Capenter* (for Carpenter*)

Writing about Catcher yesterday has put me in mind of another Salinger story, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters. And calling it Catcher has put me in mind of a couple of movies I greatly enjoyed, The Good Girl with Jennifer Anniston (Justine: "Whatcha readin'?" Holden: "Catcher in the Rye ... I'm named after it." Justine: "What's your name? Catcher?") and Down with Love, in which Renée Zellweger's love/anti-love interest is the publishing mogul "Catcher Block." Catcher in the Rye, you've got to admit, is a very catchy title for a book, and so is Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters. The latter is named after a "fragment" of a poem by the ancient Greek poet Sappho, after whom lesbianism itself was named! The titular line goes: "Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Like Ares comes the bridegroom, taller far than a tall man..." In the Salinger novella (paired with another one, Seymour: An Introduction), Seymour Glass, the Manhattan family's most mysterious and evolved savant, turns out to be a no-show at his own wedding, where his intended, Muriel (a lovely if rather pedestrian "good girl"), patiently awaits. Capenter* (for carpenter*) was found ten times in OhioLINK and 81 times in WorldCat. I won't carp on it, but it'll be a feather in your cap if you can manage to catch a few of these in your own catalog today.

(Fragment of the painting Sappho by Charles Mengin, 1877, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid