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OfflineWildCardsRevenge
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Re: SUGGESTION: Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll [Re: phrozendata]
    #639834 - 05/22/02 01:06 AM (22 years, 5 months ago)

Why is a Raven like a Writing Desk?

This riddle has bugged me for a great deal of time and the best answer i could come up with had to do with Poe's Raven.
His raven says Never More, and is used to symbolise the lost dead lover, in other words the end of something, Now a writing desk is where ideas are born, tales are begun... in other words the bignning.
Now you can't start something without having and end somewhere. Thus you can't have one without the other. But of course this is just my ramblings. Now i did a quick and dirty search for the real answer and come up with this.....
This is something that drives me crazy every time I hear it: "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" Is there really a hilarious answer to this seemingly impossible riddle? Or is the hilarious part that there really isn't an answer? Also, where did this riddle originate? --Mary, via the Internet

Dear Mary:

This riddle is very famous, although it is the rarefied kind of fame that entails most people never having heard of it. It comes from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Alice is at the tea party with the March Hare, the Mad Hatter, and the Dormouse, when apropos of pretty much nothing the Hatter pops the question above. Several pages of tomfoolery ensue, and then:

"Have you guessed the riddle yet?" the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.

"No, I give it up," Alice replied. "What's the answer?"

"I haven't the slightest idea," said the Hatter.

"Nor I," said the March Hare.

Alice sighed wearily. "I think you might do something better with the time," she said, "than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers."

At this point most of us are thinking, ho-ho, that Lewis Carroll, is he hilarious or what? But inevitably you get a few losers who say, well, OK, but I still want to know why a raven is like a writing desk. One sighs wearily. Guys! It's a joke! The answer is that there isn't any answer!

Oh, they say. Pause. But why is a raven like a . . .

Lewis Carroll himself got bugged about this so much that he was moved to write the following in the preface to the 1896 edition of his book:

Enquiries have been so often addressed to me, as to whether any answer to the Hatter's Riddle can be imagined, that I may as well put on record here what seems to me to be a fairly appropriate answer, viz: `Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is never put with the wrong end in front!' This, however, is merely an afterthought; the Riddle, as originally invented, had no answer at all.

Did this discourage people? No. They figured, that dope Carroll, he's too dumb to figure out his own riddle, setting aside the halfhearted attempt just quoted. So they ventured answers of their own, some of the more notable of which are recorded in Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice and More Annotated Alice:

Because the notes for which they are noted are not noted for being musical notes. (Puzzle maven Sam Loyd, 1914)
Because Poe wrote on both. (Loyd again)
Because there is a B in both and an N in neither. (Get it? Aldous Huxley, 1928)
Because it slopes with a flap. (Cyril Pearson, undated)
Not bad for amateurs. But the real answer, to which the careers of Poe and Carroll bear ample testimony, is that you can baffle the billions with both.

Postscript: In 1976 Carroll admirer Denis Crutch pointed out that in the 1896 preface quoted above, the author had originally written: "It is nevar put with the wrong end in front." Nevar of course is raven spelled backward. Big joke! However, said joke did not survive the ministrations of the proofreaders, who, thinking they understood the author's intentions better than the author, changed nevar to never in subsequent editions. The indignities we authors suffer! Sure, it's partly made up for by the money and groupies, but still, if in some book (e.g., this one) you come across a line that really clanks, be assured: it was funny before.

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_266.html
peace


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Invisiblebigidiot
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Post deleted by Moe Howard [Re: WildCardsRevenge]
    #639914 - 05/22/02 04:12 AM (22 years, 5 months ago)


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Offlinegnrm23
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Re: SUGGESTION: Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll [Re: Anonymous]
    #639960 - 05/22/02 05:10 AM (22 years, 5 months ago)

samuel dodgeson?
degree in divinity, writer on mathematics?
in heinlein's _the number of the beast_ the 4 main narrators of the story find themselves travelling through universes that are recognizably fiction (oz, lensman stories, wonderland, ending up in a heinlein story)... they consult dodgeson in order that he could assist in solving a puzzle with them...
i think that alice also shows up in farmer's riverworld series...
as to shroomin' in victorian england... well, fly agaric has a reputation for magical effects going back centuries (millennia?), and the psilocybe's were not formally identified as mind-altering by the scientific community until the 1950s (with hints in the 30s) but almost certainly intoxication from ingestion of psilocybin/psilocin containing mushrooms took place in england, europe, asia, and elsewhere in the 1800s...


--------------------
old enough to know better
not old enough to care

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Invisiblebigidiot
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Post deleted by Moe Howard [Re: gnrm23]
    #640021 - 05/22/02 06:00 AM (22 years, 5 months ago)


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Invisiblephrozendata
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Re: SUGGESTION: Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll [Re: Anonymous]
    #640403 - 05/22/02 10:41 AM (22 years, 5 months ago)

In reply to:

Enquiries have been so often addressed to me, as to whether any answer to the Hatter's Riddle can be imagined, that I may as well put on record here what seems to me to be a fairly appropriate answer, viz: `Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is never put with the wrong end in front!' This, however, is merely an afterthought; the Riddle, as originally invented, had no answer at all.




Exactly what my copy say!

I agree with the fact that it is based on a dream land...I mean...look how it ends...kind of cheesy eh?


--------------------
"There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving and that's your own self. So you have to begin there, not
outside, not on other people" - Aldous Huxley

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OfflineGillette
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Re: SUGGESTION: Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll [Re: phrozendata]
    #640890 - 05/22/02 06:29 PM (22 years, 5 months ago)

I wrote an entire analytical essay on Alice in Wonderland...this is what I came up with...but I also read through the looking glass, the second part to Alice in Wonderland. I went into this reading with little prior knowledge and assumed it would all be drug related as well.

