If you hate J.D. Salinger sooooooo much, (January 2010: RIP)

I like JDS a lot and have never seen TRT.

Is this dumbo question just an excuse to start another thread on TRT so that its position as 'most threaded' will be the more unassailable?

PS / definitive a/c of TRT will come from the shaking pen of Edna W: oh yes.

I'm just curious about what people perceive as the comparative strengths and weaknesses of the two as they deal with such similar themes.

also films and books are actually different fritz

also trt is FUNNY which i do not recall salnger being much (but i haf not read f&z for c.20 years

Right again, Mr. Sinker.

And I think there's a substantial part of this that is based on book- hate. Anderson uses lots of cute distancing devices that reassure us that this is just a movie, just an entertainment, whereas the Salinger books make people uncomfortable because they are meant to be taken seriously - and I (like a lot of others I think) have a hard time taking the adolescent mysticism of Franny & Zooey and 9 Stories seriously anymore. But I don't hate them.

But what did Dr Vick think?

actually what trt mostly reminded me of is ELOISE (see other thread), a FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR better book than catcher in the rye, funny and sad and moving and subtly angry and intelligent (none of which apply to CitR)

I've not read any Salinger, not seen any Anderson.

CiTR arguments are kind of a side issue, since TRT is very close to 9 Stories/F&Z but not much to do with CiTR. But most of the ILE criticism did focus on CiTR, so fair enough.

(gabba gabba one of us one of us)

but can surely SOMETIMES be when used in phrase "cute distancing devices": ie "well very cute no doubt, but ultimately trivial and unserious blah blah"

someone else said to, re TRT: "It's very John Irving" — which is a MUCH WORSE DISS (not that i've EVER read Garp). blimey now i come to think of it i think it was dr vick...!!

i think i like the trick of making something appear less serious — eg adopting the genre-form of a (brilliant brilliant) child's book — in order to intensify the darkness the characters themselves are after all in denial about, once you actually recognise it (as opposed to bigging up the seriousness, in order to "make a statement about the phoniness of society" or whatever). Best recall I was mr punk-rock-at-17 when i read CitR also...

What consensus? You silly billy. I happen to disagree with everyone on ILx about everything.

sheesh. that would be Margot/Franny, I suppose, but I don't really even know if the parallel holds water.

Still even beyond the obvious family-of-geniuses parallel, there are some substantial plot elements that are shared in the film and the books, especially the hint of repressed romantic interest between siblings & the suicide (attempt) of the most beloved brother.

And while "Tenenbaums" does have more gags, the humourlessness of Salinger's stuff is being overstated of ILE. And, nonstop laffs aside, the film is a pretty melancholy piece of work too.

Anyway, I'm sure everyone's sick of tenenbaum talk anyway.

Though this does bring up a point, how come certain artists bring up such reactions? There are certain people who if you don't like them, their fans get very touchy about it. I'm fans of a couple artists like that, and sometimes it cracks me the fuck up, especially since I'm specifically thinking about Madonna, who gets uppity about Madonna for christ's sake?

My question, though: just judging by age, it seems like Salinger's bound to pass on quite soon (born 1919), at which point someone will open up the floor-to-ceiling vaults in his home and find the majority of his life's work. Do you think it'll be any good? A life of great works tumbled out at once, or a pile of weirdness and religious rambling from the guy in the woodshed? I get the feeling the Glass family stuff quickly exhausted him into intricacy and navel-gazing (per Seymour: An Introduction and the writing of a novella-length letter by seven-year-old Seymour), but he has novels up there! About other stuff!

i'd love some of this stuff to see the light of day in spite of the fact that i never finished "Seymour" and barely started "Hapworth" (which i think is the novel length letter you referred to). i'm interested in Zooey though - i could read much more about him.

you really think he has unfinished novels that are not about the glass's?

http://www.freeweb.hu/tchl/salinger/hapworth.html

currently it's listed publishing date is january 2009.

The all-powerful world-wide library catalog tells me that "Hapworth 16, 1924" was republished in 1997 by Orchises.

xpost

theres some really great short stories in that collection, its pretty easy to find on the internet as well

I dunno -- his main discomforts seem to be with the idea of a writer being around and alive along with his work, not any great sense of lasting personal privacy about the work itself. Most accounts have him archiving all his work in giant safes, complete with labels on how finished they are or what he wants done with them. It seems a bit like he's happy with the idea of kicking off and being blissfully absent from the part where people actually read the stuff and have opinions about it.

LOL PWN3D U R ALL GAYYYYYYYYY I DRANK PEE 2NITE LOL LOL

margaret salinger says in her book that JDS has a bunch of manuscripts ready for publication when he dies; hopefully he won't get pissy about her revealing this and decide to just junk the whole thing.

anyway yeah, what a weird thread. imagine thinking salinger is humorless!

I read his first available story online the other day, "The Young Folks," and it's funny how much it really does come across as "gifted" -- it's practically an exercise, and there's nothing really to it apart from his ear for dialogue, and yet this turn comes along and the characters seem remarkable and affecting.

Salinger's apparently passed on, according to his son.

This via the AP, no further details yet.

damn... that's sad.

wow. RIP. i wonder if his rumored safe full of writing will ever emerge

Guardian has it as BREAKING NEWS. Proper thread?

Feel free.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/top/all/6840095.html

if you hate J.D. Salinger sooooooo much, you must be happy now

wow.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/jd-salinger-91-is-dead/

can we get a mod to change the thread title?

or, perhaps, add an RIP

"If you hate J.D. Salinger sooooooo much, RIP"

oh man RIP. what a writer

just noting that, if this is going to be the Salinger RIP thread, it would be good if the title in some way reflected that so that people skimming Site New Answers know why this is being bumped

so wondering what's gonna happen next.

