Monday, February 15, 2010

Holden Caulfield - distressed hipster, first ever rockstar?


This is an image I stole from the internet


It's been awhile since I was in high school, hence it's been a bit since I read Catcher in the Rye. But since Salinger peaced out recently, I've been enjoying reading the inspired analysis that has cropped up.

A lot of what I've recently been hashing out in my own work is figuring out at what point sincerity should enter poetry, and the best way to display it. I live in a world where hipsters roam the streets with reckless abandon, doubting sincerity then doubting doubting sincerity, and then wondering if it's more sincere to doubt sincerity in the first, and if they should go back and do what they used to do. And if that's not interesting and daunting enough, add the fact that hipsters are a faceless movement which nobody claims to be apart of, yet everyone has a clear image in their head of hipsters, what they do, and what they look like roaming the streets with reckless abandon (damn vampires.)

Maybe ideological social movements should only happen if the participants of the movement aren't self-aware of what they look like all the time.

Anyhoosies, Holden Caulfield plays into this somewhere, where was it...oh yes. As a sort of proto-hipster, and as the Guardian calls him "the original rock star." Perhaps he was the first prominent voice to hash out the fogginess of teenage angst, and since we've marched forward more uncertainly. Yet, though uncertain, angsty teens and "colleges" (they're getting thrown into this group under than name) have a ridiculous amount of communication ability, and are incredibly influential to social norms and expectations. Are the confused-angsters heading the pack?
(maybe. maybe not.)
(that being what it is, I still maintain my point that middle schoolers run the internet, and invent every single internet meme, and single-handedly write every definition on Urban Dictionary.)

Here's a link to the Guardian article, which if anything, is a fun read: Click that shit. It spends more time discussing Caulfield's influence on rock music than I did.

Oh, and The Onion makes a salient point as usual.


Now, as Iain Marshall literally just pointed out "Salinger died, like, forever ago." Which in internet years is a good point.
So I'm sorry about the untimeliness of this post.

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