J.D. Salinger, Famous Shut-ins and Hikikomori in Japan

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The death of writer J.D. Salinger last week renewed the public’s interest in his reclusive life-style. According to most accounts, Salinger lived a fairly conventional life until after the publication of his most well-known work The Catcher in the Rye – some claim that he actively sought fame and success until he found it and, with no explanation, retreated. He’s in the good company of other famous recluses including: Harper Lee, Lauryn Hill and Bobby Fischer.

Perhaps because the very nature of anti-social behaviour is a closing off from society, it remains something that very few people understand, including those in the medical community. In recent years, pathologically reclusive behaviour has become such a phenomenon in Japan that it has been given its own name: hikikomori. Although his figures are disputed, psychologist Tamaki Saito has estimated that “there may be one million hikikomori in Japan, representing 20% of all male adolescents in Japan, or 1% of the total Japanese population.” According to a fascinating profile of hikikomori in the New York Times, “though female hikikomori exist and may be under counted, experts estimate that about 80 percent of the hikikomori are male, some as young as 13 or 14 and some who live in their rooms for 15 years or more.”

Unlike most of the young hikikomori of Japan, Salinger did seem to reach out to people – he was married a number of times and had two children. Time and again, these relationships tended to be fraught and often ended abruptly. Salinger’s daughter Margaret published a memoir about him and wrote, “His search . . . led him increasingly to relations in two dimensions: with his fictional Glass family, or with living ‘pen pals’ he met in letters, which lasted until meeting in person when the three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood presence of them would, with the inevitability of watching a classic tragedy unfold, invariably sow the seeds of the relationship’s undoing.”

J.D. Salinger’s version of events? “You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you’re not looking, somebody’ll sneak up and write “Fuck you” right under your nose.” (source)

Image from Strawberrymilkchocolate.

Robert McGinnis: The Art of the Femme Fatale

Robert McGinnis - The Lion House

Robert McGinnis is a prolific American artist, responsible for illustrations adorning the covers of over 1,000 paperbacks. Much of his work concentrates on the crime/mystery genre, which features alluring, semi-naked women, as clearly demonstrated in the Robert McGinnis Flickr pool.

His talents are also employed for movie posters. Among the most memorable of his film output to date are the posters for Breakfast At Tiffany’s, The Man With The Golden Gun (along with many other James Bond posters), and the collectable cult-classic poster for Barbarella.

A recent documentary, Painting the Last Rose of Summer (2008), beautifully captures his story and creative process.

The Lion House photo by Flickr user Olivander

Murder Inc. – The Psychology of the Battlefield

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The February 2010 issue of Vanity Fair has a great profile on a US military sniper called The Distant Executioner. Although the piece focuses on one man in particular, it delves into the politics and psychology of killing the enemy by sniper fire as opposed to killing at close range during combat.

In 1947 an army general and historian named S.L.A Marshall conducted a study and extensive survey that uncovered that “up to 85 percent of frontline American riflemen had not fired their weapons in combat – even when under attack and at risk of being overrun.”

He attributed low firing rates to an instinctive aversion to killing at close range, when the potential victim is clearly identifiable as another human being. At the vital moment, Marshall wrote, the rifleman becomes a conscientious objector… Numerous independent studies have since found similarly low firing rates among Japanese and German riflemen, as well as among the frontline soldiers of World War I, the American Civil War, and several other conflicts. For whatever reason, the Pentagon took Marshall on faith and initiated a decades-long human improvement campaign. By the Korean War in the 1950s, surveys showed that fully half the frontline riflemen who saw the enemy fired their weapons in response. In Vietnam, the number rose to 90 percent … Of course, to fire at someone is by no means to hit him. The 90 percent figure was undermined by a significant number of intentional misses, and it was inflated by a battle doctrine called ‘Quick Kill’, which taught American soldiers to spray masses of automatic fire rather than take careful aim. As a result of that doctrine, in Vietnam U.S. infantrymen fired 50,000 rounds of ammunition for each kill they made – a ratio that would have encouraged even conscientious objectors to go ahead and shoot.

This all leads up to the discussion on snipers, also referred to as ‘Murder Inc.’. In comparison, snipers with their advantage of being able to kill from a distance expended only 1.39 rounds for every Vietnamese killed.

“Big Gun” Susan image by ttstam.