Even when he was designing bugspray ads, Dr. Seuss' creativity seeped in to his work
We all secretly believe that we’re geniuses. Come on. Yes we do. The problem is that the rest of the world doesn’t always acknowledge our brilliance, and as a result many of us have been forced into taking menial jobs, where we push our creativity deep down inside ourselves, hiding it away so we can get through the day. The thing about creativity though is that, much like severe heartburn, it’s not easily suppressed; I’ve always believed that if you are truly, inherently creative, your weirdness will come bubbling out into whatever job you have, whether you want it to or not.
The perfect example of this is Dr. Seuss. During the Great Depression, Seuss supported himself and his young wife by drawing advertisements for companies like General Electric, Ford, Standard Oil and NBC. We’re not talking about selling the Eight-Nozzled Elephant-Toted Boom Blitzer here; Seuss’ early ads were for more “practical” things like Ajax Cups, General Electric Convenience Outlets, Essomarine Oil, and Flit Insect Repellent. And yet, despite the mundane nature of these products, Seuss produced some incredibly creative ads, pieces that displayed just as much imagination as his later, more famous work. For example, in one of his more surreal inserts, a man roasting in the pits of hell informs Satan that if he really wanted to turn up the heat down there, he should contact GE and install electricity, while in another ad, a colorful parade of germs declare “Down With Ajax Cups” as they march into a common drinking glass. Despite it’s decidedly odd nature, Seuss’ work was quite popular; his ads for Flit Insect Repellent, which contained images of people being menaced by sinister, whimsical insects, became a cultural phenomenon long before he was famous for writing children’s books.
John Hurt recorded the definitive version of Stagger Lee
It’s pretty rare these days that a song in popular music tells an entire story from start to finish, with defined characters and a decisive resolution. I think the reason for this is partially that story structure is inherently incongruous with writing a conventionally popular song; the backbone of pop music is the chorus, a familiar meme that gets repeated constantly throughout the song and which, by the nature of its repetition, weasels it’s way into your brain (Mmmmm bop, hippity dop bop doo wop…). And while this may be an effective tactic for making catchy music, you can imagine how annoying it would be to have the flow of a story you’re reading constantly interrupted by the same thing every twenty seconds.
This is not to say that story songs don’t exist — you can find them in the seemingly diametrically opposed genres of rap and folk music, both of which are less reliant on strictly defined song structures than pop music. What’s really interesting to me is that in both of these genres, there are certain tales that have endured over the years, becoming classics and even insinuating their way into mainstream culture. What makes certain story songs endure while others fade away? Why do they stay with us? In answering these questions, I think it’s useful to consider the ballad of Stagger Lee.
How do you turn a ten sentence book into a 94 minute movie?
So, at this point I’m sure that many of you have checked out Spike Jonzes’ Where The Wild Things Are. While this film has certainly polarized audiences, I hope that at least one thing we can all agree on is that adapting a ten-sentence book into a feature length film would be incredibly hard. And while I think that the team of David Eggers and Spike Jones ultimately did a good job in preserving the feel of the original Where the Wild Things Are, their movie got me thinking about the challenges implicit in turning unconventional books into successful films. Here are, in my mind, some successful adaptations of incredibly challenging source material:
There comes a magical time in many young writers’ lives, generally a few months after they graduate college and move to the “big city”, where they find themselves temping for some huge corporation, alone in a tiny cubicle, filling invoices or entering numbers into an Excel document. Most writers mitigate the depression that comes with this by telling themselves that they are secretly biding their time until they can just finish their novel, screenplay, poetry compilation, psychedelic pop-up book, whatever, their masterpiece that will catapult them out of this awful white-grey world of coffee and horrible inside jokes into a trendy, intellectually stimulating lifestyle where they get laid far more frequently. My advice though, if you find yourself working in a situation, is to take a deep breath and relax. It could be worse. In fact, in one way you’re incredibly lucky, because you have a magic portal that can take you out that office window, up above the clouds, past the city to anywhere you want to go.
