Be more like J.D. Salinger, an exemplary role model, who never wore pyjamas in public

The death of reclusive author J.D. Salinger, which coincided last week with the ban placed on shoppers who want to visit a Tesco supermarket while wearing pyjamas, raises an important philosophical issue, namely, “Should I bother to get dressed and go out, or just hang around the house? Or, wait, maybe there’s a third way.”

Salinger’s allegedly hermetic existence in the New Hampshire backwoods was considered inexplicable in our modern age. How could the man call himself a writer if he didn’t appear on the Oprah program, where everyone could see him looking all writerly-like? He Twittered not, neither did he maintain a Facebook page. While other estimable authors, such as the one-time radio traffic-reporter Dini Petty, might be out charming consumers at the Chapters store on Howe Street in Vancouver, Salinger kept well out of the limelight, leading to longstanding rumors that he might be some kind of crank, or dead, or some kind of dead crank.

Other contemporary novelists appropriated the legendary Salinger reticence for their own material. W.P. Kinsella, in his book “Shoeless Joe” did a pretty good job of explaining J.D., or at least an invented version of J.D., to readers, which was something Salinger himself would never dream of doing. Between the time Kinsella’s book was filmed as “Field of Dreams” in 1989, and the time Salinger died, the fictional movie Salinger (played by James Earl Jones, in an out-of-character role) was the only one an entire generation might have been expected to know.

The characters and themes in the Salinger literary canon won’t make much sense to today’s yout’, although that’s not at all what the obituaries are saying. One clueless scribbler, assigned by his editor at Canada’s National Post to find references to Sal in contemporary culture, came back with some truly gut-busting examples (see here). But the baby boomers who suffered, like me, the ancient indignity of having to pretend to read actual books in their high school English classes still seem to have a soft spot for Sal’s “Catcher in the Rye.” That could only be because Holden Caulfield, the novel’s protagonist, was more accessible than the trash-talkers in the rest of the assigned reading — especially Chaucer, that douche-bag.

Nothing is going to mark you as over-the-hill faster than raising the matter of reading, unless you’re talking about reading on the forthcoming Apple iPad, which, we’re told, is something everyone will want to do. Seriously? I’m looking over at the corner of my desk that contains all the expensive technological dust-magnets I never seem to use anymore — my Dell Axim X50v personal digital assistant with wi-fi and Bluetooth, my flyblown old Hewlett Packard 660LX palmtop computer with quaint dial-up modem, other gadgets now worth less than the effort it would take to dispose of them on E-bay – and I’m thinking that I don’t need to scuttle out in my pyjamas to buy an Apple iPad, even if Steve Jobs says it’s a great idea.

I’m certainly not going to be shopping pyjama-clad at the Tesco’s in Cardiff, Wales, where the manager last week explained to the press: “We request that customers do not shop in their PJs or nightgowns… We have listened to customer feedback that it makes them uncomfortable and embarrassed.” Can’t imagine why they’d feel that way. I’ve witnessed increasing incidents involving groups of women – and it always seems to be women – hanging around the public areas of business-class hotels in the US, nonchalantly chatting while eating breakfast in their PJs. I can’t say it makes me uncomfortable or embarrassed, but it does make me remember the name of the hotel, so that I can stay anywhere else next time.

The peculiar practice of wearing sleepwear in public during daylight hours was noted in a 2005 soft-news article picked up by a US wire service. Five years later, it’s a full-blown trend. In Shanghai, the authorities consider it more than a fashion faux-pas, and are keen on curtailing all outdoor activities of the pyjama-clad. A report says the Chinese government regards it as a “loss of face.”

They concur over at Illinois State University, where undergraduates in the marketing and education streams are advised against showing up for lectures in their PJs. And so, all the great educational, social and mercantile institutions of our age seem to be of one mind on the matter of inappropriate dress: They consider it inappropriate. I fully expect other organizations, such as the funeral home operators association, and the United Nations, to weigh in on the subject, issuing edicts advising you not to dress like a babe-in-swathing if you have expectations of being regarded as an emotionally hygienic adult.

Take a tip: Be like J.D. Salinger. Don’t be seen in public wearing your pyjamas. And if you find that instruction overly restricting in any way, why not try being even more like J.D. Salinger, and never be seen at all?

