Food for thought

So I haven't decided whether not to make this entire blog a food blog. I started reading around looking for something to eat. Using my trusty cultural zietgeist-o-meter:

obviously the best one........................................ 

but it doesn't hurt to be second best

See if you can guess which one is which?
Anyway!
I found something WAAAY awesome on the first list.  A profile on Cornish, New Hampshire! You know, the city that JD (not Zach Braff) chose to hole himself up in?

"J. D. Salinger a Recluse? Well, Not to His Neighbors"

I love profiles. I love them on people. I love them on animals, cities, cars, styles, movements, and most of all places! I like the idea of participating cultural voyeurism into generally public items.

So Cornish  NH, a well known small town due their one well known resident. The piece makes a big deal about how people have been and still are pretty tight-lipped about their man Jerry. But about midway through the piece, someone spills the beans because all of a sudden we're starting to learn a lot of Jerry. He drive a landrover, he's a nice neighbor, would always let kids sled down his sweet hill, he loves sunday Church dinners, he would show up hours early, and like a recluse, write in his little moleskin notebook hunch up in a corner.

ASIDE!:
------------------------------------------------------------------
Is Jerry a hipster?

Now that I think about it, Holden seemed like a proto-hipster. Seymour, also sounded like a hipster. Franny and Zooey--also hipsters. Jesuse!  The entire Glass family were hipsters.  Don't believe me? Fine, I have no proof, but reread Franny and Zooey and Seymour, and see how many hipster things you can read into and drink after each one. I bet you at the end, Jerry Salinger will start to sound like Ryan Schreiber.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Anyway, I love profiles, I love the fact that Jerry is just a regular guy like us.  Perhaps even more regular, he drives a truck. Hangs with dudes like this:

Sherry and Ken at Elk's Lodge

Even though it's a profile on Cornish, it's just another profile of JD Salinger. That's cool with me. It's kind of hard write a profile on a person who won't participate. The one thing I always feel bad for are the people who have to tell his story. They're collateral damage, to the real story, the real man, Jerry. He touched our lives, and then we forced him to touch our kid's lives, and they will force him on their kids, so on so on. That's ok with me, because his stories are very very good. But what I didn't like about his stories were that they so focused on elevated myths of people--extraordinary people, intelligent, well bred, amazingly talented, and elite. That intrigue is appealing to adolescents and adults alike, but I feel it is disingenuous as well.  Mainly, because no one thinks to cares about "people who don't have anything to say" like Sherry or Ken of Cornish. Well what kind of story is that? I don't know, but I'm trained to see gaps, and if anyone leaving a MFA program really wants to drain his career he/she really should try to do that story, because it's a real big gap. Maybe that's why Jerry decided to live in Cornish, and maybe that's why he didn't manage to publish anything at all.