Quotulatiousness

October 28, 2019

The demonstrated need for “Clean Teen” fiction in the YA section

Filed under: Books, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

You don’t need to be a Bible-thumping traditionalist to be alarmed at what publishers are pushing into the Young Adult fiction market for teenagers and older pre-teens. There are themes and content choices that many parents would be unwilling to allow younger readers to encounter, but the criticisms are falling on deaf ears, as Megan Fox shows:

It’s tough to find a book for pre-teens and teens without graphic sex and violence. The “Young Adult” section, which is marketed to kids from nine to seventeen, is full of stuff most parents would not want their children reading about. Because of it, sites like Common Sense Media, where you can see what kind of content is in the books before you let your kid read them, are very popular with parents. Parents and kids rate the books according to how much violence, sex, drug use, mature themes, and the like are in them. Librarians and the American Library Association are staunchly opposed to anyone categorizing books by content and liken it to censorship. They’re out of their minds. On one hand, they tell parents, “It’s up to you to direct your child’s reading,” but they offer no help in actually doing that by their refusal to mark books that contain adult content. And now that some websites are answering parents’ calls for innocent plotlines by offering “Clean Teen” selections, SJW authors, who think every child should have the sexual knowledge of Caligula, have their panties in a twist about it.

“If they’re named ‘Clean Teen’ novels what are the rest called? ‘Unwashed Teen’ ‘Trash Teen’ ‘Didn’t shower after soccer practice Teen’ ‘Say three Hail Mary’s in confessional Teen?'” said Zorri Cordova, a supposed author.

The far-left weirdos are never satisfied to corrupt their own children, they want your kids too. The American Library Association loves to take potshots at Common Sense Media. “These days, Common Sense Media’s initiatives contain a less than subtle paternalism based on the conviction that its values should control children’s learning experiences,” wrote Joyce Johnston on the ALA’s Intellectual Freedom Blog. They have no problem, however, controlling children’s learning experiences with their far-left values. For a laughable example, check out ALA’s LGBT initiatives.

Publisher’s Weekly wrote about this topic.

    Kendra Levin at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers observes that “the meaning of ‘clean teen’ can depend on the context, but within publishing houses, I think it’s most often used to describe a buffer zone between middle grade and mature YA — books specifically geared toward the younger end of the teen spectrum. You could also call this young teen and 12-and-up YA, as opposed to 14 and up.

This suggests that 14-year-olds are ready for the Roman orgies and coke parties that are depicted in the majority of YA fiction these days (and yes, I’ve read them). I don’t know what planet these people are living on, but it’s starting to get to me. What is wrong with Little House on the Prairie? Oh yeah, Laura Ingalls Wilder has been branded a racist.

October 16, 2019

QotD: Childhood fears of nuclear armageddon

Filed under: History, Humour, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When I was a kid I was terrified of the End of the World. Kids heard things; older kids who’d read that ridiculous end-times tract, The Late Great Planet Earth said it foretold a struggle between the “bear” and the “eagle” and we all knew what that meant. One summer at Bible Camp I asked one of the pastors if this bear-eagle end-of-the-world stuff was true, and he said “we know not the day or the time.” You know, I thought, but you just won’t tell us.

It was 1968. On the night before the last day of camp, a counselor named Charlie Brown interrupted our sunset meeting by the shores of White Bear Lake to tell us the news: Russia had launched their missiles and they would destroy America before the night was out. It was time to get right with God.

Silence; crickets; small sobs. I’m sure no one thought much about Jesus right then. We thought about Mom and Dad and Spot and our room, where we really, really wanted to be right now, with the familiar smell of the goldfish bowl, and —

Charlie Brown guided us through some prayers. We all said Amen, and I’m sure for some it was the least heartfelt Amen we’d ever said. Then Charlie Brown said he had made up the story. Russia hadn’t launched the missiles. But what if they had? Were we right with Jesus?

Back at the barracks we were quiet and unnerved. No one wanted to go to sleep. No one wanted to talk, either. Finally John Larson, the bunkhouse bully, broke the silence. He was the mean kid. He was the one who tormented me at home, and had bothered me at camp. Nelson Muntz without the charm. John Larson expressed his simple wish to stab Charlie Brown in the stomach.

