How could I not have made the connection before? Parental memoir Oh the Glory of It All, which I don’t want to ever end; and parental memoir “I Bought a Bed,” Donald Antrim’s shockingly lovely 2003 New Yorker essay about life with and without his manically inventive mother. In fact, Antrim’s piece inspired this blog: What do you do when the issue date is long past but the issue is still smoldering? Who do you tell about the review that keeps coming back to you, or the strange melancholy of “Missing a Piece of Your Pattern?”?

But back to the memoirs—both are funny-sad, and both Antrim and Wilsey write with bemusement, clarity, sternly regulated moments of bitterness, and a perfect grasp of the absurd uncontrollability of their circumstances. I think exciting things are happening in nonfiction, and no one would dare call the essay a lost form anymore. Oh the glory of it all!

Categories: Wilsey, NYer, Antrim

Tom Engelhardt and Mark Danner detail the outrages behind and resulting from the Downing Street memos. Danner’s response here to Knight Ridder’s John Walcott also appears in the July 14 New York Review of Books, and Tom Engelhardt’s piece appears on his blog. Here’s Engelhardt:

Let’s just add that if Post editorialists and Times journalists can’t tell the difference between scattered, generally anonymously sourced, pre-war reports that told us of early Bush administration preparations for war and actual documents on the same subject emerging from the highest reaches of the British government, from the highest intelligence figure in that government who had just met with some of the highest figures in the U.S. government, and was immediately reporting back to what, in essence, was a “war cabinet”—well, what can you say?

Danner writes (link is from source):

The Knight Ridder pieces bring up a larger issue. It is a source of some irony that one of the obstacles to gaining recognition for the Downing Street memo in the American press has been the largely unspoken notion among reporters and editors that the story the memo tells is “nothing new.” I say irony because we see in this an odd and familiar narrative from our current world of “frozen scandal”—so-called scandals, that is, in which we have revelation but not a true investigation or punishment: scandals we are forced to live with. A story is told the first time but hardly acknowledged (as with the Knight Ridder piece), largely because the broader story the government is telling drowns it out. When the story is later confirmed by official documents, in this case the Downing Street memorandum, the documents are largely dismissed because they contain “nothing new.”

Part of this comes down to the question of what, in our current political and journalistic world, constitutes a “fact.”… There’s lots more.

Speaking of NYRB, and of widespread (in this case unfounded) panic, did you know about the publishing arm’s reissue of Edward Gorey‘s version of The War of the Worlds? I didn’t, and it looks fantastic! They write:

In 1960, Edward Gorey prepared a set of his inimitable pen-and-ink drawings to illustrate a new edition of [H.G.] Wells’s The War of the Worlds for the legendary Looking Glass Library. Characteristically quirky, elegant, and entrancing, Gorey’s visual take on Wells’s seminal tour de force has been unavailable for close to fifty years. This special hardcover edition from NYRB Classics brings back for today’s readers a richly rewarding collaboration between two modern masters of all that’s wonderful and strange.

When I’m able to post PDFs, I’ll put up my interview with Gorey from just before he died. He collected rusted metal objects and had a tangly garden, and he wore the heaviest rings I’ve ever seen on a real person. When one slipped off and hit the floor, I’m pretty sure it made a dent. He talked long after the tapes ran out (about, for instance, Kenneth Koch and Joyce Carol Oates—those were separate anecdotes), and boy, is he missed.

How We Went to War: What the Downing Street Memos Demonstrate [via History News Network]
What the ‘Downing Street’ Memos Show [Christian Science Monitor]

Categories: Danner, Gorey, Extracurriculars

All over fair Chicago, more toasts to The Clumsiest People in Europe, in the Chicago Tribune and the Sun-Times. Here’s Henry Kisor in the latter:

If you thought Evelyn Waugh and Paul Theroux were the most disagreeable travel writers ever, make room for Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer, an Englishwoman who never left home. Between 1849 and 1854 she published three travel books of singular ill temper. The French, she wrote, “like being smart, but are not very clean.” Russians are “civil, but sly and dishonest, and fond of drinking.” The Irish subscribe to “the Roman Catholic religion. It is a kind of Christian religion, but a very bad kind.”

Nasty as her sentiments were, she delivered them engagingly, and Todd Pruzan has collected the most bizarre into The Clumsiest People in Europe, or: Mrs. Mortimer’s Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World (Bloomsbury, $19.95).

Just the thing to help get through the long wait at airport security.

Judy Holliday on “What’s My Line?” (1958) [Judy Holliday Resource Center]

Categories: Pruzan

Q&A with Sean Wilsey in The Boston Globe. Oh the Glory of It All—which I’m now reading seriously, start to finish—is a marvel. You know how it’s a sin not to read certain books in, say, Italian or Japanese? This one’s worth learning English for. It makes me wish I were still teaching freshman comp. so I could assign some chapters to the little devils. Even the surly, sleepy undergraduates of NYU would be moved, and I hope they’d even wake up enough to see how hysterically funny sincerity can be. It’s inspiring writing, outlandishly true to the state of the post-Baby Boomer mind (often regressed, often old before its time, always kaleidoscopically referential to pop culture, Great Themes, and itself). If you’re married to the idea that your childhood was weird and fractured, filled with hostile mystery, be forewarned: You’re about to become (yikes!) normal.

