Word: ishmael
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...have thoroughly enjoyed my tenure as a Crimson editorial columnist. To quote a phrase popularized by Ishmael Reed, "writin' is fightin'," and I've relished the chance to joust with my political and ideological opponents. The negative responses that I sometimes provoked only helped to motivate me. I've received replies ranging from polite criticism to outraged diatribes--even one death threat--but I won't apologize to anyone who I offended because they probably deserved...
...reputation rests on perhaps a dozen works, most of which are his famous "marines"--dark, concentrated images of the fishing smacks of his New England coastal youth, pitted against wind and wave. They concentrate the Romantic terrors of seascape; in them Ryder showed he was the Samuel Palmer of Ishmael's "watery part of the world." Some of his work, particularly the figure paintings, verged on kitsch, but that only made him seem more like another American visionary, Edgar Allan Poe--so overwrought, yet so influential. Though Ryder was never (in his own view) a Modernist, a succession of American...
...said. "We are absenting ourselves for one day from a racist system." Jackson says of the mission, "We have to turn pain to power and power into public policy." If the march draws even 200,000 people, it could turn Farrakhan the outsider into a major mainstream player. Asks Ishmael Muhammad, Elijah's son and now a Farrakhan assistant: "How can you praise a fruit and not the tree that bears...
...question about it, Larry McMurtry's shaggy new novel Dead Man's Walk (Simon & Schuster; 477 pages; $26) passes the all-important "Call me Ishmael" test. Its first line is "Matilda Jane Roberts was naked as the air." After that start, the narration wafts aloft into further elegant absurdity, as follows: "Known throughout south Texas as the Great Western, she came walking up from the muddy Rio Grande holding a big snapping turtle by the tail. Matilda was almost as large as the skinny little Mexican mustang Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call were trying to saddle-break...
...think of him as, let's see, Ishmael. No. Fred Ishmael? Nah. But any other way lies madness, a dizzy spiraling down lunacy's drain. To wit: not far into the novel, while the real Powers is setting up the furniture of a marvelous story, the fictional Powers (who like the real one has written several respectfully received novels, including Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance and The Gold Bug Variations), announces that he is finished with novel writing, nauseated to the very soul with the idea of creating another scene or character...