At 5:53 AM -0400 on 8/2/99, you wrote: > A guy goes away for a weekend at Otter Lake (where Thurber and White got > drunk one night, and tried to sneak a stolen dinner bell across the widest > stretch of water--which bell is probably STILL somewhere on the bottom of > Otter!, bottomfishers....), Gee, Paul -- Thurber and White being among my favorite writers, I'm tempted to take up the challenge of finding that bell. How crazy does that make me? > Joni Mitchell.... And wondering why no one else knew that Leonard Cohen was > half Catskills and half Charles Baudelaire.... Maybe Scottie's right after > all?).... Ah, Leonard. I have on my desk a lovely British biography by Ira Nadel, the cover of which shows the dashing Mr. Cohen strolling toward the camera in black cape, black pants, and black beret. I don't think it's possible to overrate him. At Madison Square Garden a few nights ago, where I saw Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, some youth was lugging a sign around that said something to the effect of: BOB DYLAN IS THE ONLY SONGWRITER ALMOST AS GOOD AS LEONARD COHEN It was quite a sentiment for a piece of cardboard. I accepted his nearly stepping on me twice, if only because of the sentiment of that sign. > Will, I believe, should be back from Tuscany (where, no doubt, he nibbled > little tidbits of boticelli bananafishfood from the bottom of the Arno....) > any instant, if he's not already back and moving east from Colorado even as > I type.... I'm also eager for his return, because I'm looking forward to > taking him to a World Series Game in the Skydome this October.... He and I are having lunch tomorrow. I shall try to present him with a ceremonial banana, inscribed in spirit by all of you. And in green ink, as if by Allie. His assignment to his class, a couple of days ago, was to listen to the CBC's web page Real Audio version of The Holden Caulfield Fan Club, by the way.... > I think I'm losing it. I tried to explain Seymour's suicide to my wife this > weekend, up at Otter, and for a while I think she thought I was talking > about a real person who once worked at my radio station.... There are people I have known who felt that, given his domestic situation, Seymour's action was the one rational move to make. What did your wife say to all this? Did she make you sleep out on the porch, with the ghosts of Thurber and White around you? (Hell, I would sleep on your cabin porch if I could meet such spirits.) Best regards! But let's hold off on buying baseball tickets just yet (said foolish Tim, whose teams perennially lost, one even going so far as to flee to Los Angeles, which is *quite* lost; they still damn Walter O'Malley in my old neighborhood in Brooklyn, you know). But this is Salinger context, and Salinger was a Polo Grounds fellow, I believe. A Giants fan to the end, no? --tim