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Remembering Maurice Sendak, Who Brought Loneliness to Children's Literature
No full textMaurice Sendak, Childhood, Stories, Bedtime, LonlinessRemembering Maurice Sendak, Who Brought Loneliness to Children's Literature
Ellen Handler Spitz
Like many other enduring contributors to children’s literature (Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll, Beatrix Potter, James M. Barrie, and Margaret Wise Brown), Maurice Sendak was childless. For inspiration, he drew not on the diurnal trials, joys, and encumbrances of nurturing the young but on a bygone childhood of his own, which festered within his mind raw and accessible for many years—indeed, perhaps, for his entire life. That childhood, which began in 1928, was spent in marginal health, in a Brooklyn Jewish/Sicilian neighborhood, with ravaged working-class immigrant parents whose efforts were spent rescuing overseas Polish Jewish relatives from impending doom.
Sendak, who passed away yesterday at the age of 83, translated this childhood gradually into books that, particularly in the decade from 1960 to 1970, galvanized the entire field of late-twentieth century American children’s literature. He lay bare authentic features of childhood that had, in this genre, previously been overridden by edifying guides to behavior, bypassed by compendia of information thought to be informative for youth, or papered over by merry entertainment. His art opened floodgates that, by now, have been completely broken through. What Sendak let in were surely the dark fantasies that many commentators have noted, but something else too: loneliness.
Sendak knew from within the profound sense in which every child, from time to time, perceives himself or herself to be alone—an outsider—and feels the need to retreat into some private space, some nook or secret hiding place. Sendak’s books are themselves such places; they can so function even when being read aloud by an adult. Sendak’s supreme gift, as visual artist as well as author, was to discover pictorial as well as verbal and narrative means to portray the existential separateness of childhood. Perhaps his capacity to do this—to recognize, acknowledge, and openly reveal the anomie of childhood—stemmed from his exposure to psychoanalysis, which, during the decade of his finest work was enjoying its American heyday.
Max, Mickey, and Ida are, respectively, the protagonists of Sendak’s trilogy: Where the Wild Things Are (1963), In the Night Kitchen (1970), and Outside Over There (1981). Each of these child characters exists within a solitary world, and at the end of their stories they remain isolated and apart. All three are, at least momentarily, misunderstood, unrecognized, and insufficiently well loved. Such uncomfortable feelings, rarely if ever explored so openly in the pages of picture books, are ones routinely experienced even by the most cherished child. Who has not suffered the emotional unavailability of one or both of one’s parents? In Where the Wild Things Are, Max’s mother (who, like Kafka’s insect, is never depicted, and who is thus a fertile field for projection) grows angry at him for his naughtiness and sends him to bed without his supper. Mickey’s parents are presumably together in their own room and unresponsive when he becomes upset and hears the “racket” that angers him: “QUIET DOWN THERE!” he shouts. Ida’s father is away at sea, and her depressed mother ignores both her and a baby sister. In each story, as the plot unfolds, Sendak limits his child protagonist’s sensibility: He or she remains solely within a private world of fantasy.
As we follow the trajectories and dénouements of each of these stories, we see that Max sails away, Mickey flies away, while Ida turns away and vanishes out a window. When each fantasy ends, however, we are reassured—in a not wholly believable adult voice—that things are fine now. Dinner is hot even though you and your mother have not reestablished any direct rapport or communication. You are carefree and dry in your bed even though you are still clueless about the noise that upset you and that kept you awake in the dark. Your papa loves you still, even though it is not certain that he is alive any more and his letter has charged you to take care of your mom and baby sister indefinitely. Sendak carefully provides imagery to accompany these soothing words, but silently betrays them: Max has food but no suggestion of his mother’s arms or smile. Mickey appears smug, hugging his bottle solipsistically to himself. Ida, in profile, wiggling her big bare feet, fondles strands of her own hair and wears a distracted expression as she hears disembodied words about her bravery.
His characters’ ambiguous estrangement (we might include Johnny and Pierre from The Nutshell Library) lies at the heart of Sendak’s legacy. By leaving his protagonists alone, Sendak makes sure his child readers are not alone. The children encountering his stories realize that he understands what they are feeling, and they are thus empowered to feel less lonely or angry or left out. As children enter the realms of his picture books, they are not wholly disconnected or lost. And, after all, isn’t this what literature, at its best, whether for children or for adults, is about?
