“We die,” Morrison closed her Nobel Prize address. “That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” https://t.co/ZkIgJOChdO
— Laura Rozen (@lrozen) August 6, 2019
One of my favorite interviews with Toni Morrison. The interviewer asked her when she was going to “substantially” write about white people. Her response? “You can’t understand how powerfully racist that question is, can you?” pic.twitter.com/WFhNMgx7xv
— Paul McCallion (@OrangePaulp) August 6, 2019
The Washington Post collected memories of Morrison from “eight black female writers & thinkers” — including a best-selling author named Michelle Obama:
… For me and for so many others, Toni Morrison was that first crack in the levee — the one who freed the truth about black lives, sending it rushing out into the world. She showed us the beauty in being our full selves, the necessity of embracing our complications and contradictions. And she didn’t just give us permission to share our own stories; she underlined our responsibility to do so. She showed how incomplete the world’s narrative was without ours in it.
It’s a thread running through “Beloved” and “Sula” and “The Bluest Eye” and all of her work — that black stories, particularly the stories of black women and black girls, are worthy of examination and celebration. Again and again, she was unapologetic about that fact, deliberate in proving that our stories are rich and deep and largely unexplored. We belong, she showed us, not just in paperback books but in textbooks, not just in a publishing house but in the White House. And on their own, our stories are more than enough to inspire a Nobel laureate…
"All of that art-for-art’s-sake stuff is BS.
All good art is political! There is none that isn’t.
And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, 'We love the status quo.’”
—Toni Morrison, via @annfriedman’s always-wonderful newsletter
— laura olin (@lauraolin) August 9, 2019
I wrote about how everything I am as a writer begins and ends with Toni Morrison who shepherded a generation of black writers by showing us that we are rich places to write from. https://t.co/amVSn7cgZG
— roxane gay (@rgay) August 9, 2019
It was good to reread this slowly last night & sit with the incomprehensible weight and power of what Toni Morrison did for this country all on her own, with the force of her artistry and genius. We were lucky to be able to read her, and we still are https://t.co/KznOj5ctTI
— Jia Tolentino (@jiatolentino) August 7, 2019
Toni Morrison was a national treasure, as good a storyteller, as captivating, in person as she was on the page. Her writing was a beautiful, meaningful challenge to our conscience and our moral imagination. What a gift to breathe the same air as her, if only for a while. pic.twitter.com/JG7Jgu4p9t
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) August 6, 2019
Toni Morrison's legacy will have enduring significance for all who walk our campus: https://t.co/QDCM01whlZ pic.twitter.com/cnuAXEdMNS
— Princeton University (@Princeton) August 6, 2019
Frankensteinbeck
Woah, wasn’t expecting a book thread. I’ll mention it here as well, then! Two days ago I finished my latest novel, You Can Be A Cyborg When You’re Older. I figured teenagers today need to know how ridiculous 80s cyberpunk was. I just finished today sending it to what prooooobably will be all the beta readers? I’ve only gotten two alpha reader responses back on the ending, and those were highly idiosyncratic. What do I do with one person repeating how stunned she was that I made the tacky bikini an important non-sexual plot point?
laura
@Frankensteinbeck: has she heard about the bechdel test?
Re Toni Morrison: a towering intellect. Her works will endure and amplified by those she inspires to tell stories that demand to be told.
NotMax
Topically related, a fondly remembered book from way back when which still sticks with me is Cane (first published in 1923) by the African-American poet and novelist Jean Toomer. Posthumous kudos to the high school English teacher who included it in the curriculum.
Brachiator
Can someone remind me what tribute Trump offered to note Morrison’s passing?
James Simonds
@Brachiator: He kept his damn mouth shut.
Spanky
@Brachiator: The absolute best he could do, imo. As far as I can tell, he ignored it.
Doorothy A. Winsor
@Brachiator: I just sacrificed myself and skimmed Trump’s tweets for the last week. I don’t see anything about Morrison. Excuse me now. I have to go apply brain bleach.