I need to read 'For Esme with love and squalor' tonight.

I wasn't making fun of you ksh, I just am amused by that thread title.

I really liked him on Fun House. One of the all-time great redhead announcers, up there with Alan Kalter even (not really though).

rip

He was dead to me years ago.

*storms out of room*

RIP

wow - hardly the end of an era, but the sealing-off of a great living mystery, anyway.

wow. RIP. i wonder if his rumored safe full of writing will ever emerge

kinda hope not. unless he was secretly stoked to have something published after he died & left explicit instructions about it. I really dislike the ghoulish "he's dead, now we get full access!" thing that happens with writers.

ya but come on dude if he has 15 glass novels in there

this of course http://www.theonion.com/content/news/new_terminator_movie_brings_j_d

RIP

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/28/AR2010012803177.html

Salinger's alleged adoration of children apparently did not extend to his own. In 2000, daughter Margaret Salinger's "Dreamcatcher" portrayed the writer as an unpleasant recluse who drank his own urine and spoke in tongues.

Oh.

I gotta admit, I've been hoping for this day for a long time, just to see if any new work surfaces post-death. He's not my favorite writer in the world, (though I am awfully fond of Franny and Zooey), but the idea that he may have been quietly constructing these incredibly intricate Glass family histories for decades makes me kind of giddy.

i should have clarified, sorry. i remember hearing somewhere that he planned to release all the stuff in the safe after he died--but if he doesn't want it relased, i don't think it should be

how is that incompatible wiht love of children xxp

did not like the royal tennenbaums

No, you're quoting from Brian Eno's diary.

"Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody." --Holden Caulfield

This is going to make it a little easier to get Howard Zinn books this weekend at the library.

I've been saying for years that I can't wait for this bastard to kick it, just for the potential of all the new work.

― jaymc (jaymc), Thursday, September 14, 2006 4:02 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

...it seems like Salinger's bound to pass on quite soon...

― nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, September 14, 2006 8:28 AM (3 years ago)

Nabisco OTM!

xpost:

Nicole: :-)

as far as publishing any manuscripts he has lying around posthumously, i think that would be a dick move, especially in this case where he's made it really clear that he doesn't want any of it published

When did that matter?

there isn't much I feel quite as strongly about as the right of a dead author to remain forever silent - it depresses me that if a writer doesn't want people vampiring all his juvenilia & false starts etc he has to physically erase every trace of it

pointless windmill to tilt at I know but it's such a bummer to me, it's like "he doesn't care now, 'cause he's dead, gimme gimme" levels of grotesque to me

well he hasn't made it real clear what he wants to do so let's not jump to conclusions

there isn't much I feel quite as strongly about as the right of a dead author to remain forever silent - it depresses me that if a writer doesn't want people vampiring all his juvenilia & false starts etc he has to physically erase every trace of it

pointless windmill to tilt at I know but it's such a bummer to me, it's like "he doesn't care now, 'cause he's dead, gimme gimme" levels of grotesque to me

― Lee Dorrian Gray (J0hn D.), Thursday, January 28, 2010 1:49 PM (40 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

what are yr thoughts on the availability of the works of franz kafka

we've gone over this before s1ocki - I think Max Brod is an asshole and should have destroyed Kafka's work. Period. I don't care how great it is, I think Kafka had the right to expect his friend wouldn't decide what was best for his work.

i can dig your point j0hn, and it is kind of a weird situation, but i think it would suck to live in a world without those Kafka works

hey good job not saying anything respectful or interesting about the man or his work on his RIP thread, everyone.

sorry that was unnecessary. i think what you guys are talking about is interesting but maybe should be its own thread. just a suggestion.

It was about a boy who was put upon, whose mother was cold and selfish and whose father wanted him to play football.

i think Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour are two of my favorites. i think it's Franny that I kind of hate and Zooey I love as much as Raise High.

I dunno... the Kafka point is a good one - but it would kinda suck to see a posthumous feeding frenzy. Would be weird if JD Salinger becomes the Tupac of fiction.

and admittedly i don't have much substantial to say about salinger myself, i think 'catcher in the rye' is great but haven't read it in years, and the whole no interviews/no photos/anonymity thing is really interesting but yeah RIP j.d.

for me it sucks harder to live in a world where your best friends sell you out in the name of art. not saying everybody has to agree w/me that is just how I feel.

n/a I sort of think Salinger's seclusion & silence is perhaps the largest part of his work and begs so many question about an artist's relationship to the world & his public that I consider it respectful to talk about this stuff! if other people think this thread isn't the place to have this conversation I'll just stfu happily OK

n/a how could this possibility NOT come up on a JDSRIP thread

yeah i think it's amazing and very interesting that he just checked out for such a long time

the man was basically defined by his secrecy, so I don't think it's crazy that his RIP discussion would be dominated by talk of it. yes he was a fantastic author - I mean that's the only reason anyone cares to begin with.

look dude must have known the world was slavering after his unpublished work, he'd have gotten rid of it otherwise. (JDS here.) if not it can't be anything but an unconscious desire to let people see it imo.

this guy is such a huge unashamed part of my growing up that this makes me real sad. i think i am always being a dick on obit threads by saying that it isn't the saddest thing when like a ninety year old guy dies, just gives you a chance to view their full life, but aw man. the one thing that withstands by general suspicion of anything i was fond of as a teenager. can still quote chunks and i haven't read him in years.

search: everything, uncollected stories and all.

