Gibraltar and Betweenness

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Gibraltar in the background, I pose sideways, wearing a Spanish Chrysanthemum claw in my hair, gitana style, taking a dare from my husband. The photo is from an August afternoon, captured in the sun’s manic glare. My shadow in profile, with the oversized flower behind my ear, mirrors the shape of Gibraltar, Jabl ut Tariq or “Tariq’s rock.” An actual visit to Gibraltar is more than a decade ahead in the future. I would spend years researching the civilization of al Andalus (Muslim Spain, 711-1492) and publish a book about the convivencia of the Abrahamic people before finally setting foot on Gibraltar. “In Cordoba,” I write, “I’m inside the tremor of exile— the primeval, paramount home of poetry” and that “I am drawn to the world of al Andalus because it is a gift of exiles, a celebration of the cusp and of plural identities, the meeting point of three continents and three faiths, where the drama of boundaries and their blurring took place.” At the heart of this pursuit is my own story, one that is illuminated only recently when I see in Gibraltar more facets of my own exile and encounter with borders.

On the flight from Karachi to Frankfurt, before my first train trip to Spain, I’m in my silk shalwar kameez and high heels, a young newlywed: halved, doubled, protean, wearing a new identity I have not yet divined or defined. When the immigration officer in Frankfurt asks questions, my husband who is half-German, responds in German and I in English. No, I do not speak German. Yes, we were married two weeks ago. My passport has my maiden name, but I have now adopted my husband’s family name Hashmi. Yes, our flight out of Europe is from Frankfurt and we will fly to the USA where we will live.

A few months earlier, when I designed my wedding cards, I had an emotional exchange with my father on the matter of changing names; it was a difficult decision to give up my family name for my husband’s. The topic of my name was fraught. My first name was my father’s gift, my middle name was my mother’s and the family name held the possibility of either reinforcing my attachment to my birth family by retaining it after marriage or giving it up as a gesture to honor my husband’s family. I chose the latter. Read more »

Three Bus Years

by Niall Chithelen

Night Bus—Beijing

The night bus takes you across the city in a straight shot. This city has straight shots, it’s wide across, you span some middle area, and who knows where the night bus goes when you leave.

The night bus shows up at odd times; you realized shamefully late that there even was a schedule. The other people who take the night bus aren’t like you, not taking it for your reasons, whatever those reasons are. They take their folded-up delivery bikes and sigh off at their stop. You stand up a few blocks out and then swing out, tilting home.

The night bus is where you collect yourself after a social evening, where the emptied streets remind you that you are anonymous and you return to the grey neighborhood where your footsteps are loud after midnight. Usually you are grateful for this strange nighttime routine. Sometimes you wish you stayed longer among the neon lights.

Seaside—San Diego

In the daylight, this route takes you up and down a hill along the water and you can breathe some ocean breaths. Bus or no bus, this is a sight better than most people get to see today. You’ve stepped in this ocean only once, though, dunked yourself into it, nervous, unsure what you had to lose; mostly you’ve seen it through windows or past stone walls.

On the way back, in the dark, you don’t notice the water. It’s not window time anymore, but instead looking down at your black plastic grocery bag time, or your phone, where you have pulled up a video that will stop playing if you change applications, so that you don’t check your messages so often. But you’re not good at not checking. You change applications. It’s a shame you’re heading home for no reason other than being done, out there.

As you step off at your inland corner, the ocean waits quietly, not too far away, wondering when you might return again.

Line 52—Tompkins County, New York

My winter boots are much too big, not in fit, just in general, so I’ve ruined some pretty nice shoes treading carefully during snow season. To or from work, I saw a bus I never took, bus 52, from Ithaca to Caroline. I suppose Caroline is a town, but maybe it isn’t—I was struck with the thought of the bus, plaintive, searching:

Line 52: Caroline
please come home

Matter, Space And Time – The Enchanting Entanglement Of Physics And Art

by Ariane Koek

Iris van Herpen – dress from the Aeriform Collection (Spring/Summer 2017) Photograph: Mikael Lundgren/Bildmuseet

The architect Sou Fujimoto  thinks of space as ‘densities’ and says architecture ‘is like handling the densities of the air’

“An endless sea of possibilities…of particles jumping in and out of existence” – that’s the description of space by the physicist Bilge Demirköz, who helped build the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) detector on the International Space Station, thinks of space.

