Episode 23A: Beckett and Susan’s Adventures in Wonderland and What They Found There
For instance, some of the references in the books are only understood if you are aware of the era in which the books were written. Some only if you are knowledgeable in the eccentricities of Oxford, England. And some only if you belonged to, or knew details of, the Dodgson or Liddell families. Even more exciting, Lewis Carroll tucked so many mathematical terms, riddles and word play into the two books seeking them out would be a fantastical hobby in and of itself.
For this minicast we go chapter by chapter and discuss not only the storyline, but some references within it. We talk about some of the characters in the book as well as some of the poem satires and forgotten characters.
Beckett does not want the poor, oft- forgotten Mock Turtle ignored.
If you would like to see a really creative illustration collaboration with the original text, Alice’s Illustrated Adventure is a really fun blog. The tag line: “Written by Lewis Carroll and illustrated by Almost Everbody” sums it up.
Both books are available in audiobook form, free of charge, in ITunes. Simply search for the Librivox name with the title you would like. There are unabridged and abridged versions of them both.
But, be warned, that may be only the beginning of the adventure for you!!Summertime News!
Friends,
Alice taught us something! All the women we talk about do, but some of the lessons that we learned from Alice have to do with you.
We recorded Alice just as summer vacation began for our children. And it was challenging. Time to work on the podcasts, which we thought was precious before, became even more valuable because it became more rare. Then we encountered a technical issue with the second part of Alice in Wonderland- the chapter-by-chapter discussion of the books. We hope to have that resolved in the next couple of weeks. Add in vacations with our families, ongoing work responsibilities and commitments in other areas- our lives were as wild and nerve-wracking as falling down a rabbit hole, a mad teaparty and swimming in a pool of tears combined.
We had to cut back on something.
It sort of felt like this...
...with a bit of this thrown in. (John Tenniel Illustrations)
This is what we have decided to do: For the remainder of the summer- July and August- we will only be posting one full episode a month. We aren’t able to tell you the exact date right now, but summer is sort of about being spontaneous and enjoying the ride so that’s what we are going to do. We will make sure that we let you know when the next episode is ready.
That will bring us to the end of Season Three. We will not be taking between-season hiatus as we have in the past, and Season Four will begin as fall does, sometime in September.
Beckett and Susan
Episode 28: Alice in Wonderland
Once a season we step back from the factual historical world into the fictional historical world. This season, while stepping back, we fell into a rabbit hole of sorts and found ourselves becoming curiouser and curiouser about Alice. Alice in Wonderland, that is.
This episode is all about Alice. Who was she, how did these books about her come to be and who is her creator, Charles Lutwidge Dodson (more commonly known as Lewis Carroll)? What is it about this story that has allowed it to endure for 150 years? Is it the charm or is it the mystique that surrounds not only the tale, but the life of the writer?
Originally written for a child, this fantasy deals with some very dark images and has generated some wholly grown-up interpretations.Yet, it has been adored by children and adults alike. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Saw There have been in continuous publication since they were first published in the late 1800’s.
We discuss the storylines of these two books in our companion mini-cast, Beckett and Susan’s Adventures in Wonderland and What They Saw There. If you are not familiar with the story, or need a refresher, please give a listen to that podcast first. Some of the details of this episode are better understood within the context of those stories.
There are more references than just the biggies
On July 4th, 1862 Charles Dodgson, a friend and three young Liddell sisters- Lorina, Edith and 10 year-old Alice- took a rowing trip up a river. As was tradition for this group, Charles began to tell stories. One in particular enchanted young Alice who asked if he could write it down for her. He did, and presented her with a hand written and self-illustrated Alice’s Adventures Under Ground some time later. With further editing, reworking and creating, Charles published the tale (with illustrations by John Tenniel) as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland three years after that boating trip.
Who was Charles Dodgson? He was the third of eleven children, although the first male in his family. His father, Charles, was a clergyman and mother, Francis Jane, raised the large and close upper- middle class family in Cheshire, England. Young Charles was gifted academically and excelled in school (although he had a stint in a rather notorious institution that may not have been the cheeriest of times). When it came time for Charles to decide on a career path he became a mathematics lecturer at Oxford.( Maybe not the most obvious choice for a man with a stammer). He was quite religious, and an ordained deacon- although he never entered the priesthood as his employer would have required. He was also a writer, penning magazine articles and poems under the name Lewis Carroll, and a very accomplished amateur photographer .
The mystique of Lewis Carroll that endures is probably based on the loss of some key diary entries after his death, and what is known was often left to very loose interpretation. We knock out some of the myths and common misconceptions during the podcast including:
Did he stammer only around adults? (No, he stammered when speaking with children as well, they may have been more understanding, however.)
Was he shy? (No, he was very social and had a wide circle of friends.)
