Common scenario: You’re flipping through channels on the television and all the young people’s stations roll by. Interested in peeping into your peewee favourite is show Blue’s Clues, you are instantly repulsed to find that they have Blue venturing down the Nile river chasing after the thief who stole the clue and strapped it to a time bomb! In all your haste you change the channel to a show more reliable to engulf you in wholesome brain-melting and you find Spongebob is no longer a citizen of the ocean, but a crime-fighting space sponge who saves innocent life forms from black holes! “Wheres all the counting and colours?” you ask. Why is everything so fast?
Kids these days, right?
If there isn’t violence, toilet humor or hunky high school romance then it holds no interest for them. If the plot is not constantly moving at a rapid pace then their attention will wander and drift. I wonder now if Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland would be a story that a parent of modern upbringing could read to their child and captivate them.
Personally, it even loses my interest sometimes.
Although the plot is constantly keeping me on my toes with weird vernacular and poems of nonsense, I sometimes find myself asking if anybody else is somewhat bored? There is a lot which can be decoded (if we allow it to be) and a lot which can be discovered once we peer into the text a little more and that certainly keeps us interested for a while because we have to be interested. But if I came across it in a library and read the story for the pure joy of reading in a giant chair by a roaring fire in the dead of winter, I can say that I would be thoroughly bored.
But perhaps one can only be bored if they are ignorant; if they didn’t pursue answers to questions and ask questions to be answered.
Are you bored?
Darcy S.
Connor S.
Devon H.
Morgan P.
Scott Mitchell
Alice's Pack of Cards 
First off, Darcy I love this post. You have pointed out many truths that some may be too embarrassed or ashamed to admit. For example, violence seems to be the main thing that keeps people attention now. If its not explosions then its guns, knives, chainsaws, blood and guts, etc. I am ashamed to say it but I believe we are becoming a society that is addicted to all of the wrong things.
I feel as if society as a whole is becoming superficial and lazy. We no longer want to dig deep into something to find the bigger picture. We simply base what we do and don’t read/watch on how it appears at first glance. If it doesn’t grab our attention in the first thirty seconds we put it down or change the channel, and look for something else.
The greatest literature written centuries ago is being forgotten and brushed aside. Back then the ‘bigger picture’ (or deeper meaning) was never just sitting out there for anyone to see. People had to analyze things over and over until the could finally ‘get it’. But now, you can just watch the trailer to just about any movie and know what going to happen before hand. Nothing is deep anymore…You get what you see.
Btw: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland will always one of my favorites.
I find it fascinating how quickly the times change. It seems like just yesterday Blue was leaving clues for Steve and they were trying to find crayons for Paprika. Now kids are not interested in Blues Clues
which, by the way, is no longer running (I know! It’s madness!)My brother and dad went to see the movie “Precious” the other day. This film is rated R and has extremely adult subject matter and language. I was horrified to hear that there were parents taking their small children to this movie when they knew full well that it was rated R. My brother told me that almost every other word was a curse word. How do parents expect their children to know not to use curse words when they are exposed to them at such a young age? What has happened to kids these days?
Personally, both of the stories in the Annotated Alice are not that boring really. I do prefer slower stories because I can keep up and understand what the book is talking about. I do hate now day movies because of the need for non-funny humor and pathetic plot schemes to keep up with the tasteless mob out there today. If this insults you, I apologize. Alice is simply a story that I will always love, despite that we have to analyze and write about it. The words that are sometimes used in Carroll’s works might be wried to us, but in his time these words were our equivalent to slang that butchers the English language. So really, I find that this book as a classic that is not boring and keeps arebrains in constant motion.
Alex,
I appreciate opinions from all sides! Alice is a classic tale, and I will have continuous respect for the story and Lewis Carroll. His revolutionary ideas and visions are what made this story so thrilling, but now one can’t help but feel their eyelids dropping towards the end of the story.
Once again, thank you very much for your opinion.
I loved this blog! In todays world there is no pure humor. People can’t enjoy things unless there is action constantly in motion. My dad showed me this video called “Whoes on first” and it made me laugh so hard. That video was made a long time ago. The humor in that was totally different from the comedy I see today. What they have on television these day is certainly affecting our society. Because there isn’t only toilet humor,but people have been constanly using violence to turn heads. The thing is, if they didn’t use that stuff there wouldn’t be any entertainment.
When I read books and see shows where there really isn’t anything going on I get bored.When I read Alice I hardly evergot bored because there was action constantly in motion. Except it is so different from today because the action is more about you own creativity instead of the crude things put in front of you. I think back when Alice was written it might have been somewhat crude to some people. Maybe it was crossing certain boundries in order to entertain people. Alice is like a precedent for the outrageous things we see today.
Absolutely! Where would the fun be with no explosives?!?
JK (for the older crowd that means Just Kidding). I find that yes, it sometimes is a drag. However, when I change to thinking about the hidden implications of Carroll’s writing, I am much more entertained by the between the lines of his general STUFF.
However, like you, when I read for entertainment, I want to shut off the analysis portion and just create to follow the book. I want to freely flow with hooked mind and fired senses.
I really liked this post, because it addresses a lot of things that I fell over while reading Alice also. Carroll’s fickle writing style entertained me for the first three chapters, then the imagery kept me going through the next six, and the last 3 took me forever to read. Not because they were hard or cryptic in some way, but simply because there were things that seemed more interesting. It wasn’t my sometimes short attention span either, because i could read tolstoy for longer than Alice. With other books I simply have issues reading them because their meaning, if i ever think about it, is well hidden. Carroll puts the meaning a lot closer to the surface than others, and it made it more tedious to read. I found myself constantly interpreting while I read, which is good in smaller measures, but it ended hindering my reading significantly.
I do think that once one has read it, it is a lot easier to think about what it meant and how it connected, but the actual process can be very tedious when interrupted by tons of interpretation.
Maybe it could have used some explosives to hide the meaning a bit more and make the reading easier.
Darcy, I am addicted to your blog posts. This makes so much sense! When I’m reading ANY book, if it’s just monologue or something not exciting, then I’ve been known to skip entire paragraphs just because there’s nothing going on. It’s a sad thing to realize that you’re one of the people who’s got the attention span of a five-year-old. Maybe it’s just because real life has suddenly become so dangerous and fast-paced, that we can’t handle anything less exciting that that. Or it could be the fact that because of technology, we get what we want to much faster than we used to, and books are full of suspense and waiting games that we just don’t tolerate it. Whatever it is, it sure makes focusing on the blogs much harder.