Cover It Li–Oh Look, A Rabbit!

This is a documentation of the ups, downs, problems and possible fixes of our first Cover-It-Live session.*

As we all know by now, this project is highly based on technology. We’ve all been glued to the computer trying to fill all the requirements for this project, one of which is that we use a couple web tools. During class my group and I used the CoverItLive, trying to get in a good discussion about Alice before the period ended.

Keyword: Trying.

It started out a hot mess, then just kind of disintegrated into a plain old mess.

First we had to get a CoverItLive account, which took a minute. Then we started to have a little fun with the messaging. Ryan misspelled something, Vance pounced on it, I rolled my eyes. And then we started trying (there’s that keyword again) to get organized.

Ryan tried to start us off with a question, but we were too busy being excited little teenagers to really stay focused for long.

I know part of my problem was that this was just so cool! I mean you’re typing along, and then BAM! It’s out there for all to see! Crazy right? And then there’s the ever-present pull towards a normal conversation; with the joking and the teasing and the somewhat random comments.

We were totally focused before we started, so what happened?

Well, I think it was kind of like the new-toy-on-Christmas-morning deal. You remember when you were little, and you would go running over to the tree at an insane hour in the morning and attack the presents? And you did NOT care how the toy was supposed to work, you just wanted to play with it! That’s what happened here. We got a new toy, and man, we played with it. We did get a few productive comments in there, but about half of it was us just goofing around with the new shiny thing. Random rabbits would pop up and run away with the conversation, and we had no trouble in following them down their rabbit holes. We’d also start talking outside of the CoverItLive, which wasted a bit of time and got us waaaay off track, only this time someone reading the post can’t tell what on earth just happened.

Maybe if we had a bit more time to play with our new toy, then there wouldn’t be so many pointless rabbits for us to chase after, because we’d be more used to using it and it wouldn’t be such a fun time anymore. But that’s just my take on everything, I have a feeling my group may disagree

* This isn’t about the Annotated Alice, or really anything to do with the story. It’s about how the project threw new bits of technology at us, how and why problems came up, and possible ways to prevent them in the future. Whether or not this counts as a blog, I don’t really mind either way. It’s just something that I think will benefit the reader and hopefully make them chuckle.

Black (Movie) Magic

From a book, to an animation, and now to a live-action movie, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has come a long way from the simple children’s story that it began as. But is it actually the book itself that’s coming so far, or just the concept? We see it all the time; a good book being warped and twisted to fit into a movie that the director likes best. Is this what’s happening to Carroll’s book? Have we lost the true story in the rush to get out a good movie?

We see what Disney did with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It’s a very good children’s movie, with cute songs and a relatively clean story line. And really, it stayed pretty close to the book. Of course, it edited out a few parts, but that’s just something to be expected with ANY movie. Over-all it was surprisingly accurate. But now Tim Burton’s gotten his twisted little claws into it, and you have to wonder exactly how twisted he’s going to make this story. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a great movie man! But from the previews, it looks like he’s taking what’s supposed to be a very subtle underlying darkness and flinging it out to the front, smothering the innocence.

Really, how is anyone going to be able to see the brilliance of the Cheshire Cat if he looks like a mutated alley cat? So the question arises; is Tim Burton basing the new Alice movie on the actual book, or is he taking the story into his own hands? We can see from the first movie that they stayed pretty true to the book, but even from the previews we see that Alice is no longer an innocent little girl, but a teenager. And the Cheshire Cat isn’t the spunky, slightly confusing kitty that we all know and love, but a creepy, horrifying specimen of grossness (yes, I am highly irritated at the new portrayal of the Cheshire Cat).

There is a wonderful topic in Darcy’s blog, No Explosives, No Interest, that ties in here nicely.

