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alice in wonderland

“I’m not myself, you see”: Alice no Paint Adventure, Umihara Kawase

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And so I return to Wonderland. Because, it would seem, all ways bring me back here.

Alice in Wonderland (by which I mean Lewis Carroll’s two novels and the assorted iconography surrounding them), collectively, is my favourite story. There is literally no time I can recall in which I wasn’t profoundly shaped and influenced by Alice, or which I didn’t view my life through a lens ground from the philosophy of her story. Even those parts of my life that could have potentially occurred before I first read Alice, I now understand within the context of Alice. And Alice must have always been there, partially because Alice is part of the cosmic cultural background radiation we are all exposed to from birth, but also because I know she was. And Alice is not an it. Alice is a she.

I have previously (perhaps infamously, for longtime followers of my writing) attempted to explore and explain my experiences with video games and my understanding of their logic alongside my experience with Alice by comparing them. Probably bit off a bit more than I could chew with that one, but that’s something to grapple with in another time and another place. But Alice and games and Alice games provide a useful metaphor of a sort, in particular, the fact that a great deal of them are some manner of abortive. Of course, I am a perfectionist and have my own visions of things, and perhaps you can just chalk all of that up to me being impossible to satisfy when it comes to something like this. And that may be true: I am, after all, quite mad. But my madness is irreducible from my positionality, and my positionality is irreducible from my creative work. That’s sort of how this all works.

In 1995, there was an Alice in Wonderland game made exclusively for the Super Famicom. Developed by SAS Sakata and published by Epoch, Alice no Paint Adventure was based on the 1951 Disney Animated Canon adaptation of the story. First things first, however, I must mount a brief but necessary defense of this movie because a whole lot of Alice aficionados and Carrollians utterly despise it along with, somewhat surprisingly, a lot of Disney fans and historians. Carrollians see it as the ultimate example of “Americanization”, and you see an awful lot of teeth gnashing about its departures from the “canon text” (the idea of an Alice in Wonderland canon is even more self-evidently preposterous than canon in general already is) and pearl-clutching about fears people (read: people less intelligent and cultured than Carrollians) will get their first and primary exposure to this story through this movie, which will in turn displace the books.

What’s especially curious about this argument is the fact that in order for a movie to completely displace a book, one would think it would have to be wildly more successful than the book. For that to happen, the movie would have to be successful at all. Which the 1951 Alice in Wonderland was decidedly not.…

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Lost Exegesis (White Rabbit) — Part 2

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Part 1 of the essay can be found here. Unlike that part, this one will have spoilers of future episodes.

Alice in Wonderland

Next up in the Intermission is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, written by Lewis Carroll, and directly referred to in the dialogue and as well as being referenced by the episode’s title. Before we examine the manner of the title’s use, let’s take a brief look at Alice. Her adventures cover two books (the other being Through the Looking Glass) and are often issued as a twinset. LOST will certainly play with the Alice story in future episodes – the Season Three finale is titled after the second book, and Jack will read from the “Pool of Tears” chapter in Season Four.

Alice is ostensibly a children’s fairy tale ruled primarily an aesthetic, one that’s largely surreal and operates according to dream logic, what with all the talking animals and such. But the aesthetic is not completely arbitrary – rather, it relies primarily on finding new and strange meaning within the familiar, and in teasing out and secondary meanings for words that it can muster. The famous Jabberwocky poem, for example, is loaded with new portmanteau words, but they’re not meaningless words – rather, they are hybrids, and only sound unfamiliar until you examine the constituent components. There’s likewise a good deal of wordplay – “lessons” become “lessens” which means each teaching gets shorter – while other concepts presented are simply reversals of what we’d expect, like remembering the future instead of the past. And yet the Alice stories aren’t bereft of social commentary. Especially the first book, which presents all manner of British cultural institutions as being faintly ridiculous, albeit heavily disguised in certain aesthetic codes.

And not only does Alice function as cultural commentary, it’s become a part of western culture itself. In his introduction to the year 2000 reprinting, science writer Martin Gardner says that he would not “consider a person educated” who has never read the books. Indeed, that a phrase like “the White Rabbit” can be part and parcel of our regular lexicon attests to that.

