The Cat in the Hat part 1
It’s difficult for us, now, to fully appreciate the impact The Cat in the Hat had on generation of parents, children and educators. The Cat, as an aide to teaching children to read, seems as obvious and omnipresent as the alphabet itself and has not been improved upon in 50 years.
The story of the book, which has been told many times (and can be found in greater detail here), is that the reading programs of the US were a laughingstock for their inefficiency and waste, and an editor of children’s books decided to take it upon himself to rectify the situation. (If someone could find the name of that editor, I would be in your debt.)
Ted Geisel (that is, Seuss) was given an assignment to create a children’s reading primer that would tell a story that uses only 220 easily-recognized words, which were drawn from a list provided by an educational theorist. One might imagine that a book produced by this technique, in kind and understanding hands, would turn out something like PD Eastman’s charming but plotless Go, Dog. Go! But Ted Geisel came up with something more original, daring and explosive.
(Eastman would later climb this mountain beautifully with the woefully underrated Sam and the Firefly, which I hope to get to at another time.)
The story goes that Geisel wrestled with the difficulty of creating his primer for months before taking the first two words from the list, “cat” and “hat,” and saying, essentially, “screw it, I’ll call it The Cat in the Hat,” and going from there.
The Cat in the Hat does its job as a primer very well indeed. It’s lively, funny, and tells a complete story with its bare-bones vocabulary (Seuss would later, of course, trump himself with the 50-word Green Eggs and Ham, which I discuss here). But the thing that makes The Cat in the Hat a classic, what makes it a book that sticks with you, is not that it teaches children to read but that it contains mysterious worlds of allegory and symbolism. It’s open to many different readings and addresses, in its way, some of the most profound questions of human life.
There was a wonderful piece by Louis Menand in the New Yorker a few years ago that gave a modernist interpretation to the story, and which is not available online, (although some criticism of it is — curse you, internet!). The Cat, says Menand, is Seuss himself, who’s been thrust before an audience of children and is required to entertain them with nothing but a handful of arbitrary, meaningless words — cat, hat, wall, cake, run, thing, etc.)
(The Cat carries an umbrella but the word “umbrella” does not appear in the book — not on the list, and difficult to fit into Geisel’s patented meter in any case.)
Having nothing to work with, the Cat throws a bunch of crap together (a ball, a rake, some books) and puts on a piss-poor circus act. One can feel Geisel’s frustration — “I could tell you some wonderful stories, but look what they gave me to work with!” — as the Cat abandons his mission of entertainment and moves on to destroying the house. The Cat becomes a Beckettian protagonist — ‘there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express” is the way the author of Waiting for Godot put it.
(Beckett, Seuss’s exact contemporary, would dedicate his life to paring down his work to Seussian levels of economy — was this the influence of The Cat in the Hat? Was it the dare of Green Eggs and Ham that took Beckett from the flourishes of his youth to the spareness of his mature work? The opening sentence of More Pricks Than Kicks, an early collection of stories, is “It was morning and Belacqua was stuck in the first canti in the moon.” The first line of his last work, Worstward Ho, is “On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on.” Worstward Ho, like many of Beckett’s late prose pieces, is about the author’s inability to express himself with the tools at his disposal — he would have recognized the cat’s dilemma immediately.)
The Cat, of course, has been denatured, neutered if you will, through time and love and wide acceptance, as all successful comic anarchists are, from WC Fields to the Marx Brothers to Richard Pryor, but the book itself still retains its mysteries and wildness. We see the Cat on a bookbag or bong and smile — he is there to comfort and charm. But, like Charlie Brown (another classic baby-boomer figure), the Cat represents something much darker and more interesting than the merchandising suggests.