People are changing. Our attention spans are shorter and our interest isn’t help for very long if there isn’t action or drama or something exciting that will keep our attention for more than a few minutes. Tell me, how many times have you walked into a movie theater, sat down, and as soon as the film started, thought “ohmygosh this is boring!” because it didn’t get exciting fast enough? Maybe this is why the movie has changed so much from the book. Because to make money, they have to keep our attention. They have to have pretty much non-stop action or serious suspense or we’re lost. While it’s irritating when our favorite book gets mangled by some producer who’s only after money, you have to wonder if there’s a reason that the movies are always so different.

Whining, Complaining, and Dragging Our Feet

By now, most students are sick and tired of The Annotated Alice, and just want this project to be over and done with.

For me, it started out great, then went into a downward spiral as I had to work harder and harder to find something worth blogging about. A lot of the time I’ve started a blog, then erased the entire thing because it was just a great page of hooey. It’s Alice’s in Wonderland, for crying out loud! How many things can there be to blog about?!

It’s madness (pardon the pun) to even think about doing a high-school level project on it!

Isn’t it?

We’ve all spent out fair share of time whining about this project, and wallowing in a pit of despair every time we think about how many blogs we have left to do or how on earth we’re going to get enough comments in. But maybe the only reason this project seems so hard is because we made it that way.

Think about it: with almost every other project we get, it’s possible to put it off until the very last minute and still get a good grade, because we just have to regurgitate information and slap it on a power point and we’re good to go. But with the Alice Project, we actually have to use our brains, and think about what we’re going to say. We just can’t slop through it and fake ideas, because there’s people other than our classmates seeing our work, and commenting on it. It’s not like this is a presentation that you can awkwardly give, and sit back down hoping that people will forget about it before lunch. It’s on the internet, and is up for the public to see. I also think that we care just a little bit more about it than other projects, because we’re being asked to put our opinions out there, create our own ideas and defend them. It’s a bit more personal than the stupid little poster-board projects.

This is the first project that’s actually made me use my brain, instead of just a little creativity and time. So while we’re still complaining, griping, and freaking out about the Alice Project, maybe we can see exactly why this seems so impossible and stressful.

Waxing and Waning; A Real-Life Wonderland

Ok, so I should have done the blog on size a looooong time ago. But hey, no time like the present, eh?

Alice continually shrinks and grows, shrinks and grows throughout the story, depending on the situation. It’s very random, when the changes in size happen, and one starts to think about why size plays such a theme (especially when one is running out of blog ideas).

In one of my earlier blogs, I wrote about how the different characters in Wonderland could represent different states of mind. Such as worry, immaturity, cockiness and so on.Now, I see how the changes in size, in according to the situation, can represent growth, and a person’s journey through life. We can see our own lives as a trip through Wonderland; with all of it’s ups and downs, irritating people and scenarios that you just don’t understand. And when we’re faced with each obstacle, we either rise up to overcome it, or we shrink away from the hardship and try to avoid it. So does Alice. She grows and shrinks with each encounter, and will either face each character boldly or timidly. It’s really strange how close to real-life Wonderland is, when you get past the smoking caterpillars and coat-wearing rabbits. Maybe, underneath the intention of giving a little girl a story, he was trying to give her a life lesson. Or tell of a person’s journey through life. It would make sense, if he cared for the girl, to try and give her that little piece of knowledge. He IS an adult after all, and they just love trying to cram life-lessons down our throats.

Not only that, but how about those characters? Everyone runs into a person that’s always in a rush, or a little loopy, or feels like chopping everyone’s heads off because they don’t get what they want. Alice has effectively run into most of the extreme personalities of the people we’ll meet throughout our real-life Wonderland. It’s not only a story about a girl being thrown into a strange and mixed-up place, it’s about a girl suddenly realizing the weirdness of real-life.

Complex Simplicity

Throughout the story we are faced with riddles and characters that do nothing but talk in circles. the Caterpillar, the March Hare, the Cheshire Cat. All of these characters talk in such a confusing way that it takes us a while to fully get what they’re saying.

But is it really all that confusing?

