Saturday, July 30, 2011

J.D. Salinger and Me

I feel strangely compelled to write this morning. Really I have nothing in the tank, but I haven't written anything for two days running and this makes me uncomfortable. I am addicted to writing and I make no apologies. Been a little bit sick for over a week now and it has disturbed my rhythm. I'm all about rhythm. I was exercising like crazy, writing like a writer, I had established a new rhythm for myself and I like it. It felt right. Then life intervened, as always it must, with dizziness and fatigue, and reduced me to intermittent exercising and intermittent writing. Been sleeping later which leaves less time for life transforming activities. But I will bounce back with renewed vigor and extreme prejudice. Count on it.
Reading Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger. Fabulous. It's one of those well written literary type books I like to gush about. I am eating it up like a perfectly cooked (meaning delightfully rare) Porterhouse steak. It's a slim volume and eminently digestible. Soon I will move on to Raise High The Roofbeam.....
Salinger was fascinating. He wrote The Catcher in the Rye. If you haven't read it I don't ever want to talk to you again. I have read it 103 times and I intend to read it another 103 times. He achieved success and fame because of Catcher, which he admitted to wanting as an aspiring writer, but when he got it he turned his back on it. Became a very famous recluse. Catcher was published in 1951. In 1953 he moved to Cornish, NH and hid there from the rest of the world for the rest of his life. His literary reputation rests on essentially four published works. No one knows if he wrote anything in seclusion. He never published anything. A former lover claims there are at least two novels locked in a safe but she has never seen them. He died in Cornish in 2010 at the age of 91.
Interesting story, cool guy, great writer.
I want to be a recluse. I want to be a RICH recluse. Think I'll make that my new goal. Living peacefully in pampered seclusion with my wife, my cats, easy access to my sons and their families and a mind free of the burden of unnecessary conversation and goddamn telephones.
Just have to get the rich part down first.

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