JD Salinger estate finally agrees to ebook editions
Author’s son explains that wish for accessibility has persuaded trustees to look past his father’s dislike of digital media
Royalties can be significantly higher on e-editions and there’s only another 61 years to exploit that estate…..
‘Catcher in the Rye’ was rubbish.
Holden Caulfield is an unlikable sulky teenager who hates life, runs away from school, and hangs out in New York City, has a terrible time, goes home, tries to run away, and doesn’t.
off topic but the Guardian reports
“Britain’s biggest companies, investors and pension funds must come clean to investors on the financial risks they face due to the climate crisis, The Environmental Audit Committee has said.”
What can be done? Luckily Spud comes to the rescue;
“I created the idea of Sustainable Cost Accounting”
“I will be writing to the Committee about this.”
I bet they can hardly wait to read his letter
‘Catcher in the Rye’ was not as lengthy a portrait of self-absorbed adolescent twattery as Hamlet, but it was much funnier.
Andrew C: I agree about CitR but Franny and Zooey and associated Glass family stories made being intelligent and literate, including a familiarity with Greek philosophy, desirable to a generation of his readers.
The financial risks: vastly higher taxes, cost burden of stupid and pointless government regulation.
@Ljh
Absolutely. Yes, Caulfield was a drip. And yes, the Glass family stories are very good indeed. ‘Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters’ is an especial favourite.
Holden Caulfield is an unlikable sulky teenager who hates life, runs away from school, and hangs out in New York City, has a terrible time, goes home, tries to run away, and doesn’t.
Yes, Catcher In The Rye is complete shit, but in Holden Caulfield Salinger described a generation that was more than 65 years in the future.
HC is in all respects a millennial: Immature, arrogant, judgmental, lazy, unaccomplished and ignorant. He looks down on his WWII veteran older brother for “selling out” without ever considering that perhaps said brother might just be happy to be alive… and as such isn’t as worried about conforming to some imaginary code of ethics (dreamed up by an adolescent) as he is about enjoying life.
Not that HC seems to have any moral grounding, mind you. He’s violent (and unaccomplished about it), he lies, he hires prostitutes, and at every turn chooses to do exactly the wrong thing. He’s nasty and rude, but doesn’t seem to connect the dots as to why he’s alone and lonely.
But what makes CITR shit is that Salinger never had HC face the consequences of his actions. He never learns anything. He’s the same disagreeable asshole at the end of the story that he was at the beginning. And how do things end? Fake nostalgia for people he didn’t like and entry into yet another prep school.
I get the impression Salinger understood HC enough to describe him, but simply didn’t have the intellectual horsepower – or perhaps intellectual courage – to take HC through to the sort of end situation he deserved… hence the silly (and very Scorsese-esque) epilogue that hands the reader the semi-happy ending Salinger thinks they need.
In today’s world, HC would end up in an Ivy League school, slouching to a journalism degree and a career as a D-List ‘journalist’ shilling for the Democratic Party at Vox or ThinkProgress. How would any of that make him worth your time?
I bet they can hardly wait to read his letter.
If you’re a big enough cunt to be a part of The Environmental Audit Committee, you deserve to shut up in a small, uncomfortably warm room with Richard Murphy for a minimum of 12 hours.
A letter from him is getting off easy.
I’ve never read CitR, thankfully.
But the period did throw up some even more appalling shite. Ken Kesey, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac…
Even the OK novelists, Hemingway, Pynchon, Mailer etc were vastly over-rated.
Some of Kesey and Burroughs is good. Nothing of Kerouac’s ever was. As to Hemingway, Pynchon and Mailer, I shudder went I come across their names… Awful, awful, awful.
And you forgot Capote and Vidal. Capote is OK in small doses, Vidal completely toxic… the literary equivalent of a salami and limburger sandwich covered in chocolate and sprinkles.
Very inauthentic, Hemingway.
Kerouac is awful. It’s just typing.
Most of that counterculture stuff is awful. It’s so aimless. John McLean, Tony Stark and Han Solo are real rebels. People who get shit done and with the disapproval of the bureaucracy.
Dennis, I say this through teeth which are gritted: that was a good review. If anything it was too short.
For the time being, I shall cease teasing you which, I am sure, will come as a relief.
We did CitR for English literature o level, as a 14 yr old it was interesting though more amusing was some of the more religious types complaining to their parents and trying to have it banned as unsuitable for teenagers.
Had to read CitR in third form English, only memory of it is boredom.
When JDS died I bought Catcher in the Rye, it’s taken three attempts and I still haven’t managed to get more than about 20% of the way through.
For the time being, I shall cease teasing you which, I am sure, will come as a relief.
Is that what all the feet stuff was? Can’t say I got it. I knew you seemed to be immensely pleased with yourself about it… now I see why, I guess.
I just thought it was some sort of wog in-joke that we septics wouldn’t understand.
Wog jokes are usually best, so mother says.
Mind you, she thinks wogs are still digging the Suez canal.
Poor old Dennis. He’s still sore about the ribbing he had for being an “internet tough guy” from way back.
He gives solid erudite comments, but they’re always lined with an anti British sentiment these days.
Sad..
Anti-European, to be precise. Timmy spends more time on Britannia, so it seems like I’m anti-British.
Hate to break it to you, Dennis – and there’s no way you could know, being stuck in Leftpondia – but there’s no such thing as being ‘European’. Ask our host what the Czechs and Portuguese have culturally in common, that wouldn’t equally be shared by people in Buenos Aires or Brisbane? The cultural differences between France and England are greater than those between England and Japan.
https://geerthofstede.com/hofstede-books/
The cultural differences between France and England are greater than those between England and Japan.
Love it when Europeans explain why I dislike Europeans for me while trying to explain why I shouldn’t dislike Europeans.
I don’t see where you’re getting ‘dislike’ from my statement, though I have no problem with your doing so – de gustibus non disputandum. It’s just that ‘European’ covers as broad a range of (first world) cultures as you’ll find on the planet, so if you dislike Europeans, you must dislike nearly everyone. As is certainly your right.
Whilst I’m more or less in agreement with the prevailing opinions regarding Salinger, Hemingway, Kerouac and Mailer, I was rather pleasantly surprised with the latter’s ‘Harlot’s Ghost’, which is about the early days of the CIA from postwar Berlin to the Kennedy era, with a bunch of other stuff that he intended to address in a subsequent book that never got written. Left me thinking he was a much better writer than I’d previously thought.
The fact that Europe presents your average septic with a rich and varied variety of quaint and colorful cultures to dislike is one of things I like best about Europe.
@Mr Wog August 13, 2019 at 9:08 pm
Yes. I don’t understand why Dennis is so anti-British. Perhaps he’s a closet AOC, EU & RoP illegal immigrants supporter.
His dislike of “Europeans” is absurd as they only exist in Politicians mind. French, Dutch, Greeks, Poles… hate Germans; Swedes like Germans; Poles & Hungarians hate France and Germany…., Germans believe they are supreme race despite losing twice….
Maybe Dennis The Menace is also a Pocahontas and resents “Europeans” populating USA and making it great.
Yeah, that must be it.