#Catch 22

[ladybegood]

Martin Sheen photographed by Bob Willoughby on the set of Catch-22 (1970)

[t00thpasteface]

FIGHT THE POWER... GET NAKED

[zanephillips]

CHRISTOPHER ABBOTT Catch-22 (2019) 1.03

[wellntruly]

If you read the novel Catch-22 (1961), about U.S. Army pilots & sundry stationed on a Greek island during World War II, you will encounter this off-hand description during the period where Yossarian is hiding in the field hospital:

At which you will either pause worryingly, or you’re normal.

I am not normal, because I have watched the television show M*A*S*H (1972-1983), about U.S. Army medical staff in a mobile surgical unit during the Korean War, and which features a character called Hawkeye Pierce, who frequently looks like this:

Now this bathrobe, iconic simply, appears red to the observer. However, deep into the run there is a line in which Hawkeye refers to it as "purple"—great consternation. But film cameras and light waves being what they are (capricious, devilish), it could very well be maroon in life. It could very well be maroon. It’s what I assumed after that comment. But what I'd never asked was, what is it made out of? Is that corduroy, could it be corduroy, could this be—

Oh noooooooo!

Why is Hawkeye the only one who is wearing the robe of patients from the last war, I ask you! Is it for the METAPHOR. To make me YELL. Did the costume department make it for him, or did they just already have one on hand in the WWII storage? Wait it wasn't real was it? Where is it, where is this robe!

Well babe, it’s in the Smithsonian:

A) of all, fucking fantastic, could not be a place I more want Alan Alda’s bathrobe as Hawkeye Pierce to be than the National Museum of American History. B) well well well well well, what do we have here:

[sic]

So looking THAT up brings you nothing that makes any sense, even trying to correct for spelling. But not to fear: historical re-enactors are here.

On the website of the “WW2 US Medical Research Centre,” an absolutely delightful combination of words and spelling brought to you by two European history buffs, and that’s Europeans who are obsessed with history, specifically American medical units in the 1940s, there’s a page for pajamas, and why look who’s here:

OH ho oh HO!

“Progressive Coat & Apron Mfg. Co.” is so similarly bizarre that I would be very willing to bet that something like idk, the imperfect process of digitizing thousands of records for a website catalog, could have absolutely resulted in “Agressive Coat and Manufacturing Company.” Which would mean yeah, yeah yeah: vintage World War II, slash Korea, just five years later. It was authentic, what they gave Alda to wear, along with his dog tags.

Just Hawkeye though still, which is what's odd.

BUT HANG ON.

Heeeeey now!

So I was recently reminded that in the pilot episode, but the pilot episode only, Wayne Rogers as Trapper John McIntyre also has the regulation corduroy MD/USA bathrobe! In fact, he actually has what would appear to become Hawkeye’s—observe the location of the embroidery. Pocket, like Hawkeye’s in every robe appearance after this first episode, the robe that ends up in the Smithsonian Museum. Whereas the one with the embroidery on the chest that's hanging above Hawkeye's cot here, a common variant that shows up when you’re searching around on military history websites, after this appearance I believe is seen just once more on a visiting colonel later in the first season, then quietly vanishes. Alda ends up in Trapper's, and stays in it for keeps, while Rogers gets, of all things, a cheery goldenrod terry number.

But like, why. Why just Hawkeye in the WWII surplus robe. Both Doyle and Watson have avenues here that I like to think about. For the Doylist side, I suspect it was a decision of like, this is simply too matchy. It’s 1972, our TV screens are small, we gotta take any chance we can get to distinguish these tall white men constantly wearing the same of two monochrome outfits.

In fact, I actually wonder if there was a world where Trapper might have stayed in the maroon and Hawkeye could have ended up in Henry’s robe.

The light blue & white striped bathrobe McLean Stevenson wore as Henry Blake was sold at auction in 2018, and the item description contains the curious detail of it having a handwritten tag inside reading “Hawkeye.” Well heeeyy again.

