Alice in Wonderland

[Martyn]

This evening myself and fellow FFer Lara went to an Alice in Wonderland event at the British Library. It was to celebrate the genius of Lewis Carroll and the importance of the book itself. Actor Michael Sheen did a couple very entertaining readings, there was a screening of the first ever Alice movie from 1903 that hadn't been screened in over 107 years, and a Q&A.

Author Will Self turned agent provocateur and had everybody cringing and laughing - at the same time, when he brought up Carroll's sinister obsession with little girls...remember this was a Disney sponsored event! "It's not all going to be candy floss," he said.

However, the undoubted highlight of the whole evening was Christopher Lee reciting the Jabberwocky. That man rocks!

I saw the film last Friday and didn't like it much...but that's just me. I wish there were pictures because this was an amazing event!

Is anybody a fan of Carroll's story? Have anything to say about it? I always found the book slightly weird...even when I was a kid. And Lee said a rather lovely thing about the book:

"All the characters make perfect sense, but do not behave sensibly."

[Jim]

how could an event be better even if the movie wasn't that good
I'm reading Psychogeography by Will Self and can just imagine what He would say if the book is any indicator of his style
One of my daughter's favorite pop up books is Alice Adventure's Underground and she loves it now even as a teenager as much even when she got it years ago

[Pavel]

I think he was an unintentional genius. He really just set out to write nonsense, but when he liberated himself from sense, when he opened himself up, all this crazy symbolic shit, this mystic knowledge came pouring out. He dealt with it like a mathematician, but he probably didn't understand half of it.

[João]

Alice (both books) are in my opinion one of the greatest (two) books of literature ever. No wonder guys like Borges, Joyce or Guimaraes Rosa liked him and are under his influence.

[Matt, e-monk]

Pavel wrote: "I think he was an unintentional genius. He really just set out to write nonsense, but when he liberated himself from sense, when he opened himself up, all this crazy symbolic shit, this mystic knowledge came pouring out. He dealt with it like a mathematician, but he probably didn't understand half of it."

I think that's unfair to Dodgson - for not only was he a mathematician but perhaps more significantly he was a logician and much of his work centers on concerns of logic (and illogic) - I think he mostly knew what he was up to - at least as much as any of us do when we put pen to paper - I mean who can say exactly where our characters, themes or even 'crazy symbolic shit' comes from?

[Matt, e-monk]

From Slate:

"Toward the end of his life, in 1896, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (also known as Lewis Carroll) published a survey of his professional work as an Oxford mathematician. Symbolic Logic set out to clarify the confusion he saw at work among the academic logicians of his day. Logic emerges, in this volume, as something of a game: rule-governed, yet arbitrary. It is not the dry purview of the pedant, but the imaginative landscape of a creative mind. Indeed, the book concludes, logicians often think of things like the cupola of a proposition "almost as if it were a living, conscious entity, capable of declaring for itself what it chose to mean." But Dodgson warns that we should not simply "submit" to the "sovereign will and pleasure" of these terms. Instead, "any writer of a book is fully authorized in attaching any meaning he likes to any word of phrase he intends to use.""

http://www.slate.com/id/2245647/