A dozen little Lutheran campers nodded in the dark: ya sure, you betcha.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2003-09-11.

October 15, 2019

QotD: Over-protected children become insecure adults

Filed under: Education, Health, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Kids need conflict, insult, exclusion – they need to experience these things thousands of times when they’re young in order to develop into psychologically mature adults. Every adult has to learn to handle these things and not get upset, especially by minor instances. But in the name of protecting our children we have deprived them of the unsupervised time they need to learn how to navigate conflict among themselves. That is one of the main reasons why kids and even college students today find words, ideas and social situations more intolerable than those same words, ideas and situations would have been for previous generations of students.

Jonathan Haidt, quoted by Naomi Firsht, “The Fragile Generation”, Spiked, 2017-08-31.

October 13, 2019

Sesame Street finally gets real

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I think we can all agree that the problem with children’s TV is that it’s not gritty and realistic enough for the children of today. Well, the situation is being addressed by those brave folks who produce Sesame Street:

Sesame Street has introduced Karli, a puppet whose mother is addicted to opioids. I applaud them. For too long, children’s shows have been bright, happy, colourful and filled with problems that can be easily resolved. It’s time we saw the alleys and overflowing gutters behind the buildings of Sesame Street — the suicides, prostitution and addictions that run rampant after the sun sets. It’s time children learned about real life. It’s time children learned about flesh-eating diseases, absent fathers, and the unforgiving cycle of life. That their heroes are frauds and everyone dies, including their favourite pets and all their hopes and dreams.

It’s time children learn why people are drawn to heroin in the first place. That life can be so crushing and hopeless that the only other answer is death. It is time children learn that although on the outside the heroin addict may look sick, miserable, terrifying and disgusting, inside they feel better than you will ever know. That the feeling is so good inside, the addict forgets about the vessel and the outer part of the body slowly begins to slip away. From the outside it is hard to watch a heroin addict slowly deteriorate, and even harder to imagine how someone could let themselves fall into that state. But inside they feel perfect. Religion, spirituality, and gurus have often spoken of finding inner peace and joy, and there is no peace within as perfect as the high of heroin.

It is a feeling so good it makes parents neglect their children, as in Karli’s case. A feeling so good the user forgets everything — everything bad, and everything good. It is better than the feeling of accomplishing goals, of success or love. It is perfect — that is until it fades away. So, you chase that perfect feeling for the rest of your life, getting close, but never quite attaining it again. You chase forward, day after day, as everything around you slowly slips away, your youth, your family, your hopes and your dreams.

October 12, 2019

QotD: Giving the vote to children

Filed under: Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The irony being that children and teenagers tend to be quite selfish and self-absorbed, to a degree unbecoming in adults, and are accustomed to free stuff, all paid for out of sight by someone else, much to the youngsters’ indifference. It would therefore hardly be surprising if voting children tended to favour policies that pile up unsustainable debt, all left for whatever generations follow them.

Apparently, this constitutes “planning for the future.”

David Thompson, commenting on “”, David Thompson, 2018-12-08.

October 10, 2019

Justin Trudeau scrambles to escape from the consequences of his mistakes

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It must be awful to be a Justin Trudeau fan these days, where he seems to spend more time looking awkward as his personal mis-steps keep coming back to haunt him. I’d never vote for the guy — but I wouldn’t vote for his main opponent, the Milk Dud either — but I thought he was a better politician than he’s turning out to be in this election campaign without the dependable strawman of Stephen Harper to struggle against. While I think he’s unfit to be Prime Minister, Barrett Wilson argues he wasn’t even fit to be a teacher:

It should be well established by now that this man is unfit to serve as our Prime Minister.

But if corporate corruption, obstruction of justice, internet censorship, persecution of journalists, buying off the media, and frickin’ blackface weren’t enough to convince you that Trudeau is unfit. Perhaps this latest insanity will.

Trudeau and his campaign team somehow felt it was a good idea for the disgraced Liberal leader to appear on a pre-taped and rehearsed children’s television show today called “New Mom, Who Dis?” The appearance was cringeworthy at best, as host Jesse Cruickshank shamelessly flirted with the PM, but it was also cynical, manipulative, and exploitative, as Trudeau fielded two questions from two young black twin girls.

