Hookah

[Dekalb_Blues]

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Dekalb, this makes me extremely want to read Alice in Wonderland, as I've never read or seen any of it

A worthy ambition, C.A., old boy! As I am a bit of an aficionado of this work (and since I have some spare time and access to the internet until Dr. Shrankenkopf, the Sanitorium Director, returns and finds me in his office here at Happy Dale) I've ginned up this sparklingly brilliant guidepost unto the ages in re. the Alice material.

 Charles Dodgson and Alice Liddell [yes, THAT Alice]

In 1856 the Christ Church, University of Oxford mathematics professor and logician, Anglican deacon, writer, poet, and photographer (Queen Victoria admired his work) Charles L. Dodgson befriended the new Dean of Christ Church College, Henry Liddell, and his wife -- and their three young children, Alice, Lorina, and Edith. 

He took the girls on picnics and told them stories. Dodgson was also a celebrated Victorian photographer who had his own studio in Oxford. He photographed the girls many times (sometimes in states of déshabillé, but always with their parents' approval , and while they were chaperoned -- doubtlessly this sort of thing is liable to "trigger" the fragile ego of today's "social justice warrior" type: My God! Paedophile! Burn him!! 

http://theartofsuzzanblac.blogspot.co.uk...hiles.html

Dodgson, a fairly gentle and undemonstrative soul -- what would today be called a bit of a math geek/nerd, had a thing for the beautiful purity of true innocence, as typically archetypally exemplified by elegant conceptions in pure mathematics, and as well in the of winsomeness of young girls (it's perhaps pertinent that he was raised in a family with eleven sisters.) He was not interested in debauching that innocence, as is the current SJW consensus (being essentially fundamentalist Puritans, they see everything through a distorting lens of as-if-devilishly-imposed impurity); he was intent on capturing the essence of it scientifically or artistically.

One balmy July 4th in 1862 he and his friend Robinson Duckworth entertained the girls on a boat trip in the Oxford area with a story of Alice’s adventures in a magical world entered through a rabbit-hole...


 1951 Disney version

 1972 British version

 2010 American (Tim Burton, director) version

The ten-year-old Alice was so entranced that she begged him to write it down for her. 

As an early Christmas present, on November 26th, 1864, Carroll gave Alice a handwritten story, with his own drawings, called Alice’s Adventures Underground, dedicated to "a dear child, in memory of a summer day".
https://archive.org/details/AlicesAdventuresUnderGround

Urged by friends to publish the story, Dodgson re-wrote and enlarged it, removing some of the private family references and adding two new chapters.

The published version, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Dec. 1865), was illustrated by the noted artist John Tenniel -- his representations of characters and scenes have become iconic.

https://archive.org/details/alicesadventur00carr  (First edition, published in London. Since then this has become the single most successful children's book in the English language.)

 Tenniel's Alice meets treed Cheshire Cat; grinning (with or without Cat) ensues



http://en.booksee.org/s/?q=Lewis+Carroll...ardner&t=0  Modern annotated version explaining numerous esoteric subtleties of Carroll's best-known works (produced by a noted contemporary mathematician, logician and hyper-rationalist/materialist skeptic of all things magical or mystical, the late Martin Gardner)

The dreamily surreal and often comical, sometimes disturbing, but always mysteriously provocative psychological realities presented in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (and Carroll's laterThrough the Looking-Glass [1870] and The Hunting of the Snark [1876]) have had a colossal sort of Rorschach-effect on the hearts and minds of the generations since its publication; it has become an artistic meme to conjure with. Each succeeding generation seizes upon it anew as a metaphorical rallying-point for championing (or scapegoating) its era's idiosyncratic loves, fears, and hatreds.

In a chapter titled “Pathological Communication” in Pragmatics of Human Communication, Watzlawick, Bavelas and Jackson describe behavioral patterns that defy typical models of communication and are symptomatic of mental illness. While discussing the communicative tendencies of schizophrenics, Watzlawick et al. define “Schizophrenese” as “a language which leaves it up to the listener to take his choice from among many possible meanings which are not only different from but may even be incompatible with one another. Thus, it becomes possible to deny any or all aspects of a message” (73). They proceed to explain the converse situation, called “brainwashing,” with the example of a conversation between Alice and the Red and White Queens:


“I'm sure I didn't mean — “ Alice was beginning, but the Red Queen interrupted her impatiently.

“That's just what I complain of! You should have meant! What do you suppose is the use of a child without any meaning? Even a joke should have some meaning — and a child's more important than a joke, I hope. You couldn't deny that, even if you tried with both hands.”

