Tuesday, December 11, 2007

ah, buddy

i have a tendency to get extremely emotionally involved in the things i do for school. i'm currently finishing up a twenty pager on the religious reception of j.d. salinger's glass family and i just CAN NOT get salinger out of my head. i know that all he wants is privacy and that if he googled his own name he might just keel over thinking about all those people who think about him all the time, but i just can't stop!!! thankfully, i doubt he uses the internet very much, so i'm not going to worry about that for now. but every time i come across a negative review (which is pretty often, especially when you start getting into "hapworth 16, 1924"), i think about how salinger obsessed over it and it just breaks my heart. he ALMOST agreed to reprint "hapworth" through this tiny obscure publishing house, but the new york times found out and ran a negative review and the next thing you know, he's changed his mind. i don't want to be one of those people who are all like "oh look x happened and then salinger did y he must have been thinking z," but i just can't help it.

one of my friends from high school is a "salinger scholar," if that's even a thing, and he has all of his stories. i'm going to read all of it over break. partly because i'm burning to after all this thinking about him, and partly because i think that VOLUMES of previously unpublished stuff is going to come out after his death and i want to be ready for it. assuming he isn't dead already and no one knows about it, which is a distinct possibility. if i were salinger i would not keep in touch with margaret anne salinger. i HATE his daughter and i HATE joyce maynard and i HATE michiko kakutani. i HATE them.

1 comment:

Lizzy Acker said...

remember my presentation on "a perfect day for banana fish," back before we were friends? i think i was struck speechless by love. maybe we should dedicate our lives to getting jobs at the new york times and writing positive reviews of jd salinger.