Tag: JD Salinger

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Zooey and Bowie

Time moves in one direction, memory in another. — William Gibson

This week, an old friend sent me a photo of myself, circa 1978. In the picture, I was thin, long-haired, and standing barefoot on the porch of an old farmhouse where we lived, just outside of Columbia, Missouri. It was a shock to see it. I don’t remember my friends and I taking many photographs, and I didn’t remember this moment, but there I was, captured on film, wearing a blue T-shirt and bell-bottom jeans. That long-ago moment happened, even though I had no memory of it.

Memory is a tricky thing, especially when the years pile up. I recently watched the documentary, Salinger, about the reclusive author of Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey, and precious few other works. J.D. Salinger was one of my favorite authors when I got out of college. I probably read his books in that farmhouse.

I learned a lot from the documentary: how Salinger was terribly impacted by his World War II combat experience and by witnessing the Nazi death camps as the war was ending, how he thereafter fixated on young women, eventually marrying three 19-year-olds at various times in his life. According to one ex-wife, he was a selfish, obsessive jerk.

My memories of Salinger’s work were mostly about his characters’ quest for authenticity, their fascination with Buddhism and Eastern philosophy, and their abhorrence of the phony, shallow people that surrounded them. I remembered the books as being brilliant. I decided I should revisit them in light of what I’d learned about the author. Probably a bad idea.

As I reread Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey, and Nine Stories, I was struck by how much of Salinger’s writing was dialogue interrupted by incessant descriptions of lighting and putting out cigarettes. It seemed dated, talky, not at all how I remembered it. What once seemed authentic and edgy no longer did.

Then memory doubled down, as the news of David Bowie’s death flooded the internet on Monday. Videos of his songs were unavoidable. On social media, everyone had a story about how his music changed them in some real way. Bowie died as he lived — on the edge, pushing boundaries. His final video, Lazarus, was haunting and thought-provoking and beautiful, everything that seems to be lacking in so much of our music and culture now.

“Phony” was Holden Caulfield’s favorite word, and phony is what we’re seeing everywhere. The line between what’s authentic and what’s noisy and meaningless has seldom been more blurred. For far too many Americans, musical talent is defined by the ability to wow the judges of The Voice or American Idol. If there are Bob Dylans or Neil Youngs or Joni Mitchells out there now — and there surely are — their road to getting heard is long and hard.

Our politics, like our music, has also been corrupted by money and television ratings. Sound bites, bigotry, and controversy get you on Meet the Press to bloviate for millions of people (see Trump, Donald). Talking serious policy positions and discussing issues in an adult manner makes you John Kasich talking to 17 people in an Iowa pizza joint.

Phony is the new reality. And it’s not a pretty picture.

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Book Features Books

Remembering Franny and Zooey and Jim.

Wrapping paper. Sugar-sweet carols. Televised cartoon specials. Noise-making toys. Tinsel everywhere. I have four children, so this is how my Christmases have looked and sounded for the past 17 years. And that’s great. This is just how it should be — loud and colorful and joyful.

But I need my alone time, so every year I’ve managed to carve out a little space just for myself during these end-of-year celebrations. While the kids are watching those television specials or playing with their toys or baking cookies, I’ve made it a point to take a book off the shelf, sit, and read. And for many years — more than I can remember, really — that book has been Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger.

I can’t even recall why this is the book. It isn’t about Christmas or the New Year. Santa doesn’t appear, nor do reindeer or a trimmed tree. And yet, this book gives me comfort, each page filled with a nostalgia of my own making.

The copy I’ve been reading for all these years — a Bantam Books paperback edition published in 1964 — has been carried from house to house as we’ve moved, and from room to room as I find a new spot to read. This year, though, is even more poignant for me. Among the words of Salinger within these dog-eared, sepia pages with the covers taped together, are favorite passages, sentences, and whole paragraphs underlined. These marks aren’t just mine. Many were made by my old friend Jim Phillips.

It was Jim who, when I was a young man in that moment when reading might seem like something not to be carried in the baggage from childhood to adulthood, rekindled an interest in reading for me that had been dormant since grade school. We were roommates and would sit for hours discussing Salinger and Vonnegut and Kesey and Kerouac. There were late nights in bars when we each hinted that we, too, might be writers someday. It’s the sort of thing said aloud only between the closest of friends and after too many beers.

Jim would go on to be a songwriter, fronting bands and playing solo shows in Memphis and, later, his adopted home of Albuquerque, New Mexico. I hear so much of that literature he loved in his songs now. This copy of Franny and Zooey was his, packed up with my own books at some point during one of our many ill-conceived moves as nomads in our early 20s.

