Weaving Time and Space

            

           

            When I arrived in the lecture hall on Thursday, the young woman whose lunchbox I saved was just leaving my usual seat. She thanked me again so I took the opportunity to ask her the name of the course. She told me it was Medieval Society.

            Professor Baker was a few minutes late, but came down the aisle-way calling out, “Good morning! Good yawning!”

            She began by politely shaming us for not keeping up with the reading.

            The lecture was about Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are”. I’d had no problem reading that book more than five times since the night before. She showed us several slides that featured the text of an interview with Sendak. Some of his statements were as follows: “fantasy is all pervasive in children … We are always fantasizing … Fantasies need a form and so we build a house around them and that is a story …” He said that there should be no distinction between children’s literature and adult literature. He said he would like to take writers who set about to write a children’s story and cut them into little pieces.

            The professor said that children’s literature can certainly teach lessons but that shouldn’t be the reason it is written.

            “Where the Wild Things Are” came out in 1963 when I was eight years old. It was revolutionary because it was the first children’s book that made a hero of an angry and disobedient child. The book features illustrations by Sendak so that the text and the artwork are interdependent. He designed every aspect of the book, right down to the size and the type of paper that was used.

            She said that Sendak said that as a child, when he got a new book, the first thing he would do is open it up and smell it. At this point she encouraged everyone who had a copy of the book (Mine is electronic) to smell theirs and give their impressions. One person said that it smelled “grassy” and another said “woody”. The professor commented that those are hospitable smells.

            The second thing that Sendak did with a new book was to bite it. She told everybody to bite their copy and asked why he would do this. I suggested that it would mark the book as belonging to the person who bit it. The student whose copy I was looking at said that it was a “consummation”. The professor politely corrected that he probably means “consumption” but added that Sendak would have loved the Freudian slip.

She said that the cover design uses the title and author’s name as a proscenium arch. Inside there is a splash page featuring a multi-coloured illustration of palm-like foliage but the next page simply shows the title in a white background. I suggested that the two pages serve to isolate the purely sensual from the intellectual before bringing them together in the story.

One thing that I noticed is that the creatures in the story have the physical proportions of children who are younger than the hero. They are more like toddlers.

What I find most interesting about the text of the book is the way Sendak wove time and space together as he described the boy’s imaginary journey, “Over a year, in and out of weeks and through a day.’ To go over, in, out and through periods of time, makes time into space and space into time, and it sounds almost like weaving or tying a knot.

After class I went to Robarts Library to log into the catalogue and find out of M. T. Anderson’s “The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing” was in a library nearby and available. I discovered that there were two copies at the OISE library, so I went there, found it, and took it out. After unlocking my bike, I walked west on Bloor to get to a place to cross over to the south side and heard a woman call out my name. It was my friend Ivy. We stood in the middle of the sidewalk talking about our courses, but mostly mine, because she’s taken the Children’s Literature course and loved it. She said the M. T. Anderson book I just borrowed is one of the best books she’s ever read. We agreed to aim at getting together for a beer around the end of October and said goodbye.

I rode east on St Clair. I stopped at a light but as it changed, a female cyclist passed me. I passed her again before Mount Pleasant. She passed me while I was going north on Mount Pleasant and when I passed her again she started laughing, and commented that we keep taking turns. I stayed ahead of her till I turned right on Belsize, which I took to Bayview and then went home.

I watched the Buster Keaton silent short film, “Hard Luck”, in which he plays a homeless person looking for a meal. He goes fishing and catches a tiny fish, which he uses for bait and catches a fish that would be a good meal, but he gets greedy and uses that for bait, then catches a fish about a metre long, which he again uses for bait, but the bigger fish that bites the hook just takes the line away from him, so he’s left with nothing again.