summ( )n

The holidays is also a time for reading – or at least browsing the booked you bought with the dreams to read one day. Just before New Year I bought this book with the story of Alice in Wonderland (this is not exactly the text by Carroll, but rather a version told by Harriet Castor, and with beautiful illustrations by Zdenko Basic. The book was Dutch, but it was ok with me, because I mostly bought because of the pictures (although an official version was ‘to study Dutch’).

I was surprised, however, when I found that the English language version is not for sale till March 2010 (at least at the Amazon). I was also surprised when I found there a large amount items (books, movies, gifts of all sort) related to Alice which I never seen before; almost without exception they for sale only from March.

I soon realized this magical star/hole which both created this rush of (re)publications and at the same time halted them from materialization.

This new movie, with charming Johny Depp starring as the Mad Hatter is due in March 2010, and an amazing magic of market forces bend all these other items to this date, in the attempt to benefit from the cross-sales. A funny case of self-fulfilling prophecies, when someone anchor a very powerful attractor at some point in the ‘future’, and the myriads of forces and agencies start swarming and self-organizing around this ‘anchor’, thus making this prophecy happen.