And here's the red hat
Glad to hear from people through different channels how much they liked the story + existence of the red hat. Following up, thought you'd enjoy seeing it, at right. My dad took my post as a challenge and apparently found the hat in the family house within two minutes. Like father, like son.
And my mom e-mailed detail on the hat's origin. She bought the hat for a sorority rush party where you dressed as your favorite lit character. Continuing her streak of confronting the status quo with Catcher, after previously earning a high school nun's ire for listing the book one fall among her summer reading, she was the only one dressed as Holden.
A few other Salinger-related things I liked running across last week:
-Jody Rosen's favorite Salinger passage, about marbles at dusk.
One late afternoon, at that faintly soupy quarter of an hour in New York when the street lights have just been turned on and the parking lights of cars are just getting turned on—some on, some still off—I was playing curb marbles with a boy named Ira Yankauer, on the farther side of the side street just opposite the canvas canopy of our apartment house. I was eight. I was using Seymour's technique, or trying to—his side flick, his way of widely curving his marble at the other guy's—and I was losing steadily. Steadily but painlessly. For it was the time of day when New York City boys are much like Tiffin, Ohio, boys who hear a distant train whistle just as the last cow is being driven into the barn. At that magic quarter hour, if you lose marbles, you lose just marbles.
-The Onion's pitch-perfect "Bunch Of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger."
-The Rutland Herald, Salinger's local paper, writing about how everyone liked misdirecting people hunting him. Touching stories, too, from all over town. (This story is better than the NYT's follow-up version.)
-The Impossible Cool, just quoting: "An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s."
-Joyce Maynard's "An 18-Year-Old Looks Back On Life," especially after Lindsay reminded me Maynard was her friend Joyce from Guateamala. Wildly precocious power, for her generation but also those to come.
-Among the great number of Salinger status updates and tweets last week, I don't know if I can name a favorite. But it's hard to remember deaths in recent years beyond Salinger's and Michael Jackson's that inspired such broad art-based response. Gawker compiles some.
-And Henry Allen's lede, earning him rights to punch a few more folks.
At the end, with J.D. Salinger dead at 91, we have no memories of him.
That is to say, we have no cranky anecdotes about thrown drinks, no second cousins who once stood next to him at a roulette table, no paparazzi pictures of him with his long face and solemn eyes staring with predatory kindness at some starlet in Malibu (careful not to look at her breasts, of course).
He was a sort of saint to his upscale readers, a foe of the cruel and the vulgar, a practitioner of Zen Buddhism, it was said, a man who in his writing found his masculinity in sensitivity and self-deprecation.
