Lost and found

I.

The tale had all the hallmarks of a baroque Paul Bowles short story, set among the remaindered possessions of Bowles himself: a film director gets a call from a stranger, who says he has stumbled across an original print of the filmmaker’s long-lost first film in a windowless Tangier apartment, coated in dust and insect powder. The director, Sara Driver, at first thought the call might be a joke, but for reasons almost as strange as fiction, she kept listening.[...]

Bowles’s agent granted the rights to Ms. Driver, and the movie — shot in six days near her parents’ house in western New Jersey, with an unlikely cast that included two friends, the writer Luc Sante, little known at the time, and an equally unknown photographer, Nan Goldin — developed a following. The film was named one of the best movies of the 1980s by a critic in Cahiers du Cinéma. —NYT

II. At The Millions, Emily Darrell tracks down one of J.D. Salinger's uncollected stories, "A Girl I Knew":

As I scanned the index I noticed with great surprise and excitement that the book contained a story by J.D. Salinger that I hadn’t read before. It was called “A Girl I Knew.” Greedily, I slid to the floor, crossed my legs, and flipped to page 248, ready to start right in. The only problem was that there was no page 248. In fact, in between John Rogers’ “Episode of a House Remembered” and Alfred Segre’s “Justice Has No Number,” there was nothing. Some sneak had gone and ever-so-carefully removed the Salinger story with a razor.

III. Paul La Farge offers PDF versions of nine small books (of seventeen) that he published with/as Paraffin Press. Each had a print run of two.

IV. Can't remember what link brought me to this site for/about William Gibson's Agrippa (a book of the dead)—a book on disc that destroyed itself as you read it.

Inversions

John Deming's piece "Salinger's Poets" includes a bit from his novella The Inverted Forest, about a fictional poet named Raymond Ford:

“I have such nice friends,” she told him enthusiastically. “They all know your poetry. Some even live on it.”

“Corinne, I don’t mix too well–”

Corinne leaned forward joyfully, remembering something.

“That’s what Miss Aigletinger once yelled about you into my father’s thing. Do you remember Miss Aigletinger?”

Ford nodded unnostalgically. “What would I have to do if I met them?” he asked.

(from Travis)

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Steve Hely: "It's a sad day for readers. Every adolescent goes through a Louis Auchincloss phase."

* * *

From the Parkives: J.D. Salinger, Author of...Lolita?

To the Max

My latest Astral Weeks column looks at the longer short fiction of Howard Waldrop:

So, for instance, in "You Could Go Home Again," Waldrop's not content to imagine, with great empathy, what Thomas Wolfe might have written to Max Perkins, his old editor, had Wolfe not died at 37. No. Instead, Waldrop's Wolfe listens gleefully to the banter of Fats Waller ("That's the charm of music, the Hegemony of Harmony, the Triumph of Terpsichore, and other melodious metaphors"). Not only that, they're cruising from Japan to Germany.

On a zeppelin.

With J.D. Salinger as social director.

Kiddie modernist flatland

Who wrote this about Peanuts?

Never sentimental, never ironic, it took place in a kiddie modernist flatland where every gag was deadpan and every day held its little heartbreak, its little revelation.

Bill Watterson in the WSJ? Nicholson Baker in the NYO?


No—Devin McKinney in the Guardian! Here's some more:

Its title was quickly changed to Peanuts by the head of UFS. Apparently Schulz hated it because it didn't mean anything-were the characters the Peanuts or what? No explanation-hence it's the perfect name.

Read it all here.

* * *

In Britain, [Werner Kleeman] was transferred to division headquarters to serve as a post-invasion interpreter, an assignment in which he would forge several lifelong friendships, one of them with a counterintelligence man named Jerry Salinger, who wanted to be a writer.

“Jerry was just a nice little boy then,” Mr. Kleeman said of the man who would become the celebrated J. D. Salinger. “He was kind of quiet.” —NYT

Looking glass

The Harry Potter creator and Desperate Housewives star are beginning to look alike...

Researching this important item, I discovered that Andrea Bowen (the Teri Hatcher character's daughter) once "played the role of Zooey Glass in the ABC primetime series, That Was Then."

You can just name a character "Zooey Glass"?