Westeros Community Bulletin Board

Summer Reading & The Red Wedding, etc.

So we've been watching HBO's  Game of Thrones and, yes, we watched "the red wedding" episode last Sunday, as did, it seems, more people than watched anything else on cable-television that night.  More curiously still, more people watched that episode than actually subscribe to HBO.  (A fascinating story on NPR explains how this was possible.  Not to worry now, neither I nor the radio link should spoil the show for any who haven't seen it, or seen that episode.)  And we've now watched the finale as well.  For any who haven't read the George R. R. Martin books, or seen the show, and might be wondering what all this blaze in the Twittersphere etc. is about, that penultimate episode was a specially violent one, perhaps the most violent one to date. Moreover, good people, people important to the story so far, died.  Shocking.  As for the resulting television-fan-outrage, the wave of new memes and the rest, what all that means is that frankly, too few people read history.

 I should mention that I have not read Martin's books.  It's almost an exaggeration to say that I "perused" the first volume.  I did finally pick it up though, when after a very long wait, the last sequel finally came out to great fanfare a year or so ago.  (?)  I poked around in that first book for a couple of evenings, but that was all.  I'm not being snide.  I got a taste of the novelist's style.  That was enough.  Nothing wrong with it.  There's nothing, based on my brief experience, to say Martin's work isn't a fine example of the genre.  He's enormously popular.  His readers are devoted.  I know and love a number of them.  But, I wasn't going to read what looks to be only the first brick in a still rising wall, is all.

Now that may seem strange, considering my established devotion to long books, but there we are.  I'm not one for dragons, generally, a fact equally well established.

I prefer my Fantasy on film or television, and in smaller, more digestible doses.

I don't mean to be a tease by mentioning all this popular culture and then actually writing about a very old, and no longer very popular history. There is a point yet to come, I promise, but first a word or two on my summer reading project.

Even as I contemplate further reductions in my library, I have to admit I've had my eye on these beauties for a month or more, down the street at Magus Books.  I've been setting aside my nickels.  They weren't cheap.  (They still have a second, all but identical set, if you're interested.)  I've never seen this book -- and it is one book in six volumes -- but in a distinctly unattractive, academic, paperback edition which did not appeal.  Nevertheless, this book has been on my list now for a very long time, so when I saw these handsome old things on the shelf, and though it took me some time to finally make up my mind and my budget, I did decide to have a go at last, so here we are.

Pictured then is David Hume's History of England: From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Abdication of James the Second.  For any that still remember the name of David Hume, or know his writing as an important philosopher, it may come as something of a shock to know that in his own time, and for a good while thereafter, he was known primarily as an historian.  It took him more than fifteen years to write this book, which contains more than a million words.  The book has gone through more than fifty editions, and one way and another, has never been out of print since it was published in it's present form, in six volumes, between 1754 and 1762.

Hume believed that the nature of humanity didn't changed all that much; that history shows us more often at our worst than our best, and that most people, left to themselves, only really concerned themselves in politics and slaughter under the influence of religious and what we would now call ethnic differences. He also believed that the history of England, after a very rocky start, at the time of his writing this book, presented perhaps "the most entire system of liberty that was ever know amongst mankind."  That, you see, was the point of telling the story, really, the struggle to that point.

This would be the common theme for most of the greatest narrative historians of the last two hundred and fifty years or so; the struggle for a stable and relatively free society, unshackled at last from the old, exclusive loyalties to tribe and conquest, and defined by a progressive establishment of the rule of law and mutually beneficial civility.  From Hume, through all his successors in both Britain and the US, from Macaulay to John Richard Green, to Henry Hallam and William Prescott, and yes, Karl Marx, whatever their differences politically, this theme predominated until nearly our own day.  (I make that list from my own reading, admittedly limited by literary reputation and my own taste in such books more than the ultimate value of these books to present historians.  I see no reason to apologize for it.)  There have always been writers who took exception to this progressive reading -- here Gibbon and Carlyle come most to mind, again, mostly from the evidence of my own shelves, but I still think it a fair description of most of the major popular historians down to at least H. G. Wells, if no further.

