Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Family at the Ransom Center day

Visit Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on Saturday, April 25, between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. and enjoy activities that are free the young and young in mind. You are able to participate in writing activities with teaching artists from Austin Public Library Friends Foundation’s Badgerdog 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 when you look at the theater. Family days are generously sustained by a grant through the Austin Community Foundation, with in-kind support given by Terra Toys.

Below is a detailed schedule:

Teaching artists from Austin Public Library Friends Foundation’s Badgerdog Creative Writing Program will lead activities that are writing the top the hour from 10 a.m. through 4 p.m.

Join a docent-led tour associated with exhibition at noon, 2 p.m., and 4 p.m.

Enjoy story time when you look at 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 while you tour the galleries.

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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 film strips portray two of the most extremely memorable parts 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 essay writer wooden dowels and kept in colorfully printed boxes that are little. The Movie Jecktors could have been combined with a toy film projector to create a animation that is simple.

The Ransom Center’s Movie Jecktors required conservation before they may be safely displayed when you look at the galleries. Both the wooden dowel and the storage box, which will be manufactured from wood pulp cardboard, had a high acid content. An environment that is acidic damaging to paper. The Movie Jecktors had become brittle and discolored, and there have been many tears and losses to your paper. The movie strips had been repaired in the past with pressure-sensitive tapes (the tape that is common all used to wrap gifts). These tapes will never be appropriate for repairing paper because they deteriorate and often darken over time and are also difficult to remove once in place that we hope to preserve.

Because the Ransom Center’s paper conservator, I removed the tapes using a heated tool and reduced the residual 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 permit these additions to blend with the original paper. Aspects of ink loss are not recreated.

People to the exhibition can see the certain areas of the filmstrips that were damaged, but those areas are now stabilized and less distracting. This sort of treatment reflects the practice of conservation to preserve, but not “restore,” the object’s appearance that is original. Libraries, archives, and museums today often select the conservation approach as it allows researchers as well as other visitors a much better knowledge of the object’s history, including damages that occurred, which could talk to the materials used in the object’s creation.

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Please click on thumbnails to enlarge images.

Easter hours weekend

The Ransom Center are going to be open throughout Easter weekend, including on Friday, April 3, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m, as well as on Saturday and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m.

Free docent-led gallery tours occur daily at noon and Saturdays and Sundays at 2 p.m. No reservations are needed.

Admission is free. Your donation will offer 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 April 4 saturday.

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John Crowley, whose archive resides during the Ransom Center, is an American composer of fantasy, science fiction, and mainstream fiction. He published his first novel, The Deep, in 1975, along with his 14th volume of fiction, Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, in 2005. He’s got taught creative writing at Yale University since 1993. A special 25 th -anniversary edition of his novel Little, Big is going to be published this spring. Below, he shares how Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland influenced his or her own work.

A vital ( sense that is best) reader of my work once wrote a whole 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 type of title to begin with. 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 aloud: my older sister read them to me when I was about eight yrs . old. I don’t remember my reaction to Alice in Wonderland—except for absorbing it wholly—because for several books read or heard at certain moments in childhood, there’s no first reading: such books enter the mind and soul as though that they had always been there. I really do remember my reaction to Through the Looking Glass: i discovered it unsettlingly weird, dark, dreamlike (it is in fact 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 also the sheep into the stern knitting (!)—it wasn’t scary, but it was eerie I was then becoming a connoisseur because it so exactly replicated the movements of places and things and people in my own dreams, of which. 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 a write-up 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 even more distant than they really are. It’s more common in childhood, often in the start of sleep, that can disappear by adulthood…”

I have tried to describe this syndrome to people for years, and never once met anyone who recognized it from my descriptions. In my experience it’s more odd a sense than this, and more ambivalent: I feel (or felt, as a child, almost never any more) as though 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 on occasion even monstrously closer. It had been awesome within 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 was created in the appropriately liminal town of Presque Isle, Maine, and as a child suffered from or delighted in Alice in Wonderland syndrome.”