Paper Rocks

"Last week Maurice Sendak visited The Colbert Report for a very entertaining two-part interview. After commenting on the complexity of children, the 'hopelessly vile' politician Newt Gingrich, and the abysmal current state of children’s literature, Sendak weighed in on e-books: 'Fuck them, is what I say,' griped Sendak. 'I hate those e-books. They cannot be the future. They may well be. I will be dead, I won’t give a shit.'
While the future is arguably already upon us when it comes to e-books, Sendak isn’t the only lauded author to speak out against the technology recently.
     At the Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts in Cartagena, Colombia, Jonathan Franzen spoke of his dislike of e-books as well. 'The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it and it would still work! So it’s pretty good technology. And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It’s a bad business model,' said Franzen."
—Carmel Lobello, Death+Taxes
Read more...

"Maurice Sendak looks like one of his own creations: beady eyes, pointy eyebrows, the odd monsterish tuft of hair and a reputation for fierceness that makes you tip-toe up the path of his beautiful house in Connecticut like a child in a fairytale. Sendak has lived here for 40 years – until recently with his partner Eugene, who died in 2007; and now alone with his dog, Herman (after Melville), a large alsatian who barges to the door to greet us. 'He's German,' says Sendak, getting up from the table where he is doing a jigsaw puzzle of a monster from his most famous book, Where the Wild Things Are. Sotto voce, he adds: 'He doesn't know I'm Jewish.'
     At 83, Sendak is still enraged by almost everything that crosses his landscape. In the first 10 minutes of our meeting, he gets through: Ebooks: 'I hate them. It's like making believe there's another kind of sex. There isn't another kind of sex. There isn't another kind of book! A book is a book is a book.'"
— Emma Brockes, The Guardian
Read more...