or in the computer - so, nice people that they are, they just even-exchanged the two!!!!!!!!!!!

So, here I am...not quite ready, but as soon as I clear the dinner dishes, I plan to put on my nightie, my coffee (I'm the only person I know who drinks black, caffeinated coffee before bedtime and sleeps like a baby!)...also a big beautiful McIntosh apple and my box of Frango chocolates from Marshall Fields in Chicago...and curl up with Alice.

Are we just opening up the front of the book and reading the preface and the two introductions this week? Goooooooooooosh! This is a beautiful book! Shall we learn the first stanza of Vincent Starrett's poem? The last line of that Stanza could be our Motto in this discussion!

"Let me be young again before I'm old." Will check in after dinner before I start to see what all of you are reading right now...

We can always read further - I'm alway conserned near the holidays that we don't overload ourselves and, as your shopping list must be reflecting, Thanksgiving is next Thursday.

Joan Thanks for prompt --we have the first weeks reading schedule in the heading now and great suggestion on the quote! Doesn't this book just feel great holding it. What ever the ink or maybe the paper it is wonderful. Your right this book is such a 'keeper' I really do not want to underline phrases as usual. I guess I'll need a pad tucked in the cover as I read this one.

Oh, this sounds so delightful - particularly, Joan curling up in bed with an apple and candy! It's my very favorite thing to do. Hello, Barbara and Joan!

No, no, I promised myself I will not start reading until after the holidays, I'll just follow along. So many choices! I've been reading all the posts in ART FOR DUMMIES and will follow this one also. I just may have to buy this book though - I'll be behind all the way, but that line you just quoted, Joan, is so entrancing! Ohooooooo, Noooooo! Books, books, books, so many wonderful books!

Well, I'm glad to see that Martin Gardner still thinks Charles Dodgson wasn't really a dirty old man. In the introduction to the original AA, Gardner quotes from a biography of Dodgson a story about John Ruskin and the Liddell sisters. Look at the top of page xix. See the reference to Alice's sisters, Edith and Rhoda? I thought the third Liddell sister was Lorina (the Lory in the caucus race). Where does Rhoda come from? The references to Ruskin are interesting. The high school from which I graduated near Kansas City, Mo. was named for John Ruskin.

YES Katie, in fact the bio above seems to be the best for learning the scoop. Much to read --the simple bio doesn't expand the information that so many of the early authors were hampered by not having access to the Lewis Carroll papers or diary. Later, when the family was induced into sharing the diaries, many pages were missing and sections razor cut or scissor cut out by family members, assumed to be his sisters. His younger married brother disposed of his papers and belongings within weeks of his death. Recent research has fresh information that he had female relationships with divorced and some married women as well as, prostitutes. Some of his female companionship stayed with him at his Oxford appartment and cared for him while he was ill.

It turns out that many of his little girl friends remained friends far into their 30s and 40s although, he still refered to them as his little girl friends. Also, this whole rumor of his relationship with little girls started in the 1930s with an author whose name I did not copy but, is referenced in the above linkable article. This is one for the world wide web, the article seems to be newer and more accurate then many of the books available. The references listed allows me to believe the article is accurate.

I found and purchased several books by the authors mentioned in the Bio link. Most of these authors wrote their bio's before a good source of information was readily available. So far, from all that I have read, it appears the early Bio's are good for giving us an account of C.L.Dodgson, the mathematician and monastic Oxford don's early years and the explanation of how the story was written. But, all the psycho references and comparing the Victiorian sexual mores and attitudes toward the innocence of children with our 20th century Modernist thinking is just that, authors talking and trying to make something by using today's set of mores to explain history.

Thank you June! You were right on when you said none of that mattered!

Aha here is the quote from the above linked Bio.

The Victorians had saints; the 20th century has psychological disorders. And like every age, we take our own delusions as the proofs of our enlightenment. For us, locked in the prison of our materialism, disgruntled as a child who has just discovered the non-existence of Santa Claus and who knows presents will never be the same again, "Carroll" has become the proof that such aspirations are dangerous delusions. The twentieth century is too smart for innocence, it looks at purity with a smile and knows better. For the twentieth century reality means the worm in the bud. Things that spoke to the Victorians of naivet* and sweetness, speak to the twentieth century of hypocrisy and deviant, dangerous, repressed sexuality. The question of which of these images is the more 'real' is irrelevant. What is going on here has very little to do with reality.

Carroll as sexual deviant was ushered into existence by a young man called Anthony Goldschmidt. In 1933 he was an undergraduate at Balliol, a gifted student who had won himself an Exhibition. It was in that year that he turned his bright young attention to the Lewis Carroll of Collingwood and Reed and legend. He studied the man presented there, with his endless succession of "little girls," his social isolation, his apparent absence of any adult connection, and concluded that he was looking, not at a saint, or an ethereal being clothed for a while in mortal flesh, but at a repressed paedophile. What else, after all, was to be made of a man who, it was said, could only deal with adult women by post?

Goldschmidt published his views in a four page article in the New Oxford Outlook entitled "Alice in Wonderland Psycho-Analysed." The hyphens and capitals testify to the awkward newness of such a concept. His theory was that the opening section of Wonderland was a kind of cryptic message from Lewis Carroll's subconscious. The incidents were signs and symbols that could be decoded in the face of modern psychoanalytical understanding, to reveal the inner workings of the author's mind.

I've read through the introductory pages and then purposely set aside my book before beginning Alice to sort out my feelings about the author, and to separate the author's life from the story we are about to read. Those of you from Great Books' discussions know that I find this very difficult to do. Am trying to keep to facts and those I find ...unsettling. I want to reach June's approach..."it doesn't matter." But it still does.

Some facts and some conclusions I found relevent:

Dodgson (Carroll) lost his father at a young age. Phyllis Greenacre writes of an Oedipal attachment to his mother...she regards our Alice as a real Mother symbol. Now to me that is very interesting as I have always associated the story with my mother who died when reading it to me when I was 7!
Does this explain his neurosis? His sexual repression? His inability to relate to adult females, his fixation on the purity of little girls. Is it their purity that fascinates him, not their sexuality?
His sketches, his photographs of young girls. These can be unsettling! But it seems that parents knew of this? They allowed him to spend time with their daughters, they certainly must not have considered him a "threat". And as you point out, Barb, these girls remained friends with him throughout...there seem to be no accusations of anything unseemly as these young girls grow to adulthood.
Could the photos be emphasizing the childhood innocence of these young girls rather than some sort of perverted interest in their sexuality?
He never did marry, although there is some talk that he spoke to Alice Liddell's parents about a possible marriage some day when she grew up! Imagine how that must have been received by her parents...wasn't she 11 and he in his mid thirties at the time?
Ellen Terry describes him as a "curious combination of sexual innocence with heterosexual passion." I suppose I want to know more about this "heterosexual passion", but never will. Was it totally repressed?
The Alice books are described as "an outlet for repression" for the children of Victorian England - "books without pious moral". Okay, that helps...I always thought that there were morals here that were slipping right by me...I won't be looking for them (so hard) as I read Alicethis time.

But I won't be able to read it without looking at it as an outlet for for the author's repression, as well as for Victorian children...
Carroll is described here as a "gentle bachelor whose life was sexless, uneventful and HAPPY." I've decided to accept that as I read Alice.

Well, I guess for me the bottom line is, I really don't care whether Dodgson was a pedophile "in his heart," as Jimmy Carter would say <G>. What he did is what matters. And what he did was invent a wonderful story full of wordplays and inside jokes. I loved it as a child for the story, and as I grew older, for the wordplays and inside jokes. And I still love it, and quote it regularly. In fact, I do believe (with Gardner) that the psychoanalytic approach to Alice would try the patience of an oyster.

Maybe Dodgson did have sexual feelings for his little girl friends ... but evidently he never acted on them. So -- who cares? Katie

Joan and Katie I hear you both. Obviously we each come to our own justification for handling the uncomfortable.

For me, I can't say I don't care but then, judging another isn't really my job either. Yes, I would be so much more comfortable if the Lewis Carroll Bio. link was correct explaining that we have misunderstood LC behavior using our Modernistic thinking without really walking in the shoes of Victorians and that many Bio's were just so much fantasy about Lewis Carroll because there were few documents available telling the truth.

Some few years ago I came to the conclusion that most of civilization is built on the back of unacceptable behavior. That watching a Woody Allen movie was strange, knowing he married his adopted daughter, that enjoying the beauty of an oriental carpet meant, I was exploiting very young child labor, taking solace in the constitution was declaring my national allegiance through a document written by a man who held slaves and, parts to the very car I drive are made in Mexico where workers live in shacks of found material, without utilities, earning 56 cents a day. That some of the civic leaders in my city put a black eye on all women by soliciting prostitutes and because of my volunteer work I know some city leaders and policemen are pedifile and some batter their wives.

I realized that if I no longer accept in my life anything that was created by someone who does not live to my standard of morality, I would deny something of God. That most have great virtues side by side with their obsessive ravaging of individuals. That the twentieth century is about chaos and my judging, selecting and condemning would not straighten out the chaos or affect the morality of individuals. That being angry/resentful only affects me and not the perpetrator of violence to human souls.

Therefore, with much self talk I realize that anger/resentment is my issue and I have no clue to the demons incurred by perpetrators of devient behavior. For what it's worth that's how I'm handling what makes me uncomfortable.

Saturday I recieved in the mail my copy of The Life of Lewis Carroll by Florence Becker Lennon. I am anxious to read this bio since the Forward states that the bulk of the diaries were made available in 1954 as well as LC photographs were published in 1949. Others that she includes in her research are Martin Gardner's Annotated Alice Dr. Phyllis Greenacre's Swift and Carroll Dr. Elizabeth Sewall's comparative study of Lear and Carroll and the Biographies by Mrs. Green and Mr. Hudson. We shall see what we shall see as Lucia, of Benson's Lucia stories, would say.

I don't think it is useful to require acceptable personal behavor from someone in order to appreciate his/her work. I mean it is nice if they do live up to your standards, but you lose a lot of good experience in art, music and literature if you demand that. There have been a lot of creeps who produce wonderful work despite their personal failings. Look at Picasso (my favorite artist), look at Wagner's operas (in my youth when I knew everything I refused to listen to his work, because of his politics). And it is even less fruitful to discount someone who had a leaning which we find depicable, but who never acted on it! June

I got so wound up on my last post I forgot to say something else. I am having a terrible time keeping up on my reading (Alice and Absalom) with all the stuff going on at this time of year. And I am going to Los Angeles for a few days over the holiday, which doesn't help, either. But I am still here and following along even if not offering much of substance. June

June Hurrah --hoped you were there and worried since we hadn't seen you post in awhile. Understand the busy time of the year and with that in mind we really must think how slowly we do want to go without losing any momentum so that we abandon our adventure. We may just do as full a week as we can the week after Thanksgiving and then slow down till after Christmas. Then really get into the swing again with bigger weekly commitments directly after New Years day and still finish in style by mid January. The more we hear from folks it is sounding like finishing mid January is going to fit more schedules then trying to hurry and finish the end of this month.

Need to run, I have a contract to hammer out in another half hour followed by visiting folks that want to sell their house. I am looking forward to reading the first chapter tonight.

June please drop-in just briefly and let us know what you are up to.

Barbara, thanks for your note. You are the most welcoming and friendly host we could have, and I and others, I am sure, feel at ease and wanted because of you. Have a good holiday. June

Well! The whole little episode about eating the cake has my brain just spinning.

To be sure, this is what generally happens when one eats cake, but Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it semed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.
She set to work, and very soon finished off the cake.

Instead of looking for the deep down psychological reason for my eating so much bread and cake maybe it is as simple as feeling dull, expecting some out-of-the-way things to happen that eating cake feels like the work that makes life seem less common and since nothing happens, of course more cake eaten should remedy that. Right? Oh my. Hmmm I do like the rational. Simple, that could direct me to making my life more interesting rather then eating cake because my life feels common and dull.

I wonder if Marie Antoinette was really bored, ate cake and just assumed that the cure of peasents in an uproar was to eat cake?? Funny possibility.

I must remember to say "Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it's getting!" I am always running late and in a panic about being somewhere on time or completing a project promised.

Must say I really liked the reference to LC as

"foster-father's eyes...Loving, first, loving and gentle loving as a dog (forgive the prosaic simile, but I know no earthly love so pure and perfect), and gentle as a fawn: then courteous--courteous to all, high or low, grand or grotesque, King or Caterpillar, even as thought she were herself a King's daughter, and her clothing of wrought gold; then trustful, ready to accept the wildest impossibilities with all that utter trust that only dreamers know, and lastly, curious--wildly curious, with the eager injoyment of Life that comes only in the happy hours of childhood, when all is new and fair, and when Sin and Sorrow are but names--empty words signifying nothing!"

