It's a rainy day, I was wondering what I could look forward to as I walked home from dropping off my daughter at school. I thought about how Zooey tries to articulate preciousness, how she dislike Freudian analysis, how she dislikes English professors that dismantle a text, and sell it for parts. Her boyfriend Lane is on top of the world, he got an A for a paper about the need for masculinity in fiction, a friend wanted him to publish it. Lane punctures his good feeling, he had the right girl at the right place for lunch and he was feeling great for his defense of masculinity being rewarded with an A, and Zooey just isn't buying it, and he loses that special feeling he had.
Maybe I'll read some more, but I wonder if you can really neutralize criticism with that start of a novel.
I watched Carrie Pilby, and she says that's a favorite book she likes to read. The movie is about a prodigy who graduated from college at 19 and was lost. She's seeing a psychotherapist. Nathan Lane plays a philandering hetrosexual psychotherapist.
He's trying to get Carrie to be more social, less enclosed. She read 17 books in a day. Gabriel Byrne is her father. Those two right there make a film for me. I love it that it's a woman director. I read an article headline that more romance novels need to be adapted to film. I like Bridgerton, but I'm stalled in my first season rewatch to get to the new second season. I wanted a palate cleanser after watching Florida Project. That's a pretty good balance, realism and romance, realism and romance.
You can tell that Zooey could almost be against phoniness like Holden Caulfield. I wondered at the 3 book output of Jerome David Salinger. The little things I know from his biography, the lurid stuff comes through without having to read the book. He died 12 years ago.
The quest for the non-phony authentic life is real. The desire for re-enchantment after disenchantment. 202 pages of struggling to be real. Franny and Zooey is a fun book, I remember laughing when Franny throws a thrashing tantrum in the bath to be left alone.
Franny and Zooey came out in 1961. Updike liked it, but someone I'd never heard of before didn't like it.
In my head non-phoniness is trying not to be absurd. I don't think a human can contain all the truths, so try as we might to not be absurd, hypocritical, we will inevitably be phony.
Everyone is having a breakdown, seems like they should be monks they want to be so pure and have such a refined life.
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