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

[Mark Kohut]

Better: "next time I'll try to remember to signal when I am ruining
someone's reputation especially my own".

On Mon, Jan 25, 2016 at 8:12 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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