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@ Jaesha, hi, yes I enjoyed the Disney version because it's still quite faithful to the book but pleasant enough to appeal to children, (and the child in all of us, blah, blah). Remember - the book still "works" as just a kids fairy tale (and fairy tales are often weird and gruesome, aren't they). The book was, of course, originally written as a gift to a little girl called Alice.

It's interesting that the Disney animators stuck closely to the original illustrations of the book which were done by John Tenniel. He had some affiliation to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, so
that brings another dimension to what the book is really "about" in an artistic sense.

Can I just mention that I don't think there was any evidence to suggest that Dodgson ever took drugs, even though many other writers at the time did experiment.

He was a very, very shy Victorian with a tragic stutter, who was intelligent to the point of being a genius, never married and got on better with children than adults. I think his real life was rather quiet and he simply expressed his amazingness though his writing.

These ideas about the book being specifically drug related belong very much to the 1960s and what was going on then, I think. The Victorian mindset was very different to the modern one.

One curious bit of trivia: Dodgson crossed both paths and swords with Gilbert and Sullivan, whose satirical operettas continue to be performed to this day.

The first big G&S hit, HMS Pinafore, is a trenchant satire on the British navy and contemporary melodrama. At one point, one of the heroes, the captain of the Pinafore, sings about what a kind, courteous, and clean-mouthed person he is. He never swears, he declares, and when the chorus questions this, he amends it to say, "Well, hardly ever." Later on, he utters a "Damme," which of course provokes horror among all the characters on stage--including every stage sailor in site. The audience, seeing a twisted version of its own reality, laughed for hundreds of nights of performances.

Yet it has to be remembered at this point that in English middleclass society of the period, swearing was tantamount to throwing a brick through a plate glass window. Even in private, it was seldom done by gentlemen and ladies. (The famed Victorian historian Macaulay, when writing to his nephew and later biographer, always used abbreviations when he wanted to indicate the force of his emotions through the use of four-letter words.)

The Reverend Dodgson was not amused, any more than Victoria was. He railed in the most prestigious newspaper columns of the day about this vulgarity on stage, in a production to which parents might accidentally bring their children. (Always, with Dodgson, it came back to children and innocence. I suspect there was some childhood crisis in the back of his own life.) The matter blew over after a while, but Dodgson's complaints did temporarily threaten this first great G&S success, since he was already an extremely popular and well-regarded author.

At another point in his life, Dodgson actually suggested obliquely to Sullivan, the composer part of the team, that perhaps he could do something about setting Alice to music on stage. Sullivan must have seen just how impossible that was, and with his equisite sense of courtesy, managed to deflect the idea tactfully. But it does leave me wondering what Sullivan might have written to Dodgson's satirical songs in Alice or LookingGlass, had he been given the chance.

Originally posted by fable
The Xanadu/Coleridge myth is just that, a myth, as he himself admitted; but he never could shut the thing down.

Says you, perhaps Coleridge felt the drug angle dimished his work so he tried to counter the rumour to make his work seem less effected by his opium addiction. It's conjecture but then it's equally as plausible.

Originally posted by Mr Sleep
Says you, perhaps Coleridge felt the drug angle dimished his work so he tried to counter the rumour to make his work seem less effected by his opium addiction. It's conjecture but then it's equally as plausible.

Well, yes; but meaning no offense, one might as well say that your great-grandfather killed little children. It's purely conjecture, and there's no way to disprove it. The burden of proof, here, is on the person who makes the allegation. There's no evidence that Coleridge's opium-taking caused the poem; only the remarkable effusions of some Edwardian period writers who were totally in the dark about opium, despite it's widespread use.

Coleridge definitely did use opium, and he hated his addiction, as some pretty horrifying letters indicate; but there's no evidence that he ever wrote under the influence, and he resisted it during most of his active poetry-creating life. (He nearly ended up taking his life on one occasion to break the habit.) I tend to follow one of the leading modern scholars, Elisabeth Schneider, who writes: "The narcosis of opium has been popularly described as having the effect of heightening and intensifying the acuteness of the senses. This it quite definitely does not do. If anything, the effect is the reverse." Coleridge's own meticulous notebooks also pay tribute to the care with which he painstakingly worked and re-worked his supposed "visions."

But then, you know, that's the highest art, in some sense of the word. The ability to craft something so carefully that there seems no care in it at all. To cut a gem delicately into some animal shape so flawless, that nobody thinks it's a gem any longer, but something spontaneous, leaping forth into creation.

