Tag Archives: Maurice Sendak

Ruby Reads 22:

Posted on 30 January 2021 | 5 comments

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted about books read with my granddaughter. Here’s a beginning catch-up.

Dinner with Olivia (Simon & Schuster 2009, based on the TV series, adapted by Emily Sollinger, illustrated by Guy Wolek)

Neither Ruby nor her grandparents knew there was a TV series featuring Olivia, and at first I was wary of this knock-off of Ian Falconer’s wonderful books: as befits children’s TV, the illustration style is a lot cruder than Falconer’s New Yorkish elegance. But it turns out the book is lovely. Olivia goes to her posh friend Francine’s place for dinner. At first she is in awe, and mildly ashamed of the messiness of her own family, especially her little brothers. But once she has experienced the rule-bound life of Francine’s family, not to mention the Brussels sprouts, she – and Francine – realise how excellent it is to slurp spaghetti sauce and occasionally have a meatball bounce to the floor.

Alison Lester, Hello Little Babies (OUP 1985)

Like Alison Lester’s Clive Eats Alligators, this follows a number of children in different activities. This time the children are babies, of a range of ethnicities. Ruby is besotted with her little brother, and with babies in general – at the museum, the exhibit that held her attention was the diorama of baby dinosaurs hatching from their eggs. An added attraction in this book is that one of the babies is named Ruby.

Sally Lloyd-Jones and Sue Heap, How to Be a Baby, by Me, The Big Sister (Schwartz & Wade Books 2007)

Much loved by Ruby, this mocks the narrator’s baby brother for his comparative helplessness. At least, we assume the baby is male, because that’s what Ruby’s baby brother Charlie is. We first read this before he was born. It has become much more popular since he became a reality. I’m not entirely comfortable with the book’s rampant condescension, but I think Ruby can tell it’s joking, and she particularly likes the last pages, where the big sister looks forward to the time when the baby will be as tall as her and able to play with her.

Maurice Sendak, In the Night Kitchen (©1970, HarperCollins Publishers 1988)

Ruby’s not so fond of this. I think there’s too much that she doesn’t quite recognise: the cooks in the kitchen, dough rising, New York skysline, naked boy … And the story line is weird. However, we were driving in the car the other day and she started chanting, ‘Milk in the batter! Milk in the Batter!’ So the magic of Sendak is percolating.

Margaret Mahy (writer) and Jenny Williams (illustrator), A Lion in the Meadow (©1969, re-illustrated edition ©1986, Picture Puffins 1989)

We picked this up at the Addison Road markets. Margaret Mahy is one of the great children’s writers, and Ruby has responded to this book appropriately. Like Sendak’s The Sign on Rosie’s Door, it has a brilliant mother who responds intelligently to her child’s fantasies. The difference is that is this case the child’s fantasy, of ‘a big, roaring, yellow, whiskery lion in the meadow’, turns out to be real, and so does the mother’s counter-fantasy of a dragon in a matchbox who will chase the lion away. Not a word out of place, this is irresistible, and – like the Sendak books – a pleasure to read aloud.

Libby Gleeson (writer) and Freya Blackwood (illustrator), Banjo and Ruby Red (Little Hare 2013)

A dog and a chook overcome initial relationship difficulties to become good friends. What’s not to love? We used to visit some urban chickens when Ruby was much smaller (her word for chicken as ‘babook’, but she eventually decided to go with the consensus). She still talks about the family dog who died some time ago – ‘It’s very sad.’ And relationship difficulties seem to be an issue as she spends more time in childcare. Plus, the chook’s name is Ruby Red. I don’t imagine the Australian farm setting is any more familiar to our inner-city girl than Sendak’s New York skyline, but in this case that doesn’t seem to matter.

This book is also a pleasure to read aloud, for the pathos of a scene where Ruby Red is apparently lifeless as much as for the pages where Banjo does a lot of barking and for the way movement can be traced in great arc across the pages in Freya Blackwood’s illustrations

Hello Little Babies and Banjo and Ruby Red are the first two books I’ve read for the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2021.

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Ruby Reads 21: Books lent by a blog reader

Posted on 23 May 2020 | 2 comments

I’m doing proportionally more posts about children’s books just now because this Covid lockdown is giving me more time than ever with granddaughter Ruby, and concomitantly less time for other reading.

