Yukon ho!

Like Calvin and Hobbes in a Sunday comic strip I’m striking out for the Yukon.

Actually, I’m flying to Alaska to meet a friend from college ( let’s call him …John b/c, well, that’s his name. what are the odds, right) to help him make the drive from AK to St. Louis where’s accepted a new job. He and his wife have been living in AK for about nine years now, I think it is, and finally decided it was time to move back down to the lower 48.

Maybe about 12 or so years ago I had the chance to move to Alaska with John. This was before he was married and I was just out of grad school. I had no real reason not to go, but I balked anyway. Not exactly sure why. Perhaps that shall be the subject of my therapy session today. We shall see…

Anyhoo…I’ve always regretted not taking John up on that earlier offer, even though he was there only about 6 months and I likely would not have stayed on my own, but you never know, right. I could have at least said I’d lived in Alaska for a time. With that in mind, I didn’t want to let this opportunity pass. Fortunately, I was able to get the time off work and my wife was more than understanding about the trip. In fact, she said she’d be pissed at me if I didn’t go, which makes me wonder if she’s just trying to get me out of the house. I wouldn’t be surprised — I learned along ago that I’m the kind of person that others need a break from, from time to time. And John was willing to use his frequent-flyer miles to pay my airfare because there is no way I could have afforded a ticket to Alaska right now.

So I’m pretty much all set. Just need to pack and be on my way. I’m not taking the laptop. If I do any writing it will be with the low-tech method of pen and paper, although John will have his so I may be able to post about my trip. Most of the trip is going to be about driving, though. But I will need something to read, especially since I have a more than three-hour layover in Salt Lake City. Originally, I thought to reread “Girl with Curious Hair,” by David Foster Wallace as well as J.D. Salinger’s “Nine Stories,” but then we got in the new edition of “On the Road.” This is the “original script,” the way it was before it had been edited. Apparently there was content that just couldn’t be pub’d at the time. But it’s in there now.

I have never read “On the Road,” if you can believe that. People are often surprised to discover that I haven’t read it. Not sure why. I guess I just seem like an “On the Road” kind of guy. I’ve tried to read it a few times but there was something about it that I just couldn’t get into. That happens to me with some books. But that was before. Now I think might be the right time to try again.

In any case, I’m now toggling between excitement and nervousness. I don’t travel much, especially on my own, especially on airplanes — my wife is the expert traveler. Hell, my daughter has logged more miles in the air than me, and she’s only soon to be 9. It’s kind of sad really. But that’s a subject for another navel-gazing post.

Yukon ho!

The post I’m NOT going to write about JD Salinger’s death

Unless you’ve had your head up your backside this past week, you know that JD Salinger died [no link required - just google it for crying out loud]. Dude was 91, and he was healthy an active right until about the first of this year. Hope I’m that fortunate.

Anyhooo…I respect the way JD Salinger chose to live his life as much, if not more, than his work. And I’m not going tarnish that respect by blubbering about what his books meant to me.

I’ll just say this: He lived. He wrote. He died.

And I just hope that some of what he wrote will yet be available to read.

Bright Lights, Big City redux

When it gets cold like this, especially if it’s accompanied by snow, I’m reminded of when I lived in the dorms at school. Sitting with my feet up on the radiator, reading. While through my window I had a view of the dorm complex courtyard coated with a layer of snow that twinkled in the bright, even harsh at times, sunlight.  I read a lot. The book I read more than any other was Jay McInerney’s novel, Bright Lights, Big City. (Less than Zero by Brett Easton Ellis was a close second) And today  I’m compelled to read it again, as I have been doing almost every years since I first discovered, not when it was first published in 1984 but in 1988 after seeing the movie, staring Michael J. Fox, Kiefer Sutherland and Phebe Cates.