*the one thing that withstands my general suspicion of anything i was fond of as a teenager

i think he had to be aware that by keeping physical copies of these things, he was making it probably they would be published after his death. maybe he left orders for the stories to be destroyed after his death, who knows? but that didn't stop the nabokov "novel" from being published.

probable/probably

if not it can't be anything but an unconscious desire to let people see it imo.

otm, dude's not stupid

Oh dear. RIP. Obviously one of my faves and someone whose writing I will love forever.

for me it sucks harder to live in a world where your best friends sell you out in the name of art. not saying everybody has to agree w/me that is just how I feel.

i can live with one person pulling an asshole move on someone who is dead and will never feel the consequences so that the world can experience what is imo some of the greatest art ever made. that's how i feel.

xposts
um, i think i was agreeing with you, John D.

tbh I think Salinger probably burned the shit out of anything he didn't want published a while ago. I mean, dude was 91, I don't think the concept of his own mortality was a surprising one.

xpost okay that's been said

i think salinger is probably smart enough to set up his trust/will whatever so that if he wanted the works unpublished they would remain unpublished.

otoh it would be awesome if his will was just like "yeah have at it, publish the suckers now that i'm dead" and all of a sudden there were like 15 new salinger novels out there and everyone had their minds blown

like whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?

it depresses me that if a writer doesn't want people vampiring all his juvenilia & false starts etc he has to physically erase every trace of it

give it to someone you trust. don't trust anyone not to vampire you? maybe that's whats buggin you.

xpost

for me it sucks harder to live in a world where your best friends sell you out in the name of art.

haha damn you dont disappoint john

ya that is best-case scenario haha

ahem, xp

haha yeah maybe he just wanted to fill the nyt bestseller list

look dude must have known the world was slavering after his unpublished work, he'd have gotten rid of it otherwise. (JDS here.) if not it can't be anything but an unconscious desire to let people see it imo.

this is the part I get so mad about! by making this assumption, you force a person to physically annihilate all traces of his work before he dies if he doesn't want it published. that seems massively uncool to me. how 'bout if somebody leaves explicit instructions to publish, g'head, and otherwise, let a person actually rest in peace?

actually the best-case scenario is this from the onion article:

Besides setting the literary community abuzz, Salinger's decision to come out of seclusion has allowed scholars access to his massive archive of unpublished work for the first time. So far, critics have examined three never-before-seen novels, eight novellas, and more than two dozen short stories—all of which appear to be Terminator fan fiction.

This may be a stupid point but isn't part of the reason he stopped publishing works because he hated the publishing industry and the people in it? I was under this impression for some reason and if true, doesn't mean that he stopped writing or finishing things. I dunno. RIP. <3 Bananafish.

this is the part I get so mad about! by making this assumption, you force a person to physically annihilate all traces of his work before he dies if he doesn't want it published. that seems massively uncool to me. how 'bout if somebody leaves explicit instructions to publish, g'head, and otherwise, let a person actually rest in peace?

― Lee Dorrian Gray (J0hn D.), Thursday, January 28, 2010 2:04 PM (10 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

the person is already resting in peace imo

n/a how could this possibility NOT come up on a JDSRIP thread

Especially since this wasn't even an RIP thread until 10 minutes ago.

its not like disobeying their wishes is going to turn them into a tormented ghost

i mean i'm sorry dude but if you'd really rather live w/o the works of kafka and feel secure in the knowledge that a dude 80 years ago was nice, u r nuts

If Kafka wanted the shit burned, he could have done it himself many times. I tend to see Brod as an asshole friend but a huge boon to literature and if Salinger has a safe full of fetishized writings, he should have expected it to get published.

artists are often NOT RIGHT about what should be done with/to their art (see george lucas)

disobeying their wishes is going to turn them into a tormented ghost

that would make a dope movie

oh no he's right, lucas is

"I think Max Brod is an asshole and should have destroyed Kafka's work. Period."
This might not mean as much if Max Brod is the only one vouching for this, but how much stock would you put in the contention that Kafka was a drama queen and "destroy my stuff" was just a flight of false modesty, in which case the way to truly respect his wishes was to have them published?

artists are the worst.

its not like disobeying their wishes is going to turn them into a tormented ghost

also if anyone would have turned into a tormented ghost, it woulda been kafka, and afaik there is no evidence of him wandering the streets of prague on spooky winter nights

I think the notion of "resting in peace" is a little broader than that, s1ocki - it means you as a person are freed from the world. unless people think they know better than you whether the world "deserves" to read stuff you didn't choose to share with them - then you are sort of forced to go right on living in a way you wouldn't have chosen to do. that's really depressing to me. one of the few theoretically good things about dying is the cessation of activity it implies; you get to end, the narrative that is you reaches its conclusion. sweet, in a way! unless people think they have some historical right to gnaw on your bones. then any amount of work you did to remain a private person gets trashed in favor of, to be reductive about it, people's belief that they have a right to be entertained by you now that you can't stop them any more.

and yeah, to me, better world if friends do right by each other than if one more work of genius is around. "of the making of many books there is no end."

my hero in this btw is Hans Rott, who ate all of his symphonies except the first one

brb, going to connecticut to burn some MSS, the other JD would have wanted it this way

collected and unpublished works funeral pyres, c/d

j0hn, surely you've READ kafka - and wouldn't that still be disrespecting the dead from your POV?

brb, going to connecticut to burn some MSS, the other JD would have wanted it this way

he lives in New Hampshire bro

you're thinking of Uncle Wiggly

(that is, reading his books) xp

r.i.p. old weird dude. i can't front. catcher in the rye made teenhood a little more bearable.

and yeah, to me, better world if friends do right by each other than if one more work of genius is around. "of the making of many books there is no end."

