Graduations, Tulips and Other Salinger Irritants.

To the list of things that J.D. Salinger found hard to bear, we can now add these: pompous graduation ceremonies and shlepping overseas to see tulips. ''I've been going to graduations, and there isn't much that I find more pretentious or irksome than the sight of 'faculty' and graduates in their academic get-ups,'' he wrote a friend in June 1982, mentioning that it took self-control at one point ''not to gag.'' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]