Weightless

Outside, just killing time and making noise
Outside, the daylight comes, the daylight goes
Weightless affairs that weigh less than air weighs
Make no stairways, just stairs, goes nowhere
Don�t dream that it�s a dream it is what it seems
That it�s a dream it is what it seems

Climbing from over-stimulated states
To hearing cold radio and license plates
But don�t dream that it�s a dream it is what it seems
That it�s a dream it is what is seems

Behind every desire is another one
Waiting to be liberated when the first one�s sated

Water-skiing, the water�s soft, the water�s hard
You act nice, a black birthday card, I threw it away
Grown-up life is like eating speed or flying a plane
It�s too bright, it�s too bright

White and black hats
Hide behind each other�s backs
All the time

Behind every desire is another one
Waiting to be liberated when the first one�s sated

The 20th Century's 100 Best Books in English

This list of 100 novels was drawn up by the editorial board of Modern Library. Where possible, book titles have been linked to either the original New York Times review or a later article about the book.

1. "Ulysses," James Joyce

2. "The Great Gatsby," F. Scott Fitzgerald

3. "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," James Joyce

4. "Lolita," Vladimir Nabokov

5. "Brave New World," Aldous Huxley

6. "The Sound and the Fury," William Faulkner

7. "Catch-22," Joseph Heller

8. "Darkness at Noon," Arthur Koestler

9. "Sons and Lovers," D. H. Lawrence

10. "The Grapes of Wrath," John Steinbeck

11. "Under the Volcano," Malcolm Lowry

12. "The Way of All Flesh," Samuel Butler

13. "1984," George Orwell

14. "I, Claudius," Robert Graves

15. "To the Lighthouse," Virginia Woolf

16. "An American Tragedy," Theodore Dreiser

17. "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter," Carson McCullers

18. "Slaughterhouse Five," Kurt Vonnegut

19. "Invisible Man," Ralph Ellison

20. "Native Son," Richard Wright

21. "Henderson the Rain King," Saul Bellow

22. "Appointment in Samarra," John O' Hara

23. "U.S.A." (trilogy), John Dos Passos

24. "Winesburg, Ohio," Sherwood Anderson

25. "A Passage to India," E. M. Forster

26. "The Wings of the Dove," Henry James

27. "The Ambassadors," Henry James

28. "Tender Is the Night," F. Scott Fitzgerald

29. "The Studs Lonigan Trilogy," James T. Farrell

30. "The Good Soldier," Ford Madox Ford

31. "Animal Farm," George Orwell

32. "The Golden Bowl," Henry James

33. "Sister Carrie," Theodore Dreiser

34. "A Handful of Dust," Evelyn Waugh

35. "As I Lay Dying," William Faulkner

36. "All the King's Men," Robert Penn Warren

37. "The Bridge of San Luis Rey," Thornton Wilder

38. "Howards End," E. M. Forster

39. "Go Tell It on the Mountain," James Baldwin

40. "The Heart of the Matter," Graham Greene

41. "Lord of the Flies," William Golding

42. "Deliverance," James Dickey

43. "A Dance to the Music of Time" (series), Anthony Powell

44. "Point Counter Point," Aldous Huxley

45. "The Sun Also Rises," Ernest Hemingway

46. "The Secret Agent," Joseph Conrad

47. "Nostromo," Joseph Conrad

48. "The Rainbow," D. H. Lawrence

49. "Women in Love," D. H. Lawrence

50. "Tropic of Cancer," Henry Miller

51. "The Naked and the Dead," Norman Mailer

52. "Portnoy's Complaint," Philip Roth

53. "Pale Fire," Vladimir Nabokov

54. "Light in August," William Faulkner

55. "On the Road," Jack Kerouac

56. "The Maltese Falcon," Dashiell Hammett

57. "Parade's End," Ford Madox Ford

58. "The Age of Innocence," Edith Wharton

59. "Zuleika Dobson," Max Beerbohm

60. "The Moviegoer," Walker Percy

61. "Death Comes to the Archbishop," Willa Cather

62. "From Here to Eternity," James Jones

63. "The Wapshot Chronicles," John Cheever

64. "The Catcher in the Rye," J. D. Salinger

65. "A Clockwork Orange," Anthony Burgess

66. "Of Human Bondage," W. Somerset Maugham

67. "Heart of Darkness," Joseph Conrad

68. "Main Street," Sinclair Lewis

69. "The House of Mirth," Edith Wharton

70. "The Alexandria Quartet," Lawrence Durrell

71. "A High Wind in Jamaica," Richard Hughes

72. "A House for Ms. Biswas," V. S. Naipaul

73. "The Day of the Locust," Nathaniel West

74. "A Farewell to Arms," Ernest Hemingway

75. "Scoop," Evelyn Waugh

76. "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie," Muriel Spark

