As Holden once told me, which authors would you call up?

I just finished The Catcher in the Rye which I adored, I'm gonna be thinking about it for ages, and when I finished it I wanted to call up old J.D. Salinger to have a chat and all, about the book and all. I remembered how Holden Caulfield once said that in the earlier chapters in Pencey College about authors he had read. It's quite an interesting thing to say, don't you think?

So, which author/s did you want to call up after finishing their book? Just for to chew the goddam fat and all for a while.

Would love to have a few words with Mario Vargas Llosa... :oops: :D Loved Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and well, all of his books.

Bohumil Hrabal, would love to hear how crusty and curmudgeonly he really is.

And would love to have some absinthe with Aldous Huxley and talk metaphysics and make fun of people with him :P

Camus, Sartre, Jean Rhys (Wide Sargasso Sea, a lovely movie too) and would love to drive to South America with Henri Charriere (Papillon and Banco)

Oh yeah, loved Catcher in the Rye, would love to talk to J.D. and Holden. ;)

I'd have sold my soul to shoot the **** with Jack Kerouac after reading On the Road.

Yes, J.D. Salinger would have been a good author to talk to after The Catcher in the Rye, and me and Holden would've gotten on well I think.
Like den, I always want to talk to Albert Camus after his books, and to talk about his journeys both geographically, and philosophically.

On the subject, as Holden once touched on, of authors I wouldn't really want to chat with after their books, I didn't really feel like talking to James Joyce. I loved A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, it was beautiful and brilliant to me...but yes, he does seem arrogant.
Same goes for T.S. Eliot. There seems to be a lot of writers who were arrogant bastards. My English teacher and I were talking about it, and he wondered that if they're thinking on a level different to everyone else, then maybe they can be excused for not being...very nice. I still think that humility is an important trait for any person, great, brilliant or otherwise.

Oh crumbs, praticaly any of them.
Has anyone actually tried getting in touch with an author?
Downer

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Originally Posted by Downer

Oh crumbs, praticaly any of them.
Has anyone actually tried getting in touch with an author?
Downer

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I once crank called William V. Spanos, the author of such verbose, pompous, circumlocutious, bombastic, pretentious, derrogatory, condescending critical theory works such as America's Shadow and Heidegger and Criticism.

i'd LUV to call a. dumas, if he weren't dead and i could remember more than two words of french. maybe jand austen would be really interesting to talk to. once again, if she were alive now.

Actually, I would love to simply talk to Lucy Maud Mongomery. She's not my favorite author, but I did love the Anne series growing up, and she reminds me more of one of the fun little old ladies I go to church with that I like to talk to anyway.

I think talking to Hugo or Dumas would put me in an embarrassed silence after I've commended them on how much I loved their works. :oops:

I related with Catcher immensely. I do feel exactly like Holden often. The world full of phonies! If only the world were innocent and true.

I would like to talk to Dostoevsky, Fyodor. His writings are kinda dark, but I like his understanding of the human condition, specially suffering. He was a brilliant suffering man. His best work--The Brothers Karamazov!

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Actually, I would love to simply talk to Lucy Maud Mongomery.

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Ditto.








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Hmm, Jeff Shaara. I love US history and his war novels are extraordinarily well-researched and thoughtful. I bet he'd be fun to talk history with. And Ray Bradbury, too--but I wouldn't talk, I just want to listen to him. :)

Also, I was fascinated by The Prince. I'd like to talk to Machiavelli, dig into his mind a little, see how the gears work.

OK heres my list and why
Twain=for laughter
Steinbeck=because he's my idol
Vonnegut=For war stories
Hemingway=To go fishing and have a good time
Rowling=So I could ask for money

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Originally Posted by Downer

Has anyone actually tried getting in touch with an author?
Downer

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I haven't, but I've heard a couple good stories.

I read an article written by a guy who was "chanelling" Joseph Conrad. The whole thing was pretty absurd. Apparently JC was coaching this dude on writing a novel, but about two-thirds of the way through, Conrad told him to quit. Sounded to me like Conrad made the right call cuz this guy could not write for the life of him.

One of my professors at UW-Madison tried very hard to get in touch with Thomas Pynchon, who's notoriously reclusive. He checked like every phone book, and none of them listed Thomas Pynchon. So then he checked the phone books for names of Pynchon's characters, and he found one (I wish I remembered who...my guess is Roger Mexico), got in touch with him, and made a lunch date. At this lunch, the guy kept insisting that he wasn't Thomas Pynchon, though my professor never suggested that he was. Very interesting, especially considering the vast paranoid conspiracies of Pynchon's books.

I went to a Terry Pratchett book signing once to get my brother a signed book as a birthday present (I queued for 2 hours!) Obviously, we didn't have a lot of time to chat. But my brother was really impressed.

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Originally Posted by Unspar

One of my professors at UW-Madison tried very hard to get in touch with Thomas Pynchon, who's notoriously reclusive. He checked like every phone book, and none of them listed Thomas Pynchon. So then he checked the phone books for names of Pynchon's characters, and he found one (I wish I remembered who...my guess is Roger Mexico), got in touch with him, and made a lunch date. At this lunch, the guy kept insisting that he wasn't Thomas Pynchon, though my professor never suggested that he was. Very interesting, especially considering the vast paranoid conspiracies of Pynchon's books.

