Blogtrek

500 Hats

This weekend I checked out two books that I had checked out of the school library in 1953 or so. I enjoyed these stories when I was a child, and I checked them out to read them again. They are Dr. Seuss' "500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins" and "Bartholomew Cubbins and the Oobleck". 500 Hats is a story of how this young man was shopping, and had to take his hat off before the King, but couldn't because every time he would take off a hat, another one would come on his head. This reminds me of a computer program gone wrong; in particular, one that gets a hat object creation caught in an infinite loop. A review said this story represented creativity, but was Bartholomew actually creating the hats? Or maybe it reflects the non-determinacy of creative impulses - the bigger and better hats near the end represents a burst of inspiration that Bartholomew had no control over. I simply enjoyed it because of the absurdity of the idea; another example would be the Queen in Alice in Wonderland trying to chop off the head of the Cheshire Cat when only a cat head was shown suspended in air.

The Oobleck story had great visual imagery. As a child I dreamed and imagined several times the idea of a storm of green football-sized gooey hail falling. To me it is a story about boredom. Why must it rain and snow all the time? Why can't it oobleck? Why are there traffic jams all the time when I go to work? Why can't I put on a jet pack and fly? Why are the colors red, yellow, green, blue, purple, white, black, and orange? Can't it be palist once in a while? Maybe this story says that our imagination exceeds the capacity of our world to handle it. Still, we need imagination to give us what we have today. Why couldn't I have a typewriter in which I can untype letters that I typed wrong and type in the right ones, or, better still, a typewriter that will correct the spelling of a word I misspelled? Sounded pretty farfetched in 1960, when I learned how to type. Yet today I am typing on such a machine. Still, the story says that if you get things different once in a while, it may not turn out too well, as with oobleck. The King apologized for coming up with the idea. But why blame him? He just wanted something different; he certainly did not want green goo gumming up his whole Kingdom.

Next time I may comment on another Dr. Seuss creation: "On beyond Zebra".