The difficulty which comes when writing blogs is finding time to write them and when you are in your last year of school and for no logical reason you take a dozen extra things it is particularly difficult to fit blogging in. I’ve been sick lately. A ghastly bit of flu which I was bound to get when I spend so many hours of the day in confined classrooms with at least one sick person. Along with this I had the biggest and last English Oral of my high school career as well as a History preprelim (a pre pre final exam – yes it is a bit over the top) and so I have been running around, or more walking as flu slows one down slightly, like a headless chicken trying to prepare. But now today is over so I can blog but inspiration combined with laziness struck me so I thought “Why not just use the piece of writing you’ve been working on all week?”. I know pure indolent genius.
So I have decided to give you my speech. We were given no topic which posed difficulties. I mean you want to end on bang but not a flop so I in the end decided to talk about a person who I admire.
From now on pretend this is being read to you by an almost 18-year-old girl with a slightly posh (or at least my friends call me posh in speeches) South African accent of medium frequency with a slight nasal backdrop and if you really want authenticity imagine a cough here or there.
When given absolutely no speech topic at all it becomes quite difficult to shift through all the things worth talking about, all the things that one loves to find a singular topic that is speech worthy. So I did what I always do and decided to fall back on the author and poet that keeps me going through everything… good old funky and fantastic Dr Seuss.
Dr Seuss was born in 1902 and no his surname is not Seuss and his first name isn’t Dr. He was born as Theodor Geisel but how did he become the famous Seuss? Well he, as most aspiring young literature lovers do, worked as a student journalist for a college magazine called Jack-o-lantern. One day however he and some friends were bust drinking which was quite a bad thing at the time considering that alcohol was prohibited by law so he got kicked off the magazine but he was after all in the making of becoming the incredible writer we know today and whoever ran the magazine noticed this and so he allowed Theodor Geisel to still write but under a pseudonym and Geisel chose his middle name Seuss.
This was the start of an incredible career of writing through which Mr Geisel decided to stick with the pen name rather than his own.
I won’t tell you every detail of his career except that it took him a while to find himself both as a writer and of course an illustrator and to gather the momentum that his fame has today but at around the end of world war two his career started really moving and he started publishing children’s books. He did some incredible things. One of his most famous books and a turning point in his career was the publication of The Cat In the Hat. He wrote this in response to an article that criticised children’s reading levels. This book was written with over 220 different words to help improve children’s vocabulary. After this he took a new more educational approach to writing to try and help children while entertaining them.
A book that always stuck out for me and that even today I find myself reaching to when I feel over worked or underappreciated is If I ran the circus. Seuss wrote it for his father and I used to make my own dad read it to me almost every week. It is about a boy who wants to start a circus, the Circus McGurkus. He spends the whole book dreaming of it starting from where he will put it to what it will contain and as you turn the pages the acts get crazier and the animals get weirder and it gets more and more stoo-pendous. The stuff that he has displayed, the “many surprises, You’d never see half it if you had forty eyses”. What a circus it was. And in true Seuss fashion every page was chocabloc full of incredible illustrations. I used to sit wide eyed and fascinated. Before I could read I would just open the book and take in the pictures. That alone was enough to inspire a little girl’s imagination. I think today the fact that I read so much and always have this itch in my very soul to be creative is due to this remarkable writer.
In Oh the Places you’ll go he writes “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go…” Dr Seuss strove to inspire children and in this quote and in fact the book it comes from he challenges readers to take their own initiative and move forward. There are hundreds of brilliant authors out there but I for one would never be able to appreciate any of them if Dr Seuss had not laid the ground work.
Children’s authors are the creators of readers. Whether they be Raold Dahll or Beatrice Potter but for me it was Dr Seuss and it always will be. No matter where I go, where I live or how the big book shelf in my house is I will always own at least one Dr Seuss.
(Still not quite sure how referencing works here so the header picture is from http://desmoinesparent.com/celebrate-dr-seusss-birthday/)
Plain Old Glasses 