Posted on 06/26/2012 8:40:17 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Where the Wild Things Are was the perfect fairytale for the post-Sixties era of navel-gazing psychobabble
Maurice Sendak, author of a children's book so wildly popular that there was even a copy of it in the largely bookless house I grew up in, has died. He will always be remembered for Where the Wild Things Are...it will be the simple story of a naughty boy called Max who gets sent to bed and encounters various wild things, told in just nine sentences, for which Sendak will win his place in literary history.
It is appropriate that Where the Wild Things Are is treated as an Important Book – not only because it is pretty good, with some excellent illustrations, but more importantly because it represented something of a turning point in children’s literature. Published in 1963, Sendak’s book is in may ways the bridge between old-fashioned children’s stories in which kids battled with real-world demons and new-fangled children’s stories in which they largely do battle with their own inner demons. It’s the perfect fairytale for our psychobabbling, navel-gazing age, in which tackling one’s own psychological foibles counts for far more than going out into the world and actually doing stuff.
[snip]
...That’s probably the most telling thing about Sendak’s story: the absence of adult actors to shape or guide Max’s behaviour. He’s all alone, feeling his way through his own anger towards some kind of mental balance. As one writer has said of Where the Wild Things Are, it really captures how the “dislocation of the 1960s confused the baby boomers about the best way to [parent]”. Confused adults, annoying kids, inner demons, no good or evil, and far more therapy than morality – no wonder this book made such an impact in the post-Sixties era.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.telegraph.co.uk ...
Talk about psycho-babble-navel gazing.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar...
Oh, get a grip. The fun is watching a pack of little boys engage in a Wild Rumpus when the book is read.
It sucked. The kids said it sucked. We bailed it halfway through.
A great work? I didn't see it. Neither did anyone else.
I was a kid in the seventies. I did not like this book, although as a young boy, I couldn’t put my finger on the reasons. The boy’s adventure all just seemed rather pointless.
Isn't that a porn movie with Ron Jeremy and Ginger Lynn?
Loved the book illustrations. Didn’t remember the storyline of the book. The movie WAS terrible. Artistically solid, but banal, boring...psychobabble
If it was, I missed it.
Right up there with jonathan livingston chickenshirt.
Well, he *did* say it “sucked.”
——I was a kid in the seventies. I did not like this book, although as a young boy, I couldn’t put my finger on the reasons. The boy’s adventure all just seemed rather pointless.-——
As a kindergartener, the monsters frightened me. A few years later, I just didn’t want anything to do with it. Couldn’t tell you why. Something just seemed off.
The article makes some sense to me.
Books I loved at that age: Go Dog, Go!, and anything by Dr. Seuss.
The Dick and Jane books had me scratching my head.”So this is a school storybook. Hmmm...” I attempted to understand, “Look Jane, Look!” But I was mystified.
Turns out, the limited vocabulary was developed for whole-word language learning. Supposedly, children were to learn to read by looking at entire words as pictographs, as in Chinese. At least that’s what was told to the public.
Dewey’s intention was to have children work collectively to guess the meaning of words, and to prevent children from reading independently. The method was effective in achieving those goals.
Fortunately, I was taught using phonics. At age 4, I taught both of my daughters to read, using phonics, in a total of about 10 hours, which is typical for homeschoolers. It gives you an idea of how much time is wasted in schools.
Isn’t that a porn movie with Ron Jeremy and Ginger Lynn?
You’re thinking of “The hedgehog meets the bearded clam.”
Like the man says, you don't get a 104-minute movie out of a book whose story in 9-sentences long, without a lot of stretching and padding.
I suspect the filmmakers watched a lot of Sid and Marty Krofft shows stoned and wanted to recreate the experience for a new generation.
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