To me that is as much a statement about LC as it is about Alice Liddell and LC as a loving foster father fits so much better for me then the inferences of misconduct by some authors.

Her falling is so reminiscent of the feeling I invoke when I relax to meditate. It feels so slow and unbelievable as I too notice all kinds of impractical possiblilites as I fall deep into my relaxed state.

Seems to me there is a nursery rhyme riddle about a girl being really a candle or a description of a girl that really is the description of a candle --I can see the illustration in my head. Do y'all know what that riddle is??

Happy Thanksgiving y"all! I'm off to Collage Station for just a few day...be back Saturday late. It has chilled down a little so that all this cooking shouldn't require air conditioning. I will see if I can interest the grandboys in Alice.

It is hard to breathe in this area for the vapor of prayers and fog of shock. The 12 A&M students dead (hitting all buttons with the A&M 12 man tradition) were preparing the pre-Thanksgiving shoot-out between A&M versus UT. The bonfire pep rally has been a 94 year tradition in both schools. These bonfires are engineered, not just a bunch of wood thrown into a fire. UT, out of respect, did not have it's bonfire rather, they held a prayer service. There is no heart for the game with it's traditional rivalry.

"The time has come, The walrus said, To speak of many things. Of sailing ships and sealing wax, And cabbages and kings."

Hi, everybody! I'm on the waiting list at the library for my copy of Annotated Alice, and when it comes, I'd like to pop in once and a while to join y'all, as Barbara would say. Lorrie

Hope you all had a grand day! Yes, we are all running late, like the White Rabbit! Time for some time out, for some cake, marmelade, a fall down that rabbit hole! Reading Alice will be my time out!

Good, Lorrie, another viewpoint! While waiting for Annotated Alice, I hope you can get your hands on the tale itself? Wonderous reading...

Yes, Barb, I did note Carroll referring to himself as the "foster father" here...I prefer that too. There he is, this thirty-something year old man, spending the hot summer day with the three young Liddell sisters, drifting along in the rowboat on a hot summer's day, creating stories for their amusement... Somewhere in the annotations we read that he always wanted a wife and family. I can imagine his pretend-I'm-their-father interest here...

I also keep in mind that Carroll did NOT write this story for publication or profit. He created it simply to amuse. It was Alice who begged him to write it down for her! And it was with great difficulty that he did! I'm wondering though what the other two sisters thought when he named the heroine Alice? Were they jealous? Had he told other tales inserting their own names, but it was Alice who begged that he commit hers to paper?

"Dream Alice" he refers to her. Hmmm...

This is very dream like, isn't it? Alice is so drowsy that afternoon on the river bank, she doesn't even know if "it's worth the trouble to get up" and pick daisies for the daisy chain... Is it your experience to see children, not babies, but children of 8, 9, 10...(how old is Alice supposed to be here?)... is it your experience to see children drop off to sleep in the middle of a summer afternoon - especially in the presence of other children? (I thought just we "d'un certain age" did that sort of thing!)

Anyway, she is clearly nodding off, and so we are made aware that this is to be Alice's dream.

"What is the use of a book without pictures or conversation", she asks? And so Carroll and Tenniel will include plenty of both!

Will go find my notes about "Down the Rabbit Hole and be back in a flash!

I remember my mother reading this part to me...the long fall down - no fear, just curiosity at what those cupboards held...and also the maps and pictures on the wall. Whose were they? The rabbit's I concluded then. I remember. Thought it was funny that he kept the empty marmalade jar in his cupboard.

The reference "if I fell off a house" is referred to in the Annotations as the first "death joke" of the story. That was lost on me the first time as well as during this reading, but I see now that if she fell off a house roof, it would be "very true" that she would not complain about it...

I found it interesting that she felt herself "dozing" off while falling!!!

So she completes the fall, lands on a leaf pile, and comes across the locked doors. This meant a whole lot to me back then. I think children regard so many things as "locked doors" to the garden...beyond comprehension, although there is growing realization that "some day", I will understand. I loved learning that TS Eliot was thinking of this episode when he wrote one of his poems abut lost ppportunity...the door not opened, the road not taken...br>

Alice's "someday" is more immediate. The little jar marked "Drink ME" just might be poison...must remember to read the label. What did the label tell her? Did it say, "no poison" in here? Did it list the ingredients? We aren't told, but we are warned as was Alice about the need for caution - "NICE LITTLE STORIES" about children who got burnt' or eaten up." Is this the moral from other fairy tales that children were accustomed to hearing? So they don't react to this line at all? Would love to be reading this with a grandchild to get a better understanding of a child's reaction to such lines!

Alice worries about "going out like a candle"! This is sort of a "death" reference, although not a "joke", isn't it? No, Barb, I can't think of the riddle! Please tell!

My eyes opened wide, reading that Alice, the curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people! "She gave herself good advice though seldom followed it." How much did that influence me as a child, I wonder...because that describes ME to the fullest. I not only think I am two people, I am two people - and think I have always been...since this time. Since I first read Alice! YIIIKES!

She sees another glass box on the table that says "EAT ME" and throws all caution to the wind - "I don't care" is what she says...don't care what happens to me, I just want to get into that garden!!! That's ME!

Finally, I loved the "alas Alice" play on words and Joyce's lines referring to it in Finnegan's Wake! He read this too! But though I appreciate his lines about this wonderland, I understood from them that I am a long way from reading FW! Years away. Need a whole lot more time and patience for deciphering that than I do Alice!

Gotta run...back later! This is fun!

Lorrie Hope your library has the book for you soon. I cannot believe you actually remembered and could quote a line from Alice. Wonderful!. Really looking forward to your joining us.

Joan I forgot about the pile of leaves. I remember as a child thinking a glass table in a space with a pile of leaves was strange. I spent so much time in my head imagining that glass table. Desiding, if it was shaped like a half circle, if it had glass legs, wrought iron legs, against the wall or in the middle of the space at the bottom of the hole. I remember definitly it could not have wood legs because to me that would be ugly. I also somehow had the area brightly lite.

Well Joan, according to taday's belief with each having an inner child, you were right on being two people!

I'm still in Collage Station and do not have my books with me - I must look as soon as I get home at " LEWIS CARROLL; Fragments of a Looking-Glass", by Jean Gattégno, translated by Rosemary Sheed. I remember he described that entire afternoon rowing and how the different characters were as a result of his imagination playing with those enjoying the day. According to Jean Gattégno research, they were caught in a rain shower and stopped at a home to remove their clothes and dry off. This is were Alice was supposed to have left her glove and asked about it during the row home.

Need to run, we are on the way to a movie - will have time to really chat when I get back home.

Hi, I hope to join you too. I thought I had Annotated Alice but I just have a copy with an introduction by Camille Paglia. So I'll read that and see what she has to say to add.

So I haven't started reading yet. Grandparents came to visit the baby (not me and my husband; they barely notice we're here!) for the holiday. But I did want to add to the discussion: Marie Antoinette didn't say "Let them eat cake." In Rousseau's Confessions (which I suffered through in Great Autobiographies as an undergrad) he repeats the story of the "German princess" who said that. This was a hundred years before Marie Antoinette was born. I don't want to pick at anyone; this is just one of those things I do.

I knew a man when I was an undergraduate who we found out a few years ago was a pedophile. He was stopped by the police in a routine roadblock and they searched his car and found child pornography. I never would have thought he was that kind of person. He was a nice man and I was alone with him on several occasions. I don't know if he ever acted on his feelings; but he got fired. My point being that it's true that you can't tell whether a person is a pedophile from looking at them. At least, I can't.

I'm with the rest of the discussion on this. In some ways, it doesn't matter what a person's private life is like when you look at what they produce. Dickens had a mistress but he still wrote some of the best stories I've ever read. The truth is I can't think about that man I knew as a friend any more. I didn't know who he really was.

My own (admittedly) uninformed opinion of Carroll is that he liked the innocence of the girls with whom he was friends, and that he wouldn't have done anything to ruin it.

Just some unfocused thoughts...hope to have read before I post again.

EllenM Super - so glad you will be joining us. A German Princess not Marie Antoinette - well another childhood story bites the dust. Amazing how much we learned as children in school is incorrect. Research is so much more thorough in the last 20 or 25 years.

Even all this information about Lewis Carroll is more correct now because of diaries available and family members not wanting to spin their versions as well as, realizing who wrote what about LC when.

EllenM if you get your copy of Martin Gardner's Annotated Alice you will really enjoy a wonderful book not just because of what is written but the book itself is lovely.

Sounds like you have a new star in your family. Babies are just like that aren't they.

Please just add what you will and we will fill in the edges with the annotations provided in the Annotated Alice. Will this read bring back any childhood memories for you?

I'll be home tonight and can really get back into the swing again.

Little Nancy Etticoat

In a white petticoat

And a red nose;

The longer she stands

The shorter she grows.

In my tattered "Stokes' Wonder Book of Mother Goose," this verse is accompanied by a line drawing of a candle.

I don't remember how old I was when I realized that Alice could not possibly have taken a jar from a cupboard as she fell past it, or put it back on a shelf, if she were really falling. Of course, she isn't really falling; she is dreaming, and as a result, all kind of impossible things can (and will) happen.

The long fall down the rabbit hole was particularly fascinating to me as a child because I frequently had "falling" dreams, usually accompanied by falling out of bed.

One of my favorite Alice quotes is right at the beginning. In fact, I used it in an e-mail just a couple of weeks ago, when the Director of the Department of Revenue in another state sent me an e-mail to alert me to the fact that he had been interviewed by State Tax Notes and his picture was in the latest edition of the weekly magazine. (We are good Internet friends but have never met in person.) I wrote him back that, alas, I don't get the hard copy version of STN, but just have access to it electronically, without pictures or conversations. "'And what is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'"

I think the notion of growing larger and smaller is very interesting and attractive to young children - especially growing larger! The fact that Alice changes size so many times is, I think, one of the great attractions of the story to children.

One of my pet peeves is that the movie-makers mix things up. As I recall, Disney treats Alice as a dream, but there are some other movie versions in which her adventures in Wonderland are treated as if they are real. On the other hand, the movie version of "The Wizard of Oz" treats Dorothy's adventures as a dream; but in the book, they are absolutely real, and in the numerous sequels by L. Frank Baum and other writers she and other characters repeatedly return to Oz.

BTW, at my daughter's house Thanksgiving Day I picked up her tattered copy of the Wizard of Oz, which I bought for her in her childhood (mine having been so worn out that the first and last chapters were missing). She had it out, starting to read it to her 2-1/2 year old son (it's amazing what he will sit still for at such an early age; but then, she did too). It has a foreword by -- guess who -- give up? Martin Gardner!

A cross-reference -- I just put a post in the general "classic children's literature" thread about Rose Wilder Lane, which would be off-topic here. Since this discussion started, that thread has quieted down, so I thought it might not be noticed.

Katie, Katie, Katie how wonderful you are - YES, Little Nancy Etticoat - my heart is singing - yes - that is it!

Movie versions of all books have always disappointed me. I remember as a child we discussed and agreed 'read the book before you see the movie' because the movie not only spoiled the book for us but never measured up to our 'fantasies imagined', as we read.

And Katie - Martin Gardner again...with another Literary Classic for Children! This must be some amazing man. By any chance is there a bio. witten about Martin Gardner?

And yes, Katie I hope everyone has subscribed to both discussions. Just in case someone hasn't, in the heading there is a clickable that links directly to the Classic Children's Literature Revisited discussion.

Hey, Katie, down there in sunny San Diego: Thanks so much for the reminder with Little Nancy Etticoat. It's wonderful to hear those childish rhymes again, isn't it? Like "Cabbages and Kings," I hadn't thought of it in years and suddenly every word came back. I also think you're right about the enjoyment kids get from Alice's changing sizes. I wasalso fascinated by the rabbit hole. Barbara, I still am waiting for my copy of Annotated Alice. I swear, ever since I put up those flyers in the library, the waiting list for books is longer, and yet I don't see any new names from my neck of the woods. Lorrie

Lorrie hehehaha are you saying you have brought seniornet to the attention of others using your library and they have the temerity to borrow the very book you desire?

Ah such frustration not having the book you really want. So often now I just spend an evening in Boarders or B&N in one of their comfortable chairs reading the book. Of course it isn't as satisfying since I must just plow on without taking time to muse over what I'm reading.