Originally posted by Mr Sleep
Poe was also apparently a drug abuser.

You know, I meant to respond to this one, but forgot until today. My apologies.

Poe didn't use drugs. This was a deliberate lie started by Rufus Griswold, a failed Baptist minister-turned-editor. The two disliked one another greatly, although they were forced due to location and circumstance to deal with one another frequently. Here's what the Poe Society of Baltimore has to say about Griswold:

"In October of 1850, Griswold published an enlarged and even more vituperative account of Poe's life in the International Monthly Magazine. Almost simultaneously, this article appeared as a "Memoir of the Author" in a third volume of Poe's works. In this "Memoir" Griswold cleverly manipulated and invented details of Poe's life for the least favorable account he could create. He even forged letters from Poe to exaggerate his own role as Poe's benefactor and to alienate Poe's friends. (A. H. Quinn provides an exacting account of these forgeries in his 1941 biography of Poe.) No lie was too great for Griswold, no slander too outrageous. Poe's choice not to return to the University of Virginia became expulsion for wild and reckless behavior. Poe's honorable discharge from the army became desertion. The 1827 publication of Tamerlane and Other Poems was dismissed as a lie. He even accused Poe of engaging in some dark secret with the second Mrs. Allan and invented a scheme by which Poe supposedly blackmailed an unidentified "literary woman of South Carolina" (presumably Mrs. Ellet). By praising Poe's writings and attacking Poe's character, Griswold managed to make himself appear to be a sincere admirer and to attain a false sense of fairness in his general approach to Poe. In short, it was a brilliant piece of character assassination. Poe's literary executor had become his literary executioner. Once again, Poe's friends came to his defense, but Griswold had done his work well. For every magazine that carried a condemnation of Griswold's infamy, three repeated his titillating slanders as fact."

It was this man who started the lies about Poe using drugs in his so-called "biography" of Poe. Poe is known to have used laudanum (opium) only once in his life--typically, in a botched attempt to commit suicide. Otherwise, he never touched the stuff. Nor would it be likely, since the exquisite control over mood that Poe displays in his first person tales of horror require cold sobriety to write.

My, what inopportune timing...

Originally posted by Jaesha
What do you in particluar enjoy/dislike about the story
Curioser, curioser...

I like getting absolutely baked and watching that trippy Disney cartoon version. That cat is just tooooo weird. And then you have the hookah-smoking caterpillar-what a stoner movie it is.
Who cares if he used drugs or not? It doesn't change what he wrote.

If you're not wasted, the day is.

Re: My, what inopportune timing...

Originally posted by Ode to a Grasshopper
I like getting absolutely baked and watching that trippy Disney cartoon version. That cat is just tooooo weird. And then you have the hookah-smoking caterpillar-what a stoner movie it is.
Who cares if he used drugs or not?

Well, you apparently do, if you're going to refer to the movie approvingly as being "trippy," and call it a "stoner movie." Are you saying the animators were on drugs? What do you mean by stoner movie, @Ode? You've left me confused. (Not that this condition is all that hard to accomplish, still...)

What a coincidence...

...since you guys were talking about Poe, I just read this article about the Poe Toaster.

Apparently every year (during Poe's death anniv) for the past 54 years, somebody in a cloak with bushy eyebrows would come to Poe's grave touch the tombstone and place three roses and a half-filled bottle of cognac.

@Fable-I couldn't care less if he was on drugs or no, myself. Many great artists were, many weren't. Doesn't change what they created.

A stoner movie is a movie that is particularly good to watch while stoned. Other candidates include anything with the Muppets, the Wizard of Oz, the Labyrinth (a terrible, yet trippy, 80s movie starring David Bowie as a goblin king), etc. Whether the writers were on drugs or not is irrelevant, it's the movie itself that counts.

Re: What a coincidence...

Originally posted by Maharlika
...since you guys were talking about Poe, I just read this article about the Poe Toaster.

Apparently every year (during Poe's death anniv) for the past 54 years, somebody in a cloak with bushy eyebrows would come to Poe's grave touch the tombstone and place three roses and a half-filled bottle of cognac.

Yes, and what's more interesting, to me, is that people have deliberately avoided trying to find out the identity of the phantom gravesite visitor. I strongly suspect that a few Poeites behind the scenes know the identity of the person involved, because they talk about his having passed the torch on to a son or sons in 1998; just where do you get that kind of inside information? It would even surprise me if some of the local Poeites themselves were involved in keeping the tradition alive. Frankly, I don't care: like you, I think it's kinda neat.

