JD Salinger surfaced yesterday to stop the release of a novel in Britain and the US which the publishers call "a sequel to Catcher in the Rye." Salinger's lawyers call the book a "rip off pure and simple" and although the publishers are trying to say that the work is more of an homage than a rip off, it looks to me like the book is in violation of every copyright convention out there as it uses characters and situations from Catcher. The author apparently lives in Sweden but goes under the nom de plume John David California, which makes me think that he is in fact Swedish, I don't see an American picking that pen name and very few novelists choose Scandinavia as a good tax haven. The BBC has a bit more on the story here, but what's interesting to me is the fact that JDS is still alive, kicking and angry up in his somewhat isolated (though I drove past it once) home in Vermont. He hasn't published a novel for 57 years and many people wonder what he's been doing all this time. There are two schools of thought. The first is that rather like Harper Lee, he knew he couldn't top himself after Catcher in the Rye so he hasn't written anything. And it is true that he meditates a lot and watches a fair bit of daytime TV. But I prefer the second theory. In her memoir Dream Catcher, JD's daughter Margaret says that Salinger would write every single morning and occasionally he would show her manuscripts of completed novels. Supposedly these manuscripts are in a bank vault in Cornish, Vermont to be published after Salinger's death. Since Catcher is one of the funniest novels I've ever read I'm intrigued and excited by this possibility though of course I do wish Mr Salinger, who is 90 years old, a good few years yet. Tomorrow, incidentally, is D Day and Salinger is a D Day veteran. A platoon sergeant who fought with his troops throughout the Normandy campaign, he took part in the capture of Paris and had a drink with Ernest Hemingway (who had read some of his short stories) in the freshly liberated bar of the Ritz Hotel; I really hope, in a bank vault somewhere, there's a piece JD's written about that.
Friday, June 5, 2009
The Kvetcher in the Rye
JD Salinger surfaced yesterday to stop the release of a novel in Britain and the US which the publishers call "a sequel to Catcher in the Rye." Salinger's lawyers call the book a "rip off pure and simple" and although the publishers are trying to say that the work is more of an homage than a rip off, it looks to me like the book is in violation of every copyright convention out there as it uses characters and situations from Catcher. The author apparently lives in Sweden but goes under the nom de plume John David California, which makes me think that he is in fact Swedish, I don't see an American picking that pen name and very few novelists choose Scandinavia as a good tax haven. The BBC has a bit more on the story here, but what's interesting to me is the fact that JDS is still alive, kicking and angry up in his somewhat isolated (though I drove past it once) home in Vermont. He hasn't published a novel for 57 years and many people wonder what he's been doing all this time. There are two schools of thought. The first is that rather like Harper Lee, he knew he couldn't top himself after Catcher in the Rye so he hasn't written anything. And it is true that he meditates a lot and watches a fair bit of daytime TV. But I prefer the second theory. In her memoir Dream Catcher, JD's daughter Margaret says that Salinger would write every single morning and occasionally he would show her manuscripts of completed novels. Supposedly these manuscripts are in a bank vault in Cornish, Vermont to be published after Salinger's death. Since Catcher is one of the funniest novels I've ever read I'm intrigued and excited by this possibility though of course I do wish Mr Salinger, who is 90 years old, a good few years yet. Tomorrow, incidentally, is D Day and Salinger is a D Day veteran. A platoon sergeant who fought with his troops throughout the Normandy campaign, he took part in the capture of Paris and had a drink with Ernest Hemingway (who had read some of his short stories) in the freshly liberated bar of the Ritz Hotel; I really hope, in a bank vault somewhere, there's a piece JD's written about that.
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64 comments:
Wow, I didn't know any of this -- about Salinger's completed works in a bank vault or how he was a platoon seargeant and drank with Hemingway. Fascinating stuff. It brings to mind the saying 'Fact is stranger than fiction' but that's a cliche so I won't say it.
