September 8th: An article outside the gossip section

about Sep­tem­ber 8th: Today in the his­to­ry of chil­dren’s books A few ran­dom thoughts: Why is it that this day is prone to pro­duc­ing mas­ters who are par­tic­u­lar­ly fond of cre­at­ing absurd and quirky works? The fol­low­ing is a seri­ous “non­sense” from AI:

These three have tru­ly embod­ied the char­ac­ter­is­tics of “Vir­go born on Sep­tem­ber 8th” to the fullest in the field of chil­dren’s books.

If there’s a genre called “high-IQ crim­i­nal pranks”…“或““A phi­los­o­phy of rebel­lion under rig­or­ous logic”—these three could almost be placed side by side in the very cen­ter of the Hall of Fame. Their absur­di­ty is by no means casu­al ban­ter, but rather a metic­u­lous dis­man­tling of lan­guage, nar­ra­tive rules, and the order of real­i­ty.

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1. Eugene Trivizas

“A Crim­i­nol­o­gy Pro­fes­sor’s Rever­sal of For­tune: A Ver­dict for the World

Choi Vik­tor’s very iden­ti­ty is the most exquis­ite metaphor for the com­bi­na­tion of order and absurd rebel­lion brought about by Saturn/Virgo on Sep­tem­ber 8th—he isEmer­i­tus Pro­fes­sor of Law and Crim­i­nol­o­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Read­ingTheir pro­fes­sion­al research focus­es on crim­i­nal jus­tice, crim­i­nal psy­chol­o­gy, and deviant behav­ior.

• Extreme­ly rig­or­ous decon­struc­tionIn “The Three Lit­tle Wolves and the Big Bad Pig” (The Three Lit­tle Wolves and the Big Bad PigIn this sto­ry, he pre­cise­ly revers­es the roles of vic­tim and per­pe­tra­tor in clas­sic fairy tales. The Big Bad Pig, to destroy the house, does­n’t use the blow­ing air from the fairy tale, but rather a sledge­ham­mer, a hand drill, and even…Explo­sivesThe wolf cubs, on the oth­er hand, built their hous­es using bricks, rein­forced con­crete, and armor. This lay­ered upgrade in defense is essen­tial­ly a pre­cise deduc­tion of the log­ic of mod­ern vio­lence and the arms race.
• Pro­found polit­i­cal and social philo­soph­i­cal thoughtsThe Mag­ic Pil­low (The Mag­ic Pil­lowsThe sto­ry tells of a dic­ta­tor­ship and tyran­ny that deprives peo­ple of their right to dream. (The Last Black Cat)The Last Black CatWith an extreme­ly calm yet absurd tone, he dis­sects super­sti­tion, xeno­pho­bia, and geno­cide (the scape­goat mech­a­nism). He is at heart a jurist with a rig­or­ous and clear mind, yet he uses the most imag­i­na­tive alle­gories to deliv­er a pow­er­ful slap in the face to despo­tism and blind obe­di­ence.

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2. Jon Scieszka

The demo­li­tion office direc­tor of Metafic­tion

Sis­sa­ka, on the oth­er hand, turned Vir­go’s “desire to decon­struct visu­al media” into a water­shed moment in con­tem­po­rary pic­ture books. Before becom­ing a writer, he stud­ied pre-med­ical stud­ies, earned a Bach­e­lor of Arts degree, and worked as a pri­ma­ry school teacher for many years.Chil­dren’s psy­cho­log­i­cal cog­ni­tive mech­a­nismsandRhetor­i­cal devices in tra­di­tion­al fairy talesThey know it all very well.

