J.D. Salinger

Hello friends!
Well since I have already been home since Wednesday, I am finished with our first assignment.
J.D. Salinger has been my partner over the past few days; we've spent many an hour in my makeshift bed together, he helping maintain my sanity, me patiently absorbing his stories and enjoying every minute of it. My soul is still partially present in the house of the Glass family, so I hope we all find each other there sometime soon...
Emily

Why i like zooey
on marriage
"I like to ride in trains too much. You never get to sit next to the window any more when you're married"

religion
"As a matter of simple logic, there's no difference at all, that i can see, between the man who's greedy for material treasure- or even intellectual treasure- and the man who's greedy for spiritual treasure. As you say treasure's treasure, God damn it, and it seems to me that ninety per cent of all the world-hating saints in history were just as acquisitive and unattractive, basically, as the rest of us are."

funniest part of the book, " you know what else he swore up and down to me? He told me last night he once had a glass of ginger ale with Jesus in the kitchen when he was eight years old." poor franny...

Salinger's description
"He picked up his cigar from the lip of the copper ashtray where he had placed it. It was now only about two inches in lenght but was still burning. He took a deep drag on it, as if it were a kind of respirator in an otherwise oxygenless world"

royal tenenbaums.....

Franny talking to Lane: "Listen, don't hate me because I can't remember some person immediately. Especially when they look like everybody else, and talk and dress and act like everybody else." God I feel this way so often. But I feel like I shouldn't? Are we just "freaks with freakish standards"?

Buddy's letter to Zooey, writing about why they need to keep his old phone: "When I'm in town, I invariably sit talking by the hour with my old friend Yama, the God of Death, and a private phone's a must for our little chats."

I loved reading Zooey, the things he said were just so funny. Like how he talks to his mom: "You listening to this? You fat old Druid?" he inquired. "Or are you just staring at my gorgeous face?" He talks about how Buddy and Seymour ruined him and Franny, and I wonder if the fact that he uses the word "buddy" all the time is some reflection of how he can't get rid of their influence. And while I'm on the subject of interpreting those little things, I think the family name of Glass is quite fitting.

Salinger has an amazing ability to produce "quote worthy" lines on every single page, and often string together many on the same page, such as during the letters. I never really tired of his witticism, though perhaps this was because of the very short length of time I was subjected to it. Either way, it offers clever insights and effective entertainment. It makes the characters (and especially dialogue) very surreal but this is not a problem (or was not for me). Thoughts dense with overwhelming life themes (religion, death, status etc.) need not always stem from dense, overwrought analysis (whether explicit or not) but can spring forth as brilliantly, if not more so, in the form of humor, wit, satire, and sweet and short fiction.
Salinger's unending flamboyancy serves him well, as always, but there are certainly pockets of tangibility making sure we don't end up drunk on the style. Have we, as a collective group managed to sober up from our tipsy one night stand with J.D.? Have we lost members in the night's flurry of dashing remarks and wild, exuberant intellectual gesticulations? Or perhaps they went to the wrong bar? No, the snooty one in the Village is where we were! Josh, Sean, I thought you were there...it is just...well you haven't called me in a while...Oh wait, one of you was with that one girl, the bookish one who said she wasn't drinking...did you go home with her, ah you did didn't you? And Sean, well I thought i saw you talking to that chic gentlemen in the back that who always knows what you want, was that you? Or were you talking with Luke outside, passing back and forth a worn old box of B&Hs, produced slyly from an inside jacket pocket. Luke didn't say much did he? He's been awfully quiet lately...
Hangovers, perhaps. Just long hangovers.
They're having trouble telling how they feel, but they can dance, dance, dance.

Lovely photo change!

Franny and Zooey = JD intellectually masturbating

Sir Joshua Allan wrote:Franny and Zooey = JD intellectually masturbating

I absolutely agree, and while I loved his elaborate self servicing, there is only so long you can go before wondering, "when is he gonna let me get on that thing?" The answer is he's not going to, and you just watched some guy jerk off. Yeah, it was exciting(!?) and all but in the end you're not getting anything (same old story, same old characters/motifs) you couldn't get from Youtube (Royal Tenenbaums). Not all orgasms are equal. And yet, I still felt satisfied after reading it, if perhaps not enlightened.

Hmm I've never been a fan of this but I guess watching J.D. masturbate kinda turned me on.

J.D., O Darling!, despite your standard (yet elegant) masturbation techniques you have produced a tempting tale of a near insane, questionable existence of fate. Where my Zooey, poor dear, has a sincere dilemma, deciding the fate of his sister. I found his first, failed attempts pitiful and quite indecisive, yet he alone captured my admiration. And in the end of course he caught his sister, strangled by her societal outlook and pulled her back into existence. But how far away is Zooey from falling over the edge of insanity? Does his "freakish" behavior give him insight to the Glass family, allowing him to properly analyze the lunacy of his relatives, or is saving his sister his final realization before plunging into an abyss of wordless theatrics and manifestations?

As a side note, I feel the old bar has snatched our fellow readers and pushed them into a thoughtless bliss. Yet perhaps I'm too hushed and only verbally announce the known, so be it, at any rate, "I don't know exactly what I mean by that, but I mean it."

Mr. George wrote:Salinger has an amazing ability to produce "quote worthy" lines on every single page, and often string together many on the same page, such as during the letters. I never really tired of his witticism, though perhaps this was because of the very short length of time I was subjected to it. Either way, it offers clever insights and effective entertainment. It makes the characters (and especially dialogue) very surreal but this is not a problem (or was not for me). Thoughts dense with overwhelming life themes (religion, death, status etc.) need not always stem from dense, overwrought analysis (whether explicit or not) but can spring forth as brilliantly, if not more so, in the form of humor, wit, satire, and sweet and short fiction.

... wow...Mrs. Mason would be proud, im sending this to her right now