Issue 165

News: Two in One today.
1) Salinger RIP.
Two days ago, a great man died. His name was J.D. Salinger, and I can safely say that his novel, The Catcher in the Rye, changed my life. When I first picked up the book at the age of thirteen, I was being bullied at my grade school, and it had a particularly profound effect on me in at least two major ways; the first was that it got me back into reading fiction and enjoying it. Admittedly, it would be my reading Ulysses in Freshman Year that would get me to do so regularly, but really, it was this book that had the most profound effect on me (because for once, I actually had a book whose protagonist I could relate to.) The second, equally major, thing was that it effectively hardened me. I suppose that in my view, my Schopenhauer-esque personality, preferring the company of books to people, is ultimately a result of my attempt to cope with the abuse at school catalyzed by my reading of this book. I don't think it would be too much of a stretch to admit that if not for Catcher, I probably might not be here writing to you today. I read his other works, and these were less interesting to me, but, to be fair, Catcher was a hard act to follow, and it's no wonder he didn't publish any other novels after it. After leaving Slaughterhouse-five (my name for the school that abused me), Catcher still continued to have a major influence on my writing habits. In fact, my first major project as a writer was an attempt at an ultra-faithful screenplay of Catcher in the Rye, one which I'm sure will never be filmed. And, in fact, I have long considered living similarly to the reclusive J.D., except that I would be more open to publishing than J.D. was in the last 45 years of his life. And now, he's gone. Ave atque vale, Jerry.
2) Thoughts on Teenage pregnancy.
This was going to be the sole News section of today's blog until the death of Salinger. Earlier in the week, a Lifetime movie of the week aired that dealt with the Gloucester pregnancy pact. I didn't watch most of it, but I did watch a short section where the principal was talking with some concerned mother, and claimed that they probably wouldn't have gotten pregnant if they had just been taught abstinence. Here's my two cents; every sex ed course worth its salt teaches that abstinence before marriage is the best option, and even Planned Parenthood's website has a section on abstinence which states, in essence that it is the best way, except that in this day and age, it is not exactly realistic. Well, I suppose that she likely meant that they should teach it only, but the fact is that programs that only teach abstinence have almost uniformly been shown to be ineffective, and there's a very simple explanation; humans are wired to have sex in their teenage years. We are not supposed to wait until we are 26 to use our sexual organs, that was simply a byproduct of the industrial revolution and compulsory education. Priests aren't even abstinent these days, so why does anybody think hormonally-charged teenagers will be? In the end, there is only one way we can truly expect our society's teens to be abstinent before marriage, and I will use Loretta Lynn to illustrate it; by the age that most of her peers were graduating high school, she was a mother of four. I want you to think about how that makes you feel. If you really want to find a way to make teens wait until marriage before sex, family lives like Loretta's would have to be considered not something to pity, but to emulate. In Short: If you want to create a society in which you can reasonably expect teens to save sex for marriage, be willing to choose between that and a modern education.

Film Reviews of the Day: Two more in one; One good, the other bad.
Death Note. I really don't know how to explain this one to the uninitiated; a teenage boy gets the power over life and death and becomes the killer known as Kira, who kills criminals with heart attacks. After this, he gets involved in an increasingly elaborate game of Cat and Mouse with a reclusive detective about his age that goes on for years and gets increasingly ridiculous. I recently got the film version, and I must admit, that it is probably a very well-done distillation of the first few episodes of the series. I also got the sequel which covers the rest, but I haven't seen it yet, and I'm sure it does the same for the rest of the series. Sure, the dub gets pretty transparent at points, but it is still good.
The Business of Being Born. Not since Red Zone Cuba has ninety minutes dragged on for so long. I just watched this movie for my Human Development Class, and it was so poorly done that it actually made me consider transferring. I know that the subject of birth is not one that interests me, but really, that's not why I consider it bad. The big thing which ruined the experience of watching the film for me is that it doesn't seem to know where to end. In other documentaries, we know what the climaxes could be and where to end. In a movie about birth, like this, it could end with a woman giving birth, but as it turned out, the movie has several sequences where we see women (including the executive producer, Ricki Lake) giving birth at home. This could have potentially have been done well, by, for instance, intercutting the births that the women go through, but no, they just show the births happening in sequence. In a movie that pushes an agenda, the end could be where some of the advocates of the view talk about how a change is going to come and how they'll be proven right, but this happens several times and the movie doesn't end. It seems that most of the second half of the documentary is comprised of the endings of what could have been more interesting documentaries on birth, and especially in the last few minutes when it includes increasingly pointless scenes and keeps fading to black after each one, the movie makes you want to shout at it to end, and even in class, at one point, I actually said out loud "oh, come on!" Another thing I found odd was that there was no acknowledgement of the other side. I mean, even in movies like Fahrenheit 9/11 or Expelled, the filmmakers at least had the courtesy to include interviews with opponents, or at least to have them represented with stock footage. This movie has none of that. It seems to latch on to the idea that Europe has the highest infant mortality rates in the developed world because they all do home births (and it can't just be that America generally has some of the poorest health care in the developed world)In the end, it actually made me want to watch Expelled again. Sure, it is painful to see Ben Stein sacrificing all credibility and acting like an idiot, but at least it was sort of stylised well, which is something I can't say for this movie.

Quote: "Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."
_____________J.D. Salinger

Link of the Day: Watchmen: The High School Years