Mike
Yeah I should have said that Paris was only the half way point of Salinger's war. After that his unit fought all the way into Germany and he personally was there for the liberation of at least one of the concentration camps.
I like the fact that like Dashiell Hammett he was an enlisted man.
I'm pretty curious about the long silence. Hope there's a bank vault full too, but it's a pretty interesting decision--or block?-- either way.
I'd still like to read the rip-off / homage, though ... or is that sacrilege?
Cheers, Dec
Seana
Yes I hope its true too, but I'm little worried that all those manuscripts are full of pages and pages of "all work and no play makes Jerome a dull boy" or something like that.
I'm also worried that he might do a Vergil or a Gogol or a Kafka on us and order the books burned on his death.
Of course with Virgil and Kafka they saved the books from the fire against direct instructions.
Dec
You're not going to get a chance though are you?
I wonder what the executors will do after his death with all the people who want to make a movie out of Catcher, A Perfect Day for Banana Fish, Franny and Zooey etc. etc.?
Can anyone think of a sequel like this that was actually as good as what it spins off of? In the main, they just make the virtues of the original stand out in high relief.
Adrian and anyone interested in JDS:
Suggest, as I did in the last post, that you read "At Home In The World," by Joyce Maynard -- just one of the very best modern memoirs, and she is tougher on herself than she is on JDS. When it was published, it was seen as mercenary and opportunistic, but if anything, the book has become more and more meaningful as the culture has gone inexorably into the gossip toilet, and as JDS has remained sequestered.
By the way, Joyce makes it pretty plain that JDS has the king-hell writers block of all time. I doubt seriously if he's written a damn thing worth a dime since his last publication, way back when.
Seana:
As to sequels, none stand out in the literary arena. However, I would posit that Evil Dead 2 is a substantially better film than Evil Dead. I am serious.
Seana
Have you ever read those attempts to finish the novels of Jane Austen? I read one of them Sanditon and it was shockingly obvious where Austen ended and the new author began. These things never seem to work that well which is why I'm curious what Eoin Colfer is going to do with the Hitchhiker series.
Patrick
A Few Dollars more is better than A Fistful of Dollars - its got the music box and the bank at El Paso...
Doesnt Maynard say that JDS spent most of his days watching soaps?
The manuscripts - probably - do exist, though whats in them could be any old rubbish. However I'd wager that Salinger's rubbish is better than 99 percent of the fiction out there.
Movie sequels seem a bit different than books, though, because they tend to be so collaborative in the first place. Remakes are another matter. But sometimes remakes are quite good, though I can't think of any at the moment.
No, I haven't read any of those Austen sequels, though I did enjoy Karen Joy Fowler's novel about Jane Austen. Actually, new slants on the same story are often very good--I liked Valerie Martin's Mary Reilly--Jeckyll and Hyde told from the point of view of a parlor maid.
I just read on PW that some of the galleys of that Catcher sequel are available on Amazon. Pricey, of course.
Fascinating bit about old Salinger, Adrian. Glad to hear he's still kicking. Or sitting at the TV at least. Finished the most excellent 50 Grand today and will be posting Amazon review shortly.
Terminator 2 and Aliens come to mind as great sequels, if we can go there, Seana. And I like Army of Darkness better than Evil Dead 1 AND 2, if I can dare to blaspheme, Patrick. And dare I say I liked the remake of Solaris quite a bit, now that you mention remakes.
On a third note, I must shamelessly promote my buddy Greg, who was interviewed for his book THERE IS AN URGENCY on NPR yesterday here at the top of the page. It's a great interview. Figured you'd be cool with that, A.
Thanks so much for posting the NPR link for Greg's interview, Hardbarned! And, with my new DSL connection, I will now actually be able to listen to it!
It's funny to realize that before seeing that Time cover pic,I had no image in my mind of Salinger at all.
Of course, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies should probably figure into this discussion of literary appropriation.
HB
Hey that was great! Good old Greg. He really is the man. And I still have my fingers crossed for Our Lady of Chicago.
