A Guide to Practical Nonsense--a SCBWI India event

A Guide to Practical Nonsense--a SCBWI India event

with Michael Heyman, Colonel of the 5th Nonsense Brigade 

Thursday, May 21  

5:00pm - 6:00pm

Max Mueller Bhavan, 3, Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi, India 110001

Literary nonsense has a long tradition, going back to Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Rabindranath Tagore, and Sukumar Ray, all of whom have proven the nobility of this serious and silly, rebellious and strict form. Yet, whether we as writers and illustrators strive to work solidly in the tradition of nonsense, or just want our work to shine a little with the tradition, there are many simple techniques we can use to throw a little, or a lot, of nonsense into our books for children. In this talk, Michael Heyman gives a guide onwhat nonsense is and how to use it.

A blodacious blog on my visit to SDSU

The degree of my slithiness is still a matter of conjecture, this recent blog from Meg Mardian, about my trip to SDSU for nonsensical Carrollian conversation, only adding to the controversial and convivial conflagration:

San Diego State University Children's Literature blog...

SDSU Children's Literature: Beware the Nonsense, Dear Reader: Dr. Heyman’s Presentation Recap

Blog summary of Dr. Heyfrog's Alice in Wonderland 150th Anniversary lecture at SDSU

“Ladies and Gentle Frogs,” an expression taken from Dr. Michael Heyman’s opening address to Wednesday’s presentation, is being recycled here to re-invoke the proper tone that is needed to cover the topic of nonsense. It is indeed curious and peculiar to identify and question, how and why Alice has become a name and a figure recognized through several generations.  To answer this question, Dr. Heyman evoked the spirit of Charles Ludwig Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll) and took the audience down the rabbit hole with his “Magic Lantern Show.” [Click here to read the rest!]

SDSU Children's Literature: Beware the Nonsense, Dear Reader: Dr. Heyman’s Presentation Recap

Alice Turns 150! Public lecture on Alice and nonsense at San Diego State

Michael Heyman

Public Lecture

Alice in Wonderland One Hundred Fifty Years Later: A New Magic Lantern Phantasmämphigory

March 4, 2015

5:00PM- 5:50 (followed by questions and discussion until 6:30PM)

Love Library, SDSU

Leon Williams room (LL 430-431)

The National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature, with support from the Instructionally Related Activities fund, the Departmentof English and Comparative Literature, and the SDSU Library, is happy to announce a lecture by Professor Michael Heyman, noted poet, scholar, and musician. Michael's lecture concerns Lewis Carroll’s Alice and his Alice books—the first of which, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, is celebrating its one hundred and fiftieth anniversary this year!

Michael Heyman travels to sunny San Diego all the way from Boston, where he is a professor at Berklee College of Music. At Berklee, Michael teaches courses on Children’s Literature, Poetry, Arthropodiatry, and Nonsensical Nunchaku. When not teaching, he writes poetry, plays saxophone, and carries out scholarly investigations in various areas of esoterica—including the parararational, pataphysical, and nonsensical). 

Professor Heyman is a world-renowned scholar and writer of literary nonsense and children’s literature. He has edited The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense (2007), and his poems and stories for children can be found in The Puffin Book of Bedtime Stories (2005), The Moustache Maharishi and other unlikely stories (2007), and This Book Makes No Sense: Nonsense Poems andWorse (2012), which he also edited.

Of his talk, the good doctor writes: “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland lives one hundred fifty years after its publication not because Alice is a princess in a literary fairy tale, not because of our own flirtation with Charles Dodgson and Alice Liddell, and not because Alice has become embedded in our culture as innocent, vixen, or queen of psychedelia; rather, Alice in Wonderland lives because of its uneasy balance of all of these things and more. Its genius lies in what it does more than what it is. And what it does is nonsense. This talk, part magic lantern show and part paean to Lewis Carroll’s nonsense literature, does the unthinkable: it separates analysis from interpretation, it values the cart over the load. It offers the greatness of Alice as a teasing and tempting nonsense process, in its ability, like Humpty Dumpty, always to leave egg on our faces.”

The lecture is open to the public and we encourage students, community members, and faculty to join us!