The Mysteries of J.D. Salinger

what k3vin said, that paragraph kinda made me tear up with excitement

tbh after like four half-assed biographies and all those memoirs and shit i feel like i really really really don't want to hear any more about salinger's life, just give me the damn unpublished stories already and let this guy rest in peace

I read this review and....ugh yeah definitely gasface abt the bio & doc

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/08/26/books/a-biography-from-david-shields-and-shane-salerno.html

The authors contend that Salinger “was born with only one testicle” and they argue that this caused him enormous embarrassment — that it was “surely one of the many reasons he stayed out of the media glare” so as “to reduce the likelihood that this information would emerge,” and that it amplified his psychological need “to create flawless art.” This assertion, however, is based on anonymous sources: two unnamed women who the authors say “independently confirmed” hearsay that Salinger suffered from this anomaly.

Fuck. Off.

haha jesus christ that's worse than i expected.

in a way stuff like this just emphasizes how incredibly little we really know about salinger's actual life, there's absolutely nothing in that article -- apart from the bit quoted above haha -- that you couldn't have gleaned from joyce maynard's book or his daughter's book or, you know, the wikipedia article. i can't imagine we'll ever really learn that much more about JDS unless his estate authorizes a real book and lets the author quote from his letters, unpublished papers, etc. maybe in a hundred years.

Mr. Shields and Mr. Salerno even suggest that “Catcher” in some way played a role in the killings of John Lennon and the young actress Rebecca Schaeffer, and the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. These terrible acts, the authors write, “are not a coincidence; they constitute frighteningly clairvoyant readings of ‘Catcher’ — the assassins intuiting the underlying postwar anger and violence in the book.”

and jesus christ this is so fucking stupid. chapman killed john lennon because he was crazy, not because the true meaning of salinger's book is that you should kill people.

makes me wish *I* was a fucking hermit

nice piece by adam gopnik, probably one of the very few non-irritating articles on salinger we'll see for a while:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/09/who-was-jd-salinger.html

Shields, of course, has written an entire testament, the manifesto-like book called “Reality Hunger,” in defense of the chop-shop approach to prose, with a high-minded po-mo appeal to the constant recycling of other people’s words as itself a kind of originality. Like many other capitalist ventures, though, this involves taking intricate handiwork done by other people, breaking it up, and selling it off again without permission, not to mention payment. If you have persuaded yourself that invention and recycling are the same thing, then you can’t begin to make sense of someone who would spend seven or eight hours a day laboring over a single line.

gopnik eviscerated this guy

hoo, the last paragraph. brutal

so good

can't stand David Shields. That someone who so completely fails to get reading should be paid to write multiple books about how to read is depressing.

npr did an interview with him last weekend and i was just like, please stop talking to him. and that smug squeeness over he MAY be publishing new material...the more I read i'm not gonna take that as news from YOU

http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/09/translating-catcher-in-the-rye-if-holden-caulfield-spoke-russian.html?utm_source=tny&utm_campaign=generalsocial&utm_medium=twitter

god, this second translator makes holden sound like juno

ran across that salinger book in a bookstore yesterday. happen to be reading part of "seymour" atm and this passage reminded me of some of the criticism of the film/book posted upthread

I surely think, at any rate, that if I were to ask the sixty odd girls (or, that is, the sixty-odd girls) in my two Writing for Publication courses-most of them seniors, all of them English majors - to quote a line, any line from ' Ozymandias', or even just to tell me roughly what the poem is about, it is doubtful whether ten of them could do either, but I'd bet my unrisen tulips that some fifty of them could tell me that Shelley was all for free love, and had one wife who wrote ' Frankenstein' and another who drowned herself.

so I guess three unpublished stories have made it out?

?

uh

tried finding something on google news and the first thing that came up was something about how jonathan franzen thinks he's 'overrated.'

if he's talking about himself, franzen otm

this is my favourite kind of ilx threadbump, just one line in the lindbergh baby thread, "oh huh so they figured it out?" & then you go on vacation for two weeks

protip search twitter for breaking news u phonies

BuzzFeed ‏@BuzzFeed 1h
Three Unpublished J.D. Salinger Stories Have Allegedly Leaked Online
http://www.buzzfeed.com/summeranne/three-unpublished-jd-salinger-stories-have-allegedly-leaked

*phoneys

fonerz

no need to be a goddamn knowitall about it, jeez

don't you think about that story about salinger & the paris review editor guy's wife just all the time

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/04/13/salingers-nightmare/

Seven years after his death and still not a word about the supposed manuscripts in the vault. I'd have thought some journalist would have followed this up by now, if only to write a story about being stonewalled by the estate. But someone must know something!

Great story, thanks for the link JD.

And I've wondered that frequently myself Zelda. I don't think we're any further than this rather unreliable talk of a 2015-2020 release time frame.

apparently there's a JDS biopic out right now, looks even more appalling than i would've expected

also has what is easily one of the single worst movie titles i've ever seen

Uggh. Rural Juror in the Rye.

