Too Much Information
My goodness, one does see a lot of absolute rubbish on the Huffington Post. I was intrigued by a headline about dark secrets of kiddie lit authors, so I read the story. My expectations weren’t high. I was expecting to read a tired re-hash of Lewis Carroll’s attraction to 8 year old girls, J.M. Barrie’s attraction to 8 year old boys, maybe a little bit about Walt Disney’s racism and the fact that A.A. Milne was a lousy father.
None of those even made the list, but I wouldn’t have objected if the author had had some juicy stuff on some other writers, but it was really pretty weak stuff all around.
Dr. Seuss supported the Japanese Internment Camps in WWII (so did FDR, which is why they existed), L. Frank Baum didn’t like Indians, Aesop was accused of embezzlement (the author fails to mention that O. Henry was actually convicted of it, which is why we have the short stories of O. Henry) and Shel Silverstein also wrote things for adults!!
I should be a little bit more sympathetic to the author. After all, if you have to write something to fill up the space by a certain deadline and you’re short of ideas, you start writing any old thing – rather like this.
That is part of what’s wrong with the world today. With hundreds of TV channels and literally millions of blogs, it’s hard to find something unique to say. Even harder is finding something that is both unique and worth a damn.
But the curse is also a blessing. With so much verbiage at our fingertips, we truly are becoming the infinite number of monkeys who are typing at the infinite number of typewriters and sooner or later we will produce some 21st century version of the complete works of William Shakespeare.
One thing that I think would speed that process along is a filter. I wish we had a way to weed out the crap and only read the brilliant, insightful articles, to only see the good movies, to make every conversation an intelligent, idea filled interchange which would improve our lives and move things forward.
I’m hoping that eventually the comments section of this blog will be like that, but I know I’ve still got a long way to go.
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