Monday, July 23, 2007

Surrealism!! what the heck is it supposed to be????

Hey diddle diddle,

The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon;
The little dog laughed to see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.

This was my first introduction to surreal writing. I did not know it as “surreal” then…I just knew I did not like it. Then I read Lear's The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Round the World, it was full of sentences like "After a time they saw some land at a distance; and when they came to it, they found it was an island made of water quite surrounded by earth. so that it was perfectly beautiful, and contained only a single tree, 503 feet high." Pardon me but where is the humor in it?? Recently I re-read Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass” and believe me I tried but I still could not see the humor. I was told you have to have savoir faire, sophistication to appreciate such art. Well it has taken me years to attain enough of both to admit “I don’t like Alice in Wonderland”!! There I have said it!!!