Lorrie if you really would like to read Alice without benefit of the annotations the clickables above are quite good with wonderful illustrations.

Oh yes, I just loved your quote - it would be in the heading now but I thought we needed a little more about Gardner for awhile. When we get to that quote in the book it is definitly going up with your name Lorrie.

Martin Gardner is quite a remarkable man isn't he. The variety of serious subject matter that he authored is astonishing and he still liked to play music on the saw! People never cease to amaze me.

Hi, all! My computer crashed Saturday. Even though I'm not on it much it's amazing what a difference that makes to everyday life. Sunday I went to the library to check out the 1960 edition of Annotated Alice. Guess what? It's been missing since 1978. They have a 1990 edition but they have no idea where it is either. I mentioned that there was a new one. They aren't planning to buy it. In the catalog I noticed that out of 10 books that have to do with Lewis Carroll or Alice, 8 were missing. I pointed that out, too.

Yesterday I went Christmas shopping and at the end of the day found myself in Barnes & Noble. What's a girl to do? I bought it.

It is a beautiful book. The kind of book that you keep forever and smile at when you're culling your shelves. I think part of the attraction is actually the size of the book; it's proportioned like books were when my hands were too small to grip the door handles. I feel about 8 years old (I even caught myself reading with my legs swung over the arm of the chair).

I'm still in the introductions but hope to catch up with you all soon.

Meanwhile, Barbara asked me about childhood memories of this book. First, I don't remember the first time I read it, but I do remember when I decided to read it. There was a selection from it in my 4th grade reading book (How Doth the Little Crocodile). I couldn't imagine what sort of book would contain such a poem, so I was going to read it as soon as I could. I assume that I did. Of course I had seen the Disney version; actually, I had found that dull.

And I do remember reading Through the Looking Glass for the first time; I was in junior high. I was transported, amazed at the thought of going through the mirror. I remember being fascinated by mirrors as a little girl; when I was about 5 I was obsessed with the idea that the other side of the mirror was actually a different place, and I kept trying to catch my reflection doing different things. Not only did I sneak up on the mirror, I tried not to think about looking in the mirror until the last possible second. I even tried this at night.

In high school I was in a production of Alice. The drama teacher explained some of the puns to us but not the mathematical oddities. I was one of the croquet players. My older brother was the dodo (I think) and had to wear a yellow bird costume, complete with headpiece.

I have one more memory of Through the Looking Glass; I was 22 at the time, though. One of my sorority sisters compared me to the Red Queen, as I worked all the time and never seemed to be finished (=get anywhere).

I'm enjoying just holding this book, though. It's funny to think of reading as a tactile exercise.

Ellen, you're right, it is a tactile experience, isn't it? Not as in "Pat the Bunny", but rather something stretching way back in memory, when all books felt large in my hands, smelled good when new - special presents, maybe? They seemed to hold so much promise even before opening the cover...I had that same feeling with this copy. You won't regret buying this one. It's too good for the money!

And when I finally stopped admiring it and actually went into the story, I found myself remembering so much...too much? Crying those tears..when my mother died, and then reading of Alice's tears..."A great big girl like you crying!" I read that and cried some more...I do think it was 4 inches deep! There were lines that jumped right out at me...:

"I wish I hadn't cried so much...I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears..."
"I am so very tired of being all alone here."

All the memories are not sad ones though...the falling memories in Chapter I reminded me of my dreams as a 7 year old...I didn't fall, I flew! Oh yes, I could fly...BUT I needed a bannister to get started...in my dreams. I had to find a bannister, slide down and then I'd be flying...but not high enough to escape my pursuers... There were lots of them - in my dreams! They could catch the flying me quite easily, because I couldn't fly very fast, and because I was only a few feet off the ground - the same altitude as the bannister! Then I would say "TREE" and there would be a tree beneath me, and the pursuer would then be left down there beneath the tree and I would escape!

I love the drawings. I remember Tenniel's Alice! I love the 9 foot tall Alice in Pool of Tears ! Look at her NECK! She looks like a giraffe, doesn't she? Well, doesn't she? I thought that as a kid, I do remember that!

What I don't remember is the "bathing machine" mentioned here. How funny! How Victorian! Can you imagine such a contraption...sort of a mobile cabana facing out to sea so that no one would be seen in bathing attire! This story being told by a man who was photographing young girls in the altogether! Carroll must have loved describing these bathing machines. Do you believe they really existed? I'll search for a picture of one.

Yes, they certainly did! Dickens, Thackery, Jane Austen all wrote about them...couldn't find a picture tonight, except this one...the site was all Italian, but you get the idea!

Bathing Machines

Barbara:

I found some really interesting facts about that Victorian era in your links to related articles.

For instance, the use of opium was quite widespread during that period, and that may have been reflected in Alice’s adventures. Mind-altering experiences relate closely to some of the detailed descriptions, like her growing then shrinking, or the image of a caterpillar smoking a hookah.

One article says that in Carroll’s time 5 out of 6 families used opium habitually, and infant mortality was extremely common because of its use!! I can’t believe this! It was said that infants “shrank up into little old men” when they became sick. Doesn’t that image strike you as being similar to that of the duchess’s baby turning into a pig?

I find this shocking and wonder about whether the book was written as a result of opium use, but on the other hand, perhaps Carroll, who loved children, was arguing its harmfulness to children? Who knows? Or perhaps he included it simply as a sign of the times. Lorrie

Lorrie, will certainly keep the opium element in mind when reading of the baby shrinking into a pig! I had heard of heavy drug usage at the time, but not opium in particular. Had also heard that Dodgson/Carroll, himself was an addict...

In Pool of Tears the White Rabbit drops his fan, but there is an annotation:

"In Alice's Adventures Under Ground, the original manuscript, the rabbit drops a nosegay instead of a fan. Alice's subsequent shrinking is the result of smelling these flowers."

I thought that was curious...why he changed the flowers to the fan? Perhaps it had something to do with the flowers/poppies connection?

Good to have you here...can't wait till you get your book! You'll feel what we are talking about!!!

In many Victorian novels one reads of the heroine taking laudanum to calm her nerves. Laudanum, of course, is a tincture (alcoholic solution) of opium. A LOT of middle-class people were addicts in those days.

Remember that in "The Wizard of Oz," Dorothy and her friends have to cross a field of poppies to get to the Emerald City; and Dorothy, Toto and the Lion fall asleep and have to be rescued by the Tin Woodman and Scarecrow, who are not affected, and by the snowstorm sent by Glinda.

I don't know much about Victorian drug use. I do know that drinking then was a real social problem. Also, I have checked out the Cohen biography of Carroll. I'm not too far into it but there's nothing in the index about drug use of any kind. My guess is this is some revisionist theory. My high school students 2 years ago kept trying to tell me that George Washington smoked marijuana. I tried a couple approaches to this issue: 1) told them he grew hemp that was made into rope; 2) told them if he wanted something like that he'd have had a drink instead; 3) said "so what?" 4) pointed out that he also kept slaves. I'm sure there were more literary figures who did use drugs and other substances, but the only one I can think of in Victorian times is Coleridge.

I'm nearly caught up with the rest of you. I'm having a great experience reading this time, although I will say I'm not losing myself in the reading, probably due to referring to the notes. It is a fascinating read though.

One thing that came back to me: I hated the ocean scene when I read this book as a child. Here we get all keyed up to find out about the mouse and then we get a poem that didn't make any sense to me. The characters here always seemed cruel to Alice. I did know what a caucus race was though and always liked that part.

Bathing machines were not used much in the United States. I guess they thought a bathing suit that weighed about 40 pounds when wet was protection enough from other people seeing your body! I wonder if they were afraid they'd be attacked or if it was personal modesty. I'm sure you've heard the story of the Victorian woman who made little skirts for her piano legs. I've always wondered what made these people so concerned about body modesty.

Ellen You are so right - I hadn't realized but just the size of the book makes your feel like a child again trying to grasp the cover while turning the pages. The poems really are different aren't they. Reading them aloud has helped me...aloud they sound lovely but I've desided trying to make sense out of them is my downfall.

Joan Oh did you bring back memories for me...I too remember flying. I was usually fleeing and with a running start take off as high as telephone poles looking down but not really seeing the cause of my terror and then the fall, although I never actually fell out of bed!

Thanks for the link to the bathing Mashines. They rally look like Gypsy caravans don't they. Victorians seemed to have a lot of ceremony and 'things' surrounding their every act. Dinner with finger bowls, afternoon visits with calling cards and special dishes, still available at antique sales, where the calling card was placed, bathing mashines in order to take a dip in the sea and little girls dressed with golves on a summers day just to go for a row on the river. Personal freedom does not seem to be a byword of the times.

Joan do you think that the fan gave him the means to create more agitation... Alice picks up the fan and fans herself remarking about the heat. Flowers I think would be peaceful and sweet but would do little to pick up the readers rhythm.

Lorrie Your research hmmmm and wow. Seems to me I've read how several of the ninteenth century British writers used drugs. Who was it that lived with his sister - names have gone out of my head - wasn't Sherlock Holmes supposed to be addicted? Well the use of drugs or alchohol the outcome has been a wealth of Literature and Art.

I'm also picking up that Ellen may be on to something. Seems as if the creative famous are being examined with our twenty first century skepticism and this desire to smear so that we have no heros only imperfect artists, and if they do not have a wart one will be infered.

Now the concept of the shriveled pig/baby sure makes sense to me since I am always shocked to learn that original artistic creations are seldom pure artistic fantasy but rather, a twist on an author's or artist's reality.

Katie do you have any memeory of a children's syrup on the market during the 1930's that began, I think, with the letter C but. not casteroil and it was forced to be removed because it contained Laudanum. Vaguely I'm remembering that teething babies were given Laudanum and the habit was still practiced when my children where infants during the 1950s. I'm remembering a neighbor suggesting I use it rather then just giving my babies zwaiback(spell) to chomp on. Now I understand cold rags help.

Oh Ellen you are the one to ask...what do moms use to help teething babies today? Seems to me I ask you that in another discussion but your response has gone out of my head.

Well I'll never look at Dorathy in the same way again --snowstorms and poppies, I'd've never guessed!

Ellen Oh someone else, I feel like thanking you for admitting you had trouble with the ocean sequence...I was having a terrible time reading this week. The terror I felt as a child hearing chapter two, washed over me and as Joan said, it could not be shaken.

Finally, tonight, I got my courage up and re-read trying to figure out what could have created such terror. Severel insights came to me.

The entire chapter is a series of seemingly unrealated happenings
I wonder if this is the beginning of so many children's stories using mice
this mouse is not cute nor does it have many human charateristics. As a child, I did not like the mouse nor do I like the mouse now. Although I must say the poetry in the shape of a mouse is wonderful and that I found delightful.
I think children feel safe when there is an orderly expectation to their life and they feel vulnerable or feightened when things are confusing...this chapter is filled with one confusing nonsensical happening after another keeping the read very jerky and imbalanced
And for me, what really set me up so that I couldn't process my fear was the admonishment not to cry...You ought to be ashamed of yourself,...a great girl like you...to go on crying in this way! as a result my fears turned to terror as I held in my feelings. Also, somehow a great girl like me should listen all the way through regardless how I felt. I realize my personal life at the time was filled with experiences in which I was not able to react appropriatly, I was too scared to cry. In addition, I remember my Grandmother often saying, there is no sense in crying, there are too many things in the world to cry about and you would be crying all the time. I loved and admired my Grandmother therefore, I learned crying was not a good thing, so that this admonishment not to cry hit my buttons as a child.

Until I realized how that admonishment about crying was placed at the beginning of the chapter and how I reacted to that bit, I was not able to read the chapter without becoming angry and then annoyed and overwhelmed.

I still see this chapter as an author being angry and poking at children by admonishing them not to cry and by making a child feel responsible for their own death by drowning if they cry too much. Not an appropriate lesson to teach children how to react to fear or confusion. In fact, LC seems to be saying, if life is out of control, feel helpless and scold yourself if you want to cry. The rhythm of confusing nonsensical happenings creating an unsettling feeling was really teasing, after having taken away a child's appropriate coping mechanism. To be honest, I am still angry with LC... this feels like he is teaching children damaging coping skills followed by taking advantage of their vulnerable feelings and playing on a childs needs. By the way, did anyone get the Math riddle?? I just do not understand this number system so that four times 5 can become 12? at first I thought 18 represented 100 but that doesn't work for me either. Help, Help does anyone understand this?

Ok folks rather then barreling on ahead, we have several trying to catch up. Don't know about y'all but I haven't really digested chapter 4 The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill Let's finish chapter 4 and only add chapter 5 this busy pre-Christmas season.

