A Salinger catalogue

Bessie Glass has just stood up:

She went over to the medicine cabinet. It was stationed above the washbowl, against the wall. She opened its mirror-faced door and surveyed the congested shelves with the eye — or, rather, the masterly squint — of a dedicated medicine-cabinet gardener. Before her, in overly luxuriant rows, was a host, so to speak, of golden pharmaceuticals, plus a few technically less indigenous whatnots. The shelves bore iodine, Mercurochrome, vitamin capsules, dental floss, aspirin, Anacin, Bufferin, Argyrol, Musterole, Ex-Lax, Milk of Magnesia, Sal Hepatica, Aspergum, two Gillette razors, one Schick Injector razor, two tubes of shaving cream, a bent and somewhat torn snapshot of a fat black-and-white cat asleep on a porch railing, three combs, two hairbrushes, a bottle of Wildroot hair ointment, a bottle of Fitch Dandruff Remover, a small, unlabelled box of glycerine suppositories, Vicks Nose Drops, Vicks VapoRub, six bars of castile soap, the stubs of three tickets to a 1946 musical comedy (“Call Me Mister”), a tube of depilatory cream, a box of Kleenex, two seashells, an assortment of used-looking emery boards, two jars of cleansing cream, three pairs of scissors, a nail file, an unclouded blue marble (known to marble shooters, at least in the twenties, as a “purey”), a cream for contracting enlarged pores, a pair of tweezers, the strapless chassis of a girl’s or woman’s gold wristwatch, a box of bicarbonate of soda, a girl’s boarding-school class ring with a chipped onyx stone, a bottle of Stopette — and, inconceivably or no, quite a good deal more.

J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (1961)

Wonderful catalogue, and writer. I like how the deadpan assembling of sentence parts in the first two sentences — “to the medicine cabinet,” “above the washbowl,” “against the wall” — gives way to the overgrown abundance of the sentences that follow. “[D]edicated medicine-cabinet gardener” sounds Nabokovian, as does the joke on Wordsworth’s golden daffodils. Nabokov, it turns out, was an early admirer of Salinger’s writing.

Did you catch the pun in “congested”?

Argyrol? Musterole? Sal Hepatica? Stopette? Stay tuned.

More on these items from a catalogue
Argyrol
Musterole
Sal Hepatica
Stopette

Overheard

In Wal-Mart:

“Come on, Shelby, it’s time to go sniff the soaps.”

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All “Overheard” posts

Attention, Big Lots shoppers

Two Big Lots finds: Barry's Irish Breakfast Tea and PG Tips Tea, each forty bags for $3.00. They might be in a Big Lots near you.

These are excellent teas. Barry’s has an appropriately malty, dark flavor. PG Tips is winey and thirst-quenching and would be great for iced tea if it weren’t February.

From the Barry’s box: “The Irish are the most world’s most discerning tea drinkers with the highest per capita consumption.”

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Serendipitous searching at Big Lots
Sweetzels Spiced Wafers

Muntins, maybe (Hi and Lois)

Problems are worsening on the Hi-Lo line. Shifty muntins are no surprise. But today’s muntins seem to have turned into bars. Either that or there’s a lot of broken glass in the green and snowy bushes.

Get out, Trixie, while you can. Carpe noctem.

[Just so you know, if you’re here via Boing Boing: Hi and Lois posts are a small part of Orange Crate Art.]

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts

“[D]ark, wordy, academic deaths”

Buddy Glass, in a letter to brother Zooey:

On especially black days I sometimes tell myself that if I’d loaded up with degrees when I was able, I might not now be teaching anything quite so collegiate and hopeless as Advanced Writing 24-A. But that’s probably bunk. The cards are stacked (quite properly, I imagine) against all professional aesthetes, and no doubt we all deserve the dark, wordy, academic deaths we all sooner or later die.

J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (1961)

(It’s been years and years since I last looked at this book. And years.)

Clark Terry at the Grammys

Clark and Gwen Terry were visible for a few seconds at the Grammy Awards last night. Those seconds are at YouTube, at least for a little while. Do not be baffled by the clip’s title: Quentin Tarantino announces Clark’s Lifetime Achievement Award right before introducing Drake, Eminem, and Lil Wayne.

My characterization of last night’s telecast, or what I saw of it: Busby Berkeley meets Brave New World. In other words, music as hyper-technologized spectacle. I turned on the radio afterward to have some music while doing the dishes and heard Angela Hewitt’s recording of François Couperin’s Les langueurs tendres. It was the perfect Grammy antidote.

A related post
Clark Terry’s Lifetime Achievement Award

OS X hidden gems

“Have you ever noticed that little dark circle that appears within the close button of a document window in OS X when you have unsaved changes? Yeah, me neither.”

(via Minimal Mac)

Van Dyke Parks in Portland

Van Dyke Parks plays Portland, Oregon, February 10, 2010. Says he, “I’ve decided to go out and flog a lifetime of unpromoted song.”

Eve Shea remembers J.D. Salinger

J.D. Salinger, in a letter to Eve Shea:

I’m cheerless at weddings, but almost entirely, wholly, and I’m convinced it’s not a bad idea at all to spare people I like the sight of me standing around, mostly mute, with a drink I don’t want in my hand.

Shea met Salinger in 1977, when she was thirteen. They were very occasional correspondents for fourteen years. Read more:

Goodbye Uncle Jerry (The Globe and Mail)

Clark Terry’s Lifetime Achievement Award

Trumpeter and flugelhornist Clark Terry is one of seven musicians receiving Lifetime Achievement Awards today from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. The other honorees: Leonard Cohen, Bobby Darin, David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Michael Jackson, Loretta Lynn, and André Previn.

I was lucky to do a radio interview with Clark Terry some years ago, when I was putting in two hours a week playing jazz at my university’s FM station. (The station then aired four hours of classical music and five hours of jazz a day, with bluegrass, blues, hip-hop, indie rock, and reggae in the evenings. Now the station plays “hits.”) Clark was on campus to lead a workshop and perform, and had agreed to come over to the station in the afternoon for an interview. He and I talked for an hour on the air. I consider that hour one the most memorable experiences in my life: the opportunity to talk not only with a great musician but with a great Ellingtonian. It was a really good interview. The interviewer, as you might imagine, had done his homework.

The Grammy Awards air tomorrow night on CBS, 8:00 Eastern Time. I hope that the Lifetime Achievement awardees get more than just a perfunctory roll call. We’ll see.

Related reading
Clark Terry’s website
NARAS press release