As I was debating what I ought to write today, I happened to glance up and to my right. There, in the SEU section of my library, (yes, my library), though they are quite horribly out of order (I'll have to fix that eventually; Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead should never come before Dr. Seuss) I have a considerable number of Dr. Seuss books. I had never counted them until today, but I discovered that there are on that top shelf twenty-one different Dr. Seuss books in English (Note: I have four in Italian as well; I purchased three from a book vendor on Via della Liberta and one from a bookstore on Via Vittorio Emmanuele in Palermo, Sicily).
Now you are surely asking yourselves, well, that's all well and good, but why the fuss about Dr. Seuss? Indubitably, you like reading Dr. Seuss; but why should we care?
Now, there is a good question (you always ask good questions), and I guess you really don't have to care, if you don't feel like it. But I do; I do care immensely because I feel that Dr. Suess is part of the reason I am what I am and do what I do today. Dr. Seuss books were a staple in my literary diet when I was a small child.
[Note: My mom saw that I was reading Dr. Seuss books just now and started to laugh uncontrollably. I guess the sight of a grown man reading Fox in Sox was just too much for her. Ridiculous. People and their expectations. Pshaw.]
Anyway, as I was saying, such wholesome literary fiction as Horton Hatches the Egg and How the Grinch Stole Christmas provide two very significant elements to a child's development. The first is, of course, verbal experimentation and wordplay. Dr. Seuss's books demonstrate, in basic plotlines and outlines, how much fun it can be to take a word like alligator and juxtapose it with Aunt Annie in order to create an alliterative picture of Dad's sister astride a wild green reptile (see Dr. Suess's ABC). Or, to demonstrate the diversions derived from developing delightful delicacies in unreasoned rhyme, Dr. Seuss also creates such picture as this:
What would you rather be when you grow up?
A cop in a cop's cap?
Or a cupcake cook in a cupcake cook's cap?
Or a fat flapjack flapper
In a flat flapped-jack cap?
OR...
If you think you don't like cop's caps,
Flapjack flappers'
or cupcake cooks' caps,
Maybe you're one of those choosy chaps
who likes kooky captains' caps
Perhaps.
(from Oh Say Can You Say?)
Which brings me to my next point: Dr. Seuss's books are unmatched in their ability to provide fodder for a growing imagination. They give us things like loraxes, wockets, gacks, fiffer-feffer-feffs, and, oh, my personal favorite, zizzer-zazzer-zuzzes, a yellow-eyed, pink-and-white-checked creature who happens to be the narrator of Dr. Seuss's ABC. Where else could one find such creative stimulus?
To commemorate Dr. Seuss's work, I have put together a sort of poetic collage of Seussian characters from the many books I pulled down from my extremely dusty shelf. Understand, I have no desire to create great poetry, only laughable lunacy in imitation of the inimitable.
Uncle Ubb's Umbrella
(In Memoriam)
Vera Violet Vinn one day
And Rosy Robin Ross
Played a prank on Uncle Ubb
With their rhinoceros.
Jerry Jordan tried to help,
But there was jelly on his socks,
And he couldn't leave the house because
Auntie Annie took his Gox.
But the girls had plans, they always did,
They'd trick their Uncle Ubb;
They'd take his big umbrella, yes,
While he was in the tub;
Of course, they weren't malicious;
They said to Uncle's Gack;
It's no crime to borrow things, you know,
If you someday bring them back.
But they didn't return the big umbrella,
So Gacky called the fuzz;
And those officers came over
On a Zizzer-Zazzer-Zuzz.
The cops in cop's caps looked around
And tracked them through town;
They never would have caught them though
If not for Mr. Brown.
They caught those little girlies
And they threw them in a lake;
Luke Luck and Duck stopped lake-licking
And spanked them with a rake.
So, Unc got his umbrella back,
And Gacky napped, and then,
Vi and Rosy vowed that day
They'd never steal again.
The End
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