Subject: complex list (Beam me down, Scottie!)
From: Benjamin Samuels (madhava@sprynet.com)
Date: Sat Mar 25 2000 - 20:43:39 EST
Scottie and all,
> '... Here's a really nice guy, makes a parable about bananas
> and worldy things and then shoots himself in the head?
> It says a little something, just not aything really great
> or interesting ...'
>
> Not a universal view.
>
Gosh had I written that? Thanks for the insightful correction and nice
story. It now makes the subject line that I regretted not changing right
after I sent the post strangely appropriate, don't you think? What I was
trying to get at when I got carried away was what's so special to me about
the glass stories, and I think especially SaI. There seems to be a faction
forming (or is it formed because this is a familar trip around the bowl)
that prefer Salingers other stories such as Esme and don't particularly care
for the Glass stories SaI particularly, at least not with the passion that
others like myself so shamelessly exhibit.
On 3/23 Tim said:
I can understand that it's not up there with favorites like "Esme,"
but as far as I feel, it's as close as we get to the author's head as
he uses his ventriloquist, Buddy Glass, as his mouthpiece.
In a way the there's something about how the Glass stories are written that
seems a bit like cheating. The best direct reference to this from
Salinger's work might be Seymour's poems. Buddy manages to explain so well
what it means to really create great writing, he tells us everything that
makes Seymours poems so great but then never shows us the poems. He gives
only the gist of one written in an asian language and so really beyond our
appreciation as a poem, only accesible as a description of the idea of it.
And Salinger, whose ideas of great poetry and writing these are, isn't
concentrating on writing such a poem- at least not in publishing it.
Instead we have neurotic ramblings about poems and poets. A far cry from
that promise of great poetry that he desribes- or is it?
In the non-Glass stories he actually comes much closer in a lot of ways to
what Buddy has held up as the ideal- Esme or the laughing man *do* what, in
a way, SaI just talks about. But *that* is exactly why I love SaI. In one
of the very first posts from our sadly missed friend Louise, she notes how
Salinger used fiction itself to express ideas that are more from the realm
of criticism. SaI is the epitome of this- he somehow presents both an
example and explanation of great writing. This is a great theme in art, in
life for that matter. Ever read _Godel, Escher Bach_? Here the same type
of theme regarding something pointing at itself, regressing to infinity and
at the same time somehow cancelling itself out, is traced through music, art
and mathematics. SaI is the magical counterpart to this in fiction and
criticism.
Love,
Madhava
did that make sense to anyone but myself?
----- Original Message -----
From: Scottie Bowman <rbowman@indigo.ie>
To: <bananafish@roughdraft.org>
Sent: Saturday, March 25, 2000 6:34 PM
Subject: Re: complex list (Beam me down, Scottie!)
>
>
> '... Here's a really nice guy, makes a parable about bananas
> and worldy things and then shoots himself in the head?
> It says a little something, just not aything really great
> or interesting ...'
>
> Not a universal view.
>
> A party in 68 Highfield Road, Rathgar, Dublin in the autumn
> of 1951. The decidedly pissed Seamus Kelly, then literary
> editor of the Irish Times, is discussing an acquaintance whose
> taste in writing he had hitherto dismissed as totally risible.
> 'I said to him: ''Go on. Name me one short story of
> the last ten years that you liked.'''
> 'What he say?'
> 'You know what he said? He said: ''A Perfect Day for
> Bananafish.'''
> 'That's not bad.'
> 'It's bloody good. I didn't think he was capable.'
>
> This was the first time I ever heard the title & for the life
> of me I can't think how people in Dublin could have read it
> in 1951 (I'm sure of the date) unless in what were then pretty
> rare copies of the New Yorker. I can't even remember where
> I myself read it - though it was certainly many years before
> the Glass saga began in earnest.
>
> My point being that A Perfect Day was making a big impact
> on people long before those other, elaborating texts ever
> appeared.
>
> Scottie B.
>
>
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