Remembering Maurice Sendak

EVEN when someone has hit their 80s, it can be hard to think of them disappearing if they're as ornery and vital as Maurice Sendak. Famously cranky and contrary, he was also a giant of 20th century literature, and it's with great sorrow that The Misread City says goodbye to the writer and artist, who died today in Connecticut.


I spoke to Sendak just once, for my story on Spike Jonze's Where The Wild Things Are. I've spoken to a lot of people over the years, but this was a rare thrill: I'd grown up with that book, In the Night Kitchen, and other stories of his, I'd started to realize as I got deeper into children's lit, what a revolutionary force he'd been in moving the field past its patriots-and-pastoral phase. And right around that time, I was reading my son, almost every night, a book he called Where the WILD Things Are.


"I didn't have a social conscience that I was doing anything different," Sendak, 81, told me. Mostly, the Brooklyn-born illustrator, then in his early 30s, was excited to tackle his first full picture book. "It was all my own and in full color. It's hard to imagine now, with everyone doing them. But emancipating children was far from my mind."


My story gets into the effect Sendak had on the field as well as the culture as a whole.


Here is his obituary from the New York Times. Rarely has it seemed more appropriate to say of an artist that his work will live on. I know what I'll be reading my son tonight.


Update: A big-picture appreciation by the very fine book critic Dwight Garner of the New York Times.

The Return of Brian Selznick

IF you’re the kind of grownup who enjoys smart, well-drawn children’s novels, you might be as excited as I am to hear the Brian Selznick has a new novel, Wonderstruck, coming in September.

I met Selznick a few years back on the publication of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, his nearly wordless  book about an orphan hiding out in a Parisian train station. (I have another, more recent connection with his work: He illustrated Barbara Kerley’s The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse and Hawkins, a favorite of my dinosaur-loving son.)

Selznick – who is descended from film producer David O. Selznick – and I spoke about the literary tradition of orphans, silent movies’ genius of telling stories through images, and the groundbreaking work of Maurice Sendak. I’m not the only one interested in the Cadecott Medal-winning book: Martin Scorsese’s 3-D adaptation, with Jude Law and Ben Kingsley, comes out comes out in November.

Here is my LATimes interview with Selznick.

Wonderstruck, according to a story in the latest School Library Journal, will involve “two interconnected  tales,” one all text, the other in black-and-white images. The first will tell of “12-year old Ben Wilson as he leaves rural Minnesota for New York City, a few months after his mother’s death, in search or a father he’s never known. And the wordless companion story follows a New Jersey girls who’s deaf and who embarks on a risky quest of her own, in 1927.” 

Inverting Alice in Wonderland

WHEN world-class ski champion and hollywood film producer frank beddor approached me about his book project a couple years back, i wasnt sure what to think. the fact that, he told me, he had taken lewis carroll's "alice" stories and turned them into a rather violent YA novel, as well as a graphic novel and video game, made me wonder if this was just a case of corporate-style "synergy" gone mad.

but beddor's first book, "the looking glass wars," was powerful and smart, and entirely un-cynical, as was its sequel. here is my story on beddor, and here's what i wrote at the time:

'What's most impressive about them is that the novels seems to be recounting a universe fully imagined ahead of time. Beddor admires what he calls "the epic world creators" such as J.R.R. Tolkien, "Dune's" Frank Herbert and Philip Pullman of "His Dark Materials." Beddor's books seem tailor-made for kids who've completed the "Harry Potter" series and are looking up, a bit dazed from the experience, eager for somewhere else to go.'

i'm writing about beddor today because the third book in the trilogy has just come out, and my old colleague geoff boucher of hero complex, speaks to him, here, about the project. and dont forget: a tim burton "alice" film comes out in march.

Maurice Sendak and "Where the Wild Things Are"

ONE of the fascinating things about literature -- especially popular literature -- is the way it tracks the contours of the society that produces it. which is a fancy way of saying, maurice sendak books like "where the wild things are" not only reflected those churnings in american culture in the late 50s/early 60s, it helped produce what we learned to call "the 60s."

sendak, of course, is in the news because of friday's opening of the long-awaited spike jonze-helmed "where the wild things are" film. HERE is my story from today's LATimes, where i try to set sendak and his most famous book in cultural context. i spoke to sendak, jonze, librarian/ children's writer susan patron, and historian of children's lit seth lerer for the piece.

