DEEP SCRATCH

Category: Alice In Wonderland

  • Some Joyce/Pound ‘News’ items…

     

     

     

    The Politics of Modernist Poetics: Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell and Imagism:

    Imagism was the poetry of directness and distillation championed by Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell in the first years of the 20th century, reacting against the flowery verse of late Romanticism and urging poets to look to earlier models—like Sappho in ancient Greece and Li Po in 8th century China—to create a poetry of precise and powerful images, without any superfluous words or ornaments.

    http://poetry.about.com/b/2011/10/19/the-politics-of-modernist-poetics-ezra-pound-amy-lowell-and-imagism.htm

    Great literature will live on with or without a prize

    With readability the watchword for the Man Booker prize, it’s unlikely any of the literary greats would even get on to the shortlist
    • Editorial
    • The Observer, Sunday 16 October 2011  
      • Would James Joyce have ever made the Man Booker shortlist? Not, you guess, if the current crop of judges had anything to do with it. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man might have squeaked on, but Ulysses? Not a chance. “Readability” is the watchword of this year’s panel, apparently, led by the former spy mistress, Dame Stella Rimington. Fellow judge and ex-MP Chris Mullin likes something with a “bit of zip”.
      Given that the Booker is at heart a speed-reading contest for judges – 100-odd novels to read in a couple of months – it is not surprising that those poor unfortunates faced with the task favour books that can be tackled in a few swift hours. Eighty books in and counting, who would want to be confronted with Finnegans Wake?

      http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/16/observer-editorial-man-booker-prize?newsfeed=true 

      “Poetic possibilities

      Review by MARTIN SPICE

      Poet/editor Ezra Pound’s contribution to what we now know as The Waste Land was profound and is well documented. Many years ago, British publishers Faber & Faber released a facsimile transcript showing his comments and crossings out and he is frequently referred to, rightly or wrongly, as the architect of the poem. Those amendments and alterations are included in the app and can be seen alongside the final version of the poem. There are hours of interest here in examining just what Pound left in and took out.

      http://thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2011/7/5/lifebookshelf/9009337&sec=lifebookshelf

      Mad about the girl: Tate Liverpool’s Alice in Wonderland show

      Alice Liddell inspired Lewis Carroll, whose books inspired a thousand art works. But are they any good? Adrian Searle heads down the rabbit hole at Tate Liverpool’s new show
    Alice Pleasance Liddell taken by Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll 
    The real Alice … Alice Pleasance Liddell taken by Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll. Photograph: National Portrait Gallery London
     

    Lewis Carroll, or rather the fictive world of Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, is firmly embedded in our culture. I am surprised no one has made a religion out of Alice. Perhaps they have.

    She is also very much at large in Tate Liverpool. Here she is, here she isn’t: in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and in Jorge Luis Borges; in Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit, and in the surrealist works of Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí. Alice captivated Virginia Woolf and Walt Disney, inspired Robert Smithson, Sigmar Polke and a host of better and worse visual artists. Characters from the Alice books, or rather their putative ancestors, can be found, according to Alberto Manguel (writing in a brilliant, short catalogue essay), in Hamlet and Don Quixote, in Kafka, Homer and the Bible. The influence of Carroll’s creation can be found in sci-fi, detective fiction and philosophy, in pre-Raphaelite painting and in hard-arsed conceptualism. You can’t shake Alice off.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/nov/02/alice-wonderland-tate-liverpool-review?newsfeed=true

  • Alice In Amrita-Land Dodgson

    Alice in Amanita Land?

    “Alice Pleasence Liddel or ALP, “Finnegan said simply, “is one aspect of Anna Livia Plurabelle or ALP, the superwomen who contains all women, in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.”

    “Oh,” I said. It seemed the only adequate comment.

    “I have wondered, “de Selby went on, “if one can equate APL with ALP on cabalistic grounds, since both equal 111, what of PLA? But that is an irrelevance, i’ve decided. What is important is that in 1932 not only did Alice P. Liddell and John S. Joyce die, but the atom was split for the first time, and the 92nd chemical element was discovered–the last natural element, you see. For the first time in history, humanity had access to the energy of the stars and possessed a full catalog of the basic building blocks of the universe.“ – Robert Anton Wilson, The Horror of Howth Hill, email to the universe.
     http://acrillic.blogspot.com/2008/01/alp-111-and-raws-wake.html

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_in_Wonderland

    “Be who,
    farther potential? and so wider but we grisly old Sykos who have
    done our unsmiling bit on ‘alices, when they were yung and
    easily freudened, in the penumbra of the procuring room and
    what oracular comepression we have had apply to them! —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Pg 115.