Fairy Tales
Not your average gorilla
I have four year old twins, so I read a lot of what could charitably be described as “Children’s Literature”. Some kids books are terrible, but some of them are really, seriously good. There’s a book I’ve been reading to my kids called Goodnight Gorilla, and I can’t stop thinking about it. Finally I decided to create an elaborate, intellectualized permission structure to convince myself (and hopefully you) that this essay was worth writing.
I know most children’s books are slop. They’re sold to adults, and it shows. They whisper, “If you were a Good Parent, you would buy this book. If you don’t want to, perhaps you can atone for that by buying it anyway”. The titles gesture at platitudes, or perhaps a shibboleth about a platitude. The pages are full of empty rhymes, placeholders whose only purpose is to maintain meter. (“How can I say the same thing but with three more syllables?”) Often they can’t even accomplish that purpose. For God’s sake. Read the book out loud to yourself, once, to see if it sounds right. Ask your retired aunt to workshop some language for you. You’re going to print a few hundred thousand copies of this cursed thing. Of the 50% of people who don’t throw it right in the trash based on the cover, they’ll feel obligated to read it at least once to their precious children before they too throw it in the hopper.
That said, there are children’s books that are as profound as the others are terrible. I don’t think this reaction is just nostalgia for my own childhood, or preemptive nostalgia for my kids growing up. Kids books “paint with bright colors”, as my old acting teacher used to say. They’re boiled right down to their essence. Perhaps that’s why bad books are so awful. Diluted garbage is easier to hide than distilled garbage.
Why are some kids books so powerful? Because they operate like myths, like dreams. They have to be simple (archetypal?) enough for a child to understand, but also have to be deeply true or kids won’t be interested. Kids are more insightful than we give them credit for. You can’t trick them into liking a book that isn’t true.
So. Goodnight Gorilla. An unobservant zookeeper gets his keys stolen by a mischievous gorilla who frees the other animals, and they all follow the zookeeper home and try to sleep all together in his room. I just…love this story. Half of it is the pictures. The gorilla’s facial expressions! His body language as he walks compliantly back to the cage with the zookeeper’s wife, and then sneaks out again on the next page, looking out at reader with a grin and a finger to hush us! He’s naughty, but there’s not an ounce of malice. He radiates moral purity. Yes he’s breaking the rules, but look at him! He’s good! And he’s locked up after all! This zoo is the dead husk of an institution, the zookeeper is a well meaning NPC going through the motions. The gorilla is a live player! He’s providing healthy disruption to reveal the decay of the institution. Right? Surely that’s what the author was going for.
I kid…sort of. Something’s going on, because I keep thinking about it. I’ve read this book 50 times and every time it stirs me. There’s a reason the “trickster” is an archetype. Creative disruption. Sometimes rules should be broken. Rules are there to serve people, not the other way around. A famous trickster once said, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”
I’m conflicted about even writing this down, because I’m afraid that by dissecting the story I’m dismembering it. I feel like I’m spoiling a magic trick. And “the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao”. But it seems noteworthy that my mind wanders back to this picture book over and over again, like it’s a dream my subconscious continues to resurface until I learn what it’s trying to teach me. Some say stories are like a society’s dreams. Who’s to say these dreams don’t have something to teach us? Modern life is complicated. I always overcomplicate things. Maybe I just need to get back to basics.
Now if you’ll excuse me, my book club is waiting.
Process notes:
I’m starting to get into a rhythm of writing and editing with Opus. It helps me identify sections that don’t work much more quickly. Sometimes its critiques or suggestions don’t quite land, but like any good discussion they still help me think through what I want “via negativa”. Usually I end up capturing a paragraph’s worth of “throat clearing” with a line or two.
I shared this Substack with a dear friend of mine, and his first reaction was that he loved my writing. His second reaction was disappointment when he realized I was collaborating with AI. I get it; I’m so lucky I can always trust him to be honest. He had some thought provoking feedback, too. He told me he found some of the things that were cut or abbreviated to be the most interesting parts; perhaps I was setting the AI up to be overly brutal, and that confirmation bias was leading me to agree with it? He noted my line in a previous essay, saying that AI editors “smooth out my me-ness”. Wasn’t that the case here?
Yeah, sometimes, but I don’t think that’s what’s happening, mostly. I’m using the same instincts I use to write to examine Claude’s critiques and decide what to change. If you read my chat transcripts, you’ll see Claude’s feedback rarely take the form of suggested verbiage, and me accepting verbiage wholesale is rarer still. Mostly critiques take the form of “this line is stilted” or “this is too meandering”, which is exactly the feedback I need to boil the essay down into something publishable. I always lead with some disclaimer about the essay being a work in progress is so Claude isn’t worried about giving direct feedback. I’m much more worried about AI telling me crappy writing is great than I am about accidentally pruning something great.
However, I can’t say what the long term effects will be on my writing or my psyche. I hope to retain my “writer’s voice”, though it’s silly to think of it as something immutable. We are all like the ship of Theseus, being replaced board by board. Maybe I’ll still feel like me, but won’t be.
Chat transcript and first draft here:
https://claude.ai/share/b82272f5-3410-490b-a34f-81381a874ff3