A Blog of Bosh

A controversy seems to have been raised by the Ofsted report on poetry in schools, which maintains that British pupils are not prepared to appreciate classic poetry because of a focus on a few poems, which are considered not “genuinely challenging.”
When it comes to citing these supposedly unstimulating poems, newspapers, in particular the Times that [...]

Rob Richards at Animation Backgrounds has reconstructed the environment in which Disney’s 1951 animated Alice in Wonderland is set.

Thanks to Michael Sporn.

I have added Florence Milner’s old essay on “The Poems in Alice in Wonderland“ (The Bookman, XVIII, September 1903, pp. 13-6) to the nonsenselit.org bookshelf.

The International Herald Tribune has a review of Unsuk Chin’s adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice which reveals problems with Achim Freyer’s staging:

One might have deemed the book universally known, but it apparently escaped Freyer’s upbringing in East Germany. He reportedly read it only after agreeing to the project based on his esteem for Chin’s earlier [...]

Korean composer Unsuk Chin’s opera based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland was premiered on 30 June at the Munich festival and has been favourably reviewed in the Guardian and the Los Angeles Times.

More information, including a photogallery and a video, is available at the Bayerische Staatsoper site.
Parts of the opera were previewed during the [...]

I mentioned in a previous post that Edward Lear’s copy of Alice in Wonderland is now in the USA, that he discussed the book with Fortescue (though we do not know what he thought of it), and that his circle considered Carroll’s tales as belonging to the same genre of literary Nonsense which Lear had [...]

A major contemporary art exhibition inspired by Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’ books entitled ‘Alice’s Wonderland’ is opening at “the gallery — Hornseys” on 14 April. Also on display “fine printers proofs from the original Sir John Tenniel wood blocks, as well as heliogravures by Salvador Dali.”

If you are interested in C.L. Dodgson’s mathematical works, you can read this article on the website of the Mathematical Association of America, which lists and links to several other essays on Carroll’s method for evaluating determinants.

The Moscow Times has an interesting story of the coming of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland to Russia: it seems the book had a very negative reception from the time of the first 1879 translation until 1967, when Soviet bureaucrats commissioned a translation after mistaking it for a Bulgarian book.

The whole of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (well, almost) in just 9 spectacular minutes, the original probably ran a bit longer as some scenes seem to be incomplete. On YouTube, in very low quality, but then I had never managed to see it:

For more information on the film and a some good comments see [...]