Ellen Handler Spitz is Honors College Professor at the University of Maryland (UMBC). Her most recent book, Illuminating Childhood, was recently released in paperback by University of Michigan Press. She writes regularly about children’s literature for The Book
For Midnight's Children
No full textChildren, LiteratureFor Midnight's Children
Ellen Handler Spitz
The Enigma of Karma | by Raja Mohanty
Folk Tales of Uttarakhand | by Deepa Agarwal
AS TWENTY-FIRST century juggernauts of globalization and technology ride roughshod over regional cultures, there is a risk that precious legacies—oral, visual, and dramatic—are being lost. How will we preserve local customs, idiosyncratic habits of speech and dialect, humor, folklore, imagery, symbols, and artistic techniques—all with their concomitant wisdom? Sensitive editors of children’s books are grappling with these questions.
India may serve as an instructive guide. Although the government of this vast nation recognizes twenty-two official languages, its children go to schools where English is spoken, written, and read. After school, most of them return to homes still steeped in intricate patterns of local belief and practice—patterns that some children’s book editors would like to incorporate into children’s books. Yet there is the countervailing widespread public opinion that children’s books should be utilitarian, printed in functional English, and crammed with what educational authorities deem relevant for future success in a technologically advanced society. Still, a number of gifted Indian writers and artists buck this tide to produce marvelous books, and it would be a boon to make them available to American children.
Last month I participated in a conference on children’s literature in India, at Ravenshaw University, Cuttack, in the province of Odisha, formerly called Orissa. Among the authors attending the conference was Raja Mohanty, a gifted local poet and storyteller, who proposed mildly from the podium that “poetry springs from our quarrels with ourselves,” a mantra he chose in order to introduce his audience to The Enigma of Karma, a book he made with Manoj Das and Radhashyam Raut. This small work, printed in a limited edition on handmade paper, serves as a foil for the gallimaufry of gaudy commercial children’s books mass-produced worldwide today. Elegantly illustrated with full-page silkscreen images in the time-honored Patachitra painting style of Odisha, it carries forth an artistic tradition long passed from father to son and practiced communally in village squares. Less than twenty pages in length, replete with endpapers of cadmium yellow burnished in mustard overprinted with repeated designs depicting the story’s symbols—a pot of gold and a sword—it enchants with its consummate delicacy of line. Its nuanced palette refines the art of chromatic juxtaposition in illustrated books: imagine oranges and vermilions, pale yellows, sepias, dusky blues, and a rainbow of greens. As you finger the pliant handcrafted paper leaves and inhale their musky scent, you rediscover the sensuous delight of holding an object of real artisanal integrity.
The Enigma of Karma, first heard by Mohanty as an oral narrative from the stock of Indian wisdom known collectively as the Puranas, re-tells a story that evokes ancient philosophical conundrums common to both East and West—vexing puzzles about fate and fortune versus desire and free will. Every child copes with the corollaries of these dilemmas, and none is too young to consider them as such. From the earliest moments of life, wishes collide with obstacles, and youthful curiosity aims at probing the tensile strength of limits, be they physical, emotional, or ethical. Imagine a two-year-old closing his eyes for a few moments just to experiment with how far he can travel until he is forced to look again. He will go forward until he bumps, loses his balance, or feels anxious.
Mohanty offers up a story about two friends, young male characters, blue-skinned Ramu and fair-skinned Shyamu, who set out from home to seek their fortunes. They come by chance upon a soothsayer famous for the infallibility of his predictions. When they ask him to tell what is in store for each of them, he prophesies that Ramu will become a king in a year’s time, whereas Shyamu, by the end of the same year, will die. Pursuant to his auguries, Ramu grows arrogant and presumptuous. We see him menacing a man with his sword. Shyamu, on the other hand, believing his end to be near, is transformed in a different way. He turns his thoughts inward and tries to augment the happiness of others. As the year’s end approaches, Ramu discovers a pot of gold, which is suddenly snatched away by an armed bandit. Shyamu, with no thought for his own life, interposes himself between his friend and the bandit and is wounded by the latter’s sword. A year has now passed. Ramu has not become king and Shyamu has not died. On a radiantly colored page, we see the two once again before the soothsayer, but, before they can utter a word, he anticipates their question. Since Ramu has grown haughty, the sage explains, his kingdom was reduced to just a pot of gold; Shyamu, because of his humility, was made to suffer merely a gash rather than death.
