[lbo-talk] pomo cultural lefties who valorize the poor

joanna 123hop at comcast.net
Thu Apr 28 17:46:55 PDT 2005


Tillie Olsen is a great writer. It is a tragedy she wrote so little. Her short story "Tell Me a Riddle" is one of the best short stories I have ever read -- on a par with the greats: Chekhov, Maupassant.... -- except she really is a blue-collar/working class writer and gives you some inkling of what such writing looks like and makes you yearn for more.

Joanna

amadeus amadeus wrote:


>Coincidentally this was in today's "Daily Bleed"....
>http://www.recollectionbooks.com/bleed/0428.htm
>
> Catalina Rodriguez, 24,
> body shrivelled to a child's at twelve,
> catalina rodriguez, last stages of consumption,
> works for three dollars a week from dawn to
>midnight.
> A fog of pain thickens over her skull, the parching
>heat
> breaks over her body.
> and the bright red blood embroiders the floor of
>her room.
> White rain stitching the night, the
>bourgeois poet would say,
> white gulls of hands, darting, veering,
> white lightning, threading the clouds,
> this is the exquisite dance of her hands over the
>cloth,
> and her cough, gay, quick, staccato,
> like skeleton's bones clattering,
> is appropriate accompaniment for the esthetic dance
> of her fingers
> and the tremulo, tremulo when the hands tremble
>with pain.
> Three dollars a week,
> two fifty-five,
> seventy cents a week,
> no wonder two thousands eight hundred ladies of joy
> are spending the winter with the sun after he goes
>down . . .
>
> -- Tillie Olsen, excerpt,
> "I Want You Women Up North To Know"
>--- joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>
>>Left writers today who valorize the poor: Bell
>>Hooks, Alice Waker,
>>Tillie Olsen....just off the top of my head. Lots of
>>people publishing
>>to ZNet too.
>>
>>Joanna
>>
>>
>>
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