“The sun did not shine.” That’s the opening line of this beloved classic. “The sun did not shine.” Not to torture Seuss’s place in the Modernist pantheon too greatly, but I’m reminded that the sun does not shine in a great many of Ingmar Bergman’s movies. In his case, it’s partly because the stories Bergman tells take place during the Swedish winter, when the sun does not shine as a matter of course. But Bergman always used the lack of sunlight (one of the peaks of his art is actually titled Winter Light) to denote a lack of divine light, an absence of God in the lives of his characters. (The Seventh Seal, lest we forget, was released the same year as The Cat in the Hat. There truly was something in the air — maybe fallout from H-bomb tests; that’s what critics thought the characters in Beckett’s Endgame, also published in 1957, were hiding from in their skull-like bunker.)
(When the sun does shine in Beckett’s work, as it does, unremittingly, in Happy Days, it is a harsh, burning, scorching blast without night. Light in Beckett is always important, whether it’s Krapp caught in his Manichean dualism or the protagonist of “Ohio Impromptu” stuck in his unending night or the beings of “Lessness” caught in their gray un-light.)
“The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play. So we sat in the house all that cold, cold wet day.” Well, this is Endgame. Endgame is about exactly this — two people locked in the house on a cold, wet day. All the Cat would need to do is bring in two old people in garbage cans instead of two Things in boxes and they would be the exact same work. The characters in Endgame, like the characters in Waiting for Godot, like the children in The Cat in the Hat, are faced with interminable boredom and nothing but a handful of ordinary props (a stick, a hat, a chair) to entertain themselves. Geisel stands squarely at the crossroads of mid-20th-century angst. Except, of course, he’s an American, which means that his characters’ problem is that they have things, but those things are useless consumer junk, the things we buy with our post-war dollars in order to feel less empty. The kids in The Cat in the Hat sit staring out the window in their house full of junk — a ball, a bicycle (Beckett again, with Molloy’s preferred mode of transport), a badminton racket. In literal terms, the stuff is useless to the kids because it’s all “outdoor” stuff, and it’s raining outdoors. But I am reminded, again, of Beckett, and his sense of indoors and outdoors. For him, the outdoors is everything outside his skull, that is the “real world,” and the indoors is his mind. The Cat kids are stuck not in a house but in their own minds, or in the mind of Geisel anyway.
(That’s why the shelter in Endgame has two windows — the characters are all inside Beckett’s head, and the windows are his eyes out onto the world, which, in Beckett’s view, is a blasted wasteland devoid of life.)
(It’s also worth noting that Beckett’s characters, like the boy and girl in The Cat in the Hat, are pseudocouples. That is, Didi and Gogo, Hamm and Clov, Mercier and Camier, etc, are not really two different characters, but only different aspects of the same mind, a pair of characters who appear to be a couple but who are really only one character arguing with him-or-her self.)
So I’m tempted to bring a both a psychological and spiritual reading to The Cat in the Hat, and will try to do so hand-in-hand here.
The kids stare out the windows of their suburban house the exact same way the characters in Endgame stare out the windows of their shelter, the same way Winnie stares at the landscape in Happy Days (Winnie also has nothing with which to face eternity but a toothbrush, an umbrella (!), some makeup, a hairbrush and a revolver — Seuss, apparently, couldn’t bring himself to include suicide in his list of possible activities for the kids of The Cat in the Hat), the same way The Unnamable stares, unblinking, out of its jar, at the void. They’re looking for life, and meaning, where experience has taught them none exists.
Beckett’s characters search for any signs of life at all — the possible appearance of a flea counts as a major plot point in Endgame — but the kids of The Cat in the Hat are searching for one specific sign of life — their mother.
Because their mother is out on this cold, cold wet day.
It took Time Magazine until 1966 to ask “Is God Dead?” (that’s Time for you, always behind the curve) but the question was very much on the minds of all the big thinkers in the middle decades of the 20th century. For obvious reasons. The end of the world had just narrowly been avoided, only to be threatened by a different end of the world, one that was in the hands of “the good” but which was still infinitely more scary than, say, Nazism.
