Bookends ...

First edition cover

Yours truly reads a lot as you, my loyal readers know, but one book, it seems, everybody's read, but not me, is Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, a 1st person viewpoint from a preppy dealing with adolescence and angst to the nth degree. Well, in 2024, I finally have and Catcher brings back memories as a preppy who did the deed for four years in the early 60's in an environment identical to the one Holden Caufield dealt with in the 50's as my school, which will remain nameless and forever locked in time akin to the 50's, was a rather perverse monastery filled with the exact same characters described in the book. Like Holden, complaining as art form by me was the genre of the day, bemoaning how tough it was even though, in both our cases, being coddled and insulated from the real world, insured it was an absurd rant to the nth degree. 

Bringing back memories is not a bad thing as long as one's not obsessed by them. Robert E.

“I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot. ”

“I like it when somebody gets excited about something. It's nice.”

“I am always saying "Glad to've met you" to somebody I'm not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.”

“Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.”

“When you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.”

Theatrical release poster by Richard Amsel

A few days ago, I again watched The Last Picture Show, a haunting and powerful film depicting the coming of age of adolescents not insulated from the world, presents, in exquisite detail, the vagaries and tragedies of life experienced by teens living in a dying town in rural Texas during the 50s, circumstances totally opposite the plush lives of characters residing in Catcher. The thing most captivating is how director Peter Bogdanovich weaves together the complex story lines from Larry McMurtry's book and give them heart rendering life through a cast for the ages, something most rare in this age of frivolous self aggrandizement issuing forth from sources like X and Facebook. 

To this rube, The Last Picture Show is one of the truly great films without question. 

“Is growin' up always miserable?" Sonny asked. "Nobody seems to enjoy it much."

"Oh, it ain't necessarily misearble," Sam replied. "About eighty percent of the time, I guess."

They were silent again, Sam the Lion thinking of the lovely, spritely girl he had once led into the water, right there, where they were sitting.

"We ought to go to a real fishin' tank next year," Sam said finally. "It don't do to think about things like that too much. If she were here now I'd probably be crazy again in about five minutes. Ain't that ridiculous?"

A half-hour later, when they had gathered up the gear and were on the way to town, he answered his own question. "It ain't really, " he said. "Being crazy about a woman like her's always the right thing to do. Being a decrepit old bag of bones is what's ridiculous.”

“Why hell yes, Joe Bob! A cripple can always get himself a wooden leg, or a glass eye, or a metal hook for a hand, or any of that mess -- but there ain't no known substitute for a big dick. I guess you is out of luck!”

“Sometimes Sonny felt like he was the only human creature in the town. It was a bad feeling, and it usually came on him in the mornings early, when the streets were completely empty, the way they were one Saturday morning in late November.”

“He had just begun to realize how hard it was to get from day to day if one felt hopeless.”