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

WILL HOCHMAN (hochman@uscolo.edu)
Mon, 30 Mar 1998 10:22:49 -0700 (MST) 

Brendan, I am familiar with students haveing probs with holden and ask
them to write a letter of advice to holden to help them see what they see
as wrong as more than just finger pointing...I also direct a writing
center and support your decision to use your content knowledge--at my
school, we work with the writer, not simply the text...will 

On Wed, 25 Mar 1998, Brendan McKennedy wrote:

> 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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