J.D. SALINGER: Holden Caulfeild/Teen Angst... Why Ernie Sucked and of course...CHICKEN BONES! d

Soooo….J.D. Salinger died. I really liked this guy and I had only read two of his books. One was “Catcher In The Rye” and the other was “Franny and Zooey”. Both were heartbreaking in their own way and had a certain redemptive power as well. A close friend of mine had just recently re-read Catcher and did not understand what the excitement was about the book and it really made me think about what I loved about the book. Salinger was a weird, introspective and ultimately private person. His character Holden Caulfeild was a kid who was a screw up and self selected out of society and paid a huge price for it. He was too “smart” for prep school and life and condescended towards the people he viewed as “posers” and could not suffer their company or even more odious to him the adulation these pretenders got from society. He did not come by this condescension honestly being a product of good fortune himself.

There was always a tension between trying to be somehow “authentic” and yet feeling at the same time that you were really, ultimately no good. The character was totally self involved and in my mind that is what I remember about adolescence. Every decision was personal, every perceived slight was personal, war in another country, personal. Ethipian famine, personal. It is silly but I do think as an adult it is important to remember this mind set and no one had it pitch perfect like Salinger did with Holden Caulfield. And he wrote some beautiful monologues that went on in the guys head. I remember reading this quote years ago and at the same time I was reading the book. I think Greil marcus was quoting it in Rolling Stone in a Neil Young Interview, probably around 78 or 79.

I swear to God, if I were a piano player or an actor or something and all those dopes thought I was terrific, I’d hate it. I wouldn’t even want them to clap for me. People always clap for the wrong things. If I were a piano player, I’d play it in the goddam closet.
–Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye

I thought it was perfect that Marcus would quote Salinger when talking about Neil Young. Salinger through Caulfield was always raging about phonies and Young was always struggling with trying not be a phony and fall into the the perceived phonieness of the music industry. But Caulfield always spoke to me. Always tapped into my own teen angst. For me the angst was driven by my own laziness and insecurity and still probably is... but I suspect that I was no different from a lot of teen.

Who knows why Salinger withdrew from life and indeed, who cares. I think it noble. How much better served would we be as a society to have some of our artistic and sports gods retire and disappear rather then constantly watching them suffer in public, every day, on the 24 hour news cycle, on the internet. Perhaps Tiger should...disappear. Salinger withdrew and some say he still wrote, but just for himself because he loved it. I pray this was true and I pray that he found a peace in his writing and I also hope someday it will be shared with the world. We lost a good one. Fortunately he left us something good.

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On a more interesting note I have been wanting to get/buy a bag of chicken bones. The reason i want them is that so with certain clients, when they are asking me to put on my Nostradamus hat and divine the future I can use them. I picture clients paying me several hundred dollars an hour in order to smile at them, open a nice little cloth or velvet bag and scatter chicken bones on the table, stare at them intently and then, tell them the future. Surprisingly I could not find them on line or on E-Bay or Amazon or any other place. I figured certainly that there would be a specialty store that would sell them on line as a novelty. So far, no luck. So if you know a good source for divining chicken bones please let me know. In the interim I emailed someone who practices voo doo and specializes in such tellings among other things. This is his reply. There is a lot of wisdom there.

"Usually when you want a chicken bone bag to fortell the future you have to order them, each set of bones are prepared for use for one individual, and if you go to a store and just buy a set that wasn't made for you, they usually don't work very well, they cost between 300 to 1000 dollars depends on who prepares them. I'm not sure if that answers your question
Linsou..."

That seems a steep price to pay for a lark. But who knows, in this economy perhaps they would help.