Jezebel: toni morrison

"'Knowledge Is Bad,' Is The Bible's Message"

Intern Katy — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 11:20:00 EDT

In response to the banning of her novel, Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison helped launch the Free Speech Leadership Council yesterday. Of literacy, she said: "[it is] the route out of any oppression, any limitation." [AP & Mediabistro]

In a new video just up on the NY Times'...

Anna — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 15:30:00 EST

In a new video just up on the NY Times' "Paper Cuts" book blog, editor Sam Tanenhaus talks with Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison about her new book, A Mercy, and President-elect Barack Obama. Morrison compliments Obama's facility as a writer — "the beauty of his language," as she calls it — and ruminates on Obama's electoral success earlier this month. "I am a devoted, rabid supporter of his," she tells Tanenhaus. "This is curious, this moment, partly because... so much has been damaged and partly because old divisions, old divisions have surfaced again, and they're almost just as violent. It's not the majority of what's going on in this country, which is why I think, this election, this movement, this brave, in a sense, it's like a reclamation of the promise of what America believed about itself." [NY Times]

Toni Morrison on her Election Day experience:...

Anna — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 13:20:00 EST

Toni Morrison on her Election Day experience: "I was too anxious and I didn't want to be in anybody's company. But I was totally in the dark when someone called to say he won. My computer crashed and the TV didn't work. This morning I didn't know how tense I was but I felt this relief like something was lifted. Even though I look forward and relish the hard work of the next term, I know we can do it. It made me feel like that phrase Martin Luther King Jr. had said about being to the mountaintop. I could never visualize the metaphor until now." There's more, about her book, Barack Obama as a biracial American, and John Updike... here. [WSJ]

75 Books Every Woman Should Read: The Complete List

Jessica — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 15:20:00 EDT

On Friday we posted a call to help us complete a list of 75 books every woman should read. We started you off with 20 culled from our editors' suggestions, and you guys took the ball and ran with it. A few notes on the compendium of 75 that you helped us compile below. As we said in the original post, most of the extant rosters of must-read classics are full of old white dudes. So our list is going to be mostly women. Which doesn't mean there are not myriad male-written must-reads! A second note: we're aware that "The Lottery" and "A Good Man is Hard to Find" are short stories. We were referring to the eponymous books that contained those stories as well as several others. Finally, we're in no way implying that this is the final word in amazing, rich, edifying books for women, so please refrain from the "OMG I can't believe you morons forgot X," comments, mkay? The alive 75, in no particular order,after the jump!

The Lottery (and Other Stories), Shirley Jackson
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
Excellent Women, Barbara Pym
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Like Life, Lorrie Moore
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
The Delta of Venus, Anais Nin
A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
A Good Man Is Hard To Find (and Other Stories), Flannery O'Connor
The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, Alice Walker
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Fear of Flying, Erica Jong
Earthly Paradise, Colette
Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt
Property, Valerie Martin
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid
The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
Runaway, Alice Munro
The Heart is A Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
You Must Remember This, Joyce Carol Oates
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill
The Liars' Club, Mary Karr
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Betty Smith
And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
Bastard out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison
The Secret History, Donna Tartt
The Little Disturbances of Man, Grace Paley
The Portable Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker
The Group, Mary McCarthy
Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag
In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez
The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck
Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
Three Junes, Julia Glass
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft
Sophie's Choice, William Styron
Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann
Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
The Red Tent, Anita Diamant
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
The Face of War, Martha Gellhorn
My Antonia, Willa Cather
Love In The Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Harsh Voice, Rebecca West
Spending, Mary Gordon
The Lover, Marguerite Duras
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
Tell Me a Riddle, Tillie Olsen
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
Three Lives, Gertrude Stein
Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
Possession, A.S. Byatt

The 75 Books Every Man Should Read [Esquire]

