Friday, May 19, 2006

Five Stories (Some Notes)

Reading Salinger now in this blank hotel room, a bit worried of the psychological effects of this project. His uncanny ability to articulate what I can only vaguely refer to as the intuitive aspects of human interaction disarms me. Though, in life, I am aware of the underlying sadness of the everyday and of the rare moments of ecstatic beauty that interrupt that sadness, experiencing the precise articulation of those moments leaves me craving, both for more of that kind of honesty off the page and for the ability to be that genius on the page.

Each story so far has the same pattern: I resist in the beginning, I am absorbed in the middle, and I am slapped with the ending. If nothing else (and there is everything else), J.D. knows how to end a story.

This charmed me, from "The Laughing Man":

Offhand, I can remember seeing just three girls in my life who struck me as having unclassifiably great beauty at first sight. One was a thin girl in a black bathing suit who was having a lot of trouble putting up an orange umbrella at Jones Beach, circa 1936. The second was a girl aboard a Caribbean cruise ship in 1939, who threw her cigarette lighter at a porpoise. And the third was Chief's girl, Mary Hudson.

My most-recent favorite line, from "Down at the Dinghy":

Her joke of a name aside [Boo Boo], her general unprettiness aside, she was -- in terms of permanently memorable, immoderately perceptive, small-area faces -- a stunning and final girl.

1 Comments:

Blogger fin said...

I (heart) holden

3:21 PM  

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