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 […]
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 […]
Everyone You Know Someday Will Die
This is going to be unforgivably morbid. A lawsuit has been filed against the Port Authority by the kin of those who died in the 1993 car bombing of the World Trade Center. Without comment on the lawsuit, which has serious merits, one motivation is dubious. According to the NY Times: “Among survivors of the first attack, which left six people dead and more than 1,000 injured, there has long been a feeling of neglect, as if their suffering was not valued as highly as that of the people who endured the horrors of Sept. 11, 2001. There was no federally engineered compensation fund, no blue-ribbon panel to apportion blame.” Well, geez, whose death is as valued as those who perished in the attack on New York four years ago? And what, exactly, is fair about valuing any random death over another? We have in the Gulf Coast devastation wrought […]
“You just don’t fit in.”
Apparently, to soften the blow from being fired from her reality show, contestants on Martha Stewart’s new version of “The Apprentice” will be told, “You just don’t fit in.” Ha! Where have I heard that one before?
Does the NY Times Have a Homophobic Mandate?
Urban life for the straight guy is apparently quite the minefield these days. With all these homosexuals and metrosexuals running around, pinching bottoms and getting pedicures, a regular guy has to be ever-vigilant, lest an innocent dinner with another regular guy friend end in a mutual suck-fest. Thank goodness for those arbiters of social interactions at the NY Times Style section, who this week shine a light on an act that most adult men have been engaging in for as long as we can remember, but, well, might be a little gay: The Man Date. Although the term was admittedly coined for the article, it already comes with a lengthy set of definitions and rules: Simply defined a man date is two heterosexual men socializing without the crutch of business or sports. It is two guys meeting for the kind of outing a straight man might reasonably arrange with a […]
Kitty
I’m haunted by Kitty Genovese, who was murdered 41 years ago, on March 13, 1964. The New York Times reported at the time: For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens. The lede was slightly exaggerated but close enough to the truth to make the neighborhood notorious. You’ve probably read something about the case, and, if not, you can “Google it”. Kitty’s murder has been used as a touchstone or plot point in movies, books, teevee shows and even a famous comic book. It’s been tossed around like a football in various political debates and psychological theories. It’s easy to overlook the life of the young woman who died. Although, I’d known about this crime since I was taught about it in high school, I, like many people, assumed that it […]
To Insure Proper Service
Is it bad manners, bad breeding or consumer alienation in our service economy that makes your typical New York Times reader so fucking stupid? For the second time in recent memory, the Times’ Dining and Wine section has published an article on obvious tipping etiquette. The gist of the message? At the end of the day New York’s delivery rules are pretty basic: Watch your dog. Have your money ready. Tip well, and do it in cash. No fucking duh. Earlier in the year, the Times wrote about a couple of websites where waitstaff complain about bad patrons and reveal (gasp!) that customers who are rude and don’t tip will get a little extra spit in their meal. Have these uppity twits never heard the term “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you?” Is it only we socialists who think that working people deserve respect and decent pay? I’m a […]
Grave Concerns
Today’s newspaper is sure to make one consider some grave options. First, there’s Hunter S. Thompson, who, before blasting himself away on Sunday, left instructions to have his cremated remains blasted from a cannon. Second, is the far more grim news that the New York City medical examiner’s office has given up identifying the remains of 1,161 victims whose bodies could not be identified or were never recovered from the World Trade Center attack. Many families of victims have delayed holding services, awaiting discovery of all or part of their loved ones. Others have buried partial remains only to have more parts discovered later. This post is not meant to take anything away from those families’ grief, or from their desire to mark the lives of the ones they lost. I just don’t understand the need that people feel to have a proper funeral. If I had a spiritual bone […]