“Matter is creation, its evolution, it’s nature, it’s us” – that’s how Fashion designer Iris van Herpen describes matter.  The physicist Michael Doser  describes matter, the subject of his life’s work, as ‘massive, compace, heaty, light, transparent, filmy, an illusion.”

Different ways of looking at the same phenomena, revealing different ways of knowing and experiencing it through the mind or body or both. Laid out side by side in my book Entangle: Physics and the Artistic Imagination,  seven  physicists and seven  artists  individually explore what seven different phenomena mean to them. Their interviews reveal the differences as well as connections of seeing the same phenomena through different eyes. It is my belief that it is in the connections, the differences, and the gaps in between, that the two most unique aspects of being human thrive and grow – the sacred space of the imagination and creativity. Read more »

Stuck, Ch. 16. Who We’re Not: Prince, “Purple Rain”

Stuck is a weekly serial appearing at 3QD every Monday through early April. The Prologue is here. The table of contents with links to previous chapters is here.

by Akim Reinhardt

Image result for cold war cultureMost people associate the Cold War with several decades of intense political and economic competition between the United States and Soviet Union. A constant back and forth punctuated by dramatic moments such as the Berlin Airlift, the Berlin Wall, the arms race, the space race, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Nixon’s visit to China, the Olympic boycotts, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” and eventually the collapse of the Soviet system.

But on the home front, the Cold War was often less about politics and economics and more about culture and society. It was a time of Us vs. Them, of Right vs. Wrong. Certain cows were sacred, others were evil, and woe be unto those who milked the wrong teat. The Cold War was about American society demanding conformity, and persecuting those who did not play along.

The Second Red Scare (ca. 1947–57) was the most dramatic example of persecuting non-conformists. People were hauled in front of Congress and, on national television, subjected to reputation-destroying and career-ending interrogations. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts weren’t just about politics; they also disciplined the society and put dissenters on notice: get in line, or at least shut up, or face dire consequences. And the popular culture followed suit.

Americans reacted strongly to the dominant good guys/bad guys narrative. Fears of a possible World War III and accompanying nuclear holocaust were widespread. The culture was soaked through with an Us vs. Them mentality, with a heavy emphasis on choosing up sides. It could be seen in everything from the ubiquitous white hat/black hat Westerns of the 1950s and 1960s to the Rock vs. Disco antagonism of the 1970s. Everyone had to be on the right side. Picking the wrong side marked you as the enemy. And refusing to pick a side at all? That was so strange as to almost be incomprehensible. Read more »

Monday, February 17, 2020

The Achilles Heel of Liberal Democracy

by Pranab Bardhan

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi

Many find fault with liberal democracy because it exacerbates inequality, particularly when wedded to unbridled capitalism. But inequality has been rampant in authoritarian countries as well, with or without capitalism. Many non-capitalist countries in actual history have been friendly neither to liberty nor equality, never mind the soaring rhetoric, whereas some liberal democracies have provided their alert citizenry with the means of taming the harshness of capitalism, showing the possibility of liberty and equality working together at least up to some distance.

Others find fault with liberal democracy because its emphasis on individual freedom may loosen community bonding and rootedness, but ‘liberty’ and ‘fraternity’ need not work at cross-purposes, and one should keep in mind that communitarian excesses without liberalism can hurt interests of minority and dissident or non-conformist groups and individual autonomy. For a discussion of these issues see my piece, “Can the Local Community Save Liberal Democracy?”. Yet why is liberal democracy so fragile? All around us demagogues rule even in traditional bastions of democracy; and majoritarianism so easily hollows out democracies and keeps only the shell (and even sometimes triumphantly gets that shell described by the oxymoronic term ‘illiberal democracy’).