Jim died last May, far too young at the age of 46. While I still have his songs playing in heavy rotation at home and my wife and I share stories of our friend with our kids, this will be the first year reading Franny and Zooey without being able to talk with him about it. But there will be his inspiration, underlined in ink on every other page.

Jim loved reading books, but more than that, I think, he loved talking about them. Books beget conversation, something in shorter and shorter supply these days as we opt for texts and tweets. We were friends long before technology caught up, though it did help us to keep in touch over the years since he moved away.

Memory is what we get from books, nostalgia tucked neatly in the gutter like so much ephemera found in used bookstores. During this time of new and shiny gifts, where new books will certainly be stacked up on my night table, it’s the old that I go for, the familiar, the comfortable. Like a good song and the smell of Mom’s cookies baking in the oven, a book’s title or opening line can transport us back to a time that might have been happier if not simpler. What are your favorites? Which do you pick up again and again to read in full or to flip to a particular chapter? Could you go immediately to one on a bookshelf if asked to retrieve it?

Franny and Zooey isn’t about Christmas, but it is about family, and so is this time of year. And even though my family feels lighter by one, I have memories to see me through to the new year.

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Book Features Books

For the Record

It’s been a busy year for writer and publisher Tom Graves, and August has been an especially busy month. Best of Enemies, a documentary on the famed series of television debates between William Buckley and Gore Vidal by filmmakers Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville, premiered in Memphis on August 14th, and a book signing for the print edition of Graves’ Buckley vs. Vidal: The Historic 1968 ABC News Debates — published by the Devault-Graves Agency (Graves’ Memphis-based publishing house, co-founded by Darrin Devault) — was a few days earlier.

Graves was consulting producer on Best of Enemies, but the other news this month is the arrival in print form (an e-book edition with “bonus” material is also available) of another title, again published by Devault-Graves. This one, though, is all Graves. It’s a “retrospective” of his journalism over the past several decades, a collection that, as Graves says, “reflects me and my muse and my years of toiling away at this thing called writing.”

The book opens with a muse by the name of Louise Brooks and what, by anyone’s measure, was a real coup for a young journalist in Memphis in the early 1980s: Graves’ meeting with Brooks in Rochester, New York, where the reclusive silent-screen actress was living. Graves had planned on writing a full-scale biography of Brooks, and, as Louise Brooks, Frank Zappa, & Other Charmers & Dreamers explains, that biography never happened. But the beginnings (and background) to that project are here, as is an interview with Frank Zappa, which ran in 1987 in Rock & Roll Disc, the magazine Graves edited and published. Among the writers who appeared in that magazine and who also appears in a Q&A conducted by Graves in the e-book edition of Louise Brooks, Frank Zappa, & Other Charmers & Dreamers: music critic Dave Marsh.

There are other musicians featured to reflect Graves’ wide taste: the Blackwood Brothers, Mark Lindsay of Paul Revere & the Raiders, and what Graves calls “a guilty pleasure”: Tennessee Ernie Ford.

For another muse, though, go to actress Linda Haynes. Graves did, thanks to the contact information he received from another Haynes fan: Quentin Tarantino. But when it comes to literature (third in the trio of Graves’ ongoing interests), see the Q&A Graves conducted with Southern grit-lit master, Harry Crews.

Turns out, Graves’ collection is right in line with the mission of the Devault-Graves Agency: bringing out-of-print but deserving titles back to the screen (in e-book form) or into readers’ hands (in traditional print form).

That’s what Devault-Graves will be doing next month with a new print edition of Sun Records: An Oral History by John Floyd, former music editor of the Flyer. (The e-book is available now from Amazon and the Barnes & Noble website.) It’s what Devault-Graves did earlier this year when it received major media attention for publishing Three Early Stories by J.D. Salinger. The company is also restoring, in uncensored print form, Maggie Cassidy by Jack Kerouac. This week, however, the focus of attention is Tom Graves, journalist.

He’s a novelist too (Pullers), a biographer (Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson), and co-author (with Devault) of a photography book (Graceland Too Revisited). Louise Brooks, Frank Zappa, & Other Charmers & Dreamers fulfills a dream that is entirely the author’s.

“I wished there was something I had that people could focus on me as a writer — the way I tell a story, my style,” Graves says. “I’d like to think that when people think of Memphis writers that I’d be in that group.”

Not only in that group but in a subset of local writers known for their long-form journalism. From a writer who’s done decades of interviews, there’s really nothing to it. But in Graves’ words: “You’ve got to be very super prepared going in. If you’ve got 50 or so questions, you have to be prepared to not touch ’em once you start the ball rolling. A conversation takes on a life of its own.” And no telling where a series of such conversations can lead. In the case of Tom Graves, it could amount to an impressive career — and to more than a few greatest hits.