Clipping Salinger

You really should read this. And the book. But mostly the book.

"If there is an amateur reader still left in the world--or anybody who just reads and runs--I ask him or her, with untellable affection and grattitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children."

"In this entre-nous spirit, then, old confidant, before we join the others, the grounded everywhere, including, I'm sure, the middle-aged hot-rodders who insist on zooming us to the moon, the Dharma Bums, the makers of cigarette filters for thinking men, the Beat and the Sloppy and the Petulant, the chosen cultists, all the lofty experts who know so well what we should or shouldn't do with our poor little sex organs, all bearded guitarists and Zen-killers and incorporated aesthetic Teddy boys who look down their thoroughly unenlightened noses at this splendid planet where (please don't shut me up) Kilroy, Christ, and Shakespeare all stopped--before we join these others, I privately say to you, old friend, (unto you, really, I'm afraid), please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: (((()))) (98)."

"By every logical definition he was an unhealthy specimen, he did on his worst nights and late afternoons give out not only cries of pain but cries for help, and when nominal help arrived, he did decline to say in perfectly intelligible language where it hurt (104)."

From Seymour an Introduction

by J.D. Salinger

I love Salinger because he makes for a fantastic narrator. He lies to you. He knows his own weaknesses. Salinger gave us a bouquet of parentheses, who else gave us a bouquet of parentheses? Who thinks of such things? J. D. Salinger looked at the world and saw what shit it could be, but he also found immense satisfaction out of a hot day and a silent old man. His narrators were wrong, and sweaty, and hopeless. But Salinger can do something no one else can: he can be haunting AND funny AND morbid AND detatched AND overcaring. AND AND AND. And when he gave us a floral arrangement made out of punctuation, we took those beauties and ran away with him. Who could blame us?

Cheers.