A Caricature

A Caricature

Just Waiting for Recess, Mostly

Bad teachers just now are very much in the media. I've watched and listened to quite a bit of the promotion for a new feature documentary on the subject, though I have no plans to see the film. To summarize the hoopla, for any who've missed it:

A rich, middle aged filmmaker, who matriculated at the Sidwell Friends School and Brown, who's children likewise attend private school, has made a new movie that asks the burning question, why aren't American public schools just as good as the ones to which the right people go? (One wonders he didn't just ask the maid, but then I haven't seen the film, so perhaps he did.) The answer, as I understand it, turns out to be, in large part, those damned unions. Shocking. That anyone working in the United States still has a union, I grant you, is unexpected. It seems, good or bad, teachers in America's public schools are still entitled to collective bargaining, seniority and the like. This revelation has, unsurprisingly, been loudly and roundly condemned by those champions of the common people, Oprah Winfrey & Bill Gates, among other billionaires. (You have to watch for the moment someone tells Oprah that there might be someone in America she couldn't fire. Priceless.)

Imagine. You see, while those damned unions are busy protecting the bad teachers, the good ones go unrewarded, even as they try so very much harder than the rest. While the bad'uns go home after only working a single shift, the good'uns seem to be available twenty-four-seven; happy to give out their private phone numbers to any ten-year-old with a question about their homework, or have a chat with your mum after bedtime. The good'uns, you see, never stop. That's what makes 'em so damned good. Public school teachers then should be more like, well, one's dear old Nanny, or a proper governess or private tutor, for the older nippers; always ready with a bit of French, or the odd square root, or a comforting word, that sort of thing, as needed. Simple. And when the old thing gets a bit unsteady on her pins or goes a bit dotty, well, then the family really ought to find her a room somewhere. Least they could do for dear old party, no?

(So why has nobody thought of this before?!)

The most amusing aspect of this "crisis," at least as portrayed in the popular media, has been the reflexive insistence with which everyone: billionaire and union rep, talk show host and street interview, upper and lower, has hastened to concede that many, if not most public school teachers are really just grand; selfless, devoted, effective, -- under appreciated, etc., but really, just swell, for the most part. Wouldn't want anyone to think anyone was suggesting otherwise. Ever.

That, to my mind, was the most interesting point inadvertently made in the whole gassy chat on education just now. Now, I had some bad teachers in my time. Had a few good ones too. On balance? More bad than good, though mostly not so bad as all that. Now, can my experience really have been so very different from the rest of America's?

I grew up in a rather old fashioned small town, quite some time ago. I don't say my experience speaks to much, but I should think it was more typical than not.

How harshly then can I really judge the majority of the people who ostensibly taught me whatever it was I learned in school? Who doesn't remember fondly most of the dear old mother-substitutes of of elementary school days? Those who nursed one through simple sentences and the times-tables? True, some showed a prettier cursive at the blackboard than others, and some were perhaps less kind or encouraging than they might have been, but not a bad lot by and large. Some did their hair more carefully than they did their lesson-plans, but I don't remember most as being anything much but neither better nor worse than they should have been. Truth be told, I don't remember most of them at all. (Who was that woman that taught my third grade? Name escapes me now, but she was alright.)

And later? In what's now called middle school, and later still in high school, there was the battalion of simple souls, men and women, tenured and tired, who taught just to the edge of their competence, relying on the printed questions in their threadbare textbooks, on film-strips, and faded mimeos that dated to their apprentice days, to see them through to their pensions. Pitiable examples of pedagogy, no doubt, but then I don't know that Socrates could have made me pay attention to some of that stuff, on a brisk Autumn day, with the sun blazing away, just the other side of the window. As the town I grew up in was rather at an apex of a number of small local colleges of various Protestant affiliation, these teachers were often aided by various exhausted and or ill-prepared graduate students, like the relentlessly cheerful gals just out of the Presbyterian teachers' college who rather mindlessly distributed stickers like confetti at a perpetual birthday party, or the great, oafish Methodist boys who still blushed when asked a direct question by a girl. (Now and again, one of the latter, I remember, would get himself in trouble paying too much attention of just the wrong kind to some high school sophomore girl, and not be asked back.)

Mustn't forget a mention for the largely anonymous substitutes who, when called on, taught auto-mechanics on Monday, English composition on Tuesday, and sex ed. on Wednesday, all with an equal and undisguised despair.

Now none of the above were necessarily bad people, or very good teachers. They just did their jobs, as best they could, which wasn't always very well. The suggestion that each and every one ought to have been better isn't without merit, but it does strike me as statistically unlikely. Largely unexceptional teachers teaching largely unexceptionable children sounds, to me, about the likeliest outcome of mandatory eduction in any roughly democratic society, no?

What then could be sillier than suggesting that these people, teachers and students, parents and neighbors, all ought to have been somehow better than they were ever likely to be? But then, I grew up in the days before every child was thought to be "exceptional" and every teacher "great." What balls.