Maybe the only reason that their comments and questions are so confusing to us is that we’re used to looking at things from one perspective. All of us do it. Say two people are arguing over whether something is right or wrong. One person is looking at the argument from one side only, and arguing that side. The other person is on the other side of the argument and only arguing that side. Sometimes one of the people is pulled over to the other side of the argument, or they agree with a point from the other side. But there is always, ALWAYS just two sides. I’ve heard this called the Line of Discussion. There’s a very distinct line between one side of the discussion (or argument) and the other.

But the inhabitants of Wonderland seem to be on a THIRD side of the argument, one we’re not used to dealing with. They have a different perspective on the ways of society (like table manners) and on getting an answer out of somebody (like who they are). So the question remains:

Are they really so confusing, or are they using a much more simple form of speaking and straight-talking?

I think that they’re really talking in a very simple manner, but we’re blowing it out of proportion because we’re not used to it, and it’s different.

I Mean What I Say….Do I Say What I Mean?

It’s already been thoroughly covered that Wonderland is a crazy and mixed up place, where meanings mean little and sayings say a lot. And when one statement is repeated by two totally unrelated characters, it’s bound to have some significance. The phrase “I mean what I say” is said both by Alice to the March Hare and Hatter, and by the Mock Turtle to Alice. If we were to only look at the phrase in it’s individual scenarios, then it would simple be a way to confuse or embarrass Alice. But since such utterly different characters used the phrase, I’d like to try to apply it to the rest of the story. If we look back at the entire story, did any character say something that they didn’t mean? Whether the character was being obnoxious or insulting or kind or whatever, they ALL said EXACTLY what they meant. If they meant to be insulting, then you can be sure that Alice was insulted. If they wanted to be obnoxious, then they would be like a younger sibling on caffeine without a second thought.

But, as the Hatter and Hare point out, meaning what you say and saying what you mean are two totally different things.

“You might as well say that ‘I like what I get’ is the same thing as ‘I get what I like’!”

Obviously, these are very different things. So, what DO the inhabitants of Wonderland mean? We’ve already established that they mean what they say, but do they say exactly what they mean? That’s my question.

Simple Schooling

When the Mock Turtle is telling his story, he spends most of his time telling about his school under the sea. He replaces the normal subjects with words that sound a bit like the actual subject, but their meaning is very much different.

School is almost never taken with a positive state of mind. You have to get up early, force yourself to focus through classes that you don’t really care about, and then do even more work when you get home. It’s not a pleasant experience. But the Mock Turtle takes the regular classes that we know and gives them new names that I personally think fit much better than their current titles. There’s arithmetic, with its addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, which turns into ambition, distraction, uglification and derision. All of these (except addition, which to me is the easiest one) have a negative connotation.

It rather amuses me that even in a mixed-up world like Wonderland, school is still an unpleasant experience. In fact, even if Wonderland is an odd and mixed up place, the characters still seem to be more intelligent that Alice. They’re constantly badgering her about being a “simpleton” and snapping at her for asking silly questions. Now, seeing as this is such a strange place, it makes a bit of sense that uglification wouldn’t have the simple, obvious definition that the Gryphon gives. But, since it’s Wonderland, then you might be able to assume that since nothing is as it seems, then everything is as it seems in the most simple and obvious way. And that is why this book is giving me a headache

Magical Madness

Seeing as we just had our first our first in-class essay on Alice, I think that it would be appropriate to blog about it.

The prompt  was to chose one of the morals that the Duchess had mentioned and “use it to make an argument about the meaning of Alice’s entire journey through Wonderland.”

Now, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I was pretty confused as to how we were supposed to take a random moral that the Duchess brought up and apply it to the ENTIRE journey through Wonderland. But eventually I chose a quote that I felt I could at least do ok with, and ran with it.

“Birds of a feather flock together” is an old and over-used phrase speaking about how people and creatures that are alike tend to hang together. Well quite honestly I had absolutely NO clue as to how this applied to the story at all, so I let my mind wander instead of picking out quotes. Which, sadly, brought me right back to English because the quote was bugging me.

