"You know, I grew up in Wales, and when I became a writer and could choose to live wherever I wanted, I ended up going back… to Wales. I think we spend a lot of our adult lives trying to go back to where we were happiest as children."

Of all the insightful, delightful, and refreshingly honest things Jasper Fforde said this evening, in a quiet, little intimate talk hosted by the Lewis Carroll Society, this was probably the one thing above all that hit home for me. For obvious reasons, I guess.

I said when I blogged about Terry Pratchett that he was like an uncle (an old one), and Neil was like a rockstar, as he has so often been called. Jasper Fforde? Is very… dadlike. I don’t have any uncles like Terry (and I certainly don’t know any rockstars personally so can’t compare to Neil), but Jasper Fforde was so uncannily like my dad, in his offbeat sense of humour and devoted geekery towards a subject. If you’d replaced the games with books, the stacks of Magic: The Gathering cards and multi-sided dice collection with the huge plywood painting of the Cheshire Cat that hangs, grinning, over Jasper Fforde’s desk at home as he writes (he painted it himself, he told us with a gleeful childlike glint in his eyes), the likeness would have been even more remarkable.

And what an absolute treat and privilege it is to listen to one of your favourite living authors talk about one of your favourite dead authors – and talk about his work with an assurance that showed he knew his stuff while at the same time always staying accessible. I didn’t agree with every single thing he said about Alice (e.g. he thinks Alice is bland and almost a secondary character, while I think Alice is the most important character because she represents the reader wading through Wonderland), but much of what he said had me, and many others, nodding fervently: the wondrous meta-naming White Knight scene in Through the Looking Glass, how brilliant it is that the illustrations of Alice going through and coming out of the glass are on the same pageleaf, how important absurdity and nonsense is not only to comedy writing but to the whole of English culture, how, when he came to the books at five, re-read them at 13, and re-read them again at 31, they were completely different experiences, how he had hoped to layer and texture his own books so that his readers could re-read them and pick out different things each time – and much much more than I can write about.

"I was in Oxford filming Quills and decided to make a pilgrimage to the museum there to see the dodo that Tenniel and Carroll would have looked at themselves, as the models for Tenniel’s illustration. So I stood there, in front of the dodo, standing by the case and looking at it like you do on a pilgrimage – you know, you think to yourself ah, they would have stood here, and you (shifts position) kind of stand there yourself… anyway, so I wondered, what if you had a Dodo Home Cloning Kit? And I walked over to the shop, and asked if they sold Dodo Home Cloning Kits. And because this was Oxford, and the lady there probably had 18 PhDs or DPhils or whatever they call them, she calmly said to me: ‘Come back in 20 years.’"

And voila, the dodos in the Nextian world were born.

Interesting info from other questions that were asked:

• Melanie Bradshaw wasn’t inspired by anything in particular, he just liked the idea of an inter-species love story
• His favourite Nextian invention is the translating carbon paper (he also likes the rice and lentils Entroposcope)
• It was deliberate that the libraries in Shades of Grey are all empty, as a counterpoint to the Bookworld Library which has every book in the world, he thought it fitting that his new series had libraries with no books at all
• In the original drafts Acheron Hades’ hideout was in a high-tech zeppelin floating in the middle of nowhere; his (also Welsh) wife complained that this was too sci-fi and geeky, and Fforde’s response was something along the lines of "oh, all right, let’s make his hideout in some remote cottage in Wales then, you… you… Welsh socialist!" – which is, apparently, the true story of why Wales is a Socialist Republic in the books
• The reason Jane Eyre was picked for the first novel was because, starting out, and wanting to be very accessible, it was the only novel he could think of that he was sure everyone would know something about, even if this knowledge was limited to "it’s a musty old Victorian book"

And finally – an unexpected bonus!

