<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1"> <title></title> </head> <body> 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: <blockquote type="cite" cite="mid20050428215034.45317.qmail@web30004.mail.mud.yahoo.com"> <pre wrap="">Coincidentally this was in today's "Daily Bleed".... <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.recollectionbooks.com/bleed/0428.htm">http://www.recollectionbooks.com/bleed/0428.htm</a> 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 <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:123hop@comcast.net"><123hop@comcast.net></a> wrote: </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">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 ___________________________________ </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap=""><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk">http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk</a> </pre> <pre wrap=""> "Mary Poppins is alive and well in Argentina, she sends her regards." - Rod McKuen, The Mud Kids __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://mail.yahoo.com">http://mail.yahoo.com</a> ___________________________________ <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk">http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk</a> </pre> </blockquote> </body> </html>