77. "Finnegans Wake," James Joyce

78. "Kim," Rudyard Kipling

79. "A Room With a View," E. M. Forster

80. "Brideshead Revisited," Evelyn Waugh

81. "The Adventures of Augie March," Saul Bellow

82. "Angle of Repose," Wallace Stegner

83. "A Bend in the River," V. S. Naipaul

84. "The Death of the Heart," Elizabeth Bowen

85. "Lord Jim," Joseph Conrad

86. "Ragtime," E. L. Doctorow

87. "The Old Wives' Tale," Arnold Bennett

88. "The Call of the Wild," Jack London

89. "Loving," Henry Green

90. "Midnight's Children," Salman Rushdie

91. "Tobacco Road," Erskine Caldwell

92. "Ironweed," William Kennedy

93. "The Magus," John Fowles

94. "Wide Sargasso Sea," Jean Rhys

95. "Under the Net," Iris Murdoch

96. "Sophie's Choice," William Styron

97. "The Sheltering Sky," Paul Bowles

98. "The Postman Always Rings Twice," James M. Cain

99. "The Ginger Man," J. P. Donleavy

100. "The Magnificent Ambersons," Booth Tarkington

J. D. Salinger: Tribute to Author of my favourite Book!

Catcher in The Rye:
This i believe to be the best book ever written, only second perhaps to 'The Great Gatsby'

Below is a times piece on J.D.Salinger, a writer perhaps only known for 'Catcher in the Rye' which is also a poem by a different author
After receiving critical acclaim for his short story A Perfect Day for Bananafish, which was published in The New Yorker in 1948, J. D. Salinger shot to worldwide fame with his novel The Catcher in the Rye, which appeared in 1951. With its disenchanted adolescent anti-hero, perpetually at war with adulthood, especially as embodied in his own parents, it seemed to encapsulate the mood of an entire generation. Perhaps more remarkably it simultaneously exercised a considerable effect on that generation’s behaviour.

Its protagonist Holden Caulfield instantly became the symbol of teenage alienation in America and his influence spread rapidly across the Atlantic. Not merely, as is so often the case, for his own generation, but for those that followed, the character of Caulfield continued to stand for the seeming impossibility for the younger generation of communicating in any meaningful way not only with their parents but also with the friends and associates of those parents. When the Sixties opened, with teenage rebellion in Western society taking on a different hue and, under the influence of rock’n’roll, sexual emancipation and drugs, having apparently a different set of preoccupations, the gospel of Catcher in the Rye remained as potent as ever. The novel continued to sell about a quarter of a million copies a year.

Such a critical and popular success, positioning its author as it did, as the apostle of adolescence, was hard to follow. Like many authors before and after him, Salinger could hardly be expected to match it. Indeed, the rest of his creative life was not prolific and he retired to New Hampshire where, as a semi-recluse, he attempted to fend off biographers and fans. In this he was largely successful until in succession in 1999 and 2000, a former lover and the daughter of his second marriage published their memoirs which, as such things will tend to do, caused a great sensation on the score of what they revealed about Salinger’s apparent shortcomings, in the first instance as a partner in a relationship, in the second as a father.

Jerome David Salinger was born in New York in 1919, the son of a kosher cheese salesman of Polish ancestry, and his wife, who was a convert to Judaism. After attending a number of state schools, he was educated for his ninth and tenth grades at McBurney School in Manhattan, where he threw himself into acting.
But with his father determined that he should not be an actor, and his mother, as he saw it, overprotective, in 1934 he entered Valley Forge Military Academy, Pennsylvania. He spent two years there, graduating in 1936. While there he edited the academy’s yearbook Crossed Sabres. More important, in this robust and not wholey congenial ambience he began writing short stories.

He spent what he called a “happy tourist’s year” in Europe, where he had gone ostensibly to learn about the meat importing business at his father’s behest, in 1937-38. Altogether he attended three universities: New York, Ursinus College (Collegeville, Pennsylvania), and Columbia. The result of this was, he later tersely wrote, “no degrees”.