By the way do any of you celebrate Saint Nicholas Day on December 6? The grands continue the family tradition that has been going on for generations. On the 5th everyone writes their letter and leaves it on the mantle or when I was a child, under our shoe on the windowsill. Saint Nicholas not only takes the letters and leaves in their place a pencil or new tooth brush or new box of crayons or a small notepad but also, leaves the advant calanders, the increasing collection of Christmas books, the advant wreathe with appropriate purple and one rose colored candle and often either a list or slip of paper, for each, outlining secret tasks that are kindnesses to family members. Our Christmas preparation season officially starts on Saint Nicholas Day.

Okay, I'm remembering this from sixth grade (and everyone said the new math wasn't useful!)

Gardner is talking about using different bases for our number system. We have a base of 10, meaning that when you get to the number 10, there are two symbols, 1 and 0, that represent that number. Similarly, when we get to 20, we have two symbols again.

Now, what if our numbers were based on 6? We would have: 1=1, 2=2, 3=3, 4=4, 5=5, 6=10, 7=11

And if we used a base 12 system, it might look like this: 1=1, 2=2, 3=3, 4=4, 5=5, 6=6, 7=7, 8=8, 9=9, 10=!, 11=@, 12=10

I think you're right, Barbara. Maybe I've always hated that chapter because of the random, scary events.

Teddy got his first tooth in mid-November so I feel like an expert on this now. We have numerous rubber and plastic teethers, including one that vibrates when he bites it (I thought it was weird, too). The cold washrag works well too. And someone in a bookstore (where else?) suggested pouring a shotglass of whiskey, rubbing some on his gums, and drinking the rest. It was pretty tempting at the time. He also started saying "mama" yesterday. I don't know if he means it but it sure is cute.

Will try to get caught up this weekend. I have the flu, so I should be resting and reading.

Hi, I'm back from vacation and see in the New York Times Book Review, which will be included in the Dec.5 newspaper, that there is a lengthy and scholarly article about Annotated Alice: Definitive Edition by The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik. I have read it once and am impressed at all Adam knows, to say nothing of Martin! I clipped it to refer to later. The piece is a feature, not a review. Now I just have to try to catch up with everyone else. June

Oh Ellen the flu - and before Christmas - I guess I am thinking how dragged out it makes you feel for so long. I hope you have someone to call on to help you with Teddy. A vibrating teether! Amazing - has it helped? My eyes are watering as I think of how stuffy and headachy and blah you must feel.

Thanks for the explanation of the math. I sort of think I get it but I sure wish I could sit on the steps of your front porch and listen to you explain this so that I really get it. Just more of the topsy turvey goings on in this chapter.

Welcome Back June Did you have any memorable experiences while on vacation? So glad to see your post. Looks like I need to pick up the New York Times this Sunday. The annotations are downright interesting on their own, to the point, the story of Alice almost gets in the way.

learning this is a 'first' children's book is astonishing. So many themes that have grown out of this benchmark children's book. All the books with animals as characters and the many stories that are written in a way to freighten children. We think of the stories collected by the Brothers Grimm as children's stories and yet I recently read they were collected without children in mind at all. Children just loved reading about all the heads rolling and menacing giants. So maybe some children liked all this unrealated topsy turvey unconnected happening, like making faces and strange unrelated sounds to get a baby to laugh. I just was not one of those children. The chaos was unsettling and I felt like I was in a fun house trying to walk across one of those moving floors without anything to hold on to.

Yes, BARBARA, there were some happenings I won't forget soon. One was seeing the retrospective show at the LA County Museum of the painter Lee Krasner, the wife of Jackson Pollack. She usually gets overshadowed by her more famous husband, but she was a great painter.

The other thing is silly, but was fun. We bought one of those maps of the stars homes, which are for sale on the street in the snazzy part of Sunset Blvd. and drove around looking up addresses in Beverly Hills. (Never done this before.) As we cruised past Bill Cosby's house (very nice) there was Bill, wearing a tee shirt and work pants, in the driveway washing his car!!! Even as you and I. We saw a lot of other houses, too, but he was the only celeb. There are hardly ever any people on the streets of Beverly Hills, except the help. It is good to be home where there are no movie stars in my neighborhood and there are lots of residents on the streets walking the dog (like me). June

Had no idea that Jackson Pollack had a wife that was an accomplished artist. Was her art representational or abstract as his?

She was an abstract painter. I believe I saw a review of the book which is the catalogue of the show in the NY Times Book Review that has the article on Annotated Alice in it. It is called Lee Krasner and is by Robert Hobbs. The review should give you an idea of what kind of work she did and the kind of person she was. June

Here is the text of the Alice review today in the NY Times, I apologize for the appearance of it, but I believe it's readable.

Go Ask Alice

Ginny

Ginny Great! thanks for sharing. The link is terriffic. ...I just walked down the hill and bought my New York Times. The article is filled with tid bits that I love.

Much of the comedy in "Alice," we see, dependes on the absurdity of trying to think of language as an exchange of codified information rather than a broader social game with rules.

In 1960, just as Gardner was writing, "Alice" was on the cusp of a great popular explosion. The psychoanalytic "Alice" was on her way out, but another...the pop culture of the 60s revered Carroll..."White Rabbit" • The Jefferson Airplane drug song that catalogues "Alice" characters.
The Beatles ..."They were the books we knew best," • "I am the Walrus" • "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" • "Cry Baby Cry" • "Strawberry Fields" • "betters" • "Hey Jude" ...when the White Queen turns into a sheep.

He (Gardner) emerges as the highest example of an important recent American type: the critical rationalist who falls in love with the fantastic products of the repressed English imagination. This is one of the more easily overlooked yet powerful engines of cultural movement in our time, sweeping in everyone from the American woman who married C.S.Lewis to the American mania for Monty Python - which the Pythons themselves, Little Englanders, could never understand - through the Tolkien cult and on to Harry Potter.

Gardner has an old-fashioned, almost 19th-century, Oliver Wendell Holmes kind of American mind - self-educated, opinionated, cranky and utterly unafraid of embarrassment - and his Americanniess is crucial to the success of his "Annotated Alice." An English author, one fears, would have found it "naff," embarrassing, to point out what a hansom cab is or what it means for a rower to "catch a crab" or go too deeply into the philosophical implications of the Red King's dream, but Gardner has the American gift of not caring too much what people think. He likes to argue ideas and doesn't care if he seems overeager about some of them.

..."Alice" is not a subject for po-mo study, but an anticipatory critique of it. "Alice" is the common reader confronting post modern theory - the one who sees how interesting your results can be if you drain language of all reference, live in a tiny enclose chessboard world, pay no attention to lived experience or ever have to test your ideas against reality..."Alice" can survive anything, even theory.

The books seem at first fixed, frozen in a distant Victorian era, but in truth they are wound so tight, packed so densely with jagged-edged thoughts that turn out to be keys to unknown locks, that in a world as mad as ours they will always keep the time - clocks that somehow, whenever you look at them, are always right.

Hmmm; Dali's melted clock; Peter's Thrieving in Chaos; WW2 despots that yelled "off with their Heads."

"All of the really great literature for children has multiple layers of meaning" Katie Jacques said it best!

I'm confused by 'self-educated.' We know Gardner graduated from U of Chicago, was a journalist, reporter and author of well over 100 books. Seems to me journalists and reporters are on the cusp of current information gathering, education. Unless education not to be self-taught must take place in a classroom? And then we still have that pesky degree to explain away.

Hi, all...feeling much better. Now Dear Hubby has the bug. So far Teddy is bug-free. I took him to the zoo...I mean, the mall, yesterday to have pictures taken. I get the feeling I'm going to be spending all my money on pictures. Today he went to the doctor; he weighs 17 pounds, 14 ounces, at 6 months. They said this was fiftieth percentile, so somewhere out there, there must be some huge marshmallow babies.

Anyway, I actually did do some reading over the weekend and the ferrets brought a story to mind: I once worked for a very small company doing word-processing. We had a contract to help a medical research company reproduce a multitude of documents which had been lost on a crashed hard drive that hadn't been backed up. Well, one of the things I had to retype was about a vaccine the company hoped to develop for ulcers. According to this document, they were experimenting on ferrets because *all* ferrets have ulcers. I typed along, fascinated by the experiment, and the research, until I came to the part where they were going to "sacrifice the ferrets" to determine the results.

Okay, I don't want to offend any animal-rights types out there, but I thought it was a funny phrase to use. I thought about the tiny altar and the scientists in their long colorful robes and fancy headpieces. It occurs to me now that this is a pretty Alice-esque thought to have, to take figurative language literally. It seems to me that quite a bit of the humor of the Alice books is from that type of thinking (although the only one that leaps to mind is the Mock Turtle).

I had forgotten that Father William was here! I love Father William (I studied the Southey version in high school). When I was 11 or 12, I recited the entire thing to my bunk-mates at camp, but I remember no one else really thought it was as funny as I did.

Which strikes a thought: Is Alice supposed to be funny? Several of us have mentioned being confused by it, or frightened by it, but I don't recall that anyone has said they thought a particular passage was funny. What do you think?

Ellen, I love the name Teddy! It sounds so ...huggable! 17 lbs, ahhhh...I remember those days as some of the most fulfilling...felt I was doing something right!

Funny? Hmmm...so far, not funny at all. But entertaining - does that count? Do you think the three little Liddell sisters laughed at these images of talking animals, wearing gloves. They must have been amused, don't you think? Surely they weren't frightened - they were too old for that! Curious too - but funny? So far, lots of confusion and tears!

I have just finished Chapter 4 and have to say that I find the revisions very disconcerting - why did he substitute whole passages? I am so happy we have these annotations, because as far as I'm concerned, the original entries were so much more relevent and satisfactory...especially the mouse "tail", which includes

"When the cat's away, the mouse will play'"

Did Carroll pen this line, or lift it from somewhere? What do you think? If he wrote it himself, don't you think it's interesting that it doesn't even appear in print anymore...not since 1869, or whenever Alice was revised? I think I have to go to a quick search on this!

You know, I think a child would find the Caucus Race absurd, no start, everyone a winner - so absurd that it is funny! And then, Alice has to award everyone a prize, including herself, so she gets her own thimble back. Yes, I think both these occurances belong in the "funny" category, don't you?

The other thing I found of interest...Fury was the name of a fox terrier belonging to Carroll's child-friend, Eveline Hull...an interesting term. So, Alice Liddell and sisters were child-friends of the author.

Barb: Just looking in here and saw your excellent discussion about morality. Cerainly you are right, just as we have to overlook the bigotry and anti-semitism in some of the great authors we study. It doesn't mean that we accept these abuses, but we should understand that this was common thinking in the time in which they were writing. Hopefully, we will fight to change such thinking, disallow such bad practises and look forward to a better future for mankind.

Charlotte

Ellen So Ferrets have ulcers! All I could think of while reading about the ferrets was; all the ferrets that are the greedy guys that steal everything they can lay their hands on and want, want, want in the cartoon version of Wind of the Willows. And yes, there are some really amusing antidotes to her situation. Just for fun, I've been giving some of my household objects and foods personalities as they describe the benefits of their situation. Like a chair that I seldom use describing to me how he, the chair is really benefiting me because without it what would I be looking at that could better fill the space. Did it ever occur to you how still and dead most things are in our homes. Dead wood make chairs kind of dead. That we and plants are the only moving parts --oh yes and all the hidden workings to all the mashines, but even there most move electonically with no sign of movement.

I thought how right-on, when she brings up her love for her Dianh and it scares everyone that has been victimized by a Dianh. Wow I thought how true that scenario is. People can empty a room with talk about subjects that scare folks.

Joan Did the prizes remind you of being a kid when everyone had to win and the least small token was given importance so that it could became a prize or...if there were unexpected guests during the holidays, we all scrambled to find something to wrap as a gift so that no one felt left out.

Joan in your research did you find anything about Kittens and mittens or gloves as a Victorian practice. LC gives us this little pun about gloves for each paw and I'm remembering the Nursery tale about the Naughty Kittens that lost their mittens. Maybe it is nothing more then fun borrowed from fun.

Charlotte there is much about the life of LC that gives one pause and to determine for oneself what was true and what was written by psudo-psychoanalysts that seemed to be the thesis of so much early twentieth century research. We all seem to have to determine for ourselves how to accept or not the works of folks that do bad things.

I must say Lorrie's earlier post now gives me pause to wonder...If a child as Alice would know about a hookah and in the beginning of chapter 5 ...the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languied, sleepy voice. I'm thinking drugs may have been more common then we imagined.

