Posts Tagged ‘brandt’

A few days ago, I was reading the blog of Roger Simon, on the occasion of J.D. Salinger’s passing. Simon was going to school at Dartmouth, near where Salinger lived in New Hampshire, and he really wanted to meet the writer. He managed to get as far as the great man’s front door, before being turned away by a girlfriend. In response to the short blog entry, I noted that I’ve read many books, but never The Catcher in the Rye, for whatever reason. Every time someone tries to explain the book and why it resonated with them, I just get annoyed. It makes me want to read the book less.

So I commented on Roger’s blog article, and joked that I’d probably prefer a Pastrami in the Rye to The Catcher in the Rye. I have a thing for Langer’s. Anyway, Roger then wondered if anyone had read Catcher recently, or wanted to now having not read it in the past. A few days later I when I was out and about, I idly went to a used bookstore, discovered they were out, went to a second one ditto, and wound up buying one of the few copies left at the local Borders. It’s been a couple of days, and now I’ve read the thing. It wasn’t at all what I expected, and I didn’t relate to Holden at all…but I still think it’s a brilliant book, just not for the reasons that everyone else (or those I’ve read, anyway) seem to think it’s great.

For those of you familiar with music, Randy Newman is probably best known for the song “Short People.” It’s about prejudice and how stupid prejudiced people are. Newman famously has gotten sick of various lunkheads yelling “Hey Randy, short people suck!” at him randomly on the street. He deliberately chose a characteristic that would be beyond prejudice, even semi-intelligent prejudice, and found that people were much more stupid than he thought, and that the song, as a result, resonated with a lot of people it wasn’t supposed to.

With The Catcher in the Rye, I get the same impression. I don’t think this was supposed to resonate with anyone. If I understand it corr
Dr Brandt time arrest