Lit on Deadline

The following is my contribution to Letters to J.D. Salinger (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2002).

Dear J.D. Salinger,

I have searched for clues to your disappearance. When I first read The Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey as a teenager, you had already stopped publishing more than three decades before. I figured you were dead. The fictional worlds you painted—your descriptions of youthful angst over society’s falseness and pressure to confirm—were so harsh and tactile to me. I had come of age after a social era meant to vanquish, or at least expose, the hypocrisy of the gray-flannel elite. But you, who as I learned were much alive, missed taking part in even that social upheaval. You know it didn’t really seem to work much anyway.

Still, I can’t help but wonder why, for so many years, you’ve decided to play your music in the closet of your own making, leaving the rest of the world increasingly deaf. Does it have something to do with the fact that the collective American hearing is damaged, even more so today, by the annoying mantra “You’ve got mail” or the opening bells of the New York Stock Exchange. (I don’t know, maybe you’ve invested well all these years. I’ve never read an interview, however, with J.D. Salinger’s broker.)

I know the cacophony of pop culture is wearing. It’s a worldwide disease born here in this country. Even the mumble of the Jesus Prayer would seem to be better background noise for the anguished, cranky existence so many people feel, but have no idea how to describe in words.

Recently, I reread the two books and looked again for answers. As anyone can see, you don’t owe anyone of us anything, especially when the phony bastards have only multiplied in all these decades. (A faculty member I know recently termed the tenor of the Ivory Tower exchange: “elegant pettiness.”)

But I can’t help but mourn anyway. When Holden Caulfield and Franny became depressed for the right reasons—false loves and sanctioned bullies, cocktail party prattling and adults with thick, gray-wool minds—they also come back for the right reasons. Sure, we never knew if they sold out or fashioned their own, truly alternative paths. They selling-out ideas seems doubtful, and we can only hope modern society wouldn’t have swallowed their souls and given their descendants SUVs to drive. And of course, I can, at least, visit them again and again and hear them speak as they still do to me, and as they hopefully will to my own children some day.

In the end, I guess you, like Holden, decided not to ever tell anybody anything again. But, even so, don’t you miss everybody?

Sincerely,

Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson

It’s here! The full-color iPad tablet and, apparently, it’s a beauty. Hopefully, some of the killer apps will resuscitate the media. Thanks, Steve.

See The New York Times: All The News That’s Fit to Tab

The iPad is “a device that sits between the laptop and the smart phone – and which does certain things better than both of them, like browsing the Web, reading e-books and playing video. There was enormous anticipation leading up to its release on Jan. 27, 2010. Media companies hoped that the device would finally lead to a viable way for them to charge for news, books and other material.

The iPad’s features and specifications, once the stuff of Internet myth, are now sharply in focus: The half-inch thick, 1.5-pound device will feature a 9.7-inch multi-touch screen and is powered by a customized Apple microchip, which it has dubbed A4. The iPad will have the same operating system as the iPhone and access to its 140,000 applications.”

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/ipad/index.html?scp=1-spot&sq=iPad&st=cse

At the ball field near our house, my children run as only kids do—they airplane, zoom, skitter and stalk, pretending to be T Rex or just plain Rex.

To them, it’s simply another place to play.

Then one morning I went for a walk, stepping onto the same diamond—alone. Suddenly, I was seven.

In a quiet moment, touch your toes to the patina dusting home plate. If you played baseball or softball, you will remember:

The sense of wielding a bat too heavy—brushed aluminum muted by rubber.

Squinting at the spinning blur of a ball.

Thump. Crack. Pop or Thud.

I yearned to play shortstop. It seemed romantic, that dancing between bases, never tied to any one spot. I was, instead, out in left field—praying the softballs wouldn’t come my way. Inevitably, the specks would drop from the sky like stitched leather bombs. And I had reason to be afraid. My brother once hurled a baseball that grazed the top of my glove and smashed my lower lip.

Still, in the fourth grade, all my friends were on softball teams. I can picture the photo: Orange jerseys, sunburned faces, me in the first row—peeking from under my cap. My mother stood beside the team, looking so young, brushing back wisps of hair.

I didn’t step onto a field again until I was in my mid-20s—at a company softball game. It was the early days of a doomed relationship. As I stood next to the New Boyfriend—a former ballplayer for the University of Miami Hurricanes—I heard a Thwack. The ball arced over to left field.

Up, Up, Up, and then Down, Down, Down.

I closed my eyes, turned my head, and tried to catch it. With the wrong hand. The bomb landed squarely on top of my naked right thumb. One smashed joint, and, a few days later, a surgical drill and three metal pins. Yet on that Sunday afternoon, on that ballfield in Fort Lauderdale, I didn’t make a sound.

I wasn’t brave. I was embarrassed.

I called my brother. “You never could catch a ball,” he said.

It seems I was less afraid of the ball than I was of making a mistake, any mistake. Today, I look at the three-inch scar on my hand. Will my kids forgive their own imperfections as they grow up? Unlikely.

Because children understand truth in a way only children can: Even though everyone says it’s all just a game—that you’re out there to have fun—everyone really will be disappointed if you mess up.

Dear Steve,

I read a column in The New York Times the other day that implored you to create a tablet that could download magazine and newspaper subscriptions like apps, a sophisticated e-reader of sorts.

“What the world is waiting for,” the Times’ David Carr recently keened to an Apple exec, “is a lightweight device that has a backlit, four-color screen big enough to comfortably read.”

