Wild New Ways

Maurice Sendak, pen and ink, the Bat-Poet Rosenbach Museum and Library

As if all the cemeteries and churches and gargoyles haven’t been enough for you, we have more Gothic in the Hidden City: it’s Maurice Sendak, always a little unsettling, and Dracula at the Rosenbach Museum this month. The Rosenbach, which holds the growing Sendak collection, is also home to Bram Stoker’s notes and outlines for Dracula.

For information on the Rosenbach’s DraculaFest, click HERE.

Maurice Sendak, from Bumble-Ardy

At 83, Sendak keeps producing, and unleashing the sweet torment of Brooklyn in the forties. “Look, life is pretty dreadful most of the time,” he told the Guardian’s Emma Brockes in a lengthy interview in Sunday’s paper. “Even in the country that’s so pretty with the flowers and leaves and sunshine. And I was abandoned when [50 year partner Euguene] died! I’m alone. I feel like an old bubba. And I’m not kind all of the time, I’m not nice all the time.”

Much like James Joyce, the other Rosenbach interrogator of the modern world, Sendak keeps exploring the darkness, searching, he says, for light. And what would that be? A “yummy death.”

About the author

Nathaniel Popkin is co-founder of the Hidden City Daily and author of three books of non-fiction, including Philadelphia: Finding the Hidden City (with Peter Woodall and Joseph E.B. Elliott) and two novels, Everything is Borrowed and Lion and Leopard. He is co-editor of Who Will Speak for America, an anthology forthcoming in June 2018, and the senior writer of the film documentary "Philadelphia: The Great Experiment."

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