1) Yes!

Holden Caufield:

While I was waiting around for Phoebe in the museum, right inside the doors and all, these two little kids came up to me and asked me if I knew where the mummies were. The one little kid, the one that asked me, had his pants open. I told him about it. So he buttoned them up right where he was standing talking to me–he didn't even bother to go behind a post or anything. He killed me. I would've laughed, but I was afraid I'd feel like vomiting again, so I didn't. "Where're the mummies, fella?" the kid said again. "Ya know?"

I horsed around with the two of them a little bit. "The mummies? What're they?" I asked the one kid.

"You know. The mummies–them dead guys. That get buried in them toons and all."

Today's New York Times:

In some ways, the Museum of Natural History’s app is far more sophisticated: Wi-Fi is now set up throughout its building and is used to calculate your location. You can sample the app’s preset tours by asking it to begin near your location. You can request directions to the giant sequoia, the blue whale or a restroom. You can read bits of commentary and share favorite objects with others.

2) No!

Holden Caufield:

I was the only one left in the tomb then. I sort of liked it, in a way. It was so nice and peaceful. Then, all of a sudden, you'd never guess what I saw on the wall. Another "Fuck you." It was written with a red crayon or something, right under the glass part of the wall, under the stones.

That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "Fuck you" right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it'll say "Holden Caulfield" on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it'll say "Fuck you." I'm positive, in fact.

Today's New York Times:

But the app’s limitations overshadow its strengths. The information is generally far less than what appears on the museum’s labels. There is no audio. Even when novel snippets are offered (the Apatosaurus, we read, was mounted “for years” with the “wrong skull”), finding the objects and tapping through several screens is more effort than just walking around and looking. The app also ends up undermining the structure of individual galleries, particularly when they have narratives. The app isolates objects rather than connecting them.

App development goes on.

Because we were so bad at it? Discovered in a 1998 e-mail thread:

Pardon me while I vent. I know I keep saying I love American Lit and especially my discussion, but today I couldn't stand it! It was like everything bad in that class summed up in fifty minutes. We did a close reading of a passage from Frederick Douglass. First of all, a close reading has to be the dumbest form of literary analysis ever to be invented by mankind. Gee, let's go through and analyize every sentence and every possibly meaning it could have. While we're imposing all of our views on the text, why don't we just put our names next to F. Douglass? And, hey, a nice-sounding answer must be a right answer. Come on, folks, can't we all not get along every once in a while?

The class is so touchy-feely; it's sick. And the TA and professor go right along with it. If Holden Caufield was in the class, he'd be smackin these people upside their heads with one of those frozen ducks….

And Lindsay's reply. How we ever ended up blogging, close-reading the Internet, I have no idea. At least, while dumb, we were amused.

To beat someone upside the head with a frozen duck would, in my opinion, be among the most unconventional ways I've ever heard of to make a point.  But I like it.

I know what you mean about close readings.  I asked about them once in sixth grade and was told to be quiet.  Later, as my teachers got smarter as the grades went higher, i was told that it doesn't matter what the author intended, the work is independent.  Whatever.

I say go for the frozen duck!

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.

For half a year now, atop my browser at home, there's sat this link to an article, "Caulfield Preparatory Brings Us Back to School for Fall." The story is a New York magazine brief about a pricey clothing line's debut.

"Three years ago, when designer Vincent Flumiani began his new line, Caulfield Preparatory [pics], it was under the influence of J.D. Salinger and a longing to write his own story of self-discovery. The first men's collection, for fall 2009, is based on a story Flumiani wrote about a young man who runs away on various adventures around the world."

Essentially, Caulfield Prep is a clothing line for phonies. There are fake nautical touches, distressed fabrics, worn-in tees, and even removable crest patches. You can proclaim or hide your brand affiliation each day. The line would be a deliciously ironic statement were it not so serious.

I bookmarked the page to mention the clothes some day but then to talk more about my mom's old hunting hat. The hat is orange-red and has its shape somewhere between a newsboy cap and a hunting hat. I don't know where the hat is now. My guess would be in a box full of hats, stuffed animals and mini-sporting goods my brother and I liked as kids. But I do know the hat was my mom's Holden Caulfield hat.

The red hat is the first thing to leap to mind when I think of Salinger. Before the ducks, before the Glass family, before a first love's love of Esme, before the white-cover paperback that's my first and only copy of Catcher, since leaving me repulsed over any less minimalist cover of the book, when I think of Salinger, I think of pulling down the red hat.

I loved the hat as a kid and played in it. Reaching a high school class, I began to read the book, and my mom told me the hat was her Holden Caulfield hat. At fourteen years, I was stunned. My mom loved a book!

