“…and Sweet’s the Air with Curly Smoke…”
I called it a year (and four days) ago. The President of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers, has resigned. I’m reminded, at this time, of my friend and advisor Josh Freeman who was cool to the movement to oust our Queens College President, Allen Lee Sessoms, back in 1999. What comes next is not necessarily better, he reasoned.
It’s not hard to imagine this episode being used in the right-wing assault on the Ivory Tower. Those lefty professors are out of control. They have no respect for their university presidents, or any attempt to establish “standards.”
My, Oh MySpace
This phenomenom of “social networking” websites certainly seems a lot odder when described by the mainstream media. To me and my friends, sites like Friendster and MySpace are harmlessly kooky ways to keep in touch and embarass each other with sarcastic tributary testimonials. They sound a lot more sinister when described by the AP in this wire story on a rash of statutory rape cases in Connecticut:
MySpace, one of several popular social networking sites, is a free service that allows people to create Web sites that can be personalized with information, pictures and movies. Searching for someone is as easy as typing the name of a high school and the photographic results are instantaneous.
…
Some teens keep their personal profiles scant, aimed only at their friends. Others describe their likes and dislikes, from the mundane to the profane, and encourage people to send them messages.“That is a perpetrator’s dream come true,” said Middletown Police Sgt. Bill McKenna.
Worse is the news that Massachusetts’ recent gay bar murderer left behind a personal MySpace profile, as did the ex-girlfriend that he murdered. Both profiles, as of this writing, live on beyond the expiration of their authors. Hers more sympathetic for her role as victim, her vain attempts to disguise advanced age, a blog posting sarcastically titled “oh..yes…plz stalk me, i love it” (someone – perhaps the murderer – was attempting to log in and steal her identity) and the worried comment written by a friend (after she was already killed) saying simply “i love you Jenn! I miss you a lot. I hope everything will be okay =/. I love you.”
My friend, Alan Amalgamated, jokes (half-jokes, really) that when fascism finally comes to America, they won’t have to torture us to get us to name names. We’ve already done that, voluntarily, on MySpace. As it is, my coworkers use MySpace to research members of the bargaining unit during organizing drives and journalists, it seems, search for the names of criminal newsmakers there before going to press.
I really don’t like MySpace. I prefer Friendster, because it’s a simpler, cleaner way to maintain a collection of profiles of friends I rarely see, and the testimonials are more thought-out and composed for posterity. It’s silly, but it’s a silliness that I control and limit.
MySpace – pawn of Rupert Murdoch – is superficial, voyeuristic, utterly commercial and totally juvenile. It aims to be a totality of interweb activity: exhibitionist instant messaging, blogarhea, rate my photo whoredom, music and video filesharing – you name it. It’s your life, youngster, complete with corporate sponsorship. For Gahd’s sake. Get the hell out, before it’s too late!
Finding J.D. Salinger
Shedding itself of Sara Edward-Corbett’s delightful cartoon, “See Saw” and Alexander Cockburn’s enjoyably bilious essays long ago, the NY Press lost the rest of my interest when zinester Jeff Koyen resigned as editor. I’m glad, however, that I caught Sean Manning’s account of scanning a microfiche library of “New Yorker” back issues to read the most famous of J.D. Salinger’s “underpublished” short stories, “Hapworth 16, 1924.”
Salinger had a very formative influence on me as a teenager, and is most responsible for my overuse, as a writer, of asides and adjectives like “awfully,” “lousy” and “terrific.”
I also appreciate to hell the romantic mystery of this crazy guy going off to the country in New Hampshire to write in peace. He’s continued writing every day since he last published “Hapworth” in 1965. Some accounts have him as completing three whole novels. Others, more likely in my opinion, have him completing hundreds of short stories centered on the Glass family. One wonders just how bizarre these stories must grow with the passing of time, and with the elderly Jerome Salinger’s estrangement from regular society. Do his later stories focus on the kids, and grandkids, of Boo Boo, Franny and Zooey? Do those grandkids still talk like hyper-intelligent fantasies of the writer’s imagination? Do they sound like they haven’t left the house since 1965?
One day, after Salinger’s passing, we will know the answers to these questions when his work of the last forty years is finally published posthumously. In the meantime, we content ourselves with bootleg republished collections of the short stories that he published before 1965, the most famous of which appeared in an actual hardbound edition in the 1970’s, and was sued and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law that remaining copies command a princely sum. These short strories include some masterworks that were curiously left off of “Nine Stories,” as well as odd early uses of character names that would become more familiar later (Most notably, a hard-boiled sergeant named Vincent Caufield, whose “crazy” younger brother Holden goes MIA after D-Day), as well as early drafts of chapters from “Catcher.” One of these, “I’m Crazy,” includes an additional sister, a toddler named Olivia who asks her 15-year-old brother for olives (because he mixes martinis for himself on the sly?).
If I seem overly familiar with this material that hasn’t been mass produced since the 1940’s, it’s because I did my own equivalent of microfiche searching. Early in the popular Internet age, I searched for Salinger’s underpublished short stories and found a website that published the scanned and misspelled text of the lot of them. I promptly downloaded and saved them for posterity, assuming that the website would soon be sued out of existence.
