Re: GR translation: working off whiteman’s penance on his sin

[Mike Jing]

Monte is probably right, as usual.  The possessive did throw me off, but
this makes the most sense.

Thanks to everyone who responded.


On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 10:38 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Syntactically, I don't see any reasonable reading except that it's
> "shoeshine boy Malcolm" -- not his white customers -- who is working off
> the penance that they impose.
>
> On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 10:02 AM, kelber at mindspring.com <
> kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>
>> Could the whiteman's penance be the few coins they sling Malcolm as a tip
>> for shining their shoes? Nothing like slipping "the less fortunate" some
>> pocket change to feel absolved of all one's privilege.
>>
>> LK
>>
>>
>> Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> V688.6-19, P701.27-40   Well there’s one place where Shit ‘n’ Shinola do
>> come together, and that’s in the men’s toilet at the Roseland Ballroom, the
>> place Slothrop departed from on his trip down the toilet, as revealed in
>> the St. Veronica Papers (preserved, mysteriously, from that hospital’s
>> great holocaust). Shit, now, is the color white folks are afraid of. Shit
>> is the presence of death, not some abstract-arty character with a scythe
>> but the stiff and rotting corpse itself inside the whiteman’s warm and
>> private own asshole, which is getting pretty intimate. That’s what that
>> white toilet’s for. You see many brown toilets? Nope, toilet’s the color of
>> gravestones, classical columns of mausoleums, that white porcelain’s the
>> very emblem of Odorless and Official Death. Shinola shoeshine polish
>> happens to be the color of Shit. Shoeshine boy Malcolm’s in the toilet
>> slappin’ on the Shinola, working off whiteman’s penance on his sin of being
>> born the color of Shit ‘n’ Shinola.
>>
>> First, I just want to make sure I got the literal meaning right. So the
>> whitemen have done penance for his (Malcolm’s) sin, and now Malcolm is
>> paying them back for it.  Is that correct?
>>
>> Second, it's obviously sarcasm, but what could the whiteman’s penance
>> possibly be?
>>
>
>
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