All in a golden afternoon...

...Full leisurely we glide;

For both our oars, with little skill,

By little arms are plied,

While little hands make vain pretense

Our wanderings to guide.

Today is Charles Dodgson's birthday, or would be if he were alive. He is one of my favorite authors and is well known by almost everyone, although by a different name.  Charles Dodgson's pen name was Lewis Carroll.  Lewis Carroll wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, as well as Sylvie and Bruno and The Hunting of the Snark.  I've been a fan of the Alice stories for a long time, I bet we all have, and I've taken my childhood appreciation of Carroll's work into adulthood and have collected some of his work in first editions, as well as some other peripheral books.  

Today, for bloggers, is Down the Rabbit Hole Day, and you're supposed to blog about something that's not your style to blog about.  I pretty much only blog about movies, so I guess anything's fair game, so I guess it makes sense to write a little about Lewis Carroll and his works that have given me so much joy.

Through the Looking Glass used to be my favorite Carroll work, until I read The Hunting of the Snark.  It's a poem in rhyming style, and is only about 20 pages long, without annotations.  The story tells of a group of people, a boots, a barrister, a broker, a billiard marker, a banker, a beaver and the Bellman, who go on a long sea voyage to find a snark.  While on the journey they all get in each other's hair and when they hit land they go searching for the snark being careful not to find a boojum instead.  The tale is illustrated by Henry Holiday in a style that is described by Martin Gardner as "grotesque", but not in the sense that the pictures are disgusting.  They are just oddly proportioned and strangely creepy at times.  Also, there are many hints at what is happening in the poem hidden in the illustrations, but there are also inconsistencies between the description in the poem and the pictures that accompany the words.  Sometimes these can be chalked up to the pictures having been completed, and the text having been edited at the last minute, but some of the alterations are motive-less and it all adds to the surreal atmosphere of the whole work.  The Hunting of the Snark is a fun, easy read that has many strange elements as well.  I fully endorse it.

The poem at the top of the post is the opening verse of "A Golden Afternoon" which is the poem that begins Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.  Dodgson created the Alice stories for his three little friends, the Liddell sisters.  Alice herself was the middle child.  Dodgson was a logic and mathematics professor at Christ Church, Oxford, and the little Liddell girls were daughters of a co-worker of his.  The poem refers directly to them by saying "little skill", "little arms", "little hands", as "little" and "Liddell" are homonyms.  Dodgson did a lot of fun stuff like that in his writing.  Another great poem of his that I like is "Phantasmagoria" a poem in seven cantos in a collection of his poetry called Rhyme? And Reason?.  In "Phantasmagoria", a man comes home from a night of drinking with friend to find a ghost in his flat.  He and the ghost strike up a conversation and end up telling each other all sorts of things.  The ghost starts telling the man the differences between ghosts, spectres, phantoms, etc.  

Charles Dodgson gets a lot of flak for being a pedophile, and while he did have tendencies that were of that nature, the people who knew him maintain that he never acted upon those urges, urges which he himself has said had haunted and tormented him.  He took photographs too.  I have a couple books of his photography and it's all amazing.  He has great photos of animal skeletons and still lifes, as well as many many...far too many...pictures of little girls and boys portraying scenes from literature.  The Liddell girls in "Chinese dress", St. George and the Dragon, etc.)  He was perhaps more prolific a photographer than he was a writer.  

For better or for worse, Charles Dodgson produced some great art in his lifetime.  I will make sure my future kids know Alice in Wonderland, and all the versions of it that there are too.  For the record Disney's version is alright for a fusing of the two books, The Natalie Gregory version from 1985 made for TV is great because of all the people in it, but the strangest and most interesting one is Jan Svankmajer's Alice from 1988.  it's a strange fusion of live action and stop motion animation, but it is not or the faint of heart.  It's surreal and odd, and those are understatements!  Check it out if you feel up for something off the beaten path.  Thanks for reading.  Wish Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson a happy birthday for the 27th and me a happy birthday for the 28th!