http://slyoyster.com

The only person who thinks a sequel to The Catcher in the Rye is necessary is probably John David California, the 32-year-old author of 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye. The Swedish-American, California is a former “gravedigger and Ironman triathlete” so he’s got that going for him, unlike his new book.

Anyway, the new one features an aged Holden Caulfied escaping his nursing home and wandering around the city.  I shit you not.  California talks to the Guardian:

“Just like the first novel, he leaves, but this time he’s not at a prep school, he’s at a retirement home in upstate New York,” said California. “It’s pretty much like the first book in that he roams around the city, inside himself and his past. He’s still Holden Caulfield, and has a particular view on things. He can be tired, and he’s disappointed in the goddamn world. He’s older and wiser in a sense, but in another sense he doesn’t have all the answers.”

As if that wasn’t enough original author JD Salinger even appears as a character in the new novel.  I almost want to read this just to experience the trainwreck firsthand.  Because, I would assume, most people grow out of this book when they turn 18.  It’s one of those books, like On the Road, that are only meaningful if you read it at specific point in your life.

Maybe this only interests me, or those of you who enjoy the works of author J.D. Salinger (Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey). There’s an auction going on at Ebay right now where you can take home the above letter written by the author in 1981 to Janet Eagleson, whom the author carried on an affair with.

The bidding starts at $1,250 and the letter is estimated to be worth between $2,500-$3,000. So it’s not cheap but not expensive either.

However, the real news hear is that the author slags on of the greatest films ever in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

“…The sight of summer in full swing has put me off ever since I can remember. Oddly, I work nicely or at least normally amidst all the greening and flowering and burgeoning. But correspondence falls off, goes to pot…on top of everything, the woodshed crew…have been here…leaving me rattly and pale, but with a shelter of sorts for some twenty cords of wood. As ugly a structure as any I’ve seen, with lots of shitty little space-filling fancy scroll-y crosspieces, said to be ‘functional’. No doubt it will take an esthetic turn for the better with a couple of good hard winters. I took the morning bus into Boston…to do what I almost never do…went to see some particular pictures in a gallery. The Pissarro exhibit…Have seen no good movies, except The Last Metro…I got hooked into seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark, which might be excused for its unwitty, unfunny awful socko-ness if it had been put together by Harvard Lampoon seniors…Hope to see yez [sic] one of these limbo summer days…”

Boldness by us for emphasis. He closes the letter with the very emo-esque: “Have been in New York (I am the Man, I suffered, I was There.)”

Seriously though, how do you hate on Raiders? Everything I ever felt for the author is now gone. He is dead to me, even though I assumed he had been dead for the past thirty years.

Wouldn’t it be kind of cool though if J.D. Salinger had a movie blog and no one new it was him or it was one of those secrets that everyone knows about but no one will admit it? Especially the author in question. I don’t know why, but I like the image of him just writing for the simple pleasure of it alone in a house somewhere in the Vermont or New Hampshire woods.