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:lol: That was hilarious. Someone actually managed to snap a photo of Pynchon a few years ago, when he was picking up his son at school. Pynchon, apparently, chased the photographer for a while before giving up. It's not a very good photo, anyway. (He appeared on The Simpsons a while back. With a paper bag on his head and a sign saying "Have your picture taken with famous author". Nice to see the old guy has a sense of humour about his reclusiveness - though I wonder how many viewers got the joke...)

If it's just a phone conversation, I'd love to chat with... um... frankly, I'd probably say Stephen King or Terry Pratchett or someone like that. Meat-and-potatoes writers whom I like. If someone were to give me 30 minutes with Eco or Dostoevsky, I'd have to spend six months preparing first.

I have talked to Zadie Smith, though. For about 20 seconds. It didn't really change my life.

I would love to have a little chat with:

George Eliot
Tolikien
Jane Austen
Bronte Sisters
Caroline Cooney

Wilde and Shaw... not for an interview but for life-long friendship but I very much doubt if they would have suffered the likes of me.

An interesting question. I also am a fan of Salinger, but from what I've read of the guy, he's a total recluse and a bit of a grouch. So unless he's been wrongly portrayed by the many people who have written about him (which I guess could be) or one somehow manages to impress him before having met him, I doubt a conversation with him would go very far, or would be as enthralling as one might hope it to be.

if i knew how to speak spanish, i'd love to sit down with gabriel garcia marquez and chat. also haruki murakami. and if they were still alive - ernest hemingway, herman hess, and aldous huxley. i read that henry james was a sweet old lady. i still can't believe a man could write about women the way he did. oh there are so many others...some of whom i might end up sharing angry words with.

Kerouac before the later years, Malcolm Lowry and Koestler would all be good to talk to I think.

For entertainment purposes Jaroslav Hasek and Bukowski. I'd be a bit scared if they were both together though...

would love to get a hold of Salinger, as well as Mark Twain. Not only do I think Mark Twain is an amazing writer, I think he lived a pretty interesting life as well.

I'd phone Dickens and tell him to CHEER UP. I honestly don't think it would've ruined him.

George Bernard Shaw is added to my list now. There are some questions I am dying to ask from him!

I would love if I could chat with the likes of Richard Bach, Herman Hesse, Ray Bradbury or Charles Dickens. And if I could add a poet, it would definitely be with Pablo Neruda. We would be able to talk about anything!

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Originally Posted by McGrain

I'd phone Dickens and tell him to CHEER UP. I honestly don't think it would've ruined him.

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:lol:

Hmmm theres a few of them. I'd love to hang with Kerouac when he was young and dig things together and talk about the joys of living. I have a feeling that talking to Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter S Thompson would be absolutely hilarious.

The Bard
Joseph Conrad
Jack London
John Steinbeck
Marquis De Sade
Roald Dahl
gee, I know I am missing many more...


And my three homies of course, Algernon, Howard, and Arthur!

I idolise Vladimir Nabokov, so perhaps I'd like to have a chat with him. Wilde or George Orwell would be interesting too.
But I'd feel so insecure, and seriously intellectually inferior, especially in the case of Nabokov.

DOROTHY L. SAYERS!
I've practically memorized her mysteries and read her biographies and some of her correspondence. I've talked to her in daydreams. I'd sit at the feet of the lady and drink in her stories of Lord Peter and her reminescences (sp??) of things done and books read. Ahhhh, sigh. How mighty are the fallen!

And Tolkien. What a lovely imagination.

Oscar Wilde would provide stimulating conversation, I'd love to do tea with him.

Frank L. Baum would have been cool to talk with because his endless imagination was fodder to how many books?!?

John Steinbeck would be fun to talk to, too.

There really are too many!

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Originally Posted by ;6186

i'd LUV to call a. dumas

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:lol:
I know who and how that name is really pronounced...but I couldn't help myself.
Umm...I'd probably want to call up Stephen King but we'd end up talking mostly bout the Red Sox I'm sure. He always seems to be down to earth chill.
I couldn't stand talking to some authors because I'd be afraid of a huge culture rift, expecially if they were alive 200 years ago.
Maybe the author of Beowulf. Just to solve that mystery. Maybe.

Adelbert von Chamisso. That was the kind of thought I had upon finishing Peter Schlemihl.

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Originally Posted by Shea

Actually, I would love to simply talk to Lucy Maud Mongomery.

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Me too. She had an amazing way of describing people in her books, I bet it would be hilarious to chat with her :D

At the top of my list are most definitely Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain. I think I could not only have the most interesting conversations with them (probably on every topic known to man), but I think they would also be the most entertaining.

I also wouldn't mind sitting down and discussing life with Nathaniel Hawthorne and Shakespeare.

Just for some nice chit-chat I would like to meet up with Jane Austen and Laura Ingalls Wilder.