July 4, 2014

July 4, 2014

I can imagine what that boat trip with little Alice Liddell was like.  It seemed innocent enough, but that one little trip probably changed her life forever.  I remember Billy Gray telling me stories as a small child, of episodes from The Twilight Zone.  I saw the actual shows, but the way he told stories was way more effective, which means scary.  The thing is, I think Billy taught me lessons in narration.   Even though I knew how the story ended, it was the journey to the end of that narrative that was the most important to me.  So as I mentioned, I can understand why Alice was so entertained by the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson story, but what amazes me is the manner in which Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll came up with such a tale in such short notice. 

When Dodgson told the story to the three little girls on the boat - Alice and her two sisters, he was just trying to amuse them, perhaps out of their boredom of taking this specific boat trip from Folly Bridge near Oxford to the village of Godstow.  In fact, the story is about a bored young girl by the name of Alice.  I always felt that boredom have a role in creating and doing art.  Speaking for myself I find boredom as a great source of inspiration. When Alice requested Dodgson to write down the story, so she can have it, clearly gave him the idea of making a book.  Eventually Dodgson gave Alice the handwritten manuscript of “Alice’s Adventure Under Ground, ” with him doing the illustrations himself.  He inscribed to her “A Christmas Gift to a Dear Child in Memory of a Summer’s Day.” The version he gave to her was 15,500 words, but he went on to do another version of the narration that’s 27,500 words, where he added the Cheshire Cat and the Mad-Tea Party scene.  

The beauty of Dodgson’s work is how he mixed up the world of pure fantasy. Yet it was inspired by natural science.   In a way he must have been like Sherlock Holmes in figuring out the narrative by what was around him at the time.  Nature usually brings me nothing but dread, but here is a story that is based on a certain type of nature, that to my taste, is a perfect cocktail of a book.  The book works like a great Rube Goldberg machine, which is always elaborate machinery or system to do very simple things.  As a writer, I want to explore my world in such a fashion where I tear up my room and then put it back together again.  But of course, all under my power of observation, which is entirely subjective. 

The TV show “Twilight Zone” had a huge effect on me as a child.  It was the first time that I realized that there may be another sort of world out there, besides the one I’m living in or on.  Billy’s telling me of the stories from the TV show had a profound influence in how I perceived the landscape that lay in front of me.  If you dig around, or look at that world in a certain light, you may find another form of life or perhaps an entrance to another world.  I’m fascinated that the ‘other’ world of “Alice” was all underground.  I think here of the sky or above the sky as being endless, but how far down does the core of the earth go?  Surely it can’t be endless.  In my generation, it comes above, but perhaps in the era that Lewis Carroll lived in, the answer was placed under the ground.  I’m also intrigued by the thought that people when they die, are buried under the ground.  Does death and mad-Tea parties go hand-in-hand?

Alice Liddell appeared to have a long and rather normal life. Yet what must it have been like to be the model for one of the most eminent literary character of all time?  The only thing I can compare what I imagine is her oddness of seeing copies of those books in a bookstore, is seeing my father’s face on the Sgt. Pepper cover in gift shops.  It is part of me, but at the same time it has nothing to do with me.  It is the property of someone else.  Clearly I have an emotional sense of ownership of that image, and Alice was the spark that lead Dodgson to create his masterpiece.  Inspiration comes from all places, and once we know where it comes from, our lives are and will always be affected by the attention one gets that is not from us specifically, but being the son of the artist, and her being on that boat trip, changes everything. 

April 6, 2014

April 6, 2014

Some years back, while I was on the bus returning from work at Book Soup, I noticed a very beautiful young girl reading one of my favorite books of all time.  Alberto Moravia’s “Contempt.” Now to me that was strange enough, but what made it even more attractive to me was that she was reading a mass-market movie-tie of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt” with of course Brigitte Bardot on the cover.  I have never ever seen this edition of this book before, and it was obvious by the design that it was made available in America around the time of the film’s original release here in the States.     In fact, just now, I tried to find the cover on the Internet, and failed in finding this edition.  I didn’t approach her, because the moment was too abnormal for me.   But what made it odder is that I saw her a week later on the bus. On the same line, and she was reading Andrew Loog Oldham’s “Stoned, ” which is another one of my favorite books of all time.   How is it possible that this beautiful young girl is caught twice on a public bus line, reading my favorite books, and not only that, but reading either very rare or difficult editions to get.  For instance, one can’t just pop in a bookstore and buy either of those two specific books.  I was convinced that she was aware of me being there, and she was using these two books to get my attention.  Of course, me being me, I totally ignored her.

Obviously, this is the same thing that happened to the Italian Renaissance poet Petrarch, when he came upon Laura, a woman he didn’t know, but saw in the church of Sainte-Claire d’ Avignon in 1327.  Petrarch wrote many poems to and about this woman, who he didn’t know, and Laura pretty much ignored him and his work.  On a side-note, she was an ancestor of the Marquis de Sade!  A perfect woman to be obsessed with!

Anita Pallenberg must have shared some traits with Laura as well as the girl on the bus.  Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones met her while she was working as a model, and they became an iconic couple, but eventually she left him for Keith Richards, his co-player in the Stones, and some say she had an affair with Mick Jagger.  I was taught in a very young age never play in one’s playground for too long, and in this case I think the Stones put all their marbles in one place and all suffered from it, but on the other hand it was good for their art.  This I believe works for all relationships with respect to the artist who is influenced by a muse or a woman/man/ or even child, when you think of Lewis Carroll or Thomas Mann with respect to his short novel “Death in Venice.”

The Brussels-born cult comic artist Guy Peelaert was very much inspired by the French teenage singing sensation Sylvie Vartan for his erotic comic strip “The Adventures of Jodelle.” In fact he based the visual image of Vartan and made it into his “Jodelle.” I often wondered if seeing the girl on the bus was a message for me to use her as either as a muse or an inspiration to do my writing.  From those two sightings of her, she has become an ideal beauty or is that even true?   Would I have noticed her if she wasn’t reading those two rare editions of my favorite books?  Art operates in mysterious ways, as well as the affairs of the heart.  Eros, passion, and good reading material goes hand-in-hand.