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.

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.