Re: Academic Salinger Conference Presentation
Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Sat, 13 Mar 1999 20:39:52 -0500
At 2:59 PM -0500 on 3/13/99, you wrote:
> ....in fact, it's almost as sad as the fact that the Dodgers left Brooklyn;
> or the fact that they tore down Ebbet's Field....
Footage of which I saw today! I had to do some recabling of the television
coax, and after reattaching things, I turned on the broadcast end of
things, and there was footage of the tearing down of the old park. They
showed 'em pulling up home plate for the Cooperstown museum.
I'm a bit too young for real-life memories, but I grew up across Prospect
Park from where the Dodgers played. My neighborhood, of course, was
strictly Dodger-ville. My father owned a couple of bars in the
neighborhood, and in my mother's scrapbook is a photograph of a rally/riot
that took place outside the bar -- the crowd was either hanging in effigy a
NY Giant, or Walter O'Malley. (I don't have a copy of the picture, so I
can't be specific about the date.) They took the Dodgers very seriously;
to this day, my mother swears they'll be back (a detail, I confess, torn
raw from a story of mine), and I think she is not the only one in the
borough to think so.
> OSO--Some time ago, I tried to get something going on the topic of Allie's
> baseball mitt. I wondered aloud (if it's possible to do so in cyberspace?)
> what specific poems people thought might have been inscribed thereon. I'm
> sure if CITR had been penned by Buddy Glass instead of Holden Caulfield,
> we'd have been given chapter and verse....
I've always imagined Emily Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop for Death"
and something, anything, by Dylan Thomas.
If Buddy had relayed the information, we'd have another tome: Allie's
Glove: An Introduction. And it might not even make it to the actual
poetry, leaving us all in suspense.
But that's just my suspicion....
--tim