The Flipside History of the United States

I am toying with the idea of writing a version of Howard Zinn’s “The People’s History of the United States.” Professor Zinn was at Boston University when I was there, I was a Humanities Major (the last of 26 thousand students apparently) My BA is in the Humanities Department of BU in 1978, I graduated Magna Cum Laude in “The Impact of the 20th Century on the Arts.”

Sounds like a heady topic. It allowed me to spend my Junior Year Abroad in Rome — studying art and film and plays and other odds and ends. How to enjoy carbonara. “There are a many other things to discover in Rome besides Spaghetti Carbonara” said Dr. Scichlione — the head of the Etruscan museum in Rome, who was teaching a class in the history of the Eternal City.

At Boston University I was able to study 12 tone music, to learn about Kandinsky and the theosophists via a professor who wrote a definitive biography of Mozart, who had also done a translation of Kandinsky’s erotic poetry. Erotic because his poems were all about explosions of color and the thrusting of steeples into the womb of the sky — the explosions of light that he accidentally found one day in his own painting when he walked into a room and saw a “magnificent painting” in his study.

He wondered who had painted it — it was one of his own that fell off the easel, and from that point forward made a point of turning all of his canvases upside down and signing them. I pointed this out to a curator at the Metropolitan, and then two of us stood in front of a bevy of…