Thursday, January 06, 2022
Norman Mailer book cancelled after "White Negro" essay row
"The White Negro" attributed various anarchic characteristics to blacks. It was meant as praise. I am no fan of Mailer but I think he had a point
A publisher is said to have cancelled plans to release a collection of political essays by the American writer Norman Mailer after complaints from a junior member of staff about the title of his 1957 work The White Negro.
Penguin Random House is understood to have informed the Mailer family that it no longer had plans to publish the collection to celebrate the centenary of his birth next year.
Mailer was one of the defining voices of American 20th-century literature but courted controversy throughout his career and stabbed one of his six wives in the leg with a penknife during a drunken row.
Best-selling author Michael Wolff said Mailer’s oldest son had confirmed that Penguin Random House had told him of the cancelled plans.
Wolff wrote in The Ankler newsletter: “With slow-mo hammer-dropping predictability, Norman Mailer’s long-time publisher has recently informed the Mailer family that it has cancelled plans to publish a collection of his political writings to mark the centennial of his birth in 2023 . . .
The back-door apologies at Random House include as the proximate cause – you hardly have to look hard in Mailer’s work to find offences against contemporary doctrine and respectability – a junior staffer’s objection to the title of Mailer’s 1957 essay, The White Negro.”
The infamous 9000-word essay explored Mailer’s philosophy on “hipsterism” and declared the murder of a white shop owner by two black teenagers was an example of “daring the unknown”.
James Baldwin, the influential black writer, criticised the work and accused Mailer of employing racial stereotypes.
Mailer died aged 84 in 2007.
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Now Shakespeare is incorrect
The head of one of Britain's top universities has criticised Sir Patrick Stewart after he refused to read some of Shakespeare's sonnets because of 'political correctness'.
The actor, 81, skipped several poems about the Bard's 'Dark Lady' and one referring to a 'woman colour'd ill' during his recitation of a sonnet a day for online videos during the first Covid lockdown.
Sir Patrick, celebrated for his Shakespearean performances, explained that he disliked the attitudes conveyed in these verses - or struggled to make sense of them.
Professor Sally Mapstone, 64, the principal of St Andrews University in Scotland, praised the actor's decision to read the sonnets, which she found 'very salutary'.
But speaking on a podcast for the Scottish Arts and Humanities Alliance she added: 'I didn't think he was right to skip a couple in a rather politically correct way, frankly. 'I think he should have just read them and let people make up their minds but, as he said, it was his choice.'
Some of the Shakespeare poems that Sir Patrick skipped are among a group known as the Dark Lady sonnets.
Although the subject of the verses is unknown, and still sparks debate, it has been suggested by some scholars that she may have been a woman of African or southern European heritage.
In one of Sir Patrick's videos he told viewers: 'I am skipping [sonnet] 131 because I don't like it'.
Sonnet 131 features a description of a dark-skinned woman as the 'fairest and most precious jewel' and continues: 'Thy black is fairest in my judgment's place. In nothing art thou black save in thy deeds.'
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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