I went to see Tom Stoppard's 'Arcadia' last night. I can't believe I've never seen or read it before - it's fantastic. Now my head is full of vague philosophical notions. This is something of a distraction for a sociologist, but my previous incarnation as a literature student is thoroughly enjoying it.

Damn - I've not seen or read it, but I did read his play The Invention of Love a couple of weeks ago, and it was excellent. He's a hell of a writer.

Article in the NY Times about how teenagers today don't like Holden Caulfield as much as teenagers used to. [link]

Are we actually supposed to "like" him? I read it when I was 16 or so, and my impression was that he was hopelessly naive, but also that I was supposed to think he was hopelessly naive. All that stuff that I saw as naivite, was I supposed to interpret as admirable earnestness?

Julie Johnson, who taught Mr. Salinger’s novel over three decades at New Trier High School in Winnetka, Ill., cited similar reactions. “Holden’s passivity is especially galling and perplexing to many present-day students,” she wrote in an e-mail message. “In general, they do not have much sympathy for alienated antiheroes; they are more focused on distinguishing themselves in society as it is presently constituted than in trying to change it.”

I'm not sure what the "distinguishing themselves in society" thing has to do with anything -- my reaction to most of that book was basically, "You're just figuring out at age 16 that most of the world is phonies? Didn't the rest of us realize that somewhere around age 8?" I don't recall anywhere that Holden was actually trying to change society -- he was just complaining about it.

One scene that I particularly remember (not sure why this scene stuck in my head) was when Holden visits his little sister's school, and he sees "fuck" written on the wall, and he imagines some pervert going around corrupting kids by writing "fuck" on elementary school walls. My immediate reaction was that obviously some elementary school kid had written that, and Holden had a hopelessly romanticized view of childhood if he didn't realize that. Was that scene supposed to be read differently?

I don't know...I did like Holden, but like is different from "think is right about everything," right? Because, as a guy, like as my neighbor or something, I think I'd *like* Mike Huckabee. But as a politician, his view of America would probably make me wake up screaming.

Maybe the reaction to Holden is different now cause any asshole with a web connection can rip him off in their "I hate phonies," blog, that what must have seemed daring to the first people to read it is what seems like has become the national tone. Or at least, the conservatism and conformity now comes with an overlay of "We know you're too smart to be pitched to,"

that what must have seemed daring to the first people to read it is what seems like has become the national tone.

And I think erika nails it.

I am a little older than you, Hil, and I took Holden to be a sort of James Dean Rebel without a Cause anti-hero and I did like him. As I grew older, he began to annoy me, but my first impression was one of identifying with him (even though we could hardly have less in common). I am not sure that this is what Salinger meant to do, however, and I think his vision might have been closer to what you were feeling.

Of course, I also really liked Heathcliff.

And I have to agree with erika as well.

Yeah. It's like, I can see why Catcher made such a stir when it was first released, but it's unfair to expect kids now (who are perfectly aware that the world is full of phonies) to find Holden refreshing or groundbreaking. Plenty of books that kids will probably have already read by the time they're handed CitR were really strongly influenced by it, so I can totally understand kids who are told "this is an archtypical teenage figure who you will relate to" responding with "huh?"

If the things we were supposed to be agreeing with were that people are fake, and adults frequently don't know best, and people act in their own best interest, well, I got all that from Judy Blume and Beverley Cleary. This article seems to be expecting kids today to have the same emotional reaction to the book as kids in the early fifties had, but that's impossible, because kids today are approaching the world totally differently -- teenagers are expected to be cynical, and Holden almost seems like a wide-eyed innocent.

Thank you, Anne. Yeah, everybody's a wiseass who puts their sexploits on a webpage and names their band for the irony and...I'm not surprised they read that and think "What?" Oh, yeah, I was initially all about Heathcliff/Cathy once. And I guess there is a tiny part of me that still likes it as Buffy/ Spike or Tommy/Janet.ETA: And when I read "Catcher..." I halfway expected something else, due to the fact that many notable serial killers reported being enamored of it.

I am a little older than you, Hil, and I took Holden to be a sort of James Dean Rebel without a Cause anti-hero and I did like him.

Rebel Without a Cause was actually the other thing I was thinking of in stuff that made up that early-fifties teenage dynamic. I think that, among my kids-of-hippies cohort, there were a lot of times that we wished the world would be a little less real, and I felt a lot of "You don't know what you're asking for -- you really don't want it" when the kids in Rebel wanted their parents to talk about their emotions. (My other major impression from watching Rebel was "Whoa, someone's been spending WAY too much time with the Freud.")

With all of this stuff, I can get it from a historical perspective, but it's not anything that I can really relate to, and that article was just annoying me with things like this:

The culture is also more competitive. These days, teenagers seem more interested in getting into Harvard than in flunking out of Pencey Prep. Young people, with their compulsive text-messaging and hyperactive pop culture metabolism, are more enchanted by wide-eyed, quidditch-playing Harry Potter of Hogwarts than by the smirking manager of Pencey’s fencing team (who was lame enough to lose the team’s equipment on the subway, after all). Today’s pop culture heroes, it seems, are the nerds who conquer the world — like Harry — not the beautiful losers who reject it.

It's not that we don't love the losers who reject the world. It's that to many of us, Holden is the world we want to reject. Him hiring a prostitute didn't seem daring to me, it just seemed like all the political scandals that I'd been hearing about my entire life. Or like the causes of the divorces of half my friends' parents. In other words, it seemed like the adult world of my teenage years, and I couldn't get why someone who was running away from the world would want to be a part of that.