Jasper signed my book, and threw in a couple of extras as well :)

Only 2000 of them postcards in the world! Though, I must say, I wish I had got the Spoon Ishihara one.

there are some songs that just start your morning off with a euphoric bang. bon jovi’s “you give love a bad name” is one of them. so is, as i discovered this morning, matchbox twenty’s “real world”, which plastered a silly grin on my face as i walked to the tube station and which i am sure made me an object of ridicule to passersby, embarrassment fortunately offset by the said induced euphoria.

i ache everywhere (no, there is no explanation, i just ache despite a marked lack of physical exertion of late), i am really tired, i have an unprecedented amount of work to do, there are unforeseen snags with stuff, i have not left the office on time once in the past few weeks, monday promises to be a crazy busy day and i still can’t find anyone to take my extra proms ticket for monday night… not to mention i am perversely continuing to sleep deprive myself by wasting time online when i could be sleeping. why, why do i do this?

but! on the bright side there have been several pieces of good news from friends lately (yays all around), some good-ish news for myself, and teasingly tentative summer weather beckons this weekend. oh BBC, you and your vague, non-committal “sunny intervals”. you’ll probably change your mind in the morning too, as well as throughout the day, fickle and heartless as you are.

anyway, to all, i am very well, i know i owe multiple people emails/messages/chat time (i think the victorians had the right idea about setting aside a letter-writing time everyday for personal correspondence; it really piles up), but i haven’t forgotten and hope to catch up soon… “hope” being the operative word! the work and jobhunt and other annoying offline obligations never seem to end.

oh and the trailer for tim burton’s alice is really weird. i have decided to drop the idea altogether that it is an “alice film” and instead think of it as an entirely new fantasy world and characters which bear some vague, very distant resemblance to carroll’s – i am sure it will be a fabulous film but let it be said it has very little similarity to alice! it’s almost as egregious a departure as ella enchanted was, the latter being worse only because it made the pretense of being like the book while alice has the saving grace of being a sequel.

New Images From Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland | Comingsoon.net

Tim Burton’s remake of Alice – probably the movie I’ve been most anticipating, and dreading, since I first heard about it last September – has finally released its first preview images! The link I’ve posted above includes two that I haven’t seen before, including close ups of Mia Wasikowska as Alice and Matt Lucas’s Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Much as anything related to Disney and entitled “Alice in Wonderland” makes me twitch, because it smacks of the common hodgepodge amalgamation of both books that so well encapsulates a plethora of generic assumptions and simplifications of all things Alice, the fact that it was Tim Burton directing gave me a dull glimmer of optimism. And it was with enormous relief that I found out a while ago it’d be a sequel where an older Alice returns to Wonderland, rather than a movie based on the books. It actually sounds an awful lot like American McGee’s Alice, which makes me wonder if there was some unconscious, unacknowledged influence in Burton’s conception of the plot… though it’s much less dark than the game.

The good thing about it being a sequel is that my one of my biggest fears has been totally dealt with – that the books would become horribly mangled in an attempt to give the film’s stars their fair share of screen time. The Hatter, played by Johnny Depp, only gets one chapter in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and a few scant pages in Through the Looking-Glass. And really you don’t see all that much of many of the other characters; they come and go very quickly as Alice muddles through the story.

And overall, the first impression I get from the released images is very, very positive: the landscapes are absolutely stunning, Alice has just the right amount of steely primness and vulnerability, Helena Bonham Carter’s Queen of Hearts looks appropriately insane and imperious, and Anne Hathaway’s White Queen is absolutely my favourite. The ever helpful Wiki article on the film informs me that her character doesn’t walk, but float, and I think that is totally perfect for the character! I can really see the vagueness, randomness and kind but scatterbrained nature of the White Queen coming out of that picture – less enthusiastic about the fact that Hathaway plans to play her as “cute but psycho”, as I really don’t think the White Queen is that psycho, but I quite like Anne Hathaway as an actress. So we’ll see.

Things I’m less enthusiastic about include the fact that they’ve combined the Queen of Hearts and Red Queen in Bonham Carter’s character (why? why? why? as if most people aren’t already confused enough about the two – if they wanted a character just to shout “Off with his head!” they could just have kept the Queen of Hearts and axed the Red Queen), and Johnny Depp’s weirdly clownlike Hatter. The typically Disney addition of mad is one I can live with, since although he was never called the Mad Hatter in the books, the word “mad” and plenty of madness does occur during the tea-party scene in particular. But… I am unconvinced that the excess of white makeup and Ronald-McDonald-esque wig are necessary. Johnny Depp is a genius actor and I adore him to bits so I am sure he will be brilliant anyway. I’m just not all that keen on the artistic direction of his character… and what is with the “10/6″ in the hat!! That is a lazy ripoff of the Disney Hatter which ALSO read “10/6″ – book Hatter’s hat thingy reads “In this style 10/6″.