It's all very easy now to dismiss this kind of history as too narrowly rhetorical to be entirely true, and there has been much hay made in the academic world of "historiography" in more recent days, by denying even the underlying premise of history as any kind of progress at all.  To which I say "stuff."  I am more than willing to concede all the limitations of such great writers as these, both in terms of their access to the historical record and their prejudices.  It takes a certain intestinal fortitude in the common reader of the 21st Century to read Englishmen of the 18th and 19th on such subjects as Islam and "foreigners" in general.  I also happen to think that we are now living in what may well prove to be the first truly Golden Age of history as fact.  There are, I should think, more thoroughly researched and accurate histories published in any given year of our Century to date than might have been possible in any previous period.

Why then read old boys like David Hume?  First because history as literature, at least in the period described from the middle of the 18th through the beginning of the 20th, produced more established masterpieces of narrative, in English, than any time since, and more history of lasting literary value than any time since the last Roman historian went into the ground.  What all these boys have in common with Livy et al is not only a gift for the description of character and event, but a tempered and coolly considered belief in what Pope described as "the proper study of mankind."  That can be quite refreshing after any time spent reading what's come after.  Secondly, because there have been few enough books produced in the whole history of books, at least books running to roughly a million words or more, that are still worth reading at all.  Why not read those big books that happen to be history as well as literature, if one is of a mind to read literature anyway, and big books, at least now and then, of a season?

And so we circle back, no?  It's clear from even just watching the TV adaptation and glancing through one volume of his novel, that Mr. Martin has read a bit of history himself.  My preference is for history without dragons and magic, as I've said.  One of the pleasures of Hume is his not-so-subtle distaste for what he cannot help but call "superstition" pretty much everywhere he meets it, from the Romans on, and not excepting any of the major faiths to touch his country since.  Refreshing and sensible, if still a little -- and deliciously -- shocking in a man writing more than two hundred and fifty years ago.  I suspect Mr. Martin's preference is for exactly those historical sources my friends from the Enlightenment and after could not help but disdain for their reliance on the supernatural; all the saga-singers and the monks who preferred heroes and monsters to men and women. A perfectly respectable preference, if not one I share.  That may be all it comes done to; a preference for magic or man.

As for the shock and horror of my fellow television viewers of the bloody Game of Thrones, I can only suggest they might want to avoid reading some of the stories, say, of the reign of King Canute, or even the details of more than one treacherous Norman noble party, or even the fate of conspirators, real and imagined, against the person of that great queen, the first Elizabeth.  History is a bloody business.

But then again, no.  I would make so bold at to suggest that a chapter of Hume on the Crusades, or of Gibbon on the triumph of Christianity might immunize the more parochial readers of even the best Fantasy fiction, and fans of supernatural television shows, against credulity thereafter.   Might do them all a world of good.  Did me.  I would deny no one who wants them their dragons, or their bottle-blond emancipators of brown people, etc.  I would however suggest that history sans magic, need not be without heroes and heroines, villains and adventure, thrills and chills, elevating sentiments and moral instruction.  Moreover, some of the greatest literature in ours or any language is to be found in books written by men who disdained violence and the arbitrary exercise of power, even as they chronicled the worst of it.  They did not put much faith in Gods, or have much patience for priests, nor give much credence to stories of ghosts or  witches. They disdained superstition.  They believed in a fallible humanity and in the strength of humane institutions.  Doesn't that sound rather more like us than not?

Not that there's anything wrong with reading about or watching such stuff.  History shows, people have been doing it for ages, and where's the harm?

I'll tell you what though, history's more help when it comes to reading a newspaper and trying to make any sort of sense of current events -- I find.  People still do that too, read newspapers, don't they?

