Rest In Peace, Maurice Sendak

Love this, Spiegelman/Sendak New Yorker two-pager from 1993:

http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3plorZUzE1rq8nnho1_500.png
http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3plorZUzE1rq8nnho2_500.png

i think the whole feeling of the book is VERY understandable to children. which is why kids love it and why it makes grownups get that twinge of nostalgia/recollection/wistfulness.

i'm scared of the movie. still haven't seen it. maria said it was kinda scary and depressing.

^ true. book is so perfect. it might be one of the most perfect books for kids ever written.

There's so much going on, all intentional and considerate, and the way it is used by Sendak to convey deep meanings isn't reducible to 'kid has a bratty tantrum and likes it but he's also got a nice mom to come back to' even though that is the rough shape of the story.

i agree that it's a great book, but still think you're maybe pushing too hard for "deep meanings". max's imaginary world is rendered in a wilder, darker and looser manner than his home life. when he is angry, the prison of his room = the prison of "safe" reality = the prison of the illustrative frame. his unleashed imagination breaks the established boundaries of the page to forge a dangerous new world. i love these things about the book, but see them as clever and effective artistic devices. they convey meaning, yes, but i don't have to call them deep or describe them in any but the simplest terms to recognize/articulate their brilliance.

xpost to remy

i hear what you're saying, and it's a great argument for why sendak is a much better stylist than jonze (which is an understatement, jonze is a decent movie director and a good music video director, sendak is up there w/ dr seuss on the "count w/ fingers" short list of children's book illustrators ... i also think it's a good explanation of how sendak uses technique to bolster the theme in a much more effective way than jonze, and that he uses techniques that probably only an adult - and only one with more than passing knowledge of visual art - could understand.

but as far as the *theme* itself goes, i don't think there's thematic complexity in the book that's not in the movie and it sounds to me like the techniques you're talking about add that much more depth to the theme

i am with scott here - if the theme was only understandable at a deep level to adults, it just wouldn't have been that popular!

i would draw a parallel w/ "the giving tree". does a kid understand it the same way a senior citizen does? of course not, but not because there's thematic depth that the senior citizen has access to that the kid doesn't.

whoops i meant to say

"it sounds to me like the techniques you're talking about express the theme very vividly but don't in and of themselves add depth to the theme"

anyway, i remember being shocked and kind of scared by where the wild things are when i first encountered it. the scene where max jumps up on the table and yells at his mom! the transgressiveness of it genuinely shocked me. i think i was about 5.

xxpost Roz, that's so great, thanks for posting!

the interview doc that spike jonez made to go along w where the wild things are is fantastic, btw. recommended to anyone who hasn't seen it.

― 10. “Pour Some Sugar On Me” – Tom Cruise (contenderizer), Tuesday, May 8, 2012 12:01 PM (1 hour ago)

yeah, it's called tell them anything you want, it's great

also... produced by MCA

:) Right? reposted that from a blog, but the New Yorker's just unlocked it too btw - it's zoom-able if anyone has trouble reading the text: http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=1993-09-27#folio=080

xpost

this guy was wondrous and a genius. i've found his books more rewarding to revisit as an adult than almost any other kids' books.

that terry gross interview is intense.

it is one of the only times i have ever liked her!

he lived not far from me when i was a kid. i remember once he was coming to our library to give a talk and i got all excited and the librarian told me the talk wasn't for kids!! i was so sad.

That librarian was a jerk, imo.

I have spent a lot of time with his books in the past few years, and I don't ever get tired of looking at them.

those pierre illustrations are very blake.

our miss geeta with a nice piece:

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/05/maurice-sendak-rip/

this for all time:

“Too many parents and too many writers of children’s books don’t respect the fact that kids know a great deal and suffer a great deal,” Sendak told The New Yorker’s Hentoff. “It’s not that I don’t see the naturalistic beauty of a child. I’m very aware of that beauty, and I could draw it…. But I am trying to draw the way children feel — or rather, the way I imagine they feel. It’s the way I know I felt as a child.”

RIP, Big Mo.

Loved Sendak, his books and illustrations for others. The Animal Family by Randal Jarrel was a favorite, and his drawings were a really great match in tone. This picture from Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories was one of the most compelling and scary pictures:

http://forward.com/workspace/assets/images/articles/sendak2-092409.jpg

It's the combination of menace and jollity that makes the Devil scary! He really nails it. And how much his face stands out compared to the subtle relief of his body, hooves, wings. Why the gnomes? Why the menorah & c? I don't remember a thing about that book except this picture, it's burned in me forever.

He's my favorite kind of curmudgeon, and an amazing craftsman.

I just read a book about Caldecott-winning artists and the chapter on how he made Where the Wild Things Are was incredible. He spent seven years refining it. It started out as Where The Wild Horses Are. He'd put it down for months, pick it up again, rework it, over and over. Dig this dummy book he made during the process, it's just one inch tall and looks like the inside of a zeotrope:

http://28.media.tumblr.com/l9tDR5PyCnegx1em3qes9CCKo1_500.png

damn, rip

Both of my kids went through phases of loving "In the Night Kitchen," far more than they ever did "Wild Things." I think it's because it's just so batshit insane they didn't know what to make of it.

^ went through this phase. also hilarious due to wang.

Where The Child Wangs Are.

RIP!

in the wang kitchen

http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj242/donaldparsley/wangkitchensm.jpg

<3

that interviews overview on npr this afternoon was soo good!

i kinda think 'outside over there' is his masterpiece, and not just because i remember my first encounter with it in second grade with such queasy vividness that for years i thought i'd dreamed it, since no actual kids' book like that could possibly exist.

it may be. that or wild things.

i think what really puts across that devil picture is the way he's got one hand in his pocket. who else would think to draw him like that?

here's a piece i wrote about maurice sendak for wired:

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/05/maurice-sendak-rip/

great interview: http://believermag.com/issues/201211/?read=interview_sendak

[The phone rings. It is NPR letting Sendak know that a recent interview with him has run and is generating a lot of responses. He praises Terry Gross, the interviewer.]

MS: The only thing she said wrong was that her favorite interviews had been me and that stupid fucking writer. Salman Rushdie, that flaccid fuckhead. He reviewed me on a full page in the New York Times, my book Dear Mili. He hated it. He is detestable. I called up the Ayatollah, nobody knows that. What else shall we talk about?

gotta say i agree with his comments on Roald Dahl.