I Think Fighting’s Pathetic

Listening to Part 9 of Music in Twelve Parts by Philip Glass.

I actually saved a shuffled play list so I am having a go at listening to all 350 hours of the music I have on this machine.



I think this one would have been much scarier.

Anyway, I finished The Catcher in the Rye last night. It always drags me through it and as my previous port said, I always find something new in it, like looking at a complicated picture and finding something you missed the first time. The bit with his old teacher made a lot more sense. It is obvious that the older you get the more views on what the real situations are become clear. A truism I suppose but maybe one that is not clear to some impetuous youngsters. It was true that we were made to read TCITR by a teaching student. We must have been 14 or 15 and it is obvious with hindsight that this was her favourite book and she thought she would radicalise a few poor rural saps by making them read this rather than the normal stuff we were given. I can see why so many young people see themselves in this book – so many reviews you see say “Oh my God! This book could have been written about me! I am the female version of Holden Caulfield.”

There is of course the link with Sylvia Plath in that The Bell Jar is always mentioned after Salinger’s book as being similar, though I sometimes think the similarity is simply one of locations and atmosphere though there are of course parallels in the ages and academic institutions of the main characters. I think I last read The Catcher in the Rye just after I started this blog and I then went on to read the Bell Jar. I am aiming to do this again but The Bell Jar always seems so much more clinical; it has a sense of restraint as if the narrator is filtering everything through her academic abilities rather than just dumping everything in a mad rush like Holden Caulfield. Both books however have a wonderful feeling that you are jumping in to the real places described, the time periods for both are within ten years of each other and though one starts in a sultry summer New York and the other at Christmas, they both capture the spirit of the city. It is a pity that my single, short visit to New York was before I had read either of these books properly. My view of Manhattan was that of Suzanne Vega, of Tom’s Diner, rather than the movies, fashion and shows which seem to link these two books.

I will leave you with two things. Firstly, you can make up your own joke about this childish amendment to a sign in our village though there may be a clue to my immediate thought in the name of the file.



And finally, my wife thinks that this knick-knack shop figurine looks like me and my daughter.