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Well, it looks like you've missed the point again through your eagerness to refute what you'd like the opposition argument to be, Lyra. That so rarely happens.
The point is that it is *jejune* (lat. ieiunus, empty) to stand in judgement over how successfully acculturated someone is- "familiar with this sort of nuance" - on such a naive and playground level.
What "nuance" would that be? The non-white nuance? The non-white character in a book nuance? The non-white character in a book written by a non-white person nuance? Nuancepatrolgo? What the hell are you talking about? And what does being "street" have to do with it? Is Sadie Zmith "street"? I rather thought that she was bookish....hey, I'm bookish, too. My experience of the nuances of bookishness clearly make me far better able to appreciate her character nuances than "street" you.
Your arguments are utterly incoherent. I think it's very kind of you to admit that "who has the most black friends" - your argument (and I quote - "And you base this on what, Haus? Your wide and varied circle of non-white friends?" The implication being that this supposed dearth compared to your plethora of real black people! With dark skin and everything! Like what I've got! Look at my cultural capital! Worship it! holed my validity as a commentator below the waterline from the start) - is a fucking stupid one. Let's now look at:
strikes me that you are not particularly well acquainted with this sort of nuance and therefore tend to lump all black characters in literature and drama together
Yes. That's me. Black characters in Clock Without Hands. Black characters in Go Tell it on the Mountain. Black characters in Beloved. Black characters in the Invisible Man and Absolute Beginners. Rochester's wife. Memnon in the Aethiopis. I see them all as, essentially, the same character. As contentions go, that actually makes the term "incomprehensibly morontastic" shuffle its feet awkwardly and try to make eye contact with another partygoer. I can't believe that I am actually even attempting to respond to this argument in any means other than slow and very explicatory hand motions asking if it would like to be wheeled into the sunlight.
Desmond's seemed a perfectly appropriate cross-medium comparison, as it too had a tendency to rely on lazy tropes - in this case, the domino-playing senescents and the eye-gouging representations of the accents, just as in times of panic Desmond's had a nasty habit of falling back on Porkpie saying "yah, man" for no immediately discernable reason, or Desmond throwing an ineffectual hissy fit in the face of his immovable wife - rather than any sort of nuance. For other comparisons across media, you may want to look at David Lodge's book and subsequent adaptation of television of "Nice Work", where the tropes of the nineteenth-century industrial romance were modulated into the tropes of the historical television drama. You know, he's white, but he's a structuralist, and they're pretty tough cookies in a rumble.
Oh, stuff it. Much as I love you, Lyra, there is simply no point in trying to reason with you, especially not when I am angry., And especially not when you have drawn such a quaintly spiralling set of conclusions from a quite simply nonexistent premise.
I'm very glad that you are "down" with the "street", but I don't think it makes you a more nuanced reader of necessity. Since you seem incapable of picking up the actual words, much less the nuances, of a post on Barbelith, I'm afraid it may be a while before I renew my subscription to the Lyra Lovelaces Literary Review.
[ 13-12-2001: Message edited by: The Haus of a sudden chill ] |
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