Earlier: 75 Books Every Woman Should Read

75 Books Every Woman Should Read

Jessica — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 16:40:00 EDT

Esquire put up a slideshow of 75 books every man should read, and it is indeed a very good list. However, it's a very good list that's also extremely myopic. It relies way too heavily on the old white dude cannon (particularly the WASP angst end of it) with books by Updike, Cheever, Kingsley and Martin Amis, Hemingway, McPhee, Joyce, Roth, Mailer, and the token Russians. There are only four non-white men on the list (Ellison, Rushdie, Haley, Wright) and just one woman, the incomparable Flannery O'Connor with her classic book of short stories, A Good Man is Hard to Find. The only really offensive choice on the list is Bukowski. I've read Bukowski, and even though he's an old cuss, I like his writing. However, I would never call something so unapologetically misogynistic something men "should" read. Anyway, in light of Esquire's myopia, we decided to curate a list of 20 books every woman should read. You should fill in the other 55 in the comments!

One note about the choices. Of course there are many, many books by men that "should" be read, but just like Esquire's list, most of the extant rosters of must-read classics are full of old white dudes. So our list is going to be mostly women. Anyway, here goes!

The Lottery, Shirley Jackson
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
Excellent Women, Barbara Pym
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Like Life, Lorrie Moore
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
The Delta of Venus, Anais Nin
A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
A Good Man Is Hard To Find, Flannery O'Connor
The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, Alice Walker

Now you go!

75 Books Every Man Should Read [Esquire]

HBO's The Black List Offers Intimate Portraits Of Enigmatic Women

Dodai — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:20:00 EDT

Former New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell teamed up with acclaimed photographer and filmmaker Timothy Greenfield-Sanders on The Black List, a series of "living portraits" conceived by Mitchell as an "answer to the persistent taint that western culture has applied to the word "black.'" (Volume 1 of the series premiered last night.) Mitchell conducted interviews with a diverse collection of people, including Slash, Vernon Jordan, Serena Williams, and Chris Rock. But there were three interviews we especially liked: those with Toni Morrison, Thelma Golden and Suzan Lori-Parks.
It was absolutely fascinating to listen to Toni Morrison speak about why she writes. "Writing for me is the only free place," Ms. Morrison explains. "It's the only place where I'm not doing what somebody else wants or asks or needs. Writing is mine."
As for Thelma Golden, who was the art curator at the Whitney Museum and now heads the Studio Museum in Harlem, she talks about her love of art. "I became a curator at a moment when there hadn't been many black curators," she explains. She also mentions the fact that some people in the art world assume she "works for" Thelma Golden, not that she is Thelma Golden, since she's black. She speaks about the impact Jean-Michel Basquiat had on her, as well as working at the Whitney and the "legacy of exclusion" there. But Ms. Golden is upbeat: She believes that the definition of art in one's home should be "wide."
Suzan Lori-Parks won the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant in 2001, wrote the screenplay for Girl 6 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Topdog/Underdog in 2002. She talks about how many of the people who came to see Topdog/Underdog were young black kids with cell phones who felt like "active participants" in the theater. "We have to mine those riches," she claims.
It's interesting that Volume 1 of this documentary aired the same night that Michelle Obama gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention, where she was supposed to "redefine" what an American black woman is. It's often said that in this culture, a black woman is portrayed as a mammy, a ho/drug addict or a sassy best friend. And that's it. But obviously there are many different types of black women in America, many different types of black experiences. The DNC is planned well in advance; but so is HBO's schedule. Did they pit the two events against each other on purpose?
The Black List [HBO] The Black List HBO Air Date Schedule [HBO]

Toni Morrison would like to clear some stuff...

mcarpentier — Thu, 08 May 2008 12:45:00 EDT

Toni Morrison would like to clear some stuff up about her now-famous anointment of Bill Clinton as the 'first black President'. She says: "I was deploring the way [he] was being treated, vis-à-vis the sex scandal that was surrounding him. I said he was being treated like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp. I have no idea what his real instincts are, in terms of race." Morrison, by the way, is supporting Obama, but because of his "wisdom" and not his race. [Time]