Originally posted by Ode to a Grasshopper
A stoner movie is a movie that is particularly good to watch while stoned. Other candidates include anything with the Muppets, the Wizard of Oz, the Labyrinth (a terrible, yet trippy, 80s movie starring David Bowie as a goblin king), etc. Whether the writers were on drugs or not is irrelevant, it's the movie itself that counts.

Oh, I get you, thanks. I could never watch any of those films while under the influence of any drugs, including alcohol. They're far too invasive on what we call "reality" as it is.

But if you're looking for similar things to watch you might try the old Tex Avery cartoons for Warner Bros from the 1940s, with their incredible array of physical contortions, violence, mordent social commentary and a chaotic humor that has never been matched.

They were showing those earlier this year on free-to-air TV. I thought I had seen some pretty disturbing stuff (what with a year here at SYM ) but that was just something else entirely. Like Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat...*shudder*

Don't watch the Labyrinth sober, by the way. It's truly terrible, only noteworthy for the Jim Henson character design and for laughing at David Bowie.

Originally posted by Ode to a Grasshopper
Don't watch the Labyrinth sober, by the way. It's truly terrible, only noteworthy for the Jim Henson character design and for laughing at David Bowie.

Oi! Labyrinth is a cult classic, don't diss it!!

Originally posted by fable
But if you're looking for similar things to watch you might try the old Tex Avery cartoons for Warner Bros from the 1940s, with their incredible array of physical contortions, violence, mordent social commentary and a chaotic humor that has never been matched.

Except by Jim Carrey. Physical contortions... Check, Violence... Check, Mordent Social Commentary... Well, there was the Truman Show so check, and Chaotic Humor... Check. Besides, finding Ace Ventura 2 or somesuch will be a hell of a lot easier to find at a video store than old Warner Bros. cartoons (though the Cartoon Network does show them). Nothing trippier than watching him emerge from a rhino's ass.

Originally posted by Georgi
Oi! Labyrinth is a cult classic, don't diss it!!

So is Plan 9 from Outer Space, but that doesn't make it any less terrible a movie.

Jim Carrey's not really to my tastes, did anyone see that awful Ace Ventura cartoon?

Originally posted by Ode to a Grasshopper
Jim Carrey's not really to my tastes, did anyone see that awful Ace Ventura cartoon?

Yeah, the cartoon sucked.

I loved the movies though. Mind you, I can only take him in short supplies, but he cracks me up in his best films. The afore mentioned rhino scene (complete with tourists who think the rhino is giving birth) makes me almost defecate myself from laughing so hard.

Originally posted by Kayless
Except by Jim Carrey. Physical contortions... Check, Violence... Check, Mordent Social Commentary... Well, there was the Truman Show so check, and Chaotic Humor... Check. Besides, finding Ace Ventura 2 or somesuch will be a hell of a lot easier to find at a video store than old Warner Bros. cartoons (though the Cartoon Network does show them). Nothing trippier than watching him emerge from a rhino's ass.

Yeah, but the Warner Bros cartoons are far better.

Btw, Mike Werb's The Mask deliberately intended the character of the cartoonish Masked Jim Carrey as a tribute to Tex Avery. He said as much during interviews at the time of the film's release. I don't think of Carrey's work as being anything like Avery's; it's more a matter of having done a script that sticks in everybody's mind, which shows those characteristics. His humor is completely different in Liar, Liar, for example.

Like Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat...*shudder*

I don't know if you meant to indicate this was Avery, but I don't think it is--Felix was owned by a different studio. Avery was responsible for Porky Pig, the early Daffy Duck (who was more like Bugs Bunny, which hadn't been invented at the time), and later for Droopy Dog over at MGM. This is a dull transfer, but here's an example of something which is now considered standard, but was remarkable when Avery first did it on cartoon: Here's a good website that goes into Avery's way of doing things. Another is this. This page has a lot of screens, though most of 'em come from his later MGM years, rather than from his really, truly chaotic work at Warner Bros.

Re: My, what inopportune timing...

Originally posted by Ode to a Grasshopper
I like getting absolutely baked and watching that trippy Disney cartoon version. That cat is just tooooo weird. And then you have the hookah-smoking caterpillar-what a stoner movie it is.
Who cares if he used drugs or not? It doesn't change what he wrote.

Thought that would be your kinda movie.