SLSL Intro, Class/Race- "8 Mile"

[Elainemmbell at aol.com]

What a delightfully curious reference point!  As for disingenuity in Intro, 
perhaps a meaningful line from Eminem's soundtrack hit, "Lose Yourself" will 
shed rocknrolhiphop light on high literature: "This is no movie/no Mekhi 
Phifer/This is my life..."  Well is it or is it not a movie?  And of course 
he is (a) Mekhi Phifer, and his life IS a movie.  Whatever the level of 
wordsmithing may be, whatever the accumulated class or lack thereof, any 
narrator narrates false after the fact of being read--AND PAID FOR--by tens 
of thousands of reader/listeners.  Once the dollars fall into the pockets of 
the creator, original class/race/intellectual differences begin to fade 
quietly into the vast, benign equality of money.  Which entity trumps both 
Race and Class.  Perhaps the $52.4 million opening weekend of 8 Mile cannot 
be rivaled by Pynchon's initial sales of...well, anything...but if you 
consider PhD theses, graduate school term papers, journal articles, and us to 
be the intellectual equivalent of coin, then P and his literary kin (and I 
don't think that includes Kerouac) are also Mekhi Phifer onne way or another.



Elaine M.M. Bell, Writer
(860) 523-9225
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