crooked house

Toddler Hamlet

"Brian Cox is now best known for his roles in Hollywood films like Manhunter. But he keeps in touch with his stage roots. Here he develops his Shakespeare Suzuki method, with a toddler soliloquy from 30 month old Theo." Via Maud.

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Alice in Wonderland: The Mathematical Satires

Image, by Andrew Hem, taken from his blog.

Melanie Bayley explains the satires of mathematics in Alice:

What would Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland be without the Cheshire Cat, the trial, the Duchess's baby or the Mad Hatter's tea party? Look at the original story that the author told Alice Liddell and her two sisters one day during a boat trip near Oxford, though, and you'll find that these famous characters and scenes are missing from the text.

As I embarked on my DPhil investigating Victorian literature, I wanted to know what inspired these later additions. The critical literature focused mainly on Freudian interpretations of the book as a wild descent into the dark world of the subconscious. There was no detailed analysis of the added scenes, but from the mass of literary papers, one stood out: in 1984 Helena Pycior of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee had linked the trial of the Knave of Hearts with a Victorian book on algebra. Given the author's day job, it was somewhat surprising to find few other reviews of his work from a mathematical perspective. Carroll was a pseudonym: his real name was Charles Dodgson, and he was a mathematician at Christ Church College, Oxford.

The 19th century was a turbulent time for mathematics, with many new and controversial concepts, like imaginary numbers, becoming widely accepted in the mathematical community. Putting Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in this context, it becomes clear that Dodgson, a stubbornly conservative mathematician, used some of the missing scenes to satirise these radical new ideas.

Luke the Lyricist

Luke has taken to tinkling away at the piano keys, making up spur-of-the-moment songs. Two recent lyrical masterpieces, sung to hauntingly mournful (if somewhat droning) melodies:

"When I grow up, I will be a worker at the grocery store, when I come home, I will have a drink, then I will go back, then I will come home, then I will go back, then I will come home, then I will go back, then I will come home..."

"I love you, I hope you don't die... If you are killed by a bad guy, a giant robot will take him to jail, but then the bad guy will break out of jail and kill everybody except the giant robot because robots can't die..."

More Christmas Windows and Other Odds and Ends

 

These two photos of last year's Steuben Glass holiday window in New York are from wallyg's photostream on flickr. 

Here are some lovely photos of last year's Christmas lights in London.

I'd like to try to make a snowflake curtain like this one, maybe when Sylvie gets big enough to help make all those snowflakes.

Rima discusses snow in the books of her childhood and shares a few images of her own.

This animated Olivia Christmas window, featured on a lot of the children's lit blogs I like, was originally brought to my attention by Sara O'Leary.

Alice in Wonderland Christmas Windows at Bergdorf Goodman in New York

The above images, by Rudy Pospisil, were taken from here. He's got lots of great detail shots here.

One of these years I'm going Christmas shopping in New York. And then another one of these years I'm going Christmas shopping in Paris. And then another one of these years I'm going in London. Right after I win the lottery.

Yesterday on twitter @maudnewton linked to these gorgeous photos of the Bergdorf Goodman Christmas windows, decorated on a Lewis Carroll Alice theme. Update: Here is the store's own slideshow, with titles of the windows and descriptions. There are more views of the windows here although I can't tell if they're still supposed to be Alice ones. On flickr, I found some lovely detail shots here, here, and here. That last one might be from a different window but it looks like a mad tea party nonetheless. Again, this one might be on different theme but it's still stunning -- look at it in its largest size. And this series has some shots that reveal the size of the window compared to a person standing in front of it. There are some good shots in this Times  slideshow of Christmas windows. I would love to see a story about the designers behind this window and some photos of the making of it.

Searching for these images sent me on a round-the-world Christmas window shopping spree last night. Expect more Christmas windows over the coming days.

Wondering What Happened to the Moon?

Screw that whole "He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he knows if you've been bad or good so be good for goodness sake" technique. We've had rather more than the usual share of crying and pouting around here lately. Until this morning, when we played "I hope the bad guy doesn't <insert chore here>" successfully for at least two hours. All you have to do is shriek something like, "I hope the bad guy doesn't brush his teeth... Oh no! He's getting  his tooth brush... Stop him! Horrors, he's putting toothpaste on it! The moon is going to spin out of the sky if the bad guy brushes his teeth... He's... wait... the bad guy's brushing his teeth! Oh noooooooo! There goes the moooooooooooon!"

