Yesterday, I got my very own a copy of the book. (Yes, Colbert actually managed to get it published.) The front cover included a quote from Sendak: “The sad thing is, I like it!” (The back-cover quote from Sendak is less kind: “Terribly, supremely ordinary.”)
I read the book and had a good laugh. I was especially entertained when I spied an illustration of Sendak making a cameo within a crowd of characters, hands over hearts before the U.S. flag. The whole situation struck me as anti-Sendak — the outspoken, rebellious artist reduced to smiling conformist in a work he had described as unimpressive. Then again, I thought, perhaps he has a sense of humor about himself and blessed the illustration with a wry grin.
Today, I searched online for an opinion directly from the source. Would he recant and condemn the book, I wondered? Shrug? Chuckle?
I didn’t discover the answer. Instead, I discovered breaking news: The same day I got my book (Tuesday, May 8), Sendak had died from complications from a stroke. He was 83.
Hard to believe that a literary voice was silenced — especially a voice as boisterous as Sendak’s. He had never been shy about speaking his mind, and, rightly or wrongly, he had always courted controversy with his “children’s” books. “Where the Wild Things Are” (perhaps his most famed work — and the one most likely to trigger a resentful rant from the writer) shocked adults in 1963 with its depiction of grotesque monsters. Nearly five decades later, “Bumble-Ardy” worried moms and dads by telling the story of an orphaned pig whose parents had been eaten. In between, “In the Night Kitchen” managed to get banned in several areas of the United States for showing a naked boy traveling through a dream landscape.
For all the hand-wringing he had caused parents, Sendak remained unapologetic. In an October 2011 interview with The Guardian, he said, “I refuse to lie to children. I refuse to cater to the bull**** of innocence.” In the very same interview, he also used the very same word (the one with the asterisks) to describe Stephen King. He called Salman Rushdie “detestable” (actually, Sendak called Rushdie way more than that — but I can only censor so much with asterisks). He said that the best thing about Roald Dahl was that he’s dead. And he spewed venom about e-books.
His hatred of e-books came through loud and clear during his appearance on The Colbert Report too, with an obscenity-laced tirade that kept the censor busy on the bleep button. Fortunately, his final statement about e-books in The Guardian is a little cleaner (or at least this portion of the quote is): “There isn’t another kind of book! A book is a book is a book.”
View Original Article
Maurice Sendak, author of the children's book, Where the Wild Things Are.
By Jerry Janda, Global IT Communications, SAP
Earlier this year, mad children’s author/illustrator/curmudgeon Maurice Sendak appeared on The Colbert Report television program.
Over the course of a two-episode interview, Sendak’s mood fluctuated between begrudging amusement (at best) and snarling outrage (at worst). The final segment ended with host Stephen Colbert pitching his own idea for a children....