Toni Morrison Has Died
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Toni Morrison Has Died
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Re: Toni Morrison Has Died
#2My heart is breaking. Toni Morrison was one of the greatest writers of our time. I loved Beloved, but The Bluest Eye is my favorite.
Re: Toni Morrison Has Died
#3Beloved is one of my all-time favorites ️.
Re: Toni Morrison Has Died
#4I majored in English lit at university and one of my early requirements was a single author course. Having little general knowledge of famous authors, I chose the Toni Morrison class at random. I remember on the first day being surprised to find our that Toni Morrison was a woman and that her writing had such a strong focus on race and slavery. I was rather intimidated.
Turned out to be one of the best classes I had during those years. It was a very small group (I feel like only ten people or something) and there was a lot of really excellent discussion about the books. Jazz stood out to me as one of her best works, the focus shift in narrators throughout the novel was, I think, my first real exposure to the "unreliable narrator" concept and it made the story so powerful.
Re: Toni Morrison Has Died
#5I’m pained by her loss and I find it especially sad that she has passed while the current occupant’s in the White House. Did she pass wondering what will become of this country? Did she worry about a future she wouldn’t live to see?
Re: Toni Morrison Has Died
#6This is my favorite line of hers:
“How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn’t love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves.”
Re: Toni Morrison Has Died
#7I majored in English lit at university and one of my early requirements was a single author course. Having little general knowledge of famous authors, I chose the Toni Morrison class at random. I remember on the first day being surprised to find our that Toni Morrison was a woman and that her writing had such a strong focus on race and slavery. I was rather intimidated. Turned out to be one of the best classes I had…
I had a similar experience growing up in the mostly white suburbs of Baltimore. We read Beloved junior year and it was absolutely devastating. It opened my eyes to the deep, unhealed wounds of slavery and that sort of tumultuous, all-consuming pain. It was a difficult book to read at that age—I can't imagine any age when it would be easy to read—and I appreciate that we were asked to sit with it.
Another book that had a similar effect on me was Yukio Mishima's "Confessions of a Mask" about a boy growing up gay in 1930–50s Japan. I don't know that he ever actually says he's gay and you get this feeling that he doesn't even have the language to describe himself, let alone any kind of framework or support network. It was described to me by the friend who recommended it as "devastatingly sad" and I agree. He was absolutely, completely, and utterly fucked from the moment he was born and there's nothing he could do about it. The book threw me off for weeks. I highly recommend it.
Re: Toni Morrison Has Died
#8In many ways, she embodied the spirit of our current cultural moment. Obsessed with one's own victim-hood and "self-esteem", and the synergistic expansion of one's sense of personal grievance that can be obtained by viewing one in the light of the other, recursively, ad-infinitum. Her death can be seen as symbolic of the diminishing relevance of these qualities. Power via wielding guilt, and resilience via narcissism can only persist for so long, after all.
Re: Toni Morrison Has Died
#9In many ways, she embodied the spirit of our current cultural moment. Obsessed with one's own victim-hood and "self-esteem", and the synergistic expansion of one's sense of personal grievance that can be obtained by viewing one in the light of the other, recursively, ad-infinitum. Her death can be seen as symbolic of the diminishing relevance of these qualities. Power via wielding guilt, and resilience via narcissism…
Good lord, man. pull yourself together.
Re: Toni Morrison Has Died
#10We read her book Song of Solomon in my senior high school English class. It was one of my favorites of the class, along with Catch-22. I don't think I really got even close to 100% of what it was about, but her writing was just so gripping and beautiful, I still enjoyed the ride.
Years later I read Beloved and I was able to appreciate it much more. I should really read more of her work.