It's like falling in love all over again...

Brendan McKennedy (suburbantourist@hotmail.com)
Wed, 25 Mar 1998 21:54:52 -0800 (PST)

I just had an interesting experience today--and since it happened to 
*me*, everyone else must of course be interested in it as well.

I'm a student tutor in the Writing Center at my cute little college here 
in Northern Virginia--although here we're not called tutors, but 
something very nonthreatening like "peer writing collaborator", or 
something, because we subscribe to the Socratic method of tutoring, as 
opposed to the "Storehouse" method.

ANYWAY--a guy came in today for some help on a reader response to 
"Catcher", and it was amazing.  Of course I'm not supposed to deal with 
the content of the students' writing, only the technical aspects, but I 
found ways around it.  He was very broad in his opinions, and instead of 
sitting in silence while he combed through the text, haplessly looking 
for concrete examples, I acted as sort of a living text a la Fareheit 
451.  It was amazing to look at his views, however much trouble he was 
having articulating them.  We've discussed on this list before that we'd 
all like to go back and read Salinger's writing again for the first 
time, and this was sort of a crude vicarious experience of that nature.  
I was so happy at his assessment of Holden--he thought Holden was a sad, 
depressed, pessimistic hypocrite, and related that to his own 
experiences in high school.  It was a very refreshing First View of 
Holden, since I and everyone I've known personally read "Catcher" in 
high school and related to him and made him something of a hero.  Only 
in the past couple of years have I come to regard Holden as less of an 
avatar than a just very troubled young man.  

I don't have anything terribly wise to say about this; just thought it 
might be an appropriate OB Salinger, as you say, on a list that has 
recently--although not for the worse, as far as I'm concerned--shown a 
deficit of Salinger experiences.

Hope this post finds you all well.
Thanks for reading.

Brendan

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