Salinger--An Introduction
John P David
Jperdue4 <jper...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20011022165951...@mb-cs.aol.com...
> lol...whos more annoying and loathed in here..me or
> JohnPDavid?......lol.....you know whats funnier?.....MY name is ....Jon
David
> Perdue.......hmmmmmm.....
The word "annoying" is the wrong choice, but "loathed" is right on. It may
be that many Ungrateful Dumbheads are able to drum up the conceit to flatter
themselves with the notion that they are being "annoyed" by "me" or my
opinions, but like I say, in that they only flatter themselves. The truth
is that I'm the one around here who has the qualifications to be "annoyed"
in the truest sense of the word.
I find it very annoying to discover how clueless, in a spiritual sense, most
people are. It annoys me no end to see how totally without any sense of
basic goodness most people can be. I find it downright aggravating to
discover that it is only once in a blue moon that I ever run into anyone who
is even so hip as to have read J.D. Salinger's *Seymour--An Introduction*,
for the crissake, let alone a single person who appears to have understood
it.
I'm now reading *Seymour--An Introduction*, for the 4th time, and for the
first time I feel like the stuff he's talking about is finally getting
through to me. The first time, I found it so dense that I could barely
penetrate it. The second time, I managed to pick up a pearl here and there
in the midst of much skimming. The third time, I found myself making
judgments against it as something just too precious and self-indulgent. Now
on my 4th reading, I am really ticked with myself for having made that
former judgment, and I'm wondering just what in the hell could have been the
matter with me, that I should have formed such a cruel and unjustified
opinion.
This time through, the smoke is gone from the Glass, and I can finally see
to the pain that is, in the main, being so cleverly disguised by that
inimitable Salinger sense of humor. I see that all those other times
through, I wasn't getting the joke; you have to see the sadness to get it.
I finally found the sadness.
Salinger's fans and critics, had so fallen in love with Holden Caulfield
that they simply could not abide standing by to watch him grow up,
brilliantly, if not precociously into the persons of Zooey, Buddy and
Seymour Glass. There was enough of Holden left in Franny to make her
lovable, but the affair for the largest bulk of his fans and critics came to
an end right there as she passes out in the Ladies' Room. The story was
just too "precious" in the sight of at least one critic for the Times, and
it was her view that Salinger had fallen too deeply in love with his
characters, that he liked them too much to paint them in an objective light.
Was she right? Not in the least. It was inevitable that Holden and Franny's
"phonies" were bound to strike back, sooner or later. This criticism was
false, for the same supposed fault could be lodged against his treatment of
"Phoebe" in *Catcher*, let alone Holden. This is no sin for an author to
love his characters, especially when that affection forms the very heart and
soul of the writer's oeuvre, when it comes to such highly affectionate
descriptions, as for example of the girl who "always kept her kings in the
back row", and of Holden's brother Allie with his baseball mitt and his
"Secret Goldfish" and not to omit "Miss Overman" the librarian with the
Leonardo da Vinci plates in *Seymour*. No. That is a criticism which if
lodged against Salinger is a knife taken to the very heart and soul of his
art. That is the criticism of an envious phony who ought to have been
forever banned from the staff of any literary publication from then on to
perpetuity, for permitting the 'secret goldfish' of her own little neurotic
hostilities to enter into her work and her perception of art and the people
who create it. Obviously I hyperbolize, since the matter has not been left
to *my* discretion of hiring and firing.
This criticism just did cut Salinger to the quick, not just because he's
human, as if that weren't reason enough, but because he knew it was not
just, not right and motivated by false purposes. Further negative reviews
for *Raise High The Roofbeam, Carpenters* when that appeared in the *New
Yorker* drove the spear all the further into the man's side with an
injustice that is utterly without parallel in Western literature. I've read
that story three times; it has not been necessary for me to read it four, as
after the third time, I had already easily recognized it for the finest
short story/novella ever written in the English language, bar none, bar all
that Nabokov, O'Henry, Ring Lardner, Dorothy Parker, Capote and Carson
McCullers wrote, if one should look at it aside from content as a work of
fine craftsmanship, which is an objective matter, i.e. as to how well a
writer does his job; as to that, nothing yet equals it, except perhaps
another Salinger short story, *For Esme With Love And Squalor*.
