let me reiterate that it has been one of my greatest ongoing pleasures during these days of underemployment, to read (and none too seldom re-read) the works of the great and the good.  surely an indulgence, a luxury akin to a minor recreational drug habit, or at the least an inclination towards full-fat dairy products.  one of the more pleasurable of these weaknesses as of late has been the genius work of J.D. Salinger.  my friend Dariusz had made mention recently of his enjoyment of Franny & Zooey and thus got me thinking that a re-read was necessary, as neither of those novellas made much of an impression on me upon first glance, five or six years ago in bull-market, post break-up, tiny-studio-era London.  2009 finds me absolutely loving these and others of his short stories, most of which are written through the voice of one of the seven absurdly intelligent Glass children.  to quote at length from one such story:

"It seems to me indisputably true that a good many people, the wide world over, of varying ages, cultures, natural endowments, respond with a special impetus, a zing, even, in some cases, to artists and poets who as well as having a reputation for producing great or fine art have something garishly Wrong with them as persons: a spectacular flaw in character or citizenship, a construably romantic affliction or addiction - extreme self-centeredness, marital infidelity, stone-deafness, stone-blindness, a terrible thirst, a mortally bad cough, a soft spot for prostitutes, a partiality for grand-scale adultery or incest, a certified or uncertified weakness for opium or sodomy, and so on, God have mercy on the lonely bastards.  If suicide isn't at the top of the list of compelling infirmities for creative men, the suicide poet or artist, one can't help noticing, has always been given a very considerable amount of avid attention, not seldom on sentimental grounds almost exclusively, as if he were (to put it much more horribly than I really want to) the floppy-eared runt of the litter.  It's a thought, anyway, finally said, that I've lost sleep over many times, and possibly will again."

Seymour - An Introduction

J.D. Salinger