When the annotated discussion spoke about commentators thinking the puppy out of place, I thought, a message would be lost without the silent puppy. If LC intended or not, I saw how if we have boxed in our life and then kick back a little we will be thrown the very barbs that may be used for our deliverence and then once out of our boxed-in dilemma we are free but we feel small and vulnerable and we feel as if life is filled with silent, large scarry people, places, things that we think could just gobble us up. How does the saying go, something... fear is taking seriously things imagined. And so the puppy not fitting in with the type of animals in the story and although large, was a household pet which says something about being afraid of what is really harmless and it is we that feel vulnerable when confronted with 'big'.

I was reading a copy of Anne Clarks Bio of LC --in it she explains the name Lewis Carroll is simply his name, Charles Lutwidge, latinized and switched. She also includes a lovely quote from a letter to Charles written in 1840 by a rumbustious joker Bishop of Elphin. He had shopped for some trifling purchases for his son and launches into an account of setting the whole town in an uproar to get them:

Then what a bawling & a tearing of hair there will be! Pigs& babies, camels and Butterflies, rolling in the gutter together - old women rushing up the chimneys & cows after them - ducks hiding themselves in coffee cups, & fat geese trying to squeeze themselves into pencil cases - at last the Mayor of Leeds will be found in a soup plate covered up with custard & stuck full of almonds to make him look like a sponge cake that he may escape the dreadful destruction of the town.

Anne Clark proceeds to point out the similarity of "the close association of pigs and babies, the futual attempts to fit large creatures in small receptacles, the use of the chimney in a crisis, and the preoccupation with food. Ducks in coffee cups are not far removed from dormise in teapots..."

It really surprises me that many of this group don't find Alice funny. From beginning to end, as long as I can remember, I have ALWAYS thought it was funny. I suppose I was introduced to it at such an early age that I don't remember if I ever thought it was scary. In fact, the only part that I remember ever thinking was scary (and still do, a little bit) is the bit with the puppy. The puppy is "real" and so out of place.

I don't remember feeling that ALICE was afraid of anything, with the exception of the puppy. Otherwise she is curious, interested, mystified, annoyed, or confused ... and sometimes a little homesick ... but not frightened. Even when the White Rabbit and his friends threaten to burn the house down, she just threatens them back.

All the parodies are funny. All the mixed-up words are funny. As Alice is falling down the rabbit hole, contemplating where she might come out, she says, "the Antipathies, I think..." I always thought that was hilarious. (I suppose my mother must have explained to me, at some point, that Alice was trying to think of the Antipodes.) And then she wonders how she would figure out where she was, and pictures herself asking on the street, "Please, ma'am, is this Australia or New Zealand?", and how ridiculous she would feel. (I'm doing this from memory, not having the book in front of me, so forgive me if my quotations are not exact.)

And as for Bill, the hapless lizard flying out of the chimney ... to say nothing of Alice's hand (and "arrum, yer honor") grabbing for the creatures falling into the cucumber frames ...

I haven't read the biographical material on Gardner, but "self-educated" seems a reasonable way to describe him if his only formal degree is a B.A. from the U. of Chicago! I'm sure it would be obvious if we could compare what MG knows and has done with anyone else in his graduating class <G>. I don't believe he learned all that at the U. of Chicago, even if he was there in Robert Hutchins's day.

Thanks so much for the link to the Gopnik review ... I do get the NY Times, but a week late, by mail! Yes, I know, you can get home delivery almost everywhere now ... but when I call them, they say, "Sorry, not in YOUR zip code, lady." The L.A. Times is the same way; we took it for more than 30 years and then one day a few years ago they said, sorry, we no longer have home delivery in your zip code. I suspect the NY Times and the LA Times use the same distributor in our area, and I guess they figure people down by the border don't read.

Katie, I agree with you that it is a funny book. I think it gets funnier as it goes along, and I have always disliked the pool of tears scene. Partly because it didn't make sense, but also partly because all the animals are mean to Alice.

Even before I knew the source of Father William (I read Southey in high school), I loved this poem. Father William is so fiesty, and the young man so stodgy. It seemed like a role reversal (although my grandfather was noted for fiestiness).

Also, note 7 on page 53: Gardner himself is a noted skeptic of paranormal phenomena. My husband gets a magazine called Skeptical Inquirer; Gardner is a columnist. Most of the magazine is "preaching to the choir" about such things as alien abduction (they're against it) and spoon-bending (they don't believe in it). Gardner's column is fairly scholarly; in September he wrote about Carlos Castaneda and how he fooled the anthropology community.

In the 19th century lots of people were "into" spiritualism; they went to seances, tried out spiritual photography, and consulted fortune-tellers. People believed that magicians made deals with the devil to accomplish their tricks. Lots of people believed that one could communcate with the dead. In contrast, Carroll believed that ESP/psychokinesis had a scientific basis. He believed that these phenomena could be proved by scientific methods. Like Arthur Conan Doyle, he thought most spiritual phenomena were faked (and they were). Carroll believed there were parts of the brain which naturally produced ESP and that some people were gifted in that area.

I love the scene with the Pigeon who thinks Alice is a serpent. Like most of her encounters, Alice is proper and polite and truthful. The difference is that now Alice is starting to fight back: "'I'm not a serpent,' said Alice indignantly. 'Let me alone!'"

How far are we reading now? Or are we taking a holiday break?

Oh dear got behind in some of my duties here - sorry - holidays, Christmas parties, and then of course more folks trying to buy or sell now then all fall - wouldn't you know - as well as, getting Harry Potter up - Ok Let’s at least do chapter 6. Don't you think we could add chapter 7 and 8 making the dates for reading today till next Sunday. Eight seems to be almost straight reading Alice with few annotations.

With the chapters so full of these wonderful annotations I seem to go slower by reading first, all this explanation along with the story and than, going back and reading Alice in order to get the sense of the story. Then I must really take time to examine the illustrations. Some are quite busy but others are more opened and airy.

I’m thinking Christmas week we may only want to do just one chapter till the Sunday after Christmas and then finish up the last three chapters of Alice by New Year weekend so that we can start the Looking Glass on January 1 or 2.

I’m going to put all this in the heading now - IF THIS IS TOO BUSY A SCHEDULE PLEASE LET ME KNOW.

Ellen Ahh yes, the long Father William poem is really so great on the tongue. I had completly forgotten that part. I can just see you as a child, excited about sharing this wonder with your 'bored' friends. And that illustration of the caterpillar on the mushroom is wonderful.

Can actully imagine color. Rather then a mushroom my imagination got a workout designing this wonderful reading nitch or room, using the idea of a great lush red chanille cushion with long purple fringe, in place of the mushroom, having a special reading outfit of a bright green caftan, the color of a caterpillar, and of course a saffron colored turbin but, I'm afraid I would not do well with a hookam - how about a samovar, would that be exhotic enough. Yes, a tented room with silks and William Morris designed fabric on the walls - Yes, my Alice’s-Caterpiller room.

Katie And then companies talk about 'SERVICE' with a capitol S - ahrmph! And yes, I did crack my first real smile with some laughter thrown in, when Bill shoot through the air. Here he is an ordinary Lizzard, minding his own business and then he is grabbed and shot through the air. Life would never be the same would it after that surprise.

Agreed, I do feel so much more like the fun is fun now that Alice is not the weepy victim.

It was so late the other night when I finished up with some folks writing an offer - too late to focus and read - so for the first time in months I rented a vidio - shock, there is a new Alice Vidio. Not Disney! I didn’t rent it since I found a long time ago, a movie always spoils a book for me. But when I’m finished reading Alice I plan on renting it.

It would be fun if we all rented it and share our impression of the movie after having read the text. What do you think?

Joan were you able to find out if it was LC that originated the mice will play quote?

June Have you had a chance to read any from the book yet? If you are not up to speed that is fine - share any of your thoughts about what you have read. You may just see something in another light.

Joan did this wonderful post in the 'Chicago retro' discussion that reminded me of the Bishop turning the town upside down through words, as he discribed his shopping expedition with pigs and babies rolling in the street. Joan discribed an imagined, mass painting party visit to her home, with those of us that were in Chicago for the Book Gathering. Her post was priceless.

Well, Barbara, you are right: I have not read much of Alice and what I did read was before my Thanksgiving trip and then I got so busy with Christmas that I didn't read any more! BUT tonight I re-read the beginning and will try to get up to speed here. My thought about the beginning of Alice is that it is in a lovely, easy, conversational style. LC wrote it in the late 1800s when society was not noted for casualness, but I really don't know how the stuffiness of that time applied to kid lit. And he did write this for a child, even though he entertained himself with lots of little devices while doing so. As a matter of fact, what other kid lit was there at that time and did it read as easily as this? Anyone have info on this? June

June so glad to hear from you - and Christmas has you busy!

Well your question really had me thinking and wondering - someplace I read that Alice was supposed to be the first real children's book but then I remember reading that Tom Thumb was from the 10th century. Hmmmm well found a great site with wonderful information.

UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE LIBRARY Children's World

In western Europe, there was no separate category of books for children before the eighteenth century. The Bible, stories of saints and martyrs, and bestiaries or books about exotic animals, were probably the first printed books available to children. The woodcut illustrations of these early works would be intriguing even for those unable to read the text. Early books for children were strongly influenced by the conservative English beliefs of the seventeenth century. Seeing children as amoral savages needing to be taught right from wrong, society used stories filled with death and damnation to frighten children into good behavior. Humor and imagination were banned, replaced by stories of boys and girls who suffered grisly fates for misbehaving.

Stories after 1850, the golden age of children's literature in England and the United States, great writers teamed with great illustrators to produce the books we still consider classics. The industrial revolution led to advances in printing which made books colorful, affordable, and plentiful. The growing middle class, with its increased interest in education, expanded the audience for children's books.

The Pleasant and Delightful History of Jack and the Giants. Nottingham: Printed for the Running Stationers, 1790.

Famous Exploits of Robin Hood: Including an Account of his Birth, Education, and Death. Penrith [England]: Joseph Allison, circa 1800.

The Renowned History of Richard Whittington and his Cat. New-Haven: Sidney's Press, 1826.

History of the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood. Glasgow: Printed for the booksellers, 1852.

The Water-babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-baby, Charles Kingsley. London and Cambridge: Macmillan and Co., 1863.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. New York: D. Appleton, 1866. While many books written for adults are enjoyed by children, Alice is the rare children's work which is equally appealing to adults.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Hartford: American Pub. Co., 1876. is the one most clearly written for children.

Little Women, or, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. Boston: Roberts, 1868

So it looks like there were books for children before our Alice but none seems to have as much hidden between the words. So many quotes that I never realized came from Alice and the silly riddles that are really brain teasers and THAN, I found this WONDER! A site to learn Math using Alice as the basis for problems and explanations. Mathamatics with Alice

I found these remarks about Alice in Wonderland What do you think?

“Alice in Wonderland” is an allegory for the journey of life - the journey of a child growing up.

The chaos of the Mad Hatter's tea party is one of the most famous scenes in Alice in Wonderland. The Mad Hatter is the embodiment of madness in a timeless world.

The book satisfies the need to dream anxiety dreams and then to forget them.

Well, there were other easily read books for kids, I see. I had remembered people of that era relating long afternoons lying on their stomachs paging through frightening books on the lives of the saints and fairy tale books which weren't much less scary.

I have been having fits over getting AT&T @ Home installed for internet access and lots of misadventures have occurred with the AT&T contractors who came to put it in, like cutting a telephone line, disrupting TV cable, etc. (They did not break any furniture, for which I am grateful, so it could be worse.) Anyway @ Home is not working and my old ISP is iffy, so I can't always get on Seniornet. June

Oh my June misadventures just trying to communicate in todays world? Isn't it just amazing how quickly we have adapted the internet into our lives and how lost we feel without our daily dose. Of course there is no recourse with these companies when their service messes up except to not subscribe and deny ourselves the latest technology trying to send a message to them.

I remember reading about the saints and some of that Literary link may be what drives the current interest in Joan of Ark. Have you noticed she is all over in books and film again.

I've been stuggling to see Alice in Wonderland as an allegory for the journey of life - the journey of a child growing up.

Now the Mad Hatter as, madness in a timeless world, I can see. Much of the strange goings on has me thinking LC may have been before his time, as he was beginning the relationship to our Modernist Literary Theory, Choas.

