Thursday, July 7, 2022

White Rabbit

 I have finished reading to my two younger grandsons the two Alice books by Lewis Carroll. I read the edition with commentary by the late mathematician, Martin Gardner, who used to write for Scientific American. I also just listened to Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit," which is pretty bloody sharp, but which draws on both of the Alice books. While most attention is on the first one, "Wonderland," which got made into a not bad cartoon by Disney, the deep one is the second one, "Through the Looking Glass," with Dodgson (oh, excuse me, Carrol) a professor of logic at Oxford University, Oh, it really is deep shit.

There are so many cliches out of the book, but in fact the more serious ones come from the second one. The most cited of all lines from all the Alice books comes from the second one. It is when Alice encountereds the notorious Red Queen, whom she ultimately captures in the end, although that leads to the deep matte of life being a dream as the Red Queen turns into a silly kitten upon shaking and waking.

Anyway, that most famous line from all of them, which has economics signifigance, is the famous moment when the Red Queen drags her on to run very very fast, only to stay in the same place.

Barkley

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