In any case, the death of God was the central question informing Bergman’s greatest dramas, The Seventh Seal being only the most famous (Beckett’s works support a spiritual reading, but I think in the end his works are all about the act of writing itself — it is only coincidental that they invoke humanity’s relationship to God). But it’s not too far a leap, I think, to suppose that the absent Mother in The Cat in the Hat is God. God has left the children at home and gone off somewhere, she said she’d be back (like Godot) but there is no sign of her. And so all the children can do is wait (like Godot). They have a house full of stuff, certainly there’s a box of toys somewhere (although Seuss declines to put a TV in their house), but all the kids want to do is sit and stare and wait. Clearly, their mother’s absence worries them. Where has she gone, what is she doing, why is she not there? The story doesn’t say, but then God didn’t leave a note either.
The kids will sit and stare and wait (“All we could do was to Sit! Sit! Sit! Sit!” says the narrator [“I,” which I supposed would make “Sally” “Not I”]). Their house full of junk is meaningless and the world outside the house of their perceptions is a blasted void. Nothing has meaning, everything is dark, until their mother returns. Their anxiety about their lives in this suburban purgatory is palpable.
Alas, this is going on longer than I intended and my time grows short and I’m only on page 3. I will pick this up again on the nonce.
Movie Night With Urbaniak: L’Avventura
The first thing you need to know about L’Avventura is that it has no plot. The second thing you need to know about L’Avventura is that, in spite of having no plot, it is still tremendously exciting.
I don’t know how it manages to do that.
This was a rare instance of
actually requesting a movie to watch, rather than the two of us just kind of pawing through my DVD collection until we find something we both want to watch. He showed up with the movie clutched in his slender, spidery, indie-stalwart hands, still it its shrinkwrap, still with the price tag from Amoeba on it.
The movie is loaded with symbolism, but the characters aren’t symbolic — they’re real people. At least I think they are. Every time I tried to read the movie as purely symbolist it would answer with a scene that said that it was actually a character study.
Come to think of it, the story structure kind of reminds me of Raymond Carver. It’s not about big moments, or about a coherent dramatic arc. It’s about these people caught in a situation and it kind of sits there and studies how the people behave. And all the incidents that make up the narrative are all really small and not necessarily significant in and of themselves, but are so specific, and so ineffably cliche-free, they retain our interest. We keep watching partly because we want to know why the people are doing the things they’re doing and partly because we want to know why the filmmakers chose to shoot the scene. What do all these little moments of behavior add up to? Will the trashy celebrity who shows up in Act III show up again in Act IV? Why this town, why this church, why this shirt, why this room, why this hour of the day? Resonances and echoes show up all over the place (just like they show up in that scene with the church bells) and every time you think a scene isn’t going anywhere the scene goes somewhere, but never where you thought it was going.
In other ways, the story structure reminds me of Kubrick, in that there are long slabs of narrative dedicated to illustrating one plot point and we don’t know what the plot point is until we arrive at it at the end of the slab. Those slabs are, roughly:
1. Let’s go on a cruise! (30 min)
2. Looking for Anna (30 min)
3. Will Sandro get a leg over? Will Claudia give in? (30 min)
4. Claudia commits (30 min)
5. Crisis (17 min)
1. So there’s this woman, Anna. She’s young and Italian in 1960. She was probably a child during the war. Her father is a builder of some sort. We first see her have a halting conversation with dad in front of one of his building projects. He’s tearing down some old buildings to put a new one there.
says that’s a major theme of the movie: destroying down the old to make way for, what, exactly? The anxiety of that question hangs over the entire narrative.
Anna’s in love with Sandro. Or maybe she isn’t. Claudia is in love with Anna. Or maybe she’s in love with Sandro. In any case, there’s a lot of unspoken tension between the three of them. Maybe Anna isn’t really happy with Sandro and would rather go with Claudia. Maybe the opposite is the case.
This bunch of funsters go on a cruise in the Mediterranean with some friends. Their friends’ relationships are, to put it mildly, dysfunctional at best and doomed at worst.
Theyarrive at an island. Folks go swimming, folks climb on rocks, folks bicker.