It's A Coup! Barack Wins Over The Kennedys, Toni Morrison, Kills Off Suharto

Moe — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 10:00:01 EST

Here is Barack Obama with renowned ruddy ladykiller Ted Kennedy. Ted is kind of a dick, but so was Suharto, and yet he had his good points too, as Barack learned when he was a little kid and Suharto seized power from the democratically-elected Sukarno in a US-assisted miltary coup and Barack's stepdad, an officer in the Indonesian army, got a nice little raise. For years Suharto grew the economy and the profit margins of Nike at the expense of democracy and the poors until the Asian Financial crisis happened and suddenly everything was being set on fire by mobs of angry future Al Qaeda sympathizers. If anyone is in need of a new era of "change", it's Indonesia, as Barack taught us in The Audacity of Hope. (Also: we found the part of the book where he fellates Reagan! It's all inside!) After the jump, Megan and I discuss what our moms would have thought of Barack's mom, and also, Toni Morrison OMG!

MEGAN: Good morning. Apparently there is so little news that CNN is reporting that occasionally birds fly around together in large groups.
MOE: Soooooo! How was your weekend? Nevermind, because it wasn't as eventful as Barack Obama's! Lessee, a 51% victory in the South Carolina primary, endorsements from Caroline and Ted Kennedy, the death of the US installed military dictator that took control of the government of his childhood home in the wake of Barack's very first coup, and today, an endorsement from Toni "Bill Clinton is the first black president" Morrison.

MEGAN: And, you know, birds are pretty.

MOE: And yeah, you'd think maybe CNN might, I dunno, think of something that happened over the weekend and try to cover it a little more in-depth?
MEGAN: I can literally feel myself getting dumber watching, which is the reason I don't usually watch Fox News.

MOE: Hahaha but you were the one who tipped me off to the Drew Peterson interview the other day? Do you just have a weakness for Shep? Because there are a lot of people with a weakness for Shep.
MEGAN: Honestly, I was just watching because they were the only channel with live pictures of the Monte Carlo burning, and then Shep was like "Up next: an interview with Drew Peterson about his dating contest".

And I like fires and train wrecks equally.
Shep's make-up was fascinating, though.
MOE: Haha it almost always is. Um, sooooo. Can I tell you what I did last night? I broke into the Audacity of Hope for a bit. I found some good bits about Indonesia and the whole bit about Reagan that I'll share with you today! He talks about how after Suharto took over his stepfather got a nicer house and more money to buy Coca cola, etc, cause his father was in the Army. But all that came at a price!
MEGAN: Wow, now I'm totally going to feel obligated not to fall asleep while reading the Hillary bio. Also, please tell me he sorta identifies the whole "military dictator took over and I got more Coke" as a bad thing in restrospect.
MOE: Here's the broad takeaway.

In many ways Indonesia serves as a useful metaphor for the world beyond our borders — a world in which globalization and sectarianism, poverty and plenty, modernity and antiquity constantly collide. Indonesia also provides a handy record of U.S. foreign policy over the past fifty years. In broad outline at least, it's all there; our role in liberating former colonies and creating international institutions to help manage the post-World War II order; our tendency to view nations and conflicts through the prism of the Cold War; our tireless promotion of American-style capitalism and multinational corporations; the tolerance and occasional encouragement of tyranny, corruption, and environmental degradation when it served our interests; our optimism once the Cold War ended that Big Macs and the Internet would lead to the end of historical conflicts; the growing economic power of Asia and the growing resentment of the United States as the world's sole superpower; the realization that in the short term, at least, democratization might lay bare, rather than alleviate, ethnic hatreds and religious divisions — and that the wonders of globalization might also facilitate economic volatility, the spread of pandemics, and terrorism.

MEGAN: Also, everyone's forgotten about East Timor.
MOE: Barack didn't forget about East Timor! But then there's Aceh. I mean, 240 million people. He blames the unchecked corrupt pursuit of GDP growth at all costs for the economic crisis and the economic crisis for the rise of militant Islam, basically, I think. I mean, he doesn't make huge mention of the big "race" problem there, which is that not only is it a Muslim country, but it's a Muslim country with a non-Muslim Chinese minority that has all the money. When the Muslims dominated the Army and the Army dominated the government and the Chinese paid off the government, all that was okay. But, you know, it was fragile.
He also doesn't mention that Indonesia's yet another one of those MUSLIM countries that has already had a FIRST WOMAN PRESIDENT, not that it mattered.
But I will say this: Barack's mom seems like she was pretty awesome.

