Re: J.D's handy work
Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Sat, 24 Apr 1999 08:17:19 -0700
At 8:57 AM -0600 on 4/24/99, you wrote:
> Dear Koji, thank you very much for your response--you make good sense and
> though I trust Stephen Foskett's research, I'm glad to have your opinion
> in support of his...it sounds like all of Salinger's uncollected stories
> are available in Japan...is the volume we've been discussing the only one
> or are there others?
Will -- the one you had (it was the one for which I dug up a library
citation, way back) is the only Japanese volume I remember, and it had only
a handful of stories in it. Of the nearly two-dozen uncollected stories,
how many would your collection knock off the list of unavailables?
This is thoroughly unrelated, but back in the 1980s, when Leonard Cohen
couldn't get arrested, much less released in the US, an album of his
("Various Positions") was released in Japan, and the only way I could get
it was to buy the Japanese version. The frustrating part is that while the
lyrics are in English, there's a long, long essay in the booklet, but in
Japanese, and I've never been able to find out what it said. Eventually
Columbia came to its senses, released it years later in the US, and it and
his later albums did quite well here.
There's a lot to be said for the attitude of Japanese publishing of music
and books. I like that they don't treat creative material as disposable,
the attitude one runs into here in the US.
--tim o'connor