No One Lies in Lily Dale

Speaking of ghosts, while I was home last week, lost somewhere between influenza and the next world, I had occasion to put down the ghost stories I was reading and watch a documentary about a place where every house is haunted. I'd seen the listing for this new HBO feature, "No one Dies at Lily Dale", and intended to watch it straight away, but it had to wait until a gloomy afternoon with the shades down, the curtains drawn, and me in bed in the middle of the day, feverish, shivering, dripping and miserable, sourly bundled in comforters and robes. One must be in the appropriate state of mind sometimes -- undone as it were -- to be open to certain experiences. Peeping at the TV from under the covers, woozy and damply chilled, felt somehow... right.

My curiosity regarding the subject of the film goes back to my early fascination with Houdini, specifically the old Tony Curtis biopic. As a boy, I thought Tony looked lovely in his turn-of-the-century trunks, all padlocked and wet. Harry, as it turned out, was a muscled little cuss himself. My innocent curiosity led me on. (Best not to question this.) While I never became one of those boys with a magic kit and a deck of cards always at the ready, I did become quite interested in Harry Houdini, and read his books, as well as books about him. As a result, I read a good deal about spiritualism too. As an adult, and a skeptic, I've naturally read about Lily Dale as well. Houdini, as the HBO documentary briefly mentions, himself once went there. As the camp's historian describes the incident in the film, Houdini knocked on many doors in Lily Dale, but no one answered.

Perfectly understandable.

At the time Houdini went to Lily Dale, spiritualism was booming. There were a number of communities like Lily Dale, or "camps", as they were called, scattered all across the US, and followers of the movement across the globe, Houdini's great friend, and eventual antagonist, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, among them. As a professional magician, Houdini's skeptical curiosity about both the claims and methods of the spiritualists proved irresistible, and at the high point in his fame, after the death of his beloved mother, he devoted a fair part of his time offstage to visiting spiritual mediums, attending seances, and talking to both practitioners of the trade and their followers. Eventually, he wrote a number of newspaper articles, and even books, like A Magician Among the Spirits (1924,) exposing the fraudulent tricks of the mediums. He easily reproduced many of the supposedly supernatural phenomena the mediums used to gull their customers: making "spirit" photographs of himself in conversation with Abraham Lincoln, demonstrating how the mediums used accomplices to gather information for sittings, or to work the darkened rooms, even how some mediums used their feet to manipulate the various crude effects, like the floating "spirit" trumpets, apparitions, "ectoplasm" and the like. By the time Harry Houdini came knocking on the mediums' doors in Lily Dale -- then the grandest and most successful spiritualist tourist camp in the country -- the great illusionist and other skeptics had already dealt what proved to be a near death-blow to the "physical medium." No wonder then they locked their doors and drew the shades when Harry came to call.

Spiritualism, however, did not die, Houdini did. The spiritualist movement, having largely abandoned any attempt at "physical mediumship" beyond the occasional, rather quaint spell of table-rocking and the like -- as briefly and rather awkwardly demonstrated in the HBO film -- survived, as a minor American religious movement. Mediums, now generally describing themselves instead as "psychics," likewise carry on, though nowadays operating almost exclusively as cold readers.

I have some personal experience of this particular phenomenon. In college, in my dormitory, there was a boy, a dancer, who fancied himself a "psychic." The building we lived in was a converted hotel and by the standards of a small, Midwestern city, old. This kid, without meaning any real harm, I'm convinced, managed himself to convince any number of his fellow students that the place was indeed haunted. Harmless fun, for the most part. Various of my fellow theater students began sensing something dark in the corners of their rooms. There was a good deal of shrieking and running down the halls at midnight. The boy-psychic would often be called on to come and "read" someone's room. Invariably, spiritual "disturbances" would be found. Thrilling. Eventually, after much meditative humming and the like, and a brief conversation over candlelight with the ghost or ghosts, the room would be declared "clear," and the entertainment would be over for the night.