Oh yeah I'd love a review on Amazon. The more the merrier. It might convince Holt that there are people out there who like the book and it might be worth promoting. I'd be quite content with 1 percent of John Banville's promotion budget. Suit me just fine.
Anyway thanks in advance mate.
Seana
If you ever find any of the actual text feel free to post it, I'm very curious if the Rye sequel feels like a real novel or more like fan fiction.
(Not that I'm mocking fan fiction, some of it is quite enjoyable, I particularily like the entire sub genre of Seven of Nine/ Janeway lesbian erotica on the Trekkie sites, but maybe thats just me.)
The galleys are out of my price range, but I'll let you know if I see any excerpts.
And as to that Trekkie stuff, well, if there is a whole sub-genre, then you aren't the only one.
I particularily like lesbian erotica
Fixed it for you
Sorry Anon, I meant particularly.
Seana
What are the galleys going for? This project seems like such a juriprudential disaster waiting to happen I wonder that they had any galleys printed at all.
Surely they had heard of Salinger's reputation? Ian Hamilton would have been lesson enough for anyone.
Well, it's not me.
Tax haven? Haha. But at least you get something for your taxes there.
-I particularly like the entire sub genre of Seven of Nine/ Janeway lesbian erotica on the Trekkie sites
Tor.com has a rewatch/review of Arena, the episode that launched a thousand Kirk-Lizard Guy interspecies romances. Or should have, at any rate.
I don't really read fan-fiction all that much, but this guy (or gal, since 90% of slash fanfiction is written by married heterosexual women with at least 3 children and/or cats) is very good. I enjoyed his Nero Wolfe slash much more than the actual novels.
And his originals are good too; I particularly like this one, though of course it's too nice and not enough angsty to be True Art.
Tonight Conclusion of the Campaign. Someone had the very wrong idea, since they call us the "youth list" and our style tends to be very casual, to dress ourselves very formally for the final night. I'll have to borrow my father's suit and make a conscious effort to appear elegant for the first time in ages. Another good news is I'll also have to be one of the list representatives, supervising the regularity of the vote Saturday, Sunday and most importantly Monday when the counting begins.
Oh joy...
Well, my source for the galleys story was this
Publishers Weekly article but when I checked just now, I didn't see any available on Amazon. But the thing is that according to the article, it's been available in England for months now, so it's not like Salinger will be available to suppress it entirely. I just checked on Abebooks and saw a copy for sale from Sweden for about twenty bucks. I actually started to try and get it, but something weird was happening with the check out basket so I gave up for the moment.
Marco, you know we're going to want to see a picture of you in your father's suit. Think of it as a way of dispelling your image as the hyperlink Nazi, and proving you are but mortal like the rest of us. And if it just adds to that image, well, scary is good too.
Good luck!
A,
This is totally unrelated, but with the slew of post-club season 2010 World Cup Qualifiers, I had to ask. Italy is playing N. Ireland tomorrow on Gol TV, and I like to play with Rep. of Ireland on my FIFA '09 game. Are the two divided because they just frigging hate each other, or is it all just politics/Catholic Protestant issues? My roots are in both, so maybe that's why I'm so scatterbrained.
Is it the same with the North and South Korean teams?
About fitty pages left of Fitty. Mercado's going apeshit.
Any good audio interviews with YOU floating around online, Adrian? I'm sure many of us would like to hear one if it exists.
Miss Witch
I was suggesting anything, however I'll bet you know who it is....
Marco
Have you read Blood Meridian? There's a bizarre scene in there near the ehd which is strangely similar to the ending of "Arena" - I've always thought it was a bit odd. Of couse C McC is a "serious" novelist and no one dare suggest that he got a plot idea from a Star Trek episode.
Gook linkage BTW
And GOOD LUCK with the elections. Have you see the Dutch results? Slightly ominous.
Seana
It might be worth a few bob if you could get JDS to sign it!
