America’s most famous recluse since Howard Hughes wanted to be known only for his writing. And not even for all his writing, but just the one novel and three story collections he allowed to remain in print. At a time when even literary artistes are expected to brand and market themselves as celebrities, Salinger took the royalties and ran. He refused to be the voice of a generation, or of anybody else.

I’d never bothered to read Catcher in the Rye until I was in my mid 20s. Yeah I was a loner and a book-nerd, but that still didn’t make me fully identify with that book’s troubled-rich-kid protagonist.

I did, however, enjoy the part where our antihero has to listen to two fast-talking square women gush about going to Radio City Music Hall, and how Salinger instantly described their unforgivable hickness by making them from Seattle.

The Elements of Style, that ubiquitous writing guidebook, turned 50 last year. I didn’t notice. But linguistics prof Geoffrey Pullum did notice. He took the opportunity to rant against “Fifty Years of Stupid Grammar Advice.”

As you may know, film reviewing legend Roger Ebert can no longer speak, following several surgeries in recent years. Turns out he can no longer eat or drink either. But that doesn’t stop him from remembering the great tastes of his past.

You don’t have to open Barbara Ehrenreich’s latest sociocultural rant book, Bright Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America to know what it’ll say.

From the title alone, it’s obvious Ehrenreich can’t stand the positivity movement/industry, a very American institution that’s boomed and blossomed of late.

She blames positive thinking (and its assorted tendrils in religion, business, and pop psychology) for infantilizing its followers, for leading a passive-aggressive nation into all those now-popped economic bubbles, and even for the Bush gang’s gung-ho drives into war and ultra-graft.

The book is a minor work of hers, which is odd considering it starts out with a very personal crisis in her own life. (She got breast cancer. She wound up hating the teddy bears and boxes of crayons foisted upon her more than she hated the disease itself.)

And like so many left-wing essay books, it comprises a long sequence of complaints, with only the briefest hint of possible solutions stuck in at the very end. She loathes uncritical, unquestioning “positivity,” but she doesn’t want people to be hooked on depression or stress either.

So what’s left in between? Social and political activism, she suggests.

But I’ve seen plenty of “activists” who get stuck in their own emotional trips (self-aggrandizing protests, feel-good “lifestyle choices,” sneering against the “sheeple,” et al.). They get to feel powerful, or righteous, or smug, or genetically superior to the sap masses. And nothing changes.

World-changing and personal therapy, I believe, are two different thangs.

Still, there is a psychological benefit to working with other people, helping other people, becoming an involved part of our interdependent existence.

That was one of the messages in This Emotional Life, the recent Paul Allen-produced PBS miniseries. Another message was when an interviewee said, “The opposite of depression isn’t happiness. The opposite of depression is vitality.”

That meets obliquely with something I wrote around the time of the Obama inauguration. The “hope” Obama talked about wasn’t pie-in-the-sky positive thinking. It was acknowledging that work needed to be done, and then doing it, doing it with a clear and open mind and with full confidence in one’s abilities.

This has everything to do with Ehrenreich’s usual main topics, progressive politics and the plight of working families.

My ol’ pal and sometime colleague Doug Nufer looks back at a decade in which he got four books out somehow amid an ever more confused book industry and an ever more precarious alternative-literature subsegment within that industry. He offers no solutions, but I will:

• All of book publishing (heck, all of the traditional offline media) need new business models and more efficient, dynamic ways of doing what they do.
• Alterna-lit needs to build its audience. Yes, I believe even the genre’s geekier, tougher material can find more readers and more lovers. I’m sure of it.

New York media vet and gossippeer Tina Brown has issued a brief list of “Things to Stop Bitching About in 2010.” Among them, she’d like to banish the notion that “newspapers are dying because of the Internet”:

What a load of Spam! American newspapers are dying mostly because they were so dull for so long a whole generation gave up on them. They needed to innovate back in the Fax Age of the 1980s but were too self-important and making too much money with their monopolies to acknowledge it.

From that addicted-to-verbiage NYTimes, here’s graphic designer Phillip Niemeyer with a handy chart illustrating and categorizing the past 10 years in logos and buzzwords.

As self-help author Eckhart Tolle proclaims the beneficial Power of Now, essayist Pico Iyer grumbles about “the tyranny of the moment .”

Knute Berger at Crosscut mourns the decline of soap operas (evinced by As the World Turns’ cancellation) with a tribute to his late aunt, one of the show’s, and the genre’s, most enduring performers. Berger rightly notes that “the soaps are the daily newspapers of daytime TV, once everyday staples that are now dying off like dinosaurs in a meteor-induced dust cloud.”

Our ol’ pal Tim Egan chortles at the New Yorkers who’ve just discovered Costco, now that the big Seattle-founded retailer finally set up shop in Manhattan. Then Egan wanders, like a shopper through oversized aisles, into a more generalized rant about ignorant East Coasters.

Blogger Jim Linderman cites our longtime fave Sherman Alexie on a big failing of e-reader machines’ “content”: its lack of textual permanence. Then Linderman adds an aside of his own: If KIndles had been around 50 years ago, would we ever remember that the Hardy Boys didn’t use to be rock musicians?

As a wickedly haunting holiday offering, the New Yorker offers a fictional remembrance of childhood wonder, excerpted from David Foster Wallace’s posthumous last novel.

We didn’t learn about it until today, but Bob Kondrak passed away late last month at age 61. He was an avid photographer, an early documentor of the Seattle punk scene. His son Kuri currently DJs around town.

Also recently deceased is Serbian novelist Milorad Pavic, 80. Pavic became an international success with his novel Dictionary of the Khazars, a nonlinear revisionist history of the western world.

His works dealt deftly with the clashes of races, religions, nationalities, genders, and schools of philosophy over the tumultous centuries, and treated all the parties in said conflicts with equal humanity. But when it came to his own time and place in history, Pavic chose sides, defending Milosovec’s violent but futile drive to hold onto the mini-empire that was Yugoslavia.

The Onion’s A.V. Club has a list of 30 “best books of the ’00s,” heavy on bestsellers and hype-beneficieries.

One might not think of Stephen King (commercial horror storyteller supreme) and Raymond Carver (the late local crafter of exquisitely serious short stories) as working the same side of the street. But King, in an NY Times review of a new Carver bio, sees a lot of himself in Carver’s early career, particularly the chain-drinking and chain-moping parts.

But the biggest lesson King takes from Carol Sklenicka’s Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life is that we should think more (and more kindly) about Maryann Burk, the first Mrs. Carver. It was she who supported and suffered from the struggling (and often violently drunk) early Raymond. The better known second wife got to live with the sober, successful Raymond.