Because under these circumstances, why would it want to continue?
A library patron asked the library’s materials review committee to pull “Hop on Pop,” a children’s classic written in 1963, because of the book’s violent themes.
“The complaint was that it was violent and encouraged children to be violent with their fathers.”
The good news is that the library committee refused the request. The bad news is why:
The book was ultimately retained in the Toronto Public Library’s children’s collection after members of the review committee decided that the book was designed to engage children, and that the story actually advises children against hopping on their fathers.
As opposed to “Members of the review committee decided the complainer was an unbearable wanker, beat him severely about the face and ears and pitched him bodily from the building.”
But I suppose that wouldn’t be the Canadian thing to do.
For the record, my personal favorite Seuss was Fox In Sox, just because I so enjoyed trying to read
When beetles
fight these battles
in a bottle
with their paddles
and the bottle’s
on a poodle
and the poodle’s
eating noodles……they call this
a muddle puddle
tweetle poodle
beetle noodle
bottle paddle battle.
as fast as I could without laughing or stumbling over my tongue. Daughter actually preferred a different part of the book, but I insisted on reading this line over and over. On one occasion I had a Mennonite family cracking up in a doctor’s waiting room, which I consider a personal triumph.
But that book has no doubt already been banned in Canada for its violent imagery.
OH! Fox In Sox isn’t in my collection of Dr. Seuss stories. Dang… now I have to go buy another book! 🙂
If you think this is stupid check this out…
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/news/quebec-language-laws/
Not big on banning.
THAT’S an American thing!
gfa
Fatherhood has simply exploded my appreciation for Dr. Seuss. I never realized how much good stuff there is in that fella’s canon of children’s books. I’ve even gone back and read some of the source material that I’ve long associated with the most screechy, irritaing sort of political crusading–and mostly I have found simple cautionary tales. Ol’ Ted certainly seems to have had his share of annoying investment in the political process, but the children’s books seem to stand admirably apart from that.
And the best of them are startlingly powerful. I submit that you can simply read two of his works–Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose and The Butter Battle Book, and gain a better picture of how politics really works than I got by taking a four-year “Political Science” degree. (Okay, so maybe that’s not saying that much after all, but the Seuss is still stuff to make a committed “nonarchist” smile. 🙂
I still love Fox In Socks, and fortunately so do both my girls. I found a nifty trick for myself that helps me read it about twice as fast as I otherwise can. I find if I read about two or three words ahead of where I’m speaking, I don’t mentally get in my own way, and the words just zing out on their own. (It rates most impressively among 2-5 year olds surveyed.)
The tweetle beetle section will always be my first love–c’mon, they’re whanging on each other with paddles in a bottle on a noodle-eating poodle!–but my love of the art of language would point to another passage as the pinnacle of wordsmithery in the book:
Gooey goo for chewy chewing!
That’s what that Goo-Goose is doing.
Do you choose to chew goo too, sir?
If, sir, you, sir, choose to chew, sir,
With the Goo-Goose,
Chew, sir. Do, sir.
That is just 100% awesome. Both for the wordsmithing, and because the violence involved with actually masticating–eating–chewing–the possibly sentient goo has got to be enough to give someone the vapors.