Hell, any Dem could take Ted Kennedy’s senate seat. I’ll bet even Martha Coakley could get elected

Avid motoring expert and pantomime artist, Betsy

Our family dog, recognized in three different neighborhoods as Betsy the Poodle, seems convinced that she is able to drive my car, and is mightily disappointed that she is not routinely allowed the opportunity. She positions herself with forepaws against the steering wheel in the 10-and-2 o’clock position, and impatiently honks the car horn when she deems it necessary or proper, which is to say whenever the mood strikes. She will use her forehead to advance the transmission-shifter in an effort to make the car go faster. You have to appreciate this kind of gusto and verve from a canine life-form weighing around six pounds. But Betsy can still manage to be a dangerous pain in the ass during these situations, and she is not allowed to operate the vehicle.

I was attending a medical meeting in San Diego one time, when a very drunken stranger I’d encountered at an industry reception got it in her head that she’d like to try out my rental car, which may have been an off-yellow Nissan Micra, to see how it handled en route to Mexico. It’s true that I’m seldom a lot of fun at conferences, but I applied the unyielding Rules of Betsy to this inebriate: No! Not drive! But my auto enthusiast was as determined as she was garrulous, and predicted there would be more yuks in store on account of the night still being semi-young. “Will any of this include cleaning vomit off the dashboard?” I wondered. “Because Budget Rent-a-car can be pickier than you’d think, for a company named Budget.” And then something else caught her attention — probably a passing tray of spritzers — and we went our separate ways.

There you have two illustrations of why people like me aren’t in a hurry to hand over control of an automobile to an unqualified operator, just because they insist they’re up to the task. If only the Rules of Betsy had been applied when selecting Martha Coakley as the Democratic Party candidate for Ted Kennedy’s old U.S. Senate seat, this might have been a happier morning-after-the-election, and the course of future political events might seem something other than terrifying. Ted had a few faults, as Ms. Kopechne’s relatives will tell you, but you can’t say that he’d never heard of Curt Schilling.

Commentators agree, in the wake of the Massachusetts upset, that Coakley was a poor choice, and not at all what the people of the Bay State wanted. However, this is what political parties and movements do everywhere: cynically foist their jackass friends on an unimpressed electorate, knowing that the voting outcome can be manipulated and controlled. As much as I dislike what the Republican party stands for (and what they don’t), I’m still a little gratified to think that the sheep will occasionally follow their own instincts, rather than the poor judgement of their herders. Yes, the idea of electing the GOP was questionable, but there can be little denial that Coakley is an awful, disengaged mediocrity, not at all unlike the mute non-entity someone appointed to the Senate from Coakley’s neighboring state: Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. And neither of those two nebbishes could score any lower, under any fair rating system, than the selection of candidates emerging for the upcoming mayoral election in my home town of Toronto. Why don’t we save that part of the discussion for a future date, when I’m feeling a little more up to the task of considering this particular crop of local defectives and hooligans?

In any case, my suggestion to voters in all democracies is that the Rules of Betsy be applied to elections. If you wouldn’t trust an individual with your $20,000 Camry, you really shouldn’t permit them to run the gazillion-dollar economy of your city, state, or country.

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RIP, RBP: Looked like a galoot, wrote as naturally as breathing

A tragic outcome of the shocking election of Republican candidate and now Senator-elect Chumley R. Stupido (R.-Mass.) by Bay State voters was the instant death it induced in  novelist Robert Parker at his home in Cambridge, Mass. Well, actually, it didn’t happen exactly according to that schedule, but Parker surely would have appreciated my manoeuvring events to better suit a dramatic outline. I was late in discovering Parker (who shouldn’t be confused with either Robert Parker the wine writer, or Parker, the single-named character in Don Westlake’s fiction), and didn’t see any of the Spenser for Hire TV programs based on his crime novels. Critics say he lost a step or two or three in later years, when he was grinding out three novels every 12 months, which were snapped up at airport bookstalls, Costco and Sam’s Club. Be that as it may, the guy did some of his best work as he entered his eighth decade. His western novels, a genre he undertook only recently, were surprisingly good, and he continued to branch out and test unexpected themes. Double Play, a book about baseball’s Jackie Robinson, was published in 2005, and may be recommended to anyone as an enjoyable fictionalized history. It’s a tribute to Parker’s accessible, reader-friendly prose that his books were allegedly read in the White House by its attention-challenged former occupant, Pres. Geo. W. Bush, Jnr. In that sense, Parker, an egghead living in liberal-laden Cambridge, Mass., could be eulogized as a uniter, not a divider. His heart gave out this Monday (01-18-10) while he was at his desk, writing another novel, at age 77. That is what’s known as dying with your boots on, and that is the way you want to go, sonny boy, when your time comes.

