http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jan/28/jd-salinger-dies-catcher-rye

:(

Catcher in the Rye was a fabulous book, one of the best books I ever read.
He will be missed.

Absolutely! Agreed on all accounts...

He lived a good long life.

I was one of so many millions of awkward teens who identified with Holden Caulfield.  Like Sibelius before hime, Salinger said what he had to say by the time he was 50.  He did not see the need to say more or stay in the limelight.  Some people call it reclusiveness, I call it not being a phony.

I was one of so many millions of awkward teens who identified with Holden Caulfield.  Like Sibelius before hime, Salinger said what he had to say by the time he was 50.  He did not see the need to say more or stay in the limelight.  Some people call it reclusiveness, I call it not being a phony.



Right.  His fans had more angst about it than he did, hunting him down, wanting to be his best friend and get him to write again.  The guy was done, he knew it, good for him for not getting caught up in the game and having his own life instead.

When I read "Catcher in the Rye" I did not know the book's legacy as a standard for disaffected adolescents had been established decades earlier.  I'm glad I didn't know because it would have made me more skeptical.  I remembered Woody Allen referring to it in "Annie Hall," and Bill Murray saying it was his favorite book when he was a kid.  I also knew it had been banned time and again for dirty words and references to sex and prostitution.  It's all pretty mild compared to what passes nowadays.  I didn't remember at the time that just a few years earlier Mark David Chapman had delusions of himself as "the Holden Caulfield of the 1980s."  That bit of infamy only exposes how totally nuts Chapman is.

I was so taken with Holden Caulfield that I wrote an extra credit paper on it for my American Lit. class.  The teacher liked the my paper so much, he read it for the rest of the class.  My "pay-puhhh" as Mr. Reynolds used to say in his crusty old Yankee accent. 

My stepmother was also an English teacher and she told depressing stories of how a lot of her students in the 1990s didn't get Holden Caulfield.  They thought he was a loser, not because he quit school, but because he quit school and was roaming New York drinking and screwing around, and he wasn't having fun.  What the hell was that kid's problem?  They were the "Wayne's World"/"Bill and Ted" generation.  They were free of conscience and free of angst.  That shows where the uptight moralists of the fifties and sixties had it wrong.  Holden Caulfield's defiance is defiance in search for something better than the "phony" world he was expected to grow up and into.  The Generation Y kids were defying the idea of growing up at all.
::)

Chances are that Catcher In The Rye, will never be made into a movie, and probably just as well, too.

When I read "Catcher in the Rye" I did not know the book's legacy as a standard for disaffected adolescents had been established decades earlier.

...

Holden Caulfield's defiance is defiance in search for something better than the "phony" world he was expected to grow up and into.  The Generation Y kids were defying the idea of growing up at all. ::)


Some of us Xers were, too.

I never "Got" Catcher in the Rye as a teenager, nor even on second reading as an adult.  What I did get as an adult was that he was a hell of a better writer than I'd given him credit for.  (When you're in high school, you're reading good SF by reputation, and good literature by your teachers' inclusion of it in the curriculum.  When you've been out of college for a few years, you've seen enough atrocious writing to recognize it when you see it.) 

But if you dug Holden as a disaffected 1951 youth, try Joseph Heller's Something Happened as the portrait of the disaffected 1974 adult.  If you believe Holden finally grew up, settled down, and got himself a real job, think of it as the sequel.  It'll crush your soul, but the writing is just as tight.

Some of us Xers were, too.

I never "Got" Catcher in the Rye as a teenager, nor even on second reading as an adult.  What I did get as an adult was that he was a hell of a better writer than I'd given him credit for.  (When you're in high school, you're reading good SF by reputation, and good literature by your teachers' inclusion of it in the curriculum.  When you've been out of college for a few years, you've seen enough atrocious writing to recognize it when you see it.) 

But if you dug Holden as a disaffected 1951 youth, try Joseph Heller's Something Happened as the portrait of the disaffected 1974 adult.  If you believe Holden finally grew up, settled down, and got himself a real job, think of it as the sequel.  It'll crush your soul, but the writing is just as tight.


My soul is so crushed that I finally "get" my other favorite book as a disaffected youth "Nineteen Eighty-Four."  I finally get that "Greetings from a dead man" was not ironic.  I am going to become a Roman Catholic.  I love Big Brother.

Chances are that Catcher In The Rye, will never be made into a movie, and probably just as well, too.


Fortunately, there was the sad case of "Uncle Wiggly In Connecticut," a 1948 story JDS sold to MGM, who changed the title to "My Foolish Heart" (Dana Andrews, Susan Heyward) and turned it into a sentimental bastardization of the original story.  Salinger made up his mind NEVER to let any of his work get optioned for screenplays again, and when Salinger made up his mind, it was final.  Steven Spielberg wanted to tried to get his hands on it at some point.  In the 1970s, Salinger revealed that Jerry Lewis had bugged him for years to be the one to bring Holden Caulfield to the silver screen.  Can you imagine either of these atrocities:
1. "Catcher in the Rye" A Steven Spielberg Film
b. Starring Jerry Lewis as Holden Caulfield.
8-P

By the 1980s, Hollywood bigshots would have written Salinger an eight-figure check just to say yes, AND offered him a cut of the box office receipts!  Thank god Salinger was a man of integrity.  You KNOW if they made "Catcher in the Rye" in 1988 it would have starred one of the Coreys as Holden.  It would have been "Holden Caulfield's Excellent Adventure"!
::)

My soul is so crushed


Ah, Soul Crush, from an obscure Canadian electro/industrial outfit known as Digital Poodle, from 1991.  Big Brother sees what you did there!

Ah, Soul Crush, from an obscure Canadian electro/industrial outfit known as Digital Poodle, from 1991.  Big Brother sees what you did there!


No, we're back to Salinger there, not Big Brother, big phonies.  "Skinny Puppy" was a bunch of guys who did a lot of drugs.  "Digital Poodle" was a couple of guys who wanted you to think they did a lot of drugs, but all they did was a lot resumes so they could get jobs doing music and graphics for teevee!
http://www.inthe00s.com/smile/13/jerk.gif

No, we're back to Salinger there, not Big Brother, big phonies.  "Skinny Puppy" was a bunch of guys who did a lot of drugs.  "Digital Poodle" was a couple of guys who wanted you to think they did a lot of drugs, but all they did was a lot resumes so they could get jobs doing music and graphics for teevee!
http://www.inthe00s.com/smile/13/jerk.gif


Karma for not just remembering Digital Poodle, but for remembering them accurately.

And now for something completely different, I wonder how many people get that this...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d6/Laughing_man_big_2.png

may come from Ghost in the Shell, but that it's also a JD Salinger reference.  Nerdy as both may be, there probably isn't that much of a crossover between anime and mid-50s US literature.