Sleep Tight, Ya Morons!...revised and revisited.

Sorry about that last post, guys. I was doing what I usually resort to when I'm frustrated with writing... limitless rants that often merge into anarchist, anti-authoritative speeches. I realized this was unacceptable under educational standards. Right now I'll make an attempt at gathering my ideas and presenting them like prissy, rich people bouquets. In the good way, of course.

What I did come to at the conclusion of the previous post was that the topic of coming of age is horrendously difficult, if not impossible, to write about or represent in another other medium without coming off as generalizational (real word? somebody spot me on this one) or corny without offending someone or minimizing the experience of maturity. Because it's the kind of issue that every person thats ever been born has faced, or is going to face, or is facing, yet is different for everyone, makes it hard to express in something that will be mentally consumed by the public.

I've realized that the reason why I admire JD Salinger's writing style and storytelling skills so much is that he can pull of the teenage life story very well in an honest way that doesn't make the reader feel uncomfortable, bored or confused. In fact, it's the perfect coming of age story. The endearing hero, Holden Caulfield, is an easily distracted and hopelessly cynical sixteen-year old who is kicked out of his boarding school and then goes to New York.

Holden is such an interesting character yet I'm finding it incredibly hard to find things to say about him. Like me, he goes on rants in the middle of talking about something else. I can connect to him in lots of ways, yet there's no meaningful conclusion I can come to.

I realize that it takes a true artist and a helluva lot of thinking to create a piece on the coming of age experience without "trying to hard" and inevitably failing. True artists like JD Salinger, Harper Lee and SE Hinton, who have written some of the most heartbreaking coming of age stories, ones that are so impossibly good that I can't wrap my mind around the fact that they were produced by humans, not created by some god. Well, that might be exaggerating a bit.

The essence of coming of age is rebellion, formless actions and personalities, independence and freedom. How can those things be conformed into a rectangle of writing without becoming paradoxical? I'm too unseasoned a writer to possess the art of writing about a topic this free without ruining its philosophies and lessons.

Holden Caulfield's personality is unfamiliar to me. He's passionate, silly, and deeply opinionated, and doesn't glamourize his life story, nor does he dumb it down. He tells it as it is, or maybe a little skewed with some of his opinions of all those morons and phonies. But even his style of talking shows the essence of maturity - he doesn't conform to the formal dialogue and actions of the people around him.

Well, this is turning out to be another failed post. What I'm trying to get through with these disconnected paragraphs is that Holden Caulfield is the personification of coming of age because he tells it like it is. JD Salinger captured the quirks of that period of life through an imperfect but friendly character, who makes us see the truth of teenage life.

Sleep Tight, Ya Morons!

before you read... theres grammar mistakes in this entry, there's also some things you may not understand because they are unpolished gems from the mind of a futterman, and i ramble, but please give it a try and try to see what i mean. it's not a four-paragraph thing, and it's not a thousand pages long, but i think i made my point, if you can pick it out of the mess.

what am i thinking about from the catcher in the rye? i love the book, thats obvious, but how the hell am i supposed to write a decent entry about it when its main character is an easily distracted little person who goes off on long,. drawn out monologues generously seasoned with goddamn's and phonies? where is there to go? i just read and follow the story as its told, and maybe here and there there's some bits of wisdom sprouting, but my mental capacity's too small to come up with anything deep concerning the coming of age experience of holden caulfield. maybe someone would say the moment he left pencey, his private school, before he was told, was the moment he transformed into an adult. i hardly thik this is evidence, as the kid was kicked out for his bad grades and had just spent the night complaining about his roommates. but wait...maybe thats it! ok, so holden spends the very first part of the book talking to stuffy teachers and whining about his school life, but the minute he leaves, he complains more...ok, so thats not it either. maybe coming of age is realizing that you can still complain and by cynical and act like a child while maintaining your maturity. everybody wants holden to be this big man who gets good grades, and people look down on him because he goes on mindless rants that actually aren't mindless, and they're all so condescending because they wont give him drinks at bars and he knows vain men who spend their time horsing around with no-g00d girls and combing their hair in mirrors, and everyone just tells him to be like them, but maybe their views of adulthood are all wrong! maybe that's the reason why holden's so cynical, because everything is just operating incorrectly and he doesn't even know it! its just instincts! and when he calls people morons, it's not because he thinks they're stupid, but maybe because he has this internal mechanism that tells him that everyone who misunderstands him is wrong, and he just uses the only vocabulary he knows, which is heavily dosed with "morons. "

i cant do this. i cannot come to a logical, deep conclusion. what do people expect from me! i'm not freud, or any of those other guys with high iq's, right? when i try so hard to create a good piece of writing that will get me a decent grade all i get is this, some lame excuse for a "thoughtful" entry. how can i write about holden when he doesn't want to be written about? how can i write about rebellion and coming of age when they just want to be left alone to fester in the stomachs of youth? how can i compress it into a rectangle when all it wants to do is be a formless mess on the floor? JD Salinger ended up a recluse and wouldnt let them make a movie based on the book. The Catcher in The Rye was instantly popular but did he care? does holden care? Do rebels need to be publicized in glamour shots and gushing reviews?

so this, i believe, is the philosophy of holden caulfield, and salinger, and everyone who comes of age... it's not something that should be glamourized. holden's rants are seamless and formless and go in different directions, but he is the true image of the coming of age experience. what i'm trying to say is that the only true way you can capture rebellion in a novel is to make it squishy... passionate... long and drawn our with maybe a few or more hints of madness thrown in.