Blog News

1. Comments are still disabled though I am thinking of enabling them again.

2. There are now several extra pages - Poetry Index, Travel, Education, Childish Things - accessible at the top of the page. They index entires before October 2013.

3. I will, in the next few weeks, be adding new pages with other indexes.

Wednesday 11 February 2009

Alices In Wonderland: Part 25


The illustrations that I have in a rather heavy hard-backed French edition (translated byAndre Bay, published by Grund, 2002) are by Jean-Claude Silbermann and they are probably the most seriously disturbing of any edition in my collection. These are not illustrations you would want to show to nervous six year olds. They are the stuff of nightmares. I don't know if it's cultural, if the French are less sensitive to horror but these illustrations wouldn't be out of place in the grimmest of grim horror films. Skulls, snakes, dead fish, weirdly elongated creatures, grinning figures with mouths full of sharp pointy teeth: it's not easy to look at.

Anyway, Alice finishes conversing with the caterpillar who tells her that she can adjust her size by eating parts of the mushroom, one side for bigger, one for smaller. Her first experiment causes her neck to grow extremely long and stick up out of the trees where pigeon mistakes her for a serpent.

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