House of Mirth

I'm not actually a Salinger obsessive and don't have much to add to my previous post. However, the New Yorker round-robin of Salinger pieces did include this very interesting paragraph, in Lillian Ross's brief remembrance:

At one point during the more than half century of our friendship, J.D. Salinger told me he had an idea that someday, when "all the fiction had run out," he might try to do something straight, "really factual, formally distinguishing myself from the Glass boys and Holden Caulfield and the other first-person narrators I've used." It might be readable, maybe funny, he said, and "not just smell like a regular autobiography." That main thing was that he would use straight facts and "thereby put off or stymie one or two vultures--freelancers or English-department scavengers--who might come around and bother the children and the family before the body is even cold."

It's a tantalizing thought: Salinger Unplugged, with all the deflector shields down and the inconvenient facts to wrestle with. Of course it's possible that this very manuscript exists, stowed down in the bombproof vault with the hundreds of unpublished stories and the author's own, proprietary sequel to Catcher in the Rye, in which the middle-aged hero teaches English and Industrial Arts at a Connecticut high school. I hope it does.

When you think of it, Salinger's recipe isn't so different from what Philip Roth dreamed up for The Facts. The problem in that case was that Roth (for whom the fiction had at least temporarily run out) couldn't quite find the right tone. His sworn testimony sounded oddly sedated--only Zuckerman's acerbic afterword got the electricity flowing again, meanwhile muddying the very waters this "factual" account was supposed to clarify.

Finally: for an interesting take on Salinger's work (and Spike Milligan's) as a reaction to post-WWII shell shock, stop by Baroque in Hackney.

Labels: J.D. Salinger, philip roth

As I'm well aware, there's not much more to say about the Jewish shouting mix. After the initial nudge from Melville House, the yappy little artifact made its way around the world, with coverage in the Guardian, the New York Times, the National Post, Gawker, and Harper's. There were hospitable responses from around the Web, with Jewish bloggers in the pole position: I tip my hat (or yarmulke) to Tablet, For Zion's Sake, and Jewlicious, from whom I've borrowed the stellar graphic in this post. Flavorwire and American Short Fiction flagged me down for short interviews. My pal Katy Evans-Bush at Baroque in Hackney sent up an amusing signal flare. And outside the English-speaking world, the Dutch, Germans, Romanians, Swedes, Italians, and French weighed in with presumably pungent commentary. (Say, what does merdique mean?)



So what's the purpose of this post? Well, after several weeks of tinkering, I finished the nine-and-a-half-minute Jewish Shouting Cantina Club Mix. It's got lap steel, church bells, a danceable beat suitable for your next bar mitzvah or Rotary Club meeting, and (again) the inimitable vocalise of Philip Roth. You can listen to it or download the convenient, spill-resistant MP3 file here. As always, feel free to pass it along: sharing is caring. And now I will resume normal broadcasting. I promise.

Labels: cantina club mix, jewish shouting, philip roth

It was not quite a year ago that the Los Angeles Times published my interview with Philip Roth. In the course of our conversation, we chatted about the film adaptations of his earlier books, most of which struck the author as pretty dodgy:

Indignation will be the fifth of Roth's novels to be made into a film. I ask what he thought of the earlier adaptations, and he gives high marks to Jack Klugman and Ali MacGraw in Goodbye, Columbus, while ruefully acknowledging the cartoonish tone: "A little vulgarity goes a long way, and they did lay it on pretty heavily." And what about Ernest Lehman's version of Portnoy's Complaint, which brought back Richard Benjamin for a second turn as the author's cinematic proxy? "Unspeakable," Roth declares. "It's a movie about shouting. Jewish shouting." (He proceeds to give a brief, comical example, which strikes me as a specimen of literary history, like Thoreau demonstrating how to peel the bark off a birch tree.)

Clearly his ululating outburst impressed me. Later on, listening to the file, I decided to transform it into a brief dance mix. And now the kind folks at Melville House, always on the alert for booty-shaking literary artifacts, have posted the mix as a playable file or download. Please, check out their post and feast your ears. And feel free to spread this file far and wide. If it catches on, look out for the 15-minute club version, with additional shouting from Bernard Malamud and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Labels: philip roth