With no fanfare and no overt didacticism, wisdom emerges. We might think again of that two-year-old pretending to explore his kingdom blindly. Imagine how far he would venture with closed eyes if his mother were confident; but think again how it might be if she expressed fear lest he hurt himself. Parents thus modify their children’s fates no matter what is predicted. In this sense, the story recalls the Jewish prayer in which it is written that, even though on Yom Kippur the fate of each human being is sealed for the coming year, repentance, prayer, and charity may temper the severe decree. The Enigma of Karma delivers in both form and content the elements of an extraordinary children’s book: it preserves local culture while revealing its transcendent applicability; it engages abiding issues; and it educates taste by offering the opportunity to relish a genuinely aesthetic object. It grants spiritual and philosophical guidance that bears repetition with no diminution of delight.
Deepa Agarwal, one of India’s leading writers of children’s books, also came to the Ravenshaw conference. Agarwal, who has written over fifty books and received prestigious literary prizes in her native country, is virtually unknown in the United States, which is a great pity. She does not make artistic books like Raja Mohanty, but her work is valuable in similar and different ways. Drawing on the folklore of her native north India bordering on Nepal and Tibet, as well as on her childhood as the daughter of a busy doctor who made nighttime house calls with a flashlight and sometimes on horseback, Agarwal’s invented child heroes and heroines meet danger with daring as well as with fear and doubt. She takes her stories from a variety of sources, some previously published in Hindi, and others tales she heard growing up in the small town of Almora in Uttaranchal. One of the latter, “The Kaafal is Ripe,” may be found in Folk Tales of Uttarakhand.
As is typical of folklore, this story mines psychological gold, proffers a mythical understanding of natural phenomena, brings animals and humans together, and reverberates cross-culturally. To account for the soulful responsive cries of pairs of birds that are heard throughout the Uttarakhand valleys during springtime when the native red berries (kaafal) are ripening, Agarwal’s tale tells of Haruli, a little girl sent into the fields to pick berries for her mother. As she plays with her rag doll in the sun, the plucked berries wilt in their basket and shrink. Her mother angrily accuses her of eating the best of them, and although she professes innocence, her disbelieving mother looms up to chastise her. Terror-stricken, Haruli runs away, shrinking as she does into the form of a bird, and then flies off into the sky. Later, when evening falls and the moist breezes waft by, the wilted berries swell in their basket to their original size, and the girl’s bereft mother, seeing she has erred, is overcome with remorse. She, too, transforms into a bird, and following her lost daughter to the skies, cries out after her: the one bird calling penitently that the berries are still ripe and the other endlessly pleading that they are all still there.
This frightening and sorrowful tale cannot help but remind western readers of Ovidian metamorphoses—not only Demeter’s doleful pursuit of Persephone, but also the transformations of Daphne and many others, and the travails of the never-to-be-trusted Cassandra. What child has not suffered humiliation at being disbelieved by an adult? What child has not shrunk in fear of parental wrath and longed to escape by sudden enchantment into some alternate form so as to evade impending fury?
Agarwal’s masterpiece is Caravan to Tibet, which appeared in 2007. I was so instantly absorbed in it that I almost missed my train. Set in the remote mountain regions where Indo-Tibetan trade flourished until the Chinese occupation of Tibet, its hero, a fourteen-year-old boy named Debu, belongs to the nomadic Shaukas, and his father, a trader, has disappeared during a raging snowstorm while he and his caravan were attempting to cross a treacherous Himalayan pass. The villagers have given Debu’s father up for lost, but although many months have passed, the boy believes his father is still alive, and he persuades the caravan leader to allow him, despite his youth, to accompany the traders over the mountains in order to search. Western readers might recall Telemachus and possibly even Orestes, boys of ancient Greece who also longed for missing fathers.
In addition to its arresting color and detail—the buttery tea gulped by the frozen traders, their furs and wooden saddles, their dizzying vertical ascents on narrow paths at over 17,000 feet in bitter wind and cold, their sure-footed foul-tempered yaks, their sheep, and ponies—we enter the psyche of Debu, who responds to every trial with tender measures of courage and doubt. At one point, early in the story, remembering back to when his father was still home, he wanted to ask him a question but did not do so. “There were things children were supposed not to know about,” Agarwal writes, and this rivets the reader to the page with its verisimilitude because, of course, what she is implying is that not only do children know there are things they are not supposed to know but, even beyond this, children comprehend that they are not even supposed to be aware that they are not supposed to know! In her understated way, she shows us how richly she understands not just the history, geography, and local culture of her region, but also the inner life of her child characters. Yet she forbears to knit together all her threads: a malevolent character continues to lurk, which is exactly as it should be, a dangling strand for curiosity to wind itself around after the book is closed.
