Notably, it will take shape creatively under Will McRobb (creator of The Adventures of Pete & Pete), who serves as the show’s primary visionary as writer and executive producer. Welsch, joined by Jane Lynch ( Glee) as no-nonsense nanny Ole Golly. The series, hailing from The Jim Henson Company and Rehab Entertainment, will have Beanie Feldstein ( Booksmart) voice the titular role of young Harriet M. You might call Oskar Matzerath a converted stylite.Harriet the Spy is once again set to gather friendship-damaging intelligence, this time in the animated arena, thanks to Apple TV+’s green light for a new series.Īpple TV+ has announced its pickup for a Harriet the Spy animated series, which will directly adapt the iconic 1964 children’s novel of the same name written and illustrated by Louise Fitzhugh. But the stylite’s elevated situation was too static: it would take a diminutive three-year-old Oskar Matzerath to provide both distance and nobility. Its only interesting feature was my quest for a perspective. I left it somewhere, and I remember only fragments, which show, if anything, how much I was influenced by Trakl, Apollinjaire, Ringelnatz, Rilke, and the wretched German translations of Lorca, all at once. He, the stylite, high above them all, looked down, nonchalantly alternating fixed leg and free-moving leg he had found his perspective and expressed it through a volley of metaphors. The small town’s traffic circled round his pillar, friends and enemies gathered, and in the end a whole community was looking up at him. Her attempts to lure him down to earth were supported by a chorus of young girls with mythological hair-dos. His vituperative mother handed up his meals in a dinner pail fixed to a pole.

Right in the middle of his small town (which remained nameless), he therefore built himself a pillar and chained himself to the top.

Even before prosperity erupted, he was disgusted by prosperity and in love with his disgust. A savage, rather haphazardly well read, not afraid of quotation. Along with a number of exceedingly derivative cantos about the pilot Palinurus who fell asleep at the helm, I turned out an endlessly proliferating poem in which Oskar Matzerath, before assuming that name, made his appearance as a stylite saint.Ī young man, an existentialist in accordance with the fashion of the day. I sketched on wrapping paper and, infected with logorrhea, wrote and wrote. In the spring and summer of 1952 I hitch-hiked back and forth across France.

Harriet the spy book cover