It still seems like a boneheaded publishing move though, they must have known this was going to happen. But then again, I've worked with a lot of people in publishing and ... actually I'm not going to finish that sentence.
HB
Well I've done 3 BBC interviews over the years but the Beeb has this policy of removing them from their websites after 1 week for some spurious copyright reasons. Still who knows you might be able to find them.
I did two with BBC Northern Ireland and one for BBC Radio 4's book programme with Mariella Fostrop.
Oh and thanks again for the Amazon review, brutha. I appreciate it.
Liam
This has always puzzled me. Many of the Irish teams stayed together, most importantly perhaps the rugby team. But the soccer teams split in 1922 and have been split ever since. Its a shame. Irish football punches way above its weight. Northern Ireland - a nation of 1 and a half million people - has qualified for THREE world cups (more than China) and beat the hosts and made it the quarter finals in 1982. The Republic has qualified for 2 world cups and played well both times. If there was a united team it might do very well indeed.
JD Salinger is a great character in WP Kinsella's, Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa (which became the movie Field of Dreams, but they are very different).
Kinsella has a lot of fun with Salinger as a character and does mention that he writes every day, he's just not interested in publishing.
I wondered about the Irish teams, too - I notice Ireland has a single hockey team, so far not punching above its weight, but you never know...
HB -- No blasphemy! I like Army of Darkness better than 90% of the movies ever made, and it's definitely on my personal all-time top ten. Good call.
Well, you know a lot more about copyright law than I do, if only because I know basically nothing, but bonehead or not, it strikes me odd that with all that legal team around him, there was nary a clue that it had been published in Sweden and England by legitimate presses (I assume) for months. We're not talking internet piracy here, after all, which I could understand operating under the radar.
Getting Salinger's signature, which would probably involve something mildly illegal, like taking him hostage, is probably more up PKL's alley than mine. (Sorry, Patrick, but you are building up a reputation here, what with Jeremy Bentham's head and all.)
I do always wonder what writing gaps are about. It's probably too much part of the feminist syllabus for many people here to have read it, but I got interested in all that after reading Tillie Olsen's Silences many years ago. It's largely about what shuts women's writing down, or did, historically, but I would say you could extend it easily to all kinds of situations that aren't just about the suppression of women's writing or minority writing. It's not hard to make people feel as if they aren't worthy enough to bother. I always remember an account of Edmund Gosse (by Rebecca West, I believe) who wrote an autobiography called Father and Son. Somehow he got the wrong end of the stick and thought that everyone hated his book and so he pretty much clammed up. Yet Oxford has it in their classics of literature series to this day.
Lately, though, I wonder if there aren't other possibilities about why a writer stops writing. For the public, I mean, not necessarily all together. I wonder if the overarching ambition doesn't wane for a lot of people. I mean, you do see through fame, after awhile, don't you? I would imagine it's even worse for some one who has tasted a substantial amount of it, like Salinger, and doesn't entirely like what he--or she--sees.
I remember my art history teacher going on a good bit about the Romans, on the theme of what do you do when you surfeit yourself on what the world can offer? Vomitoriums and suicide become fashionable is what, apparently.
Luckily, most of us are never going to have to ask ourselves that question.
Although my friend's cafe finally opened today and I think a lot of Santa Cruz is going to be asking itself the question, is there really such a thing as 'too many cupcakes'?
Also, due to my extraordinary sleuthing skills, I was able to (almost immediately, frankly) track down this BBC interview--very apt as we are counting down to Bloomsday soon once again.
Just scroll down, to see what I'm talking about fanboys and fangrrls everywhere.
I'm sure the Election for the European Parlament will be a disaster, and in general so will be the administratives.
The left in Italy underwent Euthanasia, and the Catholic Church didn't even scream murder!
Personally I expect very few preferences, because I haven't lived much here in recent years, my family (father and mother excluded) won't probably vote for me (the rightwing bastards) and there are 5-6 candidates in our list that will pick votes in my area of acquaintances, plus lot of my friends live just outside the confines of the municipality.