Ellen Handler Spitz is Honors College Professor at the University of Maryland (UMBC). Her most recent book, Illuminating Childhood, was recently released in paperback by University of Michigan Press. She writes regularly about children’s literature for The Book
Making English Grammar Meaningful and Useful Mini Lesson #9
No full textPassive Voice, English GrammarThis lesson was developed by John Nelson and Tymofey Wowk, 2012
Making English Grammar Meaningful and Useful
Mini Lesson #9
Passive Voice: It’s All About Subjects and Verbs
The purpose of this lesson is to present a new way that Passive Voice can be understood and
presented to English language learners.
Passive Voice refers to a sentence type in which the actor, performer or executor of an action
verb is not the subject of the sentence. In Passive Voice sentences, the subject is typically the
recipient or receiver of the action of the verb. The following sentences illustrate Passive Voice
in 3 different tenses: Simple Present Tense, Simple Past Tense and Present Continuing Tense.
The assignment is given every semester.
The papers were submitted for grading last week.
Currently, they are being read and evaluated.
Notice in these three sentences, the focus is on ‘the assignment’. Who made the assignment,
who submitted the assignment, and who is scoring the assignments are not mentioned. The three
following sentences provide that information:
The instructor gives the assignment every year.
The students submitted their papers last week.
The instructor is reading and evaluating them now.
These sentences focus on the doers or agents of the actions described in the sentences. They are
Active Voice sentences.
Frequently Passive Voice is taught by providing the learner with an Active Voice sentence and
instructing the learner how to reverse the order of the subject (agent) and object (recipient) of the
action in the resulting Passive Voice sentence. Such a process is cumbersome; the active voice
subject becomes a prepositional phrase, and the active voice object becomes the passive voice
subject. This process is also not reflective of the mental process when one actually makes
statements using Passive Voice.
A much more direct and meaningful instructional approach to presenting Passive Voice to
language learners is to have them focus on the Subject-Verb Combinations as they relate to the
This lesson was developed by John Nelson and Tymofey Wowk, 2012
action of a particular verb. When the Subject receives the action of the verb, the sentence is
Passive Voice. When the subject does the action of the verb, the sentence is Active Voice.
Using this approach, the learner can be given a verb and asked to construct short sentences
combining various subjects with the verb. For example, learners can be given the verb ‘DRIVE’
and asked two questions:
What are things that are driven? Who are people who drive?
Cars are driven Chauffeurs drive.
Trucks are driven. Truck drivers drive.
Taxis are driven. My uncle drives a Taxi.
This kind of activity enables the learner to contrast Passive and Active Voices using short,
realistic sentences that reflect how they would be used in actual conversations. Other verbs that
could be used with this approach are ‘eat’ ‘drink’, ‘read’, ‘write’, ‘break’, ‘hit’ and many more.
A related English feature which can be taught using the same approach is the distinction between
verbs used as adjectives with ‘ED’ endings, and verbs used as adjectives with ‘ING’ endings.
This is illustrated with these two sentences.
The man is bored. The man is boring.
The distinction between ‘bored’ and ‘boring’ in these two sentences is similar to the Passive-
Active distinction described above. If the man is ‘bored’, he is receiving the boredom. If the
man is ‘boring’, he is causing other people to be bored. ‘Bored’ is like a Passive Adjective, and
‘boring’ is like an Active Adjective
Making English Grammar Meaningful and Useful Mini Lesson #15
No full textAdjective Clauses, English GrammarThis lesson was developed by John Nelson and Tymofey Wowk, 2012
Making English Grammar Meaningful and Useful
Mini Lesson #15
Adjective Clauses: Do They Define or Tell Us More Information?
The purpose of this lesson is to explain several characteristics of Adjective Clauses.
ADJECTIVE CLAUSES are word groups with Subjects-Verb Combinations that describe
nouns. Adjective Clauses are found after the nouns that they describe.
