And that’s why when it’s past 2:00 am, I roll over and reach under the bed for my laptop, to write this.

It occurs to me, I never sleep very much this particular Saturday night. Every year, when we turn the clocks back, gaining us an hour of sleep, I stay up until 2am to watch the clock flip back to 1:00am (my laptop does it automatically, I think. Maybe I do it by watching the prevue channel? I don’t remember). I find a certain romanticism in this split second – this year I was tired at 12:45 and consciously decided not to watch it.

Of course, now I can’t sleep. Everyone loves this weekend because its a free hour of sleep, and I waste it. I shouldn’t have had all the heavily caffeinated cinnamon tea, but I was reading I Capture the Castle and you can’t read that book without tea.

So because I can’t sleep, I’m doing a few tiny, tiny tasks to get myself back in the swing of things. I found a job to apply for, and so I opened my template for legal assistant jobs, so I can write it tomorrow while my soup cooks. Which sounds silly, but anything to make getting out an application less daunting.

This is not the end of internal angst and probably some tears. Going to the Film Festival and hanging out with people got me about 50% out of my head. And then I wound up 90% back in it a few hours later.

But right now, almost literally right now, I just want to go on record to say I think it will be okay. I think I’ll be okay.

Holden Caulfield is the character every angsty teenage boy wants to be and every lonely teenager girl wants to date. Jonathan Yardley refers to the novel in which he stars as “an essential document of American adolescence – the novel that every high school English teacher reflexively puts on every summer reading list.” Aware of its reputation, I was eager to read Catching in the Rye when it was assigned to my sophomore English class. As a sarcastic, know-it-all fifteen year old I couldn’t wait to see Holden stylishly denounce the phonies. I expected Salinger’s novel to give insight into the mind of a wise beyond his years boy, and explain to the world of popular teenagers – the world I despised – what it was like to feel misunderstood and lonely.

Yet, as I slogged through Salinger’s mawkish prose, I had a difficult time figuring out what all the excitement was about. Despite having been told innumerable times that I would identify with Holden, I couldn’t help disliking him. He was quick to label people phonies, but he lied constantly, especially to himself. I became impatient with his poor treatment of everyone he encountered. When I reached the end I was disappointed and uninspired. But, everyone else in my English class loved it – and it is a rarity in high school for students to enjoy the assigned reading. I was convinced I must have been missing something.  Certainly, there must be something to Holden besides his whining and inability to take responsibility for his own actions. Maybe there was something that justified his behavior.

I listened to the class discussion in which student after student expressed how “cool” Holden was. They felt sorry for him; he was so sad! They admired the way he cursed humanity and dismissed those around him as phonies. It’s great they said, to have a character who comes out and “tells it like it is.” I kept quiet. Maybe I was wrong to think Holden was a phony. Everyone else seemed to have sympathy for him, and some were even excited that they had finally found a character who expressed how they felt. I must have been missing something. So I answered the assigned study questions, wrote what I identified with in the text and moved on.

A year later I met a boy who proudly declared that he was exactly like Holden Caulfield. “I’m writing my junior English paper on Salinger,” he informed me excitedly. “Don’t you just love Catcher in the Rye?” I was trying to get a date there, so I smiled, nodded, and within a few weeks, I was his girlfriend. The next year, Catcher in the Rye was listed in my senior yearbook as one of “Our Top Three Favorite Books.” I never admitted that I, the girl voted most sarcastic by the senior class, could not identify with the quintessential character of cynicism. It seemed that I should like Holden. I had certainly spent a good portion of high school as misanthropic outsider. I had a bad habit of judgmentally dismissing the seemingly superficial behavior of my peers. Besides, there must be something wrong with me if I couldn’t muster up sympathy for a poor guy who was just trying to deal with his brother’s death.  Why didn’t I like Holden? I had wanted to like Catcher in the Rye. Holden and I both had a lot of angst, so why didn’t I hit it off with him? It seemed everyone else had. The novel that was supposed to speak to my typical teenage insecurity had the effect of making me very insecure in my unpopular opinion.

