Monthly Archives: June 2005

Roald Dahl Museum Opens

A museum dedicated to Roald Dahl opens tomorrow:

Final preparations were underway today for the opening of a museum and story centre devoted to Roald Dahl. The museum is housed in an old coaching inn in Great Missenden, the Buckinghamshire village where Dahl, who died in 1990, wrote many of his books.
The inn and its yard have been transformed into a series of galleries in which the story of Dahl’s life and work will be told. The museum’s designers have based the centre around the stories and characters from Dahl’s enduringly popular books for children. Younger fans will be delighted by the chocolate doors, the shadowy figure of the BFG and a bench that on closer inspection turns out to be a cunningly disguised crocodile. Read on.

Todd Pruzan on All Things Considered, ~5:50 PM EST

Update: Listen to it now. There’s also an excerpt here—the useful and engaging introduction—which Pruzan expanded into that great New Yorker piece that wasn’t online. Ah, I see, a vast left-wing conspiracy! Not to mention a great picture of ol’ Favell, poor old soul. (A bit more about her here.)

Why would you miss that? You wouldn’t. If you’re lucky, the shade of Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer will join them. Either she’ll be touched to be rediscovered or she’ll be very, very indignant and hurl ethnocentric epithets (read aloud from the book). Tune in at 5:50 (or your local time) and wait for the signal. Then break out the nasty ethnic food of your choice.

William Henry Harrison would not have been safe on the G train

To go with your Gopnik on William Dean Howells, here’s another fabulous Dead Celebrity iTunes Playlist from Minor Tweaks, whose blog is the object of my shy and profound affection. This dead celebrity, who also has three names and the initials “W.H.,” is William Henry Harrison, the ninth president of these United States. Here’s one of Harrison’s Shuffle musts:

“All Shook Down” (The Replacements): A song about failure. As someone who was President of the United States for only a month and accomplished exactly nothing during that short time, I can relate. “They shook my hand as I drowned” is a terrific line. Here are the rest.

For further illumination, a pleasing fact from the White House’s Harrison bio:

When he arrived in Washington in February 1841, Harrison let Daniel Webster edit his Inaugural Address, ornate with classical allusions. Webster obtained some deletions, boasting in a jolly fashion that he had killed “seventeen Roman proconsuls as dead as smelts, every one of them.”

Harrison later caught an awful cold. They didn’t have echinacea then, kids.

A much more prevalent problem in modern life is iPod theft, which the New York City Police Department would like you to know about. They had an officer handing out pamphlets at the Greenpoint Avenue G stop today, and until I get a scanner I have to just, you know, describe things. It’s called “TRANSIT SAFETY: DON’T BECOME A VICTIM! Keeping yourself and your belongings save within the New York Transit System,” and it goes like this:

NYPD SAFETY TIPS AND SUGGESTIONS

WATCH YOUR iPOD [note tender attention to trademark]

LET’S STOP iPOD THEFT [yes, let’s!]

* STAY ALERT
* KEEP YOUR iPOD…
OUT OF SIGHT
* DON’T STAY BY TRAIN DOORS WHEN USING ELECTRONIC DEVICES
* BE ALERT FOR PICKPOCKETS WHEN LISTENING TO MUSIC [that’s the new Jonathan Safran Foer title]
* CHANGE THE EARPIECE COLOR WHEN RIDING IN PUBLIC

Then there’s some stuff about not getting your cell phone nicked (“Don’t let it drop”), and other useful (“Avoid being ‘bumped'”), romantic (“Stay with others…during off-peak hours”), and wishful-thinking (“Protect your personal space”) tips. But iPod is, as Today’s Papers would say, fronted. What a fabulous advertisement! There’s even a huge photo of one to illustrate the iPods whose theft we would like to stop. You know what they say about those most-stolen-car lists—they make everyone want to go out and buy one. As soon as I have an iPod, I’ll try to be alert for pickpockets. Before that, I may become one. I can’t promise anything.