Adjective Clause Connectors always stand for the noun that the clause describes, and they are
always found at the beginning of the clause. However, the Connector can actually be either the
subject of the Clause or the object of the Clause. In the following two examples, the Adjective
Clause Connector is the word that in both sentences, and in both sentences the connector stands
for ‘the student’. However, in the first sentence that is the subject of the Adjective Clause. In
the second sentence, that is the object of the Adjective Clause.
I ran into a student that saw you at the game.
I ran into a student that you saw at the game.
In both sentences, that refers to the ‘student’ and that comes at the beginning of the Clause.
Notice, however, in the first sentence, ‘the student saw you’, and in the second sentence, ‘you
saw the student’.
Another distinction is whether the noun is a person or a thing. The Connector that can be used
for either persons or things. In place of that, the Connector who can be used for persons, and
the Connector which can be used for things. The following examples illustrate this difference.
I went to a game which you saw on television.
I met a famous person who you saw on television.
The Connector ‘that’ could be used in place of both ‘which’ and ‘who’. (The connector whom
can be used in place of who, but it is not used often in modern English.)
When dealing with Adjective Clauses, the student needs to recognize the Subject-Verb
Combinations of both the Main Clause and the Adjective Clause. Adjective Clauses can
describe both Subjects and Objects of Main Clauses. This is illustrated with these sentences:
The book which you read is a best seller. (‘book’ is the subject of the Main Clause.)
I read the book which you recommended. (‘book’ is the object of the Main Clause.)
This lesson was developed by John Nelson and Tymofey Wowk, 2012
One more distinction is important to know about Adjective Clauses. Some Adjective Clauses
define the noun that they follow. Other adjective clauses describe the nouns that they follow
without defining them. Look at these examples:
I met the person who you saw on television.
I met Nelson Mandela, who you saw on television.
In the first sentence, the person is defined by the Clause. The Clause tells us what person ‘I
met’. In the second sentence, ‘I met Nelson Mandela’. He is already known. That you saw
Nelson Mandela on television is just additional information. The first sentence has a Defining
Adjective Clause. The second sentence has a Non-Defining Adjective Clause. There are a few
things to notice about the Connectors in these two sentences. In the first sentence, you can use
that in place of who. You can also delete the Connector and use no connector at all. Both of
the following sentences are grammatical.
I met the person that you saw on television.
I met the person you saw on television. (no clause connector.)
If you try to make similar sentences about Nelson Mandela, they would be grammatically
incorrect. Both of these sentences are ungrammatical.
I met Nelson Mandela, that you saw on television.
I met Nelson Mandela, you saw on television. (no clause connector)
Defining Adjective Clauses are very closely tied to the Nouns they define, and commas are
usually not used with them. Non-Defining Adjective Clauses are not so closely tied to the
Nouns they describe, and they are usually separated from the Main Clause with commas
Making English Grammar Meaningful and Useful Mini Lesson #3
No full textEnglish Tenses, English GrammarThis lesson was developed by John Nelson and Tymofey Wowk, 2012
Making English Grammar Meaningful and Useful
Mini Lesson #3
The English Tense System – So Many, but Not So Difficult
The purpose of this lesson is to understand the fundamental concept of TENSE and to understand the systematic nature of the English Tenses.
To learn English tenses, one must consider the answers to three fundamental questions. First, what is a tense? Second, what do tenses mean? Third, how are tenses formed and how do they relate to each other?
First, a tense is a necessary component of nearly every English sentence or question. It exists whenever an utterance contains a subject-verb combination. It communicates something about the time of the action or state of being of the sentence. It is composed of a primary or main verb, usually accompanied by one or more helping verbs. When an action or state of being word, i.e. a verb, is used outside of a subject-verb combination, that verb does not have tense. Chart #1 presents examples of the 12 English tenses.
Chart #1 – Examples of 12 English Tenses
Simple
Tenses
(simple)
Continuing
Tenses
(progressive)
Before
Tenses
(perfect)
Continuing
Before Tenses
(perfect progressive)
Future
Tenses
I will walk home.
I will be walking home.
I will have walked home
I will have been walking home
Present
Tenses
I walk home
I am walking home.
I have walked home
I have been walking home
Past
Tenses
I walked home
I was walking home
I had walked home
I had been walking home
The names of the tenses refer to their meanings by combining the time of the tense (the row) with the kind of tense (the column): e.g. Simple-Future Tense, Present-Continuing Tense, Past-Before Tense. (Traditional tense names are in parentheses.)