Categories: Wilsey

Rolling Stone ace Anthony DeCurtis was just on NPR’s Soundcheck, talking to John Schaefer about meeting (two of) the Beatles, the bad moods of Van Morrison, and his new collection of (mostly) music profiles, In Other Words: Artists Talk About Life and Work. Both interviewers had a great time agreeing about the hazards and happy accidents of interviewing, and it was quite charming. Anyway, DeCurtis kept pronouncing the name of his magazine Rollingstone, not Rolling Stone, as I’m accustomed to, and as in “How does it feel/How does it feel/To be on your own/With no direction home/Like a complete unknown/Like a rolling stooone?” Is that the house pronunciation, or what? It now connotes roll ’em, role playing, role model, rather than, you know, stoned. Then again, rolling papers. I guess the gist is still pretty much intact.

Categories: Radio, &c.

Special gossip edition!

“His image as a freak unhealthily obsessed with children is a permanent one,” says Jeffrey Toobin, legal analyst for CNN and a writer for The New Yorker. “There’s nothing he can do to get rid of that.”
—USA Today

To the whole entire world, agitated about what will happen to Michael Jackson now that he has a weird reputation—oh, wait, he had that already—I say, Remember, people, this is the land where fresh P.R. makes it all better, and Time Inc. hails all the wounded. Did you see The Aviator last year? Do you remember what it was about? Yes, the handsome Leo version of a reclusive weirdo who had formerly caused the world to sorrow over his irreparably strange reputation. We won’t be waiting any kind of decades for some pretty young thing to give Jackson the Oscar treatment, because we’re too impatient. Next year seems likely. Toobin again:

“I went into this trial thinking that Michael Jackson was a largely forgotten, irrelevant public figure,” Toobin concedes. “But I soon learned that there’s still a huge amount of interest in him—some in the United States, but especially abroad. It was shocking to me how many people came from outside the country to give him support. And I’ve never had as much interest from CNN International as I did here.”

He might want to consider refreshing the page on Gawker occsionally. Anyway, I don’t have to tell you there are only about a billion examples of people who went crazy, did stuff, got away with it, and are magically more famous than ever. Besides, with E.T. (the extraterrestrial and Liz Taylor) on your side, who the heck are critics? Michael Jackson is America—scarified (like all the men in Hollywood don’t have surgery too), racially and sexually confused, wheedled by the ad world to love child-flesh and told by the law he can’t have it, a slave to his own image, desperate for attention, perpetually 5, love-starved and worshipped, etc., etc. We just can’t, ah, face the man in the mirror.

In other freak-obsessed-with-children news, my sister writes to say she just saw a Freudian typo on E! Online: “Last month, Cruise sent eyebrows skyrocketing with his now infamous appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, during which he bounded around the stage, springing on and off furniture, before sinking to the floor to declare his rapturous admiration for Cruise.” So even if he’s not gay, he does love one man very, very much. ‘Course, if he’s seen All the Right Moves too, I can’t blame him.

How do I love thee, Criterion Collection? Let me count the ways. Today they’re releasing the newly spangled and bedecked Heaven Can Wait (that’s 1943, Warren Beatty fans). Features include:

—New video conversation between film critics Molly Haskell and Andrew Sarris
—Creativity with Bill Moyers: A Portrait of Samson Raphaelson (1982), a 30-minute program exploring the screenwriter’s life and career
—Audio seminar with Raphaelson and film critic Richard Corliss recorded at the Museum of Modern Art in 1977
—Lubitsche home piano recordings
—Original theatrical trailer
—A new essay by film scholar William Paul

And, says Digitally Obsessed:

A surprising amount of supplemental material rounds out this release. In typical Criterion fashion, an insert containing information about the DVD’s transfers and credits starts things off. Featuring an essay by William Paul, the insert is a welcomed addition as the essay gives a good introduction to the film for those who may not be familiar with Ernst Lubitsch’s work. On the disc itself, there are a variety of features showcasing 20th Century Fox’s publicity campaign for the movie. The theatrical trailer is presented with its original narration by Robert Benchley, who delivers some very clever taglines for the film.

I’m excited to see Sarris and Haskell, who were my undergraduate film teachers (along with the aforementioned superscholar and overall mensch Tim Clinton). It might also interest you that the special features on Warner’s Night at the Opera DVD include one “How to Sleep,” one of Benchley’s fun instructional shorts. On the other hand, if you just you put a few of his essay titles in a list, you get a pretty good idea of how a typical bout of Benchley insomnia might have progressed: How to Get Things Done, Picking French Pastry; a Harder Game Than Chess, The Tortures of Week-End Visiting, A Word About Hay Fever, Imagination in the Bathroom, Malignant Mirrors, Uncle Edith’s Ghost Story, The Mystery of the Poisoned Kipper, The Mysteries of Radio, Tiptoeing Down Memory Lane, Browsing Through the Passport, The Dying Thesaurus, How I Create, The Sunday Menace, Looking Shakespeare Over, The Questionnaire Craze, First—Catch Your Criminal, The Wreck of the Sunday Paper, The Correspondent-School Linguist, Naming Our Flowers, Isn’t It Remarkable?, Do Dreams Go By Opposites?, Back to Mozart, Cocktail Hour, Weather Records, Word Torture, My Five- (Or Maybe Six-) Year Plan, My Subconscious, The Menace of Buttered Toast.

