(no subject)

I am GREAT at telling stories to toddlers and LESS GREAT at handling it when a 3-year-old decides to flip out because we have to clean up the markers now.

I was doing a "scary animals" storytime -- I don't often do themed storytimes because usually I'm doing them on fifteen minutes' notice, but this time I got a couple of good dinosaur books and a good giant squid book and then decided that I'd put together a couple rhymes and "I'm being eaten by a boa constrictor" and have a storytime. At the last minute, I decided to put in "Where the Wild Things Are."

It's been a while since I've read it, and longer since I've read it out loud, and -- I just had that rare experience of being totally blown away by the music of the prose, and feeling carried off by it as I was reading out loud.

That very night in Max’s room a forest grew
and grew -
and grew until his ceiling hung with vines
and the walls became the world all around
and an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max
and he sailed off through night and day
and in and out of weeks
and almost over a year
to where the wild things are.

The ALA award committees are supposed to have very secret proceedings, but the year Where The Wild Things Are won, someone did not heed the warning. As Kathleen Horning writes:

Then she spilled the beans about how many ballots it took before they had the winners. (Also verboten.) “The Caldecott was decided on 5 ballots — an unusually large number, I was told by those who had served in previous years.” Well, that is a tasty morsel of Caldecott gossip right there, especially as the Caldecott Medal in 1964 went to Where the Wild Things Are, a book widely considered today to be the best picture book of the twentieth century, and definitely the best Caldecott Medal book ever. (Even other Caldecott medalists would likely agree.) How on earth could they have argued about that choice through five ballots, especially given that its rivals (thanks for the list) were such eminently forgettable books as Adrienne Adams’s Bring a Torch, Jeannette, Isabella and Helga Sandburg and Thomas Daly’s
Joel and the Wild Goose?

The Caldecott Award is for illustrations, and not for writing -- but while wordless books have won, I can't think of any with outright bad prose that have. I am not an art person, and I'm probably the last person to nominate the best picture book of the twentieth century, but: yeah.

And I'm so mad at Dave Eggers for trying to turn it into a novel, because how on earth can you improve that by piling thousands and thousands of words onto it?