Second, English tenses convey 3 kinds of meanings: when an action occurred, whether the action continues over a period of time, and whether it happens before a particular time. These time concepts in various combinations reflect the meanings of all 12 English tenses. These meanings are presented in Chart #2.
This lesson was developed by John Nelson and Tymofey Wowk, 2012
Chart #2 – The Meanings of English Tenses
Simple
Tenses
Continuing
Tenses
Before
Tenses
Continuing
Before Tenses
Future
Tenses
occurring at a future time
continuing at a future time
occurring before a future time
occurring and continuing before a future time
Present
Tenses
occurring at a regular time
continuing now
occurring before now
occurring and continuing before now
Past
Tenses
occurring at a past time
continuing at a past time
occurring before a past time
occurring and continuing before a past time
Third, English tenses are formed utilizing various Verb Forms and Helping Verbs. They relate to each other in various ways. This is illustrated in Chart #3.
Chart #3 – The Structures of English Tenses
Simple
Tenses
Continuing
Tenses
Before
Tenses
Continuing
Before Tenses
Future
Tenses
will + Simple form
will + be +
ING form
will + have + ED form
will + have + been + ING form
Present
Tenses
Simple form
or S form
am, is, or are +
ING form
have or has +
ED form
have or has + been + ING form
Past
Tenses
ED form
was or were +
ING form
had + ED form
had + been +
ING Form
• Ten out of twelve tenses contain Helping Verbs.
• All Future Tenses use ‘will’. Present tenses use the present form of the 1st verb in each tense. Past tenses use the past form of the 1st verb in each tense.
• All Continuing Tenses use a form of ‘BE’ plus the ‘ING form’ of the main verb.
• All Before Tenses use a form of ‘HAVE” plus the “ED Form of the main verb.
ELLs need to learn to think of using at least one of these tenses in every utterance they make
Making English Grammar Meaningful and Useful Mini Lesson #16
No full textNoun Clauses, English GrammarThis lesson was developed by John Nelson and Tymofey Wowk, 2012
Making English Grammar Meaningful and Useful
Mini Lesson #16
Noun Clauses: Useful Structures for Gossip
The purpose of this lesson is to present characteristics of Noun Clauses.
Noun Clauses are word groups that are the subjects or objects of sentences in which they are
found. When they are sentence subjects, they are followed by the main verb of the sentence.
When they follow the main verb of a sentence, they are usually objects of the sentences in which
they are found. The two possible noun clause types are illustrated with these sentences:
That he would speak at the conference was announced last week.
Last week the president announced that he would speak at the conference.
Notice that the Connector ‘that’ is used for both Noun Clauses. In some cases when the Noun
Clause is the object of the sentence, the Connector can be deleted. This is the case with the
second example above. You can delete the word ‘that’ from the sentence.
Other Connectors often used with Noun Clauses are the words 'if', 'whether' and WH-question
words such as 'when', 'where', 'why', etc.
Noun Clauses are often used in an English structure known as Reported Speech where a
speaker wants to report what another speaker has said. These are some examples of Reported
Speech:
The student said that the homework was very difficult.
The teacher asked how many students had finished the homework.
Most of the students said that they had finished the homework.
One particular problem with Reported Speech is when a reporter wants to report a question that
someone else has asked. There is a tendency to keep the question structure in the reported
speech instead of converting it to a statement structure. Look at the following example. The
third sentence illustrates this problem.
The mother said, "What time did you get home last night?"
The mother asked her daughter what time she got home last night.
The mother asked her daughter what time did she get home last night.
This lesson was developed by John Nelson and Tymofey Wowk, 2012
Notice that there is only a question when the mother asked it. When the question is reported, it is
a statement, not a question. The third sentence is not grammatical.