Before I'd had occasion to read the fearfully unofficial Ian Hamilton
biography, I'd had no idea how rabid were the bites by which Salinger had
come to be savaged by his critics, how cruelly they had ravaged his
characters in those two books, even to the extent that a certain old dope
(Salinger teaches in *Seymour* to pay attention to Jesus about calling any
man a "fool") by the name of Harold Bloom in his critical study of Salinger:
well that damned nincompoop has decided that the Salinger corpus will barely
outlast this past century! Maybe so, but not for lack of quality, but
entirely for a dearth of understanding what the work is all about.
But now, re-reading *Seymour* in light of all that, I can finally see what
it is about. It all begins with two passages (that are not set out by
quotation marks), one from Kafka and the other from Kierkegaard which both
go directly to the matter of the criticism that had lately been lodged
against him, Salinger. Then, he begins to talk about what the two authors
are saying and how it relates to his own work. In doing this, Salinger has
of course broken a cardinal rule which is to let his critics get so far
under his skin that his pain over it begins to bleed out in his next
fictional work. He has broken this rule and has done it exquisitely! He
roasts his critics so thoroughly and secretly and hilariously, let alone
affectionately (that's the real killer-diller) that he even describes his
prose in this preamble to the main text as a "rant". And that *is*
hyperbole.
*Seymour* is not, at first so easy to read. The sentences can run quite
long with many parenthetical clauses which he introduces graciously at the
beginning after the first annoying appearance of one, as follows:
"Please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming
parentheses: (((()))). I suppose, most unflorally, I truly mean them to be
taken, first off, as bowlegged--buckle-legged omens of my state of mind and
body at this writing."
The clauses are many, both parenthetical and otherwise, the footnotes are
not eschewed, the thoughts are complex and deep--it is no *Catcher in the
Rye*, and if it's all the same to you--it is a philosophical discourse; it
is funny and ingenious as it continually violates every expectation of what
prose writing is supposed to look like. He announces at the end of one
paragraph, the beginning of the next. He confesses himself to be a "a happy
man", and he is having a ball as he begins to play with his reader like a
friendly father faking his son out in a game of catch, pretending to throw
the ball but keeping it; he offers an opinion regarding what sort of person
his reader must be, those few who he presumes to be still with him, and so,
yes, without doubt, he is a "bird-watcher" who can't get over the feeling of
speed in a sparrow's heartbeat--he did mention some other sort of bird, but
. . .
the thing is, when it comes to a reading of *Seymour--An Introduction*,
there is no way a person can catch the groove of knowing what it's about
without knowing what it's about as you start out. I read the book three
times not knowing that, and three times, while I did receive much
instruction about Japanese and Chinese poetry, the Buddha, Jesus and God,
many a good, side-splitting laugh along the way as I formed an appreciation
for the leaping, flying kind of "jumping hair" happiness that, he confides,
a "God-Knower" comes to in learning the arts of expression necessary to
communicate that happiness, alas, as I say, three times, the main and
central theme, his soul's protest against the injustice of his critics and
fans was utterly lost upon me, as again, the theme is *injustice*.
The crime against Salinger has its root and cause. Most people are not
aware that even as he wrote *Catcher in the Rye*, Salinger was mystified by
the teachings of Jesus, and Jesus does indeed enter into the text in the
place of the Girl with the Green dress, that prostitute for whom Holden felt
so sad, in the way she folded her dress, where he expresses the view that
Jesus was really neat but his disciples were a bunch of phonies. Salinger's
moral sense could not be stronger than as it is revealed by Holden's hatred
for the graffiti scribblers who scrawl ugly words on the wall where the
little children can see them.
In Franny, the whole Jesus trip gets all the more intense, starting with
Franny's obsession with the "Little Monk" and leading up to Zooey's final
pronouncement in a Zen poem's terse statement that "Jesus is the Fat Lady".
The whole extended Haiku of *Zooey* leads up to that one unmistakable and
irrefutable concluding line of truth, one that people simply will not
understand for anything other than blasphemy or nonsense.
A God-knower is never necessarily a church-goer, nor even for that matter a
knee-bending prayer mumbler, a teetotaler or a non-woman chaser. A
God-knower knows a lot more about God than such mere shows of false piety:
heaven and hell enters not into it. Are you kind? Does it break your heart
to see the way the little prostitute folds her sad green dress. There is
the separation of the sheep from the goats. There is no other. All flows
from sincerity and kindness, and that's it.
