Re: cracking the code

AntiUtopia@aol.com
Tue, 17 Aug 1999 15:58:24 -0400 (EDT) 

In a message dated 8/17/99 6:31:22 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
rbowman@indigo.ie writes:

<<  What a bunch of dull dogs.  No wonder you're all more 
     at home with the metaphorical beads & flowers 
     of the Glass family - while Holden remains a remote 
     figure from a set book on a middle grade Eng. Lit. course.
 
     Scottie B. >>

Ah, Scottie, you miss sooo much in your judgements here, but I appreciate 
that you understood my point.  I don't know what it's like anywhere else, but 
here in the States we're INUNDATED with every kind of crap imaginable.  You 
probably have an idea, perhaps you don't.  There's very little uniformity of 
culture over here.  If it weren't for television and other forms of mass 
media, I'd give the US 50 years and verbal communication between north and 
South would be more difficult than the Spanish speaking to the Portugese.  

So we all have to pick and choose what we acculturate ourselves to.  Because 
I care about Salinger and Holden I'd take the time to look up the song.  But 
otherwise?  No way.  Not worth it.  There's too many other things I'm more 
interested in.  It's really no one's place to complain about another person's 
choices in these matters, either.  No one can study every American 
subculture.  It's enough if we just study the ones that are meaningful to us.

Now, in my post I may have exaggerated the cultural distance between my 
generation and Salinger's.  I probably did.  I'd say well over 90% of the 
text is accessible and understandable to me as it is.  But there's still that 
probably well less than 10% -- in the form of song titles, figures of speech, 
etc. -- that's something of a foreign language to me.

If I do my dissertation on Salinger, I promise you I'll hunt down those 
references.  Till then, I have better things to do :)

Jim