J.D. Salinger, the exhibit

Walk through the glass doors of the New York Public Library exhibition titled J.D. Salinger — after checking the phone with which you assumed you could take photographs — and you’ll see a long glass case. Front and center, an elderly manual typewriter, a Royal, in remarkably good condition. To the left, a metal Study-Stand, much the worse for wear, for holding books or manuscript pages. To the right, a cup full of yellow crayons (proto-highlighters) and a pair of wire-frame bifocals. If you’re so disposed (I wasn’t), you can step to the side of the case, turn, crouch, and attempt to see the world through J.D. Salinger’s lenses.

Elaine and I visited this exhibition last week, as part of a day in Manhattan with our friends Jim and Luanne. The NYPL has done the Salinger reader a great service, presenting, among other things, family photographs, a copper bowl made at summer camp, war memorabilia, letters (to William Maxwell, William Shawn, WWII comrades, the occasional member of the public), a film projector and small selection of films (The 39 Steps on enormous reels), pipes, a tin of Balkan Sobranie tobacco, a revolving bookcase (detective fiction, folk medicine, Christian Science, Vedanta, Zen), manuscript pages, recipes, pocket notebooks with typed spiritual texts and Salinger’s handwritten commentary, and — here and there — evidence of a writer long at work after he stopped publishing. See, for instance, a key ring with small tabs (cut from a manila folder?) holding phrases and sentences for use in some work(s) of fiction.

Again and again, the materials of Salinger’s life belie the media image of a hermit or recluse. Did Salinger insist on privacy? Indeed. But here he is, writing with immense kindness to decline an invitation to speak to a graduating high-school class of six. Here he is, writing to a WWII comrade and promising “an enclosure” by overnight mail (the comrade had asked, not for the first time, for financial help). Here he is, sitting in a park in Cornish, New Hampshire. Here he is playing with a grandchild, with shelves of detective fiction and a Sesame Street farm in the background.

This exhibition, assembled by Salinger’s widow Colleen Salinger, and his son Matt Salinger, is a portrait of the artist with some elements absent. There’s nothing here of Salinger’s marriages, nothing of his relationship with Joyce Maynard, almost nothing of his daughter Margaret, whose memoir Dream Catcher offers a pained account of life as her father’s child. And there’s nothing to suggest what unseen writing is forthcoming from the Salinger estate. But the optimist in me (or is it the cynic?) thinks that this exhibition may be meant to stoke interest in some book soon to be announced. That’s me seeing things through my lenses.

Here are links to four reports with photographs or video, from NBC News, The New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, and Voice of America.

And here’s Elaine’s post about our visit.

Related reading
All OCA Salinger posts (Pinboard)

LAFDF

The Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation is accepting donations: “Your gift helps provide tools, equipment and resources for the first responders who are saving lives and property this wildfire season.” Here’s the page for donating.

Walter Mercado (1932?–2019)

“For years, he kept Latino families glued to their televisions as he dramatically revealed their futures, as foretold by the stars”: Walter Mercado, celebrity astrologer, has died in his late eighties. The New York Times has an obituary.

I’d describe Walter Mercado as something of a cross between Liberace and Fulton Sheen. Regalia and piercing eyes. Forty or more years ago, Mercado was a fixture on New York’s WNJU, channel 47. Yes, channel 47, in the days of UHF television. Flipping channels in a motel room a few years ago, I was startled to see Mercado still doing his thing on Univision.

A related post
En mi casa toman Bustelo (Coffee and UHF)

Another delegitimatize

In Mississippi on Friday, Donald Trump stumbled onto the word delegitimatize, which appears in neither Merriam-Webster nor the Oxford English Dictionary, each of which has entries for legtimatize and delegitimize.

So what did I see last night in the November 4 New Yorker, in a Jelani Cobb commentary on Trump?

Observers pointed to the recklessness of his words and to the ways in which delegitimatizing the system might eventually culminate in unrest.

There’s no joke in Cobb’s use of delegitimatize: the magazine arrived in my mailbox before Trump’s Mississippi performance. The thought of Trump and The New Yorker being on the same page usage-wise is, as a wishy-washy observer of politics might say, “troubling.”

Google’s Ngram Viewer shows delegitimize far outpacing delegitimatize in 2008 (the most recent data). The ratio is 90:1. It seems fair to consider delegitimatize as, at best, a needlessly prolix variant, like, say, advisatory for advisory. Donald Trump wouldn’t care. But The New Yorker should.

A related post
New “words”

TMH

[Hi and Lois, November 2, 2019. Click for a larger view.]

I debated whether to post this panel. Elaine’s response — “What is that?” — made the decision easy. That is a colorist’s oversight, turning pajamas into flesh. Too little green and TMH — Too Much Hi. Or else Hi has had his pajama pattern tattooed onto his pasty midsection. And in that case, too, Too Much Hi.

*

I’ve added a close-up below. You can click on it for a larger, better (?) view.

*

Skepticism about the patch abounds in the comments. So I’ve made a fleshy revision. If that patch is supposed to be Hi, I think his pajamas are riding way too low. TML: Too Much Low. But the crossed lines still say to me TMH.


[My revision. Click for a larger view.]

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is by Lester Ruff. Les Ruff: so a cinch, a breeze, a picnic. Duck soup, if you will. A walk in the park, straight to a picnic table where they’re serving duck soup and pieces of cake. Cake made with a Kenner Easy-Bake Oven. It was an easy Saturday.

The puzzle’s pleasures arrived in the form of novel clues and answers — novel, at least, to me. 1-A, nine letters, “Public mention.” 14-D, nine letters, “What home offices might have.” 17-A, nine letters, “What ‘the hoi polloi’ actually is.” 31-D, nine letters, “‘Enterprise’ reckonings.” And especially 13-D, nine letters, “General Pencil product.”

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

New “words”

Foistered, delegitimitize, apprenti. But I’d spell the middle one delegitimatize.

Apprenti : like alumni ? Come to think of it, The Apprentus would the perfect name for a series about a victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

“Something there is,” &c.

As the poet said, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” It’s called a reciprocating saw.

Patience, Fortitude, and feet

Patience and Fortitude are back. And the happy foot/sad foot sign has a home.

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Foot Clinic sign

The Art Theater

The Art Theater (“Art-house cinema in central IL”) has closed for keeps. I wrote this short description in a 2012 post:

The Art offers intelligent programming, atypical and well-priced snacks and drinks, appropriate pre-movie music, minimal advertising, and a terrific sound system. There’s one screen, and the audience comes to pay attention: what a difference that makes.

That description held to the end. The clearest sign of difficulty: movies often became available on DVD from Netflix just a few weeks after the Art had them. In other words, the theater was getting movies at the very end of their run.

My most vivid memories of the Art Theater: Moonlight, RBG, Coffee and Cigarettes, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (tears and sniffles everywhere), Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe, and Fahrenheit 9/11, the only movie I’ve ever seen in a sold-out theater.

Goodbye, Art Theater. Thanks for the movies.