Cosmic’s Comments (group member since Jan 17, 2014)

Cosmic’s comments from the Breaking The Code To The Catcher In The Rye group.

I want to re-read The Catcher, this time not trying to prove that the Catcher was written about WW2. I want to read Thr Catcher and discuss every place that references something to do with WW2 or something in the book. This is a book discussion for people wjho have already read the book. Probably read the book multiple times with new eyes.

Looking for references to
Puns
Idoms
Other places in the book
Historical facts
Movies
Books

Another words this is our opportunity to let Salinger teach us. We don't have to settle with a feeble education we can get one from a master who went to the ivy league Valley Forge Academy.

Remember too that Salinger was versed in classical literature. That he probably read and studied in both latin and Greek.

In Greek each word means one thing, just like in law. That's why we have The Blacks Law Dictionary so we can all speak and understand what is being said in court. At least lawyers can.

So feel free to discuss the first page of the red paper back edition of The Catcher.

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holden

"Holden, formally known as General Motors Holden, is an Australian automobile importer and a former automobile manufacturer "

Every car except one mentioned in The Catcher is a GM car.

The one his brother, DB.

http://eoddata.com/stocklist/NYSE/D.htm

Who drove a Jaguar. A little English job. LOL.

Churchill, Hitler and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World

Think i am reading to much into this book don't you?
But Salinger sets this up in the first sentence, when he says this isn't a David Copperfield kind of story. (Which is why i can't understand why everyone interprets it as an teenage angst. He tells you he is not writing a biography.) But if you read the first page in David Copperfield you find out about Holden Caulfield. And you may believe, as i do that the whole angst that everyone always talks about, (which to me has always reminded me of the Emperor's New Clothes fairytale) is really a veil to hide what Salinger knew about the orchestration of WW2.

"Ducks"<\b>

one GM machine you may not have seen the first time you read The Catcher :

https://www.military.com/veteran-jobs...

Jeffrey wrote: "could take or leave the violence. The People Hunting Hat and the swearing...that's gloss. That's Salinger painting a portrait of the rebellious teenager, necessary only for getting his message across and nothing more...."

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...


The People Hunting Hat ...
That section made sense to me. After seeing this book in light of the two wars and references to classics or classic films, music etc. The literary reference here is Bambi

If you have only seen the movie and never read the book you have no idea what Bambi is about.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bambi...
"With World War II looming, Max Schuster aided the Jewish Salten's flight from Nazi Germany and helped introduce him, and Bambi, to Walt Disney Productions.[4] Sidney Franklin, a producer and director at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, purchased the film rights in 1933, initially desiring to make a live-action adaptation of the work.[5] Deciding such a film would be too difficult to make, he sold the rights to Walt Disney in April 1937 in hopes of it being adapted into an animated film instead. Disney began working on the film immediately, intending it to be the company's second feature-length animated film and his first to be based on a specific, recent work.[32]

The original novel, written for an adult audience, was considered too "grim" and "somber" for the young audience Disney was targeting, and with the work required to adapt the novel, Disney put production on hold while it worked on several other works."

Bambi was "hugely popular" after its publication (1923 in English in 1929.),[17] becoming a "book-of-the-month" selection and selling 650,000 copies in the United States by 1942.[18] However, it was subsequently banned in Nazi Germany in 1936 as "political allegory on the treatment of Jews in Europe."[17] Many copies of the novel were burned, making original first editions rare and difficult to find.

How did Felix Salten know how the Jews were going to be treated when he wrote the book? Does it foreshadow the exodus to Palestine?

So why does Holden wear this hat and claim that it is a people shooting hat. Also all through the book he has the hat one way, as a catcher for baseball and the other way as a people shooting hat.

Hmm...
In light of WW2...

Madeline,
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

When i first read this book i was hugely disappointed. How could this be a "classic". I nearly chunked it in the garbage.

I changed my mind when a teenager i asked said he would read it again. I thought i must have missed something. I slogged through the book again. Right at the end there is a carousel that is playing the song"Smoke Gets In Your Eyes". If you are not familiar with this song i invite you to listen to it. It is not a happy song.

