I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of “generalization” of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple. But now realize that TV and popular film and most kinds of “low” art—which just means art whose primary aim is to make money—is lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain. Whereas “serious” art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort. So it’s hard for an art audience, especially a young one that’s been raised to expect art to be 100 percent pleasurable and to make that pleasure effortless, to read and appreciate serious fiction. That’s not good. The problem isn’t that today’s readership is “dumb,” I don’t think. Just that TV and the commercial-art culture’s trained it to be sort of lazy and childish in its expectations. But it makes trying to engage today’s readers both imaginatively and intellectually unprecedentedly hard.

Discuss.

The standard view on Catcher is that it’s some mopey teen wandering around being angsty. This polarises people: his worldview resonates with an awful lot of readers, particularly adolescents, but everyone else just wishes he’d cowboy up. The debate never seems to go deeper than that, which is a crying shame, because there’s way more going on in the novel.

Firstly, Holden’s mopiness isn’t just Gawd-no-one-understands-me angst. There’s a line near the start where he says¹ “Sometimes I act like I’m about thirteen”. Holden was thirteen when his brother Allie died; his brother, whom he adored, placed at the absolute centre of his universe. Allie’s death destroys Holden and, though he never confronts it head on, the entire novel details his attempts to come to terms with it.

Secondly, despite what many people seem to think, we’re not supposed to see Holden as a role model. Arrested development is not something to aspire to. All-encompassing cynicism is not something to aspire to. If there’s a how-are-we-to-live message in Salinger’s writing, it’s that no matter how hard it might be, the best thing we can do is find a way to get outside ourselves, stop acting like everything is about us, and keep moving forward. There’s an excellent distillation of this in the second part of Franny & Zooey. Or, more conveniently, you could read this speech by David Foster Wallace, who was heavily inspired by Salinger.

At the risk of turning into a wild-eyed evangelist, I think it’s a tragedy that Holden Caulfield is the only one of Salinger’s narrative voices that most people are familiar with. He’s dour and self-absorbed and I can see why you might not like him, whereas Salinger’s writing as a whole is characterised by a genuine warmth and humour that most writers couldn’t even approach. His short stories are phenomenal (see for instance the title story in For Esme, With Love & Squalor). He can do this thing where, in about four or five words, he describes a gesture or facial expression so perfectly that a character’s entire history, state of mind and motivations are dumped directly into your brain.

Ok, wild-eyed evangelist. Breathe.

Right now I’m going to read over these two letters a few times (the latter being some of the best writing advice ever dispensed). Then I’m going to go home and read the books again. Then I’m going to wait for all the manuscripts he’s finished since he retired from publishing to surface. And then… I don’t know what I’ll do.

1. I’ve no copy to hand, so I’m quoting from memory.

Which is not to say that writers should completely skip the first two seasons of a new show. Temporal logistics aside¹, that would be depriving us of some fine material. No. But on the other hand, why waste your A-game? And why keep us waiting?

Clearly the only solution is to hire a technically competent team of writers who nevertheless lack that certain spark, and task them with writing the first two seasons. The original creators and true creative minds can write the third season concurrently², with the lesser seasons being held back for release as a DVD extra.

I literally cannot conceive of any problems with this plan. Someone start writing cheques for me now, because I am on fire.

1. Physics: ever the enemy of comedy. Well, except slapstick.
2. Or maybe they’d have to wait a while, have a staggered start to the writing of each season… I don’t know, the bean counters can work it out.

I’m hoping this is a thing that will be fun for all concerned. If it goes well enough we may even be able to throw some capital letters on there and make it a full-blown honest to god Thing. I would like that. And so would she.

1. Very short, mind, we’re talking about a postcard here. I’ll make up for it by throwing on a wee doodle as well. Maybe even in colour!

1. I originally wrote “limp invitation”. Feel free to psychoanalyse that once you’ve addressed the main body of the post (I’d like to address HER main body, wha).

The final changes have been hammered out on Anything But Simple, an anthology of poetry and fiction from the graduates of UCD’s creative writing MA (including y.t. and certain others). The launch is planned for 6pm on the 20th of October in UCD. We have wine. Join ussss.

Catherine is looking for submissions from bloggers and photobloggers for an anthology to be published in the run-up to Christmas, with 75% of the proceeds going to Focus Ireland. A worthy cause and a nice opportunity to see yourself in print. Submission guidelines are here.

If you have writerly aspirations you might also feel like throwing in an entry for RTÉ Radio One’s prestigious Francis MacManus Award. They’re looking for 1,800-2,000 words (my native length – chess!) and there’s €3,000 and a trophy for the overall winner. In addition, the three winners and some of the shortlisted stories will be read on air. Closing date is the 27th of October.

Bonus: Nothing to do with writing, but this is the greatest trailer for anything ever. I’d never heard of it before today but by golly I want it.

Some writers claim you should always have a notebook handy, but they’re amateurs. You should always at least five. I’m hovering around seven these days, including On The Go, On The Go In Limited Capacity Trousers, Cutting Sociopolitical Observations In 500 Words Or Less and both Short- and Long-form Miscellany. You get bonus points for scrawling things on napkins and small pieces of driftwood and suchlike.

There’s also my mobile. I used to rely on this pretty heavily, but it loses its attraction when you start getting heavily into the habit of prancing around stacks of paper. Potential for being strewn becomes the primary criterium for note repositories. And of course, you have the character limit, which means you can lose a lot of detail. Still, I get some use out of it, generally when I’m drunk and in a crowd of people and whipping out a notebook would make me look like a proper poindexter.

This has its downsides, frankly. Witness:

all these ripe whatever fields had not happened, but there was an opportunity

Buh? There’s a classic short story in there, no doubt, full of high adventure and charismatic characters and Serious Themes, but chud me sideways if I know what it is. Then there’s the following, from 5.01am on the 20 October 2007:

Staying with a friend who’s a bit queasy, seeing dumptrucks pass by and a naked asian guy.

I like the capital letter and full stop there, as if it’s actually supposed to be a sentence and not just something I dreamed at the bottom of a jaegerbomb binge. I was in Galway at the time for a friend’s birthday, so maybe that clears things up. Maybe I just happened to see all those things in the middle of the night? I don’t know. Help me out here.

Now it seems to me that that’s not the usual way interviews are published. You open a newspaper and find some guy talking about how he’s going to meet some musician and he has certain preconceptions, and then he describes the hotel room/café/whatever he’s meeting him in and discusses whether this mildly reinforces or mildly challenges said preconceptions, and then you get something like this:

I asked him what he thought about the Irish weather.

He looked out the window. “Yeah,” he said, “it’s all right.”

There you go, you got your pull quote. Now, for the edification of the reader, you should summarise the guy’s career to date, mention what some people thought about the live show and point out that there’ll be a new album out soon. Job’s a good un.

Which is to say, there seems to be very little interviewing going on.

I love reading transcripts because there’s a real sense of the person’s character, and not just whatever aspect of said that the journalist wants to play up. Plus you get proper, thought-out answers.

On that note, I heartily recommend that anyone with an interest in writing read The Paris Review Interviews. They’re interesting, useful, inspiring and surprisingly funny, and demonstrate nicely why smart and enthusiastic people need more airtime.