― Lee Dorrian Gray (J0hn D.), Thursday, January 28, 2010 2:11 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

it is a silly either/or either way. of the making of bros there is no end either.

also i think iatee has a point

I think the notion of "resting in peace" is a little broader than that, s1ocki - it means you as a person are freed from the world. unless people think they know better than you whether the world "deserves" to read stuff you didn't choose to share with them - then you are sort of forced to go right on living in a way you wouldn't have chosen to do. that's really depressing to me. one of the few theoretically good things about dying is the cessation of activity it implies; you get to end, the narrative that is you reaches its conclusion. sweet, in a way! unless people think they have some historical right to gnaw on your bones. then any amount of work you did to remain a private person gets trashed in favor of, to be reductive about it, people's belief that they have a right to be entertained by you now that you can't stop them any more.

that is a sweet idea but the truth is u DONT get a say in posterity, in what the world thinks of u, or your art. u just don't. and that is fine with me. like i said above, many many artists make very bad decisions about what is to be done with their work or how it is to be interpreted. once u spit it out, it ain't yours anymore, imo.

if friends didnt betray each other... there would be no books... what do u think of that

serious, if cain didn't eff over abel = no bible

Y'all are being too harsh on Max. If he were really some kind of dick, we'd be reading Amerika by Max Brod.

I read Kafka in high school. Learning that the guy who wrote it specifically asked a friend to destroy it kind of ruined it for me. Again, I'm not saying anybody has to share my feeling on this. To me it's creepy to read something whose author explicitly asked a friend to keep out of the public view. But yeah - I don't think anybody's doing the memory of Kafka any honor by reading him and thinking he's awesome.

that is a sweet idea but the truth is u DONT get a say in posterity, in what the world thinks of u, or your art. u just don't. and that is fine with me. like i said above, many many artists make very bad decisions about what is to be done with their work or how it is to be interpreted. once u spit it out, it ain't yours anymore, imo.

yeah no I know, and this is why I have a personal stake in it. I'm the smallest potatoes there are, don't get me wrong, but I resent that if I don't personally destroy shit I don't want heard by whoever wants to hear it, then someday, there'll be people listening to rough drafts, sketches, etc., which to me are interesting to have around & which my family might later be amused by. it turns one into a control freak; I'm not really a control freak by nature, and resent having to be one about notebooks, tapes, etc. "once you spit it out, it ain't yours" - only true with what you choose to publish imo. stuff you didn't choose to share is private and nobody, history or posterity or anybody, has any right to it, imo

"I wish you wouldn't read that, it's embarrassing to me & I'm not proud of it"
"but I think it's awesome! so you should be happy I'm reading it"
":("

once u spit it out, it ain't yours anymore, imo.

This is only true up to a point, though; like, if Salinger's manuscripts are all locked in a personal safe or whatever, that makes them much more his than if they're filed away in an editor's cabinet. Writing something and not showing it to anyone doesn't automatically make what you wrote free and open to everyone; where the Tupac comparison falls down (IMO) is that Tupac's producers are the ones who had his piles and piles of unreleased tracks and it is wholly understandable that after his escalating profile and violent death that the likelihood of those tracks being released would go up.

Having said that, Salinger's writings are part of his estate; if there is nothing specific in his will with regards to their disposition, the executor absolutely has the right to do whatever he/she wants to with them.

I don't think anybody's doing the memory of Kafka any honor by reading him and thinking he's awesome.

'the memory of Kafka' only exists because of max brod! he's the difference between kafka being one of the most celebrated authors of all time and a dead person who nobody's heard of or cares about. I can still see your POV, but 'the memory of Kafka' is def not the right phrase to use here.

never knew that about kafka- although i just checked the collection i have and it turns out to be the stuff published in his lifetime :S

ya i mean, the thing about this, is that there's no way salinger didn't make some plans for his writings, if indeed there are any. so it's all mad hypothetical anyway.

In 1974, in a rare interview given to The New York Times, he said: "I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure." In her memoir, his daughter Margaret Salinger noted that he did keep writing, and set up a detailed filing system for his unpublished manuscripts: "A red mark meant, if I die before I finish my work, publish this 'as is,' blue meant publish but edit first, and so on."

property rights are a bundle of sticks and so is jds.

i do sympathize w j0hn, esp because i recognize this dilemma is not for me, and i should defer to those whom it affects. nevertheless, what dan said.

"A green mark meant, 'please eat.'"

it affects you too hunter!

point taken iatee, strike "the memory of" from that phrase or understand it as meaning something a little different from how you mean it

xpost how awesome would it be if he'd marked all the mss with colors not included in the color key. "an orange mark? what the fuck, what is orange supposed to be? does this look like red to you? it sure isn't blue, I know that."

yellow means written under the influence of urine

yes and no. if i was an artists bro, i would NEVER SELL HIM OUT MAN :)
xpost

interesting though that he def had his eye on publishing stuff... was there a mark for "dont publish"?

Seeing what Lucas did to Star Wars soured me on the idea that authors ought to have any control over their stuff while they are alive, let alone dead, though I'm glad Salinger never let any Catcher movies get made. (Though those youtube ESL recreations are awesome)

http://www.flatspot.com/store/images/staple/tee_dullboy_2.jpg
probably what the unpublished file looks like

w/ a yellow mark

but srsly, i kind of imagine that JD, as much as he couldn't bare the thought of having his stuff published while he was living, would want to have his stuff published afterwards, if only so that his family would have a pretty decent-sized nest-egg. but maybe not? he was a weird dude!

but didn't be basically disown and/or drive them all away

did he? i know he had problems w/ them in the past, but a lot of that stuff is from 30 years or more ago ... who knows whether he reconciled, or whatever.

this is kind of about the balance of power btw the audience and the artist, no?