• Par­o­dy like a court­room inter­ro­ga­tionThe True Sto­ry of the Three Lit­tle PigsThe True Sto­ry of the 3 Lit­tle Pigs!It is essen­tial­ly a first-per­son defense state­ment writ­ten by a sea­soned lawyer. The Big Bad Wolf explains that his sneez­ing caused the hut to col­lapse as a pollen aller­gy, and that eat­ing the piglet is a “good qual­i­ty of not wast­ing food.” Final­ly, he laments that he was framed by sen­sa­tion­al­ist porno­graph­ic media. This nar­ra­tive, which turns black into white, is not only log­i­cal­ly sound but also a pro­found satire of media tri­als and one-sided per­spec­tives.
• Par­o­dy that breaks the phys­i­cal form of mediaStinky Cheese Boy (The Stinky Cheese Man and Oth­er Fair­ly Stu­pid TalesHe direct­ly tack­led the book’s for­mat itself: upside-down title pages, copy­right notices that smashed char­ac­ters, a table of con­tents that refused to be per­func­to­ry, and a nar­ra­tive thread that was smashed to pieces. He was­n’t “mak­ing up absurd sto­ries,” but rather using an engi­neer­ing-lev­el approach to dis­sect the act of “mak­ing a book” into its com­po­nents and show them to you.
• The Math­e­mat­i­cal Curse (Math Curse)It is a typ­i­cal exam­ple of a Vir­go’s night­mare turned into art—forcibly con­vert­ing every tiny detail of life into math­e­mat­i­cal anx­i­ety, dri­ving peo­ple crazy with extreme­ly quan­ti­ta­tive and cold log­ic, and then let­ting them laugh and find relief in their mad­ness.

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3. Jack Prelutsky

The watch­mak­er’s per­fect­ly fit­ting absurd rhythm

As Amer­i­ca’s first “Chil­dren’s Poet Lau­re­ate,” Proust appeared to be a play­ful, child­like old bard, whose writ­ings were filled with images of rain­drops falling like pigs and meat­balls, and mon­sters run­ning ram­pant.Scran­i­malsBut deep down, he isSevere obses­sive-com­pul­sive dis­or­der about lan­guage rhythm and meter.

• Math­e­mat­i­cal pre­ci­sion of prosodyWrit­ing light verse can eas­i­ly degen­er­ate into ram­bling rhymes, but each of Proust’s poems is pre­cise­ly timed with iambic and ana­grams, like gears mesh­ing. The rea­son his poems are so infec­tious and make your tongue dance when you read them is entire­ly due to his Vir­go-like metic­u­lous­ness in word choice, puns, and rhyme.
• The Absurd Col­lage of Lin­guis­ticsIn “The Island of Strange Ani­mals” (Scran­i­malsIn his work, he awk­ward­ly yet clev­er­ly hybridizes ani­mal and plant vocab­u­lary with phys­i­o­log­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics (e.g., Radish + Shark = Radishark). This absur­di­ty is not only a prod­uct of imag­i­na­tion, but also a pre­cise provo­ca­tion of lan­guage spelling, ety­mol­o­gy, and tax­on­o­my.

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The rea­son these three indi­vid­u­als are so rep­re­sen­ta­tive on Sep­tem­ber 8th is because they per­fect­ly illus­trate a prin­ci­ple:

The most inge­nious “non­sense” is often done by the most “seri­ous” peo­ple.

They reject­ed sen­ti­men­tal preach­ing and despised pre­ten­tious nobil­i­ty; one dis­sect­ed fables with the scalpel of a crim­i­nol­o­gist, anoth­er dis­man­tled the struc­ture of books with the skill of an engi­neer, and a third wove non­sen­si­cal melodies with the rig­or of a watch­mak­er. They used rig­or and ratio­nal­i­ty as the strongest levers to force­ful­ly pry open the medi­oc­rity and order of the chil­dren’s book world.

[The­o­ret­i­cal Dis­cus­sion Sec­tion]

How can we explain why creators born on September 8, especially children’s book creators, tend to favor a quirky, absurd (and philosophical) creative approach?

Peo­ple born on Sep­tem­ber 8th belong to the Vir­go zodi­ac sign (August 23 — Sep­tem­ber 22). In astrol­o­gy, Vir­go is ruled by Mer­cury and is an earth sign; Sep­tem­ber 8th falls with­in the sec­ond decade of Vir­go (approx­i­mate­ly Sep­tem­ber 3 — Sep­tem­ber 12), and is influ­enced by both Sat­urn and Capri­corn traits.

This seem­ing­ly con­trast­ing com­bi­na­tion is not con­tra­dic­to­ry in the psy­chol­o­gy of lit­er­a­ture and art; on the con­trary, it is a…An extreme­ly advanced and self-con­sis­tent cre­ator path.

True metafiction/parody, the pin­na­cle of absur­di­ty, slap­stick, and post­mod­ern satire, is nev­er just chaot­ic non­sense, but rather a kind of…A high­ly rig­or­ous intel­lec­tu­al game that uses rea­son to counter rea­son..