But that's immaterial. Noone of us aspires to a seat per se -unlike in some other lists were candidates are covertly warring against each other - but we want a good result, if not the win, for our list, and that we should probably have. In any case, we have shaken things up a bit.
Yesterday went well. Our site has a lot of videos of our campaign.
Here's the direct link to the first part of the evening - there's a 10 minutes speech by Stefano who then presents all the candidates, each one of which briefly illustrates a point of the program in the form of a pledge we make to our electors.
I'm the last to speak and I look like a Igor.
Some music:
Albiano pt.1 12:48
Albiano pt.2 19:35
Scalinata P.Pio 51:17
John
Of course! I forgot about that. An excellent book. In the film they turned into James Earl Jones or someone. An odd choice.
Patrick
Did you ever see Millers Crossing? There's a bit where they attack Whisky Nicks with the entire police department. They call in a sharpshooter with two pistols to attack the joint and its Sam Raimi who SPOILER ALERT gets machine gunned.
Seana
Rimbaud is a good example. Hated the fame, the attention, hated writing and so just stopped. Buggered off to Africa and didnt write another thing for the rest of his life. William Congreve is another good example. Got a few bad reviews and just said OK then Piss Off and didnt write another thing for the last 30 years of his life.
I find these examples very very admirable.
Seana
Nice finding. Funny, they told me it would be taken off after a week.
Marco
You were the silent star of that video, sitting there like the man behind the man, kind of like Tom in Millers Crossing funnily enough, though it did look a little like you were waiting to be executed near the end.
Tres chic though making everyone else stand to talk and you just sit there like the king of the bad asses. Nice.
Well,all those within reach of the microphone remained seated, actually.
Oh, and I'm surprised Patrick didn't mention it:
"The author apparently lives in Sweden but goes under the nom de plume John David California, which makes me think that he is in fact Swedish, I don't see an American picking that pen name "
Randy California
Igor? What are you talking about, Marco?
Adrian's right--you look like the guy that after the jovial politician pleases the crowd, everyone actually goes to to get anything done. The one who knows where all the bodies are buried.
Maybe it's harder to get your interviews directly through the BBC website, Adrian, but I just did a little Googling and it was easy enough. Nice little piece--I liked the interspersed perspectives. I'm curious--do you sound like the people you grew up with--not your parents, but say, siblings or classmates--or has all your roaming internationlized your accent a bit?
Greg's interview was pretty fab, too, by the way--not easy subject matter, but he has a nice way about him, that guy.
Adrian: Didn't know or notice that was S. Raimi. Good eye! I'll have to watch this one again soon. Miller's Crossing is a very ambitious and interesting, if not entirely successful film, in my not so significant opinion. The parts are better than the sum, so to speak, but still, this is a Cohen Bros. film, which distinguishes it from the general muck. They don't always hit it out of the park, but who does? I do think Burn After Reading was one of the very best things out last year, and would highly recommend that.
By the way, did you get you card magic book yet?
How's that going? Practice, practice, practice before you ever display for a live human. That's the real key -- naturalness and craft. Every trick a little play.
Marco
And I suppose there's also Gary Indiana...
Seana
Oh yeah my accent's totally messed up, sort of a Belfast/Bronx melange if you can imagine such a thing. Although when I'm back in Ulster for about 3 or 4 days gradually the Bronx bits start to fade.
Interestingly my daughter Sophie who has never lived in New York talks like a Brooklyn cabbie from a 1930's Katherine Hepburn movie. No one knows where that's come from.
Pat
I liked Millers Xing a lot. The only weak part was the penultimate scene where he killed Bernie. There seemed to be no reason for that at all, other than it closed the dramatic arc. i.e. it was a cinematic decision rather than one the story demanded - that's has always annnoyed me a bit.
