Jonathan Miller – Page 3

Jabberwocky

The Jabberwock (2010).

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

The past month has been inordinately busy which has meant all the fine plans for a 2011 Coulthart calendar have been set back further than intended. No prizes for guessing the theme this year. This picture made its web debut last weekend at Alicenations, a Brazilian site devoted to all things Carrollian. Lots of splendid artwork on the rest of their page, including some of Jan Svankmajer’s Alice collages and some familiar bestiary hybrids. As to the calendar, I’m pleased to say the series of pictures is starting to feel halfway finished so I may have the whole thing completed and uploaded to CafePress sometime next week. Keep your vorpal blades crossed. In the meantime, here’s a picture detail, and while we’re on the subject, let’s not forget Terry Gilliam’s first feature film or the 1968 single from Boeing Duveen & The Beautiful Soup. (Given a choice I prefer the B-side, Which Dreamed It?)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Alice in Acidland
• Return to Wonderland
• Dalí in Wonderland
• Virtual Alice
• Psychedelic Wonderland: the 2010 calendar
• Charles Robinson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
• Humpty Dumpty variations
• Alice in Wonderland by Jonathan Miller
• The Illustrators of Alice

Alice in Acidland

No idea how this piece of exploitation from 1968 evaded my attention for so long but going by the IMDB reviews it’s probably safe to say that any obscurity is well-deserved:

this movie is very accurate, as every girl i have met that smokes weed instantly becomes a bisexual nymphomaniac. scientific studies have actual proved this many times over. the accuracy is phenomenal and i think i speak for every man out there when i say i leave my boxers on while having sex. the parties look like any other raging party in the 60’s where people sit together in a well lit room smoking weed and immediate have sex with everyone as soon as they walk in.

The director and writer were evidently embarrassed enough to use pseudonyms (Gertrude Steen…yeah, right) so the poster and title card (below) are probably as good as it gets unless tepid soft porn is something that really turns you on (baby).

Another fabulous Chateau Thombeau tip.

Alice has been in the news again this week with a new trailer turning up for Tim Burton’s forthcoming film and also this lengthy article in New Scientist which looks at the Alice books through an interpretative lens of algebra and geometry. While it’s nice to play with a fresh interpretation of the stories, essays like this are invariably subject to considerable strain as they attempt to wring hidden meanings from every quirk of the text.

The trouble with the Alice books is that their origin is almost as famous as the stories themselves, and it’s well-known that Dodgson wrote down Alice’s Adventures Under Ground as a present for Alice Liddell with no intention of seeing it published. Aside from the addition of extra scenes, the published book doesn’t radically differ from the handwritten original so you have to stretch your credulity to accept that Dodgson managed to improvise an entertaining story for a child whilst simultaneously authoring a critique of developments in contemporary mathematics. As usual in cases such as these it helps to refer to an earlier logician, William of Ockham, whose famous declaration that “Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily” is given on this mathematician’s page as “when you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better.”

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Return to Wonderland
• Dalí in Wonderland
• Virtual Alice
• Psychedelic Wonderland: the 2010 calendar
• Charles Robinson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
• Humpty Dumpty variations
• Alice in Wonderland by Jonathan Miller
• The Illustrators of Alice

Return to Wonderland

As the festive season shambles into view I’ve reworked my psychedelic interpretation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland from calendar to poster format for those who might prefer the latter. There are two poster sizes, the standard CafePress large and small, and the calendar is still on sale, of course. By coincidence, the dreadfully-named Syfy channel is currently running its own TV adaptation of the Lewis Carroll books. I haven’t seen Alice but the reviews I’ve read have been mixed. From the description I can’t imagine I’d enjoy it (Tim Burton’s film is the one I’m waiting for) but it shows once again how endlessly mutable the Alice stories have become.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dalí in Wonderland
• Virtual Alice
• Psychedelic Wonderland: the 2010 calendar
• Charles Robinson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
• Humpty Dumpty variations
• Alice in Wonderland by Jonathan Miller
• The Illustrators of Alice

Dalí in Wonderland

I’d only seen one or two of Salvador Dalí’s illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland before but you can see the complete (?) set here. These date from 1969 when Dalí was well past his prime as an artist but they’re still worth a look to see how he tackled each chapter, using the skipping girl motif from earlier paintings as his Alice figure. The attraction of the Alice books for the Surrealists is no surprise; Max Ernst produced a rather enigmatic series of Alice-themed lithographs while André Breton had earlier made Alice the “Siren of Stars” in the set of Surrealist playing cards he designed in the 1940 (below). I’d imagine there are other connections I’ve missed; leave a comment if you know of any. (Thanks to Charity for the tip!)

For more Dalí, here’s something I neglected to link to a while ago, the legendary Dalí meets Disney short, Destino.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Virtual Alice
• Psychedelic Wonderland: the 2010 calendar
• Charles Robinson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
• Humpty Dumpty variations
• Alice in Wonderland by Jonathan Miller
• Dalí and Film
• The Illustrators of Alice
• Surrealist cartomancy

Virtual Alice

No, I didn’t go searching for this, I had my fill of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland last month. The British Library website is a lot more amenable than it used to be for the casual browser, and one of its newer sections is a small collection of what they call virtual books which enable you to leaf through some of their exclusive volumes. The pages above are from the original handwritten manuscript, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, from which the printed book was later adapted. I have this in a small facsimile edition so I don’t need a web version, and the illustrations are often reprinted, but this web copy allows you to see the work in its entirety. They also reproduce the text and have an audio facility. I went through my copy a couple of times whilst working on the calendar in order to see how Dodgson depicted some of his scenes. A few of his conceptions differ from the famous Tenniel illustrations, not least his drawing of Alice herself who closely resembles the real Alice Liddell.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Psychedelic Wonderland: the 2010 calendar
• Charles Robinson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
• Humpty Dumpty variations
• Alice in Wonderland by Jonathan Miller
• The Illustrators of Alice