2. Somebody notices Anna isn’t around any more. The group searches the island. They call the police. The police and whatever authorities do things like this search the island. For 30 minutes we watch people climb over rocks and gaze into the water and wonder what the hell happened to Anna. Because either she’s hiding, which is unlikely, or she’s unconscious somewhere we haven’t looked yet, or she’s dead somewhere we haven’t looked yet, or she got on a boat we didn’t see and rode off somewhere. If she’s dead, she could be dead by suicide or by murder or by accident.
3. Apparently Anna is not on the island and nowhere near the island. The other couples go on with their vacation while Claudia worries about Anna and Sandro half-heartedly searches a nearby town. I say half-heartedly because, well, for some reason Sandro, now that Anna is gone, doesn’t want to waste the opportunity to make a move on Claudia. Claudia is horrified by Sandro’s advances — her friend-girlfriend -Sandro’s-girlfriend is missing and she feels guilty and terrible about it — this is no time to be messing around the ancient, tumble-down towns of rural Italy.
The narrative starts to splinter here as Sandro gets distracted and Claudia gets anxious. Sandro runs into that trashy celebrity mentioned above, Claudia gets caught at a society gathering refereeing for her non-friend Giulia’s (or is it Patrizia’s?) makeout-session with a Bob Denver-lookalike teenage artist, whose paintings are an affront not just to the beauty of the villa where he’s staying but an affront to their subjects and to the act of painting itself.
4. Claudia suddenly, and without preamble, gives in to Sandro’s advances and declares herself desperately in love with him. Maybe she’s been in love with him from the beginning, maybe she’s just recently decided she is, maybe she’s fooling herself. We know Sandro is a lout who has no idea what love is, that seems clear enough, but Claudia seems to be cut from different cloth. First, she’s the only one on Team Ennui who wasn’t born wealthy, second she’s the only one who carried any sense of guilt about Anna’s disappearance all the way through Act III. This is where I started to think L’Avventura is about postwar Italy, how a new generation chose to move ahead into some ill-defined bright tomorrow while others couldn’t help but feel a sense of guilt and loss for what had been destroyed in the war. In any case, loss, the careless destruction of the old and beautiful, the replacement of the old and beautiful with the new and ugly (and profitable) is one of the movie’s ongoing concerns.
griped toward the beginning of the movie that he didn’t like the actor playing Sandro, that he was uninteresting and shallow, giving a kind of generic “60s leading man” performance. By the end of the movie he had changed his tune, realizing that the actor was not giving a shallow performance, he was performing the action of being shallow, which is a completely different thing. That is, it’s not the actor who is giving a generic “60s leading man” performance, it is Sandro who is giving it. As Act IV goes on and Sandro starts to reveal his true ugliness, shallowness and restlessness he becomes infinitely more interesting. Conversely, Claudia, once she gives up on honoring Anna and gives in to Sandro’s indelicate advances, becomes slightly less interesting as she pines and swoons and tries on different outfits.
Why does Claudia fall for Sandro? We don’t want her to. If she always had a thingfor him, she’s an idiot, and she doesn’t seem to be an idiot. I prefer to think that both Sandro and Claudia had a thing for Anna and when Anna vanished she created a kind of relationship black hole that sucked Claudia and Sandro toward each other. Claudia becomes attracted to Sandro because they now have something in common — missing Anna.
Let’s say for the moment that Anna is a symbol for something really pretentious like “the soul of Italy.” The soul of Italy has vanished and only Claudia seems to really care about any of that. Sandro doesn’t care — he made his peace a long time ago that he wasn’t going to create anything beautiful. He had his chance — he coulda been a contender architect, we learn at one point, but gave it up for the short-end money. Then we see him knock a bottle of ink over onto a drawing someone’s making of a gorgeous church window. Sandro cares about the soul of Italy insofar as he wishes to destroy it as quickly as possible. To replace it with what? Well, that’s where Sandro’s anxiety comes in. He doesn’t have any idea what he’s going to replace it with. Maybe that’s why he makes such a fast move for Claudia — he’s just reaching out for the nearest available object to replace the hole in his soul that opened up when Anna disappeared.