I really liked the final scene though, very nice homage to another great picture - The Third Man.
Yes, in the movie version of Shoeless Joe JD Salinger somehow becomes James Earl Jones. I don't know if that movie turned anyone onto WP Kinsella, but I hope it did.
Anyway, this dedication from Salinger's Raise High the Roof Beams Carpenters and Seymour, an Introduction might give a clue about why he no longer publishes:
If there is an amateur reader still left in the world - or anybody who just reads and runs - I ask him or ger, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children.
John
Well it turned me onto Kinsella anyway. I read two of his books: Shoeless Joe and the Iowa Baseball Confederacy. Liked both of them a lot.
He keeps under the radar doesnt he? All I know about him is that he and William Gibson live in my favourite city in the world, Vancouver. Oh yeah and I have a vague recollection of some kind of scandal a couple of years ago - someone turned one his books into a film and it won the Oscar and he was watching the show and it was the first he'd ever heard of it! I dont remember what the film was, I know Field of Dreams didnt win the Oscar.
Patrick
Nope card trick book not here. I ordered 10 books and am getting them all shipped together to save on postage so it might be a few weeks yet.
One of WP Kinsella's earlier books Dance me Outside was made into a movie in Canada a few years ago - that might have been the award-winner he didn't know about. We call our movie awards the Genies. I have no idea why.
There are sort of two scandals about Kinsella. The first deals with those early books - they were in first person in the voice of a native guy named Silas Erminiskin - and appropriation of voice. That was a big argument when I was an undergrad and I didn't understand it. I still don't. I thought fiction writers created all kinds of characters in all kinds of voices.
Anyway, I think the Silas Erminiskin books (all books of short stories) are very good. Funny, touching, insightful - everything good books should be.
The other scandal for Kinsella was his rather unfortunate relationship with a much younger writer named Evelyn Lau that ended in a lawsuit.
John
The most damaging part of that story is the revelation that Kinsella is a teatotaler.
Funnily enough JDS also seemed to fall for groupies, at least in the 70's.
I suppose it is hard for anyone not to fall for their own groupies. I mean those of the more winsome sort, of course.
I heard a little Irish and a lot of American in that interview, Adrian, but not too much of the Oxford influence.
As for that Bronx accent, regular readers of this blog knows that Sophie McKinty channels much that we ordinary folk do not yet understand.
John, that's a nice quote. I am not quite sure what an amateur reader is anymore, but, though I am pretty sure I am not one, there are times I wish I could return to that state.
Slate magazine has just put up an article on all this, in case anyone's interested.
-You were the silent star of that video
Ah, but did I look young and elegant enough for a date with Northern Ireland's Sexiest Crime Writer, even if I still don't really believe him about Villa Park ?
-The one who knows where all the bodies are buried.
It's easy. We have a landfill still proudly sporting 70,000 tons of hazardous waste. I'm sure when/if the clearing of the site will finally start a few zombies will creep out.
Les Jeux sont faits.
I was one of the delegates appointed to follow the regularity of the vote on behalf of my list in the various sections. While the counting on Monday went smoothly, on Saturday and Sunday it felt a bit like guarding a henhouse from fox-candidates trying to slip in in order to amiably chat with the voters.
Results were bittersweet.
The list of the former mayor, an all-star team including all the families that count, including those of the two candidates who run for mayor at the last elections, and backed by most of the parties right to left, had a landslide victory with 3,680 votes.
The list theoretically backed by Forza Italia (Berlusconi) came second with 2,023 votes. Theoretically because many who voted Berlusconi at the European Elections did choose center-right candidates in the first list.
The fourth list (Northern League + independents) reached 433 votes, while we arrived third with 1,024 votes.
I suppose it's still a good result, starting from nothing, but we expected a bit more, especially in a couple of key parishes, and to be closer to the second.