The first twin asked Trudeau, “Why did you paint your face brown?”

Trudeau answered: “Ooh. Um, it was something I shouldn’t have done because it hurt people. It’s not something that you should do and that is something that I learned. I didn’t know it back then and I know it now, and I’m sorry that I hurt people.”

The second twin followed up: “But did you paint your nose and your hands brown?”

Trudeau: “Mmmhmm. Yeah. And it was the wrong thing to do.”

The clip deserves to be watched more than once just to understand and appreciate how clearly scripted, deeply cynical, and frankly sick, the whole thing is.

Okay. So, this will take a second to unpack. Somehow, Justin Trudeau felt it would be a good idea to use a children’s television show and two young children of colour as a stage for a preplanned apology for his blackface exploits from when he was 29-years-old. Don’t worry everyone. He’s learned from his days of trying to manipulate strong, principled women of colour such as Jody Wilson-Raybould. It’s much easier to exploit young children!

And, by the way — who doesn’t know that blackface is wrong when they are 29-years-old? The culture in 2001 rejected such racist tropes. If Trudeau were actually that stupid at 29, when his brain was fully developed, then how in the hell should he ever lead a G7 country at 47? He can’t even be trusted to properly instruct young school children.

What other stupid things has this guy done that Canada’s enemies could use as blackmail (no pun intended).

September 25, 2019

The Children’s Crusade against Carbon

Filed under: Environment, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Arthur Chrenkoff explains why political movements treasure and actively seek out the youth:

Illustration of the Children’s Crusade from Tales from far and near : history stories of other lands (1915).
York University Libraries via Wikimedia Commons.

It’s really a no-brainer. Revolutionary movements like communism and Nazism, which sought to overthrow the status quo and create a new society, have always placed huge importance on cultivating young following. I consider the green movement, particularly those sections of it that can be described as the Green religion, as a revolutionary movement too, because its main aim is to implement socialism under the pretense of saving the world from an environmental catastrophe.

There are several reasons why children and teenagers are so valued by utopian authoritarians:

1. As the cliché goes, children are the future. Invest in indoctrinating them now and your investment will last a lifetime, certainly outliving the less enthusiastic elders.

2. Children’s minds are more malleable and they are more impressionable, making them more receptive and accepting of your propaganda.

3. Peer group pressure helps to reinforce what the adults instill.

4. Children are (sorry children) ignorant and naive, having neither the sufficient education nor life experience that make adults more difficult to scare, persuade or bullshit into submission and belief.

5. Children have the energy and enthusiasm, which older people often lack.

6. Teenagers go through the proverbial rebellious stage, where they question their parents and other conventional sources of authority. This makes them very useful for the said revolutionary movements, whether fascist or socialist, which need to destroy the old, more conservative way of life so as to create a new social order according to their design.

September 22, 2019

QotD: “Light reading” aka trash novels

Filed under: Books, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

As a pretentious young viper, I would sometimes pick fights with my mother over what she was reading. I would examine some paperback she had set down, and pronounce it to be trash. She would agree, with the qualification that “light reading” was the more genteel expression. I cannot now remember what many of the books were, but the genre of detective fiction was well represented, and then-recent novels which could be located on bestseller lists. Sometimes it would be a pop “major author” — say, D. H. Lawrence in one of his repetitive attempts to write sentimental pornography on the virgin-and-gypsy theme. Once I congratulated her on attempting something translated from German. “Oh, it’s your father reading that. I don’t read books by foreigners.”

She had the habit of reading, formed early, and could often be found lost in a book. To her mind literature was meant for an escape: from nursing, housework, and raising difficult children. So if the book was arduous, it was also useless. “You can’t be serious all the time,” she would say, “you have to take a break from it sometimes.” To which I would reply, “But surely you can be serious some of the time.” For I wasn’t only a viper. I was also a little jackass.

David Warren, “Summer reading”, Essays in Idleness, 2017-08-08.

