Subject: Franny, Zooey, and Janet
From: zazie (zazie@raketnet.nl)
Date: Wed Jun 20 2001 - 03:55:46 GMT
"Scottie Bowman" WROTE:
>> It was only in the past couple of years that I tried to put
>> my objections into words, but my natural smugness was
>> certainly reinforced reading these similar criticisms first voiced
>> fifty years ago - so much more elegantly & by such a formidable
>> collection of sensibilities.
Sorry my English is so bad, what does this expression "sucking up to"
mean?????
>> Having summarised their shared distaste for the self-consciousness,
>> the preciousness, the incestuous inwardness of the Glasses,
incestuous!? Always this preoccupation with this sex-thing .....
>> Malcom reasserts - without apology - that Salinger: '... would
>> permanently retain the dualism of “Bananafish,” the view of
>> the world as a battleground between the normal and the abnormal,
>> the ordinary and the extraordinary, the talentless and the gifted,
>> the well and the sick ...’
>> This, at heart, is what I find appalling about him: that such a gifted
>> man should embrace the elitism of the second-rater.
Now really, what makes you think that it's second rate? Who are you, or I,
to judge
that his elitism is really second-rate? His snobbism may be well founded,
or maybe not
but the thing is, it is impossible to say for anyone whether this is
second-rate or not.
>> It’s the kind of sniffy withdrawal of the swot who has been turned
down
>> for the team, who can’t make it with the girls but flaunts his
collection
>> of Rilke in consolation.
and this is a bad thing? And once again, how do you know that? I mean, what
gives you
the right to be so presumptious? You give JDS all these motivations and
character flaws,
please try to be a little less arrogant, (although I can't really see how
you can do that
and still remain this conservative old man that you seem to be ...)
>> OF COURSE if he has greater facility in certain directions he’ll
>> feel different. But that makes it all the more important he
understand
>> that in his essential humanity he is NO different. A real artist -
So, YOU have knowledge that he doesn't understand that? Wow, teach me this
trick, please ....
>> a Tolstoy, a Joyce - is very, very other than Joe Soap at the end
>> of the bar. Yet his preoccupations convey nothing of this difference.
>> He identifies a dodgy little Dublin Jew or a bumbling Russian bastard
>> & in that unpromising focus concentrates mankind in general.
>> There’s none of the adolescent’s grandiose condescension to some
>> mythical Fat Lady or etherealised Jesus.
>> Sean loves the skewering of Lane Coutell. It gives him, presumably,
>> a delicious feeling of superiority or perhaps an even more deliciously
>> masochistic sense of self-identification.
This is like bullshit of the highest order. So, somebody implies that he
doesn't
like the arrogant frat-boy type. And then you conclude that he is feeling
superior?
you ARE weird ...
>> Count Leo would probably have laughed too. But as you put his book
>> back on the shelf the feeling would something warmer, more accepting,
>> more DELIGHTED, than that awful patronising sense of complicit
>> one-up-man-ship that J.D. dispenses so compulsively.
>> There may be something unimaginable building up in that underground
>> bunker in Cornish. But only if he has abandoned this overworked seam
>> & started over again - as real artists make themselves do, all the
time.
if you read the '22 stories' you can see that JDS did just that,
especially in regard to CITR. Who is to say, that he isn't doing it again?
Oh I'm SORRY, YOU would of course
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