After my last post about books I’ve read with Ruby, a lovely friend/blog reader lent me a swag of books she thought we’d enjoy. This is that swag:

Ian Falconer, Olivia Saves the Circus (Atheneum 2001)

The original Olivia has been a big success. Ruby talks about Olivia’s little brother Ian quite a lot and doesn’t want to go pink at the beach ‘like Olivia’. So this book, in which Olivia tells her class at school how she stepped into the breach when the circus performers were all sick, was very welcome. Although Ruby is a long way from getting the classroom jokes – the teacher is sceptical of Olivia’s tall tales and forces a near-admission of untruthfulness – she asks for the book on repeat. Olivia’s bold inventiveness is pretty irresistible.

Alison Lester, Clive Eats Alligators (OUP 1985)

The first spread of this gives us six children eating breakfast, all different. Turn to the next spread: the text on the left-hand page reads ‘But Clive eats alligators,’ and the image on the right shows Clive, perhaps disappointingly, eating a cereal called Alligator Pops. The book continues with Getting Dressed, Playing, Lunch, Shopping, Pets, Treats and Bedtime. Each of the seven children has a turn at having a spread to her or himself. The fun is in tracing any one of them through the book and seeing how their interests play out in the different contexts: the girl who loves horses, the bookish boy, and so on.

Shirley Hughes, Chatting (Walker Books 1994)

Shirley Hughes is one of the great children’s illustrators of the 20th century. The endpapers of this book are 18 wonderful, warm cameos of active small children, each with a present participle beneath it: laughing, aching, pushing, pouring, and so on. The body of the book picks up on one of these cameos, ‘chatting’. and rings variations on it. The first person narrator is a little girl who likes to chat, who is bored when adults chat for too long, whose mother calls her a chatterbox, whose best chats of all are with her dad when he comes to say goodnight. The illustrations are great, but not very enticing to Ruby, and the theme is a bit lost on her too, I think. (For my part, I rankled vicariously at the ‘chatterbox’ criticism.)

Vera B Williams, “More More More,” Said the Baby (Greenwillow Books 1990)

Subtitled ‘Three Love Stories’, this is exactly that. In three separate stories a small child – a toddler rather than a baby – has a great time with an adult and cries out, ‘More. More. More.’ Except , that is, for the third one, because she’s asleep and just says, ‘Mmm. Mmmm. Mmmm.’ Done in consciously arty gouache, and with attention to diversity, this is very sweet. It doesn’t have the dramatic hold of Olivia or Rosie (see below), but it’s terrific.

Ruth Krauss (writer) and Maurice Sendak (Illustrator), A Hole Is to Dig (Harper Collins 1952)

Subtitled ‘A first book of first definitions’, this is just that – a collection of definitions, mostly in the form ‘X is to y’: ‘A watch is to hear it tick,’ ‘A mountain is to go to the top,’ ‘A mountain is to go to the bottom,’ ‘A package is to look inside.’ The text is witty and charming, but what makes the book brilliant are the pen-drawing illustrations by Maurice Sendak, then 24 years old. It’s a book to treasure. Ruby doesn’t care for it at all.

Maurice Sendak, The Sign on Rosie’s Door (1960)

Stung by Ruby’s indifference to the 1952 Sendak, I retrieved this chapter book from our bookshelves, expecting it to sail right past her. The book has been on high rotation ever since.

You can see Meryl Streep reading the first half of the book at Maurice Sendak’s 80th birthday party, complete with slides of Sendak’s drawings, at this link. In that half, Rosie becomes Alinda the Lovely Lady Singer. In the second half, which is even better, she becomes Alinda the Lost Girl (‘Who lost you?’ ‘I lost myself.’) and a giant firecracker, and finally (spoiler alert) a sleepy cat. So many lines in this book make my heart sing. It was inspired by children Sendak saw playing in the street outside his window in Brooklyn, in particular the little girl who ran the show. Like Ruby, Rosie creates a lot of fun, and takes on a range of identities as she goes. I love them both.

Clive Eats Alligators is the ninth book I’ve read for the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2020.

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Ruby Reads (17): Mardi Gras

Posted on 21 February 2020 | 11 comments

I haven’t blogged about Ruby-related reading for a while. Many wonderful books have been read, but I wouldn’t dream of trying to catch you up on them all. The Sydney Mardi Gras is coming up, so here are a couple of LGBTQ+-related titles.

Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are (1963)

I’ve mentioned this a couple of times on this blog (as in this recently retrieved post). I first met it in the early 1970s when I gave it to my niece, and have loved it ever since. I even quite like the movie. The Emerging Artist, aka Nanna, read it to Ruby recently. I don’t think Ruby got it: What is this thing called mischief that Max makes? Come to think of it, maybe we should give it another go, because although R doesn’t wear a wolf suit, she often says, ‘I’m a doggo!’ and gets a mischievous/rascally look in her eye. But I don’t think she has any idea what’s going on when Max’s mother sends him to bed without eating anything: punishment isn’t yet part of her moral universe.

In case you don’t know, after Max makes mischief and is sent to bed supperless, a forest grows in his room, and an ocean tumbles by. Max sails to where the wild things are and though they threaten to eat him he becomes their king, tames them, has a rumpus with them, and sails home to his room where his supper is waiting for him, ”And it was still warm.’

I don’t know what else to say about Where the Wild Things Are beyond that it’s a work of poetic genius, and if you haven’t seen the images, or other images referring to them, you haven’t been paying attention.

And why blog about it in connection with Mardi Gras? I don’t think there’s anything particularly queer about the book itself, but Maurice Sendak came out as gay towards the end of his life.

The Family Book (Todd Parr 2003)

The next three books were read to us at rainbow-themed events in a nearby library.

The Family Book is a straightforward celebration of diversity in families: heterosexual parents, same-sex parents, single parents, mixed race, many children, single children, adoption, and so on. It culminates in the statement: ‘There are lots of different ways to be a family. Your family is special no matter what kind it is.’

Like Sophie Beer’s Love Makes a Family (my blog post here), it’s fine, would irritate some culture warriors on the right and its illuatrations are lively enough to hold a young audience’s interest

Lesléa Newman (words) and Laura Cornell (pictures), Heather Has Two Mummies (2001)

First published in the USA in 1989 with a different illustrator and mommies rather than mummies, this is regarded as a groundbreaking book about a non-heteronormative family. According to Wikipedia (here) it is one of the most often banned books in the USA.

It’s a baldly didactic book. Heather goes to school, or perhaps it’s daycare, and discovers that all the other children have a mother and a father. When the teacher realises Heather doesn’t have a father, she sets up a number of activities to teach the children – and the readers – that having two parents of the same gender is fine, that what matters in a family is that people love one another ‘very much’. Someone, in recommending this book for early-childhood educators, says that you can do the activities that come with the book without actually reading the book.

The illustrations bring a lightness of touch to a text that is resolutely didactic though not, to be fair, completely humourless.

Mel Elliott, The Girl with Two Dads (Egmont 2019)

Matilda is new at the school. Pearl is excited to have a new friend, and even more excited when she discovers that Matilda has two fathers. In her family, the mother is the disciplinarian, so a family with two fathers must be a lot of fun. It turns out that Matilda’s parents are just as boring and full of rules as Pearl’s own.

Unlike the story of Heather and her mummies from 30 years ago, this one allows room for the readers to have a range of responses: they may identify with Pearl in thinking it’s odd to have two fathers, they may think that Pearl is a bit silly to think that, or they may see the whole same-sex parents thing as peripheral to the main story of friendship. I don’t know how this went down with the two- and three-year-old audience, but I liked the passionate friendship between the two girls, and the humour of Pearl’s disappointment worked for me.

Joe Brumm (creator), Bluey: Fruit Bat (Penguin Australia, 2019)

This book has got nothing to do with Mardi Gras. I just love Bluey and wanted to mention her. The book is a glow-in-the-dark version of an episode of the Bluey TV animation series, which you can watch online here.

Bluey is a blue cattledog who lives with her father (Dad), her mother (Mum) and her little sister Bingo in a suburban home, probably in Brisbane. The adults know how to play with the children. The children, er, pups are clever, affectionate, cooperative (mostly), energetic. Since seeing a little of this show, Ruby has taken to spinning around on the spot, which Bluey can do without getting dizzy. She’s also requested drawings of Bluey (which are much harder than Peppa Pig) and occasionally announces that she herself is Bluey, or Bingo.

This and Bluey: The Beach may be the only spin-off books from a children’s television cartoon show that I’ve enjoyed.

