Management pointers by Lewis Carroll

"Long and painful experience has taught me one great principle in managing business for people, viz, if youQuad at Christ Church, Oxford University want to inspire confidence, give plenty of statistics. It does not matter that they should be accurate, or even intelligble, so long as there are enough of them." Lewis Carroll wrote in Three Years in a Curatorship by One Who Has Tried It (1886).

Among other things that Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) accomplished at Christ Church Oxford was to supervise the Common Room where faculty would gather for afernoon tea, or a glass or claret. He was responsible for ordering the supplies including a stock of wine with more than 20,000 bottles. Being detailed and fastidious, he also looked to improve the ventilation, lighting and furniture in the Commons Room. He describes this as improving "Airs, Glares, and Chairs." He wanted the room to be cheerful and efficient.A Commons Room today for senior students at Christ Church

The pamphlet, Three Years in a Curatorship by One Who Has Tried It, records his attempts to keep the Oxford dons well supplied and contented. With Carroll in command, the Commons room was cheerful and efficient. In no way did it resemble The Mad Tea Party in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

The Witch House in Hollywood, from Weetzie Bat

The legendery witch house, familiar to YA readers from Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat series, is more charming and less frightening in real life.  Quirky, yes.  But sweet and intriguing. When we were in the LA area, we drove around Beverly Hills and easily found it off the main drag, not that far from Beverly Hills High School and Rodeo Drive.  The house is located on an extremely well manicured street filled with beautiful suburban-style houses that have clearly been well maintained and constantly upgraded.  There's something rather amusing that these buildings at first glance seem like typical (almost boring) suburban tract houses.  But then this is Hollywood, land of veneer, so on second glance it's clear that the homes are polished, refabbed to look like the dream of suburbs but better.  Every lawn is clipped perfectly.

The Witch House, in contrast, appears a little scraggly with its wild garden, craggy trees, stretching bushes.  Yet, this landscaping is clearly as well planned as the detailed lawns, just in a different way. In the front, behind the fence is a pleasantly landscaped area that features a pond surrounded by bushes, grasses and plants climbing to the sky.  The people who live here obviously adore their home, but like the messed up look, too.

Signs on the fence read "Keep Out" in typical hardware sign and then there's another one that's carved out of wood that also tells people to keep away, but it's artful, almost like an apology for the first sign.

According to several Hollywood blogs, the house was built in 1921 in Culver City where it served as offices and dressing rooms.  It was moved to this location in 1926 and is a private residence.  The house appears in Clueless.  Alicia Silverstone walks by it after flunking her driving test.  Architect Charles Moore as the "quintessential Hansel and Gretel house."   Aaron Betsky, an architecture critic for the LA Times, has noted that it, "It represents the skills of an experienced form-giver to fantasy more than the scrupulous translation of concerns about function and site into built form that an architect might offer."

The house design reflects the popularity of storybook type houses in the 1920s.  Their creators and owners must have yearned for a combination of European sophistication and mystery while still desiring modern updates.  The village of Riverside, IL, always strikes me as having some homes in that style as well and there's a fairy tale type cottage in Normal, too.

Ever since I read Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat and her description of this unusual, legendery house, I have wanted to see it in person.  I'm glad I did. The Weetzie Bat series is an intriguing contemporary literary fairy tale about modern LA, as I wrote about in “The Rebirth of the Postmodern Flâneur: Notes on the Postmodern Landscape of Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat" in Marvels & Tales.

Unfortunately,  I didn't get to Amoeba Records as we couldn't quite figure out where that was.  The rest of my group found it a day later and said it was amazing.

Mary Blair's "It's a Small World"

Mary Blair's artwork and creative ideas for Disney are legendery.  She had a modernistic, more abstract vision that Walt Disney appreciated but was very different from the drawings in his animated films that are rounder, softer in town and cuter, in a different way.  Blair is so revered at Disney that she is lauded in a special section of Disneyland's museum area as a Creative Innovator.  She's in a hall of luminaries that includes astronauts, inventors, politicians, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney and others.

A chapter in my book, The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children's Literature, has a section critically analyzing a book recently published by Disney that uses Mary Blair's conceptual art for Disney's Alice in Wonderland film along with a text loosely adapted from Lewis Carroll's by children's author Jon Scieszka.  Here's a link to a presentation, with images, based on that chapter.

For this blog on our Disneyland trip, I am posting photos of the "It's a Small World" ride to show what it looked like during the Christmas 2010-2011 season.  The music had been changed to an amalgam of the original "Small World" tune along with Christmas carols.  The dolls and scenery within the ride had been decorated for Christmas to reflect the different culture's Christmas, or end of the year, celebrations. 

A panorama of "It's a Small World" at night

Floating along the front of the ride, while going into the ride buildingThe clock area where the dolls come out and walk around.

Floating into the ride during the day

The ride during the day. It's much whiter and doesn't have the same presence within the park as it does at night.

Inside the ride the colors are bright, the dolls look rather cute, slightly dated but still charming and over the top.

The music is constantly playing, a little like treacle. Note the poinsettias and other holiday decorations

Just happy to be in front of "It's a Small World"

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Disneyland!

Disneyland is still the most magical place on Earth I'm happy to report. Like so many kids who watched Disney's Sunday night TV show, I was fascinated with Disneyland in California.  My parents took our family once, in the late 1960s.  When we arrived in Disneyland, I wanted to go everywhere, see everything that I had seen on television.  Instead, my parents made us stop on Main Street.  Not to watch a parade, or wait in line to see Mickey Mouse, or anything interesting like that.  No.  My parents, always pharmacists, wanted to hang out in the drug store on Main Street USA.  It's not like they hadn't seen drug stores before.  They worked in them.  They even collected a few antique drug store items.  But they couldn't budge for what seemed like an hour as they looked at every detail of that drug store.  I don't remember them complaining something was wrong with it -- as Disney people work hard to get the essence right.  But I do remember being enormously disappointed at my introduction to Disneyland.

This year, my son, my wife and I visited Disneyland before going to MLA in downtown LA.  We have been wanting to go for years.  Some of us have never been and some of us hadn't been for a very long time.  So the experience was new and exuberant for us.  I'll post some of the photos from our trip over a few blog posts.There's always a light in the apartment above the fire station to remember when Walt Disney lived at Disneyland.

Main Street Disneyland at night. The drug store isn't there any more. We did have to check.The fireworks over the castle were particularly spectacular. The firework show told a story and featured a flying Tinkerbell.We had to get our photo taken with the Mad Hatter and Alice, of course.