Outside of a Dog Read Online Free Page B

Flesch’s bestselling book Why Johnny Can’t Read: And What You Can Do About It caused such national consternation that even Life magazine, hardly a
bastion of high literary culture, took up the cause. Its answer? We needed more Seuss books! In 1957, the obliging doctor responded with The Cat in the Hat and, sure enough, it sold huge
quantities. Kids know quality when they see it: to this day 25 per cent of American children read a Dr Seuss title as their first book. But Rudolf Flesch missed the real point, because he thought
that American child illiteracy resulted from bad teaching, whereas it is clear in retrospect that the very activity of reading was being superseded. Within a couple of generations, not merely many
children, but their parents too, would admit without shame that they have never read a book.
    Even one by Dr Seuss. What a deprivation! His characters are so loveably free and wild, perfect embodiments of the lawlessness and egotism of childhood. His world is always in danger of falling
apart: he is children’s laureate of entropy. Think of the crazy energy of The Cat in the Hat , or the infantile omnipotence of Yertle the Turtle . It is no surprise to hear that
Dr Seuss (like my mom) didn’t actually like kids, because both knew you couldn’t trust them. Mrs Seuss once admitted that her husband was frightened of children, because he was so
worried what they might do or ask next.
    That doesn’t bother me at all. Many of the greatest writers for or about children didn’t like kids much, partly because they understood and respected them so thoroughly, and
anxiously knew what they were capable of: not only Dr Seuss, but Beatrix Potter, Charles M. Schulz, and Lewis Carroll (unless they were half-naked little girls). But from such child-phobic writers
we get many of the abiding images and ideas that shape our sense of ourselves.
    I never thought of myself as one of Dr Seuss’s child figures. Though I flew to Horton like that new-born chick, it was the estimable elephant with whom I most identified. His heroism made
me swoon with admiration: ‘he sat and he sat!’ From which, I rather believe, I derive both a lifetime preference for sitting rather than doing, and a tendency to present myself
as bigger and more important than I actually am. Yet I am grateful for my inner Horton, who has otherwise guided me truly and well. Though if I regret anything from our lifetime association it lies
in my apparent need, in unconscious acknowledgement of his internal presence, to emulate his waistline. I try to lose weight – in my time I have lost a Horton-amount of weight – but I
just don’t feel comfortable at an everyday size. It’s better to be big.
     
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SPRITZING OVER THE BOOKS
    my sexual appetite is directed towards myself . . .
    A patient of Magnus Hirschfeld,
    quoted in his Sexual Anomalies and Perversions
    At the time of writing A Friend for Mickey I was, according to Freud, supposed to be entering that phase of psychosexual development that he called the latency period. I
had already failed my Oedipal tests by attaching myself to my father rather than my mother, not to mention identifying with an androgynous elephant-bird, and I didn’t do much better at this
later stage. Latency is supposed to involve the sublimation of the heightened (oral, anal and phallic) sexual awareness of the infant into other interests and activities, until that reawakening
that occurs at puberty.
    But it was just the opposite for me. All the polymorphous sexual pleasure and curiosity of the infant continued, thoroughly unsublimated, throughout my later childhood years, in which I could
most frequently be found pants down behind a bush with any available child companion, peering and giggling. At least my parents never had to worry where I was. They’d lure me out, covered
with leaves rather than embarrassment, and suggest I came in to have something to eat, and maybe read a book.
    My mother, Ruthie and I spent