Tracking the ever-elusive Great American Novel

[jbor at bigpond.com]

Yeah, that was my intuition too. After confirming that was what he 
meant by his comment, Henry asked offlist for terms so I suggested that 
there might be a transcript or webcast, or that someone else might have 
heard the interview or heard a lecture or read an article where she 
repeated the comments. Seems not, but really, it was a sucker bet all 
along. Toni Morrison's not the ignorant one.

Most astonishing and alarming was the automatic assumption that 
Morrison (an African-American woman) must have been either "stoned" or 
"ignorant", let alone that she thought that the Venus de Milo was 
sculpted without arms, rather than even considering the (obvious, to my 
mind) possibility that the listener had misheard or misunderstood the 
point she was making. (Whether or not one agrees with her on that point 
is a different matter.)

best

On 23/05/2006:

> I haven't found anything along those lines yet msyelf,
> nor do I much exopect to, given that, whatever the
> comment was, it was made on a radio show, so ...
>
> But perhaps she was indeed not tlaking about the
> statue as it was created, but, rather, as it's come
> down to, not to mentione come to be fetishized by, us
> ...
>
> --- jbor at bigpond.com wrote:
>
>> Just waiting to hear back from Henry on the friendly
>> wager I suggested ($50 donation to waste) about
>> whether or not Toni Morrison really was "ignorant"
>> of the fact that the Venus de Milo statue originally
>> had arms.
>
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