Whatever happened to nostalgia?

[entropymail]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, Barry Arrowsmith 
<arrowsmithbt at ...> wrote:
The realisation struck when a  
> couple of old friends, more in mock sorrow than anything else, 
chided  
> me for my enthusiasm for a 'kid's book'. Not for the first time -  
> usually this provokes an entertaining, insulting, almost 
scurrilous  
> exchange terminating with us laughing our way to the pub. Not this  
> time. "Yeah, you're probably right," was the reply, followed by a  
> scathing assessment of clunky authorial manipulation of text and  
> fandom. 



To some extent, perhaps, we have only ourselves to blame.  After 
years of brilliant posts regaling us with in-depth analyses on all 
aspects of mythology, symbology, astronomy, and alchemy (not to 
mention conspiracy theories of positively labyrinthine proportions) 
 
well, JKR's children's books seem to pale by comparison.  

For many of us, the beginning of the end came with The List. That's 
right, that "list of plots, mysteries and unfinished character arcs 
to be completed in Book Seven" posted back in October by Pippin et 
al. It was, well, long. Very long. And we began to see that the 
volumes of theories, mysteries, hints, conspiracies, and 
inconsistencies which we had amassed over the years could never be 
resolved within the confines of one final book and we would be, 
ultimately and inevitably, disappointed.

So, maybe Kneasy is right. Maybe this general disinterest is just a 
symptom of growing up and growing older. But perhaps it is something 
more.  Perhaps we see the promise of the early books fading away 
under the weight of thousands of hours of meticulously written 
analyses and brilliantly surmised conclusions. Maybe we've just been 
too smart for our own good.

Entropy