'Where the Wild Things Are'

as read by President Obama--



I hope somewhere, Maurice Sendak is enjoying a 'wild rumpus', or at least is not lonely for someone who loves him. Rest in peace.

Good night.

Home

and that was a fairly short doctor's appointment, only taking an hour and twenty minutes. He increased my medicine a notch and I see him back for a major blood draw in July. He said I looked a little tired. I think I actually fell asleep in the chair waiting for him to come in. I told him I'd done a lot of housework today. That must be it because my blood sugar was only 117 when I got home, which is pretty close to normal.

I have showered twice today, put on three outfits (one for housework, one for going to the doctor, one for housework/relaxing in), and I've gotten a lot accomplished. The windows are open with a nice breeze coming through and the sunlight is shining brightly, which is great considering the day started out a little gloomy looking. I love this time of day.

While I was at the doctor's, I was looking through the news and saw that Maurice Sendak had died. :(

Maurice Sendak, Author of Splendid Nightmares, Dies at 83

In book after book, Mr. Sendak upended the staid, centuries-old tradition of American children’s literature, in which young heroes and heroines were typically well scrubbed and even better behaved; nothing really bad ever happened for very long; and everything was tied up at the end in a neat, moralistic bow.

Mr. Sendak’s characters, by contrast, are headstrong, bossy, even obnoxious. (In “Pierre,” “I don’t care!” is the response of the small eponymous hero to absolutely everything.) His pictures are often unsettling. His plots are fraught with rupture: children are kidnapped, parents disappear, a dog lights out from her comfortable home.

A largely self-taught illustrator, Mr. Sendak was at his finest a shtetl Blake, portraying a luminous world, at once lovely and dreadful, suspended between wakefulness and dreaming. In so doing, he was able to convey both the propulsive abandon and the pervasive melancholy of children’s interior lives.

And this...

As Mr. Sendak grew up — lower class, Jewish, gay — he felt permanently shunted to the margins of things. “All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy,” he told The New York Times in a 2008 interview. “They never, never, never knew.”

His lifelong melancholia showed in his work, in picture books like “We Are All in the Dumps With Jack and Guy” (1993), a parable about homeless children in the age of AIDS. It showed in his habits. He could be dyspeptic and solitary, working in his white clapboard home deep in the Connecticut countryside with only Mozart, Melville, Mickey Mouse and his dogs for company.

But he was not totally alone. His partner, Eugene Glynn, died in 2007 of cancer, and he himself was cared for by a longtime friend, Lynn Caponera.

In an interview with NPR's Terry Gross last year, Sendak said:

"I have nothing now but praise for my life. I'm not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more."

"There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready."

The world has lost a creative soul, but his works will live on in the hearts of children, and also in adults who are young at heart.

For those of you who love Maurice Sendak's work

An excellent look into the writer/illustrator's life and personality can be found in:

Concerns Beyond Just Where the Wild Things Are

Things I didn't know about Mr Sendak:

1. The son of Polish-Jewish immigrants, he lost many relatives in the Holocaust.
   
2. Gay, his partner of 50 years died last year. He never told his parents he was gay.
   
3. He recently turned 80, despite having a heart attack at 39 and a triple by-pass recently.