Reading the review of the 'bio-documentary-official-book', my impression of Salinger is of the ultimate narcissist. The ordinary is never good enough for the narcissist. The narcissist must go to the special doctor, have the unusual car, eat the most unique meal.... specialness in all things because it shows how wonderful the narcissist is. For Salinger, the entire world was too ordinary for his greatness. All the other guessing by the authors is fluff, IMO.
i never figured salinger. i mean, i read CITR when i was right in the bullseye of its target readership and i've never emitted a bigger meeeh in my life. i also read franny and zooey though i can't for the life of me understand why. that such a mystique could be entwined around two such mediocre books (actually only the one) and the recluse who wrote them is one of the wonders, not just of this, but of all half centuries since eve loved adam.
For sure, his going into hibernation only helped his reputation... But I know lots of non-readers who've told me Catcher in the Rye is the only book they read in high school that they cared about.
I've taught Catcher in a couple of college classes (Am. Lit of the 1950s esp.). Invariably, it's the only book on the reading list the majority of students have already read, so I have to convince them the importance of rereading. The book holds up fairly well for me, and most students find that the book strikes them as vastly different when the read it at 20 than when the read it at 16. So while it's not my favorite book in that class, nor the one that I think most people should read, it gets the job done. Now, of the books that I assigned, there was one that most older adults have heard of but haven't read, but which they turn out to dig when they do read it: Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit [/URL]
So, why did Ernest Hemingway kill himself? Interesting article from a couple years back: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/p...ystery-behind-hemingways-suicide-2294619.html
Slate.com says it's the worst movie tie in book cover ever... http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat...cover_worst_movie_tie_in_book_cover_ever.html In case you’re wondering: No, As I Lay Dying is not a memoir, and it is not by James Franco. And William Faulkner, though he did have a mustache, wasn’t quite so hunky.
New series of pulp fiction classics I can't wait for this one due in the US in November! "Tess is just a humble milkmaid when the local landowner has his wicked way. Her new beau, the smarmy Angel Clare, is none too pleased when he finds out she's already been deflowered. What is a girl to do? Bloody revenge of course, and an ending to touch the hardest of hearts." More info here http://www.pulptheclassics.com/about/
School board bans "Invisible Man" from school libraries. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/19/invisible-man-banned_n_3953740.html One board member says, "I didn't find any literary value."
no literary value? wtf? it's one of the seminal works of the second half of the XX century! of course everyone's free to like or not like, but banning this book? the first word that comes to mind is unamerican. the next are obscurantist, racist, ignorant... feel free to continue.
More on the morons who banned the book... http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Latest-News-Wires/2013/0921/Invisible-Man-book-ban-Who-s-behind-it This struck me... "Invisible Man" was one of three books from which rising Randleman High School juniors could choose for summer reading for the 2013-14 school year. The others on the list were "Black Like Me" by John Howard Griffin and "Passing" by Nella Larsen. Honors students had to choose two books. Black Like Me is 200 pages. Passing, IIRC is around 180 at most. Invisible Man is over 500 in my old PB version. As a result, the bookbanners actually increased the likelihood that a rising junior at Dale Earnhardt High School will actually read the longest book on the list. Well played, and thank you.
Carolyn Cassady, the lover of Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac and the wife of Kerouac’s road companion Neal Cassady, the “Dean Moriarty” of Kerouac’s 1957 novel “On The Road,” died Sept. 20 in a hospital near her home in Bracknell, England. She was 90. http://www.washingtonpost.com/local...5245d2-23ab-11e3-b3e9-d97fb087acd6_story.html
Pretty decent writer in her own right. When I taught courses on the beat generation, I'd often assign her memoir, or at least put it on reserve...
A new theory on the origins of Mr. Samuel Langhorn Clemens' famous pen name... http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/a-new-theory-on-mark-twain Kevin Mac Donnell, a book dealer and scholar in Austin, Texas, found the potential source while searching Google Books for unknown pieces of Twain’s writing. To his astonishment, one of the hits led to a mention of “Mark Twain” in the humor journal Vanity Fair — one of the author’s early influences — two years before he adopted it. In a burlesque titled “The North Star,” the sketch reports a farcical meeting of Charleston mariners who adopt a resolution “abolishing the use of the magnetic needle, because of its constancy to the north.” These characters include a “Mr. Pine Knott,” (a pun for dense wood), “Lee Scupper” (a drain), and “Mark Twain,” (shallow depth in shipboard jargon). “I wasn’t looking for what I found. I stumbled across it,” Mac Donnell said in a phone interview. With a flair for folksy humor that made Twain famous, he also added that “you could train a cat to do what I did. You could train a garden slug to do what I did, but the cat would be quicker.”
Alice Munro Wins Nobel Prize In Literature - N.Y. Times http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/11/books/alice-munro-wins-nobel-prize-in-literature.html?_r=0
since i make a fairly hard and fast point of reading only writers who have been dead at least 50 years, i've never heard of, much less read, any recent nobel prize winner, who if i'm not mistaken must be living (makes it easier to get to stockholm and pick up your medal). i will say that the worst choice i could imagine has already won the prize: toni morrison. for some reason i can't remember i once read a few pages of one of her books (probably beloved): the writing was excruciatingly bad. i also once saw her interviewed on TV and found her vacuous, inarticulate, egocentric, and uncultured... or rather making a fatuous display of the most kind of asinine pseudo-culture. i'm sure she's got university chairs all over the country.
fairly hard and fast i said. but i have Ellison's Time obituary in the book for proof i'm not a complete hypocrite. when i read Celine he had only been dead for 25 years, but some risks are really a sure bet. he cassed his pipe 52 years ago now and it's clear he isn't going anywhere. i've read murakami too, and he's not dead. he'd better get cracking though because with each new book he writes he isn't doing himself any favors.
The year Harold Pinter won it, IIRC, the prize was delayed. Probably not coincidentally, American playwright August Wilson died on October 2nd that year. My guess was he was the winner, but the dying thing undercut his chances. Too bad: his 10-play Pittsburgh Cycle is ********ing monumental. Definitely a worthy American. Of course, if the poet and essayist Gary Snyder ever wins it, I'll be out of American darkhouse contenders to cheer for.