Tag Archives: Jerome David Salinger

“Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”

Posted by Marco Sparks on

“What I was really hanging around for, I was trying to feel some kind of a good-by. I mean I’ve left schools and places I didn’t even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don’t care if it’s a sad good-by or a bad good-by, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it. If you don’t, you feel even worse.”

from here.

“That’s the whole trouble. You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you’re not looking, somebody’ll sneak up and write ‘Fuck you’ right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it’ll say ‘Holden Caulfield’ on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it’ll say ‘Fuck you.’ I’m positive, in fact.”

RIP J. D. Salinger, 91 year old reclusive author of 1951′s The Catcher In The Rye, which is almost universally and immortally beloved, and several other books, including his collection, Nine Stories, featuring the fantastic short story, “A Perfect Day For Bananafish.” And, you can find more of his short stories here. He’s been on the run from fame and possibly the rest of society since 1965, being both a hater of the world of phonies and drawing inspiration from it. Salinger is a writer that loved the art of writing, but just for himself, and it’s said that he’s written as many as 15 books since he stepped away from the public eye.

from here.

“I hope to hell that when I do die somebody has the sense to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddamn cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.”

Nobody wants flowers when they’re dead.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.”

-from chapter 3 of Catcher In The Rye.

I’ll resume howling at the moon tomorrow probably, but today I just wanted to share a chuckle with you not only that someone is attempting a “sequel” to J. D. Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye, but that Salinger himself is coming out of his intense decades long seclusion to try and fight it.

Here’s the description of the sequel from Gawker:

60 Years Later, by a mysterious guy living in Sweden (!) named John David California, imagines Holden Caufield as a 76-year-old escapee from a retirement home wandering the streets of New York City. Salinger’s lawyers argue that “the sequel is not a parody and it does not comment upon or criticise the original. It is a ripoff pure and simple.”

Wow. That sounds like a very special kind of bad. Way to go, John David California. Also, your nom de plume is a bad “homage” to Jerome David, but also sounds like the lamest porn name ever. But it leaves me amazed, thinking about it, that someone hasn’t crossed that uncrossable line and bastardized a movie version of the classic book. I guess I’m pleased that some things are still sacred?