Domestic comedy

“Nothing says ‘summer’ like a big pot of stew.”

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All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[It’s true too.]

Grammer and spelling

Mark Zuckerberg, inscribing a copy of The Elements of Style: “Now learn some grammer.”

Well, he could have been joking. Hard to say.

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All OCA Elements of Style posts (Pinboard)
Mark Zuckerberg and the Aeneid

Simulacrum alert

[Photograph by Michael Leddy. Click for a larger simulacrum.]

As seen earlier this summer at Garden State Plaza, Paramus, New Jersey.

A previous alert
Minetta Tavern and Monkey Bar

Review: J. D. Salinger, Three Early Stories

J. D. Salinger. Three Early Stories. Illustrated by Anna Rose Yoken. Memphis: Devault-Graves, 2014. $14.95 paperback. $8.99 e-book. $3.95 audio. 69 pages.

Three Early Stories reprints work for which J. D. Salinger, careful though he was, never held copyright: “The Young Folks” (Story, 1940), “Go See Eddie” (University of Kansas City Review, 1940), “Once a Week Won’t Kill You” (Story, 1944). The stories are short, and slight. Gathered here, they make a meager bouquet, but a bouquet nonetheless, and a wondrous one, something rather than nothing. In the first of these stories, a young woman at a party of “noisy young people” works hard to make conversation with a young man whose attention is directed to a “small blonde” who sits on the floor, at some distance. The blonde is laughing and already commanding the attention of at least three other young men. In the second story, a brother attempts to exert authority over his sister’s life by insisting that she give up her married lover and “Go see Eddie” about a job. In the third, a young soldier packs his suitcase and talks with his wife and aunt before shipping out. He struggles about how to tell Aunt Rena (now lost in a placid dementia) that he is leaving. These characters are recognizable as Salinger people: they smoke cigarettes, squint to avoid the smoke from their cigarettes, sip coffee, bite their fingernails. At least two characters are marked by lovely idiosyncrasies: the soldier remembers that his mother always whistled a risqué song through her teeth when drawing the blinds; the soldier’s aunt has started collecting canceled two-cent stamps. We are not far from Jane Gallagher’s habit of keeping her kings in the back row.

Already on display in these stories is Salinger’s ear for the registers of modern American speech. Consider Edna Phillips, the lonely young woman of “The Young Folks,” determined to be cheery and social, insisting with forced gaiety that people and things are grand: “He’s a grand person, don’t you think?” “It’s so grand out here.” “Oh, he’s a grand guy.” (Says Holden Caulfield of “grand”: “There’s a word I really hate.”) Edna later explains with Caulfield-like honesty and awkwardness her thinking about sex: “It’s gotta be the real thing with me. Before, you know. I mean, love and all.” Or consider this exchange between brother and sister:

“Have you ever seen his wife?” Bobby asked.

“Yes-I’ve-seen-his-wife. What about her?”

Or these words from the soldier’s wife:

“Well, I hope at least they send you to London. I mean where there’s some civilized people.”

There’s an element of defensiveness in Salinger’s effort to capture tone by means typography: “It had been three years and she had never stopped talking to him in italics,” the narrator observes. In other words, that’s just how she talks. Salinger’s characters would never stop talking in italics.

Also on display in these stories is Salinger’s indebtedness to Ernest Hemingway. A sentence in “Once a Week” about a woman’s arms — “They were brown and round and good” — is either hapless imitation or fine parody. The real debt to Hemingway in these stories involves narrative silence. Hugh Kenner offers a brilliant characterization of Hemingway’s achievement as a matter of “setting down, so sparely that we can see past them, the words for the action that concealed the real action.” After the distracted male partygoer walks off to pay attention to the blonde, Edna Phillips retreats to a forbidden part of her host’s house (a parental bedroom?), and returns with cigarettes. She is gone nearly twenty minutes: doing what? Grieving her social failure? The sudden violence of brother against sister suggests that the exhortation to “Go see Eddie” is just one more moment in a long history of sibling conflict and sexual tension. The poignance of Aunt Rena’s Miss Havishamish existence and the great losses that lie in her past are left for the reader to infer — or is it only suspect? — from a handful of details.

