How J.D. Salinger met his wife Colleen

 

On a bus.

According to an autobiography by someone who knew Salinger for a time, Salinger met Colleen O’Neill, a young nurse, on a bus.  Then he began writing her letter after letter.

She was already engaged to a man who had a disabled son from a previous relationship.  They all got along swell and were to be married and become a family.

Then Colleen left her fiance and his son.  She never told them why.  From time to time, she sent small checks back to both of them, but that was it.  She moved in with someone else – Salinger, as it turned out.

If this story is true, it begs an innocent question:  Did Salinger ever let this woman her visit her former fiance and the almost-stepson who cared about her?  Or was it her choice?  Or was there more to the story?  We don’t know.  But we imagine it was probably hard for her former fiance to compete with letters written by such a literary giant.

Maybe now the former fiance will contact Colleen again.  Hopefully he has found happiness in his life, maybe has a growing family now.

IF this story is true – and one never knows – perhaps some mysteries will be answered for him now.

To be sure, Salinger is a literary giant and should be revered as such – but definitely not a perfect human being.  He wasn’t necessarily Holden Caufield embodied.  Maybe he would have liked to be more like Holden.

New Yorker 02/01/10

This week’s issue was sublime.  A great read.

Which is bad for business here at the blog, but once in a while they do good over there.

Particularly worth reading: Edwidge Danticat’s piece about his relatives in Haiti and their status, page 19.

Hollywood fails to get ‘Up in the Air’ joke

Has anyone seen the Golden Globes?  The film “Up in the Air,” based on the book by Walter Kirn, won several nominations this year.  The main character in both the novel and the film happens to be named Ryan Bingham.

At one point in the Golden Globes, two men won an award for creating the music for a different film:  ”Crazy Heart,” about a country singer.  The two real-life men are T Bone Burnett and a singer/songwriter named Ryan Bingham – just an interesting coincidence.

Burnett was first to the podium, so he made a joke about how Ryan Bingham was late, and that he must be “Up in the Air.”

But there was very very light laughter from the audience of actors and directors.  Clearly they didn’t get the joke.  Hey guys, do you watch any other films but your own??

Congrats, by the way, to Kirn for being mentioned several times in the broadcast – more proof that you are famous.

Comma killer of the week: Anthony Lane

Film reviewer Anthony Lane helps the New Yorker live up to its reputation this week by including looong sentences with too many commas.  (In this case, the commas may be justified; the problem is that there are so many phrases packed into one sentence.)  Since calling out New Yorker commas is our Raisinet d’ etre (Hey, George Saunders, that joke would have fit right into your hilarious Shouts piece), here they are:

This has less to do with the performances than with the attitude of the director, Andre Technie, who, at the age of sixty-six, approaches the exploits of his characters with a gusto, and a willingness to be led astray, that borders on the adolescent.

It would have been a little easier if they’d just said “attitude of director Andre Technie,” but that would have meant one fewer comma.  Awww shucks.

Here’s the very next sentence:

The film is sliced into two parts, “Circumstances” and “Consquences,” but within that division there are frequent spinoffs, as we pull aside from the action and follow the flight of a minor figure, or even a moment of natural beauty, as if it were an idle train of thought.

Not horrible, but not so great, either.  Does it ever occur to the copy editors that these can be separated into shorter and better sentences?  Just like an earthworm cut in two, we’d still get the same nutrients out of it.

Here is another run-on:

Jenny, in Jon Amiel’s “Creation,” is certainly a hell of a role, beginning with an action sequence in the nude, switching to a flirtation scene — in which Jenny wears bloomers and a knitted top — with an ardent admirer, and closing with her demise, filmed in unremitting sorrow.

Methinks the cadence is meant to echo the Bard:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Exactly.

George Saunders’ Shouts and Murmurs piece: Not funny

The standard for New Yorker “Shouts & Murmurs” pieces by famous writers, or writers who have graced those glossy pages before, should be this:  If an unknown sent in the same piece, would it pass the threshhold?

Most of the time, the answer is a big fat “No.”  An unfunny piece by a New Yorker writer or famous author is going to get into print well before a funnier piece by an unknown.  At least, today’s evidence implies that this is the case.

George Saunders, who “has written six books” according to his bio on page 2, and who has been published in Shouts & Murmurs before, poops out a really dull “Shouts” piece this week.

It starts by quoting a recent internet article about how so many young people don’t meet the minimum standards of basic military training because they are out of shape.

Then Saunders launches into a satirical two-page summary of a military expedition in which the soliders are out of breath, panting, dealing with back spasms, their pants are falling down, sweating, thirsty, reaching for sodapop and snacks as they march foward.

Ha ha.

Toward the end:

We were not afraid.  We were not cowards.  Well, maybe a little.  But mostly we were just so tired.  Also starving.  Plus, like I said, several of us were chafing.