The characters in Wonderland are all quite mad, as the Cheshire Cat says “We’re all mad here. I’m mad, you’re mad.” They’re all mad. ALL of them. I have yet to find one sane person in this book, so what does that say about the moral that the Duchess brought up? Well, I’m not sure about the other ones, but this particular moral has some merit in that it links with the story. They are, quite literally in some cases, ‘birds of a feather”. It’s interesting, really, that Alice would fall into a world where everyone is mad. If everyone there is mad, then does that make her mad as well? I would think so, seeing as she has absolutely no problem with having tea with a Hatter, Hare, and a Doormouse. In fact, she has problems with their manners, not at all with the fact that she thinks that animals should have manners in the first place.

As the Cheshire Cat most wisely put it, “You must be mad, or you wouldn’t have come here.” certainly it seems that nothing can exist in Wonderland with out being mad, or heading in that direction rather quickly.

Tea for Three (Plus a Rodent)

Alice has fallen into a world where everything is topsy-turvy and nothing makes much sense at all. So naturally we’re going to come across characters that match the setting.

She comes across a fabulous tea-party with a few characters that are going to give her a headache. The March Hare and Hatter are rather like the Caterpillar in the fact that they talk in a circular manner, but while the Caterpillar speaks in a very neat, defined circle, the Hatter and Hare speak in loops and zig-zags and turns that hardly resemble a circle at all. One could go so far as to say that they have ADD, as they change the subject so much.

One has to wonder why these characters were introduced. Was it simply for entertainment, or was there some underlying reason that the Hatter and Hare were added? There’s certainly enough madness in Wonderland that they could have done without these characters.

There is one particular detail about their conversation that stands out: It is the first time that a secure character* states that they are mad. This is kind of like a one of those break-throughs that you hear about in therapy sessions when the patient has an epiphany, and starts on the road to recovery. Only this time, everything goes down-hill from the moment that they say that magical word. The conversation turns from weird do down-right disturbing as they jump from topic to topic in the blink of an eye. Now, what’s the significance in the fact that someone says that they’re crazy? It’s very simply the fact that a suspicion we’ve had of of the sanity (or lack thereof) has been proven.

—

* What I mean by “secure character” is that unlike the Cheshire Cat (who was technically the first Wonderland inhabitant who mentioned being mad), the Hatter and Hare have a very distinct setting that you can link them to.

While the Cheshire Cat wanders about and does as he pleases, the Hatter and Hare are stuck to their tea party, and then the trial (ch. 11) and are very set in their places. While the Cheshire Cat does not obey anyone and is a rather lose character, and strange even by Wonderlands standards.

A Taste of Frank Philosophy

When we first see the Caterpillar, the image we get is of a calm blue worm, in a sort of meditative state. He’s sitting back, “quietly smoking a long hookah” and not paying any mind to the world around him. This kind of reminds me of old gurus and Indian medicine men who would go into drug-induced states to find enlightenment or what have you. And when he speaks his first words, we’re instantly introduced into a frank character, and with his next words, a frank philosopher. He demands “Who are you?”.

I’d like to stop a minute and think about how many different ways that question can be taken. There’s the obvious and most used “Who’re you?” Just asking who this person is that interrupted a caterpillars smoke break. Or there’s the more surprised and angry “Who ARE you?” which is more of an expression of surprise at something that is strange and unusual. But the Caterpillar puts the emphasis on “you”, so we can safely assume that he meant the third way of taking the question; as an eternal question on who is a person? What is I? And the rest of that headache-inducing mess. That, and the Caterpillar also proves to like talking about in circles and riddles. Whenever Alice says “you see” the Caterpillar immediately responds with “I don’t see” which is bound to get annoying, just like when you say “can I go to the restroom” and the teacher absolutely always replies “I don’t know, can you?”. It’s a way of taking things way too literally, yet when you double that smarty-pants attitude with a philosophical question, you get a very interesting character that’s bright blue with a hookah.