Absolute Gentleman

My blog gets approximately fifty hits a day, which qualifies it as a personal journal, for the most part. The people who read it are people who care about me, people who dislike me and want to see if I talk about them (You (plural) know who you are.), and those who are interested in J.D. Salinger. Based on what people search before arriving at my blog, this is what they’re really interested in:

• Where does J.D. Salinger live?
• Did Frank Tempone really move to Chicago? If so, why did he go? What fucking happened? (Answer: None of your fucking business.)
• Is Junot Diaz married?
• Is Junot Diaz gay?
• Is Junot Diaz an asshole?
• What’s Amy Hempel up to?
• What does it mean to have a 120/96 blood pressure?
• Does anyone contemplate dialogue about ‘building a fire’ from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road?
• Is Sherman Alexie as terrible as I think he is?

The day J.D. Salinger’s death was reported, I received 1,619 hits. The next day, January 29, I received 1,543 hits. January 30? 747. The numbers are dwindling, and soon my blog will return to its near-anonymity, but before that happens, I want to use my little moment in the sun to take a shot at an oh-so-irreverent writer named Shalom Auslander.

Actually, to have fifty people read your work – think about you – per day, isn’t too bad. Think about who pays attention to you on a normal day. How many people call you, for instance, or visit, or read anything you’ve written? How many of these people are strangers?

This fifty-per-day number is excluding the students who listen to me every weekday. Fifteen years as a teacher, all those student-listening sessions – I’m a lucky person.

I regret that I have nothing to help me parlay all this attention into big book sales. You know: someone shows up to look at the photos my wife took of Salinger’s house, see I’m selling a little book, and they consider buying it if they like my writing.

When Salinger died, some media outlets scrambled to cover his death and secured interviews with a few supposed experts to get their reactions to Salinger’s passing. NPR put together something decent, but had two writers, people meant to give a special kind of insight on Salinger. The first one to offer commentary was Rick Moody, whose writing I kind of like after reading it four or five times, but the pretension in his voice, his demeanor, his gait, sicken me. That’s really all I have to say about that.

The other guy was Shalom Auslander, someone obviously influenced heavily by Salinger. He has the irreverence down, but none of the talent Salinger had. My problem with him in this program happened in a span of like thirteen seconds. Host Robert Seigel, in introducing Auslander’s commentary, said “…as for Salinger’s final journey, writer Shalom Auslander was a bit concerned.” Auslander then says:

“I hope he’s being left alone. I hope God is leaving him alone, but I doubt it. That guy is probably a bit of a nag, probably chasing Salinger around for autographs…”

You might think it’s completely psychotic, but this upset me. Yes, I hunted down Salinger’s house and posted the photographs on my blog, but what this guy did to Salinger was worse.

Here’s some of Auslander’s work, fresh from his website:

Three sentence fragments in one paragraph, an annoying voice, riddled with cliché, and the words “Bling bling.”

Me? Photographs. Him? Copied his style, rendered it into unreadable garbage, then got on the radio while Salinger’s corpse was still warm, concerned that God wasn’t leaving Salinger alone. You know who should’ve left Salinger alone, Shalom? You. You should have.