One evening in the lobby, I witnessed all of this good natured spookery being taken in a new direction, when a number of kids gathered around this dancer while he did "individual readings." Handing him a ring, or some other personal possession that they normally "kept close" to them, each of the boy's new friends would sit opposite him on the couch, and after a few seconds spent "feeling the vibrations," the consultation would begin in earnest. General astonishment. Amazement. I watched at least three of these readings before requesting my own. I was careful to control myself with a rigid discipline. I confined my answers to monosyllables whenever possible. I intentionally blinked and allowed myself only the smallest movements only when I was quite sure to be unobserved by the boy during the reading. I even smiled at inappropriate moments, before rejecting his conclusions, though always in a seemingly encouraging way. My reading was his first complete failure. General Astonishment. Disbelief. Then I read him. And then I did another. And then I told them what I'd done.

It was exhilarating, and more than a little cruel. I don't say that either of us was specially expert, or that my understanding of doing this trick was specially sophisticated. What I counted on, as all amateur practitioners of the technique must, was mostly the willingness of my sitters and audience to overlook and promptly forget all the guesses I'd got wrong, all the vague questions and not very specific predictions, the broad conclusions from the small details I'd been told and that the sitters invariably then forgot having mentioned. To "read" someone in this unscientific, spiritually unsophisticated way, really only requires patience, a little practice, concentration, particularly on any change in the sitter's expression or posture, and most importantly, a willingness, or rather a genuine eagerness on the part of the sitter to believe. I don't doubt even now that that kid who fancied himself a psychic was completely sincere. Maybe he was extraordinary, in some way, you know, just not the way he thought. (I'd still love to meet a genuine psychic myself.) He had never questioned, so far as I was ever able to tell, but that what he was doing was making some mystical connection with his sitters and or the spiritual realm. What I did, he eventually explained, despite my own explanation of the cold readings we'd both done that night, must somehow have been influenced by some malevolent "presence," presumably beyond whatever malevolence I was exhibiting myself. When he retired from the field, I actually felt kinda bad. I made no friends among his followers either, though a few of my friends who had actively participated in all this did seem a little shamefaced that night. I don't think the dancer did any more readings in the dorm thereafter, at least not in public, to my knowledge.

Some part of me then, despite my own experience, despite my own reading on the subject, watching "No One Dies in Lily Dale," rather hoped to have the little hair I have left on the top of my head be made to stand up at some point by something like the inexplicable. As I've said, I was feeling a special connection that day to the dead.

What I saw though was a melancholy business. Today, Lily Dale, rather than the thriving resort it was before Houdini's day, is a shadow of its former self, just a quaint little village in upstate New York, seemingly populated entirely by mostly well meaning souls who make their obviously rather modest living by charging admission to the camp, renting rooms to the sparse crowds of summer visitors, and performing a few shows a day at the stump, when they aren't holding private consultations at picnic tables or in their parlors. It was all just so very... sad.


The famous stump, now fenced, was the spot in the woods where once the spiritualists held their high hootenannies with believers in their hundreds. Onto this natural Chautauqua platform would rise one of the leaders of the movement, and from that perch would come all manner of revelation, presumably. Now, prognostications are confined to the ground, where the hardworking "Miracle Mongers," to use Houdini's cruel phrase, must mingle with their meager audiences like performers in a rather musty night-club act; calling out ailments, etc., like diabetes, until they get a nod from the fat lady, or rather until they pick one of the nodding fat ladies to diagnose in this way.

The film concentrates on roughly half a dozen of the locals, mostly ladies of a certain age, as they work the little crowds or practice on their porches. The personal interviews with nearly all these folks are quite sweet. One never gets the sense, even from the most hopelessly inept of these "certified" practitioners but that they, like the dancer in my dorm, are utterly sincere. Even the gentleman who cures illness by holding a green pepper near people, seems touchingly proud to have "helped." Another fellow, an impatient, almost brusque little bald chap, while by far the least likable and least successful of those offering private readings, seems not so much smug as sad when the camera finds him left to console himself on the stoop, without receiving so much as a thank you from his client, though presumably she paid up-front. He tells us that not everyone is ready to hear what he has to say. He then offers a wan, rather toothy smile. This, after he's got things quite wrong, even as to the voice and vocabulary of the deceased, obviously relying on a rather unsophisticated template of a generic male and in so doing producing a specially disastrous failure with a young woman seeking a message from the fiancee who may or may not have done himself a deadly harm before they could come to get married. The client angrily tells her friends as they walk away, that the guy was obviously "a fraud."

I don't know that that was a fair statement. Of all the Lily Dale residents one meets in the film, he did seem the least enthusiastic performer, but I at least never had the sense, even from him, that he thought for a minute that what he was doing was put on, or that he, or any of them, gave the slightest suggestion of obvious fakery or attempted tricks of any kind. Even the brassy chick from Vegas, making her first guest appearance at the stump, hilariously hobbled in the gravel by her stripper-heels, proves to be a surprisingly sincere, even vulnerable individual under all the makeup and false tits and hair. When we see her later in private consultation with a resident operator, to whom she confesses her confusion about what to do with her ne'er-do-well adult son, even the Vegas gal seems strangely without personal resources, and willing, grateful in fact, to take in the blandest greeting-card-wisdom as one thirsting in the desert.

For the most part though, everyone living in Lily Dale seems jolly enough. One woman, in an unguarded moment, does admit to the occasional conflict in the community, though a second later, she's quick to reassert something more like universal harmony as the general rule. In my favorite scene in the film, this lady and her two sisters, village psychics all, join a small gathering of savants for what would once have been called a seance. Circling the dining room table, heads bowed in the fading summer light, this might almost be a Quaker meeting; the silence slowly punctuated with murmured prayer. Then the other guests are announced. One by one, various invisible visitors are noted as present. The roll-call is surprisingly extensive in the small dining room. One wonders if various dead relatives might be on the porch impatiently waiting their turn.

"I'm getting a David," one lady says, "but not your David," she adds helpfully, referring to another lady's deceased husband. "Though, your David's here," a third lady is quick to assure the widow. "Yes, I know," the widow rather irritably acknowledges, clearly not needing to be informed as to her late husband's whereabouts by some helpful third party.

Were the spiritualist activities in the town confined to just this sort of harmless after dinner demonstration, the daily recreations in the woods and the services in the clapboard meeting hall, the decision of the documentarians to treat the whole enterprise as a ever so slightly risible exercise in religious Americana would be understandable. These folks are Constitutionally entitled to rock tables, talk to the dead and see angels in the hedges. But Lily Dale, remember, is not just some New Age retirement settlement, but a business, or, as one visitor calls it, a kind of "spiritual Disneyland." (Though, from the look of the place, it might be better to think of Lily Dale as a kind of Colonial Williamsburg of Spiritualism; a minor historical site preserved from more prosperous days, where instead of churning butter, they churn the dead.) Beyond the entrance fees and the hotel rooms and the price of rock crystals in the gift shops, Lily Dale is a working psychic mill. Though money is never seen to change hands in the film, everyone in for the day or the week for consultations with the unseen, pays for the privilege. The grandmotherly lady with the fluttering eyelids presumably doesn't invite passersby into her pink living room without collecting admission. Some of these old birds even have their rates helpfully posted at the door.

The film's director, Steven Cantor, never saw a pseudo-religious lawn ornament, or even a lawn-gnome, he didn't choose to photograph in the dewy light of dawn, or a music-box-angel that didn't deserve a close-up. Cantor's recurring emphasis on this ubiquitous kitsch in Lily Dale is as close as he comes to commenting directly on the vacuity of the spiritualists' theology, at least as touched on in the film. Only a brief scene of Christian fanatics protesting witchcraft at the gates of Lily Dale, suggests that there is an alternative view of all the relentless sunshine and sugar-water being served inside. In the psychic readings, public and private, into which Cantor inserts his camera, the filmmaker maintains an almost cinéma vérité neutrality. The clients are interviewed before and after, and allowed to comment without prejudice. The only negative review of these readings comes from the one dissatisfied customer I mentioned above. She is encouraged, by her friends, and then by the one -- resident -- expert in these matters, an in-house historian of the movement who smilingly acknowledges the possibility of just such an empty experience as that which she'd had with the toothy little bald guy, nevertheless she is encouraged to have another go. When she does, she doesn't so much endorse the second reading as satisfactory, so much as less unpleasant. In her final scene in the film, what she seems finally to come away with from the experience is the same conclusion about the need to "move on" with which she came to Lily Dale. So, did this woman have some spiritual connection to her dead fiancee at Lily Dale? Far be it from Cantor to be so unsympathetic as to intrude further on her grief by asking directly.