It was an enormous pleasure finally reading these stories that I had long heard about. I suspect, sadly, that Salinger’s “new” material will never match what he published when he was still young and still a part of society.
My favorite story, “A Young Girl in 1941 With No Waist At All,” is a typically wonderful coming of age story. It features a teenager on a cruise with her fiance’s mother. The power of the story is communicated in details, side comments and awkward silences in the dialogue. To spare you a search for “Mademoiselle’s” microfiche catalogue, or to spur you on in your search, here is a legally permissable 479 word sample:
“I just don’t want to get married to anybody yet.”
“Well! This is certainly very – unusual – Barbara. Carl loves you a great, great deal, dear.”
“I’m sorry. Honestly.”
There was a very brief silence. Mrs. Odenhearn shattered it. “You must do,” she said suddenly, “what you think right, dear. I’m sure that if Carl were here he’d be a very, very hurt boy. On the other hand-”
Barbara listened. It amounted to an interruption, she listened so intently.
“On the other hand,” said Mrs. Odenhearn, “it’s always the best way to rectify a mistake before it’s made. If you’ve given this matter a great, great deal of thought I’m sure Carl will be the last to blame you, dear.”
The ship’s library novel, upset by Mrs. Odenhearn’s vigorous elbow, fell from the night table to the floor. Barbara heard her pick it up.
“You sleep now, dear. We’ll see when the sun’s shining beautifully how we feel about things. I want you to think of me as you would of your own mother if she were alive. I want so to help you understand your own mind,” said Mrs. Odenhearn, and added: “Of course, I know that one can’t alter children’s minds so easily these days, once they’re made up. And I do know you have a great, great character.”
When Barbara heard the light snap off, she opened her eyes. She got out of bed and went into the bathroom. She came out almost at once, wearing a robe and slippers, and spoke to Mrs. Odenhearn in the darkness.
“I’m just going on the deck for a little while.”
“What do you have on?”
“My robe and slippers. It’s all right. Everyone’s asleep.”
Mrs. Odenhearn flicked on the table light again. She looked at Barbara acutely, neither approving nor disapproving. Her look said, “All right. It’s over. I can hardly contain myself, I’m so happy. You’re on your own for the rest of the cruise. Just don’t disgrace or embarrass me.” Barbara read the look faultlessly.
“Good-by.”
“Don’t catch cold, dear.”
Barbara shut the door behind her and began to walk through the silent, lighted passages. She climbed the steps to A deck and walked through the concert lounge, using the aisle a cleaning squad had left between the stacked bodies of easy chairs. In less than four months’ time there would be no easy chairs in the concert lounge. Instead, more than three hundred enlisted men would be arranged wakefully on their backs across the floor.
High above on the promenade deck, for nearly an hour Barbara stood at the portside rail. Despite her cotton pajamas and rayon robe there was no danger of her catching cold. The fragile hour was a carrier of many things, but Barbara was now exclusively susceptible to the difficult counterpoint sounding just past the last minutes of her girlhood.
An Observation About Rockville Centre
Rockville Centre is, I believe, one of the “Five Towns” on Long Island. I’m not exactly sure what the other four towns are, except that one is Valley Stream, and that they all focus around shopping malls, the Long Island Rail Road and a shitty college.
Actually, I’m pretty sure at this point that Rockville Centre is not a town at all, but an incorporated village. Nassau county has lots of incorporated villages. I’m not really sure what their function is, but they all seem to have police departments whose main function is to write traffic and parking tickets.
The actual governmental structure of Nassau seems to consist of a county legislature and executive, who can establish prevailing wage laws like the NY City Council and…well, I’m sure they can do other things, too. Within the county, are three major townships (Hempstead, North Hempstead and Oyster Bay), which manage some public housing for seniors, maybe collect taxes and might even collect garbage. I’m vague on these details. Within Nassau are two independent cities, Glen Cove and Long Beach, which act like any other city that lies within the borders of a county (rather than encompassing five entire counties). While I’m still unclear on how these borders and responsibilities overlap, I’m impressed that I’ve learned this much in the space of two weeks, after living two and a half decades in such close proximity to the edge of the world. I figured this information would be a lesson, of sorts, to my readers, which is why I share it.
My observation about Rockville Centre is that residents actually press the “pedestrian waiting” button at street light intersections! Consistently. Reliably. Their naive faith in governmental authority is enviable.
I’m sure you’re familiar with these buttons. Accompanied by a sign that says something along the lines of “Press button and wait for green light,” these are the busy-work doohickies that can be found at most city streetlight intersections. Seasoned city slickers probably allow themselves a private chuckle when someone actually presses the button, expecting a green light light that will come sooner than that crazy scheduled light change.
In New York City, at least, we have have two buttons on any corner; you known, to signal which direction you intend to cross, north or east, south or west.
In Rockville Centre, they have only one button per corner. How this is supposed to tell the computerized traffic gods which light you hope to turn which color is beyond me, but the fact that residents – seniors, workers, businessman, school children and crossing guards, alike – dependably press this button while waiting for a light change kinda warms my heart. I envy that naive faith in truth in advertising, governmental honesty and patience as a virtue.
Come to think of it, I saw a lot of Bush re-election bumper stickers there, too.