I think that Lewis Carroll is depicting the life journey of Alice this young girl that he was infatuated with (research on Carroll proves this) if you mirror his life and hers and their interactions you can plainly see them in his books. You see young Alice progress through her years as a child at the very beginning of the book, as she recites poems, then a period where time speeds up as she falls through the rabbit hole (if you watch any of the movie versions at this point you do see a clock speed up) near the end of the first book you can see her teenage years approach and drug use comes into play, at the begining of the second book she goes through withdrawl, as the "white knight" (in carroll's eyes himself) comes to save her. By the end of the book she has gone through many identity battles and general life experiences that shes "all grown up" and invited to tea.


thats just the short of it, I'll see if I can find the actual essay that has all the quotes that proves that theory, I'll also reread it and point out the exact points in more detail where this theory is evident.


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~Earth is the Insane Asylum of the Universe~

A closed mind is a wonderful thing to lose.

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Invisiblephrozendata
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Re: SUGGESTION: Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll [Re: Gillette]
    #640896 - 05/22/02 06:33 PM (22 years, 5 months ago)

Wow! That would be excellent.

I will be reading a little more tonnight and try to come on with some discussion after work tommorow. I am going to try and wrap this up before the deadline for Vineland, the offically voted book, starts.

Thanks Everybody.


--------------------
"There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving and that's your own self. So you have to begin there, not
outside, not on other people" - Aldous Huxley

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Offlinepsyko7862sex
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Re: SUGGESTION: Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll [Re: phrozendata]
    #643090 - 05/24/02 08:50 AM (22 years, 5 months ago)

ahhh yall started! no one told me when to run. I'v missed the starting gun.
oh well next time


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Normally psyko78626

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Invisiblebigidiot
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Post deleted by Moe Howard [Re: psyko7862sex]
    #643624 - 05/24/02 02:28 PM (22 years, 5 months ago)


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Invisiblephrozendata
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Re: SUGGESTION: Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll [Re: Anonymous]
    #644377 - 05/25/02 06:06 AM (22 years, 5 months ago)

No, we'de love to have you join the discussion. This topic has layed dormant for a couple days so i'll try to bring something new up. Some quotes that made me laugh:

"The March Hare took the watch and looked at it gloomily: then he dipped it into his cup of tea, and looked at it again: but he could think of nothing better to say than his first remark, "It was the best butter, you know."

"...neither of the others took the least notice of her going, though she looked back once or twice, half hoping that they would call after her: the last time she saw them, they were trying to put the Dormouse into the teapot."

The last quote comes with a picture. It really made me laugh!

(Thats the exact one)

Anybody who doesnt want to purchase this book or go to the library can read it online or print it out. It's acutally a short book: Heres one link I found:
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/People/rgs/alice-I.html
and another was posted earlier.

I've been doing some reading by others on this book and have found a few interesting things: *** NOT MY WORK ***

...point out that the girl?s experiences in the world at the bottom of the rabbit hole are similar to the dreams (sometimes, nightmares) that most human beings have.

By exploring this observation further, you can help your students connect what Lewis Carroll was doing in words with what the surrealists in the early 20th century were doing with painting. The connection should increase students? appreciation of both modern literature and modern art?and perhaps help students to better understand the historical period of those writers and artists.

I think that a good point towards this being a dream world is that nothing seems to make logical sense like our dreams do.

heh..have you guys all heard Jefferson Airplane - White Rabbit ??


--------------------
"There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving and that's your own self. So you have to begin there, not
outside, not on other people" - Aldous Huxley

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Offlinegnrm23
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Re: SUGGESTION: Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll [Re: psyko7862sex]
    #644790 - 05/25/02 12:27 PM (22 years, 5 months ago)

hey, yr never too late to join in discussion about _alice_ !
~
yeah a lot of dreamtime stuff... and before freud & jung and that crowd, heh...
of course a lot of victorian-era fantasy just cires out for freudian analysis, but is that "fair" (hehheh...) --- a shrink get ahold of dodgeson - anyway...
~
nad as a hatter... bit o' mercury poisoning, no doubt... heh...
~
hookah smoking catterpillar... well, opium & opiates were no doubt available at the local apothecary... (louisa may alcott wrote a short story about a cannabis-candy fueled party... hmmm...)
well, later (i still can't find my copy of aliice in wonderland& thru the looking glass (maybe in my daughter's room?)
~


--------------------
old enough to know better
not old enough to care

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Offlinewindex
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Registered: 06/27/01
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Re: SUGGESTION: Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll [Re: gnrm23]
    #648135 - 05/27/02 02:34 PM (22 years, 5 months ago)

I have a question about alice and wonderland and through the looking glass.

When i was about 7-8 i watched a movie that resembled alice and wonderland. I dont remeber the begining to well, but there was a part where alice was home (i assume) in her living room (not what they would have called it) and there were mirrors every were and she was deathly afraid of them. Eventually the room got dark and stormy and lightning could be seen through the mirrors. This was near the VERY end of the movie. and thats about all i can remeber, i think it was a abc family special or something... but id love to watch it again, if anyone else has seen it please speak up.

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OfflineGillette
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Re: SUGGESTION: Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll [Re: windex]
    #660193 - 06/03/02 06:58 AM (22 years, 5 months ago)

I think that would be the movie "Jaberwocky" and it's the people acted version of Alice in wonderland and the final part of the book series, its sounds like the part your describing is the part right before the jaberwocky comes in, I have the movie if you want to borrow it.....
...I could be totally wrong about the whole thing tho....


--------------------
~Earth is the Insane Asylum of the Universe~

A closed mind is a wonderful thing to lose.

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