In *Seymour* it became necessary to blast through the pious nonsense, where
it is finally revealed through the mind of Seymour that the phrase, "God
damn" is actually "a low form of prayer" the way man gives constant and
unremitting invocation to the existence of God and his power. I might add
for my own part, that as it's written in Torah, as one of ten commandments,
in fact it only bears upon the sin of swearing an oath in God's name and not
making good by it, and has nothing whatever to do with any "sin" of
"cursing" which is not even so much as mentioned as a sin or even something
known to exist in the ancient scriptures of the Hebrews, and as one learns
from the New Testament, when it comes to Jesus, it is no big deal at all,
being a matter very easily forgiven, so long as the "blasphemy" is not
against the "Holy Spirit".
In *Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters* we get a chance to see what makes
Seymour tick, and if anything, one thing's certain, the charge that Salinger
likes his characters too much to be honest about them could not be more
seriously wrong. Seymour has a mean streak, as it turns out that on one
occasion, he actually did a permanent injury to a girl who was a fellow
contestant on the radio show, "It's a Wise Kid". I don't recall how he hurt
the girl, whether by a bite or a kick, I just remember my sense of extreme
disappointment in learning of it, and yet in an odd way I am satisfied by it
to learn that afterall the man was human, and not just human but inhuman, as
we all are, both, always too often.
Yes, I can be both, and I make no excuses for it. I've done injury of
saying mean, biting, kicking things to people in this cybernetic universe
and not just (as is most often the case, in my view) when they've tried to
bite or kick me first. But a thing like that can never be resolved; our
biases are too intense to decide who started it. Even so, I am always
shocked to laughter any time I see someone accusing me of "bullying" people
out there. Who, me? A bully? Not. I hate a bully more than I hate the
chief bullmoose bully, the devil of ignorance and illiteracy herself and I
would never be like that, or so I like to think.
Others seem to think that they see me as being the victim of bullies around
here. They are only half right. Bullies are attracted to me like bees to a
gladiola, and they do seek to wreak their damage, for whatever perverse
reasons they may harbor, but I've finally come to realize by the testimony
of the other half, that sadly, or comically, it seems that I had been guilty
of being a bully to them, first, and that's their whole problem: I am the
mean guy in their sight.
Am I such a bully? By all means, yes. Here's how: I regard any person who
has not yet even so much as attempted to read *Franny & Zooey* and *Raise
High the Roofbeam Carpenters & Seymour--An Introduction* as insufferable
bores and barbarians who are not worthy of my company. That's pretty mean,
I'll admit, but I'll never change when it comes to that. Of course, there's
one big problem involved with reading these works: if you have not done a
fair amount of studying in Oriental mysticism and the synoptic gospels (the
first three) of the New Testament, your homework is not sufficient to fully
comprehend what is in those latter works of Salinger. But, even if you have
read, for example, the New Testament, if you haven't given it adequate
thought, and most importantly, if you haven't given the ethics of Christ a
fair chance to work on your mind and soul, you're still out of luck so far
as getting the first clue as to what those stories are about because
Salinger is just totally knocked out by Jesus.
Salinger didn't fall out of favor with the critics because Jesus is always
leaping up at you from the text with a big smile and his hair jumping. No.
It's just that the critics can't see the smile and the jumping hair. They
simply don't get what Salinger's on about, because the background is
missing.
So you see how God is by far a worse bully with a knuckle-rapping ruler than
me or JD Salinger or Seymour. There is one thing you have to get hip to, for
this project though, right in front and that is how you can't take
everything you read in the New Testament at face value; you have to read it
intelligently and let your soul decide which things Jesus really would say,
and separate those from the sort of things that some prudish damned
blasphemy-happy idolater of a cleric turning out Second Century
ecclesiastical propaganda would want for Jesus to say, as he does his best
by additions and erasures to turn Jesus into a little hand-puppet who
repeats the stupid, earth-bound, all too human sentimentalities that men
like that are apt to think or wish or hope, or see to it that Jesus would
say. Fortunately they didn't dare wreck everything, so you can still get a
fair idea. The entire 4th Gospel is full of that malarkey; it reads like the
Koran and isn't worth the bother. Not only that, you have to be able to tell
when reading Matthew or Luke (even Mark, in places) when some authentic
saying of Jesus has been bent, or slightly added to, or subtracted in order
to suit a purely pat and human false understanding. You can tell if the
statement contradicts itself. Then only ask the question: which part of
this would God who is non-man say, and which part could any damned ding-dong
of a man come up with? You can't go wrong.