September 3, 2019

QotD: Fencing out the London poor

Filed under: Britain, History, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Orwell’s press card portrait, 1943


I see that the railings are returning — only wooden ones, it is true, but still railings — in one London square after another. So the lawful denizens of the squares can make use of their treasured keys again, and the children of the poor can be kept out.

When the railings round the parks and squares were removed, the object was partly to accumulate scrap-iron, but the removal was also felt to be a democratic gesture. Many more green spaces were now open to the public, and you could stay in the parks till all hours instead of being hounded out at closing times by grim-faced keepers. It was also discovered that these railings were not only unnecessary but hideously ugly. The parks were improved out of recognition by being laid open, acquiring a friendly, almost rural look that they had never had before. And had the railings vanished permanently, another improvement would probably have followed. The dreary shrubberies of laurel and privet — plants not suited to England and always dusty, at any rate in London — would probably have been grubbed up and replaced by flower beds. Like the railings, they were merely put there to keep the populace out. However, the higher-ups managed to avert this reform, like so many others, and everywhere the wooden palisades are going up, regardless of the wastage of labour and timber.

George Orwell, “As I Please” Tribune, 1944-08-04.

July 20, 2019

QotD: Spices

Filed under: Food, Health, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Why do we use spices in our foods? In thinking about this question keep in mind that (1) other animals don’t spice their foods, (2) most spices contribute little or no nutrition to our diets, and (3) the active ingredients in many spices are actually aversive chemicals, which evolved to keep insects, fungi, bacteria, mammals and other unwanted critters away from the plants that produce them.

Several lines of evidence indicate that spicing may represent a class of cultural adaptations to the problem of food-borne pathogens. Many spices are antimicrobials that can kill pathogens in foods. Globally, common spices are onions, pepper, garlic, cilantro, chili peppers (capsicum) and bay leaves. Here’s the idea: the use of many spices represents a cultural adaptation to the problem of pathogens in food, especially in meat. This challenge would have been most important before refrigerators came on the scene. To examine this, two biologists, Jennifer Billing and Paul Sherman, collected 4578 recipes from traditional cookbooks from populations around the world. They found three distinct patterns.

1. Spices are, in fact, antimicrobial. The most common spices in the world are also the most effective against bacteria. Some spices are also fungicides. Combinations of spices have synergistic effects, which may explain why ingredients like “chili power” (a mix of red pepper, onion, paprika, garlic, cumin and oregano) are so important. And, ingredients like lemon and lime, which are not on their own potent anti-microbials, appear to catalyze the bacteria killing effects of other spices.

2. People in hotter climates use more spices, and more of the most effective bacteria killers. In India and Indonesia, for example, most recipes used many anti-microbial spices, including onions, garlic, capsicum and coriander. Meanwhile, in Norway, recipes use some black pepper and occasionally a bit of parsley or lemon, but that’s about it.

3. Recipes appear to use spices in ways that increase their effectiveness. Some spices, like onions and garlic, whose killing power is resistant to heating, are deployed in the cooking process. Other spices like cilantro, whose antimicrobial properties might be damaged by heating, are added fresh in recipes.

Thus, many recipes and preferences appear to be cultural adaptations adapted to local environments that operate in subtle and nuanced ways not understood by those of us who love spicy foods. Billing and Sherman speculate that these evolved culturally, as healthier, more fertile and more successful families were preferentially imitated by less successful ones. This is quite plausible given what we know about our species’ evolved psychology for cultural learning, including specifically cultural learning about foods and plants.

Among spices, chili peppers are an ideal case. Chili peppers were the primary spice of New World cuisines, prior to the arrival of Europeans, and are now routinely consumed by about a quarter of all adults, globally. Chili peppers have evolved chemical defenses, based on capsaicin, that make them aversive to mammals and rodents but desirable to birds. In mammals, capsicum directly activates a pain channel (TrpV1), which creates a burning sensation in response to various specific stimuli, including acid, high temperatures and allyl isothiocyanate (which is found in mustard or wasabi). These chemical weapons aid chili pepper plants in their survival and reproduction, as birds provide a better dispersal system for the plants’ seeds than other options (like mammals). Consequently, chilies are innately aversive to non-human primates, babies and many human adults. Capsaicin is so innately aversive that nursing mothers are advised to avoid chili peppers, lest their infants reject their breast (milk), and some societies even put capsicum on mom’s breasts to initiate weaning. Yet, adults who live in hot climates regularly incorporate chilies into their recipes. And, those who grow up among people who enjoy eating chili peppers not only eat chilies but love eating them. How do we come to like the experience of burning and sweating — the activation of pain channel TrpV1?

