Noam Chomsky - 'Illegitimate Authority: Facing the Challenges of Our Time'
Chomsky talks about the most current pressing matters currently on Earth, mainly the climate catastrophe and the threat of nuclear annihilation.
Toni Morrison, one of the most well-known American post-war authors, reclines throughout this book. This is a collection that spans interviews from 1973 to 2018. Unfazed by most but poignant, sprightly, and funny, Morrison delivered most of her lines in a way that may seem lukewarm, but, intellectually speaking, is far beyond that. Remember, she was a person who was very close friends with Fran Lebowitz, which means something.
JAFFREY: Do you see a place for gay literature, Indian literature, black literature, black women’s literature—in a positive way?
MORRISON: Oh, absolutely. It’s changing everything. They may take longer; the marketing shapes how we understand these books. Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers. I had a student who was Native American and I told him, “You’re going to have trouble getting this book accepted, because there are no moccasins, there are no tomahawks.” And he did. He had enormous trouble. I mean, submissions, I don’t even want to repeat the number, but he finally did have this book published, and you know, it’s a first novel—it got excellent reviews—but the point was that the rejections, I know, were based on the inability to think of Native Americans, in this particular case, as Americans.
At eighty-seven years old:
ELKANN: Why do you write?
MORRISON: I’m very good at it. That’s one of the reasons. I know how. I always knew how. The problem was that other people didn’t think so.
Morrison was clearly a very sharp speaker, keeping fun in one hand behind her back, ready to spring that shit on her audience.
ELKANN: Do you still write?
MORRISON: “Oh yes,” she said. [Laughs]
ELKANN: Did the Nobel Prize change your life?
MORRISON: No. They gave me some money, which I spent. It made a lot of people mad. They wrote very—not insulting, but close to insulting, articles that were really hurtful. What’d they give it to her for? [Laughs]
Morrison speaks with experience and pathos (for white people) on the topic of race. She speaks of both teaching youths and editing masterful writers in the same breath; she kept all people on the same level. A very human writer.
Even though these interviews aren’t as long as, for example, the one Morrison produced in The Paris Review in 1993, they’re still insightful and provide a quick glance into her brilliant mind.