About a week ago, I wanted to see if there was anyone on YouTube who has talked about The Glass Family, an odd, quirky, mythical family, invented by author J.D. Salinger, and whom he wrote three novellas and 3 or 4 short stories about. I found this great, 18 minute video above about Salinger's book Nine Stories. This really inspired me, and helped me figure out why I like The Glass Family stories so much. Right after watching this video, I wrote a tiny, two page short story, to try out these techniques with an idea I had. If you have any interest in writing fiction, watch this video by Scot Bradfield.
Last December, my laptop broke, it just froze up, for no apparent reason. I spend much of every day doing some blogging, doing my social media, and occasionally other writing. Since I'm homeless, that's pretty much all I do, other than drawing my Sharpie pictures and just surviving day to day. I don't have a TV, or anything else going on, I just create stuff every day. So when I couldn't get the laptop to work, it was a big hit to my daily life. I didn't have money to get the computer checked. So my life of daily creativity ground to a stop instantly. So I went to the library that day, as I always did, and decided to do some reading. While I consume a huge amount of content these days, I rarely read actual books anymore. I'm listening to YouTube videos a lot, everything from lectures and keynote speeches, to financial channel content, to TED Talks and other informational content, on several topics. I also read a lot of articles on websites, on news, business, and anything else interesting to me. My laptop started working again a couple of weeks later, it appears to have been a static electricity issue.
I read at least 200 or 300 books, ranging from business and self-help books, to intense novels like Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and many things in between, between 1991 and the mid 2000's. Most of what I read was non-fiction, but I read quite a few novels, as well. I read almost all of Michael Crichton's novels, and most of Clive Cussler's as well. My dad, a lifelong avid reader of spy novels and westerns, turned me on to Cussler's adventure novels. I've read a few novels by some other well known writers, like Dean Koontz, Stephen King, and Robert Ludlum, as well as Mark Twain, among others. Those were the years I devoured books, all in my quest to try and figure out what life was all about. Since I started seriously blogging in late 2008, I've done more writing than reading, particularly in the last few years.
Back in December, when the laptop died, I felt like reading some fiction, something different than all the content I had been consuming online. But comtemporary novels didn't interest me at all then. I wound up reading several books I had to read in high school. I started with The Pigman, by Paul Zindel. Then I read Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes, a book my sister, Cheri, had to read in high school, and turned me on to. Soon after I read the classic Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, which I think is about the most brilliant look at human society possible. A new book, The Reservoir, by actor David Duchovney, caught my eye, and that was a pretty good read, as well.
Then I dove into the Glass Family stories by J.D. Salinger, all of which I first read in the early 1990's. I find those books far more interesting than the uber famous Catcher in the Rye, which I also had to read in high school. These past few days, just to reaquaint myself with it to write this blog post, I went back and re-read Cathcer in in thr Rye again. My main feeling when I finished it this time was, "Man, Holden Caufield was kind of an asshole." I get his whole existential crisis part, millions of people have been there, and I've been there. Hell, I spent most of my life there, that's probably why I'm a writer now. But thinking about it a bit more, Holden was a really provocative character, and highly controversial story, for the time it was written, in 1951. Much like Huckleberry Finn, his character looks at the world of human society, and gives a critique on human civilization itself. It's no surprise Holden sees so many people as phony in the book, there are plenty of those people in the real world, we all know plenty of them. It's still a great book, but I like the Glass Family stories much better, personally.
The Glass family is a fictional family created by J.D. Salinger, and his first stories about them were published in the New Yorker magazine initially. Ultimately, he wrote about members of this family in three (I think) of the Nine Stories (1953), as well as Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (1955), Seymour: An Introduction (1959), and Franny and Zooey (1961). First of all, hardly any action, as far as things you'd see in an adventurous movie, happen in these stories. Most of them are long conversations between two or three people, just hanging out, or in everyday type scenarios. If you need swashbuckling action, like in a Marvel comic, to get you reading, these are not for you. These are very readable, but intellectual, and spirtual-oriented stories. By spiritual I mean "seeking the meaning of life" type of stuff, with a lot of talk about Buddhism, in particular. These stories are not contemporary Christian fiction, the stories are kind of the antithesis of that.
