From a novel in the form of a college application essay: “Characterize, in essay form, your high school experience. You may use additional sheets of paper as needed.”
Daniel Pinkwater, The Education of Robert Nifkin (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998).
Young Nifkin is applying to St. Leon’s College, Parnassus on Hudson, New York. Get it? That’s a pseudonym for the college Pinkwater attended.
This passage brings back to me the smell of my elementary school’s basement, a smell still there when I visited the school in 1987 and 1998. As I wrote in a 2018 post, “I always thought of the smell as years of spilled soup.”
I am the only person to have borrowed The Education of Robert Nifkin from my university library — twice in seventeen years. Sigh.
Other Pinkwater posts
“Nice, heavy notebooks” :
“Pineapples don’t have sleeves” :
The Snark Theater
[The college? Think Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson. President since 1975: Leon Botstein.]
Friday, August 30, 2024
Smells
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comments: 3
Oh, I read that on your recommendation and loved it! Very helpful perpsective as I enter my first full year working in a high school.
Funny---yesterday was my first day back and when I went into the staff lounge I thought, "Why does it still smell like curry, 10 weeks later?"
I’m glad you found it — he’s not always found in libraries. The Snarkout books are great too for kids’-eye depictions to “school.”
Come to think of it, I had to retrieve the novel from the public library stacks. But at least they hadn’t tossed it.
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