Re: Buddy's house style

Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Sat, 28 Feb 1998 10:30:46 -0500

> 	As for the Upper Case Words - aren't they just Buddy being
> 	rather laboriously ironic ?  The Primeval Mother, the Child Radio
> 	Celebrity, & so on - aren't we meant to smile archly to each other
> 	well aware that while the pitiful, yet dearly beloved, mass of
> 	humanity may take these concepts at their face value, we of
> 	the inner circle know better.

Salinger wrote the flap copy on the hardcover editions of of F&Z and Raise
High the Roofbeam.  In one or the other, he indicates that he writes very
slowly, but that something else will follow "soon or Soon."  I never
bothered to categorize it; it seemed simply perfect in a way I understand
instinctively -- the way in one place (again, I don't have the books at
hand and can't be more specific) Buddy talk about someone who Wants to
Write.  It has always seemed to me that this device of Capitalizing Certain
Phrases is as much a narrative tic as putting italics on one SYL-lable of a
word.  I get a kick out of it; it is as memorable to me as the admonition
in Strunk and White about using the phrase "the fact that."

--tim