In honor of Mother’s Day (May 13), here’s some footage of Bruce Springsteen dancing with his 90-year-old mother. Â The clip, recorded on March 29, comes to you here courtesy of Springsteen fan TheMagikRat. Happy Mother’s Day!
For a week in February of 2011, I blogged exactly what I did each day – the goal being to show precisely how academics spend their time. Starting today, I’m beginning the summer edition of the same experiment. From today through Friday the 18th, I will publicly keep track of how I use my time…
Fitting that the passing of an artist should inspire so much art.  Here are a few tributes to Maurice Sendak that I’ve enjoyed. (I’ve assembled links to prose tributes at the bottom of my reminiscence of Maurice; The Comics Journal has its own page of mostly prose tributes, too.) Pat Bagley This is easily my favorite,…
Graphic genius Chris Ware designed the cover for my Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI, and Transformed Children’s Literature (due this September from the University Press of Mississippi). The front cover is above.  The full, wrap-around cover is below.  Click on it for a larger image.  Trust me: you’ll…
But the wild things cried, “Oh, please don’t go– We’ll eat you up–we love you so!” And Max said, “No!” –Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are (1963) In June 2001, I went to hear Maurice Sendak speak at Yale University. A couple of years earlier, I’d started working on a biography of Crockett Johnson,…
David Bowman – the writer, not the character in 2001: A Space Odyssey – died on February 27. Â He was 54. Â His obituary ran in this past Sunday’s Times. Â He and I have had an on-and-off correspondence since the fall of 2000. Â Upon reading his obituary, I realized (guiltily) that I’d failed to answer his…
The main problem with Chronicle of Higher Education blogger Naomi Schaefer Riley is not racism.  The main problem is her intellectually lazy, sloppy “journalism” that cherry-picks examples in order to “support” uninformed opinions.  In her recent piece, “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations,” she reads the descriptions of dissertations by five recent…