In maintaining something like the appearance at least of journalistic neutrality then, Cantor is free to return to his wind-chimes and sweeping, overhead shots, so suggestive of souls in free flight. Steve Cantor can't seem to help himself, whatever the evidence of human misery he's recorded on the ground, from finding Lily Dale charming. But this isn't journalism, of course. While such a dusty little operation as Lily Dale may admittedly not deserve anything like an expose, neither does it deserve this reverent silence as to the veracity of it's claims to spiritual comfort, or it's history as the summer quarters of this antique sideshow still called spiritualism. Cantor, in choosing to not explore the history of the place, or question either the residents or their paying clients too far as to the substance or even the palliative efficacy of these "readings," or the tragic circumstances that brought these paying visitors to Lily Dale, ends by endorsing the experience as unique. In not providing the viewing audience with any perspective antithetical to either the shallow optimism of the spiritualist "theology," other than a few ranting fundamentalists at the gate, or any explanation of the thoroughly shoddy methods employed in the readings, the filmmaker frees himself to remain utterly credulous as to the psychics' claims, and indulge his taste for pretty aerial pictures, while condescending without much subtlety to the sad people who've come in search of consolation, and the resident believers in auras, angels, and universal love.

That is the film's failure. My own disappointment in not seeing anything supernatural happen at Lily Dale isn't unexpected, but I was frankly shocked to watch a documentarian with a connection to HBO -- perhaps the most influential, and certainly the most economically powerful support of the form in the US today -- produce such an insubstantial exploitation of American spiritual naivete. Glancing mockery of the taste or mental stability of the participants aside, what Cantor's film ultimately comes to is a valentine to a persistent, and more than a little pernicious, failure of contemporary American society to deal honestly with either the immutable nature of grief or the inscrutability of death. We do not like, in this country, to be seen to have failed at anything; medicine, parenting, love, life, or even the persistence of personality after death. It goes against the grain to admit the end of anything so ruggedly individual as us. So, buck up, people! It's all good. Even death can be an opportunity. Spiritualism then, as seen in Cantor's puff, is but the natural reductio ad absurdum of this insistent, sunny economic optimism that has already proved that it can kneed traditional Christianity into such a doughy mixture that it easily accommodates greed and pride, yoga and animism. Commercial spiritualism, at least as seen sincerely practiced in Lily Dale, in Cantor's film, comes from the same benign capitalist impulse that make saints into Santa Claus for Coca Cola, and Milton's angels into hummel figurines. Death then is just another stage in our personal growth. Seems silly the to get so worked up about it, doesn't it?

Where's the harm in Lily Dale, then?

Well, there isn't, much. No one goes there but in search of what's on offer, even, evidently, Steve Cantor and HBO. No one is getting rich in Lily Dale. No one is telling lies, even the filmmaker, except maybe to themselves. That I was hoping for something a little more enlightening, or at least harrowing, let's blame on my cold. Takes a lot to make me optimistic about immortality when I'm shivering with a fever and can't taste anything but salt.

Telling the Truth: Maurice Sendak in Autumn

One of the grandest things about paying for cable television is the access it gives one to films that might otherwise pass unnoticed by, or play in the city for just a week or a day, or at some crowded festival. For every blockbuster that requires a big screen in a big theater, there are a dozen interesting, smaller pictures, fictional and documentary, that can be experienced with real pleasure on TV, in bed, with maybe a sandwich. Renting movies from Netflix or from a great video store requires getting out of bed, trusting to other people's descriptions and promotional materials, making choices in other words that can't quite be judged until after some effort. In bed, on my back, I can press a button, and then another and another and so on, and passively command a whole troupe of great actors, directors, writers, to pass before me in review, and stop any I like the look of and bid them, "play." I am the pasha with a remote control.

