Word: spearmints
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Despite Malamud's careful portrayal of the young black writer, Willie Spearmint, and his intuition for the kind of stories Willie would invent and the plots he would pick, most blacks would probably still say that only a black writer could describe this experience. Malamud disagrees. "Anyone with imagination and a strong sense of involvement with the black experience can write about some aspect of it which in fiction will speak the truth about that experience. The key to all writing is imagination. All writers write about what they know. Even a revolutionary black writer, if he's good writer...
White to Black. Willie Spearmint is also a writer, though his ways are more direct. Black, consumed by the reality of his color, Spearmint takes over an abandoned apartment in the building and begins to cut out steaming hunks of black experience on an antique L.C. Smith. "Man, can't you see me writing on my book?" he growls when Lesser first appears. Lesser tries to be helpful -white to black, writer to writer, man to man. He keeps Spearmint's typewriter safe from night-crawling junkies. He buys the black writer a few sticks of furniture. There...
...situation is primed for disaster, not by urban sociology or racial tensions, but because human needs lead to confusion and tragedy. When Lesser tells him that his writing lacks form, Spearmint furiously rejects the criticism as an attack on black art. When Lesser says that he and Irene have fallen in love, Spearmint assaults a flaking wall with his head and moans, "I forgot to go on hating you." Later he burns Lesser's unfinished manuscript and writes graffiti with its ashes...
When Lesser and Spearmint have a showdown, with hatchet and saber respectively, the abandoned tenement is transformed into a hallucination of a jungle battleground. The realistic props that Malamud has so expertly designed are yanked away, and the two writers assume the proportions of brutal historical forces. Significant blows are struck. White buries his weapon in black's brain. Black directs a castrating swipe at white's sexuality. Malamud himself brings the curtain down with the brooding thought that at the moment of ritual bloodletting each felt the anguish of the other...
...shirt and rumpled slacks, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee donned a dark suit, striped tie, and vest and headed back to Washington. With 53% of the vote against a field of three opponents, J. William Fulbright had handily won renomination. Chewing laconically on a stick of Spearmint, he allowed: "I wasn't surprised. I had faith in the people of Arkansas...