David Rachels writes that high school English is indoctrination, that encourages independent thinking by “letting students explain why he or she accepted someone else’s view on the subject.” Instead of debating whether Holden is a good human being, it is already accepted that he is the victim of circumstances. He is universally seen as hardened to the world; sad and broken. Thus his behavior is accepted, excused, and admired.  He’s seen as heroic for the way he rails against the world and honestly assesses humanity. He’s labeled tragic for being punished by a world that can’t possibly understand him. It is demanded that one sympathize with his plight; to think otherwise about Holden would be insensitive. The only choice that was placed before my sophomore honors English class was whether Holden was a static or dynamic character. Is he able to recover from his depression? Or is he still in the same state he was at the beginning of the book? Acceptance of Holden as a tragic hero is a foregone conclusion. Questions about whether we even liked Holden were never raised. It was already assumed that every high school sophomore would be eager to sing his praises.

Holden isn’t necessarily a horrible person. He’s a seventeen year old who made some bad decisions and isn’t happy with his life.  Everyone has felt alone and misunderstood, and seen their circumstances as unfair. It’s practically a requirement of adolescence to occasionally hate the world around you. But one of the lessons one learns again and again is that you have to take responsibility for your actions. Holden never does this. Students seem to admire that, after being kicked out of school, Holden fearlessly roams New York City, having adventure after adventure. Everyone skips over the fact that Holden was kicked out of school for a reason – it was his fault and it seems he was given a number of second chances. He didn’t take them. Holden chooses not to take advantage of the opportunities bestowed upon him, and then he blames the school, the world, and those “damn phonies.” After page upon page of unsubstantiated whining, I couldn’t trust Holden’s view of the world.

Holden, like a lot of teenagers, thinks that everyone is out to get him. He’s not a very nice person. He’s selfish. He’s whiny. He’s a typical teenager who thinks he knows everything and needs to grow up. Jonathan Yardley writers that Salinger’s mediocre novel is “required reading as therapy, a way to encourage young people to bathe in the warm, soothing waters of resentment (all grown-ups are phonies) and self-pity without having to think a lucid thought.” Many of us are embarrassed by an honest look back at our adolescence because we all acted like immature brats at some point, and must often sheepishly admit that our parents might have been right about a couple of things. Thus, the admiration teenagers have for Holden seems misplaced. No one should aspire to stay seventeen forever.

Salinger’s novel appeals to the insecurity many teenagers are overwhelmed by and makes them proud of their whiny rebellion. Holden has been canonized as the patron saint of adolescent angst by kids who admire him because he’s “just like them..”  Unfortunately, no one ever stops to ask if this was a good thing. It is only now, high school four years behind me, that I can say that I wasn’t missing anything back in sophomore honors English.  Hopefully all the boys who declare themselves the Holden Caulfield of their high school grow out of it and all the girls who want to date a Holden Caulfield realize that they’d be better off with someone who isn’t so callow. I still have a lot of growing up to do, but I like to think I’m past the stage of blaming the world for any misfortune I encounter. The world according to Holden is an unfair place, and he is unwilling to accept that. Growing up means accepting the world isn’t always fair. And that quite often, you’ll have to deal with phonies like Holden.

]]> http://rachelnotrebecca.com/2010/01/30/coming-out-against-catcher/feed/ 3 http://rachelnotrebecca.com/2010/01/21/posts-i-havent-written/ http://rachelnotrebecca.com/2010/01/21/posts-i-havent-written/#comments Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:11:27 +0000 Rachel Not Rebecca http://rachelnotrebecca.com/?p=6533 The thematic title is blatantly stolen from Charlotte, who is awesome and even responds to my whiny emails.

In the past week I have started several posts bemoaning my laziness but I never finished them. A parable. Sort of. Like that episode of the West Wing, when Donna whines to Josh about the budget surplus not meaning a tax refund, because Democrats know how to spend your money better than you do, and then she refuses to give him change from buying lunch, because she knows how to spend the change better than he does. Or something. Clearly my West Wing obsession is out of control. But I have nothing better to do in suburbia. I could temper the obsession by starting to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which I’ve seen bits and pieces of over the years, but never chronologically.

Or I could, you know, read a book. I recently read “Reproduction is the Flaw of Love” (or something like that. And I don’t remember the author, but I’m not going to google that at work.) The book itself was ok, but the premise made me so antsy that I had to skip to the end before I could concentrate on the middle. I do this sometimes.

A bunch of new, interesting positions (for which I am highly qualified) came up on today’s job search.  One is at Much-Coveted-Organization. They no doubt recieve thousands of resumes for every job posting. On some level, I feel that if I don’t get my application in seconds after the posting goes live, I’m screwed. But then maybe waiting a few days, until the announcement “cools down” so to speak is a viable strategy, given that it’s going to take me at least until tomorrow afternoon to put together an application, properly. And no one reads mail on Friday. So maybe it should wait until Monday. These are the things I’ve been thinking about lately. You’ll forgive me for not posting, right?  You should thank me for not posting them, actually. 