In my article, “Coping with Resurgent Nationalism” I have suggested that if the constitution in some democratic countries incorporates liberal inclusive values and is reasonably difficult to change, it can provide the basis of some form of civic nationalism (or what Habermas called ‘constitutional patriotism’) that may resist the marauding forces of majoritarianism or exclusivist ethnic nationalism. But the ethnic nationalist leaders are so adept at whipping up our primordial or visceral evolutionary defensive-aggressive urge to fight against so-called ‘enemy’ groups, that such resistance is currently crumbling in many countries –for example, conspicuously in India under the onslaught of Hindu nationalism, even after several decades of reasonably successful civic nationalism based on values of pluralism enshrined in the constitution and undergirded by centuries of folk-syncretic tradition of tolerance and pluralism of faith among the common people. Read more »

The Impact of Philosophy – and the Philosophy of Impact

by Robert Frodeman and Evelyn Brister

Where is philosophy in public life? Can we point to how the world in 2020 is different than it was in 2010 or 1990 because of philosophical research?

On the first day of class, philosophy professors tell their students that philosophy promises to make us better citizens and to increase our understanding of science, politics, and art. Or in the words of the American Philosophical Association’s guide for undergraduates, philosophy develops the capacity to see the world from the perspective of other individuals and other cultures; it enhances one’s ability to perceive the relationships among the various fields of study; and it deepens one’s sense of the meaning and variety of human experience.

We agree. But more needs to be said about the relevance of philosophy to shaping society than that. People want to know that philosophy and the humanities are valuable not only to college students while taking a class or two, but also how the massive bodies of professional research that are being produced are relevant to society at large.

This is where philosophy (and the humanities generally) has failed: philosophers don’t investigate the specificities of philosophy’s relevance. Granted, there’s a pile of works (e.g., Martha Nussbaum’s Not for Profit, Fareed Zakaria’s In Defense of a Liberal Education, Michael Roth’s Beyond the University) that provide a general defense of the humanities. But when the question is put: “How specifically is humanities research relevant to society?,” any answer is seen as either a political challenge aligned with a defense of ignorance or else as being self-evident.

We think that asking—and answering—this question is neither a disrespectful nor a trivial task. Read more »

Monday Poem

Galleon

Click to enlarge

the complexity of your crossed purposes
beauty and war, grace and wastefulness,
you rest solidly at sea upon a liquid
without yet dropping through,
a steel log with algorithmic spurs
hollow inside of rust and rot, a contradiction,
weighty, weightless, floating

divine swan human pawns
Jesus weeps Mars is gloating
.
Jim Culleny
2/15/20
Pen & ink 1997, Jim C.

What Works?

by Joan Harvey

Everyone at every moment is guided by what he sees most clearly—compounded with what he sees least clearly. —Paul Valéry

And while this show is going in public, in the background, the wrecking crew is working. —Noam Chomsky

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar is proposing a new nickname for his agency: the “Department of Life.” An agency, as Ilyse Hogue of NARAL has pointed out, that was a primary architect of putting children in cages at the border.

More frightening is Attorney General William Barr’s announcement of the “Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice.” Under the guise of uncovering “opportunities for progress, improvement, and innovation,” the commission is a thinly veiled move toward increasing the power of the federal government to extend law enforcement and interfere with local decisions. An Executive Order recommends study of:

  • The challenges to law enforcement associated with mental illness, homelessness, substance abuse, and other social factors that influence crime and strain criminal justice resources;
  • The recruitment, hiring, training, and retention of law enforcement officers, including in rural and tribal communities;
  • Refusals by State and local prosecutors to enforce laws or prosecute categories of crimes;
  • The need to promote public confidence and respect for the law and law enforcement officers; and
  • The effects of technological innovations on law enforcement and the criminal justice system, including the challenges and opportunities presented by such innovations.

Then we have the new travel ban. The first ban restricted travel from Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia, as well as Venezuela and North Korea. Recently six more countries have been added: Eritrea, Sudan, Tanzania, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar (where the Muslim population is fleeing genocide), and Nigeria. The ban bars a quarter of Africa’s population from applying for immigrant visas to the U.S. Recently Iranians, including American citizens, were singled out at the border in Blaine, Washington and subjected to questioning about their political and religious beliefs.

The Federal Election Commission is down to three members, not enough for a quorum, and so cannot enforce campaign finance violations.