Yes, my mother was a writer. Yes, she and my dad read to me and my brother all the time growing up. Yes, she had quizzed me on spelling words while cooking dinner, let me loose at the library in summer and encouraged the wild storytelling I did then and wish I could recapture now. But this time with the hat was different. Here was a book she'd loved so much she worn it on her head. Now I got to read that book.

Read it, found it thrilling, understood it a little then and so much more later. "Kids tend to hold onto it," a high school English teacher of mine, Mr. L'Etoile, told NPR late today. "This is a book they don't sell." Friend Karen heard this as she drove in Chicago tonight and called to tell me.

In Catcher, another English teacher reminds us, the hat shows up, truly shows up, in chapters three, four, 20 and 25. "What I did was," go the first lines about the thing, "I pulled the old of my hunting hat around to the front, then pulled it way down over my eyes. That way, I couldn't see a goddam thing." On the next page, the hat isn't a deer-shooting hat, Holden jokes, it's a people-shooting hat. Far later in the story, the checkroom girl at the bar gives him his coat. "I showed her my goddam red hunting hat, and she liked it. She made me put it on before I went out, because my hair was still pretty wet. She was all right." To care…

Chapter 25, two pages from the end, I read it tonight and broke down. Holden and Phoebe rode the carousel in Central Park, and it started to rain. "Then what she did — it damn near killed me — she reached in my coat pocket and took out my red hunting hat and put it on my head."

The first time a book moved me was at the end of "Teddy" in Salinger's Nine Stories. The surprise was overwhelming and I must have shouted, skimming the trailing words and walking quickly and off-kilter like I get on adrenaline to the backyard half of the family house where my mom wondered what had made me shout. "That's awful," she had said after I explained, and she was right. The shock was awful and spectacularly so. For the first time since storytelling had instilled fear or excitement from the sheer newness of emotions experienced, since every other child and I had built dimensions and separation, a book had won out. There was some place beyond vocabulary and a character's actions.

My keyboard's black so can't show the hardcover grit my fingertips are leaving there now. One sink scrub hasn't been effective. Literarily club stamped or even printed down at the station weeks ago and released on recognizance, I had to take off the cover because of how distracted I get. I start playing with the paper on the flaps or down at the binding — and did, on page less-than-five ripping the cover slightly – and miss sentences and paragraphs, realizing only when my eyes get blurry or the next page digs into my thumb. But why sweat to draw the stain?

At the family house the other week for my brother's birthday, I tried to tell my mom the prologue of The Song Is You. Prologue was as much as I'd read at the time, and my explanation took forever. A quarter-hour, a few minutes, however long the wooden clock above where I was standing would tell you — or at least the spot where I remember that clock as a child, whether repaintings have changed the wall or not — the roast in the oven would've taken on new table-readiness. "And this all happened in the prologue?" she asked and I said, yes, it was great, only a couple dozen pages, but I began to doubt my memory. Conflating with the first chapter seemed likely, so much had occured. As happy as I'd been to tell the prologue, the feeling was momentary but greater when I looked later. Nine pages, two just halfway filled.

The first line: "Julian Donahue's father was on a Billie Holiday record."

Weeks later, I got to the last line, more in love than ever with music and love itself, briefly victorious over the managed, lasting fears that sent me from the couch to the mouse or fridge or washer-dryer stack at the plot's harder points. I connected with the search for the right note. A first note, next or last, our lead punched and spun his iPod wheel for it, and the world did the same. Yearning had contributed, and balance and a future had come unexpectedly. That the note still mattered… mattered to me. The last line choked me up. I glossed the credits, a vexing buried instantly, and finally got to close the book.

Later, spun and found, my next note was a song I once thought was a first note and far later realized was a last. The song shared the great-as-in-greatness blend of music and love, at least for me, and the pain of failing to want to share it had muddied but not quite subsumed the thrill of discovery. I played the song twice before stepping away to do laundry. The album moved to the next song, respectfully forgettable.

The store is the most fun you can have near O'Hare with an hour to kill and an old car that won't drive highways anymore. American Science & Surplus is exactly what its name leads you to believe, and it knows it.

Blurry blurb says: "Although they neither come from the sea, nor are they mammalian, they are a lot of fun. See! I can make stuff up too!"

The way all picture frames should be sold…

The way all beakers should be sold…

Lindsay tested a Chicken Dance Chicken, and the monster quickly got out of control. Singing, dancing! Where is the off switch? Where is it?

I tried to be good — resisted a steering wheel not knowing how TSA at O'Hare would like it —  but then bought Stickman Action Figure ("Make your own international hazard symbols") and a lightbulb with feet.