As for Harrison, a safer piece of equipment for his underground adventure might be the iTurntable I’ve written about before. He’d have to travel to 1959 to get it, though.

iTurntable, circa 1959


Afterward, he could keep going and join New Yorker iPod Guy on his lonely bench.

Update: Here it is in glorious, wrinkly 2-D for all you lovely iPoddies and presidential historians. Click to enlarge, and watch your pockets!

Steal different.

The NYPD cares.

Notes from Colonial Williamsburg

Speaking of substances, yesterday I thought I’d buy a highlighter pen, for distinguishing the entries in my datebook (yes, there are PalmPilots; also, I’ve had three and they all had meltdowns; yes, I dropped one on the sidewalk) that are unignorable from those that are merely suggestions. I couldn’t find one, but there were yellow highlighter pipes. This will not aid memory retention in local Parsons students, I fear.

Eaten by the monster of love

Don’t miss this riveting piece by Tony Valenzuela in the L.A. Times about gay men and crystal meth. An HIV-positive man who’s pretty much done it all and lived to tell the sometimes frightful, sometimes troublingly thrilling tale, Valenzuela dramatically and thoughtfully expands the context of why talking about how to kick the habit isn’t enough:

But it is worth noting that in the gay community, the sky is always falling—because it did once, because we fear it might again, and so we shouldn’t be shocked when an alarming number of us respond to endemic fatalism by practicing nihilism by rote.

One doesn’t have to have a problem with drugs or be infected with HIV to feel the painful legacy of AIDS or to know the slow suffocation of homophobia. These cataclysms reside beneath the surface of our skins and come up as boils every time another state writes anti-gay discrimination into its constitution, another school board erases us from textbooks, or more parents teach their children to revile us. The future of drug addiction is all but guaranteed in a population of gay kids growing up in today’s savagely anti-gay, Constitution-hating age of hyperbole.

In case you missed it, here’s Michael Specter’s story in similar territory for The New Yorker.

Wilsey on WNYC today

Love the radio! We’ve been having a happy reunion these past few days.

Here’s the archived show. Wilsey’s a charming speaker—great voice, self-deprecating. He clearly has a highly developed sense of humor (it’s in the book, but it’s revealing to hear these stories told aloud) about the over-the-topness of his family drama. This is not an ungrateful child.

Wilsey on his mother, whose memoir he quotes extensively in Oh the Glory: “She would love to have her book get published!”

Lopate to Wilsey: “You do not dress like the child of wealthy parents,” indicating his T-shirt, and Wilsey laughs. “Yes, well, I was thinking since I was doing a radio show…” and notes that Lopate isn’t wearing a tie.

Lopate: “My brother [Philip] and I often have this argument—should you open yourself up to people slowly, like a rose, or rip off big chunks of yourself at a time, like a loaf of French bread?”

Wilsey on readers outside San Francisco: “Who am I, who are they, to your average reader?”

On book-party-location kerfuffle: “The U.S. miliary ultimately sponsored the party, which is kind of ironic considering my mother’s efforts for peace.”

On his father: “He had a huge file on me in his office.”

On Eggers and McSweeney’s: “I was very lucky—I met Dave out at a bar and we just really hit it off.”

On whether his own young son might someday write a memoir: “I’m being SO nice to him.” Laughs heartily. “He’s got every right to his own opinion, but I’m going to try to be as good a father as I possibly can be.”

Wilsey’s at the Chelsea B&N tonight at 7.

Jonathans Are Illuminated: Something wild

Exclusive interview with Jonathan Coe on the music in his books, Louis Philippe, and his prog phase, on Untouched by Work or Duty, a.k.a. Marlow Riley. Who knows everything that’s going to happen on the L.A. music scene before it happens, and will as likely or not be involved in some way while it’s happening. Read Sasha Frere-Jones on the White Stripes, then turn the virtual page for more White lightning from Marlow. When they say all the kids today think about is what song is coming up next, they’re darn right.