on the one hand i dont really like how "never publish anything posthumously that was forbidden to be published" privileges the artist and his/her wishes over the art itself and the reader. we spend way too much time listening to artists talk about their art, and i think that gives us the kneejerk idea that artists have a greater stake in the discussion than the audience, or than the art itself.

on the other hand i think we as readers and as an audience, tend to demand too readily that everything be available to us, however we want it, whenever we want it. this--the question of availability--is a place where (maybe) the balance of power favors the reader--its basically accepted that the audience deserves to get whatever they want from the art, whenever they want it.

so i dunno.

i hope the books show up on what.cd soon

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2010/01/salinger-in-our-archives.html

I'm gonna cobble together a bunch of fake Salinger mss and make them available as a torrent marked "salinger estate leaks 1 of 40" in a couple of days so stand by for drama

salinger.unpublished.rar

exciting new rickroll opportunities

it is pretty fascinating though, isn't it? i mean, how many other authors are there like JD, in that he didn't have to worry about money (i'm assuming), and continued writing (every day, apparently!) for 40+ years w/o publishing anything. What does an author like that write if he literally has *no* audience in mind except for himself?

Someone should poll "what JohnD said" (xpost Hi John)

I'm with him, tbh.

I have loads of old tapes of my 14yrold self doing songs with (and without) frinds/helpers. what do you do with this sort of thing? There is absolutely no chance of it being 'foisted on the outside world", and I wouldn't want to play it to my immediate family either so do I have to put a match to it?

we can call it "ryerolling" xxp

Someone should poll "what JohnD said" (xpost Hi John)

ooh can we not

What does an author like that write if he literally has *no* audience in mind except for himself?

I'm guessing Xena/Gabrielle slashfic

(also wouldn't "ryerolling" involve tricking ppl into reading Catcher in the Rye?)

What does an author like that write if he literally has *no* audience in mind except for himself?

I think they're mainly thinkpieces about Facebook & Twitter

would the slashfic be mostly talking though, or just sex scenes

I have loads of old tapes of my 14yrold self doing songs with (and without) frinds/helpers. what do you do with this sort of thing? There is absolutely no chance of it being 'foisted on the outside world", and I wouldn't want to play it to my immediate family either so do I have to put a match to it?

no offense, dude, but i think your situation is just a little different than Salinger's

I have loads of old tapes of my 14yrold self doing songs with (and without) frinds/helpers. what do you do with this sort of thing? There is absolutely no chance of it being 'foisted on the outside world", and I wouldn't want to play it to my immediate family either so do I have to put a match to it?

very few people in the world are famous enough for anyone outside of their immediate family to give a damn about stuff like this. if you were planning on running for political office or something, yeah, maybe you should.

xp yeahh

How about Syd Barrett?

Famously, painted. Famously, destroyed it all after completion.

Also fam, photographed each one first.

Because he was rich enough not to have to sell any, and didn't want to enter the marketplace.

And didn't want to have to store everything.

But still wanted to have those images.

(I saw some on't internet. They are very good)

(blimey, jd, you type fast!)

(also wouldn't "ryerolling" involve tricking ppl into reading Catcher in the Rye?)

aka 8th Grade English class?

Nine Status Updates, By JD Salinger

^^^publish as is

I approve this English class rickrolling:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SWN3uAiTz8

How about Syd Barrett?

Famously, painted. Famously, destroyed it all after completion.

Also fam, photographed each one first.

Famously, a crazy man

no offense, dude, but i think your situation is just a little different than Salinger's

For the most part, sure. As I say, it's not going to be.

I don't want the kids to hear anything I wrote/performed (cover versions are just about OK), because I know they can do much better than me, eventually, and I don't want to influence what they do.

xpost (blimey, keep up MG!)

Less crazy than everyone thinks.

(sure, a bit.)

Mark I'm something of an absolutist about this. Admittedly tho it's the artist's responsibility to personally destroy his own work & all traces of it unless he is happy with the idea of everyone seeing it, and pronouncing his cast-offs good, etc. It's just kind of a drag. not news that most of the things I would like from the world are up on some castles-in-the-sky stuff tho right.

well if you dont want even your immediate family to hear it, uh, maybe you should burn it xp

Nine Status Updates, By JD Salinger

Chapter 1.

Xena arched her back and moaned, hands tightly clutching Gabrielle's hair. The smaller woman winced, grabbing her lover's wrist in protest.

Seymour is feeling depressed.

btw that is as far as im going with that joke, dont worry

in the digital age you have to destroy stuff before you're even sure whether it's good or not, which, I have to admit, is kind of fascinating from a certain kind of perverse lit-theory standpoint

in the future, thanks to the iPad, we will have to destroy art before it is even finished

if you were planning on running for political office or something, yeah, maybe you should.

As I say, it's all (OK mostly) in the loft.

Apart from a track on ILX2, and some vids of the shows in Turkey that the other group members own, thats all.

unless he is happy with the idea of everyone seeing it, and pronouncing his cast-offs good,

It could happen, other people think it's better than I do.

Anyroad, enough about me.

in the future, thanks to the iPad, we will have to place art in our menstruating vaginas before it is even finished

waiting to see what happens in the second status update

J0hn, why would you do that?

Or is it a case of "if it was that good an Idea, it will re-emerge from my subconscious" ?

I can dig that one.

Mark I'm something of an absolutist about this.

Oh, I think he figured that out six years ago.

lol

(that's not an "LOL" btw it's a man with his hands up)

I was kinda sad when I heard this news but then I realised they weren't talking about J.D. Fortune, former INXS frontman.

A Perfect Day for Suggest Ban

(that's not an "LOL" btw it's a man with his hands up)

― Lee Dorrian Gray (J0hn D.), Thursday, January 28, 2010 2:56 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

LOL

TOUCHDOWN!