When you have been exercised by that, then you are ready to read the latter
works of JD Salinger, and only then are you worthy to stop being bullied by
me. Until then just count on getting your butts kicked, every damn time you
turn around. Yes, my foot will be there. I will count you as stupid,
ill-educated, boring, unspiritual, and stuck in the foul cruelty of your
all-too-human ways; I will see you as the authors and fomenters of injustice
and sadism on the earth, and I will continue to have no part with you, nor
any sympathy in hearing your howling about it.
--
Uncle John long_go...@nobodyfeelsanypain.com
John's Joint:: http://jpdavid.freewebspace.com/
On-Line Novel, *Amador Green*, MP3's and Usenet Archive
"I've often regarded my life as a series of fights; my fight with these
guys, my fight with those guys: I've finally come to see my life as
entirely one long fight." -- Dalton Trumbo
luna
with the Grateful Dead
PJ
: no time to read the post...but I'm figuring it has little or nothing
to do with the Grateful Dead
That's a criterion for cross-posting? One person who cross-posted to
misc.writing also posted to alt.breastfeeding. I'm still trying to
figure out that connection.
Ciao,
PJ
:
:
--
Peggy J. Parks
www.pjparks.com
JC Martin
news:9r2h40$i77$1...@newsreader.mailgate.org...
Well, aren't you deep mon. BTW, it's called self-hypnosis. Read anything
enough times and it starts to make sense. Read it a few more times and you
end up living your life by it. Brilliant dear man.
-JC
Gina
> news:20011022165951...@mb-cs.aol.com...
>
> > lol...whos more annoying and loathed in here..me or
> > JohnPDavid?......lol.....you know whats funnier?.....MY name is ....Jon
> David
> > Perdue.......hmmmmmm.....
>
> The word "annoying" is the wrong choice, but "loathed" is right on.
I wouldn't say that. In my opinion, it is highly illogical to loathe
someone you've never had actual physical contact or dealings with. A cyber
persona cannot steal from, damage, emotionally hurt, ruin, defame, etc.,
you. All rational reasons to loathe someone. (unless of course, one has
crossed the limitations of cyber relations and shared personal information
that can be used to hurt them)
Annoying is the most one could claim in this medium given it's limitations.
After all, there is the delete key.
Gina
Gina
"PJ" <peggy...@home.com> wrote in message
news:mK4B7.195920$K6.93533864@news2...
> "luna" <wdf...@home.com> wrote in message
> : no time to read the post...but I'm figuring it has little or nothing
> to do with the Grateful Dead
>
> That's a criterion for cross-posting? One person who cross-posted to
> misc.writing also posted to alt.breastfeeding. I'm still trying to
> figure out that connection.
>
> Ciao,
> PJ
I think John is still breast-feeding. How else would he have all this time
to write so much nonsensical
dribble?
Gina
Gina
"JC Martin" <subs...@NOSPAMearthlink.net> wrote in message
news:uR9B7.4331$AQ6.4...@newsread2.prod.itd.earthlink.net...
> "John P David" <dadd...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:9r2h40$i77$1...@newsreader.mailgate.org...
> >
> > Jperdue4 <jper...@aol.com> wrote in message
> > news:20011022165951...@mb-cs.aol.com...
> >
> enough times and it starts to make sense. Read it a few more times and
you
> end up living your life by it. Brilliant dear man.
>
> -JC
Really does explain religious beliefs, doesn't it?
Gina
PJ
: "John P David" <dadd...@yahoo.com>
: > Jperdue4 <jper...@aol.com> wrote in message
: >
: > > lol...whos more annoying and loathed in here..me or
: > > JohnPDavid?......lol.....you know whats funnier?.....MY
: > > name is ....Jon David Perdue.......hmmmmmm.....
: >
: > The word "annoying" is the wrong choice, but "loathed" is
: > right on.
:
: I wouldn't say that. In my opinion, it is highly illogical to
loathe
: someone you've never had actual physical contact or dealings
: with. A cyber persona cannot steal from, damage, emotionally
: hurt, ruin, defame, etc., you. All rational reasons to loathe
: someone. (unless of course, one has crossed the limitations of
: cyber relations and shared personal information that can be
: used to hurt them) Annoying is the most one could claim in this
: medium given it's limitations. After all, there is the delete key.
