Two Words for You Kid: F*king Sleep!

Growing up, bedtime stories were a nightly ritual for my siblings and me. Many of those children’s books, I’m realizing, had a recurrent sleep theme. The glossy covers were saturated with an indigo/dark-blue color-scheme, there was a prevalence of graphically depicted moons and stars, and the words themselves formed a hypnotic chant of soft sounds repeating over and over again. There was Agatha’s Feather Bed, Goodnight Moon, and my inexplicable favorite, The Napping House, among others. All of them revolved around the task of going to sleep.

As an adult I’m more able to decode the parental subtext beneath all those gentle words and nocturnal settings. My mother, all parents really, had just one message to convey with these bedtime stories: Go the Fuck to Sleep! This succinct interpretation is the title of Adam Mansbach’s new ‘children’s book for adults.’

Here’s the best part, according to me:

I know you’re not thirsty! That’s bullshit, stop lying. Lie the fuck down, my darling.

The child’s sudden urge to hydrate is just a ploy, but as Samuel L. Jackson learns, resistance is futile.

Sure! Fine! Whatever! I’ll bring you some milk. Who the fuck cares? You’re not gonna sleep.

Besides Jackson’s brilliant reading, there was a New York Public Library event during which both Werner Herzog and Judah Friedlander each voiced the text.

FYI: the cover of Go the Fuck to Sleep has an illustration of a toddler sleeping next to a family of tigers. Above, the full moon obscures the letters ‘u’ and ‘c’ in the word ‘Fuck’. Totally resembles every bedtime book in history. I wonder how many people will maybe accidentally buy it for their children. They should definitely buy it for themselves.

Special Collections

You know, some very cool historical things exist out there in the world. They specifically seem to coagulate in library collections. Perhaps because nerdy librarian-types are the only kind of people who would think to preserve a lock of Mary Shelley’s hair, presumably sent to Thomas Jefferson Hogg (is it me, or am I detecting an unusual number of split ends? Not Shelley’s fault, I’m sure).

The MS lock is at the New York Public Library. They also have Malcolm X’s Koran, Charlotte Bronte’s writing desk, and Charles Dickens’ letter opener, made from his deceased cat’s paw.

Harvard College just opened an exhibit called Tangible Things, indeed full of tangible things. Strange, tangible things. Like a rock-like mineral that formed in the body of a wounded Civil War veteran. They also possess Mark Twain’s telescope, with which he was researching a never-finished novel about microbes. The protagonist was to be a cholera germ. Seriously.

As a Chicago native, I’m particularly fond of the Newberry Library, where I spent a semester as an Undergrad learning about island culture and colonialism: the Philippines, Hawaii, Haiti, and more. (Did you know that previous to the Revolutionary, there was an epidemic of a disease called “the jaw-sickness” among the slave population in Haiti? Despairing slave women would secretly perform an operation on newborns that would effectively force the child’s jaws to remain shut; thus, the baby would starve rather than grow up in slavery. True story, according to C.L.R James.)

Anyway, the Newberry has a vast collection of books, manuscripts, and maps. They have the Latin Vulgate Bible, c.a 1250. One of the previous owners was Calvin Ellis Stowe, husband of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Happy Birthday Mrs. Stowe!). Also, they’ve got an original Lewis and Clark map. Impressive.

I think people, myself among them, like historical artifacts because, unlike the information you look up on Wikipedia, such objects have a physical, tangible presence. Something more substantial than a fact to be memorized. I can imagine Charlotte Bronte’s work space all day, but if I go to the New York Public Library I can prove to myself that such a space existed in reality, too. Sometimes we need that kind of reassurance.