MEGAN: But was she a minority?
I meant the female President of Indonesia, not Obama's mom

Mostly because I know she wasn't.

MOE: Megawati Sukarnoputri? No, she was Malay
MEGAN: Barack's mom seems like the kind of mom at whose house my mom would be vaguely uncomfortable with me hanging out but would never say.
MOE: Hahaha that's funny. Having lived overseas and known foreign families that weren't, like, "expats" — he didn't have the money to go to the international school — I can totally tell you exactly how my mom would have felt about Barack's mom; she would have thought she was really cool, but really just wished from the bottom of her heart that she'd wear MAKEUP now and then.
MEGAN: My mom would've been more worried about the whole two-kids-two-dads thing, worried that I'd end up slutty or something. Whoops.
MOE: And she would have told me this. "Don't you think Ann would just look so beautiful with a little lipstick? She has such nice bohemian clothes..."
MEGAN: I'm so going to your house without any makeup next time.
MOE: Hahaha well she raised me. She's used to that by now. Every time I actually put on makeup she invariably says, "Hey, you clean up good!" And like, every time. But I think when we were overseas there was something weirdly civilizing, for her, about a little lipstick. It was like Barack and his coca-cola. Or the way my roommate wears heels in the house even though we work at home. OR something, I'm not sure...
MEGAN: My mother didn't let me wear make-up until I was 16 because she saw it on The Cosby Show or something. And, so, I still kind of suck at it.
MOE: I think I'm pretty good at makeup. It's one of my skills. There actually wasn't much to do as a kid in China, so I got good at it early.
Well let me take that back, there was a lot to do, but there was also a lot of free time since there were no, like, soccer teams or ice skating lessons or crap like that. Anyway. Back to Barry.

MEGAN: Right. Barry. Ted's a fan.

MOE: Toni's a fan too. That's the part I can't get over. But here it is. I guess she'll make some speech today maybe? Do you think that's why Obama was so unruffled when they asked him about this at the debate? Uh, and speaking of, did you see the column about how Barry will actually be the country's first Jewish president? On the basis of his intelligence and kvetching wife or something. And the Harvard Law Review.
MEGAN: Bill seems to piss off the women who love him eventually. Also, you know that there's someone in the world that will read that column and think that Obama is really Jewish. Like, the anti-Obama equivalent of Robert Morrow, or just the neo-Nazis that support Ron Paul.

Or any of the people who think, somehow, that Obama really is the Antichrist.
MOE: Oh right! My sister was telling me that she'd actually met someone, about a year ago, who thought Obama was the antichrist. I guess that rumor will have to resurface. Also maybe that he once did drugs or something?
MEGAN: And he was schooled in a madrassa, which is like, totally, a turrist school.
MOE: And he totally has a soft spot for Reagan, which I am going to lay bare for you right now after investing in an ebook of The Audacity of Hope.

But at times, in arguments with some of my friends on the left, I would find myself in the curious position of defending aspects of Reagan's worldview. I didn't understand why, for example, progressives should be less concerned about oppression behind the Iron Curtain than they were about brutality in Chile. I couldn't be persuaded that U.S. multinationals and international terms of trade were single-handedly responsible for poverty around the world; nobody forced corrupt leaders in Third World countries to steal from their people. I might have arguments about the size of Reagan's military buildup, but given the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, staying ahead of the Soviets militarily seemed a sensible thing to do. Pride in our country, respect for our armed services, a healthy appreciation for the dangers beyond our borders, an insistence that there was no easy equivalence between East and West — in all this I had no quarrel with Reagan. And when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, I had to give the old man his due, even if I never gave him my vote.

MOE: To be fair, this follows several pages on everything from ouster of Mossadegh to Grenada, Iran Contra, the Iron Triangle and the Pentagon scandals, Panama, etc. etc.