The bad guy took off his pajamas, put them in the wash, picked out his clothes and got dressed entirely by himself, brushed his teeth, brushed his hair, picked up all his toys, picked up all his sister's toys, took some dirty laundry upstairs, took all the dirty dishes out to the kitchen, took out the garbage, scrubbed the bathroom toilets, did the grocery shopping, and reshingled the roof.

Okay, so maybe those last three are a bit of an exaggeration. 

If you're wondering where the moon went, why the sun has turned black, why the earth's orbit has suddenly stopped, and why an alien spacecraft has landed on the White House lawn, well, I'm afraid we might be responsible. We're sorry for the inconvenience but David and I feel it was totally worth it.

Keeping a Poinsettia Alive

On a somewhat cheerier, more Christmassy note, from Jean Kerr's Penny Candy:

My next-door neighbor believes in an after-life for poinsettias. According to her, when the blossoms have wilted you must pinch them off. Next you place the pot containing the remains in a warm, dark place in the attic, where you water it every five days. Then in May you take it out and plant it in the garden. In September, you dig up the shoots and move them to a sunny window indoors. Eventually, if you have been constant in your ministrations, the plant should bloom again.

Listen, I would do all that for a friend but not for a three-dollar poinsettia.

I'm not even sure I would do that for a friend. (Just kidding, friends. I would totally dig up your shoots if you needed me to.)

Irene Vilar's Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict

Irene Vilar's memoir, Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict, has gotten a lot of attention from the press and, with that sensationalistic subtitle, it's not hard to see why. Vilar wrote an earlier, well-received memoir about her relationship with her mother, who committed suicide when Vilar was eight years old, and her grandmother, an heroic Puerto Rican political activist. This second memoir is about what was happening in Vilar's life while she wrote the first, especially her relationship with a man at least thirty years her senior with whom she became involved when she was only fifteen years old and studying at Syracuse.

The man, a narcissistic professor of Latin American literature, had three successively younger wives before his relationship with Vilar and claimed that each of the marriages had ended because the women wanted children. It was, you see, essential for artistic and philosophical reasons that he remain free of all such encumbrances. (Of course. Why didn't he just get a vasectomy is presumably a question for another book.)

Once we learn about Vilar's mother's sucide and her father's quick remarriage, it's easy to understand how Vilar became unusually dependent on an abusive relationship with this man. The obvious question then becomes: why didn't she simply use birth control instead of undergoing fifteen abortions in fifteen years? Well, as her subtitle indicates, Vilar claims that the cycle of pregnancy and abortion became a kind of addiction as her unconscious desire to have children conflicted with her need to keep her lover. And -- although Vilar never mentions this in the memoir proper -- in the foreword it is revealed that, in the 50s and 60s, Puerto Rican women were used as guinea pigs by the US government to test female contraceptives, particularly dangerously high-dose pills that sometimes resulted in sterility. For me, this is a very telling fact.

Vilar prefers to call the book a "testimony" rather than a "memoir." I'd go one further, perhaps -- it reads almost like a psychological or sociological case study, albeit a well-written and even at times poetic one. But one that is uncomfortable to read, as such things usually are, nonetheless.

Sleeping Beauty's Stupid Parents

Evening. Steph is sitting in the living room, watching TV. David comes downstairs, looking upset. He pauses in the doorway and sighs.

Steph [looking up]: What?

David: Sleeping Beauty's parents had fifteen years to warn her about spindles. FIFTEEN YEARS.

Steph: ...

David [shaking head]: All they had to do was show her a few pictures, explain the thing's use, warn her never to touch one...

Steph: Been reading Luke fairy tales while he's in the bathtub again?

David: Yes. Stupid parents.

Steph: Oh well. It all turned out okay in the end.

David: Yeah, but they were just lucky.

I should have told him sure, they could have warned her never to touch a spindle but that probably would have been the fairy tale equivalent of abstinence-only sex education.