![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The wild rumpus
Jan. 7th, 2007 06:40 amOn Durham's South Road, at the crossroads where the University Science Site faces the New Inn, there is one of those metal boxes full of electrical stuff: perhaps it's something to do with the traffic lights, but that's just a guess. Sometime last year I noticed that this piece of graffiti had been stencilled onto it, and on Friday I finally managed to pass it on foot, by daylight, and take a photo.
It's Max, of course, from the first textless double-page spread, after he has given the command for the wild rumpus to start: here's a poster based on that image. But he's lost his bushy tail, and he's changed direction. Being inclined to over-analyse, I wonder whether this reversal comes from a sense that forward motion is left-to-right, that it's acceptable for Max to run contrary to this when he's surrounded by wild things dancing around and saluting the moon, but that it looks wrong without this context? Or perhaps the image has been reversed as part of the stencilling (or stencil-making) process?
The same image - I only realised this morning - appears as a magnet on my fridge door. If I ever found myself in Ray Bradbury's post-literate dystopia, obliged to become a book whose text I had learned by heart, I could do worse than become Where the Wild Things Are.
It's Max, of course, from the first textless double-page spread, after he has given the command for the wild rumpus to start: here's a poster based on that image. But he's lost his bushy tail, and he's changed direction. Being inclined to over-analyse, I wonder whether this reversal comes from a sense that forward motion is left-to-right, that it's acceptable for Max to run contrary to this when he's surrounded by wild things dancing around and saluting the moon, but that it looks wrong without this context? Or perhaps the image has been reversed as part of the stencilling (or stencil-making) process?
The same image - I only realised this morning - appears as a magnet on my fridge door. If I ever found myself in Ray Bradbury's post-literate dystopia, obliged to become a book whose text I had learned by heart, I could do worse than become Where the Wild Things Are.