(An apology: I don’t have the book with me, and can’t find name of the book’s – as opposed to the cartoon’s – author.)

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Esme the critic

Posted on 12 March 2016 | Leave a comment

My mother, Esme, left school at 14 or 15 in the mid 1920s. She married my father when she was 19 and lived on a sugar-cane farm outside Innisfail in North Queensland for the next five decades. As her five children went off to boarding school and then spread out over Queensland and beyond, she wrote letters to each of us, weekly to start with and then less frequently but still with a shaming regularity. Mostly she kept us informed on one another’s doings and home-front developments. Occasionally she would comment on literary matters.

Here are some of her passing comments on the literary scene, which I find interesting in all sorts of ways:

17 December 1971: I’ve just finished reading Thomas Keneally’s The Fear & enjoyed it more than any book I’ve read for ages. So nice & clean & sort of old-fashioned.

7 March 1972: I’ve just read [Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s] Cancer Ward. It’s really absorbing but very frightening really. I’m sorry I’ve finished it really. … You’ll be pleased to hear A was reading [Germaine Greer’s] The Female Eunuch. I have to own that I burnt my copy. M & N said, ‘At least you could have passed it on to us.’ Perhaps I should have saved their money as curiosity will get the better of them I’m sure.

25 July 1972: I am reading a book of yours that MA found in her box. I’m not liking it as much as The Fear. It is [Thomas Keneally’s] Bring Larks & Heroes.

28 November 1972: Thank you so much for remembering my Birthday. I’m sure I’ll enjoy the books. I’ve started [the first book I worked on in my editing job with Currency Press, David Williamson’s] The Removalists. It’s nice & easy to read. [Later in the same letter:] Having read The Removalists I’m glad it was a gift from you Jon because from you it is meant as a shocker. [It wasn’t.] From anyone else I would have a sneaky feeling that he/she might imagine I liked that sort of talk. If he’d made it a story of police brutality without the four letter words I feel sure it would have been just as big a success or even bigger.  Anyhow now I’ve started the [Gerald] Durrell one [probably Catch Me a Colobus] & it is really my pick. I’ll be able to lend it around.

25 December 1972: It was only today I learned that it was you who gave [my nieces and nephews Maurice Sendak’s] Where the wild things are. I had made a note of it to buy for [another grandchild]. It is the most read & the most cherished book in their house & yet it looks ghastly really.

24 February 1973: Of course I have not burnt The Removalists, Jon. As a matter of fact I have a waiting list of about a dozen women, as ignorant as myself, wanting to learn all about life!! seeing that M & N & E & V think that I have no ears to hear with. ‘Surely you’ve heard such talk,’ even in the street. Well I haven’t. Actually I think [youngest daughter] Liza knows more than I do but I certainly don’t feel underprivileged because of my ignorance.

28 March 1973: We have watched some of Certain Women on your recommendation Jon. I missed the name of the writer last night (not being in the habit of reading all those names, though I do notice that the writer, who should be the most important, is never so). It was the ‘model’ girl & I think it could have been Keneally as he is sort of old fashioned. I thought the Williamson one was the most – real is the word I suppose. He certainly understands today’s youth, don’t you think?

8 April 1973: Our Repertory Group put on [Richard Beynon’s ] The Shifting Heart last week. Roslyn Watt played the Italian mother & she was perfect. Seniors must have to study it this year because the night Dad & I went there was a bus load from Tully & the night E & V went there were 2 bus loads from Cairns.

9 July 1973: Last week there was a play on TV, The Cherry Orchard Chekhov [an MTC production with Frank Thring, Googie Withers, Irene Inescort] & knowing how interested [oldest son] Michael is in plays (He was in a Chekhov once) & feeling it would give me some culture, we watched it right up to the end of the first act then turned the TV off. It was played to packed houses in Melbourne for ages so the ad said. I wonder if you watched it & don’t say you enjoyed it. To me it could have been Innisfail repertory doing it for the first time. Dad stayed home from Poker to see it too which made it worse.

1 August 1973: I see [Peter Bogdanovich’s] What’s Up Doc advertised at the pictures somewhere in Sydney. Do go & see it if you can. [I did.] It’s really a scream, Makes you laugh till it really hurts – just absolutely stupid but I’m sure you couldn’t help enjoying it.