In my reading of fiction, J.D. Salinger and Herman Hesse are the only writers who really go deep, the kind of stuff I really get into reading. Everyone else is pretty shallow, by my standards. OK, J.R.R. Tolkien, by creating the tales of Middle Earth, with its wide variety of characters got pretty deep as well, in places. Even in those great novels, I find things that bug me. In Hesse, the old ferry man at the end of Siddartha is a wise, old, interesting man, but the's not actually enlightened at the end, in my opinion. In Tolkien, what the hell is Tom Bombadil's back story? That guy fascinates me, and there's only one poem about him, besides the short part in The Fellowship of the Ring.
Back to the Glass family. Les and Bessie Glass are the parents, retired Vaudeville performers, who live in a sizeable apartment in New York City. They had seven children, all quite intelligent, and all of which appeared in a popular radio show over the years, called It's a Wise Child. The money from the show helped put all the kids through college. The time most of these stories take place is in the 1940's, and the children are all adults at this point. The children, from oldest to youngest, are: Seymour, Buddy, Boo Boo, Walt, Waker, Zooey, and Franny. Several of these are their nicknames in their family, not their given names.
If you are a writer, or think you would like to be one, Seymour: An Introduction, has the best advice I've ever seen about for writing. I won't tell you where it is in the story, you'll know it when you find it. In a similar fashion, Franny and Zooey has some great advice about being an actor, which both of those characters are. I think I first heard of the Glass Family books in an interview with Jodie Foster, where she mentioned Franny and Zooey being one of her favorite books, when she was younger. I looked through several of her 90's interviews today, and couldn't find that reference. It may have been in a written interview.
In any case, The Glass Family stories are some brilliant fiction, in my opinion, and dive into some really deep questions many of us weirdos of the world struggle with, at one point or another. Why are we here? What's the point of it all? How do I work as a create person in a world chock full of fucking idiots? That kind of stuff. That's about all I'm going to say. If this blog posts piques your interest, find a copy of Nine Stories, and read the first story, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish." You can read it at the library, or even hanging out at Barnes & Noble. It's online as well. That story is about Seymour, the oldest, and generally believed to be the most brilliant, of the Glass Family. He's on vacation in Florida with his new wife in the story. Seymour is an amazing character, and if "Bananafish" gets you interest in learning more about Seymour, and the rest of his talented, quirky, and weird family, then check out the three novellas, and the other two short stories. In this group of stories, Salinger creates a written mosaic, or perhaps a collage, of kety moments in the lives of members of the Glass Family, which is another thing I like about these stories. He could have written 50 more stories about them, filling in different parts of the overall picture of the clan.
I've learned in my 50 years of reading, and 38 years of doing some writing, how to tell if you need to read a book at any particular time. If you own a book, and it keeps grabbing your attention, you keep walking by and noticing it, then you need to read that book. Or if you hear about a book, and then hear more references to it soon after, it's trying to get your attention. In my experience, when those things happen, then your sub-conscious (or whatever) knows that there's something in that book that you need to hear at this point in your life.
So that's my message of this post. The weird and crazy J.D. Salinger wrote three short novels, or novellas, about a talented, weird, very intelligent, family called the Glass Family. These books, each in a different way, dive deep into the questions of what life is all about, and how people who are creative and intelligent struggle with our crazy world. If that sounds interesting to you, check the books and short stories out.
J.D. Salinger's own personal story is every bit as crazy as those fictional stories he has written, and that's a whole different thing. In 2010 I heard he had just died, and I thought, "That guy was still alive?" I thought he had died way back in the 1960's or something. I just never got interested in his personal life. It turns out he becames a recluse, in progressing stages, after Catcher in the Rye thrust him into the limelight in the early 1950's. If you are interested in his personal story, as well as how his four books affected the literary world, here are two links below about him. The top one is a journalist and a couple of critics, talking about the impact of Catcher in the Rye on the world. The second is a 48 minute documentary on his life, made before he died.
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