Bites: Sendak Retrospective, Amos Oz as Nobel Fav., Is Teaching Shakespeare a Problem?, Af-Pak Reading, Chicago’s Loss, the age-old Polanski debate, and more

Top: Preliminary drawing of dust jacket for Where the Wild Things Are. © Maurice Sendak, 1963. All rights reserved.  Bottom: Final drawing for WWTA © Maurice Sendak, 1963. All rights reserved.
© Maurice Sendak, 1963. All rights reserved.

First William Blake, now the Wild Things!   The Maurice Sendak retrospective opens tomorrow at the Morgan Library.  To coincide, the Animazing Gallery presented last Thursday Sendak in SoHo, the world’s largest exhibition & sale of original illustrations from the collection of the legendary artist and author.

Lit.

Speaking of Where the Wild Things Are, Vice Magazine has a WTWTA blog, which presents work from 24 contributing artists inspired by the story.  A little weird because the site is totally in with Warner Bros., but it balances out since they also offer free wallpaper for your iPhone.

Amazon is shelling out $150,000 to the kid whose homework they ate by inexplicably deleting George Orwell, along with the kid’s notes, from the Kindle last July.  Thankfully, the money’s going to charity.

An interactive guide to the 2009 Booker shortlist and its writers.  Sweet.

Israeli novelist Amos Oz is the 4 to 1 favorite for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In high school and college literary curriculum, is Shakespeare the problem?  Or is the problem the fact that we’ve allowed our schools to develop it as such?

Politics

If you’re looking to get educated on the subject, George Packer thoughtfully provides us an Af-Pak reading list to go along with his outstanding piece on Richard Holbrooke from last week’s New Yorker.

The US refused entry to a radical German publisher last weekend and PEN, the international writers’ organization, is not at all happy about it.

Should Chicago be grateful they aren’t hosting the Olympics?

Misc.

Who should patrol the internet?  How can we protect free speech in a digital internet age?

Kant, Nagel, Twain, Nietzsche, and moral responsibility.  Morgan Meis at the Smart Set on why the Polanski debate started 200 years ago.  “The idea of moral luck haunts us because it brings together two things we’re pretty sure are true — that humans are both morally responsible and a product of greater forces — without any clue of how to fit them together.”