Here is a treat. A small Christmas project...Troll pencil topper

New link above...send one of 22 Illustrated Alice post cards Alice Postcards

I just love this illustration and had to add it as a link to the discussion:

The Duchess holding the Crying Baby...by Tenniel I love the way Tenniel directed the eye. Of course the Duchess' face and the crying baby immediatly cought my eye and then he cleverly has you follow the babies dress that is echoing the yellow tandrels on the queens dress picked up by a soft line created by Alice's shadow to Alice's shoes, then the blue stockings leads you like skipping stones up a path of blue on Alice till her head seems to be at the correct angle, the bow pointing as well, almost like a directional marker, to the Duchess scarfed headress. Along the scarf to the next spot of blue, the large bow on the cooks bonnet to the steam and top of the spoon stirring the pot, that is just lite by a patch of brown that points to the wooden cooking object in her hand and that, like an arrow, points, and down we go not wanting to go into the shadows, no further then her apron bringing the eye to the Cheshire Cat, whose smile is a copy of and echoing the cats oblong body and that creates a line across to the Duchess' dress, where the folds guide you to the red stocking peeking above the dusty black shoe. The shoes and her knees create a heart shaped lap where the baby rests and we are back at the beginning. I Love it!

I love that picture too, Barbara, but my ears and whiskers, that's not the Queen, that's the Duchess!

Katie Thank you, yes, it is the Duchess!! I'm going back and change it right now from the Queen to the Duchess. Had only read up to the Chershire Cat when I posted and than chugged onward to pictures, like an eight year old, without reading. I still enjoy the pictures as much or more then reading a story. For years magazines were my weakness because of all those lovely colorful pictures.

Looks like pre-Christmas left many of us behind...We have all next week with a schedule suggesting we read only one chapter. We can catch up if we have desided where we want to get to. As the Chershire Cat would says, if we have no plan where we want to go it doesn't much matter what road or path we take.

So many quotes that are part of our everyday thinking that came from Alice. I had no idea.

I'm thinking the holidays are cutting into reading time and maybe the schedule is too ambitious. Really hope we could start Looking Glass early January but maybe we need to relax this schedule and then pick up after the January 1, 2000 with the ambitious schedule that we enjoyed when we started.

Barbara--I agree with you on the schedule. Between other commitments and the holidays I've gotten behind on reading. The book is on my kitchen table and I read it every morning for the 10 minutes between when I get up and when Teddy does.

I threw off the thought at the end of a previous posting, but the more I think about it, the more true it seems. This book a lot more fun now that Alice is speaking up for herself and fighting back.

Ellen I guess my eyes are still too big and it appears so for others as well. I am so glad you posted that you are behind, now I do not feel as quilty.

Ellen I'm going to back the schedule up just a tad more and take the pressure off. We have January ahead of us when typicaly the weather says, bundle up and read.

A simple little Holiday Cheerfulness
Have a Joy Filled Holiday Everyone!
Click Here

I'm off to my daughter's Tuesday morning (so early it will still be darknight, flight leaves at 6:30 AM aughh) upon arrival, we will be very busy visiting so I may not be in here as often. Please post when you get a chance between baking, visiting, and playing Santa.

Amazing what you find when you clean things out for Christmas <G>. Martin Gardner wrote another book a couple of years ago, which I bought and promptly buried and forgot about. It came to light as I was clearing space for the Christmas tree yesterday.

The book is "Visitors from Oz," published in 1998. Gardner is also a great fan of L. Frank Baum. He wrote "Visitors from Oz" in a style reminiscent of Baum, and using characters and history from all of the Oz books written by Baum himself. (Many others were written by Ruth Plumly Thompson and John R. Neill, who illustrated all the Oz books except the first one.)

"Visitors from Oz" is about a movie producer who plans to make a computer animated version of "The Emerald City of Oz," the story of the attack on Oz by the evil Nome King, and his defeat by the magic of Oz. The producer believes that Oz is a real place (and hates the Judy Garland movie, which turns it into a dream like Wonderland, a view with which I heartily agree!), and he gets this great idea to bring Dorothy, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman to the U.S. from Oz to publicize his movie. He contacts Glinda via the Internet!

I don't want to give too much of it away, but the mechanism by which the Oz characters get to New York is marvelously Gardnerian. In "The Emerald City of Oz," Glinda decided that too many people had found their way to Oz from Earth, and she moved Oz to a parallel universe. As a result, it became impossible for her or Ozma to move people and objects between Earth and Oz by magic, as they had often done in the past. However, Prof. H.M. Wogglebug, T.E. comes up with a plan to move Dorothy and her friends through the fourth dimension by the use of a Klein bottle, which is two Moebius strips (one with a right-handed twist, the other with a left-handed twist) joined together at the edges. If you try this, you will find it cannot be done in three dimensions. Where the Klein bottle goes into the fourth dimension, it creates an opening through which objects can move between universes. Ku-Klip, the Munchkin tinsmith who made the Tin Woodman, constructs a large Klein bottle from tin, and the friends use it to slide right into Central Park!

Dorothy, the Woodman, and the Scarecrow have a few adventures in Oz, on the way to the place where the Klein bottle has to be placed in order to come out in Central Park. It turns out that both Wonderland and Looking-Glass Land have been moved to a remote corner of Oz. Alice, who was just a dreamer, is not there, but Dorothy and her friends meet Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee (who NEVER fight), Humpty Dumpty (who turns out to be hard-boiled, and whose shell was glued back together by Ku-Klip), the Mad Hatter (who is no more crazy than you are), and the Duchess, who lives with the Duke and their 10 children and is devoted to her baby. The Duchess is actually a beautiful young woman, but she wears the ugly mask for company because they always expect it. The characters say Lewis Carroll got a lot of things wrong.

A lot of other people turn up in the book, including Stephen Jay Gould, Oprah Winfrey, Pat Robertson, Rudy Giuliani, and Gardner himself. They seem no more real than the Oz characters (less, if anything). Of course, there are also some bad guys, who get their comeuppance without actual physical harm in authentic Oz fashion.

As you might expect, the book is a hoot, and a visit to well-known country for Oz fans.

I know that this is a completly diffrent subject but i need to know which island was the setting for this book can anyone help me please, I also have some other book related questions 1. Whose story is told in the book that opens with the chapter"I am born? 2. Whose country seat was pemberley? 3. Which famous fictional californian private eye shares a surname with an Elizaberhan writer. I would be really grateful if any one can help with theses questions as they are for my daughter quiz at her school in Essex England U.K.

Welcome, Freddie! We are delighted to see you here, and I know we have the answers for all your questions, Barb put your request in our Library and I put your California mystery writer request in the Mystery Corner, you will soon be flooded with answers!

Maybe this will start us off: Pemberly: Apparently in PRIDE AND PREJUDICE Darcy Meets Elizabeth at Pemberly Hampshire environs of Jane Austen Am not sure that's the reference you seek, if not, please let us know.

The "I Am Born" sounds very very familiar to me, hold on....

Ginny (So glad you're with us)!

Do stay a while, and look around all our discussions while you're waiting, we would love to have you in all of them. We have a lot of people who have read CORELLI'S MANDOLIN, and they should be able to help!

Freddie: "I Am Born" is the title of the first chapter in Charles Dickens' DAVID COPPERFIELD.

Ginny

many thanks for your quick response to my unusual requests, I do thank you for the time you have spent on this, This is my first time trying to find out information via the net and i am not to sure about what i should and should not be doing. so thanks again for all your help. I will watch this space for any replies.

Hello thank you for your help can you tell me if this is the right way to go about finding the answers or would you use another way please let me know.

Freddie, click on my name and write me a letter? My letter to you bounced and it's got another answer in it and some info you will want?

Ginny

did you get my mail i told you i am not very good at this sort of thing if its to much trouble don't worry about it i will just have to go to my local libaray

Freddie, I got it, I sent you one, did you get it, it's got three answers and a very good search engine in it! Have a good night's sleep, see ya tomorrow!

Ginny

Ed Zivitz - 01:11pm Dec 28, 1999 PST (#38 of 39)

Elizabethan Answer

Hi Ginny: I suspect the answer you're looking for is Philip Marlowe from the Raymond Chandler novels.

It's a good thing you specified Californian character,because Robert Parker's main protagonist is named Spencer ,after Edmund Spenser of Faerie Queen fame. Now all we need is a character names Queen Mab

Ed

Rah, Rah, Rah Ginny to the rescue...Thanks so much Ginny...I also tried to email Freddie and the message came back. And now Ed as well...three cheers to you both!

Welcome to SeniorNet Books Freddie Hope you will stay awhile and visit this and other sites on SeniorNet. We seem to read so many British authors and we would love to have a British voice adding to our understanding and further enjoyment of our selected books.

Freddie we are having great fun reading Harry Potter and if you or your daughter would like to post your thoughts we would just love it. We understand the British version is a little different the the published version for the States and that there is an actual ADULT copy available in Britian!

Click here and join our 'Inter-Generation discussion' where Grands (children and seniors), discuss Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

We would of course love to have you continue to stay right here and join this discussion on Alice but I do not know if this newly published Annotatied Alice is available in Britian of not.

Freddie I'm delighted you found us and hope we have helped make your daughter's paper work for her.

Hello and thank you for your help in finding the answers i was looking for sorry i have not replied to your E mail but i will as soon as i have finished this message, as i have one more question for you do you know who won the booker prize for the second time this year has anyone got an idea i would be truly grateful many thanks

Freddie, yes, I do, it was J. M. Coetzee. Now you must pay a forfeit! hahahahah Come on over to the Library, you will find several people there anxious to help you, too, they posted yesterday and do stay around and visit all our discussions!

We are quite fond of the Booker Prize winners and have read several of those winners or short listed. I have a real fondness, myself, for Penelope Fitzgerald. In February we'll read a Prize Winning Book, check out the Book Club Online 2000 at the very top of the B&L listings for all the prize winners nominated. Our Sarah T, who is 40 years old, will be leading that one and you are welcome to join us there, to vote, and to give us your perspective!

So glad you're with us,

Ginny

Is there no question that I can stop you with? do you and your friends know all there is to know well I will try again this time getting really crafty and I am sure you will not Know this are you ready? This by the way has nothing to do with books or reading In which year did John Curtis produce the first commercially available chewing gum in the USA. This is not a joke but another one of my daughters homework questions I will leave this with you and talk with you in the morning. Ginny I will reply to you very soon if not tonight then first thing in the morning O.K. by for now

Freddie, have no clue! Books I might be able to help with, chewing gum? Am a chewing gum illiterate. I have posted your request here in our Library, check there to see if anybody knows anything about chewing gum and say "hi!"

Ginny

Welcome back everyone! Hope everyone had a great Holiday season and wishing y'all a properous New Year!

I return home tomorrow and by Wednesday I feel I will be back into my routine again. Having read to my grandboys these past two weeks, my thoughts kept floating back to Alice and the magic the LC created. I'm not remembering other stories for children that delt with a parallel world or chaos prior to Alice's Adventures. Both themes seem to be ahead of the times and more indicitive of the twentieth century then the ninteenth century.

I haven't made New Year Resolutions in years but I think this year I'm going to take LC's directive above and deside "where I am going." Of course then that brings me face to face with the chaos issue that LC introduces as a way of life. I don't know if there is a plan that works in the face of chaos except to have as much fun as possible and use your wits while life happens.

HAPPY 2000. FRIENDS! I woke up nice and early this morning, put on a pot of coffee and spent some time with Alice...Although I am behind the posted schedule, I am delighted that we are still together to discuss the book...I have just completed Chapters 4 & 5 and will post a few observations, realizing full well, that this is not part of the ongoing discussion, but I'll get to Chapter 9 by week's end and will get into the chat!

It means so much to me to have people to share the reading of this book. I've puzzled over it for so many years - it is liberating to talk about it with you! So glad we are using the Annotated version too...much is clarified. Now I don't feel so dense trying to figure out the story and as an adult, I find it fascinating in context of Carroll's life and times. So there is appreciation on two levels, through the fanciful eyes of the child within and the inquisitive old lady...

Several references made in 4 & 5 to this old lady, which were definitely not appreciated by this child all those years ago - probably not even noticed!

"That'll be a comfort, one way, never to be an old woman" , says Alice. Of course we know now of Carroll's antipathy toward all females past puberty...so that comment makes sense on several levels.
The annotations included the original text of Robert Southey's, You are old, Father William, which Carroll had such fun with in Alice...I think it contains some bits of wisdom for us, at the start of this new year, century, which of course, has to make us aware of our own age:
I thought of the future, whatever I did
That I never might grieve for the past."

I keep staring at Alice's contraction for cannot = I ca'n't...

Yes, that enormous puppy is out of place in this dream, isn't he? He doesn't speak as the other creatures, for one thing. Alice seems conscious that he is beyond her dream...she's three inches when she sees him and refers to him as "a poor little thing"...He's not in costume either. Just a reminder perhaps that Alice has fallen asleep and that this is a dream?