Noun Clauses are often used with verbs like 'hope', 'wish', 'think', ‘know’ 'understand', and
similar verbs
MoMA and Child: The Century of the Child at the Museum of Modern Art
No full textMoMA and Child: The Century of the Child at the Museum of Modern Art
by Ellen Handler Spitz
The Century of the Child:: Growing by Design 1900-2000 at the Museum of Modern Art
July 29 to November 5, 2012
11 West 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, www.moma.org
Arriving expectantly at the sixth floor atrium of MOMA, prodded by a mad crush of child-loving visitors of all ages and nationalities, you are met by the blow-up of an original gelatin silver print (Boy on Wall, Hammarkullen by Jens S. Jensen, 1973). From a massive face of concrete blocks a child dangles, eerily hanging by his right arm, more than a body’s height above the ground. Is it a boy or a girl? The figure wears a leather jacket, or possibly that’s a quilted fabric, hard to tell, and the frowzy blond Christopher Robin haircut might signal either gender. What about the smile? Not an exhibitionistic grin, as in “Hey, everybody! Look what I can do!” Just a glance, acknowledging your arrival: “Oh, it’s you,” as if being suspended by one hand high above the earth were the most natural way in the world to greet someone. No bravado, no fear of falling. The perplexities of this uncanny image epitomize the show. As you stare at it, you experience dysphoria, weightlessness, a fleeting sense of levitation, and you may even recoup your own childhood wish to float above the ground. For the boy (it is, we read, a boy, named Michael, aged nine) actually seems to be suspended in front of the wall, not securely attached to it. Is this an illusion, or not?
What, this image makes you wonder, will this exhibit on The Century of the Child have to do with flesh and blood children, pace its title? Who or what is the child? What does it mean to design for the child? What are the ethics of such an enterprise? Presuming overall a rather bland and benign notion of childhood (think of Locke’s tabula rasa), the show withdraws for the most part from messy engagements with actual children. Children float suspended and detached from what is presented: like the figure in the Swedish photograph, the work on view in these MOMA galleries bypasses emotion (with some notable exceptions, including film footage related to the 1940s work of Bauhaus-trained designer Friedl Dicker-Brandeis with children in the Terezín concentration camp near Prague, and Polish director Andrzej Wolski’s 2011 film, Toys, that features Warsaw children scrounging in the rubble after World War II). Much of the intense passion, however—the felt crises, anxieties, puzzlements, riotous humor, and delirious joys— that characterize living children both mentally and behaviorally has gone missing. The distance off the ground, so to speak, can be disconcerting.
Indeed, what this ample, richly crowded, and perhaps unintentionally provocative seven-room exhibition reveals—in spite of itself— is a thoroughgoing exposé, decade after decade, of nearly unbroken top-down efforts to use, exploit, and control as well as engage children, sometimes by imitating them, occasionally by mocking them, all the while subsuming them under whatever artistic style, political agenda, or commercial opportunity happens to be ascendant. No major effort has been taken by the otherwise remarkably diligent curators to do more than show this. How have the successive waves of stylized objects on display—toys, furniture, books, clothing, as well as imagery, shifting educational practices, and spatial arrangements actually impacted the children exposed to them? A visitor seeks in vain for critique and evaluation—for any report on the later effects of all this adult-perpetrated design on youth. Few questions are aired. A typical text panel reads: “In such rooms, it was felt, children’s spontaneity and pleasure in learning would flourish.” But why was that felt? And by whom? And was this feeling ever put to a test?
Walking from room to room, you are struck by the way the putative child, objectified despite protestations to the contrary, has been incorporated into period style, the vector being culture > child, not the reverse: the Arts & Crafts Movement, Art Nouveau, Expressionism, Futurism, De Stijl, Pop Art, digital art. Despite claims that artists’ approaches were rooted in desires to understand children, you may come away feeling that, if the twentieth century is indeed The Century of the Child, surely that child is as much a projection of adult fantasy and social ideology as the pale coy innocents of the pre-Raphaelites or the bedizened seventeenth century infantas of Velázquez.
A Gargantuan wooden table with a climbable oversized chair and step stool offer adults who try them out a bodily take on children’s experience. Mugging visitors pose on them for photo ops, while uniformed security personnel control access by ordering people brusquely to form a queue. For one split second, I clamber up on the chair and, when the tabletop reaches barely to my nose, my bygone helplessness and marginalization as a child rush back in a flood: I am Gulliver in Brobdingnag until an officious guard whisks me away: “You can’t spend any time here,” he admonishes sternly; now, I truly am a child.
Visitors chuckle and guffaw at wall-mounted black and white 1927 footage of a three or four-year-old who steers his kiddie-motor wheel of fanciful circular design along an empty road. His father, in fedora, tie, and three-piece suit, chases him dutifully, unable to keep up as the child and his mini-vehicle careen along a wide unpopulated avenue in zigzag swaths, as if illustrating the line from Isaiah 11 (“the little child shall lead them”) or Wordsworth’s similar sentiment from the Rainbow poem of 1802. Throughout the exhibit, which is thronged morning and afternoon, spectators seem euphoric, entranced by images such as this. They appear bemused and nostalgic, while their children respond especially to movement for, as Fénelon wisely wrote, children are happiest when their bodies are in motion, when they can change position.