“I don't deny things with my hands,” Alice objected.

“Nobody said you did,” said the Red Queen. “I said you couldn't if you tried.”

“She's in that state of mind,” said the White Queen “that she wants to deny something — only she doesn't know what to deny!”

“A nasty, vicious temper,” the Red Queen remarked; and then there was an uncomfortable silence for a minute or two.

The Red and White Queen “brainwash” Alice by taking the things she says and applying any meaning they choose to her words. This technique is essential to the language of the characters of Wonderland, who are always puzzling Alice by assessing different meanings to her words than she had intended. The use of the above dialogue as an example of this type of communication speaks to the relevance of the Alice books to studies of interactional patterns, and also to their value as teaching tools. The stories of Alice’s adventures are widely known and offer an easily-relatable way to explain complex topics through the playful situations that Carroll crafted.

Lough too sees educational value in Carroll’s work as he traces lessons in logic and behavior through Alice in Wonderland, illustrating various concepts related to adolescent psychology with Alice’s interactions in Wonderland. The Cheshire Cat introduces Alice to syllogistic reasoning, and the Queen of Hearts provides training in dealing with authority figures (312-13). At the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, Alice learns a lesson in impulsivity and over-confidence (309-10):

“Take some more tea,” the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
“I've had nothing yet,” Alice replied in an offended tone, “so I can't take more.”
“You mean you can't take less,” said the Hatter: “it's very easy to take more than nothing.”
“Nobody asked your opinion,” said Alice.

Lough reveals how impulsiveness leads Alice into a logical trap here, for a simple “Yes, thank you” would have avoided the Hatter’s backlash; instead, over-confidence acquired from other lessons in Wonderland causes her to act impulsively and fall into the March Hare’s trap (310). Carroll’s Alice enters Wonderland with a preexisting set of behavioral patterns that reflect her child-rearing and social conditioning, and as she comes into contact with many characters whose ways of thinking differ from her own she learns valuable lessons about communication. Lough projects theories of cognitive development onto the conversations between Alice and the Wonderland creatures, teaching by using Carroll’s work as examples to illustrate theory.

As a result of his productive usage of the text in building from Carroll’s writing and mixing in his own intentions to use the text as a teaching tool, Lough’s conclusion regarding the impact of Alice’s Wonderland travels on her life is far different from those of the psychoanalysts: “ . . . she re-enters [the everyday world] as a new person with new skills and strengths. Alice’s newly-acquired cognitive, moral, and ego development enable her to rise out of the unconscious” (314). Indeed, this re-contextualizing of Alice in Wonderland takes on a very different tone than the psychoanalytic studies concerned with contextualizing a hostile and disconcerting Wonderland in the details of Carroll’s life. This is further evidence of how authors over time continue to infuse their own readings and perceptions of meaning into Carroll’s work, continually widening its scope and allowing it to take on new meanings. The audience of Carroll’s books, in effect, is much like the Red and White Queen; Carroll has set out his words in conversation with his readers, and they are free to “brainwash” them as they will, assessing any variety of meanings to them.
--- from Jason Beckman, “ 'We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.' The Alice Books and the Professional Literature of Psychology and Psychiatry" http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/carr...kman2.html

The rise in the 1960s of mass interest in consciousness-change in general, and psychedelia in particular, led to a great revival of attention upon Carrol's by-then-nearly-century-old tales. Nowadays the high ground on the official narrative has been taken over by academic ideologues who demonize Alice's author for supposed personal rapacious depravity, educated-upper-middle-classist elitism, white-male-ist patriarchalism, capitalist imperialism/colonialism, and God knows what-all. Hollywood and Videogamewood tend to cast the Alice story in a very dark (nearly psychopathic) light.

PRO:
Ca. 1967: "Just Say Feed My Head!"
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKtFLDmIXrg Incidentally -- late in life, the psychedelically iconic Mdm Slick took up painting... https://www.artbrokerage.com/art/slick/_...5866_3.jpg https://www.artbrokerage.com/grace-slick http://www.peabodyfineart.com/slick/slic13440.htm)

CON:
1965 American "Just-Say-No" version (compare slightly later "Alice in Acidland" version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rotvMo022Do or the iconical "Go Ask Alice" of 1973: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_FqQ38DUaU)

http://booksellersvsbestsellers.blogspot...rland.html
https://www.leafly.com/news/pop-culture/...d-cannabis
https://www.leafly.com/sativa/alice-in-wonderland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheshire_Cat
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-19254839
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainmen...es/473082/
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainmen...and/36998/