Every member of Trump’s human rights commission is an anti –LGBTQ activist. Read more »

The case for dumb kindness

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in a typhoon of steel and firepower without precedent in history. In spite of telltale signs and repeated warnings, Joseph Stalin who had indulged in wishful thinking was caught completely off guard. He was so stunned that he became almost catatonic, shutting himself in his dacha, not even coming out to make a formal announcement. It was days later that he regained his composure and spoke to the nation from the heart, awakening a decrepit albeit enormous war machine that would change the fate of tens of millions forever. By this time, the German juggernaut had advanced almost to the doors of Moscow, and the Soviet Union threw everything that it had to stop Hitler from breaking down the door and bringing the whole rotten structure on the Russian people’s heads, as the Führer had boasted of doing.

Among the multitudes of citizens and soldiers mobilized was a shortsighted, overweight Jewish journalist named Vasily Grossman. Grossman had been declared unfit for regular duty because of his physical shortcomings, but he somehow squeezed himself all the way to the front through connections. During the next four years, he became one of the most celebrated war correspondents of all time, witnessing human conflict whose sheer brutality beggared belief. To pass the time in this most unreal of landscapes, Grossman had a single novel to keep him company – War and Peace. It was to prove to be a prophetic choice. Read more »

Stop Pursuing Us With Happiness

by Thomas O’Dwyer

Pollyanna statue in Littleton, New Hampshire, home of Eleanor H. Porter.
Pollyanna statue in Littleton, New Hampshire, home of author Eleanor H. Porter.

Is there anything more depressing than the happiness industry? Never mind Google, just check out Amazon Books for something to read about this mental snake-oil, and just look at that — “50,000 results for Happiness.” With so much advice available, it’s hard to grasp how there could be any misery left in the world. At the top of the list among the “happiness projects” and “happiness how-tos” sits The Art of Happiness by no less a global guru than His Holiness the Dalai Lama of Tibet. But wait; there’s less. The small print reveals that the Dalai Lama didn’t even write the book. It is a set of “observations and analysis” by some American psychoanalyst who “echos” the ideas of the world’s favourite holy man. I wonder if he’s happy with that.

The British feminist Lynne Segal has suggested that the “happiness agenda” ought to be named the “misery agenda”. She argues that it adapts people to the causes of their misery, rather than addressing them. That’s a nod to Professor Pangloss, of whom more later. The Dalai Lama is elsewhere reliably quoted as teaching that “the purpose of our lives is to be happy.” The American people’s genius, Benjamin Franklin, wrote that “wine is constant proof that God loves to see us happy.” Come on guys — this is a serious existential topic, and that’s all you’ve got?

The mystery of happiness, once owned by ancient high philosophy, is now all over the place. As with so much else in the disintegrated temples of ancient values, we can probably blame the Americans. The ancient wisdom of the Greeks, of Marcus Aurelius, the Buddha, Confucius and other giants has been deconstructed into streams of glib cliches that can be transformed into dollars by slapping them on mugs, T-shirts, Hallmark cards and blurbs for “self-help” trash. What have they wrought, those framers of the U.S. Constitution, by sticking into it that fuzzy inalienable right to “the pursuit of Happiness”? Read more »

The Cancer Questions Project, Part 29: Leonidas Platanias

Leonidas C. Platanias, MD, PhD, is the director of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University. He is the Lurie Family Professor of Oncology and Professor of Medicine and Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics. He is board certified in Internal Medicine and Medical Oncology and started his research career at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, followed by clinical training in Medicine in New York and Hematology-Oncology at the University of Chicago. Dr. Platanias’s research work focuses on cytokine signaling pathways in malignant cells and the targeting of such pathways for the treatment of leukemias. He has published more than 320 papers in national and international scientific journals. He is the recipient of several grants including R01, U54, T32, and P30 awards from the National Cancer Institute and an I01 Merit Review (VA). His work is recognized by numerous awards, including the Seymour and Vivian Milstein Award for outstanding contributions in cytokine research. A member of various scientific societies, Platanias served as President of the International Cytokine Society and in other national leadership positions. He serves as Associate Editor and/or in the editorial board of several scientific journals and has chaired and/or been a member of several NIH, VA and DOD study sections.

Azra Raza, author of The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last, oncologist and professor of medicine at Columbia University, and 3QD editor, decided to speak to more than 20 leading cancer investigators and ask each of them the same five questions listed below. She videotaped the interviews and over the next months we will be posting them here one at a time each Monday. Please keep in mind that Azra and the rest of us at 3QD neither endorse nor oppose any of the answers given by the researchers as part of this project. Their views are their own. One can browse all previous interviews here.

