"The Catcher in the Rye"- Almost a review

I just finished reading “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D.Salinger. It was a parting gift from my juniors when I passed out from college. And now, for the review, or rather, my response to the novel:

If you think reading ahead would spoil the book for you, don’t worry. There’s nothing to be spoilt! It’s as bad a novel as can be. It was the first novel I’ve finished in over a year. I thought my lack of reading was responsible for the searing headaches I used to get after reading a few pages of this novel at night. But now I’m sure the culprit was just the novel, and not lack of novel-reading. As I lumbered my way to the final few pages and the long-anticipated climax- and I was a fool to believe that there was a climax, the 'carousel incident' being a strict non-event- my mind drifted to another death-inducing bore (Inducing sleep is a noble thing to do- ask my mum! Saas-bahu serials have gone a step further by inducing thoughtlessness- that dream of nirvana-seekers; but some books unleash a boredom so ghastly that they might induce death). I’m referring to “The Namesake”. Just as Jhumpa Lahiri had done in her literary sleeping pill, J.D.Salinger suffocated me with the insignificant travels and travails of his protagonist.

Holden, the protagonist, is an aimless teenager who gets kicked out of every good school his parents get him into. Fed up with the phonies in his school, the teachers included, he roams around in his hometown New York on his own to keep his parents from finding out that he was thrown out. Our anti-hero utters the word ‘goddam’ with an irritatingly high frequency- I couldn’t find a goddam sentence where he didn’t swear. He calls nearly everyone a phony, notwithstanding the fact that he’s the biggest phony of all- a shameless liar who's pretentious and manipulative. Narcissistic, directionless and a major drunkard, Holden’s almost a juvenile Devdas, or is at least on his way to becoming one. Reading those pages was very painful- especially considering that the book I read before this one was Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” and the one I’m reading now is Orhan Pamuk’s “My name is Red”.

They say that “The Catcher in the Rye” is a book about adolescent angst. That, the phony that Holden really is weary about, is ‘adulthood’. Bollocks I say. Good ideas and noble intentions cannot make up for bad writing and the utter insignificance of what’s being described- I would have thrashed this book even if I had read it as an adolescent. Here’s someone who shares my views about this nightmare novel.

But yes, nothing ever goes in vain- this bad little book got me blogging again- reading sure helps me shrug of my laziness to write.

SPAM!

I return to blogging with 'spam'. In the academic environs of IIMA, spam is ubiquitous. It’s not simply the umpteen mails on the institute email id, or the barrage on the internal messenger ‘Dbabble’- there’s a spamming of gyaan, ideas, gossip, and of course, the mind-boggling sights, sounds and smells on campus. Some despise spam (at least the electronic kind), some live for it, while I like it because it makes the place seem alive. Indeed, the spam in my mailbox and on the google group created for the incoming batch at IIMA makes sure that I don’t miss IIMA while I’m on my internship.

Then there’s spam discussing 'spam'. People on Dbabble justify their spam using principles of logic, and post references and links to videos that substantiate their points. And so it was through one such link that I first watched a Monty Python sketch. (For those who are asking what the hell Monty Python is, please find out- you'll thank me for this). And then, last week, I stumbled upon another meaning of ‘spam’ through another spam message on Dbabble.

Spam: Noun
‘a canned meat made largely from pork’, or
‘a trademark used for a canned meat product consisting primarily of chopped pork pressed into a loaf.’

Now, this ‘spam’ stands for "Shoulder Pork and hAM"/"SPiced hAM". Apparently, my fellow intern’s mum makes spam for him sometimes. Haha! That cracked me up when he told me. On further digging, the link between this ‘spam’ and the friendly neighbourhood Dbabble spam became clear. The link is Monty Python! The term spam, as we now use to refer to repeated unsolicited messages, originated from a Monty Python sketch called ‘Spam’. In the sketch, a restaurant serves all its food with lots of spam (the kind that’s eaten), and the waitress repeats the word several times in describing how much spam is in the items. When she does this, a group of Vikings in the corner start a song:
"Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, lovely spam! Wonderful spam!"
Here’s the video.
Now you know…spam leads to more spam!!!

PS: Here’s a history of how the word spam came to be used as it usually is now.