23rd October 1973 (after a visit to Sydney): I managed to get a Sat Aust(ralian) with Katharine Brisbane [my boss at the time] write up of the play [probably Rex Cramphorn’s cutting-edge production The Marsh King’s Daughter, which she mentions in a later letter] & I agree with her and the more I think back on it the more I like it really. Then today I found Jock Veitch’s write up which is downright lousy – even saying he couldn’t hear. I feel like writing & telling him to go again & wear his glasses & take along his hearing aid.

4 February 1974: Poor Mr Solzhenitsyn is having a rough time. Have you read Cancer Ward, Jon? [I had.] It is the best I’ve read. It seems queer but I think Patrick White writes much like him, so simply. I’ve read only one of his, The Tree of Man, & really enjoyed it.

March 1974: Innisfail had Godspell during the week,  packed the Shire Hall. We didn’t go, we left it to the young. The [Marist] Bros all went & raved on about it – more an experience than a show etc. They took 45 boys along so deserved a free ticket.

31 July 1974 (reporting on a time in Brisbane): We went to see [my cousin G’s] production Fetch Me a Figleaf. There were 10 of us … G sat with us so we had to say all the right things. It was rather naughty but really entertaining all about gods & goddesses on Mt Olympus.

13 October 1974: Well! we were trapped into a bit of culture last night. If we’d been at home we’d have turned it off but we were babysitting so left it on & were really sorry it had to end. It was The Misanthrope, Moliere’s play. The man who did the translation [not named on IMDB] must be a marvel & all the players were lovely. It says ABC production but I can’t believe it was. It was too good.

7 March 1975: Have you seen a book Watership Down? It’s about rabbits, all about rabbits. I’ve just read it & loved it. [I still haven’t read it.]

22 June 1975: We’re all reading The Towering Inferno, actually it’s called The Tower. Dad’s on it at the moment and doesn’t even answer when spoken to. It’s really suspenseful.

Late September 1975, from Launceston: We went to see [Roman Polanski’s] Chinatown & thought it pretty ordinary. Being overheated didn’t help. I’d put on woollen sox & extra cardigan & shed everything except the sox as the theatre was heated.

And that – when she was 61 and I was 28 – is where I stopped carefully hoarding her letters.

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Maurice Sendak’s Pierre

Posted on 10 March 2014 | 5 comments

Maurice Sendak, Pierre (HarperCollins 1962)

20140309-072501.jpg I don’t generally blog about books I’ve re-read, but my blogging has been light-on recently as I’ve been reading mostly film scripts, which are exempt from my self-imposed task of writing about everything I read, so here’s a quick note on Maurice Sendak’s Pierre, which I re-read recently before wrapping it as a present.

Pierre: A cautionary tale in five chapters and a prologue was first published as a tiny book, cased with three others as The Nutshell Library. Our copies of those tiny books have long since disappeared after a huge amount of use and abuse. Besides Pierre, there are an alphabet book, Alligators All Around, a counting book, One Was Johnny, a book of the months, Chicken Soup with Rice. In case there’s anyone who doesn’t already know, Sendak was one of the 20th century’s greatest writers and illustrators for children, and though these books are in some ways very modest, absolutely obedient to the rules of their genres, each of them is a masterpiece. I have read them all aloud many many times to small co-readers and still love hem.

But Pierre has a special place. I think I first heard of it when my older brother took his eleven year old son on his knee and said,

Good morning, darling boy,
You are my only joy.

And when his son said, shockingly, ‘I don’t care,’ they both laughed.

And that’s the set-up: Pierre’s refrain is ‘I don’t care!’ Because it’s billed as a cautionary tale, the punitive saying ‘Don’t care was made to care’ can’t be far from an adult reader’s mind, as in the cautionary tales of Hilaire Belloc. For those who have so far been spared the delicious horrors of Belloc, let me mention ‘Jim, who ran away from his nurse and was eaten by a lion’. The title tells the whole story really – and then there’s this (punctuated as in the original):

His Mother, as She dried her eyes,
Said, ‘Well – it gives me no surprise,
He would not do as he was told!’
His Father, who was self-controlled,
Bade all the children round attend
To James’s miserable end,
And always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse.

