Monday, February 01, 2010

if a body meet a body

I haven’t said anything about the death of JD Salinger, who gave us The Catcher in the Rye. It’s practically uncool to like this book, being so conformist, but alas, I love it. I haven’t said anything about his death because, 1) in effect, for our purposes, it’s as if he passed away a long time ago, and 2) I figure lots of people love The Catcher in the Rye their own selves and it’s presumptuous of me to go expounding about it like an enormous selfish baby.
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Anyway, I'm sort of glad they've got the atomic bomb invented. If there's ever another war, I'm going to sit right the hell on top of it. I'll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will. p. 141.
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It’s been snowing like mad here. Lovely, and yet almost like being blessed too much. Not to complain. On the way home it was even snowing inside the tram. It was dark out and I thought it might be a trick of the streetlights or a reflection in the window. I closed my eyes tight and opened them. Closed them again and opened. Nope. It was snowing in the tram. All I had to do was look at my black sleeve and see the snowflakes land and turn to water beads. Somewhere a window or vent was open and it was snowing in the tram, but nobody wanted to acknowledge it, and besides there was a toddler in the next car making a racket and that was kind of distracting.
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People never notice anything. p. 9.
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Over at Good Reads, one of the groups I’m in has a thread on foreign words. For today, mine was the German word “Brustwarze,” which literally means “breast wart.” Translated into English it’s “nipple.”
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I keep making up these sex rules for myself, and then I break them right away. Last year I made a rule that I was going to quit horsing around with girls that, deep down, gave me a pain in the ass. I broke it, though, the same week I made it - the same night, as a matter of fact. p. 63.
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Song of the day: Lived in Bars
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I'm not kidding, some of these very stupid girls can really knock you out on the dance floor. You take a really smart girl, and half the time she’s trying to lead you around the dance floor, or else she’s such a lousy dancer, the best thing to do is stay at the table and just get drunk with her. p. 70.
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I'm taking down the part about my sad review, lest it be misconstrued. I'll leave up the Salinger quote, though.
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I was still sort of crying. I was so damn mad and nervous and all. ‘You’re a dirty moron,’ I said. ‘You’re a stupid chiseling moron, and in about two years you’ll be one of those scraggy guys that come up to you on the street and ask for a dime for coffee. You’ll have snot all over your dirty overcoat, and you’ll be – ‘ Then he smacked me. I didn’t even try to get out of the way or anything. p. 103.
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Another funny thing my Purple Haze brother used to do at 13 or thereabouts was buy two copies of books he really liked. Of course we all rolled our eyes at him, but I have to admit it made sense in a way, and maybe I was a little jealous of what a lunatic he was. The Catcher in the Rye was one of those books, the duplicate copies right next to each other on the shelf.
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“Perhaps you know my son, then, Ernest Morrow? He goes to Pencey.”
“Yes, I do. He’s in my class.”
Her son was doubtless the biggest bastard that ever went to Pency, in the whole crumby history of the school. He was always going down the corridor, after he’d had a shower, snapping his soggy old towel at people’s asses. That’s exactly the kind of guy he was.
“Oh, how nice!” the lady said. But not corny. She was just nice and all. I must tell Ernest we met,” she said. “May I ask your name, dear?”
“Rudolf Schmidt,” I told her.
p. 54

5 comments:

Valerie Loveland said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Valerie Loveland said...

Thanks for the lovely quotes!

I always suspected people who say they don't like The Cather in the Rye actually secretly like it.

SarahJane said...

I think some people just get tired of the hype, which I can understand. But still, "The Cathcher in the Rye" deserves way more hype than most books.

ron hardy said...

I think I was around 18 or 19 when I first read The Catheter in the Rye. I had a library copy that I left on the coffee table after laughing hysterically over it for a couple of hours. My Dad picked up the book, inventoried the profanity, and promptly burned it in the fireplace. I told him he missed the point. But the continental drift was underway. He paid the library for it but also scolded them for carrying such a book as The Cacther in the Rye. You would have been two. The year was 1965.

BJeronimo said...

I am struck how, in reading some of the passages here, how much any of them could have been written by Sarah. Perhaps she just needs a red hunting cap and 186 pages will come to us.

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