Seats will be 13-4-2-1. We missed a third councillor for 90 votes. It stinks because the one who just missed really deserved it, for her years of environmental activism (not least against the above-mentioned landfill). She and the candidate who passed are friends and the ones I feel closer politically, so I'm happy/sad.
Given that there are 14 geographical sections, if you didn't reach that many preferences you can tell who voted for you. For example, my cousins didn't, not that I was expecting them to. While we didn't go directly asking "vote for me", some of us have friends who assured them their vote and then apparently changed idea.
It's quite easy to do the math when in a section you have 0 votes instead of 2.
Finally, I had the weird experience of meeting someone who complimented me for my speech and asked forgivance for having bullied me in the past (some 25 or more years ago). He assured me he was a good boy now. I remember he broke my nose, but I thought generally I handled myself well in our fights, and certainly wasn't the only one he bullied.
Well, that was my final electoral dispatch. Bye.
- I'm sure when/if the clearing of the site will finally start a few zombies will creep out.
And I feel for them. Precious few brains in the area, given voting results in that section.
Thanks, Marco. I was hoping you would post a summary for us somewhere.
Disappointing or not, it sounds like you did pretty well against what sounds like a very well organized machine.
So what was your reaction to that guy wanting to apologize? I'm curious, because this came up recently in a slightly different way. My elderly mother was having me track down this kid who she shoved in kindergarten or something. He fell and broke his arm, which was not her intention. She said she was mean to him because she had a crush on him. I think I did track him down, but she got a message machine so didn't pursue it.
I guess my intuition is that the apology does more for the offender than the offended, who in both these cases are or would be more surprised than exalted by the experience.
Oh, I assured him everything was A-OK. After breaking his arm.
While we didn't exactly run in the same circles, it's not like I haven't seen him since then (though admittedly not in recent years), which contributed to the weirdness. It was really all long forgotten for me. I was a bit embarassed and said to him no lasting damage was done.
Yeah, that's more or less what I thought it would be like--apart from the broken arm of course, which I'm sure came as something of a surprise to him. I'd guess he didn't know how much Irish crime fiction you'd been reading since your last meet up. I hope you asked his forgiveness immediately, as it's obvious now that it doesn't do to drag these things out.
Marco
It actually sounds to me like you did pretty well. Yes it was a shame that you missed out on the third seat by a couple of votes but I think you can be proud of yourselves.
The bully apologizing I think is at least better than him not apologizing. Better for him and probably better for you, if you'd remembered it.
Seana
I think it is better to at least to attempt to heal (a lot of 'to's in that phrase) these psychic wounds. I mean why the hell not. You do something, it doesnt feel good, the feeling festers away, why not go for something closure. You dont have a lot to lose, though there is the outside chance of utter humiliation.
I think apologies are sometimes brilliant and healing, sometimes simply embarrassing for all concerned, and sometimes just a reopening of old wounds that doesn't do anyone any good at all. I am not really taking an anti-apology or anti-forgiveness stance here, and certainly it is brave to go up to someone you've harmed and ask forgiveness, but what does it really undo? Sure, if people are needing an acknowledgement that a wrong was done them, as sometimes happens collectively, it can ease that.
Funny, just remembered I was down with my mom this weekend, and while we were waiting around for my sisters to turn up she started talking about all the ways she'd been a bad mother or a bad daughter, etc. She said, you don't know how much time I spend thinking how I could have done this or that better. Which is all quite ridiculous, because she was and is great mother and was a very steadfast daughter as well. So she suddenly said, "Seana, please forgive me for all the things I did wrong in bringing you up." She was half kidding and half serious too. So I said in the same tone, "Mom, I forgive you."
And though I would like to think that absolves her in her own mind from all these perceived failures, I'm very much afraid that it does not. Nor, frankly, would it for me if the situation was reversed.
I think what eases her mind more is that we all survived and turned out pretty much all right, so it didn't count in the grand scheme of things quite as much as she thought.
Purely by chance, I just came across this one post blog, which strikes me as appropriate, though it may not seem so to anyone else.
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