Research by psychologist Paul Rozin shows that people come to enjoy the experience of eating chili peppers mostly by re-interpreting the pain signals caused by capsicum as pleasure or excitement. Based on work in the highlands of Mexico, children acquire this gradually without being pressured or compelled. They want to learn to like chili peppers, to be like those they admire. This fits with what we’ve already seen: children readily acquire food preferences from older peers. In Chapter 14, we further examine how cultural learning can alter our bodies’ physiological response to pain, and specifically to electric shocks. The bottom line is that culture can overpower our innate mammalian aversions, when necessary and without us knowing it.

Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter, 2015.

July 14, 2019

The Epstein scandal is another example of the importance of accurate names

Filed under: Law, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

ESR has some concerns about the Epstein case, specifically on the correct terminology to use:

The sage Confucius was once asked what he would do if he was a governor. He said he would “rectify the names” to make words correspond to reality. He understood what General Semantics teaches; if your linguistic map is sufficiently confused, you will misunderstand the territory. And be readily outmaneuvered by those who are less confused.

Mug shot of Jeffrey Epstein made available by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department, taken following his indictment for soliciting a prostitute in 2006.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.

And that brings us to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. In particular, the widespread tagging of Epstein as a pedophile.

No, Richard Epstein is not a pedophile. This is important. If conservatives keep misidentifying him as one, I fear some unfortunate consequences.

Pedophiles desire pre-pubertal children. This is not Epstein’s kink; he quite obviously likes his girls to be as young as possible but fully nubile. The correct term for this is “ephebophile”, and being clear about the distinction matters. I’ll explain why.

The Left has a long history of triggering conservatives into self-discrediting moral panics (“Rock and roll is the devil’s music”). It also has a strong internal contingent that would like to normalize pedophilia. I mean the real thing, not Epstein’s creepy ephebophilia.

Homosexual pedophiles have been biding their time in order to get adult-on-adult homosexuality fully normalized as battlespace prep, but you see a few trial balloons go up occasionally in places like Salon. The last round of this was interrupted by the need to take down Milo Yiannopolous, but the internal logic of left-wing sexual liberationism always demands new ways to freak out the normals, and the pedophiles are more than willing to be next up in satisfying that perpetual demand.

Liberals have proven themselves utterly useless at resisting the liberationist ratchet, so I’m not even bothering to address them. Conservatives, if you want to prevent the next turn, don’t give the pedophilia-normalizers maneuvering room. Rectify the names; make the distinctions that matter.

Epstein’s behavior is repulsive because we judge young postpubertal humans to be too psychologically immature to give adult consent, but it’s nowhere near the evil that is the sexual abuse of prepubertal children.

July 6, 2019

QotD: How to learn

Filed under: Books, Economics, Education, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I can imagine an economics professor reading through The Literary Book of Economics in search of things he can use in his teaching. But I find it hard to imagine anyone else doing so on his own initiative, merely because he enjoyed reading it. There is a reason why a book is the length it is; a novel is not, with rare exceptions, a series of short stories. I conclude that most of the people reading [Michael] Watts’ book, most of the people it was written for, will be students reading it because their professor told them to. And, judging by my experience of students over the years, many of the students told to read it won’t.

That fits the pattern of most modern schooling at all levels. Someone else decides what you should learn, tells you what you must do to learn it, and makes some attempt to make sure you follow his instructions. It is not a model I think highly of. A much superior model in my view, if you can pull it off, is to get someone to learn something primarily because he finds it interesting. The best way of doing that is to provide students with things to read that are worth reading on their own, not things they read only because they are ordered to. Not even things they read only because they think the labor of reading them will pay off in future benefit.

