Re: documentary on salinger?

On Sun, Nov 10, 2002 at 09:24:31AM -0000, Scottie Bowman wrote:

> Reaching for my cigar & patting the couch invitingly, I recall
> how often an unacceptable emotion can find expression
> only in an apparently unrelated, or even contradictory one:
> unacknowledged lust in mockery, prurient excitement in ennui,
> hostility in zealous concern, rage in embarrassment & so on.
> I note too, that Tim's contributions to the film were, in the end,
> spurned.
>
> Hmm.

Oh, dear, dear, Scottie, I had hoped you knew me better than that.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, is it not?

No, I had no bad reaction at being "spurned" (on the contrary, I got a
nice note and a copy of the master tape, and a lot of the documents
displayed were documents I loaned them), but, in fact, I watched the
thing unfold with mounting dread, worried that my head would pop on the
screen and sound as silly as did so many of the others. (For example,
while Frances Glassmoyer was a delight, the underside of it was that we
had to listen to too many people talk about the guy who shot John Lennon
and was carrying The Catcher in the Rye when he did it; they even had
the bad taste to punctuate breaks in a few places with the staccato of
gunshots as their rhythms.) And they managed to dig up Jay Goldberg,
who is Salinger's first cousin, and who spoke nicely of their days
growing up, as well as a fellow whose family rented Salinger an
apartment in Connecticut when he was writing the novel, and who felt
that the book was explicitly about him, a recurring motif in the
documentary.

So, you see, I can say certain nice things ... but overall, I was
mortified by the spy-camera footage tracking him through Cornish and
Windsor, by the innuendo about little girls, and by the voice-overs
of some would-be adolescent, reading Holden Caulfield's narrative and
managing to miss the subtle intonation of how a teenager talks, and
to miss it on every possible syllable. Even his commas sounded false.

Better you should return to the couch and pat it down again, and the
next time I'm in Cork I promise you an hour to whack away at the thicket
that is my head in action <he said, closing with warm regards despite
the sometimes infuriatingly bad communications that happen in too many
email exchanges>.

Or, to quote the Bard Cecilia, Tra-la....

--tim

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Received on Sun Nov 10 10:06:00 2002