SALINGER & HAWTHORNE: STYLISTIC TWINS?

you know who

If what I say today sounds a little blurry, it's because my eyes are dilated. At exercise today, a beautiful new inky floater bloomed in my right eyeball accompanied by a ton of tiny circular floaters. After my cataracts were removed, I was told to watch out for this phenomenon as it might be a sign of retinal detachment. Thus I hurried to a nearby optometrist and had the eyeball looked into. No detachment, but now I have a bleeder on my optic nerve, the sign of a "violent" but fairly common detachment of vitreous matter [floater] from the back of the eye that will now drift in my eye in perpetuity. 

Salinger at war. PTSD in later life?

As to literature, the supposed purpose of this writer's blog. I'm giving up at the halfway point on reading House of the Seven Gables by Mr. Hawthorne. When I was working on my Masters, I was drawn to his writing, but no longer, it appears. His rhetorical flourishes are too much for me. However I was surprised when, as an antidote, I picked up Ten Stories by J.D. Salinger and realized that Salinger's method of writing can be traced back to Hawthorne — the p.o.v. of their narrators', the rhetorical flourishes and asides they employ, the way both take the reader into their cubbyholes, so to speak, to talk to them about their subjects and subject matter. If ever there were a scholarly article, there is one to pursue, i.e. similarities in technique and p.o.v. between Salinger and Hawthorne. I did a quick Google and found none. For reading, I've got Durrell's Judith and, somewhere in the limbo of inter-library loan, Ron Padgett's poetry is plodding its way toward my home. 

Durrell

It's obvious to me now that I can no longer write lyric poetry. My lines no longer sing, but Padgett's poetry may be my out. I've now written 6 or 7 poems in the style I imagined I saw in the Jarmusch movie, Patterson. So I continue to rewrite some of my 8 line poetry in the mode of Han-shan's poetry with an eye to creating a chapbook length work for submission to contests, etcetera, while also trying to create a few original poems. Still in the tube, the rewrite of my science fiction novel Ghoul World to remove some of the cleverness I thought was just too precious for words. And another movie???