5. Sandro and Claudia, having declared their undying love for each other, check into a hotel where their friends are staying. There’s a big party going on. Claudia is tired and wants to stay in the room, but Sandro gets duded up in his tuxedo to check out the action. Claudia can’t sleep and mopes around the room while Sandro wanders, bored and restless, among the empty suits and fashionable gowns. He sits down to watch a TV show in the hotel TV room. We don’t see what’s on TV, but it seems to be a show primarily about things that go “WHOOOSH!” He watches this scintillating program for a few seconds before wincing at it and moving on.
Claudia suddenly has a vision that Anna has returned, which she feels would be really bad at this point because it means that her love with Sandro would be doomed. She rushes downstairs to the empty ruined ballroom and finds Sandro making out with the trashy celebrity from Act III.
Claudia dashes out of the hotel, as one does in situations like this, and Sandro chases after her. (The trashy celebrity begs Sandro for a “souvenier” and he disgustedly throws a wad of money at her. She lazily gathers it up with her bare feet like an octopus capturing its prey.)
Sandro collapses on a bench and cries. Does he feel something? Is he worried about losing Claudia? Is he mourning Anna? Is he mourning his own soullessness?
Claudia approaches. A satisfying ending would be: she hits him with a big rock and screams “I KILLED ANNA AND ATE THE BODY, YOU FOOL!” But that’s not what happens. She should, at the very least, be very angry at him — he went pouncing off after Paris Hilton mere moments after declaring his unending love for Claudia — and did so while Claudi was right upstairs! But we watch as she balances that anger for a moment, as she literally balances her own self, gripping the back of the bench to keep herself upright. Then she places a hand on Sandro’s shoulder, as though to forgive him, then, incredibly, she moves her hand up to his head, to pull him to her, to comfort him. We have no idea what happened to Anna, all we know is she’s gone and, as far as the movie is concerned, isn’t coming back.
(Idea for sequel: L’Avventura II: Anna’s Return!)
And then the last shot, reproduced above. Half mountain, half ruined building, the wounded, conflicted, embattled couple facing their uncertain future. “The ‘adventure,'” says
, is the couple’s adventure into adulthood.” “And Italy’s adventure into the future,” I add, half-heartedly, because I’m really not sure.
New drawings up at DeviantArt
Last year I took some photos of my son’s Justice League 4.5″ action figures to test out the close-up feature on my digital camera. Then later I did some drawings based on the photos to test out my Wacom tablet. The results of this screwing around may be found here.
Teh Metapost
I HEREBY DECLARE:
From this day forward, the practice of deliberately typing “teh” instead of “the” for the purposes of some kind of ironic or faux-innocent joke (“teh hot, teh sexy, teh cool,” etc, etc, etc) is no longer funny. It’s no longer funny partly because it wasn’t funny to begin with, but now it is both not funny and a sad, tired cliche.
Got it? Stop it. Just stop it. That day is done.
Karl Rove one-liner
When Karl Rove dies, people will say he’s spinning in his grave and will mean it as a compliment.
Happy Death Day
No doubt you have been alerted through your local media outlet that this is the 30th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. I could write a lot about this event, but unfortunately this is not the week for me to do that. However, if you wish to celebrate this sacred holiday by watching an Elvis movie, I recommend this as a helpful aid to your selection.
sketchbook
click for larger version.
Master cartoonist ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
r_sikoryak is in town visiting and had two notes for my drawing from yesterday — one, I had made the file too small, which was going to complicate printing later, and two, I had made some errors in coloring that it turns out I didn’t have to make. So I thought, well, I had so much fun drawing it the first time, it won’t kill me to draw it again and do it properly. So there you are — a little peek inside the graphic-novel development process.
sketchbook
click for larger version.
Above, the opening panel of a new graphic novel I’ve started working on. Details to come.