in the years before "wild things" came out, in 1963, the big kid-lit awards were being won by books of nursery rhymes and american patriots. robert mccloskey and e.b. white had published wonderful book in the protestant-pastoral tradition. (dr. seuss, of course, had hit his stride, though, i'm told, wasnt taken very seriously by the field's gatekeepers.)

something i wish i'd had room to get into the piece: as lerer points out, the 20th century was the first in which children typically had rooms of their own -- dickens grew up with several other kids in the bedroom with him. this allowed kids to develop their own private imaginations, but also generated anxieties -- will the room be here when i wake up? are there monsters in here with me? -- that sendak's "wild things" was one of the first to address so eloquently.

i will post at least one more "wild things" related piece as we build up to the film's release.

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss

TODAY i'm wishing a happy 105th to one of the greatest writers this country has known, and one i've come to appreciate more as i've revisited him for the sake of my son. (i only regret that the good doctor did not have the good fortune to be born an aquarius.)

there are many wonderful authors for little kids -- lucy cousins, eric carle, byron barton, ezra jack keats -- but for an adult who loves the sound of language, what an electric jolt it is to get to the point where you can read junior dr. seuss! even a simple, almost monosyllabic book like

"hop on pop" is quite ingenious.

perhaps my favorite of his, and certainly the most poignant of his books, is THE LORAX. here is a recent LAT story, not by me, about that book and how is speaks to both the past and present of the green movement.

part of what has struck me as i've read the book for the second and third time on the same day to my son ian is how stodgy the lorax himself is. that is, here is a book written effectively, in "the 60s" (it came out in 1971), with an enviro/countercultural message, and where the hero is someone who represents not youth but the wisdom of the ages. in fact, the once-ler, the spirit of full-speed-ahead capitalism and innovation, has a younger, more dynamic spirit and actually calls the doomy lorax "dad" in a condescending way. we have geisel, an older liberal, looking at his times and coming to an original conclusion about what's needed. it also presages the way al gore was often portrayed.

(a great overlooked book is "on beyond zebra," which posits a kind of psychedelic alphabet that picks up where ours lets off. appealed to my childhood love of codes and hidden things.)

but you've surely got your own favorites. either way, happy birthday to the good doctor!!

Photo credit: Flickr user 31

BARACK OBAMA AND EZRA JACK KEATS

Amazing amount of excitement, anticipation, and i expect resentment and suppressed fear right now around the obama inauguration... i will try to avoid getting too deeply into politics in this blog despite my fascination with it -- i've learned the hard way over the years that there is actually some wisdom to the old warning about talking about politics and religion across the dinner table.

but obama's arrival has me thinking about someone else: old-school children's writer ezra jack keats. we learned about him as children, as the first writer to bring black characters into mainstream kid lit -- i guess i assumed he was black himself. but turns out he was of polish-jewish descent -- his dad's last name was "katz."

so first off, i love the fact that the offspring of european jews took the surname of england's greatest romantic poet (who was himself a cockney and spoke that weird rhyming slang) and created a character who resembles, both physically and in his habits of mind, the nation's first black president. (born just a few months before keats' best book was released.)

by that i mean that the protagonist of "the snowy day," 1962, who lives in that keatsian world of brooklyn-ish brownstone pastoral, shares not only a haircut but an introspective, analytical temperament with the nation's soon-to-be-leader. there are several scenes, including one of peter in from the cold, soaking in the bathtub, where there are virtually no words on the page and we see him >thinking<: it's among the few images i know from kid lit that show characters in the act of reflection or imagining. (peter also shows up in another book i like, "whistle for willy.") there's a wonderfully simple illustration of his footsteps across the white snow that reminds me of the work of alt-comic artists like seth.

it's too soon to tell how obama will govern, and how he will handle this incredibly bad economy and a demoralized nation -- i will not make any predictions... but i think it's fair to say it's been a long while since we've had a president with this reflective, even poetic, temperament that we find in keats' books. (there's probably a counter-argument here that what we need is "a man of action." let's table that for the moment.)

so my final irony here is that my son ian, a blond, blue-eyed two-year-old living in the hills above 21st century los angeles, can respond so fully to the tale of a black kid walking in the snow, almost five decades ago, in a city my kid has never visited and a season he has never really experienced. the book gives ian a glimpse into a world he's never seen before.  through his enthusiasm, he's taken me there too.

Photo credit: Ezra Jack Keats Foundation