Flitty
I was seized by the need to reread Catcher, which I do every five or ten years, and fortunately I had a chance yesterday. My flight to San Diego to see the Morris Louis show at SDMOCA (thanks for the wonderful tour, Kathi; what a treat to see so many "Veils"--impossible to imagine, they are so big and complex and beautiful) was delayed for two hours and the airport bookstore, nicely stocked by a local independent, Books, Inc., had one copy, all I needed.
Every time I reread Catcher, I'm struck by something I hadn't noticed before. This time it was a word I had forgotten, "flit," which the Urban Dictionary calls "a 50s slang word for a homosexual. Largely fallen into disuse, yet popularized by Salinger's book."
Holden first uses "flitty" as a commonplace insult with other boys in the dorm. In New York, he wakes up on his former teacher's couch (he had retreated there in the middle of the night and had been taken in) to find the man "sort of petting me or patting me on the goddam head....That kind of stuff's happened to me about twenty times since I was a kid. I can't stand it."
The next day, having fled-- and slept out the night in Grand Central Station--Holden reconsiders: "maybe I was wrong about thinking he was making a flitty pass at me. I wondered if maybe he just liked to pat guys on the head when they're asleep. I mean how can you tell about that stuff for sure? You can't....I mean I started thinking that even if he was a flit he certainly'd been very nice to me...."
Meanwhile, am I the only one to feel that Catcher is our version of Ulysses?
Every time I reread Catcher, I'm struck by something I hadn't noticed before. This time it was a word I had forgotten, "flit," which the Urban Dictionary calls "a 50s slang word for a homosexual. Largely fallen into disuse, yet popularized by Salinger's book."
Holden first uses "flitty" as a commonplace insult with other boys in the dorm. In New York, he wakes up on his former teacher's couch (he had retreated there in the middle of the night and had been taken in) to find the man "sort of petting me or patting me on the goddam head....That kind of stuff's happened to me about twenty times since I was a kid. I can't stand it."
The next day, having fled-- and slept out the night in Grand Central Station--Holden reconsiders: "maybe I was wrong about thinking he was making a flitty pass at me. I wondered if maybe he just liked to pat guys on the head when they're asleep. I mean how can you tell about that stuff for sure? You can't....I mean I started thinking that even if he was a flit he certainly'd been very nice to me...."
Meanwhile, am I the only one to feel that Catcher is our version of Ulysses?
posted by Howard Junker at 7:57 AM
3 Comments:
Hmmm...I don't think I packed it with me since I moved for college to now. I'm visiting my folks tomorrow and I think I'll go try to find my copy (in a bedroom where the nightstand is still decorated with a stuffed pink unicorn) and see if I "get it" any differently than 15-20 (!) years ago.
Flit is go lightly. Butterflies flit, homosexually.
The Hood Company
If you want to make Ulysses a MUCH lesser book, and Catcher a much, much, much greater book, you might have a slight comparison.
Or, if you want to examine both as male-exclusive interior journey texts, you could sure do that. As always, the boy's clubs win. For Catcher, yes, for sure. For Ulysses, well, there you might have a good solid conversation or two.
BUT if you're talking about writing, and language, and the risks of language, and the enormous inventive journey of Ulysses across the entire landscape of language/time/occassion/event/human condition and with a female sexuality alive there as well. . . . .
No contest.
so what was that you were saying again about Catcher? That Americans are governed by a puerile young men aesthetic and so writing about THAT makes the great novel?
So here's another version:
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. Ever notice George Bush's codpiece on his flyer-boy suit when he announced four years ago today that the Irag mission was "Mission Accomplished"?
In those terms, you'd have a case for Catcher.
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