“Taste worth dying for!”

The Heart Attack Grill in Chandler, Arizona, seems like an outtake from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Key themes: freedom, self-destruction.

[The spokesman just died.]

The decline of the omnivore

“[T]he coveted creature — known for its sensitivity, inquisitiveness and tendency to congregate around galleries and concert halls — is in decline”: Decline of the Omnivore (Miller-McCune, via Arts & Letters Daily).

I’m grateful to my parents for raising my brother and me as omnivores. Every weekend — or so it seemed — our family went off to a museum or historical site. That was hardly the norm on our Brooklyn block, where our day-trips seemed to provoke amused derision among our neighbors. I remember a well-used copy of Murray Polner and Arthur Barron’s Where Shall We Take the Kids?: A Parent’s and Teacher’s Guide to New York City (1961) sitting around the house. Thanks, Mom and Dad.

A poem for the day

Related posts (really)
Alkalize with Alka-Seltzer
Dennison’s Gummed Labels No. 27

A Garry Wills review

“This book, which was featured on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, comes recommended by some famous Big Thinkers”: Garry Wills reviews Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly’s All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age.

For dummies

A Google search that led someone to Orange Crate Art: the mixed up files of Mrs basil e. Frankweiler for dummies. That’s sadder than sparknotes for movies.

If you want to be able to talk and write about From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, read the novel, kid. You’d be a real dummy to cheat yourself by doing otherwise.

A related post
Review: From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

Olivetti again

[“Time Life Inc. photographer Michael Rougier, taking pictures of passing people trying outdoor typewriter at Olivetti Fifth Ave.” Photograph by Peter Stackpole, 1955. Click for a larger view.]

I found this photograph at Life. But it’s also to be found in the Life Photo Archive, where it’s free for non-commercial use. The 1955 Life feature on the outdoor Olivetti, “A Sidewalk Candid Photos Show,” can be found at Google Books.

This post is for my friend Sara, who should find it very meta.

Another Olivetti post
Q.: “Where are you going to get a typewriter?”

HOUSE TO NPR: DROP DEAD

From the PBS NewsHour:

The House of Representatives approved a measure Thursday to bar federal funding of National Public Radio. The bill also prohibits public radio stations from using federal grant money to pay dues to NPR.

The 228-192 vote came mostly along party lines, with most Republicans backing the proposal and nearly all Democrats opposed. Republicans said it was time for the federal government to get out of the radio business.

All but twelve Republicans voted for the bill: seven voted no, one answered “present,” and four did not vote. No Democrat voted for the bill; seven did not vote. Here’s the roll.

My NPR stations, WILL-AM and -FM, are local treasures. If they were to disappear, I’d have little reason to own a radio. I am sorry but not surprised to see that Congressman Tim Johnson (R, Illinois-15) voted to end federal funding of NPR.

A related post
Going to the meeting (A “town hall meeting” with Tim Johnson)

[If the post title doesn’t ring a bell, see here.]

Words from James Joyce

Nations, like individuals, have their egos.

James Joyce, “Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages” (1907)

I’m half-Irish. Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

Q.: “Where are you going to get a typewriter?”

A.:

“In front of the Olivetti place on Fifth Avenue. We passed it twice yesterday. Once when you made us walk from the laundromat. And again when we walked from library to library. It’s bolted to a stand outside the building for everyone to use. You know, sort of a sample of their product. It’s free.”

E.L. Konigsburg, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1967).

The Olivetti showroom stood at 584 Fifth Avenue, between Forty-seventh and Forty-eighth Streets, now the address of a chocolate shop. The outdoor Olivetti seems to have been a longstanding fixture: the New Yorker has brief references to it from 1954 and 1962. Note the modern graphic on the showroom window, lower right.

[Photograph by Michael Rougier, n.d., from Google’s Life Photo Archive. Here’s a photograph of Rougier at work in the showroom.]

Related browsing
A Sidewalk Candid Photos Show (Life, April 11, 1955)
Photographs of the Olivetti showroom
Another photograph of the New York showroom
And one more

Pretty clearly a major inspiration for Apple stores, no?

Review: From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

Reading someone else’s favorite-book-from-childhood can be an occasion of bafflement, akin to the bafflement one might feel about someone else’s choice in love: what does she see in him?¹ The magic of a favorite book might reside not in what’s visible on the page but in long-nurtured devotion that a grown-up newcomer cannot hope to understand.² E.L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1967) though is a book whose magic is easy to see, even through progressive lenses. My wife Elaine Fine loves the novel, and our fellow blogger Bill Madison just wrote about the novel, so I took their enthusiasm as my cue to read the novel. And I’m glad that I did.

Konigsburg’s novel has a premise that should make any right-thinking kid gleeful with excitement: that it’s possible for two children — twelve-year-old Claudia Kincaid and her nine-year-old brother James — to live undetected in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Coming in by train from the Connecticut suburbs, Claudia and James discover the anonymity of life in the city, which works entirely to their advantage. They sleep in the museum, eat at the Automat, type (like the poet Frank O’Hara) on a sample Olivetti, and play in Central Park. Claudia is something of a pre-adolescent Holden Caulfield, in flight from daily routine. James and his pockets full of money are along for the ride. Neither child seems overly concerned about the grown-ups’ reactions: Claudia did after all send home a reassuring letter telling her parents not to call the FBI.

Along the way, there are several mysteries, artistic and human, all of which seem beyond easy solving. Claudia learns much about the inevitability of routine and about what it might mean to be “different” — something she desparately longs to be. And sister and brother begin to feel like a team, “a family of two”: even their nicknames for one another, Claude and Jamie, suggest a blurring of the line that might separate girl from boy, sister from brother. And Konigsburg is doing some very sophisticated things with narrative: that’s where Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler comes in.

A particular pleasure of this novel is Konigsburg’s ear for diction and dialogue. Found change? For Claudia and James, that’s income. Bathroom stalls? They’re booths. The sibling dialogue often sounds like a great American screwball comedy. Here Claudia has just told her brother that their destination is not the woods but a museum:

“Let’s get off this bus and on the train, and I’ll tell you about it.”

Once again James Kincaid felt cheated. “The train! Can’t we even hitchhike to New York?”

“Hitchhike? and take a chance of getting kidnapped or robbed? Or we could even get mugged,” Claudia replied.

“Robbed? Why are you worried about that? It’s mostly my money,” Jamie told her.

“We’re in this together. It’s mostly your money we’re using, but it’s all my idea we’re using. We’ll take the train.”

“Of all the sissy ways to run away and of all the sissy places to run away to. . . .” Jamie mumbled.

He didn’t mumble quite softly enough. Claudia turned on him. “Run away to? How can you run away and to? What kind of language is that?” Claudia asked.

“The American language,” Jamie answered. “American James Kincaidian language.”

From the Mixed-up Files is of course still in print. But could it be newly published as a children’s book today, with a nine-year-old who hums a beer jingle, drinks coffee, and cheats at cards? And a twelve-year-old who brings him with her on the lam? I fear that too many publishers would see the novel as a Bad Influence. Hint: it’s a story, one whose most common side-effect might be a burning desire to spend some time in the Metropolitan Museum of Art — during visiting hours.

¹ Also: What does she see in her? What does he see in her? What does he see in him?

² Here I’ll mention my affection for Clifford Hicks’s Alvin’s Secret Code, whose sentences still move me more than forty years after I first read them.