In fact it was recorded at Abby Road during the war to play to the Germans at the end of the war.

Salinger had a rough assignment during the war! I think that The Catcher in the Rye is an allegory to tell us about War and Power.

Their is so much in The Catcher that it took Salinger 10 years to write it.

Hint, the first paragraph mentionsDavid Copperfield David Copperfield. Read the first page of that book and you will learn something about Holden Caulfield!

Now investigate little further. Read about the history of Holden. A car factory in Australia. Why were they tooling up to make war machines in 1931, way before Hitler came to power.

Oh yeah, who bought the Holden factory. Interesting that every car mentioned in The Catcher is by this car manufacturer, except one. Can you remember which one and what country that car was from.

There are references to books and movies in The Catcher. You must read and watch them all if you are going to piece the "code" together. Why did Salinger have to write a book about ww1 and WW2 (and there is even some references to the civil war) in code?

Because it was a popular war and the victors get to write the history, but Salinger saw a different side to war. Truth is short change in war.

What is also interesting is that Salinger went to Poland for his family business interest before the war. What was he doing?

Read The 39 Steps
Pheobe watched the movie 10 times. Both the movie and the book are reference in The Catcher (like how he got a good goodbye)

Or just for fun read Romeo and Juliet from Holden's point of view. Reason everything through the filter of WW1 and WW2.

But the most frustrating thing was the amount of time he spent talking about ducks. Give me a break. Went through the whole book looking for an explanation....
Then i Google ed

WW2 ducks

Go ahead read about it....who made them. Starting to see the point of the book? Brilliant!

I often write threads about why i love this book. I thought i would start a thread here with some of the comments that i have left:

Phoebe

I believe that Pheobe is a literary reference to the short story The Lost Pheobe by Theodore Dreiser.

Pheobe represents:
The Lost Generation is the generation that came of age during World War I. Demographers William Strauss and Neil Howe outlined their Strauss–Howe generational theory using 1883–1900 as birth years for this generation. The term was coined by Gertrude Stein and popularized by Ernest Hemingway, who used it as one of two contrasting epigraphs for his novel The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway credits the phrase to Gertrude Stein, who was then his mentor and patron.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_...

In The Catcher in the Rye we have Holden (a archetype of the GM corporation) searching for Pheobe. He looks for her in the natural History museum (or in history). I always thought Phoebe was someone that was feeble. Or the gullible masses. Obviously Phoebe didn't get the same advantages that a private school like Pencey Prep gave to the boys. There would be no hurdles that would be easily jumped over. No connections made that would glide Phoebe. She would be destined to a Dead Beat Horse. On the wrong side of the argument.

But even though I believed this i couldn't find the literary tie to who Phoebe was till this week. Not only did Phoebe become personal but so did the title The Catcher in the Rye.

Holden says that he wants to be a hero, in a rye field, saving children from going over the cliff.

By the time Salinger has invented Holden many Phoebe(s) have already gone to war and perished. And by the time he writes The Catcher in the Rye we have already seen WW2 and have begun a cold war with Russia. Maybe even the Korean war?

But today i read The Lost Phoebe. It is a short story. And in this story have found the archetype of Pheobe.

Just think how the cohesiveness of Europe was changed by these two wars? Think of the families and Men and the women and children. Who benefited? GM did. DB did. America did. Wall street did. Bankers like the Bush's family did.

Is corruption new to American politic. No. But exposing it is dangerous business. I think this is why Salinger was a recluse.

So in The Lost Pheobe we not only have a dead Phoebe but also a cliff. Is the dead Phoebe those that died in WW1. Did twenty years later create the condition for "Like father like son"...recipe?

In The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us about America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny the authors discuss what makes generations behave the way they do.

I was not interested in war before i read The Catcher In The Rye.

So in thinking more about The Catcher and The Lost Phoebe. Holden or GM doesn't want to save children, he wants to use them before they go over the cliff. The society that was between the wars was somewhat insane. They were part of the roaring twenties trying to escape the insanity of war. Band they were the ones that raised the next generation to go to war.

Hope is not a strategy! But too often this is what our politicians and the United Nations hold out for us. And like a siren song we listen and are driven, yes driven by design, over the cliff.