:
: Gina
Extremely good point, Gina. People tend to get all wrapped up in the
words someone posts, since that may be their only exposure to the
person. There are people here on mw who are friends in real life but
if you only read what they post, you'd think they hate each other.
They call each other names like fuckwit and idiot and sick bastard and
then they go play golf and drink beer together.
I've said this before: if you don't like someone's posts, ignore them.
This is usenet. Everyone has a right to say what's on their mind, even
if others don't like what they say. Or, to paraphrase words from my
friend gekko, we don't neeeeed no steeeeenking Netcops.
Ciao,
PJ
John P David
>
> "JC Martin" <subs...@NOSPAMearthlink.net> wrote in message
> news:uR9B7.4331$AQ6.4...@newsread2.prod.itd.earthlink.net...
anything
> > enough times and it starts to make sense. Read it a few more times and
> you
> > end up living your life by it. Brilliant dear man.
> >
> > -JC
>
> Really does explain religious beliefs, doesn't it?
All it explains is that so far there isn't one person within range of this
subject header who can contribute to a discussion about this book: it's a
sad and snotty sounding excuse he makes for not having read it and worse
than that, it's an aspersion against a dedication to understanding, it's a
way to pretend that despite his ignorance, he's still cool and worthy to be
paid attention to. Not. No, not under this subject header. Not on his
life. He needs to get over to the library or on back to his sandbox.
There are scholars who have devoted their entire careers to a study of
*Finnegans Wake* and nobody is accusing them of some sort of peculiar
obsession with James Joyce. It's okay because, like, John Hinckley wasn't
arrested with a copy of *Ulysses* in his pocket, although granted, he was
not a kangeroo--or that at least that had not been reported at the time.
Indeed, had John Hinckley been sane enough, or had he brains enough to go on
reading Salinger right on up to the present book under discussion, there
should have been no way for him to justify his actions on that day. And
never mind the fact that only a madman could so do on a basis of *Catcher in
the Rye*.
There are worse madmen loose in the world, specifically those who get all
freaked out behind the crazy notion that there must be something in the head
of JD Salinger that drives people crazy and makes them want to assassinate
presidents and rock stars. On the basis of that reasoning, there should
have been, by now, a cemetery the size of Forest Lawn set aside for the
*Catcher in the Rye* dead, every grave boasting a tombstone with an engraved
picture of a little girl who keeps all her kings in the back row.
But never mind that, a copy of *Seymour--An Introduction* can easily fit in
a purse or back-pocket and so there is no excuse for any literate person to
be ignorant of it, unless you are seriously concerned that it might cause
you to go right out and shoot some draggy-ass hip-hop or heavy metal star.
In that case, please do not delay to buy and read this book.
j...@radidelmex.net
> But never mind that, a copy of *Seymour--An Introduction* can easily fit in
> a purse or back-pocket and so there is no excuse for any literate person to
> be ignorant of it,
If you Seymour, you also might like Hapworth, at:
http://groups.google.com/groups?ic=1&th=a657b8450f430ab2
Seymour wasn't my cup of tea, but it might be yours!
John P David
<j...@radiDELMEx.net> wrote in message news:9r4fv8$1ce$1...@news1.Radix.Net...
> In rec.arts.books John P David <dadd...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > But never mind that, a copy of *Seymour--An Introduction* can easily fit
in
> > a purse or back-pocket and so there is no excuse for any literate person
to
> > be ignorant of it,
>
> If you Seymour, you also might like Hapworth, at:
>
> http://groups.google.com/groups?ic=1&th=a657b8450f430ab2
>
Thank you for that even though I already have it. Was it you that posted
the link last time? If so, thanks again--even though I first read
*Hapworth* in '68 standing at the magazine rack in Gray's Drugs, after
classes. Well, that is until I finally cracked for the cover price of 50
cents or whatever outrageous amount they were demanding for the New Yorker
in those days, and read the rest of it on the bus to and fro from school.
I didn't like it first time I read it, didn't like it the second time, when
I ordered it from the library in that back issue of the New Yorker some few
years ago. Hapworth is a pissed off little diatribe whose only purpose is to
introduce a reader to the background texts which may well be necessary for
anyone who wants to penetrate the rest of Salinger's works written since
*Catcher* which, obviously, requires no preliminary courses in Zen and the
New Testament.
