Subject: Re: uncollected stories
From: Valérie Aron (miss_vertigo18@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun Apr 01 2001 - 14:17:28 GMT
I join you with my "How did I discover The Catcher"
story: I was 17 and my family and I were about to go
on holidays so I was collecting some books for the
occasion (holidays are often boring): I found the
Catcher in the toilets (very nice place to keep your
books safe; Holden would have loved it). I don't know
how it had landed here (none of my family had read
it). I read it in one day: it was a strange sensation.
On one side, I felt as unique and separate, and on the
other side, I knew my feelings were very basic
teenager's feelings. I asked 3 of my friends what they
thought about it, and they said Holden was the worst
guy ever. Today (I'm 21), I still feels like Holden in
some ways, but I realize how it is silly. Somebody
said in a previous mail he was disappointed because
today's world was corrupted ... and that the Catcher
should have changed that: even if I love Holden, a
world full of Holden wouldn't be a nice thing: he's
not really a good person: always criticizing, but
doing nothing to change things (it looks pretty much
like me, but I'm not proud of it).
That's it.
Valérie
PS: Sorry for the mistakes. My english is bad.
--- Tim O'Connor <oconnort@nyu.edu> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 31, 2001 at 01:59:32AM -0600, lray
> wrote:
>
> Hi, Levi!
>
> > i am new to this list and cant quite understand
> why everyone is constantly
> > arguing, and not about what this list is supposed
> to be about or what i was
> > under the impression that this list was for. i am
> a 19 year old college
> > student, but i feel like the mature one on this
> list because i feel like
> > salinger and his works have almost completely
> taken the back seat since i
> > have
> > been on this list the past two weeks or so. is it
> always like this?
>
> No, you've caught the place at a bad point in time.
> Things here
> follow their own Circadian rhythms, and ours is in
> the trench right
> about now. We are delighted at the prospect of an
> infusion of fresh
> blood, and hope you will not be scared off by the
> temporary
> squabbling. We also (I hope I'm not being
> presumptuous in sounding as
> if I speak for everyone) enjoy seeing new threads of
> discussion tossed
> in the ring.
>
> > how about a conversation starter like what impact
> did catcher have on
> > everyone
> > the first time they read it?
>
> Well, I had some preconceived notions. I had seen
> it carried around
> by one of the kids on my block who, like me, used to
> get beat up all
> the time by the bigger kids. This boy (we were
> about 12 at the time)
> was a big reader of sports books; I remember him
> reading things about
> the Mets (!) and about sports figures like Ty Cobb.
> So when I saw him
> carrying around a crumbling copy of the original
> paperback edition,
> with the painting of Holden in what appears to be
> Times Square, with
> that lurid text that ended, "... but you will never
> forget it" (or
> something along those lines), I thought it was some
> inspirational
> sports book about a baseball catcher. Score one
> "D'oh" point for me.
>
> Fast forward ahead a year or two and I was in high
> school, very
> unhappy there and feeling intensely alienated. I
> stayed for a weekend
> with my aunt and uncle at their weekend bungalow,
> where my aunt told
> me I could take a book, any book, for the ride back
> to the city. I
> found NINE STORIES and selected that one. The most
> memorable image I
> have is of reading "The Laughing Man" while driving
> down the
> Palisades, where some of that story took place.
> When I was finished
> with the stories, I was enchanted. I felt that I
> had found a magical
> place that only I knew of. I never connected it
> with that wacky
> sports book about the baseball catcher that had been
> read by the kid
> down the block. I sought out other books by him and
> Catcher was the
> first one I found. However, I got the hardcover, so
> it took a couple
> of extra years before I put together the Salinger of
> the hardcover
> with the author of the book with the lurid paperback
> cover.
>
> And so it was that my alienated self found a
> soulmate in Holden
> Caulfield. I couldn't run away from my dreadful
> "prep" school (I use
> the word loosely; it didn't do much "prepping" and
> it was a loathsome
> place), but I could escape vicariously through him.
> Like him, I
> wandered the streets of Manhattan alone at night,
> though I came from
> a decidedly lower class and couldn't afford taxicabs
> ever. But I
> loved the movies and spent many nights tucked away
> in a repertory
> movie house (all of which are now, sadly, closed).
> I didn't feel
> superior to people around me, only separate. I
> began to keep a
> journal and start to write fiction. I also
> photographed like (as
> Holden would say) a madman, and I have plenty of
> Cartier-Bresson-ish
> street scenes of the times I passed through. In all
> of it, Holden was
> like my big brother, my wisecracking protector, the
> person through
> whose eyes I saw what went on around me. I read the
> book countless
> times; it was embarrassing on the subway, because I
> would laugh until
> I was in tears. I didn't know anything about
> Salinger at the time,
> and I guess it never occurred to me to look at the
> copyright date on
> the back of the title page, because the book seemed
> so fresh that it
> never seemed plausible that it had been decades
> since the book had been
> published and that the author might have opted out
> of the publishing
> business. Eventually I tracked down Franny and
> Zooey and Raise
> High the Roofbeam, Carpenters. When I realized that
> that was it, in
> terms of Salinger, I started rationing the books
> slowly.
>
> > personally, i felt so similar to holden that it
> was frightening. thoughts
> > about a superficial society, suicide, not fitting
> in, having no one to talk
> > to, etc, etc, basic teenage feelings.
>
> Yes, absolutely. That's where my journal came in.
> It was my only way
> of letting off steam.
>
> > i felt that there was a beauty to
> > holden because he had retained the ability
> children have for seeing the TRUTH
> > in things and not allowing oneself to be swept up
> by all the crap and still
> > being able to recognize things around him. it is
> after two and i am not
> > articulating well, but im sure that these thoughts
> make sense to someone who
> > has read catcher and felt like "here is someone
> that i understand."
>
> Your articulation is pretty clear to me. I
> definitely understand.
>
> > salinger
> > said so much in catcher and it is sad that 50
> years later things still havent
> > changed, if anything they are worse.
>
> I don't know if they're worse, so much as different.
> Young people are
> still alienated -- it's just that the alienated
> drift away in
> different ways than Holden did. They have more
> avenues of escape.
> Alienation is actually big business in America, at
> least, as corporate
> America figures out ways of co-opting alienation.
> (There's something
> awful in seeing corporations like Viacom, et al.,
> seizing irony as a
> means of expression to reach teenagers for whom
> irony is second
> nature.)
>
> And I'm not referring to the really bad cases that
> end up in high
> schools getting shot up by off-the-wall students who
> feel a grudge. I
> agree that THAT is something unthinkable in Holden's
> world, and that
> makes it look magically innocent in comparison to
> the daily headlines.
> His odyssey is free of politics, free of hurt to
> others, since he
> perpetually thinks instead of hurting himself.
>
> I still think -- as Paul Kennedy discovered in the
> radio show he did
> about two years ago (!) -- that there's a huge
> groundswell of
> affection for, and devotion to, Holden. Holden's
> still like a
> touchstone for young people who look around
> themselves and think that
>
=== message truncated ===
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