A Blog of Bosh

My Italian translation of Peter Newell’s Rocket Book, Il libro esplosivo, has been out for some time now. The publisher, orecchio acerbo, have a beautiful book trailer on YouTube:

While you are there, don’t miss the short for Stefano Benni’s first children’s book, Miss Galassia:

Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library has scans of a few of their Edward Lear manuscripts online; the small collection includes self-caricatures taken from letters and original cartoons for the Nonsense Botanies, but also the full manuscript of “The Nervous Family,” a parody of an old song “augmented” by Lear.
Unlike Lewis Carroll, Edward [...]

You may remember that a few months ago I posted on a projected TV series on Edward Lear’s journey through Albania in 1848. A promo of the documentary is now available on YouTube.

On YouTube, a nice animation based on Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies, by Matt Duplessie of Clandestiny:

Sumanguru Gyra Jones, from Somewhere West of the Everglades, proposes his own arrangement of Edward Lear’s poem:

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He also has an arrangement of Lewis Carroll’s “The Jabberwocky”:

At long last I have managed to see an episode of Tomfoolery, the 1970-1971 Rankin-Bass show based upon the nonsensical verse and whimsical characters of authors such as Edward Lear, Ogden Nash, Frank Gelett Burgess, and Lewis Carroll.

Thanks to tooktracker for uploading this; also visit the YouTube page for comments.

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 [...]

Edward Lear’s most famous poem is performed by the “amazing” Kazzy, with limited animation:
The Owl and the PussycatCaricato da norrisnuvo

There are a lot of UPA cartoons on YouTube; I had never seen Christopher Crumpet (1953), another story drawn in a pseudo-simple style reminiscent of Edward Lear with a largely nonsensical tale by T. Hee and Robert Cannon. The cartoon also reminds me of the earliest animation sequences, which very often started with a hand [...]

James Thurber’s drawings, once extremely popular, place him firmly in the tradition of Edward Lear’s apparently childish illustration, while his stories tend to be mildly satiric or parodistic.
One of the most famous of these, The Unicorn in the Garden, was adapted for one of UPA’s most acclaimed cartoons. After watching the short, don’t miss Michael [...]