Reckless Eyeballing by Ishmael Reed

Author:Ishmael Reed [Reed, Ishmael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781564782373
Google: 4MZbBwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1564782379
Goodreads: 855411
Publisher: NY Books
Published: 1985-12-31T11:00:00+00:00

16

Paul Shoboater, critic for the Downtown Mandarin, kept Ian waiting. He looked at his watch. Paul was forty-five minutes late. He was like that, especially toward up-north fellas. They were from the same neck of the woods, but back home he and Paul didn’t move in the same circles. Shoboater had been in the North as long as Ball had, but refused to drop his down home accent. Shoboater knew that Ball would probably be uncomfortable in this kind of place, with its white and black checkerboard tile floor, and waitresses in black silk dresses and white aprons, and tuxedoed waiters. Ball sat at the bar, sipping from a glass of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

The bartender had sighed when Ball ordered it. Shoboater finally entered, or swept in. He saw Ball, but pretended not to notice him as he greeted some of his friends. Artists and critics from the downtown art scene. He finally reached the spot where Ball was seated, and gave him a cool handshake. The maitre d’ came up bowing and scraping before Shoboater, greeting him as he escorted the pair to Shoboater’s reserved table. Ball followed Shoboater, carrying his Pabst with him and finally placing it on the white linen tablecloth. When the waiter asked them what kind of cocktails they wanted, Shoboater ordered some vintage wine, and Ball ordered another Pabst. The waiter and Shoboater shared a chuckle. The fellas called Shoboater “Eye Spy” because they claimed that his column for the Mandarin was actually a literary reconnaissance mission for tourists who wanted to become acquaintances with the trends and styles of Afro-American culture. An expedition into the heart of darkness, as it were. The fellas claimed that his position made him lazy because his editors didn’t know whether he was faking it or telling the truth. Others said that his real role was that of a hit man for modernism, Pound’s “botched bitch gone in the teeth” reeling from blow after successive blow. The modernists could take Sartre’s late disavowal of existentialism, and the failure of Marxism, or even the death of abstract expressionism, but Freud’s fall, that was the severest blow, and finished off the movement that had been traveling a steady intellectual downhill since the revelations about Stalinism. Freud had achieved the status of a Holy Man for them.

Brashford had claimed that the Jews ran the Downtown Mandarin, and that even though it carried articles that opposed quotas and affirmative action as methods for subsidizing blacks, fifty percent of the revenue of Jewish organizations was derived from government subsidies, and though they had put Shoboater up to claiming that black talent got by because of liberal guilt, the same thing was said about Jewish talent in the fifties; that the rise of the American Jewish novelist coincided with a wave of guilt that swept the country after the discovery of the Holocaust. The fellas also ridiculed Shoboater’s “show-out” ornamental prose style that made his work nearly unreadable—they said that if his prose style were a horse someone would have put it out of its misery long ago.

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