Brachiator
@James Simonds:
@Spanky:
I was being snarky about Trump. I doubt that he reads literature, or anything else. Among his many failures, and God knows there are many, he is the champion of dull, ignorant white people who are proudly culturally illiterate.
Frankensteinbeck
@laura:
Passing the bechdel test is noooooot a problem I have, and with this book being 90% female characters with no romantic subplot for the main character, definitely not an issue there. It’s just that my writing style involves tying together threads and details from the whole book together at the end, and she was stunned that the bikini of all things turned out to be more important than ‘Vanity hates how this girl dresses.’
West of the Rockies
@Brachiator:
Would you really want a Trumpian tribute? It would only sully matters.
NotMax
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre just beginning on TCM. Writer of the original novel, B. Traven, was about as mysterious an author as one can be. His novel The Death Ship is a genuinely chilling, if mostly forgotten, mixture of atmosphere, anarchy and dread, IMHO. All the more relevant today as it involves the predicament of the undocumented.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
Ya gotta give him credit, he goes with his few strengths, this being one of the very few, none of which are actually considered strengths by rational people.
AliceBlue
@West of the Rockies: “Tony Morrison? Fantastic guy. The best. I hear he did some great things.”
West of the Rockies
@AliceBlue:
Sounds about right!
And if he attended a service, “Look at this crowd size. They heard I was coming, and it’s crazy–we had to turn people away. Meanwhile, Harris is wandering around by the King Memorial and about, what, a hundred people show up…”
Morrison lived with courage and creativity. Trump is a toxic mold.
O. Felix Culpa
I love how Professor Morrison didn’t take shit from that interviewer. I also love the side-eye and very deliberate sip of water she took before answering the powerfully racist follow-up question.
Ruckus
@AliceBlue:
trump parody?
Doesn’t that give you permeant brain damage?
Miss Bianca
@AliceBlue:
“And he’s being recognized more and more.”
Seriously, that’s the best we could hope for.
Brachiator
@NotMax:
Oddly enough, one of my favorite novels. It saddens me that it has been largely forgotten, as has Toomer, I suppose. I admired the novel for some of its lush language and symbolism. And for its largely sympathetic treatment of women characters.
Up through the early 1970s, I think, although black women had long been represented in poetry and in theatre, black novels seemed to be dominated by male writers, and black women too often were barely present in these works or worse, depicted negatively. It is also amazing and sad, to recall how little this seemed to bother many literature professors or their students.
Cane was not perfect, but was relatively speaking, a blast of fresh air. I think that Toomer may have influenced Ishmael Reed and August Wilson.
I have not read all of Morrison’s work and recently fell out of love with fiction, but I remember how friends and some teachers who loved her work at times had to “justify it” as being worthy of being considered to be literature. It makes me very happy to know that Morrison was honored in her lifetime and didn’t have to be rediscovered long after she had died.
Alice Walker
@Ruckus: Let’s hope not. But it’s kind of scary how that just popped into my head.
prostratedragon
@Doorothy A. Winsor: Ewww. When you find that somehow you just must, the sanitary attributes of specificity can be exploited at this searchable archive of twitter posts.
Mnemosyne
American literature professor and historical novelist Piper Hugeley posted the following list on Facebook on the order in which Morrison’s books should be read for maximum comprehension and effect:
The Bluest Eye
Sula
Jazz
Paradise
Love
Home,
A Mercy.
God Help the Child
Tar Baby
Beloved
THEN
Song of Solomon
Hugeley’s full explanation:
germy
When it was first reported that Morrison had died, i was having a conversation with a neighbor. I was surprised when she brought up the subject. “Her first book came out when she was 40,” she told me. The way she said it made it sound like Morrison had been a middle-aged woman who decided to take up writing.
Although I don’t know the details of Morrison’s life, I suspect it was more likely she was writing her whole life, but it took her until she was 40 to be taken seriously by a book publisher. It’s a tough enough business, but even tougher for a woman of color forty + years ago.
Alice Walker
@Ruckus: Let’s hope not. But it’s kind of scary how quickly that popped into my head.