That blue caterpillar smoking his hookah (? speaking with a sleepy, languid voice - sort of surprised that this is not annotated - or is it perfectly obvious to all that this is a funny pipe?). He does speak words of wisdom when he warns Alice to "Keep your temper." Good advice for all when in frustrating situations as is our Alice! He advises her to make use of the mushroom too. Surely the child has been warned not do eat "mushrooms" growing in the wild. Alice seems to think that she needs to be swallowing something to control her physical problems, doesn't she?

"Never sure what size I am going to be from one minute to another", she complains... I suspect that this is a universal concern for all growing kids! Clothes and shoes never seem to fit right for long...(at least mine didn't)...always felt awkward - envied the girls who had dance lessons, I recall. They seemed in control of their bodies. I never thought of eating to solve the situation.

The caterpillar can read her mind - the Annotation tells us that Carroll really believed in ESP. That's interesting. Do you? As a child I used to feel that the adults always knew when I was lying, so I wouldn't make eye contact. Of course, that was the first give-away sign I was lying, but I didn't know it then!

So I left Alice at the end of Chapter 5 with that elongated neck, which appeared to me as a child, and still does, more like a giraffe, than a serpent. Still a kid, I guess...refuse to accept other's explanations if I can't see them for myself!

No, wait, she nibbles further on that mushroom and now she's 9' tall again, free to investigate the little house...

I was cleaning out my file drawer and found something I'd been looking for! A 1997 article written by a man named Everett Bleiler, author of a guide to supernatural fiction...he regards Carroll as a supernatural fiction writer...I'll agree with him. This is the article I was trying to find - about the zodiac and Wonderland. Are we going to read Through the Looking Glass along with Alice? That's where the zodiac connection becomes clear. If not, I could type in some of it if you are interested.

Again, a happy new year to all, and although the holidays were exhilarating, am glad to get back to the books!

Joan

Hi, everybody!

Joan--I read somewhere that "ca'n't" was one of Carroll's inventions. Apparently he thought "can't" was incorrect because it had only one apostrophe to replace two letters ("cannot").

I can't help noticing as I read how many things in Alice are common expressions and references today. "Curioser and curioser," for example.

ESP: I don't believe in it. Incidentally, neither does Gardner. But Carroll did, and so did a lot of other people in the nineteenth century. So do a lot of people today, for that matter.

I'm a bit ahead in the reading, but I was looking back at the tea party chapter (7) today. I've always loved the logic discussion--"I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know." I remember puzzling over this as a child for a long time. It's funny to me now to think that the two insane characters are so concerned with logic and meaning. And at the end of the tea party, she finally arrives back in the hall she fell into in the first place. Since Alice has been travelling for so long and in any direction at all, isn't it funny that she gets there and finds the place is just like it was when she left it in the pool of tears?

Help me. Or scroll right through me - but above all, please forgive me for what I am about to do - commit the major SN sin of SPAMMING...and a long spam at that.

It is out of desperation that I will paste this post in Alice in Wonderland, Harry Potter, and Absalom, Absalom! (will stop at "Good" War, although I see strong links between Sutpen, Voldemort and the Holocaust-maker of World War II...)

For days I have been attempting to post for each of these discussions, but they are of a piece in so many ways, that I feel paralyzed, unable to separate the three to write at all.

I will take advantage of your good hearts to spill out my thoughts in these pages, hoping that your objectivity will help me through this.

"It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live."

I watch very closely all children who have been traumatized at a young age, fictional children as well, to see how they "struggle to live", and not dwell on the dreams of "what might have been"...

The child in me tends to hide behind a veneer of normalcy - in a struggle to live, hiding from reality. The children in all three stories, Harry Potter, Charles Etienne Bon and Alice, have been communicating to my inner child in a profound way. This is highly personal, soul-baring...raw and unedited..so please, scroll right through to the next topic is if is more than you care to listen to...I can understand that...and I won't even know if you do that!

...I'll begin with Alice, who was seven at the time her story is told - because up until that age, I had a normal childhood - I think! I don't really remember anything much before seven, when my mother died. My memories before that resemble Harry's - vague fleeting memories of color and sounds, but no faces, or voices....not a single memory of his mother's face!

My mother was reading Alice in Wonderland to me before she died. I do remember that because I continued to read it alone, trying to make some sense out of it. I no longer thought it amusing, though I once did. Now it was simply baffling, and I thought I was missing the obvious meanings that everyone else grasped easily. Now, as I read it with you folks, I understand all the reasons that no child really understands this story. Children just delight in the story...and what strange things children find amusing...violent things! Throwing that awful pig/baby around like a sack of potatoes...these stories remind me of the cartoons we all loved as kids...violent, canon blasts, rifle shots, pummeling...yet never even a band-aid on the victim in the next frame!!! Clearly not real! Just a story...

So, I read of Alice, suddenly transported from some place safe and warm - to a mean place where everyone was angry, in a hurry, totally unconcerned about her physical or emotional needs. Completely lost in Wonderland, in the Dursely's in Surrey, Sutpen's 100...and lost in that strange boarding school...

A child needs a parent ...or a strong parental substitute at least. Alice, Harry, Charles and I were alone. We fell, we flew, we lost touch with reality to some extent...and then created our own idea of reality from our rabbit-holes, cupboards, and attics....why did Judith Sutpen send for Charles Bon's delicate, octoroon son at his mother's death, only to keep him in the spartan attic, totally alone with his grief?

"Clytie or Judith, found hidden beneath his mattress the shard of broken mirror: and who to know what hours of amazed and tearless grief he might have spent before it, examining himself...with quiet and incredulous incomprehension."
"What are you? Who are you?"

And then there's Alice and the Looking Glass wondering, "If I was on the other side of the glass, wouldn't the orange still be in my right hand?"
In a mirror all asymmetrical objects go the other way...Alice is told that "to say what she means is not the same as meaning what she says"....

Does Harry's MIRROR OF ERISED read the same from the other side? If his reality could be reversed, would he still be "aching for the smiling, waving beckoning" desires, his heart's desire??? ...I don't know the answer to that. Is it right here in front of me and I don't see it?

"He stared hungrily at them with a powerful kind of ache inside him, half joy, half terrible sadness...

My heart's desire, to see to remember my mother's face...would I be satisfied, or worse off. Probably still the same powerful ache of loss! Yes?

Would Charles Etienne Bon have been better off knowing of the curse on himself and his family, the reasons why he was hidden away from the world. Was this the reason Judith kept him hidden...out of love for his father and concern for his child, or out of fear? What do you think?

"It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live."

My child struggles with these children, struggles through Wonderland, knowing the loss, the ache will never really go away, but avoiding that mirror at all costs, not dwelling on dreams of what might have been.......

Thanks for listening...just for being there. I do feel better and free to get on with all three discussions now.

Dearest Joan, I know it is hard - My childhood was not filled with the actual death of a parant. My loses are mostly filled with expereinces of terror. My father was a criminal and in retaliation my mother was taken from us for a week and when she returned she was something of a zombie. And yes, it is amazing how so often the collective reading for a month dwells an a similar theme.

For me what I have learned about myself is, I will do anything, including blame myself, hurt myself, stay in depression, not live to my potential and during times of acute stress become that silent terror stricken child hiding in my head as if I was still hiding pushed under the bed by my grandmother, so that I do not know where I am or remember who I spoke with, rather then own that I had no control over what happened and I could do nothing to stop what happened and I must just accept the walk through the pain and wail.

That feeling - such the victem is devistating and I want to believe I can be more like Harry Potter creating in my fantasy, as well as my real life, a hero like action. Alice living a chaotic like dream world is hitting so many of my buttons and when she 'kicks back' I feel better. But trying to make sense of other's behavior is my nemesis especially in light of having trusted a man, the father of my children to not only love our (have a hard time saying our) children but to share in my desire to provide a better life for them then we experienced. To have learned a little over 10 years ago that he was incesting my daughter all the time she was growing up had plummeted me back into a world of Alice that I have been clawing out ever since with again, the same reaction, not wanting to own the pain and realization that there was nothing I could do to help her. (Part of that disease is the secret manipulation) This was also part of my childhood and I thought I had chosen someone, because of a similar religious faith and his advanced education, that was safe and honorable.

Oh I've learned all the words about describing and forgiving but it is really hard to accept the pain and feel right, adventurous, good about living a full life.I cannot turn back the clock and even if I could, I cannot change someone elses experience or another's behavior.

Joan I've share to let you know I understand some of your anxiety. I know we cannot fix each other, in fact no one can fix another, all I can do is share my life's experience and what I have learned as the result and in addition ask for prayers.

Dumbledore says, the mirror does not show knowledge nor truth and death is the next great adventure. I am beginning to think that death is not refering to the body, heart and brain ceasing to function but the death of wanting the past to be different and our experience as well as, the experience of our precious loved ones to be different. No one likes pain and the concept of living with a painful scar feels unacceptable.

Well I have finished chapter 9 and was amazed to learn that there was someone's portrait used to inspire the painting of the Duchess. The idea of straw indicating a slow wit fits the straw man in the Oz books doesn't it. Seems to me I vaguely remember a discriptive expression used when I was a child about slow witted folks having a head filled with 'bits of straw and fodder'.

These chapters seem to be one pun after another, what fun LC must have had taking the gossip and happenings of the day and reversing or retelling the story with an opposite slant. I wonder how he imagined the idea of playing cards as the characters surrounding the Queen. Oh it seems so logical after the fact, with the picture cards having a queen but at the time...I wonder if he played cards often or if children played cards and this was as natural as children watching TV today.

So far I'm not getting any meaning from this story and it seems that often, it is an essay on how ridiculus the expectations were for some of the behavior of the day. I feel like I am frolicking through this story, like tripping over rocks in a stream, never sure if I am going to miss the next pun and fall into the water.

The illustrations are just wonderful and really make this story come alive as most children's books with good illustrations are a halmark in our memories. Interesting that the Nursery Version he wrote is refered and we have that version linked above with the wonderful color graphics.

I'm still struggling with the concept mentioned that this story is like a timeline of a child growing to maturity. If anyone can see the analagies please share.

I love this essay by Ms. Beck on the Lunacy in the Ballroom prompted by the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon Lunacy in the Ballroom

Two days ago I was at Sears shopping for a new purse when an older lady came along pushing a baby in a stroller. I asked her about her baby, how old she was, etc. We chatted pleasantly for a few minutes and then she told me that she was the baby's grandmother. The baby's mother was murdered by her boyfriend two months ago. The lady shared the whole story with me, and told me about how her daughter was a loving, trusting young woman, who was taken advantage of by this man who was having an affair with her best friend.

My point is that we don't know what kinds of things are going to bring up issues for any of us. I'm sure that in this lady's case it was that I was also a young mother, with a baby about the same age. I made her think of her daughter. I imagine almost everything is making her think about her daughter. And who knows--maybe I told her something she needed to hear (we also lost a family member to a spouse who shot him).

I have this experience too--everything I'm reading or doing seems to converge on a particular theme. I had a friend once who was really into Jungian psychology and said that this was called "synchronicity." As I understood it, that means that themes converge to tell us what we need to hear. I don't know if I buy it, just thought I'd share.

I don't really see the timeline, either, Barbara. I'll go back through the incidents and see if I can piece it together.

Oh my Ellen, you too! I wonder now as I walk along the streets if anyone I see has what we think is a normal life filled with love and balance. Nearly everyone in the Potter discussion shared their painful losses. My good friend read and truly believes there is no hell. That most of us experience our hell right here on earth. Then my mind goes off into this whole thing if there is a hell on earth then logic says to me paradise would have to be present also. Hmmmm the experience of Alice is saying more to me that what ever is, is life and sometimes it is beyond our ability to imagine. Life and logic are not compatable.

Well all of a sudden, or I should say since last week, I've been having fun with Alice. The varied illustrations I'm finding are great. They are so full of color and activity. And y'all must try the new site, where you plug in some words and automatically the program takes your words and mades a Carroll like paragraph. Here I'll make a clickable in this post. MaD!, write like Carroll It is so much fun. The site showing the origins of Tenniel's illustrations is another super site with an index of many pieces of information and pictures.

Oh yes the head of the young girl is none other then our Alice Liddell.

At first I wasn't sure I would like the Gryphon but I do, I do and the scene of him and the mock turtle on the beach is precious. I had to stop and learn more about a gryphon and this is what I found.

griffin, also griffon, or gryphon: from the Latin gryphus and Greek grypos, hooked or curved; probably so called from its curved beak.

