Heeb Magazine + Kafka

The generous folks at Heeb Magazine just put up a review of My First Kafka, and they seem to like it:

[T]here’s a sense of childlike wonder that permeates even the strangest of Kafka’s parables. That’s a tricky proposition to pull off effectively –especially for Roth, who is tasked with the unenviable job of transposing Kafka’s prose into child-sized morsels. Fortunately for weird kids (and their weird parents) everywhere, Roth is more than up to the task, reconstructing three of Kafka’s works into the sort of stories that would fit nicely alongside the Shel Silverstein’s stranger works.

My favorite part is the description of Rohan's illustrations, though: "His ‘Nobodies’ in Kafka’s “Excursion into the Mountains” call to mind Maurice Sendak’s eponymous “Wild Things”, transforming what was originally a passage about Man’s isolation into a whimsical adventure with imaginary friends. Similarly, his Gregor Samsa-bug in “Metamorphosis” is at once monstrous and sympathetic."

Okay. My day is made. Now I'm gonna go and read and stay up all night.

You, on the other hand, can read the review or buy the book (and then stay up all night with me, if you want).

Trying to be really rosie.

maurice sendak is dead. i think this might be the thing that finally keeps me off facebook today. person after person mourning. when did it become a thing to post that someone's dead? i guess it's one more thing to identify ourselves with. one more way to build our personality out of other people's bones. and here i am, doing the same thing. i'm not sad -- i mean, he lived a full life, and he knew it was his time and he loved it, and he laughed at death, and now he's with his boyfriend, and hopefully happy, but it still ensaddens the hell out of me. here's Carole King singing "Pierre." I'm still not listening to music because it's sefira, but let's see if this gets me out of it.

Make my heart sing.

Q: What does it take to make me burst into tears at work?

A: The trailer for Where the Wild Things Are.

I could be critical. I could start second-guessing what the rest of the movie is going to be like, and whether the Wild Things will have the same voices that they did in my head as a child (they won't) or that I give them when I read out loud to my daughter (probably not). Somewhere in my head right now, I'm thinking about it from the perspective of Maurice Sendak, and whether he would have expected the film version to be anything like his book (no) and whether he would be happy anyway (I really, really believe yes).

But at this very moment in time, I don't care. I just want to run out of here and not stop till I get to the ocean.

Vilde Chayas

I'm the first person to 'fess up to my Maurice Sendak obsession -- Where the Wild Things Are is the only book that my daughter actually asks for on her own. (The fact that I toss her around during the Wild Rumpus probably has a lot to do with it, but I think she admires the strong narrative tone, too.)

Anyway, I kept telling everyone that the Wild Things themselves were given traditional Yiddish names from the 1940s and '50s: Moishe, Emil, and Tzippy, but no one seemed to believe me -- even when I tracked down references).

Anyway, here's a site where you can buy mini-Wild Things of your own -- named, as it turns out, after Sendak's uncles and aunts. Even the term "Wild Things" comes from the Yiddish vilde chaya, which is what your grandmother called you after you had a little too much salt water taffy and were leaping on the furniture.