{"id":48,"date":"2008-12-05T10:51:50","date_gmt":"2008-12-05T15:51:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/henryalford.com\/?p=48"},"modified":"2008-12-07T13:19:02","modified_gmt":"2008-12-07T18:19:02","slug":"elderism-29","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/henryalford.com\/?p=48","title":{"rendered":"Elderism #29"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve always loved the seeming disparity between the highly stylized, incantatory prose of Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison and her more spontaneous public persona. A friend of mine who was a colleague of Morrison’s in the English department at Princeton once overheard Morrison–who used to bomb around campus in a tiny, red sportscar–telling someone in the faculty lounge,<\/p>\n

“Honey, she’s not my friend–<\/em>s<\/strong>he’s my agent!”<\/strong><\/p>\n

There’s a Q and A with La Morrison in this month’s AARP<\/a> wherein the 77 year-old explains that what she values in life now is humor:<\/p>\n

“…what’s really important is humor–the way you see through things. And I don’t mean just ‘Ho, ho, ho!’ but real irony about the diabolical nature of things.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

Morrison’s interest in diabolicalism led her to set her new book about early American colonists and their slaves, A Mercy, in late 1600’s Virginia, long before slavery had ossified or even matured as an institution:<\/p>\n

“I was very interested in separating racism from slavery. The assumption has always been, in this country, that [slavery] began with a few colonists, and then came the Africans, and that relationship is the reason for much of the slavery that still exists in this country. And I didn’t believe it, because nobody is born [a racist]. Racism is constructed. It was an insisted-upon protection for the landed and the aristocrats.”<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve always loved the seeming disparity between the highly stylized, incantatory prose of Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison and her more spontaneous public persona. A friend of mine who was a colleague of Morrison’s in the English department at Princeton once overheard Morrison–who used to bomb around campus in a tiny, red sportscar–telling someone in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/henryalford.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/henryalford.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/henryalford.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henryalford.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henryalford.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/henryalford.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/henryalford.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henryalford.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henryalford.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}