Mnemosyne
@Frankensteinbeck:
Hey, would you be willing to write a short “Writer Beware” type of article about the slow collapse of your previous publisher and what other writers should watch out for? I could get it shared to RWA via our local chapter’s newsletter. Let me know and I’ll email you — I think I still have your address.
Mnemosyne
@germy:
Around 40 or 50 is when most people start a second career, and Morrison was no exception. One of the linked articles (probably more than one) talks about how she started out as an editor for African-American books and then decided to write her own.
Brachiator
Of course, Morrison nailed an issue that is still roiling literature and pop culture, how some white people and especially some white men, always expect a novel, movie or TV show to be about them, and how they get anxious and actively hostile if they feel excluded. And of course it is just too much to ask them to empathize with or to see themselves as characters who are not white.
Sadly, this informs politics as well. Sullen, resentful white people voted for Trump as a counter-reaction to Obama. These sad fools could never believe that a black man (or white woman, in the case of Hillary) could ever understand them or fully represent them.
Miss Bianca
@Mnemosyne: Oh, great, you had to lay it out in a *list* for me, didn’t you? Now I have no excuse for how shamefully little I’ve read of her work.
chris
@Miss Bianca: Same. *Hangs head, shuffles away.*
List copied, thanks, Mnemosyne.
Ruckus
@Mnemosyne:
I started a second career at 45. And a third career at 57. So right on schedule?
NotMax
@Brachiator
Oddly, computer gaming may have a small hand in changing this as one can, albeit anonymously, play equally well as a character of any gender or shade (and sometimes as different species). Know at least two older guys whose characters in various games are always females, for example.
Brachiator
@germy:
Italian Author Andrea Camilleri, who recently died at age 93, didn’t invent his most famous character until he was in his late 60s.
Talk about writing as a labor of love.
laura
@Frankensteinbeck: I meant it for the person that asked…. You, obviously have passed the test ?
Frankensteinbeck
@Mnemosyne:
I would. I put a post up for one of the Sunday Writers Threads here about it, but I could certainly write something from scratch. People need to know.
ola azul
Request for info: Anyone know how or why vids that have the white circle with the blue circle with the white arrow will not play onna (my) phone? Do you need some app or is it some platform I don’t have possibly?
(I REALLY wanna see the look on Toni Morrison’s faces when she fields then responds to the “substantially” white question. Loves me some Toni Morrison; member as a northwoods hick attending UuvM and taking a AA Lit. course being introduced to her and Zora and others; be an understatement to say it changed the tragectory of my existence inna profoundly beneficial way.)
Gotta go get f/g resin so, if a solution is proffered, tx. and will — as they sez on the radio — “take my answer off the air”.
debbie
@Brachiator:
Doubtless Ivanka has sprinkled her penthouse’s bookshelves with tasteful editions. //
Toni Morrison crafted language as well as a human being possibly could.
rikyrah
As a teenager Black girl, reading The Bluest Eye was a life changing experience.???
Toni Morrison was BLACK…
in every sense of the word…..and, her writing, like Baldwin before her, told me that there was nothing wrong with being BLACK.
RIP??
rikyrah
I am watching the Aretha Franklin documentary.
I am at Amazing Grace. Rewound it for the third time.
You can literally SEE ?? the people catching the Holy Ghost while listening to her. I feel like I AM catching it in my tv room.
It is worth buying the movie just to see this song.???????????
Citizen Alan
@Miss Bianca:
I would guess that Fat Bastard doesn’t know the difference between Toni Morrison and Tony Robinson. Just that one of them makes good bank off infomercials for gullible rubes.
debbie
@Mnemosyne:
I’m old enough I read them in the order they were published. Worked perfectly fine for me. ;)
If you can find it, her two-part interview with Dick Cavett in the early 1980s is worth watching, if only to hear her talking about moving from editing others’ words to writing her own.
germy
(Robert Benchley)
Jay
Brachiator
I highly recommend Meghna Chakrabarti’s Interview with David Blight, author of the recent Frederick Douglass biography, on the NPR program On Point. The host clearly knows a lot about Douglass and reads some well chosen excerpts from his autobiographies. I think this encourages Blight bring his A game to the interview, and to try to give the audience a vivid sense of Douglass’ life and times. And Blight’s discussion of Douglass’ Fourth of July speech and its impact on its audience is really amazing.
