Sometimes I ask myself, how did I come to like mopey British pop songs from the Smiths and New Order? Was it because I was already mopey, or did liking those songs make me mopey? Same question for Vonnegut, Lynch, Murakami, and all my literary, musical, cinematic heroes. How did I become this hard-boiled, nostalgic, agnostic, sarcastic, cynical, sentimental, irreverent, sensitive, hopelessly romantic, and infinitely sad person?
J.D. Salinger passed away this week. I first read Catcher In The Rye in high school, probably tenth grade. It was the singularly most influential novel of my youth. Like Holden Caulfield, I too wanted to just walk away from all the phoniness of the world around me. That feeling has regrettably never left me. The world is still phoney, and I still want to hit ctrl-alt-del all the time. I don't know why, but I can always relate to fictitious people more than the real people I know. Again, maybe it's not so much that I can relate to them, but that I just want to be like them, so I adopt these world-weary views from these brooding characters. Inside my head, I am Holden Caulfield, I am Toru Watanable, I am Chow Mo Wan. In this way, you can say J.D. Salinger has ruined me for life.
Another important thing about reading Salinger at that age is that it made me think I could write. And it made me want to be a writer. Some teacher, somewhere in college, had commented on the Salinger-feel of my writing. (Just like someone in film class had said my Super-8 was very Lynchian.) It's not copying; it's influence. You see, writers like James Joyce and Dostoevsky made writing seem impossible, whereas Salinger made writing deceptively effortless. It's just putting your stream-of-consciousness on paper; it's just arranging words til they mean something. A teenager can do that, I thought. So I was never afraid of writing. Of course, I know a little better now, but I still don't think it's such a mystery. It's not Mount Everest for me. It's a craft you need to hone. A craft that you don't need fancy tools for, and a craft that lets you express yourself when you can't talk about it with real people. In this way, you can say J.D. Salinger has saved my life.
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