Visit Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on Saturday, April 25, between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. and revel in free activities for the young and young in your mind. You can easily take part in writing activities with teaching artists from Austin Public Library Friends Foundation’s Badgerdog essay writing Creative Writing Program or engage with Lewis Carroll–inspired math activities with local math literacy organization Math Happens. University of Texas at Austin museum theater students will lead visitors through the galleries. Additional activities include docent-led exhibition tours and story times within the theater. Family days are generously sustained by a grant from the Austin Community Foundation, with in-kind support given by Terra Toys.
Below is a schedule that is detailed
Teaching artists from Austin Public Library Friends Foundation’s Badgerdog Creative Writing Program will lead activities that are writing the top of the hour from 10 a.m. through 4 p.m.
Join a tour that is docent-led of exhibition at noon, 2 p.m., and 4 p.m.
Enjoy story time into the theater at 1:15 p.m. and 3:15 p.m.
Follow University of Texas at Austin museum theater students through the galleries between 10 a.m. and noon.
Complete Lewis Carroll–inspired math activities with Math Happens as you tour the galleries.
Receive the Harry Ransom Center’s news that is latest and information with eNews, a monthly email. Subscribe today.
Before and After: “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” Movie Jecktors
The exhibition Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland features two 1933 toy paper film strips called Movie Jecktors. The movie strips portray two of the most extremely memorable components of the Alice story: “Down the Rabbit Hole” and “The Mad Hatter.” Images and text are printed in three colors on 35? strips of translucent paper. The strips are rolled onto wooden dowels and kept in colorfully printed little boxes. The Movie Jecktors could have been used in combination with a toy film projector to produce a simple animation.
The Ransom Center’s Movie Jecktors required conservation before they could be safely displayed into the galleries. Both the wooden dowel while the storage box, which can be made from wood pulp cardboard, had a acid content that is high. An acidic environment is bad for paper. The Movie Jecktors had become brittle and discolored, and there were tears that are many losses to your paper. The film strips was in fact repaired in the past with pressure-sensitive tapes (the tape that is common all use to wrap gifts). These tapes will never be right for repairing paper that people desire to preserve since they deteriorate and frequently darken over some time are also difficult to remove once set up.
Since the Ransom Center’s paper conservator, I removed the tapes using a heated tool and reduced the rest of the adhesive using a crepe eraser. I mended the tears and filled the losses using paper that is japanese wheat starch paste. When it comes to fills, the Japanese paper was pre-toned with acrylic paint to allow these additions to blend because of the original paper. Regions of ink loss were not recreated.
People to the exhibition is able to see the regions of the filmstrips that were damaged, but those areas are actually stabilized much less distracting. This type of treatment reflects the practice of conservation to preserve, not “restore,” the object’s original appearance. Libraries, archives, and museums today often select the conservation approach given that it allows researchers and other visitors a better knowledge of the object’s history, including damages that occurred, which might speak to the materials utilized in the object’s creation.
Get the Harry Ransom Center’s news that is latest and information with eNews, a monthly email. Today Subscribe.
Please click on thumbnails to enlarge images.
Easter weekend hours
The Ransom Center will likely be open throughout Easter weekend, including on Friday, April 3, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m, and on Saturday and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m.
Free gallery that is docent-led occur daily at noon and Saturdays and Sundays at 2 p.m. No reservations are expected.
Admission is free. Your donation will support the Ransom Center’s exhibitions and programs that are public. Parking information and a map can be obtained online.
Please also be aware that the Ransom Center’s Reading and Viewing Room is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, April 4.
Get the Harry Ransom Center’s news that is latest and information with eNews, a monthly email.Subscribe today.
John Crowley, whose archive resides at the Ransom Center, is an American author of fantasy, science fiction, and mainstream fiction. He published his novel that is first Deep, in 1975, and his 14th amount of fiction, Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, in 2005. He has got taught creative writing at Yale University since 1993. A special 25 th -anniversary edition of his novel Little, Big should be published this spring. Below, he shares how Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland influenced his own work.
A vital ( sense that is best) reader of my work once wrote an entire essay about allusions to and quotes from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland books in a novel of mine called Little, Big—a very Alice sort of title in the first place. Some of the quotes and allusions, while certainly there, were unconscious; the turns of phrase and paradoxes and names in those books are so ingrained they simply form part of my vocabulary in me that. I first heard them read out: my older sister read them to me once I was about eight yrs . old. I don’t remember my reaction to Alice in Wonderland—except for absorbing it wholly—because for many books read or heard at certain moments in childhood, there is no reading that is first such books enter the mind and soul as if that they had always been there. I do remember my response to Through the Looking Glass: I found it unsettlingly weird, dark, dreamlike (it is in reality the dream-book that is greatest ever written). The shop where the shopkeeper becomes a sheep, then dissolves into a pond with Alice rowing and the sheep in the stern knitting (!)—it wasn’t scary, nonetheless it was eerie because it so exactly replicated the movements of places and things and folks in my own dreams, of that I was then becoming a connoisseur. How did this written book realize about such things?
Another connection that is profound have with Alice I only discovered—in delight—some years back in (of all of the places) the Wall Street Journal. In an article about odd cognitive and sensory disorders, it described “Alice in Wonderland syndrome:” “Named after Lewis Carroll’s famous novel, this neurological condition makes objects (including one’s own body parts) seem smaller, larger, closer or maybe more distant than they really are. It’s more common in childhood, often in the start of sleep, and could disappear by adulthood…”
We have attempted to describe this syndrome to people for a long time, and do not once met anyone who recognized it from my descriptions. If you ask me it is more odd a feeling than this, and more ambivalent: I feel (or felt, as a kid, almost never any longer) as if my hands and feet are huge amounts of miles distant from my head and heart, but at the same time I am enormously, infinitely large, and so those parts come in the same spatial regards to myself as ever, and even monstrously closer. It was awesome when you look at the strict sense, not scary or horrid, uncomfortable but also intriguing. I wonder if Carroll (Dodgson, rather) had this syndrome. I’ve thought of including it on my resume: “John Crowley came to be when you look at the appropriately liminal town of Presque Isle, Maine, and as a kid suffered from or delighted in Alice in Wonderland syndrome.”