MEGAN: Wait, corporations aren't responsible for all the poverty in the world? Now I totally have to vote for John Edwards. He knows that corporations are the source of all evil
MOE: Poor Edwards. Did you read the story about how Clinton and Obama are going after his donors? Do you think Barry will ask him to be his running mate?
MEGAN: I can't really see that happening, or him accepting. Although some people are now pushing for him to be AG regardless of whether Hillary or Obama gets the nod. That would be cool.
MOE: Totes! He'd be like the honey voiced, honey haired non nebbishy Sptizer of America.
OH and speaking of Jews did you check Giuliani in Boca over the weekend? He is still around, and he is SO BAD.

He was wearing a yarmulke is why I made uh the connection there
MEGAN: I mean, I get his whole "we can win by taking big states" strategy, I just don't get why Florida is the ONLY state he's trying to win. I really think he's just trying to set himself up for retirement there or something.

Will Feminists And Oprah Winfrey Help Obama Win The Oval Office?

Jessica — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 12:30:00 EST

The New York Times was deep in the throes of Obamamania this weekend, with four separate articles discussing Barack's candidacy, from Oprah's endorsement to his chances against the dynamic duo of Bill and Hillary. The most interesting of the bunch describes Obama's feminist pitch, i.e., how he plans on stealing some of the pro-female vote away from Hillary Clinton. While heralding the historic nature of Hillary's run, the article suggests that Obama is simultaneously trying to show female voters that he's the more "feminist" candidate because of his personal history. "I know what it's like to be raised by a single mom who's trying to work and go to school and raise two kids at the same time, doesn't have any support from the father," the Illinois senator has said. "These are issues I'm passionate about." All the same, recent polls show that more black women support Clinton than Obama by a margin of 15 points, largely because they loved Bill, the man novelist Toni Morrison called "Our first black president."

Another of this weekend's Times pieces — this one by op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd — reinforces Michelle Obama's assertion that Hillary polls better than Barack amongst African Americans because blacks have been systematically oppressed and therefore believe that "somehow, someone is better" than they are. Dowd likens Obama to "a child prodigy" in a completely condescending piece that both infantalizes him and ignores Obama's agency. Ms. Dowd goes onto claim that what Americans want is a father figure as President, but with Obama they're getting a petulant kid, and that those " enraptured with his gifts urge him on, like anxious parents, trying to pull that sustained, dazzling performance out of him that they believe he's capable of."

The question is whether Oprah, with her rhetoric of positivity and inclusion can help Obama pull out that "sustained, dazzling performance" and encourage "oppressed" African Americans to vote for him. Political scientist Ross K. Baker, in the paper's Sunday Styles section says: "Obama is a post-polarization candidate and Oprah is a post-polarization celebrity...Whereas people like Barbra Streisand and Jane Fonda make you think of taking to the barricades, with Oprah it's conciliation and brotherhood." (Obama claims that "I'm not somebody who believes that her endorsement, or anybody's endorsement, actually secures me votes." But honestly? The woman got millions of people to pay for the hardcover copy of a book about hiding vegetables in brownies. We're pretty sure her endorsement will wrangle at least a few thousand votes from suggestible couch surfers.)

Lastly, Frank Rich gets in on the Obama act, saying that Hillary's candidacy is nowhere near a forgone conclusion, and that Obama is an equally formidable Democratic opponent to any possible Republican candidate. Hillary's Achilles heel is no doubt her flip-flopping on Iraq, and that makes her an easy target for anti-Dem rhetoric. Meanwhile, according to Rich, Obama signifies a "mainstream multiracial and multicultural America," and if he were matched against either Guiliani "who was forged in the racial crucible of New York's police brutality nightmares of the 1990s, or...Mitt Romney, who was shaped by a religion that didn't give blacks equal membership until 1978, [the bid for Presidency] would be less a clash of races than of centuries."

So can Obama pull it off? Will Oprah's support push him over the edge? Will African Americans ever stop loving Bill Clinton?

Feminist Pitch by a Democrat Named Obama [NY Times]
O Brother, Where Art Thou?[NY Times]
Who's Afraid of Barack Obama? [NY Times]
The Oprah Party Wants You [NY Times]
Why Black Women Prefer Clinton To Obama [CBS News]

Earlier: Do Black Voters Favor Hillary Because They've Been Oppressed?
Feminists Might Like Hillary, Or Not