Hello Bananafishers
JLiving591@aol.com
Thu, 04 Dec 1997 03:20:19 -0500 (EST)
Here's my letter of introduction: J.D. Salinger (Antonia White, Hemingway,
Waugh,
Pynchon, maybe Scott Spencer and a few dozen others) were the reasons why
I became an English Major. I quickly realized that I had made a
mistake.--you see
I liked the pictures that the books left in my head and the thoughts they
would
start humming there, but I didn't like to disect, analyze, or apply the
words. Anyway I learned to pretend and do well, but I started to dislike
reading whereas
before I would practically eat the words. In the middle of my senior year,
during one particularly grueling Prof.'s class, I (not to use sloppy
metaphors) literally
stopped eating for a while--the thought of ingesting and the digestive noises
that
might thereafter occur in class had me terrified. One day Kurt Vonnegut
walked
into our classroom wearing an old gray suit, a pair of Reeboks circa. 1980
and smoking a "100's" cigarette. He told us that what he felt was the
"best"(sorry)
writer of his generation had been silent for some time, adn that he thought
that
Salinger was coming towards some kind of cosmic answer in his stories. The
sheer audacity of the comment threw me. If a student had suggested this, he
probably would have been bounced from the class. Needless to say, I ate an
entire snickers bar during the discussion. The feeling quickly left, though,
because the day after my Prof., being the oracle that he was, told us that in
100
years people would still remember Hemingway, but nobody would have an inkling
of who Vonnegut was (Vonnegut had made the fatal mistake of saying that
young Hemingway was relieved when the girl died in in love and war.)
---I'm sorry that I subjected everybody to this long and convoluted story,
but I guess
what I'm trying to get accross is that I'm excited that this list exists and
I will eat
many candy bars while I am reading it. Liz.