That’s basically what the whole piece is, and that’s as good as it gets. Well, there is an almost funny joke about them fighting over Raisinets left over from a Halloween care package.

Know what it’s like?  ONE OF THOSE SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE SKITS WHERE THE VERY PREMISE ITSELF IS THE JOKE, AND THE SKIT JUST GOES ON AND ON AND NEVER GETS A LAUGH.

So let’s see.  If anyone other than George Saunders had written this, would it have been published?

No.

New Yorker goes down the shaw

Finishing up our belated (sorry) analysis of the past week’s New Yorker, we see that Nancy Franklin has dedicated two pages (and there’s a page of art, too) to MTV’s latest highbrow reality drama, “Jersey Shore.” She posits that people enjoy these shows as long as they can feel as though they are anthropologists studying a new tribe. She is correct – very few people will admit that they simply enjoy such an undemanding form of entertainment; we’d rather harrumph and say we are watching it out of curiosity for how other people live. She then gets to the truth about most of these shows: In studying these tribes, we also feel self-congratulatory because we are so superior to the houseguests or contestants. (Not that it’s very hard, in this case). In Jersey Shore, the priorities of these tanned, muscular younguns are: 1) Sex, 2) Looking good to get sex and 3) Hmmm…fame, perhaps?

There are very few reality shows that cast intelligent people, and very few in which the smartest houseguests/participants win or become popular (except, perhaps, the very first season of “Big Brother,” in which the three most intelligent houseguests — all physically bland men — won first, second and third place in the end. One of the winners was an assistant prosecutor; another mentioned he had been tested and had a genius-level I.Q. No one watched that first season).

Frankin’s piece basically lets those who haven’t seen the show in on its dubious appeal. It’s also filled with the New Yorker’s trademark long sentences strung together by commas and piled-on phrases:

The logo of these shows might be one of those large red plastic cups used for beer (and beer pong) and frat parties, and in evidence in many teen-agers’ Facebook photos, signaling the overflow of alcohol and expectations that happens at large gatherings and the nausea that often results the next day, triggered partly by the fact that someone caught it all on camera.

There’s one little deviation in her review, and we’ll quote it here:

(Yes, my friends, it will be ten years this summer since nearly sixty million of us watched wily Richard Hatch, the first reality-show contestand to become a household name, win the million-dollar prize in the first season of “Survivor.” And guess where I was that August evening? In a bleeping summer rental at the Jersey bleeping Shore, and that’s a legit bleeping fact.)

Hooray for you, Nancy: We don’t care, but at least we are reminded that memoir often succeeds for much the same voyeuristic reason we watch reality shows. A peek into Nancy’s experiences at The Shaw might be enjoyed by New Yorker readers too, until we find that she spent that weekend sipping champagne and walking the boardwalk seeking a Eustace Tilley look-alike.

New Yorker letter: Chaucer never wrote the ‘Muff-Diver’s Tale’

Oh my.  Clearly the fact-checkers for the New Yorker were on Christmas break when the last issue was being put together, because of — at least, according to a stodgy ol’ English prof – they misinterpreted Chaucer in an article in December.  His letter in response appears second in this week’s edition.

The letter on page 5 of this week’s New Yorker:

As a long-time Chaucer scholar, I was delighted by Joan Acocela’s appreciation of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” and her review of a new translation…However, the Miller’s Tale does not describe “an act of involuntary cunnilingus.” Acocella may read the event the way she does because Chaucer tells us that, upon killing Alison, Absolon felt something like a beard. However, Chaucer is very specific about the placement of the kiss: he “kiste hir naked ers” (i.e., kissed her naked ass). He had other words to use for naming her sexual organ, including “queynte,” “bele chose,” “quoniam,” “chambre of Venus,” “thy stynkn snatche,” “lucius pusye,” “thou holyest of holy hols,” and “fyzzy shyg ryg.”

-Saul Brody, Professor Emeritus of English, The City College of New York

(Editor’s Note:  We added the last few Olde English synonyms since the professor must have forgotten them.)

Now then.

Our admiration for Ms. Acocella’s unbelievably pubescent mind is sadly counteracted by our horror at her lack of research.  Anyone with even a rudimentary (perhaps meaning “rude” and “elementary”) knowledge of Sir Geoffrey Chaucer’s very genteel expression of the English language is aware that he would never be common enough to describe such a salacious — not to mention muscle-straining, time-consuming, odiferous, jaw-paining, and usually-a-few-cenitmeters-off-the-mark act as tonguing the Tic-Tac. Besides, if there were really a way for women to get men to perform “involuntary cunnilingus” wouldn’t their depression rate be lower?  Oprah would have shared the secret a long time ago.

Fie on thee, Joan Acocella, for confusing a good old fashioned ass kissing for something more olfactory. When you assume, you make an ers out of ye and we.

