Regarding Phonies in the West Village
Andrew Charles Kennis (holden@escape.com)
Wed, 21 Jan 1998 01:04:16 -0500 (EST)
Hello all, it's been quite a long time since I've made a post on
this infamous list. I think, perhaps, the last time I wrote anything here
was while I was at Grinnell College. Back then, we weren't even on this
new nyu.edu contraption that I suppose Stephen is running this list off
of these days. In any case, I'll try and cut the crap for now and get to
the point of this post.....
Someone, named Jessica I believe, wrote a post regarding phonies. It
annoyed me a bit, as I did disagree with her assertion that Holden's
reluctance in CITR caused him from forging any kind of successful
interactions with people he otherwise dismissed. Personally, I feel that
if someone gets forced into talking to somebody they didn't want to talk
to simply because of superficial social polite protocol, then they have
a fake foundation. With a fake foundation, only a fake end could be
reached. But in any case, that's just my feeling. The mere mention of the
word phony, a word and a concept that is so central to Salinger's
criticism of the superficial tendencies of Western culture evident in
almost all of his books, got me into thinking about something rather, no
pun intended, local to me.
I am a new resident of Greenwich Village these days. I live on
MacDougal Street and a few blocks away from Washington Square Park and
NYU. Since this list is run off of NYU, I was wondering, is anybody on
this list familiar with the neighborhood that I now live in and am
referring to here? If so, I have a question for them (or for any of you
who have visited this pretty renown area of the Village). Do any of you
feel that the Village, though it may still have retained to some degree
the ecletic nature that made it famous, has now lost that to trendy
Yuppie'ishness and conformist fashionable people? If so, do you feel that
this would successfully qualify as being a phony neighborhood?! The
implications are scary to me, as everybody in this god foresaken country
thinks of the Village as this SO unique place.....when it sometimes seems
to me, to really be a bastion of trendy phonies! I want your feedback, NYC
residents especially......
--AK