On Jul 21, 2011, at 11:54 AM, 123hop at comcast.net wrote:
> I reread the book recently and liked it more than I thought I would. It's hard to like Holden, but on the other hand, he is having a nervous breakdown. And this is happening because he has recently witnessed two deaths, that of his beloved younger sister and that of a colleague who was thrown out of a window....and both deaths were met with complete silence. Part of the phonyness he complains about is this grownup silence that wants to gloss over anything that is actually important and chooses comfort and self interest over everything.
This point (comfort and self-interest) is one that jumped out of Cornell West's opening plenary speech when I listened to it last night. It was a point that he made in the first few minutes, and one that I thought might have been partly responsible for the 'hissy fit' that Carrol commented on yestereve. I thought that it might have made some members of the audience uncomfortable.
But I haven't gone back into the speech a second time to find the references to Avakian and Newton, to determine what it was that Carrol saw as the 'core' of the speech - overlooked by lbo commenters. If anything, I would have said that 'solidarity' was the prominent theme.