And here’s another curious detail:

There was a blue & white striped Army-issue robe as well

Now Henry’s is clearly NOT vintage WWII, lacking the pocket embroidery, being terry cloth, and also of course: pastel. But it’s INTERESTING, isn’t it? They had to have been GOING for that look, with that same unusual collar shape and that multi-stripe patterning.

(Also, for real 'what the hell even IS this color' fun, this militaria collectors purveyor has one of the maroon versions too, with photos you can page though and laugh as it flips between looking clearly purple and clearly red in every other photograph. Cameras!!!)

Anyway now we turn to the Watsonian explanation, which seems to run like this: the men at the 4077 were just casually passing their robes around to each other. It's about the intimacy in the face of war, etc. I can see bathrobes going missing when they bug out, getting stolen from the laundry by Klinger and scrapped for parts, being handed off to a poor cold Korean kid who needs it more, and then they need to get to the showers and one of them is like hey, just take mine, and then it’s his now. And eventually most of them end up in warmer-looking civilian robes than the Army holdovers that were being distributed early on, but Hawkeye, he just hung on to Trapper's.

And as a side effect, still looks like he's been injured in World War II.

[opiepebbles]

read catch-22 i BEG YOU it is so soldier coded

[mysharona1987]

Undocumented immigrants who like Trump: “But when Trump and MAGA talk about deporting illegal immigrants, they mean gang members and criminals. Not us who came here just came to work, make a living and abide by the law.”

Trump and MAGA will point out that by coming here illegally you were already a criminal anyway.

It doesn’t matter if you obey the law and are good, working hard people and helping the economy. You still broke the law by coming in.

Catch 22.

[texaschainsawmascara]

Christopher Abbott, Interview Magazine

[movietonight]

Method and Madness

Catch-22 // M*A*S*H // Hamlet // The Physicists

[stvrmaker]

Gabriels bookshelf, but with my own editions and copies of the books 🫶🏻⭐️ Thanks for my pals @ineffable-detective-agency for helping me come up with some more fun easter eggs to add in 😊💖

[mushroommans-cache]

Where my Catch-22 sufferers at

[ladybegood]

Orson Welles being interviewed by Peter Bogdanovich photographed by Bob Willoughby on the set of Catch-22 (1970)

[t00thpasteface]

really obsessed with the chapter in catch 22 that's dedicated entirely to making a guy named major major major major look as pathetic and miserable and mediocre as possible, as if the name didn't already do that for him. he was born in a wet cardboard box all alone

[cctinsleybaxter]

I do like that Moby Dick is such a patchwork quilt of a book; I've seen people say the same of Catch-22 and i disagree i think it's more like pointillism or a magic eye picture, but Melville was just fucking out here. You can really see the seams and scraps of drafts that no longer fit the final story but are there anyway

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[theygotlost]

fancy some chocolate covered cotton balls?

[shpjarkley]

The Best Prose Writer of the 21st Century Is Writing About Space Lesbians

I don't think I have ever read an author as fearless as Tamsyn Muir. If I have, they have never had the talent to pull off what she does. Her imagery is synesthetic, her syntax is Arachnean, her sentences are dissonant like a maestro's symphony. She's Michael Chabon in one line and Douglas Adams in the next. She's Poe and she's Pukicho. She's the new Shakespeare, complete with sex jokes and pop culture references. The absurdity that her byzantine grammar and archaic language are as parsable as they are visceral is only matched by the absurdity of successfully landing emotional beats that are punctuated by memes (my Alecto prediction is that I will be left sobbing by a sentence that contains "ligma balls").

Muir uses the English language for everything it's worth, reinvents it as a self-aware mosaic of literary history that stretches from antiquity to twenty-first century slang. She has to. The enormity of human love and grief is too vast to be contained within all the languages of the world, let alone one. The praxis of The Locked Tomb mirrors that of Catch-22, for they are united in their foundational tenet: Every atom in the universe put together cannot hold the pain that a single human soul can. Thus time, reality, language - those inadequate vessels of our sorrows - are bent and warped by the gravitational pull of a broken heart. To say it in Muir's own words: "Of such banality was grief made."