Who remembers much of what was taught in school days, anyway?

The best teachers I had, all had something to say that may or may not have had anything much to do with the curriculum. Some, like Miss Joan Stuck, gave me genuinely useful information, like how a sentence might be made, and why it mattered. A few others directed me to books I might like, though these weren't the ones required. Some of the best teachers I saw in my day, weren't necessarily mine. I remember the patience with which some of them helped kids who were struggling. I struggled too, of course, but usually with what I would never need again, could not be made to see the point of, or was quite rightly convinced, even then, they'd somehow got wrong. I'd hazard a guess, for example, if I'm to be generous, and say half of the history I was taught was true. Not entirely the teachers' fault, I should think, as they may not have known any better themselves. Mr. Flynn introduced William Manchester at one one. That was rather a surprise.

It isn't really the well-intentioned or the competent though that I remember best. Who does? Other than the ones who actually made something memorable, like Ms. K. Gilliland, in her whirling peasant skirts, whirling her way through Shakespeare's tragedies as if, from somewhere, she heard a lute, mostly who one remembers are the cranks and the loonies, and the bullies, of course, can't forget them. Like the 9th grade science teacher and religious fanatic who "skipped" human evolution, and once told me, "privately," that Catholics went to Hell, or the mad war veteran who might forget a scheduled quiz and instead demonstrate between the rows of desks how to escape a submarine filled with smoke, or the militant Libertarian who taught the Civil War as the "War of Northern Aggression," and called Social Security, "a tragedy."

I don't know that any of those last three deserved employment in a public or any other kind of school, but realistically, they were rather a cross section of the community. I doubt it was their union cards alone that kept them on the payroll.

Now that this fascinating media "discussion" is underway, I find myself almost sentimentally defensive of the general run of my school teachers. Most were no better, and no worse, than most of the adults I encountered as a kid. Strikes me as both hypocritical and frankly more than a little ridiculous -- to say nothing of the underlying political agenda involved -- to hold teachers to a standard higher than that to which any or all of the ministers and priests I ever met subscribed, to say nothing of the scout leaders, the school administrators, the PTA, or most of the parents I've ever known, other than my own of course. I was lucky there.

And it must be a specially thankless job, teaching. Oh, I know, it is now the rule evidently that teachers must all be either great or nothing, but while that's obvious nonsense, I wonder how most people do it. I, for one, would be an awful teacher. Shiver to think. Never contemplated even the possibility. I've know some of my contemporaries who did, and then thought better of it. I know more than one brilliant student, now my age, who once taught for a bit, usually in graduate school, and then had the sense to become a librarian.

But I don't mean to defend the worst, either. I'm thinking of the truly memorable villains, not just the drunks and depressives, the dogmatists and the fanatics, but the real monsters. Everybody remembers the villain, no? The truly bad teachers I have in mind, were, quite frankly, just awful people.

All my monsters, or most of them, I should think, are dead. I can think of few human beings better remembered, or ironically enough, likely to be less lightly mourned, than one's worst teachers. Bad bosses, bad lovers, bad roommates, none but bad parents, I should think, come quite so quickly back to mind, or haunt whole areas of enquiry or endeavor so effectively, down even into the dignity of an otherwise contented middle age. I know many a competent, confident matron who can still be made blush passing a mirror by some thoughtless cruelty tossed off as a joke by some lumpen, hormonal lady-coach, and many a strong man who still can't figure a fraction without remembering the sting of a ruler across his palm. Literature is full of heartless masters thrashing their pupils into unconsciousness, wicked marms humiliating their tearful charges... worse. That my eighth grade algebra teacher has long since salted whatever sorry plot of earth into which she was finally felled, does not mean I can keep from still catching an echo of her insufferable rasp in every old woman who questions my competence to calculate the tax on a special order at the bookstore where I work. "What are you, stupid?" That my junior high school gym coach should by now at least be beyond the vengeance of any but the nursing home orderlies who -- one can only pray -- he also pinched and mocked in "special" gym, does not compensate me for my irrational horror of locker-rooms, communal showers and anyone for whom "fitness" may best be judged by completed laps and a stop-watch. (I suppose I might be grateful for the traumatic distrust of even the most seemingly safe and clean bath-houses he unwittingly instilled in me, as this may have inadvertently saved my life at the dawn of the dangerous eighties, but no, even that I refuse to put to the old brute's credit. May he rot.)

Had I the time, or was it my purpose tonight to call out all the martinets and bullies that ruled and ruined for me so many of the schoolrooms in that little town I've tried to forget, I could go on. If called on, I could provide a list. But I'm already weary of the topic, so perhaps another time.

Meanwhile, anyone with children really needn't pay any attention to me on this subject at all. I'm sure it matters very much, to you. Perhaps, given the publicity generated by this new film, something might actually be done to get the worst of them gone, but as for making all that great majority "great," well... I'm sure your children deserve no less. Good luck with that.

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.