Oh and my resume has an NJ address and I’m applying for jobs in DC, and it has occured to me that maybe I should use a local address (of one of my friends) but won’t that just make things more complicated? I’m still at my current job, in NJ. And I’d need a little notice for an interview. Sigh. I fear that I may end of staying here until I go more insane than I am already going, and then quitting my job (which will no doubt be a bad move. I have never quit a job before. Well that’s not true. I worked for a headhunter for 2.5 weeks.) and moving to DC and sleeping on Keith’s couch forever, and I won’t find a job and I’ll run through all my savings and it will be another failed experiment and I will have to go back to answering phones, and I will do that for the rest of my life.

I enjoy writing long, run-on sentences with fatalistic predictions.

Oh, and I just got an email informing me that my car is being recalled. Awesome!

My room is already a mess. I’m tired. I’m not happy with any of my interview outfits. I think I’m burned out. I have not been reading up on foreign policy and my justification for this is that cramming for the interview isn’t going to be helpful.

But mostly it’s that I can’t concentrate. That’s why it’s almost 9:00 and I’m just now writing the last blog entry of the month. Which also means I haven’t read any of your blogs. I’m sorry. This is also why I stay up late for no reason, because I keep putting off doing things that I want to do, because of an inability to concentrate on, say, the entire series of the Alice books by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor that I just got. I didn’t know most of them existed! I read about 5 of these when I was maybe 14ish, and I always liked them well enough, but they were not among books I saved.

(Example of my lack of concentration: I just had to get up and clean a few things off my nightstand/shove stuff in a drawer because I could not stand to look at the disarray for one more second)

Ok, I think I’m done. Because while i theoretically have a bunch of stuff going on what with the interview/trip to DC, and work being busy, and the fact that I can drive again, I still DON’T have anything going on in terms of social life/boys/drama or any of the other stuff that I used to fill blog entries about.

Happy Almost December!

-Doing all this political minded readnig lately makes me want to re-read Allan Blooms The Closing of the American Mind. If you are in academia, or even just thinking of going into it, I cannot recommend it enough. A professor gave it to me right after I transferred to Skidmore, after hearing about my experience at Hampshire College.  It is definitely one of those books that made me question a lot of what I thought I believed or helped me clarify a lot of things for myself. The problem with re-reading anything is that I have about 1,001 books that I haven’t read, and should read.

The guest on the Daily Show last night was the woman who wrote Ayn Rand and the American Right. I hadn’t heard of it, but now I want to buy it. I’m not Randroid – I’ve said before I that I can take or leave her philosophical writings — but this looks quite interesting. The author brought up Rand as a reaction to FDR, which is something I addressed in my senior thesis in college, so it was exciting to hear.

Additionally, I liked what the author had to say about Rand’s fiction. There are a thousand and one jokes made at Rand’s (and her book’s) expense because really, Rand is a drama queen. Her fiction is overwrought and yes, Atlas Shrugged does include a 60+ page speech by the “hero” that basically just spits out her “philosophy.” But the author honed in on what Rand’s fiction has always done for me – you can read about the main characters and they can inspire you.

And lord knows there have been plenty of times where I’ve admitted to wanting to be Dagny Taggart. For anyone who has read Atlas Shrugged , says the authors, this invokes the entire narrative. You don’t have to explain what it means, beyond “I want to be Dagny Taggart.” That’s all you have to say.

Of course, given that Rand is also hated, this could certainly stir up some negative connotations. But the first time I read Atlas Shrugged I was 18 (the perfect age to read Rand: you think you know everything) and the parts where the metaphorical camera is on Dagny’s thoughts, and connected with her more than any other literary character. (Also, Hank Rearden = Hot) For all of her faults, for all of my mistaken attempts at stoicism as a result, she taught me a lot.

This isn’t very light reading for a Friday, so I’ll leave you with an excerpt of one of my favorite passages, from my absolute favorite part of Atlas Shrugged.

“She felt no anger towards anyone on earth. The things she had endured had now receded into some outer fog, like pain that still exists, but has no power to hurt. Those things could not stand in the face of this moment’s reality, the meaning of this day was as brilliantly, violently clear as the splashes of sun on the silver of the engine, all men had to perceive it now, no one could doubt it and she had no one to hate.”