So this is where we get the title to this episode, which is directly invoked by John Locke: Jack is chasing his “white rabbit” just like Alice chased a white rabbit into a strange and magical place. Which, of course, suggests that the Island is a kind of “wonderland” and that it operates by different rules than the mundane world. This usage, however, has definitely become mundane in SF/F culture. In the Star Trek episode “Shore Leave,” for example, Dr. McCoy sees a White Rabbit (crafted much like the original illustration of John Tenniel in Carroll’s book) passing by shortly after transporting down to a new planet, which turns out to be an elaborate amusement park. The interactions that the various crewmembers have on the planet are derived from their subconscious, and that is likely a clue to understanding the nature of the Island.

Or perhaps we should consider The Matrix, where Neo follows “the White Rabbit” (this time a tattoo on one of his clients) to meet Trinity, and eventually Morpheus, who describes the experience of leaving the Matrix in Wonderland terms.…

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Shabgraff in Wonderland (Shabcast 7)

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“[T]he speaking of language is part of an activity, or a form of life.”

– Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Today is the 150th anniversary of the origins of Alice in Wonderland.  A century-and-a-half ago today, Lewis Carroll took a boat trip with the Liddell family, and told the children a story.  Alice Liddell asked him to write it down.  He started the next day.

To celebrate, follow me down the rabbit hole and listen to Shabcast 7 – here.

A special one, this.  I’m once again joined by Josh Marsfelder (of Vaka Rangi) and for the first time by the wonderful Jane of many fames.  We watch (and chat about) the neglected 1966 Jonathan Miller TV version of Alice in Wonderland.  A forgotten masterpiece.  Well, maybe not forgotten… but not exactly remembered either.

This podcast had various titles before I settled on my final choice: ‘Alice Narrates Herself’.  It was going to be called ‘Cobwebs on the Tea Urn’, then ‘Mock Turtles all the Way Down’, then ‘Pig Latin’…  I even toyed with a facile but amusing ‘Shabcast Madness Returns’.  I eventually settled on a title which reflected something myself and my guests all seemed to notice and cherish: the fact that this production gives control of the narrative to Alice herself, and lets her tell the story.  One of the many things which makes this production unique.

I’m very proud of this episode, not just because I was lucky enough to get Jane to guest with myself and Josh, but also because the dynamic of the discussion is lovely.  The three of us attend a tea party, detached from time (it’s the evening for them, the middle of the night for me) and talk at cross purposes for ages… though, of course, unlike the Hatter and his friends, we’re hopefully not talking nonsense.  I love the way our distinct perspectives each hook into something different about the story we’re watching, and the way we overlap and converge.  We don’t always end up in exactly the same territory… but we get to read and enjoy each other’s maps.

What could be more apt?

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UPDATE (Same day):

I somehow forgot to link to Josh’s pieces about Alice.  Here they are:
http://forest-of-illusions.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/pet-hobby-of-mine-has-always-been.html
http://vakarangi.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/and-when-i-grow-up-ill-write-one-once_26.html
http://forest-of-illusions.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/the-second-song-of-queen-aliissa.html 

And here’s Jane’s essay about LOST, mentioned in the Shabcast:
http://www.philipsandifer.com/2013/11/pop-between-realities-home-in-time-for_27.html

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EDIT (Also same day):

In the original version of this post I mistakenly claimed that today was the 150th anniversary of the publication of the book.  I have corrected this howler. …

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The Colour Foundation

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More flash fiction.

Marcel Miedinger surveyed the system one last time before he disconnected. The dumbs were already active, weaving their own tagging system to correspond to the existing catalogue. Marcel watched the broad strokes of the semantic filing system get mapped out, but moved on as it all got a bit too big data for him. No intelligence was ever going to need to deal with the dumb catalogue anyway – it was just an underlying system to support the semantic labeling that the Colour Foundation had meticulously created.

There had been some debate right before the downsizing began over whether or not to maintain all four versions of the semantic catalogue, or just the most recent one. Marcel had, romantically, advocated for the full system. He prided himself on an old-fashioned streak that valued preservation. But in the end he was outvoted by a bloc of neo-modernists who wanted to ensure the immaculate design of the Colour Foundation’s final edition. He could have reopened the issue once the Foundation had shrunk to a skeleton crew, but he didn’t. In the end, he understood the impulse; he’d been an iconoclast once too.