I know that BLBC, like it’s author, has something of checkered past, and that even McInerney himself refers to it at times as a kind of albatross around his neck. The books was and still is sometimes mocked. Sometimes I wonder when a Best of Bad McInerney contest is going to be created, if it doesn’t exist already. The second person narrative technique employed is often dismissed as nothing more than a clever device. Perhaps. But no book before it nor since has continued to resonate with me, has regulaly lured me back to read it again, has made me want to write. For me, it was my persmisson book – it gave me permission to write about what I really wanted to write about because I didn’t know you could write about such things; I wasn’t very well read at the time, so sue me. Before I’d read BLBC it was J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, of course, that held that distinction but it was quickly replaced.

I’m trying to resist the impulse to set aside what I’m reading now to read BLBC because I’m perpetually backed up on my reading and never seem able to make a dent in the stack of books that I want to read, it just keeps growing, but forces seems to be conspiring against me.

This morning the movie was on cable. Of course, it is not a very good movie but even so I’ve watched it many times. Less Than Zero is a better movie. But a remake of BLBC: the movie is in the works, due to be released in 2010. I’m curious to see what comes of it this time around. I’ve often wondered what it would been like if Woody Allen  had directed it or perhaps Ed Burns. My person preference would be for Stephen Sodeberg to do it. But I think the guy who produced and directed Gossip Girls for TV is doing it.

No doubt, in the end I’ll succumb to t his impulse to read BLBC yet again.And maybe this year of all years I shouldn’t even attempt to resist since 2009 marked the 25the aniversery of it’s publication. And as such maybe this year more than most it deserves a re-read.

I wonder if McInerney, because he seems to want to be remembered for his more sophisticated novels, is balking at a 25th aniversary edtion of BLBC. Or maybe they’re simply waiting until the movies comes out, releasing them together.

Catcher in the Rye revisited

I’m re-reading Catcher in the Rye. Again. I read it for the first time when I was about 14 or 15. And, of course, loved it! I carried paperback copy around everywhere, thumbing through it constantly until it pretty much fell apart. After that first time, I read it at least once a year, and often more than once, all the way through undergrad. There was something about it that was a comfort to me, especially as a teenager.

I remember after dropping out of Central Michigan University, after only a week, and feeling like a complete fucking loser, I read it again. Then I read Salinger’s other books — Franny and Zooey, Raise Hight Roof Beam, Carpenter and Seymour: an Introduction, and Nine Stories.

I continued reading it all the way through undergrad. By time I hit grad school, I stopped for some reason.

Not sure exactly what made me pick it up again. I was looking for something to read and it just happen to occur to me that I’d not read it in years. Perhaps find a hard copy of Franny and Zooey had something to do with it.

It was a formative book for me as a teenager, but I suppose that is true for a lot of people. Still, I can’t help wondering if Catcher in the Rye is particular resonant for other GenXers? It strikes me as a particularly GenX kind of book. Of course, it was published at a time when many Boomers were coming of age — 1951. But even so, I wonder if that alone allows them lay particular claim to, which they no doubt will. I suppose the appeal of Catcher in the Rye as more to do with adolescence, never mind a specific generation.

Re-reading Catching in the Rye at 40 is…interesting, I suppose. Of course, it does not strike me as powerfully as it did when I was 14/15. How could it? I still like it to be sure, but at times I find Holden a bit of a whiner. I find myself wanting to smack him upside his head, and tell him to get over himself. Did adults, at the time that Catcher in the Rye was published, have a similar reaction?

Still, for a portrayal of the confusion and drama and dread and angst of adolescence, Catcher in the Rye is the gold standard. Although I can’t help wondering if that Salinger‘s intent. Certainly, if it was, it wasn’t his sole intent. Beyond being a teenager, Holden is a character on the edge of cracking up, which of course he eventually does.

One thing that struck me was the regular reference to pop culture of the time — music, movies, etc. I do this pretty regularly in my own writing. I was, at times, in my graduate writing workshops, taken to task for it, and for a time I worked to refrain from it, but I’ve learned that it is simply a natural tendency and so I no longer try to curb it.