Tuesday, June 25, 2002

Dreamcatcher



(From - Propaganda of the PRC - for more go here.)

Soundtrack - Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea - PJ Harvey

I read someone's review of Peggy Salinger's autobiography the other day. The writer criticised the book because he could not take it seriously factually after he decided that Peggy Salinger's account of her mother's experience of the sinking of the Benareswas inaccurate. Peggy Salinger's mother was nine at the time and on the way to a strange country. It would be strange if there was no distortion to the story over the years. A reviewer with no soul. Another criticism was that the process of sorting out the events was out in the open, as if the back was off and all the workings were visible. Maybe it's me but I like the honesty which that implies. Most polished autobiographies are probably a lot less accurate as they are designed to remove all the 'uncool' bits. I don't mean the negative things; plenty of events can be negative and still make the reader either more sympathetic or admiring because of the adversity overcome or the honesty. Peggy Salinger just writes with no filter and for me that makes it more believable. I got the impression from the reviews that she was going to make out that her father was horrible to her. I haven't finished the book yet (she is fifteen) but my overall impression is of a changeable curmudgeon but not a monster. He even reminds me of my dad in a lot of ways and though I had bad things happen to me when I was a kid, and yes at times I hated my father, looking back he was better than most dads. I never get the impression that Peggy Salinger was doing a "hatchet job" on her father. I would consider the book as an honest account of what JD Salinger was really like as opposed to the distant figure suggested by the cult that has sprung up around the author of "Catcher in the Rye". I am nearly finished reading it. Next book - Alan Turing: the Enigma .

I have also just got The Passionate Eye - the collected writing of Suzanne Vega. A lot of it consists of the words to her songs but often interspersed with early poems which show the development of her writing. There are also a few prose pieces including one I remember her telling between songs when I saw her live during her tour of 1990 for the Days of Open Hand album. I have found as I get older that fewer and fewer pieces of music give me that real tingle but just reading the words of the songs from her first album gave me the same feeling I had on first hearing them. To open an album by an unknown with a spoken song (Cracking) was very brave of the record company. Oh and some of the poems she wrote in the mid seventies are almost like raps.

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