About the design of Three Early Stories: the cover is promising in its Salingerian austerity, but inside are mistaken choices. The text is printed recto-only in a large thin font (a Goudy Californian, I think), with a ragged right margin and generous space between lines. There are only thirty-two pages of text, and ten full-page illustrations. The design, especially when text and illustration appear side by side, too strongly resembles that of a young reader’s chapter book. This book is of course the first illustrated edition of Salinger, illustrations or annotations having been a requirement for permission to reprint. Anna Rose Yoken, the book’s illustrator, appears to be an artist of genuine ability, but her work here looks unidiomatic, far removed from the sophistication of mid-century commercial illustration. I’d like to see larger margins, a more substantial font, small blocks of text recto and verso, and (if need be) a handful of small line drawings. And one annotation I’d like to see: an explanation of “Tea Gardens” (for “Teagardens,” recordings by Jack Teagarden). Is that Salinger’s joke? Or an error in the original publication?

New Salinger work is supposed to begin arriving in 2015: David Shields and Shane Salerno’s Salinger (2013) describes five volumes to come but makes no mention of the early stories. Will Three Early Stories (and last year’s digital bootleg of three unpublished early stories) move the Salinger estate to consider making all the early work available in book form? I think that’s unlikely. Which makes the legitimate publication of these three stories an even more wondrous thing.

Thanks to the publisher for a review copy of the book.

Related reading
All OCA Salinger posts (Pinboard)

[In The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Holden describes Jane Gallagher’s checkerplay: “What she’d do, when she’d get a king, she wouldn’t move it. She’d just leave it in the back row. She’d get them all lined up in the back row. Then she’d never use them. She just liked the way they looked when they were all in the back row.” Hugh Kenner’s characterization of Hemingway’s achievement appears in A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (1975).]

Stritch wisdom

From the documentary Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me (dir. Chiemi Karasawa, 2013). Elaine Stritch, in the rehearsal room:

“It’s hard enough to remember Sondheim’s lyrics when you don’t have diabetes. But — everybody’s got a sack of rocks, as my husband used to say. One of the best minds in the world. Everybody should think of it.”

And on stage:

“I’m up here, and I’m being given the opportunity to sing one glorious Sondheim song after another. And I'm happy about it. If I forgot my lyrics — fuck it! I’m happy!”

For anyone who is getting older, Just Shoot Me offers excellent food for thought. And as Elaine Stritch seems to have been fond of pointing out, we are all getting older.

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Elaine Stritch (1925–2014)
“Elaine Stritch Arrives in Heaven”
From the local news (A lot of people getting older)

[Transcription and punctuation by me. Elaine Stritch was married to the actor John Bay.]

False needs in the mailbox

“False needs” is our household’s name for the catalogues that come to our mailbox, day after week after month after year:

“Did we get anything?“

”A water bill, a New Yorker, false needs.”

The term comes from Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (1964):

We may distinguish both true and false needs. “False” are those which are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice. . . . Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs.

The term “false needs” is related of course to the Marxist idea of false consciousness.

[Your needs may vary. This post makes no claim as to the truth or falsity of anything beyond the contents of my mailbox.]

On Louis Armstrong’s birthday

“Musician Louis Armstrong waving to the audience seated at back of the stage.” Photograph by John Loengard. Manchester, United Kingdom, 1965. From the Life Photo Archive.

Louis Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901.

WKCR-FM is playing Armstrong all day.

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All Louis Armstrong posts (Pinboard)

Telephone exchange names on screen: GRamercy

[From the Naked City episode “Color Schemes Like Never Before,” May 1, 1963.]

The Naked City also contains at least one pay telephone in the GRamercy exchange. This desk phone is a model 500.

Related reading
All OCA Naked City posts (Pinboard)

More exchange names on screen
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : Born Yesterday : The Dark Corner : Deception : Dream House : The Little Giant : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Naked City (5) : Naked City (6) : Nightmare Alley : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Side Street : Sweet Smell of Success : This Gun for Hire

Metaphors for writing

Walter Benjamin:

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

One-Way Street, in “One-Way Street” and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: NLB, 1979).

This three-part model reminds me of Betty S. Flowers’s four-part model for the work of the writer: madman, architect, carpenter, judge. Flowers’s madman and architect are more or less Benjamin’s composer; her carpenter is his builder. Flowers’s carpenter and judge share the work of Benjamin’s weaver. I think.

What all good writers know is that the work of writing is many kinds of work, not to be attempted all at once.

A related post
Granularity

Domestic comedy

[Watching Food Network not long ago.]

“It’s Perth Amboy!”

“Do you know him?”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[The Food Network sounds better, but it’s Food Network. Go figure. Perth Amboy is a place, not a person. Go figure.]