Remembering J.D. Salinger--Part 3
by Fringe Magazine • 02.03.2010
We lost one of the American literary greats this past week. Fringe celebrates J.D. Salinger’s ineffable legacy with posts from writers who have been affected by his work.
Today, Laura van den Berg, author of What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, remembers what it was like to read Salinger as a teenager and as an adult:
Growing up, I was a decidedly non-literary child—the kind who had to be routinely prodded to complete assigned readings for school—but that began to change when I encountered J.D. Salinger, the first writer I fell in love with on my own volition. Like many others, I felt an immediate kinship with Catcher in the Rye. At the time, I felt as though the book, with its brilliant exploration of coming-of-age angst and loneliness, had been written for me; I longed to be like Holden, a see-er of the truth in a world populated by phonies—which is, I suppose, as good a reason as any to become a writer.
When I revisited Catcher in the Rye in later years, my view of Holden grew more nuanced. I could see that he was unreliable, at once see-er of the truth and also in the grips of a kind of blindness. And yet his essential loneliness still called out to me, like an old friend. I was also struck by the extent to which the novel was governed by voice, more specifically by the idiosyncrasies of Holden’s voice—an early lesson in the writing of first-person narrators.
Before Salinger, most of the fiction I’d read involved ordinary people caught up in unusual circumstances—a perfectly good and enduring model—but Holden Caulfield and the Glass family were among the first characters I encountered that were emphatically un-ordinary, precocious, eccentric, and one-of-a-kind. From this I learned that in fiction, what is real and what is ordinary can be whatever the author, and the world they create, decides. This is hardly a novel observation, but for me it was, at the time, transformative.
Salinger has been quoted as saying “I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.” For some, unhappiness can become a kind of religion—another Holden-esque quality I glamorized until I was old enough to realize that life is hard enough when you’re happy and near impossible when you’re miserable—and I’ve long wondered if that was the case for Mr. Salinger. Nevertheless I always liked to imagine him puttering around on his farm in New Hampshire, an artist with a monkish devotion to his work. In Catcher in the Rye, Salinger writes, “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody,” a line that seems to echo the author’s seclusion and public silence. But if Salinger did in fact want to stop telling people things, he failed in that enterprise. With his fiction, Salinger continues to tell the world so much; he has given me voices that I can call to mind so vividly, I feel like they’re in the room; characters that have alerted my way of seeing myself, the world, and the fictional enterprise; enduring insight into that delicate and troubled thing we might refer to as the human spirit. Salinger himself spoke one of my favorite quotes on writing, one that I often call to mind when struggling with a new project: “an artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s.”
Goddamn, Mr. Salinger, I’ll miss you.
Four Golden Rules of Stock Market Investing
If you thought that investing in the stock market is very difficult then you need to rethink as it is not too complex as you think. It does require some home work before investing in the stock market but it gives you really good and fruitful results when you invest in the right stocks. You should learn the four golden rules of stock market investing that are very important to understand the stock market. Well you should keep in mind that you should never let your cash invested in the wrong stocks. After all it is your hard earned money and you should never let go your money into the wrong hands. So let us have a look at the golden rules.
1) Make a good research
Prior to making your money invested in the stock market, you should keep in mind that you make a good research on the stocks of a particular company. Even if you wish to go for online trading you need to research on the website so that you are not fooled by the different websites. You should know that there are many fraudulent websites that tends to fool the visitors to their websites. They make some fraud techniques like taking into account all the details of the bank or the credit card numbers. You would find that you have been robbed off your money that makes you go penniless. This should be very carefully handled when you go for buying or selling your stocks online. You should also try to understand the different useful concepts like NSE, NASDAQ, BSE…etc that are very important to understand the working of the market.
2) Gain good confidence
It is very important that you develop some good confidence so that you can become successful in making good income out of your investment. There are some people who lose all their hopes after losing quite a lot of money in the market. So stock market is not for them. You should try to face the reality and make a good interpretation of the market so that you can get good money from the money that you have invested in the share market. You should also try to get the best advice from an experienced person who would be able to guide you in order to get the maximum returns from your investment. You should never go for investing any money that you are not quite sure about its results. So you need to stop worrying and make the best effort in order to get good financial returns. When you gain good confidence you would be able to lay the foundations of your future financial returns.
3) Look for the right broker
If you are not really sure where to invest and when to invest then you need to find the right broker for you who would be able to guide you in order to get the right track. The broker would be able to make you the correct choice where you can be benefited from the market from the hard earned money that you have invested. There are also some brokers that charges high commissions and so you need to discuss these things with the broker prior to appointing the one for you. When you get the right broker you would not have to worry at all about losing your money in the stock market.
4) Stay yourself updated
You need to stay yourself updated on the latest scenario of the stock market. You can go for watching business and stock news and also read books on stock market. This would help you to stay updated and also help you to understand much about the stock market. You should remain quite abreast of the latest happenings in the stock market.
Well these are the four golden rules of stock market investing. But you need to understand that there are other rules too that go hand in hand while investing in the stock market. Remember that it all depends on your knowledge of the stock market and also your research on how you can go for investing in the right and the best stocks.
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