Late in the show, you come upon a striking work that chimes with the Jensen photograph you met at the start: Paul Rand, in 1996, shortly before his death, composes a flat black child, upside down, arms akimbo, balancing precariously on a slanting tightrope made of words. The great designer fills in the body with saucy details from Breughel’s Children’s Games (1560) to create an indelible poster in support of a village devoted to orphaned and abandoned children.
Aesthetically, top prize belongs to The Adventures of Prince Achmed, an exquisite dreamlike shadow film by Berlin artist Lotte Reiniger (1923-25) that plays silently in a gallery labeled “Avant Garde Play Time.” Possibly the earliest surviving animated film, this gossamer confection was painstakingly made by hand, its style inspired by finger puppets, embroidery, and lace making. Reiniger, who invented her own techniques, created this masterpiece by scissor work, intricately cutting out characters of astonishingly delicate beauty, which, in an evanescent world, sway, prance, bow, and embrace while enacting stories of intrigue, romance, and suspense drawn from the Arabian Nights. Reiniger’s villain, a wicked enchanter known as the African Magician, appears maleficently in Aladdin and the Magic Lamp. To stand spellbound watching as these silhouetted tales unfurl their sinister plots and metamorphoses in ever-swirling motion until Prince Achmed is at last reunited with his slender fairy Peri Banou, is to recapture a childhood in which magic is real and flying demons are more true than anything attached to solid earth.
This thought returns us to the elevated image with which we began — the photographed child in the air— and leads me to conclude that, if real children are to be found in this show, they must be summoned, like genii, from encounters with whatever designed objects move us most, for there is, after all, no such thing as the child but rather millions of uniquely responsive children, and adults, for whom childhood, despite varying degrees of distance, can still be occasionally invoked. Perhaps that is as close as we will ever come to the angel with the flaming sword who guards the way back, as Ernst Gombrich wrote famously once in his essay on the hobby horse
A MYC-PROTEIN KINASE A SIGNALING LOOP REGULATES MYC IN PROSTATE CANCER CELLS
No full textMYC is frequently overexpressed in many human malignancies including prostate cancer. MYC accumulation is tightly regulated through transcriptional and post-translational mechanisms. Here, we demonstrate that a complex MYC/Protein Kinase A (PKA) signaling loop functions in prostate cancer cells. We show that MYC up-regulates Protein Kinase A Catalytic subunit � (PKAC�) transcription in human prostate cancer cells and mouse prostate cancers. We further demonstrate that PKA positively regulates MYC by phosphorylating Ser279, thereby priming phosphorylation by Polo-like kinase 1 at Ser281 and protecting MYC from degradation. Consistent with this, brief pharmacologic pan-PKA inhibition diminishes MYC level. Paradoxically however, prolonged Protein Kinase A Catalytic subunit α (PKAC α), but not PKAC�, knockdown increases MYC mRNA and protein levels, linking transcriptional repression of MYC with PKAC α activity, and revealing distinct functional roles among PKA catalytic isoforms in MYC regulation. We demonstrate that this effect stems from differential substrate selectivity among PKA isoforms, providing a mechanistic understanding of differential MYC regulation by PKA. Our observations establish PKA as a viable therapeutic target in MYC-overexpressing cancers, but highlight the risk of global PKA inhibition, underscoring the need to develop advanced inhibition strategies to disrupt specific kinase/substrate interactions
Job Search Methods and Networking Strategies of College-Educated African Americans
No full textThe present study seeks to fill a gap within the literature pertaining to the formal and informal job search methods utilized by college-educated African Americans. An online survey was administered to members of Black alumni groups at various universities, and referral sampling followed. Statistics were computed on responses to closed-ended items using SPSS, and thematic analysis was used to analyze results of open-ended items. Sending out r�sum�s was the job search method most utilized among both employed and unemployed respondents, however leveraging personal relationships was the job search method with the highest reported success rate among those currently employed. Over half (56.6%) of employed respondents reported that they received assistance from a personal contact in the process of obtaining their current jobs. Utilizing the help of family, friends, professors and acquaintances in the job search process is the most effective form of job search for college-educated African Americans