Re: Read OR Write
Camille Scaysbrook (c_scaysbrook@yahoo.com)
Mon, 02 Aug 1999 10:58:47 +1000
Sorry if this has already reached b'fish - I'm reposting it as I've been
having email maladies. Anyone else at Geocities wanna get up and have a
whinge about all the problems since it's been sold to Yahoo !!?
Camille
> Seymour Glass wrote:
> > "If only you'd remember before ever you sit down to write that you've
> been a
> > reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in
> your
> > mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of
> > writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had
> his
> > heart's choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly
> > believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the
> thing
> > yourself. I won't even underline that. It's too important to be
> underlined."
> > -Seymour Glass
>
> .... and this is SUCH an important thing to bear in mind when reading
> Salinger's fiction, expecially the later stuff. `Catcher' strikes me very
> much as a book written on that ethos and which lends the book its
> uniqueness and originality. The later stuff though sometimes puts me in
> mind of the Brontes' Gondal saga (and Salinger is on record as being a
fan
> of E. Bronte) - an enormous fictional history begun in childhood with all
> members of the Bronte family contributing to it, and continuing it far
> beyond the age where such family games are usually discarded. Salinger
has
> not only sat down and written the book he wants to read, but seems to
have
> invented the world he would like to live in. To my mind the Glass stories
> can often seem like Douglas Adams' description of the game of Brockian
> Ultra Cricket - that is, a game played in a high walled enclosure so that
> what is going on inside seems much more exciting for the people outside
(:
> A Fountain Seal'd as Christina Rossetti said; there's this inescapable
> feeling with the Glasses that Salinger is getting far more out of it than
> we are, and it shouldn't be like that. (That said, I'll unashamedly admit
> that it's exactly the reason I started writing myself - because I
couldn't
> find the sort of books I'd like to read in the library - but that,
perhaps
> as a theatre practitioner, I am always conscious that writing should be a
> communication rather than a rant into an empty phone receiver).
Certainly,
> writing in this manner is very much `to thine own self be true', which is
> certainly one of my life axioms - and I think this is what we respond to
so
> warmly in Catcher -
>
> That's not to say I don't get a kick out of those crazy Glasses in a kind
> of half-assed way (: (but the fact that I saw fit to voice that opinion
in
> the words of Holden Caulfield must say something, too)
>
> P.S. Eschewing search parties for myself (I've been back a week now and
> you're all bored with me again) - where on earth is Will. How I miss his
> down-to-earth denouments he gave to every argument! I am ready and
willing
> to send a search party out to Colorado (where, if the South Park movie is
> to be believed, the war with Canada has just finished (: God that was a
> funny movie) - anyone willing to don a beanie and help me?
>
> Camille
> verona_beach@geocities.com
_________________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com