The Owl and the Pussycat is the best nonsense poem of all time. Edward Lear’s nonsensical words gently undercut a sentimental story, balancing romance with frivolity, sense with nonsense, adventure with security, and the result is a story whose perfect meter and easy rhyme lull one to a state of blissful conviction that, yes, the world could be lovely if only it were full of owls and pussycats. Continue reading
This posting is long overdue. Yet perhaps no time is the right time to pay homage to a man who births brilliance from sadness. Edward Lear, impoverished epileptic, clownish artist, misfit bumbling socialite, endearingly teary-eyed poet, and above all, a man whose name should ring out side by side with Lewis Carroll, but very rarely does. Continue reading
Oral story-telling is in the throes of a long, drawn out death, one which it began decades, even centuries ago, well before most of us were born. And though we do not mourn that fact, we should. Continue reading
Heckedy Peg is a story about a witch who turns seven kids, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc, into food and brings them to her lair where she plans to eat them. Their brave mother tracks them down and must guess which kid is which food in order to save them. With Heckedy Peg, Audrey Wood wrote a proper fairy tale. It’s dark and frightening, but in the end, the magic and terror are all dismissed through ingenuity, a moral is conveyed, and we are left with the black and white triumph of maternal good over a barren evil. Proper. Continue reading
Maurice Sendak passed away this morning in a hospital in Connecticut where he had been since a stroke last Friday. He was 83. Read the NPR article here. From interviews with Sendak, it might be said that he didn’t mind heading out of this world, happy to follow his dearly loved ones already gone. And his death … Continue reading
So, what’s great about Sendak’s next best known book? His second little dark haired hero, Mickey, falls into a surreal bakers’ world and saves the day by flying a dough plane to a giant milk bottle and getting the bakers the milk they need for the morning cake. Again, as in Where the Wild Things Are, imagination takes a boy to a world outside of his own. But this one’s got a slightly different kind of ending… Continue reading
When you read criticism on Maurice Sendak’s first hugely successful book (and there are academic essays, I assure you), you realize, holy shit, people have applied phrases like “colonialist or Freudian prism” and “the psychoanalytic story of anger” to this tail of an angry boy who sails to where the wild things are. This isn’t the first place that Where the Wild Things Are has been treated as a book whose readership has no age limits. Continue reading
Over the last five decades, Maurice Sendak has been the genius behind innumerable picture books, some of which have reached the status of irrefutable classics. Indeed, today Sendak is one of the most recognized names in illustrated children’s books. Born in Brooklyn in 1928 to Polish Jewish immigrants, he knew by the age of 12 that he wanted to be an illustrator. Continue reading
The Giving Tree deals with that issue that no one can or really wants to avoid, not even Poe or monster robots: the inexhaustible conundrum that love can hurt. And here, with his simple, sweet, yet somehow mildly grotesque little line drawings, Silverstein looks at the pure side of that pain, and lets his reader do the hurting. Continue reading
Little Book Review 