1. We were treating acute myeloid leukemia (AML) with 7+3 (7 days of the drug cytosine arabinoside and 3 days of daunomycin) in 1977. We are still doing the same in 2019. What is the best way forward to change it by 2028?

2. There are 3.5 million papers on cancer, 135,000 in 2017 alone. There is a staggering disconnect between great scientific insights and translation to improved therapy. What are we doing wrong?

3. The fact that children respond to the same treatment better than adults seems to suggest that the cancer biology is different and also that the host is different. Since most cancers increase with age, even having good therapy may not matter as the host is decrepit. Solution?

4. You have great knowledge and experience in the field. If you were given limitless resources to plan a cure for cancer, what will you do?

5. Offering patients with advanced stage non-curable cancer, palliative but toxic treatments is a service or disservice in the current therapeutic landscape?

Thoughts on killing a dog

by Charlie Huenemann

Maggie, in memoriam

Last week we had our dog put down. It was time. She was getting old and facing some serious neurological difficulties. The tipping point was a pair of severe seizures in the middle of the night, spaced about a minute apart. I know that seizures can trigger more seizures, and as I was trying to help ease her through the second one, I was thinking “What if this is it? What if she keeps seizing until she dies?” and I wondered whether I would have the nerve to strangle her myself rather than let her die in that horrible way. Thankfully, I was not put to that test. She came out of the second seizure, and stumbled around blind for the rest of the night, trying to escape from the dark hole she thought she was in.

We visited the vet in the morning to get some advice and a “quality of life” assessment. He was very kind in examining her and then laying out our options. Yes, we could submit Maggie to tests, and find some procedures and drugs that would help mitigate her impairments. Or we could wait it out, and see how things were going in another couple of weeks or months. Or we could decide that it was time to say goodbye. He emphasized that each one of these decisions would be right, and in the end we would have to decide what felt most right to us. My daughter and I both felt the time had come. So the vet gave us some time with Maggie, administered a tranquilizer that put her into deep sleep, and then a drug that stopped her heart. It was a gentle death.

It’s an occupational hazard for a philosopher to wonder about all sorts of odd questions even in the midst of a dramatic event like this. As it happens, this was a decision made under a cloud of uncertainty, with many different interests balanced against one another in utilitarian fashion: the interests of the dog and the family, as well as how those interests were likely to change in the near future. Read more »

Context Collapse: A Conversation with Ryan Ruby

by Andrea Scrima

Ryan Ruby is a novelist, translator, critic, and poet who lives, as I do, in Berlin. Back in the summer of 2018, I attended an event at TOP, an art space in Neukölln, where along with journalist Ben Mauk and translator Anne Posten, his colleagues at the Berlin Writers’ Workshop, he was reading from work in progress. Ryan read from a project he called Context Collapse, which, if I remember correctly, he described as a “poem containing the history of poetry.” But to my ears, it sounded more like an academic paper than a poem, with jargon imported from disciplines such as media theory, economics, and literary criticism. It even contained statistics, citations from previous scholarship, and explanatory footnotes, written in blank verse, which were printed out, shuffled up, and distributed to the audience. Throughout the reading, Ryan would hold up a number on a sheet of paper corresponding to the footnote in the text, and a voice from the audience would read it aloud, creating a spatialized, polyvocal sonic environment as well as, to be perfectly honest, a feeling of information overload. Later, I asked him to send me the excerpt, so I could delve deeper into what he had written at a slower pace than readings typically afford—and I’ve been looking forward to seeing the finished project ever since. And now that it is, I am publishing the first suite of excerpts from Context Collapse at Statorec, where I am editor-in-chief.

Andrea Scrima: Ryan, I wonder if it wouldn’t be a good idea to start with a little context. Tell us about the overall sweep of your poem, and how, since you mainly work in prose, you began writing it.