> Seymour wasn't my cup of tea, but it might be yours!
If you are basing your impression of Seymour entirely on Hapworth, then
Salinger has done himself a great injury by writing Hapworth, as I suspect
he well knows, since he has once again decided not to publish it in
hardcover. Probably nothing he's written to date has been received with
such nearly universal critical condemnation and disappointment.
My own disappointment with it was extreme to the following effect: I
refused to believe it had been written by the same author. According to Ian
Hamilton, the only reason it was written in the first place is because he
owed the New Yorker a story. They kept hounding him for it until finally he
showed up at their offices, sat down at one of their typewriters and wrote
the damn thing in a few days just to get them off his ass.
Bad business. Unfortunately for him, he is no Bob Dylan who did the same
thing when he went to Nashville to produce the sparkling beauty of *Blonde
on Blonde* laying flat on his back on the studio carpet penning the lyrics
for "Memphis Blues, Again", "Desolation Row" and "Visions of Johanna" to
come out of it with his first double album, the masterpiece he painted
before he ever wrote, "When I Paint My Masterpiece".
No. Hapworth is a huge disappointment with Seymour being presented as an
annoying, precocious, pissed off, snotty little
too-smart-for-his-own-britches eight year old kid.
I actually wound up thinking in my disappointment that all this time,
Salinger had a "secret goldfish" of a pen-pal who in '68 had been dead for
three years, who may well have been the true author of these works, a monk
in a monastery writing under Salinger's name; a man whose life closely
parallels many biographical details that may be found in Salinger's short
stories and later novellas.
Madness? Of course. I became convinced that Salinger had a ghost writer in
none other than a fellow who had attended Columbia at the same time Salinger
was there taking extension courses from Whit Burnett--and I am, madly,
sadly, still not completely convinced that I am totally insane so to think,
that Thomas Merton wrote all that stuff, many of the Nine Stories, Franny &
Zooey, right up to and including *Seymour--an Introduction*. Hence, all the
mystery and secrecy surrounding Salinger's life and existence. Well, you'd
have to read Merton's *Seven Storey Mountain* to catch the same mental
aberration that I enjoy in this, that you might also begin to note all those
odd and utterly striking biographical parallels.
In any case, it's plainly a nutty obsession, since there is no record
anywhere that the two men even so much as knew one another. We all must
have our little pet conspiracy theories, our Elvis is Not Dead myths. You
have just seen mine. ;-)
Anopheles
"Gina" wrote:
>
> "PJ" <peggy...@home.com> wrote in message
> news:mK4B7.195920$K6.93533864@news2...
> > "luna" <wdf...@home.com> wrote in message
> > : no time to read the post...but I'm figuring it has little or nothing
> > to do with the Grateful Dead
> >
> > That's a criterion for cross-posting? One person who cross-posted to
> > misc.writing also posted to alt.breastfeeding. I'm still trying to
> > figure out that connection.
> >
> > Ciao,
> > PJ
>
>
> I think John is still breast-feeding.
Aren't we all.
Anopheles
frustratedCNA CA
just kidding. i'll look for seymour at the library. you have piqued my
interest by your fanatacism.
John P David
frustratedCNA CA <headcor...@webtv.net> wrote in message
news:4919-3BD...@storefull-103.iap.bryant.webtv.net...
> i thought it was mark david chapman.
Quite so. I'm always getting those two mixed up. Worry about me on the day
I start claiming it was Squeaky Frome who did it.
> anyway, who are you going to kill?
The same person as always: myself, slowly, by exquisite torture of
nicotine: I have but one life to give for the sweet, fearless, smoky
relaxed ambiance of my country.
> just kidding.
Oh good.
> i'll look for seymour at the library.
Wonderful. And of course, you can only get it bound up right along with
"Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters" which really ought to be read first.
> you have piqued my
> interest by your fanatacism.
So long as we remain fanatical about a *search* for truth, yet remain in the
ever-present and irrefutable knowledge (and truth)--as we run around in a
circle in an eternally joyous, happily barking tail-chase--that we probably
wouldn't know it if it came up and gave us a big smooch: a little fanaticism
can go a long way toward keeping us happy if not downright tickled pink.
One word of caution: this book should not be approached by anyone not
having his chest entirely wrapped with adhesive tape, like any average
pleurisy patient-as protection against coughing--lest by laughing you should
chance to shatter your entire ribcage.