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a8fe92b
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No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o'clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.
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writing
novels
writers
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Ishmael Reed |
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8061a2f
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I had no systematic way of learning but proceeded like a quilt maker, a patch of knowledge here a patch there but lovingly knitted. I would hungrily devour the intellectual scraps and leftovers of the learned.
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learning
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Ishmael Reed |
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2ac3cb3
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All art must be for the end of liberating the masses. A landscape is only good when it shows the oppressor hanging from a tree.
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Ishmael Reed |
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3c8fe78
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Dualism::In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man I am outside of history. i wish i had some peanuts, it looks hungry there in the cage. i am outside of history. its hungrier than i thot.
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Ishmael Reed |
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f72eb31
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Fear stalks the land. (As usual; so what else is new?)
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Ishmael Reed |
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3054e59
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What is the American fetish about highways? They want to get somewhere, LaBas offers. Because something is after them, Black Herman adds.
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progress
highways
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Ishmael Reed |
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790e08b
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America is the smart-aleck adolescent who's "been around" and has his own hot rod."
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Ishmael Reed |
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e5a5db7
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If Orwell had a chance to write from the vantage point of 1984 instead of 1948, perhaps he would have seen the class of hackers instead of the proles as a threat to Big Brother's rule.
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Ishmael Reed |
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551a564
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the Thing has stirred in its moorings. The Thing that my Grandfather Harry and his generation of Harrys had thought was nothing but a false alarm.
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Ishmael Reed |
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46e7341
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Yes. You see, it's not 1 of those germs that break bleed suck gnaw or devour. It's nothing we can bring into focus or categorize; once we call it 1 thing it forms into something else.
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Ishmael Reed |
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7fd026b
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He said he felt like the gut heart and lungs of Africa's interior. He said he felt like the Kongo: "Land of the Panther." He said he felt like "deserting his master," as the Kongo is "prone to do." He said he felt he could dance on a dime."
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Ishmael Reed |
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dc7616f
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Dance is the universal art, the common joy of expression. Those who cannot dance are imprisoned in their own ego and cannot live well with other people and the world. They have lost the tune of life. They only live in cold thinking. Their feelings are deeply repressed while they attach themselves forlornly to the earth.
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Ishmael Reed |
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7fedd81
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democracy and freedom began bouncing all over the world like bad checks
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the-gangster-s-death
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Ishmael Reed |
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0e8b9e4
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Time is a pendulum. Not a river. More akin to what goes around comes around.
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Ishmael Reed |
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eb66207
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I think that when people like you , Mr. Von Vampton, say "The Negro Experience" you are saying that all Negroes experience the world the same way. In that way you can isolate the misfits who would propel them into penetrating the ceiling of this bind you and your assistants have established in this country. The ceiling above which no slave would be allowed to penetrate without stirring the kept bloodhounds." --
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Ishmael Reed |
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278804a
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The Jes Grew crisis was becoming acute. Compounding it, Black Yellow and Red Mu'tafikah were looting the museums shipping the plunder back to where it came from. America, Europe's last hope, the protector of the archives of "mankind's" achievements had come down with a bad case of Jes Grew and Mu'tafikah too. Europe can no longer guard the "fetishes" of civilizations which were placed in the various Centers of Art Detention, located in New ..
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Ishmael Reed |
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1295c26
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To some if you owned your own mind you were indeed sick but when you possessed an Atonist mind you were healthy. A mind which sought to interpret the world by using a single loa. Somewhat like filling a milk bottle with an ocean.
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Ishmael Reed |
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ecf4cf4
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61 lynchings occurred in 1920 alone. In 1921, 62, some of the victims, soldiers returning from the Great War who after fighting and winning significant victories - just as they had fought in the Revolutionary and Civil wars and the wars again the Indians - thought that America would repay them for the generosity of putting their lives on the line, for aiding in salvaging their hides from the Kaiser who had been tagged "enemy" this time. Ins..
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Ishmael Reed |
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953e272
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He is summoned and asked to swear upon the only book the judge will allow in "his court." PaPa LaBas won't dare touch the accursed thing. He demands the right to his own idols and books. It reminds PaPa LaBas of the familiar epigram: "Orthodoxy is my Doxy, Heterodoxy is the other fellow's Doxy."
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Ishmael Reed |
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fd68e30
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Whenever sophistry and rhetoric fail they send in their poor White goons. They don't have the guts of real gangsters. The letters after their names are their tommy guns and those universities where they pour over syllables in the many cubicles, their Big House.
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Ishmael Reed |
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a26daf9
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But what have Cortes and Pizarro or the others to do with me? You carry them in your blood as I carry the blood of Montezume; expeditions of them are harbored by your heart and your mind carries their supply trains. You've changed your helmet for a frontier hat while I have changed my robes for overalls and a black leather jacket. The costumes may have changed but the blood is still the same, gringo.
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Ishmael Reed |
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4738f08
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Have you ever seen people line up outside a Van Gogh exhibit? When they get inside there are so many they can't even see the paintings, they just pass by like sheep or like mourners passing the tomb of a fallen hero, a bier, with the same solemnity. And the extent of their knowledge concerning Van Gogh is that he "cut off his ear." Man, it's religion they make it into."
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Ishmael Reed |
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0052fa9
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Faust was an actual person. Somewhere between 1510 and 1540 this "wandering conjurer and medical quack" made his travels about the southwest German Empire, telling people his knowledge of "secret things." I always puzzled over why such a legend was so basic to the Western mind; but I've thought about it and now I think I know the answer. Can't you imagine this man traveling about with his bad herbs, love philters, physicks and potions, char..
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Ishmael Reed |
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baa61b0
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I'm just 1 man. Not Faust nor the Kaiser nor the Ku Klux Klan. I am an individual, not a whole tribe or nation. That's what I'm counting on. But if there is such a thing as a racial soul, a piece of Faust the mountebank residing in a corner of the White man' mind, then we are doomed. It always seems that we talk to the many and then the few and the we are down to 1 man and just as the war between the races is about to begin that 1 man becom..
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Ishmael Reed |