A mythical creature with the body and hind legs of a lion, and the head and wings of an eagle. Representations of the griffin are often used in heraldry

Catch this little Gem I found about Carroll:

It was not until 1913 that Newtonian Physics was overturned by Einstein's Theory of Relativity (not completely true as people like Planck had been nibbling away at the edges before that - but that's the general perception). Now, in 1915, Einstein said that his inspiration for the mathematics of Relativity Theory was what he called a thought experiment.(Relitivity: the theory that space and time are reletive to one another)

He said that he had imagined a group of scientists trapped in a lift - that the lift was in a shaft which extended to infinity. He then imagined that the cords holding the lift had broken and imagined the universe which would then exist for the scientists in the lift. He said that trying to work out the Relativity of these scientists' experiences in relation to the rest of the universe enabled him to arrive at the math of Relativity Theory.

Now read this excerpt from 'Sylvie and Bruno' (Chapter heading 'A Ride on a Lion'.)

"One can easily imagine a situation", said Arthur, "where things would necessarily have no weight, relative to each other, though each would have its usual weight, looked at by itself."

"Some desperate paradox!" said the Earl. "Tell us how it could be. We will never guess it."

"Well, suppose this house, just as it is, placed a few billion miles above a planet, and with nothing else near enough to disturb it: of course it falls to the planet?"

Earl nodded. "Of course - though it might take some centuries to do it."

"And is five-o-clock-tea to be going on all the while?" said Lady Muriel.

"That and other things," said Arthur. "The inhabitants would live their lives, grow up and die and still the house would be falling, falling, falling! But now as to the relative weight of things. Nothing can be heavy, you know except by trying to fall, and being prevented from doing so. You all grant that?"

We all granted that.

"Well now, if I take this book, and hold it out at arms length, of course I feel its weight. It is trying to fall, and I prevent it. And if I let it go, it falls to the floor. But if we were all falling together, it couldn't be trying to fall any quicker you know: for if I let go, what more could it do than fall? And as my hand would be falling too, at the same rate, it would never leave it, for that would be to get ahead of it in the race. And it could never overtake the falling floor!"

VERY curiously similar, don't you think? Those interested should read the whole of this section - and if possible get hold of Einstein's biography where he describes his 'thought experiment'. In fact Carroll's 'thought experiment' is even clearer than Einstein's! Actually Sylvie and Bruno and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded are both filled with gems of relativity.

Wow, Barbara--your relativity is really fascinating! I guess relativity is as much mathematics as it is physics.

Well, to change topics entirely: developmental psychology. One of the more accepted people in this field is Erik Erikson, who proposed 8 stages of human development. And you can see all 8 of them more or less in Alice. Each of these stages is seen as a set of conflicts with a hoped-for outcome.

First stage: birth to 1.5 years. Trust vs. mistrust; hope. When Alice falls down the rabbit hole, she is presented with a choice; to eat or not to eat. She does. She learns to trust that her choices lead to a desired result.

Second stage: 1.5 to 3 years. Autonomy vs. shame and doubt; will. When Alice cries the pool of tears, she tells herself she should be ashamed. Then she falls into the pool and still manages to keep going, and keep interacting with the animals she meets (even though some of them are mean to her).

Third stage: 3 to 5 years. Initiative vs. guilt; purpose. The White Rabbit sends her after his gloves. She is shocked that he has mistaken her for the housemaid, but she feels guilty that she didn't correct him so she goes after the gloves. Then she grows big again after taking initiative and drinking from a bottle. At the end of the house sequence, Alice decides to grow to her right size again and find the garden. She ends up with a purpose.

Fourth stage: 5 to 12 years. Industry vs. inferiority; competence. The whole caterpillar chapter is about Alice not becoming bogged down by being unable to grow to her right size. At the end she chooses a bite of mushroom to make her the right size for the Duchess' house.

Fifth stage: 12 to 18 years. Identity and repudation vs. identity confusion; fidelity. Through much of Wonderland, Alice talks to herself and wonders who she really is. Then in the tea party, she keeps trying to fit into the conversation. Finally the Hatter is so rude to her she leaves (true to herself).

Sixth stage: 18 to 25 years. Intimacy and solidarity vs. isolation; love. During the croquet game Alice is pretty much on her own until the Cheshire Cat appears and would now have someone to talk to. She describes it as her friend.

Seventh stage: 25 to 65 years. Generative vs. self absorption and stagnation; care. In the trial scene, Alice is still interacting with the creatures of Wonderland. She cares passionately about the unfairness of the trial.

Eighth stage: 65 up. Integrity vs. despair; wisdom. Alice is upset that the trial is going badly even though she has told all she knows and is trying to make it fair. When the queen orders Alice's head off, she proclaims that she knows they are only a pack of cards. At which point, she wakes up back in reality. We could also use the last two pages of the chapter as a description of wisdom and maturity.

Ellen how absolutly fabulous! Not only sharing Erick Erickson's progression but relating it to Alice - Kado's

Now how did you learn about Erick Erickson? This is so wonderful - I just could not figure out how this story related to childhood development and here it actually relates to the development of an entire lifetime. This alone makes the whole book meaningful for me. I really was having a terrible time understanding what I was getting out of this book other then a lot of history and puns, ready to focus only on the possiblities for illustrations. Now I am ready to review the story and see some parallels. It appears there are choices at each phase of development that probably allow you to successfully go on to the next stage of development with a thread allowing a creative and satisfying life.

Ellen thank you so much. I'm so glad you found this and shared it. Where did you find it and how did you put it together?

My favorite characters and story part is the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon on the beach and I loved the discription of the Lobster Quadrille. I wonder where that fits into the growth development if at all. I could feel what it would be like sitting hugging your knees and listening to the Mock Turtle and Gryphon talk with the sound of waves and a wind blowing hair in your face, all very companianable.

Ellen, that was brilliant!

Ginny

Wow, Ellen! and Barbara, too, for the discussion of relativity theory. Gardner does point out that Dodgson certainly knew that Alice could not have taken the marmalade jar out of the cupboard as she fell down the rabbit hole, or put it on a shelf, or even dropped it on somebody underneath.

Don't you love all the answers to the Mad Hatter's riddle? I never knew there were so many.

Did you find the White Rabbit in the picture of Alice and the Queen of Hearts?

In my family, whenever we are out in the sun too long, we recite "'Tis the voice of the Lobster, I heard him declare, You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair!"

I am surprised that Gardner doesn't note the mooing of the Mock Turtle (which has the head, feet, and tail of a calf) in "Beautiful Soup." Maybe he thought it was too obvious to mention.

Graduate school is where I studied Erikson (along with a lot of other developmental people) when I was getting my teaching certificate. To be truthful I thought most of them had never met a child! Erikson is different, though.

Another one I remember is Carol Gilligan. She's working on alternate theories of moral development and basing all her research on girls (the rest of them all base it on boys--therefore, boys are by definition normal, and girls aren't). Her basic theory is that girls are different in that they base their decisions not on "what is right," but on "who would this decision affect/how would they be hurt?" I don't see her theory reflected much in Alice, though. Alice is a fairly self-centered child.

"Alice is a fairly self-centered child." You're right about that. And Lewis Carroll, though he detested little boys, was once one himself, after all.

In what ways would we have to change the Alice stories if we changed the protagonist from a girl to a boy? How would "Harry Potter" be different if the hero were a girl?

Katie, will think about that when I curl up with Alice tonight! Finally! Just in time for wrap up! You're research has been stunning, Barb - as usual. Have you decided against Looking Glass? Was bowled over by Ellen's post!!!

I came in here to print it out and ponder as I read...will address your questions too, Barb! You people are amazing!!!

Hmm. I know I should be pondering the wrap-up questions, but I'm not ready yet. I've been thinking about this question for days. I don't know how Harry Potter would be different, but I am reading it. My mother-in-law gave us a copy when she was here last week. I'm anxious to read it as I know it gave many of the people reading it on Senior Net a lot to think about.

To be truthful, it's hard to think about Alice written with a boy as the main character. I think it would be a completely different book. For instance, Alice cries a pool of tears and nearly drowns in it. Well, imagine a boy doing that! In a book written today, he might; in Victorian times, it just doesn't seem likely at all.

In many ways, Alice is a feminist book. Alice doesn't wait to be acted upon; she acts. She sets a goal and tries to reach it--and her goal isn't just to go home, it's to explore the place in which she is. (That always annoys me about fantasy stories; the characters are always trying to go home. That, and they always seem to build "small, smokeless fires.") In the sense that she is active and curious, I think the story would be pretty much the same if she were a boy.

On the other hand, maybe a male main character wouldn't admit he needed direction, and wouldn't admit he was lost. (Stereotype, I know; when my husband and I go places, I'm the one who won't stop for directions.) I think a boy wouldn't interact so much with the characters in Wonderland. Come to think of it I think I've seen an adaptation of Alice that had a boy and a girl fall down the rabbit hole. I don't remember anything else about it though. And a boy, especially one written by Carroll, would be caught up in the Queen's game. Alice knows she can't win the croquet match, but a boy would find it more important and would try to win.

Still feeling too fuzzy to wrestle with relativity. Maybe next post. I will be travelling next week but hope to keep up with you all while on the road.

Um, gosh, where is everybody?

I just got back from taking the baby to visit his grandma. Now he tries to go with every redheaded woman he sees!

So, working on the focus questions. Do I like the book? At first I thought, how could anyone say no? But I know this book and Harry Potter (which I have now read) have brought back bad memories for some of you. I do enjoy the Alice books, although for me, too, it has some terrible moments, in particular at the beginning. Then, when Alice begins to assert herself, the story becomes more entertaining. The silliness inherent in the book (for instance, the croquet game) makes it pretty enjoyable.

Is it a fairy tale? No. Fairy tales are more magic-based, I think. In Alice, events unfold because of something Alice does or because of some physical law. Even when she grows and shrinks, there is a kind of logic to it. I think it's an adventure story.

Is it like Cinderella? Hmm. Pass for now. I don't know.

Favorite character: would it be too weird to pick the Red Queen? She gets to make the rules, and shouts "Off with their heads!" if anyone disagrees with her. She's not really a character so much as she is a cartoon, though. I've also always been fond of the Mock Turtle, with all the bad puns and the energetic quadrille. Maybe I should pass on this one for now, too.

I just wanted to say I'm game to read Looking Glass as well, unless Harry Potter has got everyone's attention now. Hope all is well and happy out there. I feel somewhat like I'm shouting down the rain barrel...

And the rain barral echoes - Juuusssst desided tooooday that enough was enough and, I was going to read the Looking Glass, just posting as I read regradless of schedule and the like - Ellen so glad you stopped to call, I'll be out to play shortly just finishing some laundry and cleaning my kitchen. No plans for tomorrow - we could have tea in the kitchen tomorrow afternoon if your game!

LIke you Ellen I liked the book better after Alice became pro-active. come to think about it the Mock Turtle is crying and I liked him as well as the whole experience at the beach was my favorite and yet Alice crying was a problem for me. I think it was more that she was being chastized for crying where the Mock Turtle crying is accepted and his tales were a delight.

You really had me thinking about a boy playing the part of Alice and I think a young boy would become just as confused and overwhelmed but after about the age of 4 or 5 he just wouldn't cry. To the respect that Cinderella has a fairy world, created by her fairy godmother, I guess Alice did experience a fairy world once she fell down the hole and then she awakens in her sister's lap to what appears as normality. And Cinderella also seems to be helpless to change her circumstances as Alice seems to have little control over the characters in her story. The more I use the physics model the whole story seems to be one big math formula. I think the structure of Alice has as much to do with the story as the tale itself.

Seeing the relationship to growth was another window to read the story. I had some books by Carol Gilligan that I recently gave to the Rape Crisis Center. Have you noticed the dialogue has switched and is now about boys rather then girls. I wonder if there isn't another stage between the sixth and seventh that would relate to the scene I love at the beach where we begin to accept that rules and power struggles are the silly games played the outcome is authority figures can continue to control those that do not see the games as silly and control was or is used to socialize us as young people. In other words our parants can be our friends and we are individuals with our own opinions that mutual respect, love and acceptance for the job our parants did is in order rather then, feeling the need to be pleasing or accept their values.

I guess that scene at the beach was one I could actually feel and smell the seashore. I liked the idea of sitting quietly and giving everyone a chance to speak so that to me the scene was more important then the actual characters. The other chapters where things popped and voices shouted and steam rose, cards flying all that was so much like being in an old fashioned fun house at an amusement park - fun but very unsettling.