Salinger and Zinn

A few months ago Patrick Swazye died. As a girl I thought Dirty Dancing was about the best movie I'd ever seen, I loved the dancing, I was totally oblivious to the whole abortion thing, but the scene where they practice in the lake- wow. It was sad to hear about Patrick Swazye's death but yesterday two people died who, at least for me, changed me in more significant ways. Last week Sylvain helped me translate my CV into French and under "interests" he had written "reading" and he asked me to include an author that was important to me- I told him Salinger. I dont remember when I first read Salinger but it was sometime in high school, a book I wished had been on our Language Arts reading list because I felt like as much as I loved reading Catcher in the Rye, there were probably things I was missing, depth and nuance that needed more voices to suss the meaning out. Later when I moved to New York I was working as a reading and writing tutor in a class that was reading Catcher. I had reread the book several times in the interim, but I sat back and soaked it all up reconsidering so many details of the story. His short stories were probably my favorite but surely Holden Caufield was my favorite literary character.

Howard Zinn's A People's History I read the summer of 2000 when I did my internship in New York. I remember reading it across the street from my apartment in Union Square in the evening when I could hear rats scuttling back and forth behind me. A People's History was a brick, but it reoriented my ideas about the history I was born out of. At the time I felt like all history textbooks should be burned and replaced by a personal copy of this book. It felt like a bible for me- this was far more important then any Adam and Eve fairytale, this book had real significance in giving me perspective on how we live today and what matters. Zinn was teaching at UW Madison and I felt jealous of all my friends that were there. I lent that book to my friend Ben and he never gave it back hinting that I might want to buy another copy, I wanted to, but it was 20 dollars in paperback and at the time, that seemed like a ton of money to re-spend on a book I'd already read. Naomi Klein has probably usurped Zinn on my bookshelf, but I don't think I ever could have gotten to Naomi if it hadn't been for Zinn.

I recommend the NYT's article about Zinn and of course go out and get a copy of the People's History.