Rating: 
Summary: Celebrating the imagination-- my favorite children's book!
Review: Twenty-five years after I last read the story of "Harold and the Purple Crayon", I picked up the book again to read it to my four-year-old son. He loved it! Several years later, I picked up a copy again to send to my grandson.... what amazed me about both those times (even with the lengthy intervals between them) was that I had forgotten nothing. The pictures were burned into my mind's eye; the text still a part of my memory. I found that I could recite the story of Harold and his crayon without even looking. This is a true celebration of the imagination, and in my opinion the very best children's book ever! It has a profound impact on adults as well as children, and it is infinitely delightful. (I even learned my very first play-on-words/pun from Crockett Johnson's classic (near the end of the book, when Harold "drew up the covers"). "Harold and the Purple Crayon" is the first and by far the best book in Crockett Johnson's "Harold" series, but it is not necessarily Johnson's best work. That distinction is reserved for his old "Barnaby" series of comic book stories, with the memorable Fairy Godfather Mr. O'Malley (hmmmm... come to think of it: Barnaby and Harold look a lot alike-- could they be related?). If you have children emerging from the theatrical threes and heading into the fabulous fours, try them on "Harold and the Purple Crayon". It is a masterpiece of perfect simplicity and imaginative joy!
Rating:
Summary: Harold et la differance
Review: Under an everpresent crescent moon, Harold's signifying crayon implies the metacritique immanent in all eschatologies: Outcoding the text beneath him, he at once embraces and negates the subject's death in a meeting of poststructural praxis/(post-)modern framing with narrotological desire. Harold, purple crayon firmly in hand, rises from the smoking ruins of continental thought; but having been "written", will our protagonist find fortitude to "write" his way out of the aporias inherent in a de-centered, post-historical dasein? There is hope....The trace, in erasure of its present presence, loops back from Harold to Johnson, engendering ample clues for resistance to our clinical gaze...But the specter of psychoanalytic eschatology haunts his every gesture. Every slippage is deferred, in its deferral, of Harold's problematized Lacan, leaving no indivisible remainder, defying the fatal strategies of his feints (forgetting Baudrillard) to attempt that final erasure of Derrida's (cottage) industry through a (re)sound(ing) metanarratalogical poetic. Outdistancing at every step all Derridean slippage, Harold's gestures in the dark problematize the infinite substitution and free play within a field of signifiers (themselves privileged signifieds of the wall/not-wall of the enclosing space/page), resisting inevitably all attempts at reconstituting envelopes of perfomative (de-)coding. With startling metaphysical elan, Harold slips the bounds of our logocentric world to inscribe traces of an essentialist foundation light-years beyond the binary opposition (re)inscribed by la differance: beyond Freud, with (in) Freud, with(out) Freud, to be about Freud, forgetting Freud. All in all, this "Harold" represents a remarkably vigorous (re)covery of Saussurean categories. This is no boy scribbling terse graffitos to a lost master narratology; this is the newly minted currency of our retinal field.
| 
