Writers

RIP Toni Morrison, 88. Born in Ohio, she became a Catholic at 12 and took the baptismal name Anthony in honor of the saint, which led to her nickname, Toni. After earning a Master’s at Cornell, she taught at the college level for several years, then moved into publishing, eventually rising to senior fiction editor at Random House. She had begun writing informally in college. She focused on race. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970, when she was 39. Others followed, as well as children’s books, short fiction collections, plays and non-fiction. Among the boatload of honors she received, she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for Beloved, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She was outspoken politically, a strident leftist. Her work is required reading at many colleges. I’m probably in complete disagreement with her views but there is no denying her accomplishments.

What the mainstream media leaves out, according to an editorial by the NY Post’s board: “… the El Paso shooter ranted about a Hispanic invasion of Texas. But his manifesto also showed him to be an anti-corporatist environmentalist and backer of universal health care.”

Chicago last weekend: seven dead, 46 wounded. Since there’s no way to hold Trump responsible, the left and mainstream media ignore this carnage. And they have the audacity to call him a racist.

It seems Debra Messing may not be far from the character she played in the The Yada Yada episode of Seinfeld. The main plot involved George and his larcenous new girlfriend. The subplot involved Jerry’s hots for Messing’s character, a recently divorced M.D., and the lampooning of bigotry (anti-dentite). Here’s the last of her dialogue:
Beth: Hey, what do you call a doctor who fails out of med school?
Jerry: What?
Beth: A dentist. (They laugh)
Jerry: That’s a good one. Dentists.
Beth: Yeah, who needs ‘em? Not to mention the Blacks and the Jews.
Later, when Elaine asks where Beth is, Jerry says: “She went out to get her head shaved.” (Written by ‎Peter Mehlman‎ & ‎Jill Franklyn, nominated for an Emmy, lost out to an episode of Ellen.)
Messing, 50, is taking heat for a tweet she recently sent out: “If I get killed in a mass shooting please cremate me and throw my ashes into Mitch McConnell’s and Dana Loesch’s eyes while I’m still smoldering.” Loesch is a spokesman for the NRA.

Favorite headline of the day, from foxnews.com: “Sanders, Harris and Booker stump at church whose pastor said being gay is ‘enough to send you to hell.’” Can’t make this stuff up.

Here’s a neat snippet from Yahoo Sports: “Army threw just 65 passes in 2017 and 98 in ’18, the only two times in the last seven seasons any team has attempted fewer than 100 passes. The Cadets’ record in that time: 21–5.”

My thanks to Alice, who bought a Bob Dylan bio, and to the two women who purchased three books in Russian between them; and to Michael, who opted for a paperback romance by Lisa Kleypas; and to the young man who selected By Time Is Everything Revealed: Irish Proverbs for Mindful Living by Fiann O’Nuallain.

My Amazon Author page: https://www.amazon.com/Vic-Fortezza/e/B002M4NLJE

FB: https://www.facebook.com/Vic-Fortezza-Author-118397641564801/?fref=ts

Read Vic’s Stories, free: http://fictionaut.com/users/vic-fortezza