J.D. Salinger and wielding copyright as self-protection | Hacker News Reader

J.D. Salinger and wielding copyright as self-protection

crimereads.com

51 pointsCaiero29 comments

Salinger's estate wants to wait literal decades to publish the rest of his works. There was a bunch of controversy in 2013 when Three Stories leaked on what.cd. I'm not a Salinger expert by any means but having read and liked Catcher in the Rye and Three Early Stories, I didn't find Three Stories particularly exceptional. Maybe the estate is so sensitive because the unpublished stuff isn't as good as the published stuff?

> Maybe the estate is so sensitive because the unpublished stuff isn't as good as the published stuff?

Or it could be the author's wish since the unpublished material may contain sensitive information. TS Eliot most famously had an embargo on publishing his letters 50 years after his death or the death of his 'mistress' depending on whoever died later.

Salinger's literary reputation is already set. Don't think any new material will add to or detract from it.

this is also tied to how banksters make money

it's about timing, letting the culture soak up the ideas, then release at the time of biggest likelihood of great profit...

consider why has disney+ removed so much content? so they can time it, to sell it at a higher value in the future, once the nostalgia has set in....?

that or they're just too stupid to understand how culture works and are destroying their own value? both of these completely unlikely. but I'm just ranting/guessing online....

The craziest part of that saga was that what.cd later banned unreleased Salinger works from being uploaded. They are still banned from a number of private torrent sites. How is Salinger's estate so scary?

>In other words, before his death in 2010, Salinger became the ghost in the machine of American literature, embodying the battle between preservation attempts of his exterior works, and therefore the maintenance of their immortality, and the need for self-preservation and an undisturbed, peaceful human existence.

Salinger's works are referenced frequently in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - I wonder if the word choice here is a reference to that series.

It reminds me of the film Coming Through The Rye(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Through_the_Rye_(film) ) about some school kids trying to get permission to put on a play of Catcher in the Rye and getting refused, and decide to visit JD Salinger

Supposedly in Cornish, if you asked anyone where he lived, they'd all claim to have no idea.

As for all these writers, I think he wanted to be left alone, so leave him alone.

Yeah I can’t understand how people rationalize harassing Salinger.

Maybe some percent of them are just testing out the Cornish solidarity thing.

I’ve been to some small towns in Montana that value discretion and isolation. I prefer it to a gaggle of consumers.

I grew up in Cornish. Most of us knew. Our plumber was his plumber etc etc. he was left alone, there’s a lot of interesting art in the community to see, his house not being one of them.

The locals may have left him alone, but let's say 1% of the US population read the book and 1% of them decided to go have a look at him. That's still a person a day for 100 years.

I like The Catcher in the Rye quite a lot and have read it three or four times. I also loved the Calvin and Hobbes cartoons of Bill Watterson. It is interesting to me how both authors chose shy away from fame and to protect their works from commercialization so ardently. I am fascinated by their single minded integrity. It also causes me to consider the similarity in their works. There is certainly an element of Holden present in the character of Calvin now that I consider it.

"To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim." -- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

> “It’s evident Salinger has a saint complex. He wants to be a saint. The trouble is, he doesn’t have a saintly personality—quite the opposite—he is egotistical, ill tempered, unforgiving. But he wants to be a saint because saints are above the humans, they are unstoppably superior.” Hamilton is the proponent of this view of Salinger—a haughty relic frozen in time.

I hope conversations around personal privacy have improved in the years since it became so much easier to broadcast our lives to the world, because this is an insane attitude to have that I hope we’ve evolved beyond.

Having that kind of fame thrust upon you having written one book would difficult for anyone to navigate, I certainly don’t judge his desire to fight people that tried profit from his life story.

The idea someone else has an entitlement on the life of another person, even if that person has done something like publish a successful book, is narcissistic on the part of the person who thinks they have that entitlement. There is arguably an expectation of loss of privacy for public figures, but even that is limited.

I imagine, unfortunately, this has gotten even worse today where the sense of entitlement in the general populace has grown significantly.

As with George R.R. Martin, who is a kind of ecdysiast that I had mistaken for a hetaera. He seduced and aroused me and then failed to deliver what I thought I had bargained for, but had in fact not. Like the ecdysiast, he owes me nothing I had not been promised, despite my expectations.

But while my entitlement to the future work of Mr. Martin is zero, I still feel somewhat jilted.

I feel similarly toward Patrick Rothfuss, since I absolutely love his few books and I've re-read them a few times, but it seems like there's no end to the series he created in sight still. Early into his creation he promised not to be like other fantasy authors who let their series stretch into decades, often unfinished, but after some time it became pretty evident that he had fallen into the same hole they had.

So on one hand I appreciate that creative writing is tough, and meeting the rising expectations of your fans is very difficult. But on the other hand we feel a little teased with no meaningful climax, and often you hear the creator assure you that things will be coming to a close soon, but left with nothing. That's maybe the only thing I might have to be a little angry about, but the stakes are low enough that I can't really get worked up about it without feeling pretty silly.

Well, to be fair, he has broken multiple promises (for the release date of WindsOfWinter alone). I don't hate him for it, but he's not trustworthy in that I doubt he has any idea when any book will be released and should know better than to opine since he's been wrong so many times before. Of course fans beg him for comments so... whatever.

Ecdysiast == stripper

Hetaera == prostitute/escort

Where did you find these odd words!?

It seems like Ecydysiast for one is a facetious term invented by H.L. Mencken and barely ever used since.

I actually know where I learned these odd words: Heinlein uses them both. I picked them because they sound more respectful than the alternatives and I'm in awe of Martin.

Only in its obscurity does it sound respectful at first blush, but upon learning the meaning- the effect is still the same. ;)

That actually makes sense. I'm guessing that it was in Time Enough for Love?

He also stormed the beaches at Normandy and whatever happened after that. He deserves his own desires.

Do people who have not stormed beaches, gone to war, etc. Have a different set of privacy rights?

I understand the underlying sentiment, but I strongly dislike the notion that serving in the military de facto entitles you to a stronger say in what or how society operates.

I have an Uncle that served in the infantry division. I view that generation as a ruined group of kids that came back to the US and did the best they could. I also maybe over personalizing the issue.

I simply mean that facing the worst of humanity buys people extra space to exist in my dealings with them.

I believe we all have the same privacy rights. Some of us get the right to be eccentric in uncomfortable ways to a certain extent.

Never got this attitude. Plenty of people are roped into wars; this doesn't make them any better or worse than anyone else. More pitiable? Certainly.

If Salinger wasted his time it was his to waste. He made a point and an entitled public proved him right.

I’ve never read any Salinger, but after reading that article I sincerely doubt that old curmudgeon could have ever had anything to say about the human condition.

People have a right to privacy, for sure. No one living a private life should be stalked by paparazzi. But once you let an idea out into the world, it’s never really yours ever again. All of that effort to use copyright as a form of thought control on others. So much for promoting the useful arts.

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