Categories: Movies, Benchley

If you were a bad person, this would be your enemies list: the known celebrities who’ve seen Avenue Q (including lots of the Sesame St. principals, like Elmo, Bob, Maria, and Snuffy). Also, this disclaimer:

Adults love AVENUE Q, but they seem a little, er, fuzzy on whether it’s appropriate for kids. We’ll try to clear that up. AVENUE Q is great for teenagers because it’s about real life. It may not be appropriate for young children because AVENUE Q addresses issues like sex, drinking, and surfing the web for porn. It’s hard to say what exact age is right to see AVENUE Q—parents should use their discretion based on the maturity level of their children. But we promise you this—if you DO bring your teenagers to AVENUE Q, they’ll think you’re really cool.

There were lots of excited but confused little kids in the theater both times I saw the show, along with their freaked parents. Sometimes it’s not obvious how one’s neighbors in row W got there, unless they checked off a box somewhere that said “Yes, I like Broadway shows! I’ll show up for anything regardless of content.” Actually, that pretty well describes me (though Broadway tickets aren’t, as everyone knows, for ordinary theater fans anymore, which is offensive), but it wasn’t at all the case for the pissed couple next to me who couldn’t understand what everyone thought was so funny. They didn’t laugh once. That was a shame for everyone.

In other arts news, there’s a new Flux Factory show afoot, this time of cartoonists, on the heels of the big novel-writing installation/experiment. The stylishly drawn website explains the plans of each of the participating artists: Ian Burns, Daupo, Brian Dewan, Andrea Dezso, Michelle Higa & Leah Beeferman, Aya Kakeda, J. Keen, Yunmee Kyong, Jason Little,“Pirate” Brian Matthews, and Doug Skinner. All of them are making machines that suggest “the antique entertainment devices of the 19th century,” like kinetoscopes, a motorized funhouse ride, an “interactive console for creating enigmatic rubber stamp comic strips,” a multilayered rotating mechanical theater, a phenakistiscope (looking forward to seeing what that is), etc. Cool! If all of life were like the Boston Children’s Museum circa 1979, you wouldn’t hear me complaining. The Comix Ex Machina reception is this Friday the 18th, 7 p.m. at the Flux Factory.

Yunmee Kyong’s hand-cranked scroll for the exhibition reminds me of the ingenious book-roll machine invented by big-thinking novelist Allen Kurzweil, which I got to see in action. Kurzweil’s entrancing story of watches, obsessives, and blocked NYPL librarians, The Grand Complication, came out in September 2001, so if you missed it it’s definitely worth looking into now. He also just wrote a kids’ book, I’m happy to see: Leon and the Spitting Image, and the first chapter is here. Leon is a fourth grader at the Ethical School who magically outwits the school bully—could that be in the Randyland School District of The Ethicist‘s dreams?

The SF Examiner, bless its heart, puts the “literary” in “hot literary gossip.” P.J. Cokery writes:

Jerry Matters, who lives in his own Pacific Heights down in Costa Rica, has just completed reading all of Sean Wilsey’s “Oh the Glory of it All.” He has now, with the aid of James Joyce, produced a one-sentence summary of the 496-page memoir of life in the local heights: “They lived, they laughed, they loathed and they left.” Voracious reader Jerry is quick to credit Joyce for the original version of his précis, which occurs in Finnegans Wake, with one telling, deliciously obscure Joycean twist. Joyce—and isn’t Bloomsday, June 16, just around the bend? All hail the master!—wrote, “they lived und laughed ant loved end left. Forsin.” “Forsin” is an ancient word meaning, “burdened by sin.” But of course there is no sin in San Francisco.

The audio version, unabridged, of Wilsey’s book is out, with the narration done by a 38-year-old Shakespearean actor and one-time skateboarding kid out of Southern California, the solid Scott Brick. Brick has narrated more than 200 audio books. His specialty had been science fiction.

You’d be doing yourself a disservice if you didn’t check out Brick’s smokin’ photo. Which reminds me that you ravenous alligators keep searching for “Sean Wilsey photo,” to put up in your locker next to Ricky Schroder, no doubt, so here! Here it is! Little Sean, Al, and Pat Montandon, from the Chronicle‘s nifty gallery. Sean with the Pope (scroll down), from, yes, Children as the Peacemakers Foundation. And not at all least, contemporary Wilsey from Newsday, in a photo taken by my former colleague Ari “Junior” Mintz, one of the sweetest guys around. An adjective also frequently applied to Wilsey, which must have made Ari’s sometimes trying job much easier.

Here’s a question: Is Oh the Glory of It All a bad Father’s Day gift, or not?

Almost completely Lost in the Fog [SF Examiner]

Categories: Wilsey

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.