“Reviewing something like this just leads to arguments, but here goes: Snickers, of which we ate 407 million last year, may be iconic, but it’s not very good. Snickers Dark is far better than the “original,” which indicates that any candy bar could be better if better ingredients were used. I’m not encouraging anyone to start producing candy bars, but if there were a premium dark Snickers, that might be something worth craving. (Having said that, if there were a premium Baby Ruth or a premium PayDay, then we’d really be in business.) As for the regular Snickers, it’s a halfway-decent-tasting high-level dose of sugar, which, with a coffee, will get you through almost anything.”

– http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/09/08/magazine/the-culture-package.html?hp#/#item_03

“

George Best once said that the greatest disaster of his life was that everybody he met wanted to buy him a drink. You might say, in defence of a well-meaning public, that the disaster was compounded by Best’s inability to refuse. But drinking is in many ways a selfish art, and I say that as someone who likes drinking and who used to love it. There’s a world of difference between the drinker who always wants a companion and the drinker who yearns to drink alone. I’ve always been in the first category and that to me felt like an achievement: my family was riddled with people who died of drink or whose lives were totally unmanageable because of their addiction. They used to say it was an Irish thing or a Glasgow thing, but in fact it was a sad life thing, as if being numb was simply the best option.

Things that rely on disinhibition (dancing, charades, karaoke and fucking) can be improved with drink. But anything that relies on precision (fighting, writing) must be done cold, as Hemingway put it. There are writers who feel quite strongly that disinhibition is the essence of writing, that writing is a form of running naked through the streets. (Put it away, Allen Ginsberg.) My view would be that writing fiction is a form of inhibition made dense and technical. Other people might be freed by it, for a while, but the author is unlikely to be, and God help him if he isn’t sober for the time it takes to get the thing down.

”

– http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n17/andrew-ohagan/short-cuts

“What is true is that Salinger, through no fault or even an act of his own, save publishing a book whose reception no one could have anticipated, became the victim/beneficiary of the kind of hyper-fame that usually gets reserved for singers and actors. Seen that way, there is little that’s peculiar or pathological about Salinger’s retreat, though much in it that’s sad. A book about a week in the life of a sensitive, observant kid—affectionately viewed by the author, as one might a teen-age son or a younger brother, but hardly idolized—became a bible to a whole generation. (The ironies could not have eluded the author, since the one thing that a loner like Holden doesn’t want to be is the voice of a generation—his contemporaries being the very thing he has most contempt for.)”

– http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/09/who-was-jd-salinger.html