Was he a pedophile? (No, probably not. When the social context of the times, as well as the trends in photography are taken into consideration evidence seems to point to no.)
We cover quite a bit more in the podcast, but the one that pertains the most to this topic? Who WAS Alice and who was she to him?
Alice Liddell was the forth of ten children of Henry and Lorina Liddell (rhymes with ‘riddle’). Henry was the Dean of Oxford during a large chunk of Charles’ time there, and his boss. Charles was a good family friend, spending time with the whole family, not just Alice. He photographed all of the children, and does have several existing portraits of Alice.
The two parts of the portrait sitting of Alice, meant to be shown together.
Alice lived a very long and full life, marrying a man of means she became a society hostess and mother of three boys. She held on to her original gift from Charles for most of her life, although a series of situations forced her to sell it in her old age.
But she doesn’t LOOK like the Alice you know, does she? As Charles was rewriting his original story, and combined forces with illustrator John Tenniel and sent John images of a couple of other young girls who looked more like the girl in his mind including this one:
Beatrice Henley, the probable model for Tenniel's book illustrations.
The story of Alice lived on long after the deaths of both Charles Dodgson and Alice Liddell. Alice and her friends have crept into our language (“Off with her head!”) and culture (See: Tom Petty Don’t Come Around Here No More or any number of other musical references). We don’t really know when we are going to stumble into her, but when we do- we feel like we are meeting with an old friend.
This fountain has been in Central Park since 1959.
Time Travel With The History Chicks
Have you fallen into the rabbit hole that is the world that surrounds Alice in Wonderland? Where to next? Oh, why here is a note, it says “READ ME!”
We suggest that you start with Annotated Alice, by Martin Gardner. In this (really big) book you will find the original text and illustrations for the two books, as well as commentary about the subject matter.
Are you interested in learning more about the man behind the tales? We liked The Mystery of Lewis Carroll by Jenny Woolf. Although there are MANY books about this man out there, and many contradict the others…that’s kind of what’s fun about the mystery, don’t you think?
Why should all the recommendations be non-fiction? With this topic, it just doesn’t make sense. Give these two a try: The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor.
Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin
If you are as drawn to the work of Mary Blair as Susan was, this is the book version that she gushed discussed.
Retold by Jon Sciezka, with original artwork of Mary Blair
Alice All The Things! (History Chicks Internet version)
Read both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass and The Hunting of the Snark online. LibriVox also has audio versions available.
AlteredAlice– links to Alice inspired art from all over the world.
Lostepedia– Many references within the TV show LOST. Many. (As in:enough to get you to watch it again)
Contrariwise– One of many online groups whose purpose is to discuss and exchange information about Lewis Carroll and his beloved tales.
Carrollmyth: a super slick site that helps address some of the myths surrounding the man.
And, of course, please please, take a cruise through the work of the Lewis Carroll Society (link to North America, but that’s only because we are in North America). If you investigate that site you can easily find links to many of the photographic works of the man, as well as lots of other very fascinating information. You could be there for a while.
And finally ( because, really, where else are you going to find it?) a last look at the Mock Turtle and a recipe for Mock Turtle Soup. You are most welcome.
why does he have a cow head, again? Oh, yeah.
The Walrus and the Carpenter restaurant, In Seattle- which probably doesn’t serve Mock Turtle Soup, but we thought it was pretty interesting.
Episode 27: Clara Bow
We couldn’t tell the story of Clara Bow entirely in G-rated terms, so younger ears should probably skip this one where we talk about the original It Girl. What is It? Looks, charm, talent, and something special that attracts a wide range of people. It is a mysterious quality usually likened to a form of sex appeal. Clara Bow had It. She used It for her career and It attracted many men. But, in addition to all those marketable qualities that made her a successful silent film star, she had other factors in her life that contrasted: Poverty, abuse, mental illness, and a span of time when she was treated like a pawn in an industry where youth and It survived, and all else was tossed aside.
Clara Gordon Bow was born on July 29, 1905, to Robert and Sara Bow in Brooklyn, New York. We would love to give you a romantic version of her parents, a rags-to-riches love story- but it would be a lie. Robert had a thing for younger girls and liquor; Sara was the daughter of an abusive father and mentally ill mother who was looking for a way out of her home and teen marriage was that ticket.
Robert worked as a singing waiter and at various odd jobs, but he would often leave his wife and child for long stretches. He spent his wages in bars and on underage prostitutes. Sara was miserable at home. Clara was her third child- the first two died almost immediately after birth- and Sara had been advised that another pregnancy might kill both her and the child. Death may have seemed a great strategy for leaving her sad life, but both mother and child survived.
