opionated

Scottie Bowman (bowman@mail.indigo.ie)
Thu, 30 Apr 1998 08:22:10 +0000 

	Well yes, Brendan, you're quite right.  If at all possible, 
	I like to start the day with a lovely cool refreshing glass 
	of blood.  

	However, this time I'm going to have to disappoint you by 
	placing myself fair & square in the McKennedy camp (alongwith - 
	by the looks of things - Valerie & David.)  `Instruction' is a word 
	with fuzzy edges but Advice to the Lovelorn or Nine Easy Steps 
	to God are just about the last things I look for in a book or 
	a painting or a movie or a piece of music.  (I assume this was 
	what you meant by `any medium' - which relates to `artistic medium' 
	rather than `the media' which has a more ephemeral, flashy, 
	televisual-newspaper quality & where indeed you might look 
	for guidance on the best stocks to buy or how to cook pheasants.)

	This is one of the reasons why I find The Catcher so much more 
	moving & exciting than the Glass saga.  Buddy & Seymour & the rest 
	of them are endlessly trying to improve themselves - which I find 
	one of the most off-putting of human characteristics.  It's so 
	f...ingly, drearily, self-centred.  In the same way that I never 
	belonged to the Boy Scouts so none of the people that ever 
	really mattered to me could be numbered among the self-improvers.  
	And when I begin to suspect someone's trying to improve ME then 
	it takes an awful lot of jokes & clever, ornate manipulation of 
	language to persuade me to stay.

	When Schubert opens the Trout quintet with those two superconfident 
	chords & arpeggios, he's simply saying: `There.  THAT'S the way it 
	is....'  Which is what Cezanne is also saying when he starts laying 
	in those heart-stopping tiles of colour that make the shape of the 
	mountain.  And when Ernest sends Fred Henry walking away from 
	the hospital in the rain.  

	And when Holden first fixes you with his baleful eye & begins 
	telling you what happened.

	As I've mentioned before, I met the book shortly after it came out 
	& Holden's irreverent frankness made such an impact that none 
	of Salinger's subsequent creations ever struck me as possessing 
	the same vitality.  They had too many agenda, hidden & overt. 
	Holden simply bled as most have done at one time or another & he 
	had no solutions - as most of us have also been without on those 
	occasions.  THAT'S the way it is.

	And no, Brendan, most of the Austen readers you meet on that 
	particular list have no taste for anything except the hijacking & 
	abuse of one of England's great comedians for their own humourless, 
	usually feminist, preoccupations.

	I don't know about prat & git, David.  I'd always assumed they were 
	insults of a distinctly English flavour but without the auto-erotic 
	connotation of wanker.  This last is certainly very popular in 
	England at present.  The concept of playing with oneself can be 
	extended into many other areas: a verbose, philosophically minded 
	chap will be termed a word-wanker.   I suspect the Glass family 
	might come into the category of God-wankers.

	Scottie B.