In the spring of 1942, a few months after America had been drawn into the war by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Salinger was drafted into the US Army, where he was to serve until demobilisation in 1946. After training he was posted to the 12th Infantry Regiment in the Fourth Infantry Division of the US Army — most of the time as a staff sergeant — through five campaigns. As the build-up of American forces in Britain developed apace with the preparations for the Allied invasion of occupied Europe, he was stationed in England, at Tiverton, Devon, and he was among those who landed at Utah Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

He saw service throughout the Allied advance through North West Europe, notably during the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944-45. He was assigned to a counter-intelligence unit in which he interrogated German prisoners. His wartime experiences, which included witnessing the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp, affected him deeply. He later told his daughter: “You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nostrils — no matter how long you live.”

One of the personal benefits of the war was that Salinger met Ernest Hemingway, a writer he much admired, who was working as a war correspondent in Paris. He found Hemingway to be utterly unlike the rough, tough, brusque, outdoors, literary lion he was expecting and shyly mentioned to him a story Slight Rebellion in Manhattan, which he had written in 1941 and offered to The New Yorker. The magazine had accepted it, but on the outbreak of war had changed its mind. The story, with its disaffected adolescent Manhattan hero, was very much a sketch for The Catcher in the Rye, and scarcely exemplified the qualities of manly fortitude that an America under attack by a deadly foe was expecting from its young generation. The New Yorker eventually published it in 1946.

Salinger had, in fact, published his first story, The Young Folks, in the magazine Story in 1940; he felt this at the time to be a “late start”, but he continued to publish short stories at regular intervals throughout the war.

These created a good deal of interest among the discriminating, but it was not until The Catcher in the Rye, his first and only novel, that he achieved acclaim. It became not only a bestseller, but soon achieved the academic accolade of being set as a text for examinations in English speaking countries all over the world.

It is the story of the teenage Holden Caulfield — told by himself in the form of a meditation while he is confined in a West Coast clinic some months later — adrift in New York for several days, after he has been expelled from his school. The Catcher in the Rye, undoubtedly Salinger’s most important book, gave a first-person account of a late adolescent for whom everything is in suspense; he seeks to make contact, but meets only “phonies” (the book gave this word an added dimension which it has not lost). The one teacher he likes turns out to be homosexual, and he cannot relate to him. The only person he can relate to, in his semi-articulate despair, is a ten-year-old girl, his sister. Salinger here gave an absolutely authentic pre-hippy, pre-dropout account of postwar youth’s drastic rejection of its parents and their values.

Later and more aggressive sociological manifestations of this rejection, though different from Holden Caulfield’s, remain rooted in it. Apart from conveying an almost dazzingly pure impression of an essentially innocent young man lost in a hostile world, unable to find love when he needs it, The Catcher in the Rye is a historically important documentary account of disaffected youth, more effective perhaps than many a non-fictional analysis of the condition.

With the appearance of this book Salinger became acknowledged as a classic writer, and, despite the long silence of his later years, no one has seen fit to challenge his status — even if a few have expressed reservations about the measure of its literary achievement. In its own inimitable way, The Catcher in the Rye is as firmly entrenched in the American literary canon as Huckleberry Finn.

I would like to stop thinking

Ever wondered what and how it would feel like to just stop thinking?
Because i cant stop thinking,when i am talking to people my mind cant help wandering off to far away lands, my heart skips a beat and i have to stop,put my hand to my chest just to make sure its still there, i stop to feel my heart beat and are grateful when i hear the tiny murmur
I stop, heave and sigh of relief, smile and raise my face to look at him again;

At this stage, i release a small laugh,as i just remembered a joke he made minutes ago

"Those lips that love's own hand did make"

Those lips that love's own hand did make
Breathed forth the sound that said "I hate,"
To me that languished for her sake.
But when she saw my woeful state,
Straight in her heart did mercy come,
Chiding that tongue that ever sweet
Was used in giving gentle doom,
And taught it thus anew to greet.
"I hate" she altered with an end
That followed it as gentle day
Doth follow night, who, like a fiend,
From heaven to hell is flown away.
"I hate" from hate away she threw.
And saved my life, saying "not you."

Am not in love with you..BUT

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest;
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Hogmanay! I was there and it was the highlight of this year

Happy New Year from Edinburgh’s Hogmanay.