Can a racist profile be great?
TMN linked the other day to Truman Capote's 1957 New Yorker profile of Marlon Brando in Japan. Can a racist profile be great? You decide.
"And appapie, Marron?"
He sighed. "With ice cream, honey."
Though Brando is not a teetotaller, his appetite is more frugal when it comes to alcohol. While we were awaiting the dinner, which was to be served to us in the room, he supplied me with a large vodka on the rocks and poured himself the merest courtesy sip. Resuming his position on the floor, he lolled his head against a pillow, drooped his eyelids, then shut them. It was as though he'd dozed off into a disturbing dream; his eyelids twitched, and when he spoke, his voice — an unemotional voice, in a way cultivated and genteel, yet surprisingly adolescent, a voice with a probing, asking, boyish quality — seemed to come from sleepy distances.
For a different New Yorker treatment of race in the era, Meghan links to a podcast of Joyce Carol Oates reading Eudora Welty's Medgar Evers-based "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" Full text is quietly here.