More sadness, and gloom filled the life of young Clara: her mother plummeted through episode after episode of depressed, psychotic and hostile states leaving Clara to take care of both herself and her mother. Clara’s grandfather died at her feet. As a young child she witnessed the gruesome death of her best friend, and she would be forced to drop out of school by seventh grade to get a job to help support her family. We go into details on the podcast of the impoverished and dysfunctional world that Clara grew up in, but let’s suffice it to say, it wasn’t a fairy tale. The escape method that she used was the movies- going to them, reading about them, and dreaming of a life as the person IN the movie magazines, not just reading them.
At the age of 16,she saw her chance in the form of a magazine sponsored contest With a storyline that would make a terrific movie, she scraped together the money for entry pictures, impressed the judges, kicked fanny at the acting auditions and won!Included in the prizes was a photo shoot that created these two images:
Through what may have been the hardest work of his life ( if not a singular moment of support for his child) Robert Bow pushed the powers- that- be to follow through with the other part of the prize: help Clara get work in the movies. Clara got her first role, and- in true movie fashion- her performance ended up on the cutting room floor. Crushing.
But that role landed her the next, and she was off to the glamorous local of….New Bedford, Massachusetts.
In fairly quick order, Clara set off to Hollywood with an agent who had a rather interesting tale to tell after her cross-country train trip with the free spirited, insomniac that was a teenage Clara Bow.
Of course, we go into the whole story on the podcast, but Clara’s acting skills, big eyed beauty, and ability to cry on cue (not to mention her lack of inhibitions and sparkling personality) soon got her the screen time she needed to get her career really started. She signed with Preferred Pictures and let her career be formed in the hands of the head of the studio- B.P. Schulberg.
Her looks and attitude suited the times. Women were taking more risks, making bold moves, bobbing their hair, letting their sexuality shine all while dancing on tables. Well, the women that Clara portrayed on screen were- she personified the flapper, the Jazz Baby. Women wanted to be her, men wanted to be with her and both of them were flocking to her movies.
Throughout the 1920’s Clara was, quite simply, a superstar. Her personal life was as wild as some of the characters she played on the screen. Tooling about town in a roadster she lived her life with as little a filter as she could get away with. (How is that for putting it mildly?) She was romantically linked to many men, and called her own shots in her frenetic personal life. The newspapers and those movie magazines she used to read loved her, although they may have exaggerated some aspects of her life- the public couldn’t get enough of Clara.
The invention of talkie movies slowed Clara down a bit, but it didn’t end her career as is often rumored. What did end it? Maybe the pace she had kept for so long. Maybe a series of ill-timed life moves including several stints in hospitals for “rest” and a much publicized legal battle with a former personal secretary who attempted to blackmail Clara. Maybe the love of a good man, Rex Bell, who helped stabilize her life and gave her the family and normalcy that she had longed for since she was a child. Maybe the times, as the Depression began the flamboyant lifestyle of the now matured flapper wasn’t the image that movie goers craved. Maybe it was a combination of all of those things.
Clara stopped making movies in 1933. She retired to the ranch in Nevada where she and Rex raised two boys. They later divorced and she moved to Los Angeles. She was mostly a recluse, although she did still answer her fan mail and was often surprised when people remembered her. She died of a heart attack in her home on September 27, 1965 at the age of 60.
TIME TRAVEL WITH THE HISTORY CHICKS
First thing we would do? Watch some movies. Netflix streams It, as well as some others, and you can see bits and pieces on YouTube. If you have 7 minutes, give this one a peek… the IT of Clara Bow is very obvious in this clip. This link will take you to a channel with more Clara Bow movie clips.
Since we are talking internet links here, Clara Bow Archive on tumblr maintains a twitter account as well. Get unique pictures of Clara sent right to your twitter feed. Also The Flapper Factor on tumblr is not Clara specific, nor is this Silent Ladies.com , but you might be impressed with the collections presented.
Learning more about a movie star just seems to fit visual media, you know? There is a Biography: Clara Bow which isn’t on Netflix, Hulu or Amazon-but you might want to check out your library.
Turner Classic Movies has a Clara Bow documentary, Discovering the It Girl (narrated by Courtney Love) which we liked. And a related one, Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood which is narrated by Jane Fonda ( and based on a book by Mick LaSalle who is interviewed in the film). Keep an eye out for airings of both these on TCM, or see if your library has them.
As it ties into this topic, and to cleanse your brain of the Debbie Reynolds Molly Brown image- go see Singing in the Rain. Set in the times of Clara Bow and with some of the (highly Hollywoodized) issues that Clara had to deal with. (Just an aside: the songs were written before the story of this movie but it’s still a fun romp).
We teased you about this in the podcast, an interview by Mark Twain with Elinor Glyn, writer of It and overall character herself.
So you like books? Us toooo! For Clara we recommend:
Clara Bow: Running Wild by, David Stenn
The “It”: Girl: the Incredible Story of Clara Bow by, Joe Morella & Edward EpsteinSilent Stars by Jeanine BasingerAnd finally, as a related recommended read (yes, there is a movie also), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith.