I am also reading How Britain Initiated both World Wars . This is interesting because from Salinger saying that DB (Deschutes Bank) was driving a Jaguar (a British car) and living in Hollywood.

If you have been following all the Fake News that has been permeating our media then you can believe that our history has also been tampered with. Has been adulterated and tweaked especially so we will think and respond in a particular way.

Tonight i am reading Pinocchio.

Pinocchio is going to school. His father sells his coat so he can buy Pinocchio a spelling book. On his way to school he is attracted to a puppet show. To get in the show it cost 2 pence.

Do you see any connection here between Pinocchio and Pencey Prep?

In the Oxford introduction to Ulysses:

It is probably time to attempt the formulation of a rule about Ulysses, a rule which emerges as the logical conclusion of Joyce’s having drawn Larbaud’s attention simultaneously to two different (both independently verifiable) aspects of the book. The rule: A salient, if not the quintessential, characteristic of Ulysses is that it is allotropic. 25 That is , it is capable of existing, and indeed does exist, in at least two distinct, and distinctively different, forms at one and the same time: in this case, ‘distilled essence of novel’ and ‘extravagant, symbolically supersaturated anti-novel’.

This is also how i see The Catcher in the Rye.

The Catcher in the Rye starts out in a school called Pency Prep. Someone on this discussion board noted the word Pencey as a reference to Pence or money. I have heard John Taylor Gatto say that education is big business! It is how we train people to become consumers. Not good cunsumers either, but debtors, as testimony to the student loan crisis.

But i was talking about school with a mother who said that her child was damaged by school. That his self esteem was damaged through testing his weaknesses rather than focusing on his strengths. Sye said that he was brainwashed into believing that he needs the paper from The Great Wizard of State that says he has brains.

I thought about my own paradigm that was conditioned school, that is that if you done get good grades you won't make it in life. If you don't measure up to this school standard somehow you will be defective for life.

Even though there are plenty of examples of people having dropped out of school and making it another way we still want to believe our captors. I say captors because most children wouldn't go to school willingly. If school was a job they would quit and find something better to do with their time. But school is an institution that controls thought.

So i was thinking about the relationship we have with school when we get out and discover that it isn't the real world nor did it prepare us for the real world ajd yet we perpetrate this onto the next generation.

And the Stockholm Syndrome came to mind!

What do you think?

Why do we support a form of education that waste time making kids think about things in a chaotic and confusing system. Especially when YouTube and Google can do a much better job.

In the movie The 39 Steps we have a character that has been hypnotized.
In the book:
Operation Mind Control
He discusses, in the chapter, Without Knowledge Or Consent, the work of:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg...

In the early 40's Estabrooks outlined a plan and tested it for how the military could use mind control for military purposes.

DB - Deutsche Bank Sued For Running An "International Criminal Organization" In Italian Court

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05...

Idyom: bet on the wrong horse
bet on the wrong horse
1. To support a person or thing that ultimately fails. I truly believed our candidate would win this election, but it looks like I bet on the wrong horse. I know you're confident about the success of this product, I'm just worried you might be betting on the wrong horse.
2. To anticipate some future event incorrectly. When I was a kid, I thought by the time I grew up we'd have walking, talking robots doing everything for us. Looks like I bet on the wrong horse.

http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/b...

Going to Pency Prep hedged your bet to be on a winning hores. Compare that to the horse Phoebe picked.

I heard this idiom being used in connection to those that believed Hilary was going to win the presidential race. They netted on the wrong candidate.

Thirty Nine (Steps)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/39_(n...

History
The number of signers to the United States Constitution, out of 55 members of the Philadelphia Convention delegates

The traditional number of times citizens of Ancient Rome hit their slaves when beating them, referred to as "Forty save one"

The duration, in nanoseconds, of the nuclear reaction in the largest nuclear explosion ever performed (Tsar bomb)

The number of Scud missiles which Iraq fired at Israel during the Gulf War in 1991

Holden used to smoke. I think he probably these cigarettes:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky...

