"A Perfect Day for a Bananafish"

I was going through my emails today and ran across an article that someone forwarded to me. I found it very illuminating. The article was about a recent court ruling banning the publication of a sequel to "Catcher in the Rye".

My initial thoughts while I read the article was..."Is Salinger still alive?" ; "Wow, it's about time. Is Holden still 16?" and "Why would a judge ban the publication of a sequel to Catcher sixty years later?"

I Googled for answers and come to find out... J.D. Salinger is still alive at 91 and living near Cornish, New Hampshire. The book in question's author claims he did not pen a sequel, but according to the court there are enough backhand references to Catcher the judge had no choice but to ban publication. But why? Plagiarists do that kind of crap all the time and make a good living at it. Jeez, hasn't everybody seen books titled Robert Ludlum's Bourne Whatever by Get Rich Quick or similar nonsense like J.R.R. Tolkien's Whatever of the Rings by I. Play Dungeons? I didn't understand.

It seems, since Salinger isn't dead and this plagiarist didn't receive permission to plagiarize then, I guess, it's illegal to profit. But, the friggin' guy is 91 and he hasn't published since Kennedy was shot, for heaven's sake. If you're gonna let Ludlum, Tolkien and a myriad of other fine novelists be bastardized, then...hum...I guess I see the legal point-of-view. But I'm a writer and this business of stealing another's original thought and authoring crappy sequels even if it's legal is horrific and should be grounds for immediate banishment to leper island.

Oops. This was not my intended subject matter for the blog. I wanted to talk about "A Perfect Day for a Bananafish", J.D. Salinger's first published story in 1948 by The New Yorker. I guess soapboxes were built to stand on. Anyway, read the short story, it's delightful.