Now he’d come to think of himself as an old man, whatever that concept referred to nowadays. Even today he kept track of the exterior world’s calendar. He knew he’d been around the sun two hundred and eleven times since he’d last seen it, making him two hundred and sixty-five all told. That was surely enough to be an old man by any definition, he told himself.

Suddenly, a raft of connections he had to the system went dark. Marcel started, old physiological processes kicking into action as though they’d been built for this. But the adrenaline faded quickly – it was routine. The dumbs had moved the ports allocated to the Colour Foundation so that they all went through the interface the Design Committee had created for the general public. Marcel had seen it a thousand times, but decided to connect in one more time – perhaps just for the novelty of being the first customer.

The interface was based around the sensation of an antechamber. It was not, by and large, a memory, nor even an assemblage of memories. This was reverse engineered – a set of manufactured sensations laid around the sensation of feeling your sensory input shift from being in a confined space to being in an open one. The original draft had what Marcel considered a somewhat childish sense paradox – the neurological sense of an open space combined with visual perceptions of a long corridor. Marcel had gone off on a lengthy lecture at that meeting, reminding everyone, or perhaps just himself, that accessibility was a moral principle of design.

He really could be a right old bore sometimes.

Still, he’d gotten it changed to the current open chamber, made entirely out of invented materials. This produced its own vertiginous sensation; the human mind never entirely adapts to completely artificial sensation, and an excess of it remained unsettling, though not, even he had to admit, in an entirely unpleasant way.…

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The Death of Marguerite-Charlotte David

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If you missed it on Tuesday, the Patrick Troughton volume of TARDIS Eruditorum is part of Storybundle’s new Doctor Who-themed bundle of ebooks. You can set your own price to get it, Barry Letts’s Who and Me, Nick Griffiths’s Dalek I Loved You, and Chris-Rachel Oseland’s Dining with the Doctor. Paying over $10 also gets you Earl Green’s VWORP! and The Best of TARDIS Eruditorum, a collection of this blog’s best posts with short introductions exclusive to the volume. The Best Of book is exclusive to Storybundle, and I have no plans to offer it for sale again this year. Head over to Storybundle to check it out. It’s a terribly neat deal. Meanwhile, a bit of flash fiction I scraped up off the bottom of my hard drive:

Marguerite-Charlotte David’s dress sublimates into the guttural crackle of mid-90s Japanese noise music. The shimmer of her dress curls in the informational fire consuming her, the crackle of the fire becoming a kaleidoscopic backbeat, its combusting edges measured precisely as they decay to form the outline of the resulting waveform. Her dress peels off her breasts, which, constructed out of imagination instead of memory, lack the mottling of digitized oil paint. They are instead porcelain polished with the damp shine of hardcore pornography, oil posing as sweat.

Ultradave14 has been caught out – he’s using junk data, a cache of some archive or another preserved during the final hours of the mycosis, after the mushroom cloud had finally noticed the gap in its original preservation plan. He’d gone packrat when the archives got closed out, grabbing an almost random assortment of texts and images that, predictably, he’s done next to nothing with. He’d never even looked at the painting enough to formulate a detailed imaginary layer, and when he was forced to fill in Marguerite-Charlotte’s breasts he had nothing prepared, and so subbed in something on what was, in hindsight, rather embarrassing instinct.

His sex partner, who identifies as Izu in this interaction, makes her displeasure known, quickly shredding the breasts into a stuttering Eurotrash pop jungle beat that’s emasculating in its groove. She’s only in it for the sake of making new kinds of sound, picked him because early 19th century neoclassical French painting was material she’d not mulched before. She’s running hundreds of these at once, taking memories and force-converting them to sound. The overwhelming majority will be crap, but that’s not the point of the operation. The point is the fleeting moments of truly new forms of noise.

Her use of generic sound is the equivalent of throwing a drink in his face, and he knows it. He’s caught off-guard, remembering rejection at a middle school dance. He’d been terrified all dance to ask the object of his crush, hung to the wall, not realizing until three years later how much that made him come off as creepy, and that she’d have said yes if he’d only asked her an hour earlier. Before he can get a handle on the memory it’s bled into the datastream, and Izu has turned it into a four second hiss punctuated by staccato inserts of a wet, hollow squelching sound.…

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