Because the pay channels extort ridiculous fees for this privilege, I try more things than I watch and watch more things than I should. It's there, the television, whenever I want it. I'm paying for it. I use it. All those wonderfully productive people who watch little or nothing on the tube, who read and write and interact with the world more than I do, I understand their reluctance to give over to television. They are right to resist it. It is full of bad and stupid things. If I were to claim that even two thirds of what I watch is worth watching, I would be lying. But even conceding the hours I waste, there are so many good things, even great things, that I would otherwise never have seen, had I not decided to just flip through the channels, had I chosen not to waste all this money on HBO and Showtime and the rest. And just when I begin to think life too short to watch so much television, I happen on something wonderful, like Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak. Filmmakers Lance Bangs and Spike Jonze made this documentary after talking and working with the great writer and illustrator of children's books, as Jonze adapted Sendak's early masterpiece, Where the Wild Things Are as a film. I've yet to see the movie. It does look rather wonderful, and the reviews I've read have all been good, but had Jonze done nothing else for Sendak but be his friend and make this little documentary portrait, I would be grateful to him.

Maurice Sendak is not an easy man. He is not easy in himself and he can not be easy to know. At eighty, alone after the death of his partner of fifty years, preoccupied always with death, the old man can not have been an easy friend to make, and yet the film Bangs & Jonze made is suffused with genuine affection, always careful of Sendak's feelings, and focused as much or more on relating the truth of the great artist's loves, for his friend and caretaker, for his late partner, his brother and sister, his great editor and champion, his dogs and his art, as on his bitterness at having outlived so many people he's loved and his disappointment in himself and his work. In the film, Sendak claims, more than once, to now be only waiting for death, but he still works, he still draws and paints, and when pushed he admits that another ten years might suit his purposes after all. "So much still to do," he says, and in that is the echo of every great artist at the end of life, and in his pleasure at "all the colors" seen through the window of his studio in his Connecticut home, there is a note of joy that assuages, without dismissing, his darker moods.

The most powerful part of the documentary comes in a long segment when Sendak relates the genesis of his most beautiful book, Outside Over There, and how in it he was able to pay tribute to his beloved older sister, and deal creatively with his preoccupation, since the age of two, with a horrifying headline and photograph glimpsed in a newspaper. It is an amazing story that adds much to my appreciation of his most beautiful book.

The film is full of charming things as well: a proud display of the still working wooden toys he and his older brother made some sixty years ago, Sendak's tribute to his favorite dog, shots of his gnomish figure stumping happily through a beautiful, Connecticut Autumn, in the good company of his latest, patient and faithful pooch.

And he is quite funny. Sardonic and playful in the company of the handsome and talented young filmmakers, Sendak allows himself a degree of foolishness and fun that suggests less the burned out and bitter old man he insists he is, and instead reveals something of the playfulness that has made even his most serious work never less than an enchantment. He allows for silliness in himself and recognizes the need for it in every life. Above all though, Sendak is honest. It is not always a comfortable or comforting thing, honesty, and the maker of children's literature might be forgiven for avoiding it, or at least making it less important than Sendak does. It is his honesty though, as much or more than his invention or skill, that makes his work so special and that will make it endure. Sendak knows this, and in his brighter moments, he revels in being blunt not only about old age and art and his failures, but in acknowledging his successes too. There is a mischievous quality to many, if not all of his darkest pronouncements, and his advice to the filmmakers, and to artists and adults in general when addressing children, "Tell them anything you want, but tell them the truth," is something Sendak can say because he's consistently done just that.

I can't imagine this short film being something I might ever have seen had it not popped up on the television menu. I'm awfully glad it did though. It was wonderful.