Terribly lovely

I've been having trouble writing lately, I don't know if it's the stress of my impending doom graduation, or just life or whatever, but all the words feel clunky and impossibly prosaic (that word choice just there, "impossibly prosaic", that'll make more sense in a bit.)

So I decided to go back to my favorites, to the things I can read without feeling like I'm educating myself or being productive or anything. Take the class out of writing. I took a trip to Myopic and picked up Franny and Zooey.

I had forgotten how much I loved J.D. Salinger. For a long time (and maybe still, I don't know) Catcher was my favorite book. The tone is so terribly grand and at the same time really neurotic in the most essential way. The whole thing has airs about it, as in the kind of airs that are put on. Reading about Franny doing all her Franny things, passively fighting and all that, and Lane being a complete scoundrel in an almost lovable way, really it's just terribly fine. I mean there's the whole Pilgrim bit and she's describing it to him and he's sitting there, eating goddam frog's legs for chrissake, and he's saying things like "I don't know if we'll even have time to get to the game" right before he orders coffee instead of just screwing the coffee and leaving.

It's all just fascinating, the style I mean, and of course the characters, too. Franny faints at the end, and it's just so Salinger - I mean who faints these days? No one faints anymore, or uses handkerchiefs, or tries to make someone "come thoroughly to" with ammonia. It's all just so civilized and petty at the same time, so farcical and serious and terribly fun.

But then it's over. Not just Franny and Zooey, I mean all of it, Salinger's work just stops dead. Bam. Like a car crash. Like Camus.

Sometimes I secretly await the day that Salinger dies, simply because I hope he has a whole bunch of novels just tucked in drawers somewhere, waiting to be published posthumously. I know that's really morbid and everything, and probably immoral , too. But it would just be so lovely to read a new work. So terribly lovely.