So Where Are the New J.D. Salinger Books We Were Promised?

The movie is one of the year's worst atrocities.

really feel like the strong possibility is there is no vault & never was, which makes for a mystery, which I like.

That's how I feel! And his son is playing along really nicely.

Alfred, I'll take your word for it and not watch that movie. That bad huh?

Given the eyewitness accounts of quite a few people, I think it's very unlikely there's nothing there, although what's there may well be an unpublishable mess. I think it's more likely that his will stipulates that nothing can be published for 50 years or something and also that the literary executors are not allowed to talk about it. Also, given his hatred of Ivy League colleges, his papers are unlikely to go to Harvard or wherever, he's probably given them to some obscure meditation group or something that will zealously restrict access and we'll be talking about the lost Salinger novels for years to come, just like the Kafka papers that have been sitting in a suitcase in someone's flat in Tel Aviv for the last however many decades...

imo, Salinger isn't worth the amount of speculation he generates. He's a minor American author. He's a Kenneth Fearing, not a Pound or a Frost.

gtfo

If something did get published 10 or 25 or 50 years from now, how would it ever be authenticated?

I agree w/Aimless but have only read Catcher & Nine Stories. He has a definite style that's better than his detractors say it is, but his range is pretty severely limited imo. He does a thing, it's pretty good. He's like the Vader or Manowar of 20th century AmLit. If you love what he does then he's gonna seem like a total badass. If you think what he does is pretty good he's never gonna surprise you by venturing out into places you didn't think he'd go.

Nine out of 10 times I want to reread writers. Salinger is the one I don't.

the glass stories are on my desert island list. agree he has a style that can be polarizing, but the same can be said about lots of great artists

^^ ding ding, same here

dunno about frost but salinger is certainly better than f'ing pound

Admit to being a Salinger non-fan, suspect I very much didn't read him when I was young enough to forgive his flaws

(the story I mentioned in this ol' post later leaked to the Net; ditto Three Early Stories)

Also, re unpublished Salinger manuscripts at Princeton ( NPR had also somebody else's account of reading this story, I but can't find it; other guy said he thought "Bowling Balls" was great while he was reading it, but cooled off later)http://nassauweekly.com/articles/1217/
In the 70s, a bootleg collection of unpublished Salinger stories was reviewed in the Voice, with comments on even more unpub, not included in the boot. Reviewer really liked some of these tales (despite many typos, and who knows what other slippage), but said most tended to confirm his suspicion re Salinger's inability/resistance to face getting older (as a motivation for not exposing his stories to further criticism and/or increasingly cult-like fandom)

― dow, Wednesday, July 13, 2011(He also mentioned good stories not incl.)

I finally re-read Nine Stories for the first time since high school in the 60s, and liked it as much as and in the same way I did then, basically agreeing with Joan Crawford Loves Chachi's take. May never read any others (got off the bus after Franny and Zooey).

More from before re-reading the collection:
I read Salinger mostly in high school... I don't remember much of Catcher, do remember many bits (especially zingers and other kinds of hooks) from Nine Stories. "I mean, it was nothing you couldn't read while clipping your toenails, but...", zinc oxide on the nose v sunburn, ""Sex Can Be Great---Or Hell" He calls me Miss Spiritual Tramp of 1947", all those other setups and steps and step-ins, all of them unmistakably necessary, as it turns out in "Bananafish"--also, "I guess he's got a sense of humor, he laughs at comic strips"; "He says it's so beautifully written. He can't admit he likes it because it's about two guys who starved to death in an igloo"(note to self: google L. Manning Vines) Who could forget: vomit in the military wastebasket; the remains of a dry chicken sandwich not disposed of, not quite yet; a dead voice, "rudely, almost obscenely quickened for the occasion" (which of course works, as in the King James Bible's "the quick or the dead". whether you bother with "quick" once meaning "alive" or not) "his--his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s"--and the hits just keep coming! sorry.

― dow, Sunday, July 10, 2011 6:23 PM (six years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

...I think "Zooey" is Salinger trying to achieve some perspective (incl linking the characters from Nine Stories, acknowledging and extending their relatedness--everything, including "Franny" is "pre-Glass"., as Updike says, before this explicit family tree is drawn). Zooey's lecturing, and his flailing around, is Salinger trying to adjust his voice,warning and challenging his followers and himself. (Also, none of Nine Stories was actually narrated by his child characters, right? Unless you count the excellent Daumier-Smith, who was looking back, like Salinger's other narrator/witnesses, to times of blue and gold) The lectures seemed to take over and become self-mesmerized in Raise High/Seymour, though I might try to re-read those, at least.

― dow, Sunday, July 10, 2011

(Never finished Raise High/Seymour)

assuming the descriptions of some of the unpublished works from a few years back were accurate, they sounded p different from the books we know -- there was supposed to be a war novel, i think.