Emilie’s Reviews > The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison > Status Update
Emilie
is on page 534 of 1072
the "white Negro" as the new culture hero-he thinks all hipsters are cocksmen possessed of great euphoric orgasms and are out to fuck the world into peace, prosperity and creativity. The same old primitivism crap in a new package. It makes you hesitant to say more than the slightest greetings to their wives lest they think you're out to give them a hot fat injection.
— Dec 23, 2023 04:38PM
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Emilie’s Previous Updates
Emilie
is on page 552 of 1072
I know Bard is something of a special case but the picture I get of what the American whites
who matured during the thirties are doing to their children is frightening. We were, and are, penalized out of the irrationalities of race, but these poor kids are suffering from the excesses of their parents' sentimentality and utter lack of any grasp of the tragic sense.
— Jan 21, 2024 01:58AM
who matured during the thirties are doing to their children is frightening. We were, and are, penalized out of the irrationalities of race, but these poor kids are suffering from the excesses of their parents' sentimentality and utter lack of any grasp of the tragic sense.
Emilie
is on page 549 of 1072
Doubtlessly, we're moving toward an emancipation of our fiction from the clichés of recent styles and limitations of conception. Just keep plunging ahead because there's no turning back and if only a few readers appreciate what you're doing it's only because they're trying to read the book they read ten years ago.
— Jan 21, 2024 01:52AM
Emilie
is on page 548 of 1072
Mythomania compels me to seek extreme relationships as a means of affirming our reality.
Thus we fight and argue and produce wild fictions inhabited by wild men. But perhaps we're really hopelessly sane, and our wives with or without lesions, can only take a bit of us without blowing their tops.
— Jan 21, 2024 01:50AM
Thus we fight and argue and produce wild fictions inhabited by wild men. But perhaps we're really hopelessly sane, and our wives with or without lesions, can only take a bit of us without blowing their tops.
Emilie
is on page 544 of 1072
Nor do I find Negro Americans who exploit the racial tragedy of our people for the entertainment of the French any less odious than those professional white southern literary men who go about Europe preaching the high value of that segregated and stultifying South in which they've avoided living since the early 1920s; both protest too strongly.
— Jan 21, 2024 01:45AM
Emilie
is on page 521 of 1072
Actually he isn't at all interested in novels but in neat demonstrations that archetypical figures turn up in various places.[…] Hyman can’t see that the novel devours archetypes as ruthlessly as Nature devours a vacuum.
[from separate letters but Hyman hate doesn’t just go away]
— Dec 23, 2023 04:37PM
[from separate letters but Hyman hate doesn’t just go away]
Emilie
is on page 491 of 1072
Hell, Hyman don't know that Ulysses is both Jack the rabbit (when that cyclops gets after his ass) and Jack the Bear, Big Smith the Chef, John Henry and everybody else when he starts pumping arrows into those cats who've been after his old lady. Or if he does recognize this, it's only with his mind, not his heart.
— Dec 23, 2023 11:43AM
Emilie
is on page 488 of 1072
I like your listing of blues themes but I hope you'll extend it, and get in all the irony of blues fantasy, all the laughing at the self, all the negative reassurance which, because it's sung, becomes positive, a transcendence.
— Dec 23, 2023 11:41AM
Emilie
is on page 487 of 1072
I will never tire of reading how little Stanley Edgar Hyman gets invisible man
“As for my narrator, he comes out of Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground, not Wright's Man Who Lived Underground, who is incapable of simple thought much less of philosophical articulation.”
Genuinely makes me sad for Shirley Jackson for having to put up with this dumbass
— Dec 23, 2023 11:38AM
“As for my narrator, he comes out of Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground, not Wright's Man Who Lived Underground, who is incapable of simple thought much less of philosophical articulation.”
Genuinely makes me sad for Shirley Jackson for having to put up with this dumbass
Emilie
is on page 467 of 1072
Those Latin Americans are wild and even the writers had nothing better to talk about than blame the U.S. for everything negative in the world and to mouth worn out Marxist slogans as the latest wisdom, there in one of the cities most given over to modern architecture and in a country in which there's an ocean's width between the rich and the poor, those bastards are fighting the machine!
— Dec 22, 2023 04:29PM
Emilie
is on page 447 of 1072
Read your Freud piece in PR and found it so good that I'm amazed that they took it.
— Dec 22, 2023 03:29PM
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Ben
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Dec 23, 2023 06:28PM
Well that’s going to be fun to quote in an essay
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By white negro he’s referring to African Americans who have sided with white culture right ?
Interesting on the primativism , definitely crops up (in a different form ) with soul on ice .. I wonder if this same criticism would be applied - also yes I’m a broken record it’s just a very neat If contradictory case study
I’ll give you the top part of the quote as I think you’ll like it, then
“These characters are all trying to reduce theworld to sex, man they have strange problems in bed; they keep score à la Reich on the orgasm and try to verbalize what has to be basically warmth, motion, rhythm, time, affection and technique. I've also talked to Bellow about this and it would seem that puritan restraints are more operative among the bohemians than elsewhere. That's what's behind Mailer's belief in the hipsters and the "white Negro" as the new culture hero-“
Primitivism in the Cleaver comes from a different place no? Since he’s black I imagine it’s less fetishistic
Oh that is fascinating ! Yea it is from a different angle but it’s almost equally fetishistic I think ? he’s obsessed with asserting the virility of the “super masculine “ black male as real , if a product of society, but he also has this very strange conception of the ideal “cosmic union” … and he sees a lot of it through sex … I do think you should give it a read just so I can stop harping on about such a revolting thing
