Bring your Imagination: Alice in Wonderland

I was reading "Rabbit Redux," the Ramin Setoodeh piece in this week's Newsweek.

He was talking about the imagination—those who use it splendidly well—and I was remembering my friend, Cuileann, who is one of the most imaginative people I know (we met in San Francisco, late last summer). Oh, what she does with words and photographs. What she does with heart.

So I was thinking about her, and then I kept reading, and I was thinking about my own book about the imagination (Seeing Past Z: Nurturing the Imagination in a Fast-Forward World) and then I thought, I wonder what my blogger friends would say about these thoughts Mr. Setoodeh is expressing? So I put them out there, for your comments:

"The only way to understand Alice is to use your imagination. Do you even remember how to do that? In our society of Web links, Wikipedia, Facebook, and reality TV, everything and everybody comes with a label and an exhaustive definition. There's scant room for ambiguity and interpretation. The genius of the 145-year-old Wonderland is that it forces you to bring your own creative juices to the tea party....

"Compare Wonderland with the great children's stories of our time: the Harry Potter series. As inventive as J.K. Rowling's seven books are, they're meticulously detailed (the intricate rules of Quidditch, the class rituals at Hogwarts, all the wizard paraphernalia) to the point of being encyclopedic, which is why the movies work as well as they do—they're road maps of the plot."

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What a Girl Wants

From a Sunday New York Times (Douglas Quenqua) story entitled "Blogs Falling In an Empty Forest," this:

According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream—or at least an ambition—unfulfilled.

And later:

Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the internet, but "it's probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views." He added, "There's a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one."

Statistics are statistics, and I'm not here to counter those. But I do wish to suggest this morning how downright thrilling it is when blogging communities emerge and thrive. Readergirlz, the online book club for teens, is a prime example. The virtual worlds that bloggers such as My Friend Amy, Presenting Lenore, HipWriterMama, Ravenous Reader, The Holly and The Ivy, The Curly Q, An Aerial Armadillo, Life Just Keeps Getting Weirder, and Pop Culture Junkie (among many others) generate are real and human (if you doubt the human part, follow the adventures of Cuileann, Faith, and Miss Erin—long-time blogging friends—who met in person for the first time this week). And last evening, Chasing Ray—always inventive, always forthright, impeccably well read—launched a project in which I am honored to participate—a summer-long tour of the minds of a rich slate of YA authors, all of whom are answering questions spawned by the general theme, What a Girl Wants.

Today, Lorie Ann Grover, Sara Ryan, Melissa Wyatt, Laurel Snyder, Margo Raab, Jenny Davidson, and others (including me) are reflecting on the question, "What book affected you most as a tween/teen?"

Check it out, if you have some time.

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