As a child I enjoyed Belloc’s tales of appalling retribution, confident that my own parents could never be that callous. And I enjoyed Roald Dahl’s even more gruesome variants when I read them to my children. But Sendak pushes the form beyond lip-smacking crime and punishment. Like Jim, Pierre is eaten by a lion as a direct consequence of his naughtiness. But whereas the father imagined by Catholic Belloc goes on to moralise, the Jewish Sendak’s parents, realising that their son is inside the lion, spring into action:

They rushed the lion into town.
The doctor shook him up and down
and when the lion gave a roar
Pierre fell out upon the floor.
He rubbed his eyes and scratched his head
and laughed because he wasn’t dead.

I may be idiotic, but that last couplet never fails to fill me with joy.

There’s a nice discussion of the whole Nutshell Library on the We Read It Like This blog, where there’s also an excellent reading.

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Maurice Sendak

Posted on 10 May 2012 | 1 comment

About 1970, when I was in my mid 20s I asked my school-librarian housemate for advice on what to give my niece for Christmas. She suggested Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, and at a stroke she introduced me to a world of children’s literature that had been transformed since I was a child. I loved the book. So did my nieces and nephews, who named all the monsters after adults in their lives.

When I became a parent, I must have read the book, and In the Night Kitchen, and Higgledy Piggledy Pop and  The Sign on Rosie’s Door (which has the best last line ever) hundreds of times. Not to mention Pierre:

And when the lion gave a roar,
Pierre fell out upon the floor.
He rubbed his eyes and shook his head
and laughed because he wasn’t dead.

If only!

The moral of Pierre is: Care!

Dwight Garner has an excellent elegiac ‘appraisal’ of Sendak’s work, with lots of excellent links, here.

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Love, Squalor and Seymour’s introductory exit

Posted on 22 February 2010 | 4 comments

J D Salinger, For Esmé – With Love and Squalor (1953, New English Library 1978)

I read this at least partly because I wanted to learn more about the Glass family, particularly Seymour Glass’s suicide. The suicide is there, of course, in the first story in this collection, ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’, also Salinger’s first published story. It’s a good story, full of charm and then of shocking enigma, but there’s nothing to indicate that the author would still be probing the repercussions for the Glass family a decade later (not to mention possible further Glass Family fictions yet to be discovered … I live in hope). Boo Boo, the older of the two girls in the family, makes an appearance in ‘Down at the Dinghy’. And Buddy, the family’s self-appointed chronicler who is in danger of vanishing into his own parentheses in ‘Seymour: An Introduction’, plays a central role in the title story (at least, I assume Staff-Sergeant X is Buddy, even though I may be the only person in the world to have done so). In each of these stories, the adult Glass has a conversation with a child, and these playfully smart-alecky conversations are what lift the book above standard albeit ultra-sophisticated New Yorker fare. Boo Boo could be a forerunner of the mother in Maurice Sendak’s sublime The Sign on Rosie’s Door.  Buddy’s conversation with thirteen-year-old Esmé and her follow-up letter are surely meant to be read in counterpoint to Seymour’s chat with the little girl Sybil. The latter is either a farewell to all things lovely or a cryptic explanation of his suicide, while the former has a deeply healing effect: one brother dies, the other lives. (Incidentally, I doubt if either of these stories could have been written nowadays: in the late 40s the general reader wasn’t expected to see every man as a potential child-rapist.)

Two non-Glass stories stand out for me, both with child protagonists: ‘The Laughing Man’ and ‘Teddy’. ‘Teddy’ is genuinely shocking.

Incidentally, it occurs to me that my lack of enthusiasm for The Hurt Locker may have something to do with the fact that I saw it in the middle of reading this book. It was awfully hard to see the movie as anything other than an adrenaline pumper with pretensions when I had Staff-Sergeant (Buddy?) X’s shaking hands fresh in my mind.

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Candy, The Wild Things and Baba Yaga

Posted on 20 December 2006 | 1 comment

Retrieved from my old blog, 20 December 2006.

My friend Candy, now a formidable office manager, was once the director of a childcare centre. Today she told me that she used to read Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are to her young charges, and when Max said, ‘Let the wild rumpus begin!’, she would play a tape of Mussorgsky’s Baba Yaga’s Hut on Hen’s Legs from Pictures at an Exhibition, and the young ones would go wild until Max made them stop.

I hope you find the image as charming as I do.

Posted: Wed – December 20, 2006 at 03:58 AM

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