JD Salinger Dead, Funeral on Rye

JD Salinger died today in Cornish, NH.

“Pencey was full of crooks. Quite a few guys came from these wealthy families, but it was full of crooks anyway. The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has – I’m not kidding.” – Holden Caulfield

As regards possible events following his death, Salinger apparently used part of his living time to distinctly not attend his father’s funeral… In keeping with this notion, the completely unfounded rumor is that there will be no funeral for the reclusive writer, in keeping with his hermitlike desire for privacy.

A fellow hermit, Chuang Tzu, of equally indeterminate origins, said, “you wear out your energy, leaning on a tree and moaning, slumping at your desk and dozing… heaven picked out a body for you and you use it to gibber…”… Im not sure of anything beyond the books he wrote, but as a dead writer, Salinger will join the great annals of human gibberers. And gibbering, to Chuang Tzu, was sometimes the very height of human achievement. The character of Holden Caulfield started the entire home alone / teenage nihilist rebel thing, without which, we would not have the modern day sensitive vampires of Twilight.

However, the coolest reference i’ve experienced was the character of “the laughing man”, in the Ghost in the Shell. Obsessed with the holden caulfield character and jd salinger references from his short story, The Laughing Man, The Laughing Man made himself a modern, technology augmented response to Holdens inability to create internal/external phase change:

The hacker’s first appearance in the GITS: SAC storyline is six years before the anime starts, when he assaulted the head of Serano Genomics in public on February 3, 2024, hiding his face from eyewitnesses and cameras with his Laughing Man logo. The Laughing Man is such an expert that he can “steal eyes” of entire crowds, in real time—hacking their visual cyber-brain implants, either to make himself appear invisible or to hide his face with the cartoon logo. He can also alter memories, erasing all records of his existence. Many of those who indeed saw his face would only recall and refer to the stylized logo [wikipedia]

The Laughing Man had read the Catcher in the Rye:

The Laughing Man has quite a fascination with The Catcher in the Rye, as if the work greatly influenced him: like that novel’s main character, Holden Caulfield, he can’t stand “phonies” (corrupt politicians in this case). He also kept a prized left-handed baseball catcher’s mitt for a time with a quote from The Catcher in the Rye written on it: “You know what I’d do. I mean, if I had my goddamn choice? I’d just be a catcher in the rye and all”. Ironically, while the mitt is actually real, the term “a lefty’s catcher mitt” is described in an episode as being net jargon for “something people think exists, but really doesn’t.” Aoi also has stated fairly out front that he is an atheist.

The NY Times references his hermit like funeral obituary by remarking, as many others have constantly, on his hermitage:

in 1953 Mr. Salinger, who had been living on East 57th Street in Manhattan, fled the literary world altogether and moved to a 90-acre compound on a wooded hillside in Cornish, N.H. He seemed to be fulfilling Holden’s desire to build himself “a little cabin somewhere with the dough I made and live there for the rest of my life,” away from “any goddam stupid conversation with anybody.” [link]

…but in the bigger picture, who knows.