As always, music comes courtesy of Music Alley. Visit them at Music.mevio.com
Episode 26: Rosa Parks
This episode was a surprise for us. We had planned on posting a minicast about Rosa Parks to tie in with the episode on Ida B. Wells. The women’s lives had several parallels and we wanted to highlight Rosa Park’s role in the civil rights movement. But, when we sat down to talk, the talk went longer than a typical minicast. So we made it into a full length episode about the woman called, “the mother of the civil rights movement”.
Rosa Louis McCauley was born on Feburary 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama. As always, we discuss her life in detail on the podcast and merely outline it here, but her family; father James and mother Leona as well as Rosa’s younger brother, Sylvester, left Tuskegee for Pine Level, and then Montgomery, Alabama when Rosa was a child.
She was educated first in a rural school and then at Montgomery Industrial School (also called Miss White’s School), a fairly progressive school for the times run by women from the north. Many people in her early life contributed to her firm belief in equality, and taught her character traits that would serve her well. And we cover them in the podcast, stopping for a few moments extra to talk about the strength of both character and backbone, of her grandfather and her mother, as well as what life was like in the Jim Crow south.
As she was entering college, Rosa had to drop out of school. Her grandmother was ill, and Rosa set off to work as a seamstress to help support her family. It is during this time that she mets a handsome, well dressed, self educated man, Raymond Parks who was a barber by trade, a civil rights activist by desire. They were wed in 1932. With his support, Rosa competed her education.
Raymond and Rosa were very active in their local NAACP chapter, working behind the scenes on cases such as that of the Scottsboro Boys, trying to make right wrongs done to blacks, trying to establish equality for all people. Rosa had served as chapter secretary, as well as working with youth programs and assisting with a very complex voter registration process.
The day that changed her life, was not Rosa’s first encounter with discrimination on a bus. She was far from the first black woman that had been arrested for not giving up her seat so that a white passenger could sit. And, in the podcast, we discuss the many people and actions that play into the success that followed when Rosa was the woman who was arrested.
JoAnn Robinson, a college professor, had gone so far as to intentionally sit in the first row of seats, seats that were always reserved for white passengers. She abandoned her protest when the bus driver kept yelling at her, but she thought that a bus boycott would make a loud impact on not only the economy of Montgomery, but also make strides in race relations.
Claudette Colvin, a teenager, had also been arrested for not giving up her seat months before Rosa.
Rosa Parks herself had also previously been asked to leave a bus for refusing to give up her seat . But on that particular December day in 1955, refuse she did again. She was tired of giving up her seat, tired of being treated in this manner. She was empowered by a series of events in her life and took a stand. By sitting.
When she was arrested the black community of Montgomery got busy, fast. Jo Ann Robinson, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr, and many community leaders did in 1955 what it takes the internet to do today: they spread the word. They formed an action plan and got the entire black population informed and organized. Within a day, what was planned as a one- day bus boycott began. It would not end until 381 days later.
Fingerprinting
The mugshot seen around the world
By being the right woman at the right time, in the right city and with the right support, Rosa Parks, with her quiet voice and firm but proper demeanor became the mother of the civil rights movement.
Later, Rosa and Raymond moved to Detroit where she worked toward racial and gender equality as a speaker, a writer and activist.
Rosa Parks died at the age of 92, on October 24, 2005 due to complications from dementia. Even in death, she was treated as a national treasure and was allowed to lay in honor at the US Capital Rotunda and two other locations, one in Montgomery and one in Detroit.
Time Travel With The History Chicks
Books! We have a few that we recommend, starting with the one written by Rosa herself, Rosa Parks: My Story.
My Story, by Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks, by Douglas Brinkley
The award winning children’s book that we thought was really good was,
Rosa Parks, by Nikki Giovanni, illustrated by Bryan Collier
The Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development has a website. Lots of information as well as links to youth programs, although some of the information does seem out of date.
The free, interactive app e-book , The Road to Civil Rights, is available through this site. We didn’t read it, so if you do, send us a review! Academy of Achievement.
Movies! This is the one that we were talking about staring Angela Basset:
Rosa Parks Story
Yes, there is an American Experience for that! Eyes on the Prize.
This site has a terrific collection of photos, and videos- worth a click for those alone! Rosaparksfacts.com
There are quite a few activities on this site for kids to learn about Rosa Parks, but here is a link to an interview with her based on student’s questions.
Finally the bus! Recovered and restored with help from the Save America’s Treasures program of the National Trust for Preservation, the bus is on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Even if you can’t get to Michigan, you should check out the online resources of this museum.
The restored bus
As always, music comes courtesy of Music Alley. Visit them at Music.mevio.com