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1. Absurdity is a byproduct of “extreme logic”.

Many peo­ple think that being fun­ny requires “chaos,” but the high­est lev­el of absur­di­ty comes pre­cise­ly from chaos.Extreme sen­si­tiv­i­ty to rules and rig­or­ous deduc­tion.

• Reverse map­ping of rulesVir­gos (ruled by Mer­cury) pos­sess an instinc­tive insight into struc­ture, gram­mar, clas­si­fi­ca­tion, and causal­i­ty. Only when a per­son is thor­ough­ly famil­iar with the “nar­ra­tive pat­terns of stan­dard fairy tales” and the “log­i­cal dis­ci­pline of adults” can they accu­rate­ly find the gear that turns the rules.
• Seri­ous­ly derive absurd axiomsThe real absur­di­ty often involves set­ting an extreme­ly out­ra­geous ini­tial premise (such as “what if all the fairy tale char­ac­ters were thrown into a real-world court­room,” or “what if num­bers and words came to life and pun­ished you”), and then…Using extreme­ly rig­or­ous and seri­ous log­ic to deduce the truth all the way through.This kind of “log­i­cal­ly self-con­sis­tent absur­di­ty” is often more astound­ing than wild­ly imag­i­na­tive fan­tasies.

2. Saturn’s characteristics on September 8: “Deadpan” and a philosophical undertone

Sep­tem­ber 8th, influ­enced by the num­ber 8 and Sat­urn, car­ries an innate cool­ness, restraint, and real­ism. When this qual­i­ty is infused with humor, it forms a unique cre­ative sig­na­ture:

• Talk­ing non­sense in a seri­ous man­nerThey often don’t use loud, exag­ger­at­ed, or grotesque humor; instead, they tell the most bizarre sto­ries with a seri­ous demeanor. There’s an under­stat­ed, “dead­pan” qual­i­ty in their writ­ing and nar­ra­tive.
• The stark real­i­ty behind the absur­di­tySat­urn pre­vents cre­ators from set­tling for shal­low humor. Beneath its absurd exte­ri­or often lies a per­spec­tive on human weak­ness­es, the absur­di­ty of social oper­a­tion, and even exis­ten­tial dilem­mas. After the laugh­ter sub­sides, read­ers are sud­den­ly struck by the truth and des­o­la­tion at its core—this is the key to the trans­for­ma­tion of absur­di­ty into “philo­soph­i­cal depth.”

3. Mercury’s Desire to Deconstruct: Turning Children’s Books into Intellectual Puzzles

Mer­cury rep­re­sents not only words and log­ic, but also the urge to play with “media forms”.

• These cre­ators rarely tell a straight­for­ward lin­ear sto­ry; they are pas­sion­ate about…Break­ing the “fourth wall”“Manip­u­lat­ing meta-nar­ra­tives with­in the text: hav­ing char­ac­ters direct­ly protest to the author, using copy­right pages and tables of con­tents as the main text to cre­ate a par­o­dy, or using typog­ra­phy and visu­al mis­align­ment to trick the read­er.
• For them, cre­ation is not about express­ing emo­tions, but about arrang­ing a set of images and text.High-pre­ci­sion pre­ci­sion mech­a­nismThose seem­ing­ly play­ful and quirky antics are all built with engi­neer­ing-lev­el tech­niques that are pre­cise down to the rhythm of words and the paus­es when turn­ing pages.

4. Mental fastidiousness: using absurdity to disinfect “hypocrisy and preaching”.

Vir­gos are born with a sen­si­tive “decep­tion detec­tor” and despise sanc­ti­mo­nious, con­de­scend­ing plat­i­tudes.

• In tra­di­tion­al chil­dren’s book writ­ing, adults often tend to paint a rosy pic­ture of the world or rush to indoc­tri­nate chil­dren with moral lessons.
• Cre­ators with char­ac­ter­is­tics asso­ci­at­ed with Sep­tem­ber 8th have an instinc­tive resis­tance to this. They choose to use…Absur­di­ty, quirk­i­ness and decon­struc­tionAs a weapon, it shat­ters those sanc­ti­mo­nious rules.
• This kind of cre­ation shows the utmost respect for chil­dren: they don’t deceive them, but instead use quirky laugh­ter to tell young read­ers—The world may be absurd and ridicu­lous at times, but rea­son and humor will be your strongest armor.