AHHHHH!

Right. Okay… so, well, if I get off my Alice high horse (which I know I SHOULD, at least before I see the movie) and stop nitpicking, I have to say it looks absolutely brilliant. It has quashed most of my doubts and I’m really, really excited about it. I can’t believe we have to wait till 2010 to see it when they’ve already finished filming! In the meantime, I shall keep obsessively waiting for more photos and information.

On Tuesday, one of my sister’s friends rang for her while she was out. I asked if I could take a message, and after giving me a name, she hesitated briefly and asked if I was Cuilan’s older sister.

“Yup, that’s me.”
“Oh! You probably don’t remember me, but – ”
“I do actually, we met last year at my sister’s graduation dinner, right?”
“Yeah! She told me you were coming back! So what are you doing now? Are you on holiday?”

Surprised – pleasantly so, though slightly disoriented – to find myself in an actual phone conversation with a non-family-member in Sydney, I told my sister’s chatty friend that it was actually still termtime, sorta, for me, and that I was here working on my dissertation. She enthusiastically asked me what it was about (despite the fact that she’s a science student), and listened as I rather self-deprecatingly told her, flaky as it may sound, it was on the Alice books. To my further surprise more questions ensued on what exactly I was doing and what my findings were so far, and so I told her a little about my crazy fantasy/insanity parallel idea, and the tea-party in the books, and madness in the 19th century.

“Hey, it sounds really interesting,” she said. “You shouldn’t laugh at your own thesis, if you don’t believe in it, no one else will!”

It was like a shot right to the heart. In that instant, memories of all these people who had been like, the Alice books? Really? (especially my mom’s well-meaning but rather deflating how do you write 20,000 words on Alice in Wonderland?) flashed rapidly through my mind, and I realised this girl, whom I’d only spoken to once before in my entire life and who didn’t even know me, had put her finger bang on the thing that has been bugging me the most – do I really buy my own hypothesis? It’s been an uphill climb partly because of the paucity of criticism relating to Carroll, and partly because, as I only came to realise that evening, I have been far too timid to believe that I can assert something no critic has ever said before.

Matt spoke to me about this way back in one of our earlier meetings. “I think there’s a link there,” he said, of my harebrained, spur-of-the-moment notion, “and I think it’s good that it hasn’t really been explored.” Slavish reliance on critical opinion belonged, he added, to a lower level of academia, and at this point I really should be way past that.

So I thanked my sister’s friend warmly. We continued to chat a little longer, about random things like the USyd library, and she asked if I could get my sister to ring her back once she’d returned. CALL EMILY, I wrote in caps on my notebook above my list of Alice quotations, and underlined it twice.

I don’t think you’ll ever read this, Emily, but thank you.

There really isn’t anything for deflating pride quite like receiving your dissertation draft back from your supervisor, with “rubbish” scrawled in the margin next to one of your paragraphs. It wasn’t all bad; there were some ticks, some “good”s, but still. Even when you know that bit was kind of rubbish, that’s just harsh. And heartbreaking. And shattering. Ah, the time-honoured slap in the face tactic…

Courage, a trawl through JSTOR, a thorough reread of Alice and a visit to the USyd library – all long, long overdue. I really have to get it together.

Long had paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die.
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

This is so frighteningly haunting. I don’t really know why, and I can’t put my finger on it; it’s the last stanza especially, something about the word phantomwise, the thought of Alice moving unseen, in his dreams, under skies, lingering at the forefront of Carroll’s mind, haunting haunting him – perhaps it’s the new understanding I’ve acquired of their relationship, the knowledge that they suddenly broke everything off before Wonderland was published and that he hardly saw her after that, that when they did meet, it was cold and distant – it’s tragic, and terrifying, and I haven’t been able to get the last stanza out of my head since I read it again a few days ago. I can’t imagine living with that sort of pain, with a ghostly phantom in your life, a remnant of your past which you know is never, ever going to go away… it just – sends all these chills down my spine.

These books are creepy. Terry Pratchett has said before that he hates them, that they scared him as a child and made him uncomfortable, and the more I work with them the more I understand why…