Ode to a Recluse: Thoughts on Salinger

As many other readers (and writers) did this week, I mourned the death of Jerome David Salinger at 91 years old. On Twitter, I posted that he was one of my primary literary influences, but perhaps not for the reasons a writer growing up in the 60's and 70's would typically have. After a Saturday morning of reading the musings of others about Salinger in various blogs, I thought I'd throw my offering into the collection plate of public opinion on this subject.

I was never really moved by The Catcher in the Rye as so many of my contemporaries were. It was mandatory reading for me in high school honors English and I'm sure I thought I wrote a good book report, even though I didn't share Holden Caulfield's rebellious spirit or cynicism and couldn’t relate to him on any level. How could a Catholic school-educated, first-born son ever hope to rebel and not break the hearts of kith and kin? One may think by virtue of that one-line description alone, I would have plenty of reason to raise hell, run away, commit acts of unkindness or even hate the world. Nope; I was destined to be a good boy, leaving for later the "acting out" phase of my life.

When I got older and began to buy the classics for fun instead of obligation, I read some of Salinger's best short works and was finally seduced into believing the somewhat mythic hype about him that had grown during his self-imposed exile from the publishing world. I was convinced that Franny and Zooey was one of the best pieces of literature I ever read up to then (and still insist on that today). Because of Salinger’s new influence on me, I hungered for something that went beyond mere love of his prose: I wanted to be able to move people with words like his work did to me.

When I took those early tentative steps, first writing for myself and later for others, I would take note of the occasional news story that mentioned Salinger and his (even then) famous reclusiveness. The thought disturbed me at the time because while I was striving to find my literary voice, one that others would want to hear, there was Salinger, shunning the world, claiming to enjoy being out of the maelstrom, only writing for his enjoyment alone. How could anybody with such a gift do that? The idea that an artist would almost willfully mute himself, leaving his readers to wait and wonder, seemed almost cruel.

And yet, even in his reclusiveness, Salinger was a genius. Regardless of his reasons for becoming a hermit, his fans always remained hopeful that something new from his pen would someday hit the bookstores. Certain to be his final work, it would be the most magnum of all opuses, a swan song that couldn't be scripted any more dramatically. To my eternal sadness, though, every teasing suggestion that he would publish again was quickly snuffed out. Thus, for many, his reclusiveness became a bigger story than the art he produced. Not for me; in the end, the man became less important than the oeuvre he gave us.

The truth is this: while unlikely to happen in my lifetime, to be able to read a new work from one whose craft was honed over years of being out of the public spotlight would be like hearing a lost symphony by Mozart or viewing a never-seen Van Gogh masterpiece. I suspect Salinger would call that assertion hogwash (or worse), but I would hope he would still be pleased with the comparison.

RIP, J.D.

More on Rules (of the Email Kind)

Like many busy people, I receive hundreds of email every week, much of it I want to keep, but have no time to read at that particular moment. If you're somewhat computer savvy and motivated to clear the clutter in your mailbox, you have learned to use the Rules tools in your favorite email program. However, I remain sorely disappointed with the top programs as they have not seemed to figure out how to make creating these rules intuitive and easy. So here are the rule features of what I call the Perfect Mail Client (PMC).

1. Allow the user to enable/disable an option to prompt for creation of a rule as soon as an email is dragged into a folder. This prompt should contain the most logical criteria for recognizing the email (the sender and subject are the most likely candidates).
   
   
2. If an email arrives from a contact in your address book, prompt to create a folder for that sender and to create a rule that would automatically place that sender's email into that folder. Again, this feature could be enabled/disabled at will be the user. Bonus points: address book contacts should never be categorized as spam.
   
   
3. Another user-selectable option: prompt to automatically create a new contact or update an existing one from an email that you determine to not be spam. Some email clients do this to some degree, but hardly perfectly.
   
   
4. Whether a rule is created manually or by the automatic drag feature, the rule processor should recognize that some rules can be combined into a single one in order to intelligently reduce the number of rules. For example, if there are two separate rules to move email from two different senders to the same file, those rules would automatically be replaced with a single rule that uses the OR construct on the sender names.
   

Can you think of any other Rule features you would add? Maybe if enough people spoke up about what they're looking for, we can get some enterprising programmer to write the software. Wouldn't that be something?

Best,
Michael

Photo Credit, Viagallery.com