The World Historical Cat in the Hat

If you ask many people they might say that Hamlet was one of the most important, significant or influential creations in the canon—with the exception of Tolstoy who, according to The Guardian, “Thought Chekhov 'worse than Shakespeare’" (The Guardian, 7/11/11). But there is another character who is almost as equally well-known though perhaps not accorded the world-historical significance he or it might deserve and that’s the protagonist and lead mischief maker of Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat. The oversized Cat with his two colorful sidekicks Thing One and Thing Two (Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern?) is a lord of misrule, a projection of his child narrator’s unconscious who reflects the emotion of Yeats’s “The Second Coming," unleashing “mere anarchy…upon the world” simply out of the boredom reflected in the first lines of the book, which begins thusly, “The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play. So we sat in the house. All that cold, cold wet day.” Dr. Seuss (aka Theodore Geisel) published The Cat in the Hat in l957 and it’s been translated into numerous languages. The Latin edition is called Cattus Petasatus. Could the famous scene in Bunuel’s Viridiana (l961) in which the peasants have a rambunctious orgy while Viridiana and her illegitimate cousin Jorge, the parental figures are away, have been influenced by this iconic children’s book? The bump that precedes the arrival of the Cat, by the way, also recalls the ghost of Hamlet’s father who haunts Shakespeare’s play. But it’s simpler and more elemental and in the end more powerful, since the Cat eventually cleans up the mess he's made, delighting Geisel’s main characters: Sally, her brother, the narrator, and even the fish, the voice of bourgeois values, who had been a stick in the mud from the very beginning of the tale.

"Too Wet to Play"

There are bungee jumpers and skydivers, solitary cliff climbers (they look like ants when you when you see them scaling rock faces from the distance) elite mountaineers, free divers (who don’t use tanks), long distance swimmers (who have to worry about sharks), triathaletes and stock car racers. There are mixed martial artists and ultramarathoners, fire and tightrope walkers. There are people who practice holding their breath and set records doing it (David Blaine stayed under water for seventeen minutes) and people who set records for how many hotdogs they can eat. Kobayashi ate 50 at the Nathan’s Hotdog Eating Contest in 2001. Sergei Krikalev spent 803 days, 9 hours and 39 minutes in space which is the longest time for any human being. For her performance work, The Artist is Present, Marina Abramovic sat silently for 736 hours and 30 minutes. People do lots of other things to pass time. Charles Lindberg chose to pioneer a solo crossing of the Atlantic and Philippe Petit walked between the Twin Towers back in l974 which would have been merely a hop skip and a jump for Nick Wallenda who crossed Niagara Falls in 2012. Secretariat who won the Triple Crown also broke records for the Kentucky Derby, Belmont and Preakness, but did he know what he was doing?  The Times reported that Munishri Ajitchandrasagarji, a Jain monk relayed back the over 500 items  that were spoken to him over six hours (“A Master of Memory in India Credits Meditation for His Brainy Feats,” NYT, 11/17/14). Perhaps it all goes back to Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat which begins, “The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play. So we sat in the house All that cold, cold, wet day”—with childhood boredom.

I Think, Therefore I Am. Sam-I-Am

“Aujourd’hui, Maman est morte. Ou peut-etre hier, je ne sais pas...” is the first line of The Stranger. The Albert Camus classic replaced the Gideon bible for defiant baby boomers. But these lines “The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play. So we stayed in the house. All that cold, cold wet day,” from Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat were to be found in the nurseries of these self-same baby boomers, along with other volumes like Green Eggs and Ham. “I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam-I-am,” is one of the lines from that cherished volume. Dr. Seuss of course was noted for his imaginative children’s books. After all, a cat in the hat is what emerges from an otherwise boring afternoon. But his settings definitely set the stage for the existential crises faced by the generation that read them. The streets that Camus’ anti-hero Meursault walks are hot rather than cold, but they partake of the same dread that Dr. Seuss is dealing with on the cold, cold day described in The Cat in the Hat. Notice Dr. Seuss aka Theodor Seuss Geisel uses cold twice. It’s not just a cold day. It’s a cold, cold day, in which man is separated from God, the kind of day you find in the Bergman trilogy, Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence. And doesn’t Seuss’s “I am Sam. Sam I am,” sound curiously like Descartes’s famed cogito ergo sum. It even rhymes. Sam I am. I think therefore I am.  

Datafication Redux II: Evgeny Morosov

Evgeny Morosov is a Luddite with a Luddite’s true nostalgia for a way of life that has passed. The way of life is what is known as the mitteleuropaishe esthetic of Kafka and Max Weber, Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig. In the past, this Belarusian writer, has railed against the depredations of the information age and in a recent New Yorker essay “Only Disconnect: Two Cheers for Boredom,” (The New Yorker,  10/28/13) which tips it’s hat to E.M. Forster’s famous line “only connect,” he goes on the attack against the attack on boredom by social media. However though Morosov is arguing for boredom, he is never boring. In trying to describe the plight of socially mediated man buffeted by an “information overload” that is boring in the wrong way since it “doesn’t provide time to think; it just produces a craving for more information in order to suppress it,” he cites the German cultural critic, Siegfied Kracauer, the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre and the German sociologist George Simmel whose l903 essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” describes the Faustian bargain cosmopolitan man makes in his rejection of simpler ways of life. He also makes reference to a character named Mercer in David Eggers recent released novel The Circle, about a Google like campus, who “compares social media, with their constant prompts for more interaction and feedback, to snack foods that are packed with precisely determined amounts of salt and fat in order to keep us wanting (and eating) more and more.” However, the kind of old-fashioned unadorned boredom Morosov is arguing for is a little like cursive handwriting, a talent that is slowly diminishing due to atrophy. It, in fact, may be something that has totally vanished from the palette of human emotion by a certain time in the future. Congenitally blind people whose retinal damage has been repaired aren't always able to see since their neurogenic pathways are not acclimated to sight. Similarly, the problem with the kind of cleansing and potentially creative boredom that Morosov is arguing for is that there are those of us who might not even be able to recognize it, in the unlikely event we far enough away from our smart phones and Google glasses to experience it. In fact, if the flood of stimulation and datafication continues, the old-fashioned boredom that Dr. Seuss talks about in The Cat in the Hat, when he says “The sun didn’t shine and it was too wet to play so we stayed in the house all that cold, cold wet day," may someday be banished from the nightmarish universe some now call “the internet of everything."