Word: writer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...WEEKS ago a well-known writer requested to speak with student writers about the problems of writing. I signed up and entered the room where the meeting was held in a mood of excited expectation that the meeting with someone whose work you admire inspires. She arrived a half-hour late, coming from a dinner held in her honor and accompanied by a woman described as a dear friend whose wrist the elderly writer clasped throughout the evening, as if for strength. An adulatory hush came over the room as she began to speak in her rambling, stammering, repetitive...
...expressions of magnanimity and alleged rapport enraged me. Moment by moment as she alienated me, I kelpt trying to keep in mind her wonderful stories and beautiful words, the reason I had come in the first place. Mine hadn't been the common confusion of the narrators and the writer's identities, but I had assumed, and now I know mistakenly, that the personality which spoke through those stories would be incapable of speaking to me as she did--would be incapable of seeing me as nothing but a black, a baseboard off of which to ricochet her clumsy ideological...
...stories she had written about blacks with no overtly racist edge. Now I must look at her stories again, and more carefully. I can only hope that the glib pontificator of that evening, the framer of vacuous sentences, is at odds with the humbler personality of the writer at home...
AGAIN, AS in my encounter with the writer, I wouldn't have been so upset had I not admired him so much. Everytime something like this happens, and it has happened many times, I am shocked, and then in turn I am shocked at my shock. In retrospect my reactions have been masterpieces of naivete. Admittedly, it happens less often nowadays, as I have become harder, more distrustful and more self-protective. Very few people can drive me to near tears with frustration. Not the blatant bigots, to whom I am at best a "little black girl," at worst...
What deepened my sadness that evening with my writer is that despite her unwitting hypocrisy and insensitivity, the kinds of issues that she has tried to bring to general attention in her talks and lectures, remain compelling. Perhaps she does not present the most elegantly constructed analyses, but she has the essential element of conviction that saves her rhetoric. She has, however, fallen into the habit of slinging too many canned pronouncements about complicated matters...