SBanny & zooey

Heck some of my best writing has been on this site. (also, my only...)

See, this is what happens when a reclusive author dies, we end up talking about ourselves!

Thomas Pynchon, you have been warned!

Didn't this dude indirectly kill John Lennon? </Passantino>

i'm going to have to burn down ILX before I die, I'm afraid. sorry dudes.

don't want my family to publish my posts

hah, I held off reading "Catchr" for years in the worry that I might turn into a crazy stalker (and GHarrison used to live *just* up the road from us)

"Scrap my posts when I'm gone, John.."

if kafka is too lazy to take out his own garbage then fuck him. that's what i say.

pretty awesome interview with Bob Giroux, who tried to publish Catcher

http://www.theparisreview.org/viewinterview.php/prmMID/652

I never read Salinger's famous book so can someone tell me if The Cathcher in the Rye has a literal interpretation of a baseball player in a rye field?

yes

My sister had a lot of trouble reading as a kid, to the point where she just hated reading anything at all...but somehow 'Catcher' really clicked with her, and she fell in love with it immediately. And Salinger was one of my personal favorites. I don't reread many books but Catcher and Franny & Zooey get regular visits, and often.

I'm with J0hn D on this, I think...anyone who writes has surely written stories just to exercise a muscle...the mere act of writing something down isn't just so that someone else can read it...it's as much getting it out of your head. And that all that 'other stuff' somehow all becomes public property if you don't set it all on fire before you die seems, well, kind of rude. Just because it's there doesn't make it yours. I like to think that an artist gets to decide what goes out into the world and what doesn't, and that leaving something to the imagination after death is a good thing. Assures you a safer journey to wherever you're going...I don't know if I want to be the same person to my fans as I am to my family/friends. Which is what publishing all that unpublished stuff can do.
I don't know.

http://ncowie.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/catcher-rye-full.jpg

lol, I meant 'would want' to be the same person to my fans...I have no fans to speak of

you can't hurt the dead

thanks for Paris Review link -- this is amazing quote:

Holden Caulfield. Gene said, “The kid is disturbed.” I said, “Well, that’s all right. He is, but it’s a great novel.” He said, “Well, I felt that I had to show it to the textbook department.” “The textbook department?” He said, “Well, it’s about a kid in prep school isn’t it? I’m waiting for their reply.”

I have no idea what this means, but that is insane.

I was looking for a picture of calvin playing baseball for the school's team (in the tall grass far out-field)

http://www.theawl.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/sally-490x215.jpg

classy
is easton ellis' twitter persona some kinda meta put-on?

or is he just a dick irl

Thomas Pynchon, you have been warned!

Noted.

Thomas Pynchon, you have been warned!

a Hold Steady song?

I don't see how you could read any Bret Easton Ellis and not just blanket assume he's a massive tool.

i think twitter pretty much exists to troll ppls deaths. also it's not a verified acct so who knows

They should remake Field of Dreams (Shoeless Joe) now to put Salinger back in as the James Earl Jones character.

I wish Rolling Stone's online archives had the article Ellis wrote for their summer '85 college issue: something about how his generation has no values.

xp, it could have been a butterfly catcher in a rye field knowhatamean

"I don't see how you could read any Bret Easton Ellis and not just blanket assume he's a massive tool."
I think Ellis isn't supposed to be a tool, like Laibach aren't actually nazis.

he's a fucking tool if he wrote that

If Salinger left specific instructions they should be respected. If anybody in the world has had the time and reason to consider this dilemma, it's him. Kafka you can kind of understand him thinking 'no-one gave a shit about this when I was alive anyway - burn it' and why someone would decide to ignore it - but JDS and his loved ones most certainly knew that people wanted to see what he was creating, and had 40 years to figure out how to deal with that.

the only thing Bret Easton Ellis ever means by anything is "maybe I can get some attention here"

you know if he had written anything over the years it was probably unreadable tao of pooh nonsense. i'd still probably read it though just out of curiosity.

I was half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. They really can.

The Tao of Coke

They should remake Field of Dreams (Shoeless Joe) now to put Salinger back in as the James Earl Jones character.

Who needs remakes when you have CGI?

guys pretty sure that's a fake b easton e

written by the real bret easton ellis, probs

Isn't "Bret Easton Ellis" a character in Glamorama?

They should remake Field of Dreams (Shoeless Joe) now to put Salinger back in as the James Earl Jones character.

But that would mean no "Peace, love, dope! Now get the hell out of here!"

can someone do a painting of jd salinger, jay reatard and howard zinn jamming out in heaven?

I thought James Earl Jones was Salinger with a name change?

can someone do a painting of jd salinger, jay reatard and howard zinn jamming out in heaven?

actually getting this tatted on my lower back right now tbh

Dan Lacey, where are you when we need you?

I thought James Earl Jones was Salinger with a name change?

Well, the character in the movie is a reclusive author. But he was known for being a '60s radical.

i've never seen it, but i thought field of dreams was about ghost baseball

you're thinking of angels in the outfield

2010 celeb deaths have been nothing if not eclectic. salinger, reatard, bobby charles, willie mitchell, kate mcgarrigle, paul quarrington, howard zinn.

I like all of em too. all smart, tough and weird.