On Point is available as a podcast and also probably at the sites for NPR and WBUR.
I get the impression that this interview was a rebroadcast, and may be available here. You can listen, download or read the transcript.
https://amp.wbur.org/onpoint/2019/07/24/frederick-douglass-biography-david-blight
Ruckus
@rikyrah:
I’m an old white fart and I got that from Baldwin. And from 2 men I worked with as a teen. Both of those men are heroes to me. I have 4 personal heroes. Two black men, one black woman, and one white girl who had polio. Those four people showed me that living is the entire point. Not status, not money, not religion. Living. Born, live, die. That’s what there is. How you do the middle part, that’s the important part. We all do that middle part different. We all have a different amount of time to do it in. Do the middle part with hate and you aren’t worth the piss that should infest your grave.
MisterForkbeard
@NotMax: I usually play as a gray-haired dude in his late 40s (I’m in my 30s) or as a lady in lots of games. Nit really sure why – I think I like the designs better.
That said, I won’t play as female in MMOs or games that require lots of social interaction. I’ve had entirely too many people creeping on me because they think I’m a girl. Gives me a lot of respect for what women go through in real life. let alone games.
Jay
dexwood
@AliceBlue: @Alice Walker:
Two nyms, one commentor? If you are the writer, we are honored. If you are not the writer, welcome, don’t think I’ve seen you here before..
I met you in 1989 when you spoke in Albuquerque. Thanks for the signed 1st editions.
Anne Laurie
@rikyrah: Didn’t want to insert myself into the top post… but I got an early copy of BELOVED (it was a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection, so I could afford to get my own hardback). A co-worker noticed me reading it at lunch, and asked if she could borrow it when I was finished. From her comments, she fully appreciated it. Eventually, she asked if I’d mind waiting while her husband — a Black hair stylist — read it, too. When she finally returned the book, her summary of his opinion: “He said he didn’t know that a book could be good.” Not ‘that good’, or ‘so good’, just… good.
apocalipstick
@rikyrah: What a great documentary, and I love that her band was Cornell Dupree, Chuck Rainey, and Bernard Purdie. Gave me chills.
apocalipstick
Octavia Butler gets relegated to the science fiction ghetto, but she was a fabulous writer. I thought Kindred made a great pairing with Beloved.
Betty
There is a great documentary out on Toni Morrison that I was lucky enough to see the week before she passed. It was at an indie theatre so not sure how easy it is to find.
Anne Laurie
@apocalipstick: You’re not alone!
While Butler died tragically young, she *did* get a MacArthur “genius grant”, so she had that satisfaction.
(Tiny personal brag: Back in the mid-1980s, I got Butler invited to a Midwestern academic conference on ‘Black Women Writers & the African Diaspora’. At the conference, I saw her several times, but never had the nerve to approach her & tell her how much her books meant to me. Partially because she seemed rather magisterially displeased by *something* at the conference… but later, interviewed about her Xenogensis trilogy, she talked about how much she appreciated being one among so many varied strong Black women writers, and how the experience had helped her overcome a serious block in her writing. It was a great relief to realize she was just shy around crowds — like me!)
apocalipstick
@Anne Laurie: The Parables books are outstanding. Bloodchild is a devastating story. I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever read, right up there with The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.
apocalipstick
@apocalipstick: I also appreciated her forthrightness about her hermit tendencies.
Ruckus
@Alice Walker:
@dexwood:
If as dexwood asks, you are the author, I am honored and hope that it doesn’t cause brain damage. If you aren’t the author, my answer is still the same.
Ruckus
@Alice Walker:
Also, if you are the writer, you remind me very much of someone my sister knew. She would be 76 now if she’d made it this far. I just wonder if we’ve met before. It is after all a small world.
susanna
@James Simonds: And how has the MSM handled this non-observance? I don’t engage any prominent msms regularly. Also ignorant re Twitter, Facebook, etc.