Ryan Ruby: Thank you for this very kind introduction, Andrea! That was a particularly memorable evening for me too, as my partner was nine months pregnant at the time, and I was worried that we’d have to rush to the hospital in the middle of the reading. But you remember quite well: a poem containing the history of poetry, with a tip of the hat to Ezra Pound, of course, who described The Cantos as “a poem containing history.” Read more »

Poem Without a Title

Your laughter was a car engine sputtering. Your peers were whiz kids in the dot com world. You showed me notes you’d made in the margins of all seven volumes by Proust. You said Sentimental Education wasn’t sentimental enough. You rolled your own leaves reading Ulysses, finishing it in three nights flat, but you wished to read it in one day to parallel the book’s action. “Impossible,” I said. “Impossible doesn’t exist in my vocabulary,” you said. “This can’t be a poetic line,” you said, shaking your head at my poem. “It’s running all the way to Pakistan.” I was nearly your dad’s age, yet I looked up to you literally and physically. My last memory of you standing against a pine, at my brother’s home with views of Long Island Sound, aiming your pee at the tree. You were the pine you peed on. You were the sputtering car engine hugging the tree you peed on moments ago. I pointed to the crescent moon. “Wow,” you said, rolling your leaves, “let’s read Das Kapital.” Nearly 10 years after your childhood chum, my nephew, was killed in Afghanistan, you went from your basement to au petit coin retrouvé or, depending on mood, au petit coin perdu — your Acura parked in a shuttered garage of your home in Scarsdale. You reclined on the driver’s seat, popped a pill of Topamax to dumbfound the snakes in your mind, chased the pill with a gulp of Perrier and to warm up the car, you gunned the engine.

For R. Q.  25 December 1972 —17 March 2001

By Rafiq Kathwari / @brownpundit

Looking Up with 2020 Vision: Astronomers’ Views of our Night Sky

by Carol A Westbrook

Looking up at the night sky

Have you ever looked up at a dark night sky filled with millions of stars, and felt the wonder and awe of the universe? It’s a rare experience in 2020, since the night sky is so bright due to light pollution, that even the brightest stars appear dim. Fortunately, don’t need a dark sky to appreciate the wonder of the heavens; you only have to have a look at what today’s astronomers can see.

Astronomers now use telescopes that view with more wavelengths than the human eye can see, and process the images with advanced computing, to reveal fantastic visions that even Galileo could not have imagined as he turned his little telescope towards the moon and planets. Views of everything from our neighboring planets to planets in different solar systems, to distant galaxies and even black holes! Read on, I’ll show you some of my favorites from the skies of 2020. Read more »

Stuck, Ch. 15. What We Become: Jefferson Airplane, “White Rabbit”

by Akim Reinhardt

Stuck is a weekly serial appearing at 3QD every Monday through early April. The Prologue is here. The table of contents with links to previous chapters is here.

Image result for charles lutwidge dodgson
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson ca. 1856 – 60. National Portrait Gallery, London.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was an odd fellow who eventually became someone else.

Born in 1832, he was the fourth of twelve children, and descended from a long line of English soldiers and priests all named Charles Dodgson. His parents were first cousins. He stuttered. A childhood fever left him deaf in one ear. As an adult he would suffer from migraines and epilepsy.

At age 12 he was sent away to school. He hated it. Still, he aced his classes and went on to Christ Church College in Oxford. He did not always apply himself, but nonetheless excelled at mathematics and eventually earned a teaching position. He remained at the school for the rest of his life.

Dodgson was conservative, stuffy, and shy. He was awed by aristocrats and sometimes snobbish to his social inferiors. He was mildly self-deprecating and earnestly religious. He had a reputation for being a very good charades player. He invented a number of gadgets, including a stamp collecting folder, a note taking tablet, a new type of money order, and a steering device for tricycles. He also created an early version of Scrabble. He liked little girls.

Dodgson enjoyed photographing and drawing nude children. He never married or had any children of his own. Whether his affection for pre-pubescent girls was sexual, or merely tied to Victorian notions of children representing innocence, is still debated. In the prime of his adulthood, one girl in particular caught his fancy: eleven year old Alice Liddell.

Dodgson spent much time with the Liddell family. A favorite activity was taking Alice and her two siblings out on a rowboat, where he would tell them stories. Alice so enjoyed the stories that she begged Charles to write them down. He presented her with a handwritten, illustrated collection in 1864. He called it Alice’s Adventures Underground. Read more »