"Mary Jane. Listen. Please," Eloise said, sobbing. "You remember our freshman year, and I had that brown-and-yellow dress I bought in Boise, and Miriam Ball told me nobody wore those kind of dresses in New York, and I cried all night?" Eloise shook Mary Jane's arm. "I was a nice girl," she pleaded, "wasn't I?"

raise high the roofbeam carpenters is one of my all time forevers iirc

xxxxp

It is climactically about ghost baseball -- and this time at the end they should have the ghosts of some nonwhite players! also have Joe Jackson batting lefty.

in heaven everyone is right handed iirc

You know how Capote said that Kerouac wasn't writing, just typing? My gf insists that Easton Ellis is little more than printed bragging.

i read less than zero a couple weeks ago and i was blown away that his stuff still works on non-16-year-old me

IIRC Less Than Zero is the only thing he wrote that actually works as an effective novel that doesn't leave you wanting to punch BEE in the nuts

Results 1 - 10 of about 2,800,000 for bee nuts. (0.25 seconds)

except that rules of attraction is hella awesome

fuck bee and his fucking books

also glamorama

"Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it's a game, all right - I'll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren't any hot-shots, then what's a game about it? Nothing. No game."

"effective novel that doesn't leave you wanting to punch BEE in the nuts"
don't nutpunch the messenger!

one thing tying ellis-hate and catcher-in-the-rye hate together is a common impulse to nut-punch the author for the protagonist's nut-punch-worthiness.

less than zero is probably his worse

It's the only one I didn't put down in aggravated disgust.

Actually I think I blame BEE for pushing my fiction tastes almost exclusively into SF/fantasy, ha.

I wrote a high school paper comparing Catcher and Less Than Zero. I had totally forgotten about that until now.

real conversation-starter that is - sorry, must remember not to post navel-lint

oh like that ever stops any of the rest of us

i dunno attractive ppl + graphic fucking + names of bands i like + violence = pretty awesome imo

i liked american psycho fine but have no desire to read anything else by him

american psycho is the least fun book

also, u can pretty much read all his books in a day

i dunno attractive ppl + graphic fucking + names of bands i like + violence = pretty awesome imo

Yeah, this is what I liked about Rules of Attraction, too.

you guys are easily impressed

I am actually genuinely easily impressed and I am not at all on the BEE bandwagon.

I read the Salinger stuff so long ago that I don't really remember it now; I loved it at the time, though.

mariah carey double anal fisting the modern lovers slashing their ears off and sticking them in their eye sockets

can we not turn this thread into bad BEE slash fic

I have no idea what bee is

it's what BEE would have wanted. oh wait, he's not the guy who died. damn.

bees have sex and then die

lashing their ears off and sticking them in their eye sockets

^gonna call this potato heading from now on

missing a letter but wtvr

i wish salinger had written more genre fiction. (even terminator fanfiction)
it's weird how all these dudes (salinger, fitzgerald) have one or two supernatural genre stories and nobody seems to talk about them.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2010/01/salinger-in-our-archives.html

can anybody suggest a good one of these for the metro ride home?

Last year's Oscar-nominated Brad Pitt mausoleum buried that poor fantasy story.

xpost

moreno if you haven't read anything, def check out "bananafish" or "for esmé"

Moreno: seriously, any of those are good starting points. i especially dig Carpenters, Zooey and Seymour.

i was thinking about the one where this tycoon has an underground lair built around the world's biggest diamond excavated by martian slaves. fitzgerald, i mean.
salinger has the one about a creepy kid who can tell the future.

"The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," and, yeah, I love it.

i'd say laughing man or de daumier smith; can't remember which ones are nyers, maybe not the latter. laughing man is rad.

cool. maybe i'll just start at the top.

check out Teddy -- it's borderline horror (teddy is ten-year old kid):

"All right," Nicholson said quickly. He smiled, and gently raised the flats of his hands, in a sort of ironic benediction. "We won't argue that point, for the moment. Let me finish." He crossed his heavy, outstretched legs again. "From what I gather, you've acquired certain information, through meditation, that's given you some conviction that in your last incarnation you were a holy man in India, but more or less fell from Grace-"

"I wasn't a holy man," Teddy said. "I was just a person making very nice spiritual advancement."

"All right--whatever it was," Nicholson said. "But the point is you feel that in your last incarnation you more or less fell from Grace before final Illumination. Is that right, or am I--"

"That's right," Teddy said. "I met a lady, and I sort of stopped meditating." He took his arms down from the armrests, and tucked his hands, as if to keep them warm, under his thighs. "I would have had to take another body and come back to earth again anyway-I mean I wasn't so spiritually advanced that I could have died, if I hadn't met that lady, and then gone straight to Brahma and never again have to come back to earth. But I wouldn't have had to get incarnated in an American body if I hadn't met that lady. I mean it's very hard to meditate and live a spiritual life in America. People think you're a freak if you try to. My father thinks I'm a freak, in a way. And my mother--well, she doesn't think it's good for me to think about God all the time. She thinks it's bad for my health."

Nicholson was looking at him, studying him. "I believe you said on that last tape that you were six when you first had a mystical experience. Is that right?"

"I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all that," Teddy said. "It was on a Sunday, I remember. My sister was only a very tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean."

Nicholson didn't say anything.

"But I could get out of the finite dimensions fairly often when I was four," Teddy said, as an afterthought. "Not continuously or anything, but fairly often."

Nicholson nodded. "You did?" he said. "You could?"

RIP JDS.

Should I go back and finish Seymour this time, then? Never even tried to read Hapworth.

I'm glad I managed to read Catcher and the rest while I was still 16.

"Mary Jane. Listen. Please," Eloise said, sobbing. "You remember our freshman year, and I had that brown-and-yellow dress I bought in Boise, and Miriam Ball told me nobody wore those kind of dresses in New York, and I cried all night?" Eloise shook Mary Jane's arm. "I was a nice girl," she pleaded, "wasn't I?"

― plaxico (I know, right?)