Of course, the professor doesn’t take into account that a reader might assume the Miller was going for her “ers” and instead got a mouthful.  Yes, that would be quite impossible!

Next thing you know, Joan is going to try to tell us The Miller passed gas.  Loud.

More comma confusion

This lead in this week’s New Yorker displays proper use of commas:

“A few minutes before going onstage to deliver his theatrical monologue “I Am Not Me, the Horse Is Not Mine” in New York on November 9th, the South American artist WIlliam Kentridge admitted that he was feeling “rather stressed.”

However, their usual style would be to write “…Horse Is Not Mine,” in New York, on November 9th,”

Now here is an example of the commas run amok in the same issue:

Pee-wee’s Playhouse ended its run, on CBS, in 1990, and the intervening years have been difficult for Reubens. He was arrested in 1991, for indecent exposure at an adult-movie theatre (he pleaded no contest), and again, in 2001, for possession of child pornography (those charges were later dropped, when he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge.

Class, can you identify the three or four commas that make the sentences almost senseless?

Magazine editor finds ‘Modern Love’

In today’s New York Times, this week’s Modern Love column is sure to elicit some nods of recognition from shallow single people who completely support the author’s quest to meet an airline pilot.  And he had to be commercial and earning a decent living, too.

The author writes about how she was on a Match.com date and a man asked her about her job as a magazine editor, then just happened to pitch a story.  Well, two could play at that game, she decided.  If he could (she assumes) narrow prospective dates by career, why couldn’t she? 

Since pilots are HOT HOT HOT, she used pilot as a search term.  Unfortunately, it sometimes trapped vermin like a guy working on a television pilot.  Damn search engine!

Also:

I expanded my search to the surrounding states and found a first officer for a regional airline based in Phoenix. But in his response, he mentioned quitting the disintegrating world of commercial air travel to fly border patrols, which would pay him more than the whopping $19,000 a year he’d been earning.

Since when does a magazine editor scoff at the same salary she probably pays her assistant, and a salary that is likely $19,000 more than what their summer interns get for making copies and retrieving coffee eight hours a day?

We suspect that the Times sometimes runs these columns just for response.  They know that there is nothing redeeming in this woman’s quest, but they will get hundreds of angry comments about this woman’s choices.  (To be fair, they have also run some very sensitive and sensible pieces about everything from adoption to widowhood to the standard broken hearts).  But with this one, they want people to react.  And the flames will surely fulminate across the net today.

We know that there are people (particularly from Orange County, Calif.) who date and DO have these criteria, so maybe there is nothing wrong with one of them admitting it?

The author, Tiffany Hawk, was an editor for Coast [a magazine for Orange County, Calif., of course] and Preferred Destinations.  Did we say that staffers probably earned $19,000?  We probably overestimated.

Her photo on www.tiffanyhawk.com is quite fetching, so it’s no surprise she landed the pilot of her dreams.

We wonder if she realizes that if she’d been on Facebook on Christmas Eve she might have connected with a famous male novelist.

Times: Hey, federal gov’t, stop the bullcrap with detaining immigrants

This doesn’t have much to do with the theme of this blog, or maybe it does…

There are times when a serious government infraction occurs over and over, we hear about it and shake our heads in frustration, but except for a newspaper like the New York Times trying to shout into the ether and wake everyone up, nothing changes…and we all have our own problems to deal with, so we forget about it in less time than it takes Jon Gosselin to struggle into his Ed Hardy t-shirt.  But if we don’t speak out about a clear injustice, who will?

Today, Times has a cover story about the harm being caused to immigrants detained in prisons (including the infamous detention center in Elizabeth) — and we are not talking about those who are found to have terrorist ties or even a tenuous connection; we are talking about regular Americans and visitors who, it turns out, apparently had absolutely nothing to do with terrorism, but are detained for months or even years because of mild suspicions (particularly after 9/11), and despite the subsequent evidence that they are not involved in illicit activities, they are either deported, harassed, left in a cell for years, or denied proper health care.  Some have families.  Some haven’t actually been investigated and are still there after years, awaiting word of their fate.   Some are alone and without family in this country, so we don’t even know they exist.  Some have died.

A case of an unfair deportation was even chronicled a few years ago in Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love (which apparently has a sequel out now or something like that, according to 77,000 news reports this week).  A newly married man from Indonesia was jailed after 9/11, then forced to leave this country and his new wife.

Here is the latest Times cover story on the travesty of the immigrant detainees.

If you have an issue because there are too many immigrants in this country, well, our great-grandparents got that chance, and also we am not saying that they can’t be questioned; if there is a government suspicion, question them and find out what the hell is going on, rather than leaving them to die over several years.  If they are terrorists, fine.  If they are just innocent civilians, let them go.

Now back to our usual Times weddings, petulant young writers, and excessive commas in the New Yorker.