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Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Tomorrow morning I'm off to Rutgers, the first of three visits in the next three weeks to colleges that assigned The Last Town on Earth to their incoming freshmen as their common summer read. I'm big with 18 year-olds, apparently. No, more accurately: I'm homework with 18 year-olds, which is such a weird thing. Here's hoping they liked the book and didn't feel the way I felt when I had to slog through The Caine Mutiny oh so many summers ago.
Seriously, it is hugely flattering to have the book read so widely--a neighborhood book club is cool enough, but getting a few hundred college students in one fell swoop is unbelievably wonderful. It should be interesting to hear what they thought of the book, what unique perspectives they bring to the table. On the one hand, relatively little time has passed since the book was published, but on the other hand, I wrote the first draft in 2003-2004, when current freshmen were in the seventh grade. They've grown up in a vastly different world than the one I stumbled through in my teen years, whether you're talking technology or global politics.
I am of course expecting to be flooded with nostalgia for my own college years the moment I find myself surrounded by institutional buildings and leafy Quads. I'm one of those rare writers these days who doesn't teach at a college and did not attend grad school, so it's been 13 years since I spent much time on a college campus.
Let's see, what was happening in 1992: Grunge rock, Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Rage Against the Machine, T-shirts worn three sizes too big, flannel flannel flannel, second-hand clothing, my awesome job working at a senior-citizen-run thrift store off-campus. Liberal politics ascendant, a Democrat winning a presidential election for the first time since I was two, and I volunteered during Christmas break for Clinton's inauguration in DC, catching mono soon thereafter and losing about 20 pounds in three weeks. Buying my first CD player, and those obnoxiously large cardboard boxes that music stores sold CDs in as a shop-lifting deterrant (little did we know just how easy to steal music would soon become!). The college film series and violent movies like Menace II Society and Reservoir Dogs by some new guy named Quentin, growing my hair long as Joshua Tree-era Bono, discovering that I didn't like creative writing class or even English classes very much.
Was that really 17 years ago?
link to this | File:
Seriously, it is hugely flattering to have the book read so widely--a neighborhood book club is cool enough, but getting a few hundred college students in one fell swoop is unbelievably wonderful. It should be interesting to hear what they thought of the book, what unique perspectives they bring to the table. On the one hand, relatively little time has passed since the book was published, but on the other hand, I wrote the first draft in 2003-2004, when current freshmen were in the seventh grade. They've grown up in a vastly different world than the one I stumbled through in my teen years, whether you're talking technology or global politics.
I am of course expecting to be flooded with nostalgia for my own college years the moment I find myself surrounded by institutional buildings and leafy Quads. I'm one of those rare writers these days who doesn't teach at a college and did not attend grad school, so it's been 13 years since I spent much time on a college campus.
Let's see, what was happening in 1992: Grunge rock, Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Rage Against the Machine, T-shirts worn three sizes too big, flannel flannel flannel, second-hand clothing, my awesome job working at a senior-citizen-run thrift store off-campus. Liberal politics ascendant, a Democrat winning a presidential election for the first time since I was two, and I volunteered during Christmas break for Clinton's inauguration in DC, catching mono soon thereafter and losing about 20 pounds in three weeks. Buying my first CD player, and those obnoxiously large cardboard boxes that music stores sold CDs in as a shop-lifting deterrant (little did we know just how easy to steal music would soon become!). The college film series and violent movies like Menace II Society and Reservoir Dogs by some new guy named Quentin, growing my hair long as Joshua Tree-era Bono, discovering that I didn't like creative writing class or even English classes very much.
Was that really 17 years ago?
link to this | File: