Better Living Through Literature
Words + Projects + Stuff I Like
Happy new year! And happy birthday to two of the authors in my Top Ten: E.M. (Edward Morgan) Forster and J.D. (Jerome David) Salinger.
For the new year, here’s Salinger’s Zooey telling it like it is about this world:
“God damn it,” he said, “there are nice things in the world–and I mean nice things. We’re all such morons to get so sidetracked.”
The New York Times reports that there might be more books from my favorite author, Jerome David “J.D.” Salinger:
…a forthcoming documentary and related book, both titled “Salinger,” include detailed assertions that Mr. Salinger instructed his estate to publish at least five additional books–some of them entirely new, some extending past work–in a sequence that he intended to begin as early as 2015.
One collection, to be called “The Family Glass,” would add five new stories to an assembly of previously published stories about the fictional Glass family, which figured in Mr. Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey” and elsewhere […] The new works are [also] said to include a story-filled “manual” of the Vedanta religious philosophy.
When he died, I wondered if more stories would be coming out, since he was rumored to have kept writing. More Salinger would be like Christmas morning-times-a-thousand, so I hope it’s true.
“But what I don’t like…is the way you talk about all these people. I mean you don’t just despise what they represent—you despise them. It’s too damn personal, Franny. I mean it. You get a real little homicidal glint in your eye when you talk about this Professor Tupper, for instance. All this business about his going into the men’s room to muss his hair before he comes in to class. All that. He probably does—it goes with everything else you’ve told me about him. I’m not saying it doesn’t. But it’s none of your business, buddy, what he does with his hair. It would be all right, in a way, if you thought his personal affectations were sort of funny. Or if you felt a tiny bit sorry for him for being insecure enough to give himself a little pathetic goddam glamour. But when you tell me about it—and I’m not fooling, now—you tell me about it as though his hair was a goddamn personal enemy of yours. That is not right—and you know it. If you’re going to to war against the System, just do your shooting like a nice, intelligent girl—because the enemy’s there, and not because you don’t like his hairdo or his goddam necktie.”
J.D. Salinger in Franny and Zooey, reminding us to have compassion.
1. I found a Salinger quote (I think from “Hapworth 16, 1924”) in the blog archives that is encouraging:
“I find it magnificent how beautiful loose ends find each other in the world if one only waits with decent patience, resilience, and quite blind strength.”
2. This video from the Shelter Pet Project has been making the rounds, but it’s hilarious:
3. And in other old-but-new-to me news, I’ve discovered the Hobbit Name Generator. It’s hours of fun (and there’s an Elvish Name Generator, too!).
This Cole Haan ad makes me covet that grass-green satchel (naturally), but “THE HEART IS A…” in the background also makes me think of Franny and Zooey: In the first part of “Zooey,” he has a script for a play called “The Heart is an Autumn Wanderer,” which inspires one of my favorite Salinger conversations.
I wish I could go around telling people their hearts are autumn garages, but the insult really only works with Salinger fans. (Wish I had that purse, too!)
It has been a week of crazy clients, anxiety, and stupid things happening (Toby’s space heater broke, I tried to go to Brewvies Tuesday after work and the film projector broke, etc. etc.), so I had to read some Franny and Zooey last night. Here is a scene of Zooey watching a little girl playing with her dog–and yes, in the book it’s all one paragraph:
A fair-sized maple tree stood in front of the girls’ private school…and at that moment a child of seven or eight, female, was hiding behind it. She was wearing a navy-blue reefer and a tam that was very nearly the same shade of red as the blanket on the bed in van Gogh’s room at Arles. Her tam did, in fact, from Zooey’s vantage point, appear not unlike a daub of paint. Some fifteen feet away from the child, her dog–a young dachshund, wearing a green leather collar and leash–was sniffing to find her, scurrying in frantic circles, his leash dragging behind him. The anguish of separation was scarcely bearable for him, and when at last he picked up his mistress’s scent, it wasn’t a second too soon. The joy of reunion, for both, was immense. The dachshund gave a little yelp, then cringed forward, shimmying with ecstasy, till his mistress, shouting something at him, stepped hurriedly over the wire guard surrounding the tree and picked him up. She said a number of words of praise to him…then put him down and picked up his leash, and the two walked gaily west, toward Fifth Avenue and the Park and out of Zooey’s sight…”God damn it,” he said, “there are nice things in the world–and I mean nice things. We’re all such morons to get so sidetracked.”
1. I learned yesterday (like most of you) that J.D. Salinger died Wednesday, at the age of 91. His New York Times obituary focuses mainly on his 50 years of reclusiveness, but did have this to say about the italics:
The stories were remarkable for their sharp social observation, their pitch-perfect dialogue (Mr. Salinger, who used italics almost as a form of musical notation, was a master not of literary speech but of speech as people actually spoke it), and for the way they demolished whatever was left of the traditional architecture of the short story — the old structure of beginning, middle, end — in favor of an architecture of emotion, in which a story could turn on a tiny alteration of mood or irony.
2. I have to admit that I always wondered if more Salinger would be published after he died, but now that he’s dead I’d rather think of him still writing every day than of being able to read more of his work.
3. If you would like to read any of the short stories online, you can use your subscription to The New Yorker to do so here or you can read them for free (gasp! just like a library!) here.
ETA: 4. And The Onion’s take on it: Bunch of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger. Thank you, Onion.
1. I’ve had an unfocused, uninspired week, which is why the blog has suffered: I’m not interested in my latest projects and I’m only reading self-help books, so I don’t even have anything good to quote here.
2. But there’s always Salinger…in my opinion, Franny and Zooey IS a self-help book, just better written. Here’s Zooey at the end talking about detachment, the theme of the week:
You can say the Jesus Prayer from now till doomsday, but if you don’t realize that the only thing that counts in the religious life is detachment, I don’t see how you’ll ever even move an inch. Detachment, buddy, and only detachment. Desirelessness. “Cessation from all hankerings.”
3. And finally, I wish this t-shirt used a better font, because I really love the sentiment:
“I knit so I don’t kill people.” Amen.
Yes, it’s been busy today, so we can all be glad I keep a record of these passages as I find them. (And yes, that is a James Thurber drawing of a dog. That’s a particularly brilliant detail our old buddy Salinger adds.)
This is from “A Young Girl in 1941 With No Wast At All,” Salinger’s short story originally published in The New Yorker:
She was a beautifully, a perfectly, gray-haired woman in a long sleeved evening gown with Thurber dogs in the pattern. She was wearing a pear-shaped diamond ring and a diamond bracelet. Just on sight no one very sensible would have laid bets on her background. She might, years ago, have walked very erectly across a Broadway stage, with an ostrich fan, singing A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody, or something similarly ostrich fan-ish. She might have been an ambassador’s daughter or a fireman’s daughter. She might have been her husband’s secretary for years. As only second-class beauty can be identified, there was no way of telling.
“I find it magnificent how beautiful loose ends find each other in the world if one only waits with decent patience, resilience, and quite blind strength.”
Let’s hope this is proved correct. We have a huge site that has to go up Monday morning, and it’s still being built. I hope our blind strength will be enough. It’s a little sleep-deprived at this point.