Hear! Hear! I’ve been keening for the same. Millions of us, in fact, would love to read articles and view images on something other than a 2-inch-by-3-inch palm-size screen or an unwieldy laptop. And we’ll pay to do so. You of all people know that cheap apps are all the rage.

Apparently, Steve, you’re making a big product announcement later this month, perhaps along these lines. An iSlate? An iMag? Or an iGutenberg?

Whether this product fills the niche, or evolves, I have a few requests to add to Carr’s plea:

Please make your 21^st century slate beautiful—easy to read and lovely to the touch. Let it be as slim as New York Magazine and as colorful as a full-page Vogue advertisement.  We love to look at Vogue advertisements. And please, please make it a pleasure to hold, a superlight Uber magazine that doesn’t make us hunch over like Monkish scribes chained to scrolls.

Readers will hold it, read it, show it off. Advertisers will love it. And journalism might survive into the next century.

Please enjoy this second Charles Village Observed short essay, written by Johns Hopkins University student Simon Lim, of the Fall ‘09 Introduction to Fiction and Nonfiction (IFN) cohort. — JCS

Yard sales. Where old things find new places to collect dust.

Sunlight sieves its way through a cloudy sky one day in Fall. In the wan glow on a street corner in Charles Village, everything seems older.

A ladder next rests to the door, a heap of tarps and paint buckets on the floor reveal the real reason for this yard sale: Renovation. Littered among the typical secondhand yard sale items: used doorbells, rusted switches, and ancient knobs, all which tell of one-too-many renovation projects gone awry. A cocker spaniel peeks out a window and then vanishes. The work inside clearly entertains him more.

This yard sale is small. A few old chairs sit out front, placed awkwardly, half expecting buyers. A shelf of vintage paperbacks, each book neatly occupying its own plastic sleeve sits next to a table. The table’s array seems oblivious to order, boasting towel bars, pens, light bulbs, light shades and old soda bottles as though they were all somehow related. In a corner, there’s a box stacked with neglected 78 rpm records. Had they been more delicately stored, these worn records might have caught the eye of a collector.

A blue minivan pulls around the corner. A blue floral shirt exits the passenger side, its owner looking out of place. “Excuse me, do you know what’s the name of this part of the city?” He says to the closest man. “Charles Village” was all the courtesy given in return. The blue shirt looks around, and, uninterested, gets back into his minivan and drives off. The drive-by.

“I see you’ve got a bargain! This is it! You’re the one that found it!” the seller says to a white-haired man, who holds up a faded silver tray in one hand and cash in the other. The buyers’ ponytail, a mix of white and silver, akin to his newly purchased tray, bounces down the sidewalk. The quick buyer.

An elderly couple browses, the wife pulls ahead, her eyes fixated on the chairs. The husband, having seen this happen too many times before, exclaims “No chairs! No chairs!” Looking at the sellers, he explains, “She could sell you some chairs!” The wife, a sheepish look on her face, tells her story to the female seller, while her husband does the same to the male. A cheerful exchange of experiences brought upon by years and years of yard sales. The veterans.

Two houses away sits a house. On the front lawn a “For Sale!” sign lists a Realtors contact number. Just below it, another sign stuck into the ground reads “For Rent!” in bold yellow letters. Stuck on the bottom of the For Rent sign is a paper torn from a college notebook. “Free!” Below it sits a green mannequin head and Terry Pratchett’s The Light Fantastic, crudely placed.

My muse is plugged in to her battery recharger out in the garage. She’s sparking some and there’s some smoke too. She’ll be fired up for a new post next week, the first of the new year. Happy holidays to all. Savor some R and R, and we’ll see you next year.

Please enjoy this Charles Village Observed short essay, written by Johns Hopkins University student Irina Usach, of the Fall ‘09 Introduction to Fiction and Nonfiction (IFN) cohort. — JCS

Carma’s Café is flanked by dark apartment buildings, its only identifying feature a small, maroon sign that displays the hours of operation. Sitting at the table closest to the kitchen, a young woman could hear the clanking of pots and pans and smell the beginnings of the soup special: Gazpacho.

“No, Dad, I don’t want to take a self-defense class,” she pleaded.

Her voice was playful, as though she knew her father did not actually expect her to take Kung-Fu or Jujitsu. She looked out the window. Just once, she wished, she could talk to her Dad without an emergency vehicle—sirens blazing—passing by within cell-phone-shot.

“Maybe when I move off campus…no, not next year, the year after…yea, I was saying, maybe I’ll get a dog. A big one.”

She stopped defending Johns Hopkins campus safety for a while and listened to her Dad. Her hands were hungrier than she was and kept grabbing for the straw in her peach Italian soda, hoping that it would make her Panini arrive faster from the kitchen. She eventually started pulling at her heavy sweater, trying to get it off without interrupting her Dad’s monologue. “Alright, Dad, listen, my food’s here, I have to go…love you too. Bye.”

It was clear to every snooping customer that the only reason she called home was to have someone entertain her as she waited for lunch. She ate the sandwich while balancing her chemistry textbook on her lap—the gas equations a substitute for her father’s voice.

Sitting—with her legs crossed under her body, and her sandals marking the floor where her feet should have been—she took small bites of her steak Panini, dripping oil all over the glossy page. Soon after she was done eating, she stuffed the textbook into her bag and her sweater on top of that. She put her cell phone to her earlobe, which has just began to lose its pink glow from earlier and mumbled, “Hey Mom, how’s work?”

As she opened the door of the café, an ambulance hurled itself down St. Paul Street making her strain to hear what was being said.