Knickers in a knot over bad things kept hidden

Madison Avenue decides: Making one's unmentionables tasteful requires losing Charlie Sheen

Now that actor Charlie Sheen has been deemed morally unsuitable to promote a line of under-garments, that would seem to leave the job available for Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the air traveller who seems to know a thing or two about underpants, having flown on Christmas Day with a bomb hidden in his briefs.

Can we pretend I didn’t say that? Cracking wise on such matters can lead to some all-round unpleasantness, as Bill Maher found out. However, putting the terrorism aspect aside, underpants are an inherently funny subject. There was an advertisement for European-manufactured thermal longjohns that used to appear in a magazine I once edited, that depicted a hardy Nordic-style fellow out ice-fishing in his skivvies, with a big wide guffaw spread across his face. The ad copy was spare and convincing: “Damart thermal underwear lets you laugh at the cold!” We’d snicker uncontrollably, just looking at the page proofs. Stupidest ad campaign ever.

But you do your level best not to giggle when the Transportation Security Officer is looking your way, as was the case regarding your correspondent at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix last week. They were letting passengers carry all the usual things on board, including paperback books, which had been banned from some flights for a couple of days following Mr. Abdulmutallab’s attempted mass-murder. I’ll repeat that I have nothing but disapproval for anyone who tries to bomb an airplane, but I fail to see how preventing reading during a five-hour flight adds in any way to passenger safety or contentment. (Those Amazon Kindle things are another matter. Go ahead and outlaw them, if you wish, and not just on airplanes.)

1984 reissue of early Westlake stories

So, I settled in for the duration of the flight with an obscure Donald E. Westlake, which I’d picked up for two bucks in a Mesa strip-mall. Not to accentuate the negative, but, good grief, things look awful in Mesa, a bedroom community that’s home to a couple of hundred thousand blue-collar folks. It’s not just all the closed car dealerships, and there are dozens, or the abandoned and fenced-off shopping malls, and there are many, but I actually witnessed, at a busy intersection, a shuttered Taco Bell. I’ve never seen such a sight. What kind of an economic indicator is it when people can’t spare 59 cents for a bean burrito?

In any case, in a world where you can’t count on much, you can always depend on Don Westlake to help you kill a couple of hours. It has been a year now since he died, last New Year’s eve, just as the University of Chicago Press began reissuing all the books in his Parker series. I recommend them unreservedly. My two-dollar Westlake was an early work, from the 1950s, and bore no similarities to the deeply noir Parkers, but it kept me occupied and even  engrossed until the last page.

Dennis Weaver in prime time

As I slipped the book back into the seat compartment, the fellow positioned to my right, in the window seat, held up the J.J. Jance he’d been skimming. “Want to trade?” he asked. He was a lean Western-type fellow, who looked like Dennis Weaver as McCloud. I suspected the Westlake might be collectable, and I really have no idea what or who J.J. Jance is all about. “What the  hell,” I said. “Sure.”

We exchanged paperbacks. He said he worked for an environmental company, out of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, that assists the Army Corps of Engineers. He said he works outside much of time, and I wondered if he’d ever heard of Damart thermal underwear. Surprisingly, he had.

His name was Nick. He was heading back to Tonawanda, New York, he said, where his company had a contract to work in a neighborhood where the cancer rate has been off the scale during the last three or four generations. His job, he told me, is with a team that is containing and removing radioactive material from the ground. I asked where he learned that specialized skill. University of New Mexico.

I asked, following a slight pause, how the area of Tonawanda came to be radioactive. He looked at me closely, and then he answered: Manhattan Project. Sure enough. It turns out that the deadly gunk left over from constructing the first nuclear bomb was trucked out to upstate New York 65 years ago and stuck in the ground, under a modest clay shield. Now that area residents appear to have been subject to radiation-induced tumors for the past two-thirds of a century, Nick and his bro’s are working six days each week trying to clean up the mess. After the job is done in New York, it’s on to Alaska and then Ohio, and then somewhere else where men in thermal clothing will contend with other environmental outrages in someone else’s backyard.

After the plane landed, I thanked him again for the book-swap, and wished him well. “Sounds like you’re doing some important work,” I said. I gathered up my J.J. Jance and walked out into the Western New York snowstorm, thinking about all the unexpected places various people choose to hide away different things that can kill you.