Out came a thought and then another...

For some reason, I had assumed that J.D.Salinger was dead. Of course he is not, if one believes all the sites about him, which are consistent in displaying his lifespan as (1919 - ). The fact that people around me have been talking about The Catcher in the Rye as a classic, for as long as I remember, must have contributed to my assumption of Salinger being dead. The word classic triggers an association with the Jane Austen times for me, dating every such work around the Austen era. Chaucer and Shakespeare are as ancient as Christ himself and they don't feature under my classics tag. They are more fundamental than that, like learning the alphabet, and essential to understanding that English as a label has also pointed to different versions of itself through the centuries.

Buddy Glass, the narrator of Seymour, An Introduction, remarks at one point about Ozymandias and Shelley, saying that his young women students were more likely to remember the lurid details of Shelley's personal life than to recall the frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command captured in the poem. Maybe that is why biographies always sell. And that is why it is important to know whether Salinger is dead or alive; who cares whether Holden Caulfield rings a bell? As if we didn't have enough of the gossip in us already, we have tips like these to encourage us to not finish any of the chilly prose that we pick up. Therefore articles about, say John Banville, will be lapped up with glee while pages of The Sea might be skipped in the run up to the end, when on earth is something going to happen in the book?, might say the greedy mind.

Writers, their personalities, the business of books, the showbiz called writing - topics of such frequent page space these days. Does anyone ever read and quote and allude to writing anymore? Thankfully, some do.

Posted by Echo/Lavanya on Friday, February 16, 2007 at 5:16 PM | Permalink