Cof L49

[Mark Kohut]

	* 
	* 1960: American writer Martin Gardner publishes a special edition, The Annotated Alice, incorporating the text of both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. It has extensive annotations explaining the hidden allusions in the books, and includes full texts of the Victorian era poems parodied in them. Later editions expand on these annotations. 
	* 1961: The Folio Society publication with 42 illustrations by John Tenniel. 
	* 1964: Alicia in Terra Mirabili is published: the first Latin translation of the book. 
	* ____________________________________________________________________________________________
	* 
	* Martin Gardner's book particularly was quite influential, showing all the math and other allusions in the Alice books. Martin Gardner wrote a regular column for Scientific American Mag, that mag cited in chap 1 as one Oedipa read.
	* There were also three (kinds of) movies made of Alice in 1966...............
 
Seems Carroll's work was canonized in that decade.....shown to be much, much more than your average kids' books. 



----- Original Message ----
From: "kelber at mindspring.com" <kelber at mindspring.com>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2009 6:35:38 PM
Subject: RE: Cof L49

Alice In Wonderland is kind of a mainstream work for TRP to be referencing, although the references are relatively covert.  The Grace Slick song was written in 1967, so maybe when COL49 came out, the references seemed fresher.  Finnegans Wake also referenced AiW and Nabokov translated AiW into Russian.

Also,

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

In the present day, referencing AiW in a new work would come across as pretty stale.

Laura


-----Original Message-----
>From: David Payne <dpayne1912 at hotmail.com>

>
>lotsa of Alice in Wonderland connections made in this group reading:
> 
>* Curiouser & Curiouser
>* Driblette's head / Cheshire Cat
>* Satirical poems & songs (see Laura, below)
>* Down the rabbit hole / out of the tower (see Bailey, below)
> 
>I was also reminded of AiW by Dr. H's pill offerings.
> 
>Others?
> 
> 
> 
>On Sat, 6 Jun 2009 01:00:06 -0400, michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com wrote:
>
>> Laura wrote:
>>>> The satirical poems and songs that crop up in Alice In Wonderland seem like an inspiration.
>> and I replied:
>>>
>>> Pynchon, though, often aims for lyricism rather than satire, in the
>>> songs and I think it's also fruitful to place that production value
>>> higher on an imputed scale of values in his prose than many people
>>> seem to do.
>>>
>> which sounds ever so slightly rude, though the sentiment is quite innocent.
>>
>> Alice's adventures are analogous to Oedipa's in several ways.
>> First, Alice's trip down the rabbit hole interrupts a sweet summer
>> afternoon, and young Alice is obviously well-born, young and healthy.
>> Although Oedipa's angst is inarguably real, the circumstances of her
>> life are what many people would call idyllic. We know from _Vineland_
>> that the divorce she's heading toward is going to be "unusually
>> amiable"; she's not lacking for material well-being, she's the good
>> fortune to be attractive and orgasmic. A-and although she correctly
>> senses conspiracy (or at least, something piscine), she herself is not
>> directly threatened.
>>
>> Like Alice (who faces the various bogies of Wonderland with direct
>> questions, applies her own standards of behavior to them, and finally
>> puts them in their place definitively) Oedipa has a brave heart: not
>> quailing before the hazards in any environment (instanced by her
>> willingness to pinch a boat with the Paranoids, have sex with a
>> stranger, introduce herself to various and sundry, walk the streets of
>> San Francisco without either Michael Douglas or Karl Malden), and
>> daring - in the current chapter - to detach herself from a guided tour
>> in a defense facility, an environment many of us might find daunting,
>> and strike up a conversation with Koteks.
>>
>> Delving a little deeper, the situations and characters Alice meets are
>> distortions of recognizable types in Victorian England, which in many
>> cases are still recognizable today. In some avuncular way, Carroll
>> may have been preparing the young dear with his tale for experiences
>> she could expect in her future. Unwind a little bit of the kinky age
>> difference and CofL49 might be a sort of Baedeker OBA compiled for
>> young female Republicans.
>>
>> Specifically, as the Mad Hatter referred to mercury-poisoned
>> craftsmen, the Red Queen to power-mad aristocrats, "nothing drier than
>> a caucus race" to the predictability of politics, etc etc etc, a young
>> lady worth her salt in California would probably encounter the land
>> speculators, the disgruntled techies, the New Agers (what is the
>> Nefastis Machine but an attempt to graft psychism with an overcoat of
>> Science?), the wingnuts, and - if she actually looks - the
>> disenfranchised.
>>
>> I think Carroll's songs are tighter, in general, and more loony...
>> (We went to see the Dali museum in St Petersburg yesterday, and in the
>> context of those works a little light went on in my mind and tonight
>> I'm thinking of Lewis Carroll as maybe the first surrealist.)
>> if he were in charge of the songs in CofL49, Baby Igor's song would be
>> 3 or 4 stanzas. The Serenade would not change much, it reminds me in
>> some ways of the Mock Turtle's Song. Serge's song is the least
>> Carrollian and reminds me that Pynchon's purposes are not the same as
>> Carroll's.
>> But after all this Wonderland aspect is but one of the many layers,
>> only a fraction of the surplus value.