Maybe we have a clue, in the hat, that there is a mystery in The Catcher in the Rye. There has been a murder committed, and Salinger, by way of Holden's narrative reveals the crime and criminals. Because Holden is wearing:

"The most famous wearer of a deerstalker is undoubtedly the fictional character Sherlock Holmes, who is popularly depicted favouring this style of cap. Holmes is never actually described as wearing a deerstalker by name in Arthur Conan Doyle's stories, though. However, most notably in "The Adventure of Silver Blaze," the narrator, Doctor Watson, describes him as wearing "his ear-flapped travelling cap", and in "The Boscombe Valley Mystery", as wearing a "close-fitting cloth cap". As the deerstalker is the most typical cap of the period matching both descriptions, it is not surprising that the original illustrations for the stories by Sidney Paget in Great Britain, and Frederic Dorr Steele in the United States, along with other illustrators of the period, depicted Holmes as a "deerstalker man", which then became the popular perception of him.

A great photo of Holmes in deerstalker hat:
http://bigthink.com/book-of-the-month...

I was actually studying the Jaguar automobile company.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagua...

It was started by
Reginald Walter Maudslay
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regin...

He started the:
Standard Motor Company
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand...
In 1903, putting up as a public company in 1914, right before WW1.

"In 1914 Standard became a public company."

"First World War
During the First World War the company produced more than 1000 aircraft, including the Royal Aircraft Factory B.E.12, Royal Aircraft Factory R.E.8, Sopwith Pup and Bristol F.2-B in a new works at Canley that opened on 1 July 1916. Canley would subsequently become the main centre of operations.[4] Other war materials produced included shells, mobile workshops for the Royal Engineers, and trench mortars."


Maudslay married Susan Gwendolen, née Herbert, on 30 January 1908; the couple had two sons and a daughter. Little is known of his private life, but "he acquired the reputation of a country gentleman and was fond of inspecting the shop floor wearing a deerstalker hat and matching overcoat." Contemporaries described him as "a gentlemanly engineer of the old school who found it difficult to adjust his ideas to the post-1918 industry".[5] He died in Marylebone, London, on 14 December 1934 after a short illness.[1]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deers...

This was the first time i have come across someone else wearing a "deer hunting hat." As Akley put it.

Do you have something to add to this?

I am reading Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph

Written in 1922

In the first chapter he writes:

Pray God that men reading the story will not, for love of the glamour of strangeness, go out to prostitute themselves and their talents in serving another race. A man who gives himself to be a possession of aliens leads a Yahoo life, having bartered his soul to a brute-master. He is not of them. He may stand against them, persuade himself of a mission, batter and twist them into something which they, of their own accord, would not have been. Then he is exploiting his old environment to press them out of theirs. Or, after my model, he may imitate them so well that they spuriously imitate him back again. Then he is giving away his own environment: pretending to theirs; and pretences are hollow, worthless things. In neither case does he do a thing of himself, nor a thing so clean as to be his own (without thought of conversion), letting them take what action or reaction they please from the silent example.

I am putting this book on my list to read next year:

Chasing Gold: The Incredible Story of How the Nazis Stole Europe's Bullion

Seems to me that GOLD may have been the fish!

Hitler's Madman

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitle...

The beginning of this film is a poem by

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edna_...

During the first world war Millay had been a dedicated and active pacifist; however, from 1940 she supported the Allied Forces, writing in celebration of the war effort and later working with Writers' War Board to create propaganda, including poetry.[25] Her reputation in poetry circles was damaged by her war work. Merle Rubin noted: "She seems to have caught more flak from the literary critics for supporting democracy than Ezra Pound did for championing fascism."[26] In The New York Times, Millay mourned the Czechoslovak city of Lidice, the site of a Nazi massacre:

The whole world holds in its arms today
The murdered village of Lidice,
Like the murdered body of a little child.[4]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write...

The Writers' War Board was the main domestic propaganda organization in the United States during World War II. Privately organized and run, it coordinated American writers with government and quasi-government agencies that needed written work to help win the war. It was established in 1942 by author Rex Stout at the request of the United States Department of the Treasury.


It is interesting that she was working for the Treasury Dept.


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite...