Public Address | Cafe | Speaker: Who No : Letters From Alice May Williams

Ian Dalziel

Sat, 07 Jun 2014 09:45:26 +1200

The Princess of Mars
…whether Alice lived long enough to read
Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles,
Though she may well have been exposed to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom and John Carter of Mars…

She also puts me in mind of Philip K Dick, but less disturbed…

Shazia Malik

Sat, 07 Jun 2014 08:32:04 +1200

Hi David,

Thanks for this article! It’s been a gold mine for me with regards to a school project that I’m working on. I live in LA and came away from the museum, utterly blown away. Alice sounds like such an incredible personality and I would love to know more…

Sacha

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 14:15:24 +1200

So true, thanks. And welcome to Public Address.

Guy von Sturmer

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 13:37:36 +1200

This story has great meaning for me. It evokes the universal loneliness that comes from each of us having knowledge that no one else will ever possess. Others may know about it, but never as we-to-whom-it-happened know it. There is a vast gulf between knowing something and merely knowing about…

linger

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 14:25:37 +1200

[Lowell’s] fantasies about the Martian canals […] were perhaps more grounded in observation
though of course, unbeknownst to Lowell, his observations were, at least in part, of the blood vessels in his own eyeballs.

Fuller description here (PDF).

David Herkt

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 09:17:25 +1200

It was fun seeking out the Auckland locations – it made an interesting under-history of the city. I was surprised just how fluid the names of streets were – two of the three had been renamed, and I am fairly sure K Rd has been renumbered, but I couldn’t satisfy…

Jolisa

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 22:22:57 +1200

Fascinating work, David. It must have been so fun to track down the locations and connections, even if Alice herself cannot be pinned down in any definitive way. Richard is right, that there's a lot of this sort of thing (and thus this kind of mind) out there, but there's…

Kumara Republic

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 18:57:40 +1200

But they're generally rude old men. Not nice, like Alice.

And worse still, many of them intersect with the Intelligent Design and neo-crusader mobs.

Sacha

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 17:48:16 +1200

Ta. Might need to make the two statements match. :)

David Herkt

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 16:26:20 +1200

Hi Sacha, I probably wasn't clear. Alice was married and she stated 'we' lived at the lighthouse five years before Letter #2 (written Jan 29th 1933). I presume this 'we' meant her husband and herself. She says she has photographs of her and 'the other keeper's wife' which again I…

Russell Brown

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 14:12:26 +1200

The number of amateur climatologists in NZ who are passionately convinced ‘global warming’ is hooey is quite astounding.

But they're generally rude old men. Not nice, like Alice.

Rob Stowell

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 13:58:49 +1200

There is a surprising volume of this stuff out there.
The number of amateur climatologists in NZ who are passionately convinced 'global warming' is hooey is quite astounding.
And that's just at our local pub :)

Sacha

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 13:37:37 +1200

Thanks, David. Delightful.

One point confuses me: you say at the end Alice lived "with her husband in a lighthouse" yet earlier, about Hugh Williams, that "His relationship, if any, to Alice also cannot be confirmed."

richard

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 13:12:24 +1200

I had a guy call me from Damascus last year (when I was still working in the US), to say he had worked out that the moon actually orbited the earth in the opposite direction from the one you find in the textbooks.

He was very polite, but also insistent,…

David Herkt

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 13:03:08 +1200

Agreed, Robyn. I worked for a national AIDS organisation in Australia for a number of years and our letters were sometimes particularly interesting – ranging from red ballpoint bible verses decorating envelopes to an inventor in Taranaki who had constructed an electrical cure for HIV/AIDS. I liked Alice May Williams…

Robyn Gallagher

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 12:33:58 +1200

The correspondence of Alice reminds me of a lady who used to send faxes to a television programme I worked on. (About once a year she'd ring up to get the fax number, which always prompted a "Do we have a fax machine?" panic.) The lady always wanted to appear…

Russell Brown

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 12:10:09 +1200

They had more time in those days. Although I suppose these things are relative.

Boom!

richard

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 12:01:32 +1200

I get letters (well, email, these days) all the time. I just hit delete.

One person's occupational hazard is another person's museum exhibit.

Lyndon Hood

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 11:37:24 +1200

The Museum of Jurassic Technology

My sister got me a tshirt from there.

Public Address

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 11:37:24 +1200

Discussion from blog post.