A compendium of treasures from the Junior League Thrift Shop

My thrift store of choice, the Pennywise, closes down over the summer since folks are down the shore, up in Maine, out in Colorado or Montana or off to Honduras or Fire Island. My backup thrift store is the Junior League Thrift Shop which recently yielded an oboe cleaning kit (which includes an oboe swath, a cleaning brush/duster, cork grease, a polish cloth, a reed guard, and a thumb cushion all for $3.00), a brand new pair of Saucony running shoes, size 6 ($8.00), two collections of easy pieces for beginning piano players and several books: Julie Powell’s Julie & Julia (subtitled 365 days, 524 recipes, 1 tiny apartment kitchen, and now a major movie starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams!), A Bear Called Paddington by Michael Bond and illustrated by Peggy Fortnum whose ink drawings bristle with energy, Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety, and Kevin Brockmeier’s The Brief History of the Dead.

The thing about the Junior League Thrift Shop is that while prices run a bit high for clothing – a blouse or skirt is usually $8.00, while at Pennywise they usually are about half that – the socioeconomic milieu of donors is such that there is a rack dedicated to Lily Pulitzer clothes, the kids’ selection usually has beautifully tailored dresses and blue blazers in all sizes which is great for those occasions which demand formal presentation of one’s children (or for a Halloween costume of Clark Kent midway in his transformation into Superman) and you can find an huge selection of hardback novels that have recently been at the top of the New York Times best-sellers list, or which were personally inscribed gifts to people connected to the publishing industry, as was the case in The Brief History of the Dead (“To Penelope, with thanks for raising my wonderful editor”).

The Brief History of the Dead opens in a city populated by those who have recently passed over, where folks seem to stay while they’re still part of the living memory of those who are still on earth; while there are a set number of ways in which people can meet their death, every individual’s experience of crossing into this realm is unique: “Lev Paley said that he had watched his atoms break apart like marbles, roll across the universe, then gather themselves together again out of nothing at all. Hanbing Li said that he woke inside the body of an aphid and lived an entire life in the flesh of a single peach. Graciella Cavazos would say only that she began to snow – four words – and smile bashfully whenever anyone pressed her for details.”

The conceit of the book, as far as I can tell being a couple of pages into chapter two which is set in an isolated research station in the Antarctic (though I guess when you’re talking about polar research stations the “isolated” is kind of a given), appears to be that a virulent virus is rapidly emptying out the earth’s population, and all those in the city of the living-dead are disappearing more quickly than the newcomers come in – my guess is that the remaining inhabitants of the city are all folks who are tied in some way, shape, or form to the woman at the station whose two co-workers haven’t returned from an expedition to find help after their communication system breaks down. Thus far, the writing is so pleasing that the conceit doesn’t become the driving force of the book, like those buildings under construction or renovation where all you see is the scaffolding.

Otherwise have been spending time with Daniel Raeburn’s monograph on Chris Ware. I’m liking the fact that Raeburn is conveying Ware’s aesthetic not only through the images of selected works (amazing Joseph Cornell-like constructions, contraptions like a vending machine that spits out a small hand-made comic book when the purchaser inserts a house key, a wedding invitation that can be converted into a rocket if the recipient follows the printed directions) as well as through the tone of Raeburn’s own writing; my favorite line is one where he solemnly announces that given the critical and popular success of Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, “Ware has escaped the comics ghetto. He recently purchased health insurance for himself and his wife, Marnie, as well as a three-bedroom dwelling and a used Honda Civic.”