That view of education is why both children of my present marriage were unschooled. It is also why all of my nonfiction books, with the partial exception of Price Theory, were targeted at the proverbial intelligent layman. They can be, and sometimes are, used as textbooks, but they were written with the assumption that if the reader did not find a chapter worth finishing he was likely not to finish it.

David Friedman, “Thoughts on Literature, Economics and Education”, Ideas, 2017-05-01.

June 3, 2019

Rant: music lessons should be FUN

Filed under: Education, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Lindybeige
Published on 30 Apr 2019

Thanks to several very bad music teachers, I do not play an instrument. Somehow they managed to annihilate all the potential fun.

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May 27, 2019

A genuine, bona fide electrified, six-car Fisking!

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Once upon a time, in the primordial early days of blogging, an artform was evolved that perfectly suited the ecological niche occupied by bloggers: the Fisking. Thanks to his great respect for the ways of the past, David Thompson is a highly skilled modern practitioner of that ancient artform:

    Here’s an idea! Change your parents’ bad voting habits by refusing to breed.

In the pages of Slate, Christina Cauterucci, whose enthusiasms include “gender and feminism,” wishes to share her wisdom:

    The prospect of harnessing one’s sexual and reproductive powers for social good is a tempting one. So, I’d like to present what I humbly consider a much better proposal: Instead of a sex strike, let’s try a grandkid strike.

It’s a “brilliant new weapon of progressivism,” says Ms Cauterucci, and “exactly the kind of radical response today’s radical threats to equity, justice, and humanity demand.” Specifically,

    It’s time to demand that baby boomers and Gen Xers decide which they’d rather have: their vague attachments to policies that have poisoned the earth and will soon make it difficult for anyone but the obscenely wealthy to live healthy, happy lives, or a pack of adorable munchkins in itty-bitty suspenders ready for unlimited tickle fights and cookie-baking sessions.

This is followed almost immediately by,

    I’ve already decided that I’m not having kids,

Which, for the purposes of Ms Cauterucci’s article, is somewhat convenient. This reproductive decision was, we’re told, arrived at because,

    Child care is extravagantly expensive, and paid family leave is a rare luxury. Bringing a new set of chubby cheeks and wonderfully incomprehensible babblings into the world is the most destructive thing one couple can do to the planet. It seems certain that today’s babies will be tomorrow’s survivors of famine, water shortages, unprecedented natural disasters, and refugee crises.

And furthermore,

    It’s unethical, what with climate change and all. And it’s too dangerous — you’ve seen the news reports on school shootings and know how easy it is for violent men to get their hands on guns.

Um, okay then. Apparently, the thought of becoming a parent immediately conjures mental images of famine, earthquakes, shootings and death. Proof, if more were needed, that the exquisitely woke are just like thee and me. Not unhinged in any way.

May 26, 2019

QotD: Maurice Sendak on childhood

Filed under: Books, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

We’ll begin our tribute to Maurice Sendak with an excerpt of our 1986 interview, in which he told me that when he was a child, adults looked big and grotesque to him, and he couldn’t imagine ever becoming one.

MAURICE SENDAK: It was inconceivable to me as a child that I would be an adult. I mean, one assumed that it would happen, but obviously it didn’t happen, or if it did, it happened when your back was turned, and then suddenly you were there. So I couldn’t have thought about it much.

TERRY GROSS: Because adults seemed really big and different, you couldn’t imagine becoming one?

SENDAK: And awful. Yeah. I mean they were mostly dreadful, and if the option were to become an adult was to become another dreadful creature, then best not, although I think there had to be a kind of normal anticipation of that moment happening because being a child was even worse.

I mean, being a child was being a child — was being a creature without power, without pocket money, without escape routes of any kind. So I didn’t want to be a child.

I remember how much — when I was a small boy I was taken to see a version of Peter Pan. I detested it. I mean the sentimental idea that anybody would want to remain a boy, I don’t — I couldn’t have thought it out then, but I did later, certainly, that this was a conceit that could only occur in the mind of a very sentimental writer, that any child would want to remain in childhood. It’s not possible. The wish is to get out.

“‘Fresh Air’ Remembers Author Maurice Sendak”, NPR Books, 2012-05-08.

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