</3

;_;

perfect day for bananafish

RIP. I really liked "Catcher in the Rye" when I was a young 'un. Whenever I would go to record stores that sold 78s I would always make a point to look for that Estelle Fletcher song "Little Shirley Beans" that Holden mentions in the book. It wasn't until the Internet came along that I found out that the record never even existed in the first place! Oh, that J.D.

Having spent much of today in a pointless, circular debate about what the iPad "means", JD's death kind of smacked me in the head as a reminder that I have a tendencey to forget about so many of the things (Catcher In The Rye being one of them) that I argued about so passionately years ago. It's almost certainly one of those books that, if you don't read it at a certain age (In this case 13-15) can seem rednundant, but which, if you pick it up during the right time can seem painfully OTM, even when your own circumstances are worlds apart from Holden's.

I don't think I could bear CITR these days but as adolescent books go, I'm sure it holds up better than 'On the Road'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUzofq9jjIc

^^^truthbomb

Apt:

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/bunch_of_phonies_mourn_j_d

sort of off topic now but is that bob giroux in the paris review article the same giroux as farrar, strauss & giroux?

yep

I read "Last Day of the Last Furlough," in honor of him today at lunch. Apparently this is the first appearance in print of Holden Caulfield.

http://www.freeweb.hu/tchl/salinger/lastday.html

so my dog is named holden

Read Catcher young, didn't make a huge impression. Picked it up a few years ago and realized I had ignored, when I was young, what an asshole Holden is. I would like to re-read it.

I gotta agree with j0hn D. here; imo how an individual chooses to communicate with the world is one of the few sacred things left in the world anymore and it's quickly being massively eroded by digital communication. I definitely understand all that stuff about work being out of the hands of the author as soon as it leaves the pen or whatever but I don't think it's justification for going into his mansion with pickaxes and codebreakers to get at his safe. I think this situation is different than Kafka/Brod cause whoever could get his hands on these manuscripts would stand to profit massively from the sale of these. like it would suck if one of his family members sold him out just to get the $$$.

that said, once the cat's out of the bag it's out. this is how I justify reading Kafka.

also, taking bets on how long it'll be before someone makes it to JDS' grave and carves 'fuck you' into it

it would suck if one of his family members sold him out just to get the $$$.

Actually, that's the one good reason to do it!

Sorry to get all mammon, but you know, kids inheritance (I know they are all older, grandkids/greatgran oh whatever...)

pitch-perfect RIP:

Bunch Of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger

CORNISH, NH—In this big dramatic production that didn't do anyone any good (and was pretty embarrassing, really, if you think about it), thousands upon thousands of phonies across the country mourned the death of author J.D. Salinger, who was 91 years old for crying out loud. "He had a real impact on the literary world and on millions of readers," said hot-shot English professor David Clarke, who is just like the rest of them, and even works at one of those crumby schools that rich people send their kids to so they don't have to look at them for four years. "There will never be another voice like his." Which is exactly the lousy kind of goddamn thing that people say, because really it could mean lots of things, or nothing at all even, and it's just a perfect example of why you should never tell anybody anything.

haha, ned r. posted that upthread a bit. i linked an old friend to it on facebook and he deleted my post, i guess thinking i was calling him a 'phony' for posting 'rip salinger'. whoops~

I don't think I could bear CITR these days but as adolescent books go, I'm sure it holds up better than 'On the Road'.
― Mit der Kattzheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens (Michael White), Thursday, January 28, 2010 11:55 PM (Yesterday)

On the Road is about the descriptions and the feelings. Fuck structure. Lucidity ftw

<3 u cornish, NH

http://www.rutlandherald.com/article/20100129/NEWS02/1290341

Hmm:

http://www.deadline.com/hollywood/secret-j-d-salinger-documentary-book-revealed-and-ive-seen-the-film/

the rollcall of dramatic revelations seems to contradict the noble premise the filmmaker talks about. still i always wondered what jon cusack thought of salinger though.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/02/jd-salinger-obituary-letter

Over the next couple of months we went to and fro. I sent him new mock-ups with his name below the title, and with different colour tones, and finally, without fuss, he approved everything, even the little explanation on the back about the corrected texts, which I had robustly defended.

Then he sent me a little message via Phyllis Westberg. I still have it. It read: "Tell Mr Bates for me, too, won't you, that I'll take him at his word that he'll do right by the lettering of the titles. My thanks to him, all round. He's been reasonable throughout" and then, ironically no doubt, "I mean to put in a special word for him in my nightly prayers for publishers the world over."

this was the eventual penguin cover design btw

http://mentallyvexed.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/catcher_in_the_rye.jpg

he used the word "behooved".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8569146.stm

It begins....

"The letters are peppered with references to politics and figures from popular culture, including John Wayne, Eddie Murphy and Nancy Reagan. "They show he was fully engaged with the world even after he withdrew from it," says Kiely."

"So far, critics have examined three never-before-seen novels, eight novellas, and more than two dozen short stories—all of which appear to be Terminator fan fiction.

"But make no mistake," said Salinger expert Professor Duane Hartworth of nearby Dartmouth College, "this is without a doubt the most personal and affecting body of Terminator fan fiction ever discovered."

Movie theatres, reopened for a couple of weeks where I am, are probably going close down again soon, but I was able to get out to see My Salinger Year today. Moderately well done, no real point; a 6.0 most of the way, with maybe a bump near the end for a flight of fantasy that was silly but, because I've been down lately, moved me anyway. Not sure yet about Margaret Qualley: thought she was great in The Leftovers, fit the role in Tarantino's Manson film, mostly surface here. Sigourney Weaver basically reprises her Working Girl character. Spent the whole film trying to figure out where I knew Brían F. O'Byrne from; I've seen him in a few things, but it was the TV remake of Mildred Pierce I had in mind.