Word: cataloger
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Other doctors are not so squeamish. A Manhattan resident was startled last year when her gynecologist handed her a catalog of nutritional supplements (complete with the physician's vendor number) as part of her annual checkup. "Patients in a doctor's office are in a particularly vulnerable situation," says Dr. John Lantos, a medical ethicist at the University of Chicago. They might feel pressured to buy the products just to please their physician. Wouldn't it be less of a conflict of interest, he wonders, only half in jest, if doctors ran a fast-food restaurant in the lobby...
...easy to compose a parody of the Peterman catalog. Its style, a bubbly kitsch of knowingness, creates surprising little fantasies that are part Harlequin Romance, part Cole Porter lyric, now and then a touch of the bodice-ripper; or when flying high, of Evelyn Waugh--a soigne escapism that is a parody of sophistication, so bad that it is great fun. All that literary ingenuity gone to sell clothes in the mail...and to end up bankrupt, besides. Sunt lacrimae rerum, as an unforgettable 'Cliffie whispered to me that night in the Club Mt. Auburn, just before Joanie Baez came...
...that would have been foolish. MI5 wouldn't have chanced it. Not like this anyway. Still, the man had the right look about him. The windowpane blazer. Nicely non-bureaucratic." Windowpane Blazer. $225. Too much Bond, I think--a little over the top. So is this, from the same catalog: "Fabiana whistled for the stable boy. He came. She whipped her crop against her boot. 'Saddle my horses.' (Tie-back chiffon blouse. $135.)" Then there is the turtleneck sweater from a "Bohemian aunt...says Dylan Thomas gave it to her at 3 a.m. outside the White Horse Tavern...
...trick of the catalog, as art form and selling tool, is to create an idealized world. On the planet J.Crew, for example, it is always the weekend of the Princeton game; translucent blond girls, clones of Mia Farrow long ago, smile at guys who don't tuck their shirts in, and touch the guys (on the calf, for example) in a lightly intimate way that is somehow proprietary. For the summer catalog, the setting switches to some Martha's Vineyard of the mind that, similarly, will know neither death nor gingivitis...
...Perfectly Safe catalog is the least of it. Lid Loc won't scare a kid half to death, which is more than you can say for some other attempts to remove the last scintilla of risk from human experience...