We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

Shaun O’Dell makes videos, music, drawings and sculpture with crazy-skilled draughtsmanship and a body of references that ranges from Moby Dick to Gulliver’s Travels. He’s a smart and spare artist, with works that invite exegesis the way that, well, Herman Melville and Jonathan Swift do. You could spend a long time with O’Dell’s work and find something new every time.

“Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers,” begins the jacket copy on each edition of Melville House’s “The Art of the Novella” collection. It’s true: despite the pretty name (say it out loud: “no-vell-a”), novellas are a chronically ignored form of literature. Many of the thirty slim novellas released by Melville House are available for the first time in book form, which is surprising considering that the authors include Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Cervantes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Balzac and Leo Tolstoy.

But then, novellas are sort of like the tweens of the literary world: potentially flighty, awkwardly positioned, easy to underrate. Luckily, the publisher has culled stellar examples of the form and printed them up with minimalist covers available in color schemes that range from “1960s rec room” to rainbow sherbet. Each one is thin enough to fit in a coat pocket but fat enough to provide more than a few hours of reading. The volumes make design objects as satisfying as they do reads, and that’s saying a lot.

Two of the best are written by Herman Melville: Bartleby the Scrivener and Benito Cereno. The former novella, written in 1853, tells the tale of Bartleby (whom The New Yorker referred to as “the proto slacker”), a man who works assisting wealthy men with their business on Wall Street until he decides, one day, that he’d rather not work, or do much of anything. Benito Cereno was written two years later and focuses on the true-life story of a slave rebellion aboard a Spanish merchant ship in the late 18th century. If you’ve been meaning to read Moby-Dick forever—and who among us isn’t?—this pair of novellas would be the perfect appetizer to nibble on while you build up the necessary appetite for that epic. Happy reading!

Saw this good man last week. Among topics we covered were whales having more than one penis (he says three). I have never heard of this. Maybe he was pulling my leg? I haven’t looked it up because I kind of would rather just believe it.

We went for a walk with Herman, his german shepard who is named after one of his heroes, Herman Melville.

Also, it was his birthday last month as you can see from the birthday plate.

He also showed me a Max sailing sculpture he was sent from some art gallery in nyc that is going to make them.

He added Obama to the mix with great affect. As you can remember they are close personal friends.

He was feeling a little run down the day I saw him so if anyone wants to send him a message, please do so and we will send them over to him.

The highlight of the day was him telling me why people loved Shakespeare’s (another one of Maurice’s heroes) plays when Shakespeare was alive. He told me the whole story of Romeo and Juliet which I hadn’t thought of in a long time. By the time he got to the part where the parents found their dead children and realized what they had done, we both had runny eyes.

Maurice is a good storyteller.

“Illustrating Pierre gave me the privilege of doing a grown-up book,” Maurice Sendak told his biographer and friend, Tony Kushner, “which I said I’d never do. It was my commentary on the book. I loved it so much–it didn’t need illustrating.” Saying he’d never intended to illustrate a grown-up book is almost an understatement. Throughout his career, the man behind Where the Wild Things Are had passionately decried the very concept of anyone illustrating classic adult novels. But Herman Melville’s Pierre, or the Ambiguities was an easy exception to the rule– it’s one of Sendak’s favorite books and the namesake of his aggresively ambivalent Nutshell Library character. When esteemed Melville scholar Hershel Parker asked Sendak to lend his artistic talent to a revised edition of the book, Sendak pulled out all the stops, hiring John Dugdale to help him create the extravagant William Blake-inspired illustrations for Pierre. Writes Kushner:

As he had done before starting work on Outside Over There, Sendak met with a photographer and models and had them assume poses based on sections of Pierre. John Dugdale, a remarkable photographer and a friend of Sendak’s, used for the session the old daguerrotype camera with which he shoots his exquisite, evanescent still lifes. To the anachronistic presence of Dugdale’s plate-and-bellows camera; to the intoxicating effect of Melville’s swoony prose, never more fuschia or fustian than in this novel; and to Sendak’s decision to use, as the true parent and original visual midrash on the story, the strange mannerist art of Blake, can be attributed the serioso extravagance of the compositions, of the illustrations themselves.

Dugdale was the perfect choice to help Sendak realize his vision. After gaining commercial success early on and working for clients like Bergdorf Goodman, Martha Stewart and Ralph Lauren, Dugdale suffered a series of AIDS-related health problems in the early 90s including seven strokes and CMV retinitis, a devestating disease that causes blindness. Miraculously for Dugdale, he emerged out of the ordeal with one eye somewhat functioning. While he was no longer able to shoot high-paying ad campaigns, Dugdale still had enough vision left to concentrate on his very personal body of work, which is comprised of haunting still lifes and breathtaking portraiture.

There’s a delicacy to the aesthetic produced through Dugdale’s nostalgic methods (he often shoots in the antiquated cyanotype process) that seems to reflect the artist’s own fragile nature. His tasteful nude portraits are a reserved and reverent pean to the beauty of the human form– the perfect foundation for a marriage with Blake’s tortured soul and Sendak’s cynically optimistic smirk that begot the elegant illustrations in Pierre.