Slightest, but important, social tidbit re The Crying of Lot 49

[Mark Kohut]

C'mon, Jochen.
This is my memory and judgment on the Plist.
 All can stop reading me if they don't like my "accusations"--what a word.

next time I'll signal when I'm ruining someone's reputation.

On Mon, Jan 25, 2016 at 7:44 AM, Jochen Stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>
wrote:

> That seems a bit cheap, Mark. If you make accusations like that you have
> to have book, page and line, and then you can decide if the character in
> question is racist or not or just flippant.
>
> By the way, I'm no fan either. And I most certainly don't know the book
> you are talking about.
>
> (That would be a great PH.D. subject: The Racial Slur in American Novels
> of the Sixties and Seventies) (Hi & Lo!)
>
> 2016-01-25 12:17 GMT+01:00 Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>:
>
>> p. 98 [Oedipa].."riding among an exhausted busful of Negroes"...
>>
>> When did the word 'Negro' stop being used by writers, novelists
>> in America at least, as THE overall descriptive word?
>>
>> Remember *Crying* was published in 1966, some part copyrighted
>> in 65, before the Black Power movement, before all that came
>> right before and then right after the period *Inherent Vice* is set.
>>
>> Don't know? I do. Starting and quickly happening from 1968 on,
>> African-American
>> and black began to be the descriptive word choice. Different conceptual
>> uses but 'black' preferred usually since that was the self-identity
>> preferred,
>> ---see Black Power--- as argued for by those so demeaned.
>>
>>
>> Jump cut:
>> Richard Ford. Anyone a fan? I'm not. There are multiple reasons but here
>> is one.
>> I was reading a later work, in the 2000's probably, certainly the
>> 90s...and
>> it is set long after 1968, in the recent past of the time if I remember
>> aright and
>> his character, a white guy of course, says Negro! "Negro!'. And there is
>> no reason
>> to believe that such backward 'values' are part of his character. It may
>> even
>> have been an elided authorial narrator, dunno, has melted in details cause
>> I haven't retold it.
>>
>> This novel, which i could look up, was, I think, the first after the
>> industry news-making
>> split with the legendary editor who helped make him a success. No one
>> talks.
>> Full of myself, I often wonder whether it was over such as that
>> anachronistic
>> use of the word.
>>
>> Richard Ford was born in Mississippi.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
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