Sendak on Sendak in San Francisco

Last weekend I went to see the Maurice Sendak exhibit at the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum. I am not aiming to review the exhibit here but to point out a few of the things that made me think. Like many people, I am a huge fan of Where the Wild Things Are and had read it cover to cover every night as a child. When I first encountered the book I read its Chinese translation, so it wasn't until many many years later when I saw the original English text and found it what Sendak's book really said.

But what the book "really said" isn't really what the text presents at all. A running theme in the exhibit was "The Other Story" - in the sense that Sendak's art told another story in addition to the text of the book. A lot of his "Other story" involved Sendak's Jewish heritage. Casey and I have talked at length about children's books and the ethnicity of characters in children's books. I never realized until I went to the exhibit that Sendak's Jewish heritage was such a huge part of his personal history and appeared in so many of his works.

Suffice it for me to say that you've got to go see this exhibit yourself. And about that movie? After spending the afternoon at the museum, I am wondering why it was necessary to make it into a movie or a New Yorker story at all.

p.s. If you are a fan of Sendak's art, check out the blog, Terrible Yellow Eyes, where other artists pay homage to him with their own work. One of my favorite pieces is this one called Best of All.

p.p.s. While I enjoyed the exhibit and the museum very much, I became ... disturbed and felt upset when I was entering the museum. We lined up to go through a metal detector and had to have our bags checked by some very nice security guards. Just like the airport, except the guards were much much nicer and you don't have to take off your shoes. The reason for this is obvious and one shouldn't be surprised that the Jewish Museum is the only museum in town requiring this security measure. But I found this upsetting because there were several young children in front of me and I thought, how do you explain this to kids?

What are we reading?

Just to get the conversation going again (I am a horrible blogger, I know)...what are we all reading and/or interested in at the moment?

I am reading a collection of Truman Capote stories. I probably won't read everyone of them, but I have always found with him that he seems most himself when he is writing about small town life in the south. The stories set there are his most affecting, in my opinion. In Cold Blood is a masterwork, and even though it wasn't set in the south, it's still about small town life and small town personalities and I think that's why his voice is so strong in it.

I have about 25 pages left of the Obama memoir. I don't know why I can't just finish it off. It's keeping me from moving on to other things!

I just read a great piece in The New Yorker about these gnostic gospels called the Codex Tchacos that were found in 1978 and tell a very different story about Jesus's relationship with Judas. It's amazing how the image of Jesus changes every time these new gospels are found. It reminds me of that funny bit in Talladega Nights where Will Ferrell refers to Jesus as "Baby Jesus". He just likes the image of Jesus as a baby. I guess Jesus really is in the eye of the beholder! He's like this enigmatic figure who has been depicted by all of these writers and no one will ever really know who he was. He's a reflection in a hall of mirrors.

So what are you reading, writing, interested in?

The House

by Richard Wilbur

Sometimes, on waking, she would close her eyes

For a last look at that white house she knew

In sleep alone, and held no title to,

And had not entered yet, for all her sighs.

What did she tell me of that house of hers?

White gatepost; terrace; fanlight of the door;

A widow’s walk above the bouldered shore;

Salt winds that ruffle the surrounding firs.

Is she now there, wherever there may be?

Only a foolish man would hope to find

That haven fashioned by her dreaming mind.

Night after night, my love, I put to sea.

From The New Yorker, August 31,2009

Atul Gawande, "The Unlikely Writer"

I am reading a profile of Atul Gawande in the Harvard Magazine (random, I know) and found that he had some interesting things to say about writing. I know Gawande is a little bit off topic of a writer as far as our blog here is concerned, but I love the type of medical writing that he does. It is very...humanistic, touching, and a little like an investigative story every time.

Gawande saves his writing for the hours between 7 and 11 a.m. and 4 and 7 p.m. to "capitalize on the body’s circadian rhythms." I have a day job that kind of prevents me from doing this, but I would love to know what this "circadian rhythms" business has to do with my writing. Anybody?

The next thing that stood out to me was what Gawande has to say about writing:

Once a college sophomore with little interest in literature, Gawande now says he thinks in stories and feels a compulsion to write. In fact, he recommends that everyone do a bit of writing. “It makes no difference whether you write a paper for a medical journal, five paragraphs for a website, or a collection of poetry,” he said during a 2005 HMS commencement speech:

"…by putting your writing out to an audience, even a small one, you connect yourself to something larger than yourself….An audience is a community. The published word is a declaration of membership in that community, and also of concern to contribute something meaningful to it. "

I like the idea of this community, especially when so many writers see their craft as a lonely sport.

I am lame

I know I said I would memorize and record a sonnet...well, I didn't and I don't know if I'll ever get around to it. I seriously think, with age and wear, I have gotten worse at memorizing things. I tried, folks, I really tried. It was a worthy exercise in that it made me read that sonnet many more times than I normally would have.

The Americans

Alright, you lucky New Yorkers...Photographer Robert Frank's The Americans is now at the Met. The exhibit will be there until January 3rd. If anyone does go see it, please tell me how it was!