Happy Happy Holidays

Dr. Seuss is a high-modernist

Currently the top three most popular books in our house are all by Theodore Geisel, aka, Dr. Seuss. Over the past months I have had a LOT of time to consider the oeuvre of the man who authored and illustrated among many others The Cat in the Hat, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, Green Eggs and Ham, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, and the pick of tonight, The Shape of Me and Other Stuff, read four times back to back straight through, the first three times ending with a simple reply, "again," and the last with "all done."

Dr. Seuss' work stands out among the many other children's books that carpet our house in a number of ways and I have been thinking about why. The sun sets early these days. The answer lies in how his world is formed out of his formal relation with language and drawing. I know next to nothing about his creative process, but have a number of his books memorized, and I can say with the authority of familiarity that the underlying structure of the language sets the foundation for the incredible universe that follows.

The words come together first because they sound great together. It is hard to find an awkward line. From there, Dr. Seuss illustrates a world that is uttery convincing and is built entirely around the language. There is Jerry Jordan and his jelly jar, a yawning yellow yak with Yolanda on his back (Yolanda looks like a complete brat and is yelling just as loud as the yak is yawning wide) and my all time favorite, the Quick Queen of Quincy and her quacking quackeroo.

Consider this from a page in Wet Pet Dry Pet, which is an adaptation of One Fish Two Fish...

Who is this pet?
Say! He is wet.

You never met a pet, I bet,
As wet as they let this wet pet get.

Once you can wrap your tongue around the rhyme, chant it in syncopation. Genius. Such joy in the language. You can do an amazing jazz rendition. My audience loved it.

Throughout his books Dr. Seuss' visuals are driven by the language, and the language is driven by the sound of the words, which when strung together lead to narratives, beings, and places that are incredibly integrated in their relationships with each other. All of this is built on the formal qualities of the language itself, which makes Dr. Seuss a modernist. A joyful modernist with a bit of a dark side. Just my kind of guy.

A Response

In my previous post I put up two quotes from an editorial piece by Orhan Pamuk published in the Guardian. Originally I had put the quotes into a draft to use later. Afterwards, our cat took a nap on my keyboard, publishing them for me. One should not argue with such fate, so I left them up to stand alone.

The piece in the Guardian oversimplifies the extremely complex interactions between poverty, religion, war and terrorism as they are being played out today. My personal experience having spent half my life in non-western countries is that the non-western world has complicated feelings about the west, but those thoughts and attitudes range widely from contempt to jealousy to amusement to superiority and so on. There is no unifying sense of the west, and the differences in perceptions of western culture between say China and Africa couldn't be bigger. It would be more productive to examine the use of terror in the Arab world as a complex symbol that arises multi-dimensionally to achieve diverse goals. And in doing so we should recognize that the motivations and experiences of Palistinian youths drawn to terrorism will be likely very different than the same motivations of the Lashkar separatists who carried out the recent attacks in Mumbai.

With that in mind, here is a quote from Ryszard Kapuscinski that comes much closer to getting to the philosophical root of the problem of turning a western eye on the rest of the world with a mind to understand it.

Each of these people, whom we meet along the road and across the world, is in a way twofold: each one consists of two beings whom it is often difficult to separate, a fact that we do not always realize. One of these beings is a person like the rest of us he has his joys and sorrows, his good and bad days; he is glad of his successes, does not like to be hungry and does not like it when he is cold; he feels pain as suffering and misery, and good fortune as satisfying and fulfilling. The other being, who overlaps and is interwoven with the first, is a person as bearer of racial features, and as bearer of culture, beliefs and convictions. Neither of these beings appears in a pure, isolated state--they coexist, having a reciprocal effect on each other.

However, the problem--and here lies the difficulty of my profession as a reporter--is that this relationship existing within each of us, between the person as individual and personality and the person as bearer of culture and race is not immobile, rigid or static, not fixed inside him for good. On the contrary, its typical features are dynamism, mobility, variability and differences in intensity, depending on the external context, the demands of the current moment or even one's own mood and stage of life.

As a result we never know whom we are going to meet, even though by name and appearance it may be someone who is already familiar to us. And what about when we come into contact with a person we are seeing for the first time? So every encounter with the Other is an enigma, an unknown quantity--I would even say a mystery.

From The Other by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Listen To The Damned

The western world is scarcely aware of this overwhelming humiliation experienced by most of the world's population, which they have to overcome without losing their common sense and without being seduced by terrorists, extreme nationalists or fundamentalists. Neither the magical realistic novels that endow poverty and foolishness with charm, nor the exoticism of popular travel literature manage to fathom this cursed private sphere. The great majority of the world population - which is passed over with a light depreciating smile and feelings of pity and compassion - is afflicted by spiritual misery.

The problem facing the west today is not only to discover which terrorist is preparing a bomb in which tent, which cave, or which street of which remote city, but to understand the poor, scorned majority that does not belong to the western world.
- Orhan Pamuk, Listen to the damned

via wood s lot

"An ordinary citizen living in a poor Muslim nondemocratic country will, like a civil servant struggling to make ends meet in a former Soviet satellite or any other Third World nation, be only too aware what a small share of the world's wealth his country has; he will know too, that he lives under much harsher conditions than his counterparts in the West and that his life will be much shorter. But it does not end there, for somewhere in his mind is the suspicion that it is his own father and grandfather who are to blame for his misery. It is a great shame that the Western world pays so little attention to the overwhelming sense of humiliation felt by most people in the world, a humiliation that those people have tried to overcome without losing their reason or their way of life or succumbing to terrorism, ultranationalism, or religious fundamentalism. ... It is not enough for the West to figure out which tent, which cave, or which remote city harbors a terrorist making the next bomb, nor will it be enough to bomb him off the face of the earth.; the real challenge is to understand the spiritual lives of the humiliated, discredited peoples who have been excluded from its fellowship.

Battle cries, nationalist speeches, and impulsive military ventures achieve the opposite ends. . . . If a destitute old man on an Istanbul island can momentarily approve the terror attack on New York, or if a young Palestinian worn down by Israeli occupation can look with admiration as the Taliban throws acid into women's faces, what drives him is not Islam or this idiocy that people call the war between East and West, nor is it poverty; it is the impotence born of constant humiliation, of a failure to make oneself understood, to have one's voice heard"
- Orhan Pamuk, Listen to the damned

via Politics, Theory & Photography

ed note: My response is here.