Not that it does me any good when I have internet induced ADD.

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For all my love of Russian history, Carl Schmitt, and obscure European wars, I do like my brain candy. I watch Degrassi – The Next Generation marathons. (I blame Jill-IAN on this one) I like People mazgazine. I’ve seen the movie Chasing Liberty about 1,000 times.

I didn’t think things like this were problematic until I dated HWSNBN near the end of college. He was fairly well read, a news junkie, and looked down on my more ‘shallow’ habits. I felt I had to hide them, and perhaps that is where the obsession with being well -read/ educated/”sophisticated” came from. I encountered it again, earlier this year, when I was spending time with this guy who was extremely well-read, and he was just too…much.

So while I’m in the process of getting back into reading, I am also vowing to broaden my horizons on the music/movie front. Maybe, just maybe one day I’ll wind up well-rounded

Fast forward to January 2006. Dario and I stop dating. I move to Astoria. I start hanging out with Jill-IAN. Thus began my year of living life a rockstar. I had more fun in the 9 months leading up to grad school than in my entire life. I drank too much, stayed out to late, laughed too loud, and all those delicious clichés that categorize being an untethered 20 something in NYC.

I had no time for books and besides, I was off to grad school at UChicago that fall where there would be nothing to do but read. Well reading in academia is not quite reading…it’s more like skimming like your life depeneded on it. When I graduated 9 months later, I gave myself a 6 month break from all things brainy. I had a steady diet of blogs, message boards, nostalgic childhood reads and occasional chicklit.

Six months turned into a year plus. It didn’t help that I spent 9 of those months in a miserable drunken depression but the fact is that I don’t think I can properly say I’ve read a book in a year. (unless you count chick lit/beach reads ((Christ, I used to read Stalin’s biography on the beach.))

So basically, I’m looking to ease back into maintaing myself as well read individual. I’m going to start slow, a little Fitzgerald, Creators, by Paul Johnson which can be broken down, and we’ll see.

Because three-point-five-years ago I was the most well-read receptionist on the planet. Once this assignment ends, I might find myself at a front desk again, and I’d be quite happy to reclaim the title!

If the pre-production rumors go through and Angelina Jolie plays Dagny…eww.

-Forthcomings

But seriously, I just watched a re-run of House and how can I not be re-drawn in by the quote of “I think true love’s out there. It’s just very far away in another universe. We may have to develop travel at the speed of light to reach it” (or something like that) and that has ALMOST NOTHING TO DO WITH THE PLOT. I also liked “People who are afraid of commitment are afraid of it because they know how big a deal it is”

Clearly, I need help. It doesn’t help that I’m reading the fourth installment of the Jessica Darling books. If you’re a female with a sometimes TMI livejournal between I highly recommend them. (Sloppy Firsts/Second Helpings/Charmed Thirds/Fourth Comings, by Megan McCafferty. They’re like crack. And I want someone else to read them so I can find out if its not just me who dislikes the male love interest

I found a contradiction. So I’m checking my premises. Isn’t it obnoixous that I quote Rand (who is herself obnoxious) so shamelessly?

While I am quoting Rand, I am going to post one of my most favorite passage in possibly all of literature.

“She felt no anger toward anyone on earth. The things she had endured had now receded into some outer fog, like pain that still exists but has no power to hurt. Those things could not stand in the face of this moment’s reality, the meaning of this day was as brilliantly violently clear as the splashes of sun on the silver of the engine, all men had to perceive it now, no one could doubt it and she had no one to hate. ”

Thus concludes my shameless Rand-quoting. But since I know there is one other person in the world who can tell me exactly where in the book this comes from, I am not alone in my obsession.

Brent can’t tell me where this is from, but he does know that Charles Monet was a loner.

“The ability to make references that less than three people will get is a sign of talent”-Kevin

Go here to donate.

I gave a copy of Atlas Shrugged  because it’s my favorite book in the world. (Note: the mild irony of donating copies of Atlas Shrugged does not escape me) I got my first copy of Atlas Shrugged as a “you HAVE to read this” gift and I’ve given copies to others for the same reason. My friend teases me because when I see someone reading this book in public I have to restrain myself from talking to them (especially if the reader is a cute boy.)  I also donated Paul Johnson’s “Creators” because he’s a phenomenal historian and more people should have the opportunity to read his books.