====================================================================== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. ======================================================================
The author of the bio is one Terry Teachout, who is the chief cultural critic of the wretched neoconservative magazine Commentary. The review is a bit too long to include in its entirety, but this excerpt gives you an idea of how Teachout gets taken apart: The bombshell comes near the end of the prologue, when Teachout quotes from the essay "Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family, in New Orleans, La., the Year of 1907," published posthumously in In His Own Words. In this essay, written in 1969 when he was recovering from a life-threatening illness, and dedicated to his manager Joe Glaser, Armstrong recalled how the Karnofsky family helped him in his boyhood. But Teachout quotes instead an outpouring of rage from Armstrong against the black community, beginning with "Negroes never did stick together and they never will" and ending with "Believe it--the White Folks did everything that's decent for me." That's our Louis. Claiming that the meaning of the passage is "as clear as a high C," Teachout does not contextualize it, let alone test its validity. Neither does he square it with ac-cen-tu-at-ing the positive. Just in case there was any doubt, in the November 2009 issue of Commentary Teachout prepared readers of his book, which was published the following month, for his pinched reading of the essay: "The bluntness with which Armstrong expressed himself in this 1969 memoir was more than just the remembered resentment of an old man. On numerous other occasions, he made it clear that he believed poor people, regardless of their color, to be largely responsible for their own fate." Armstrong's jeremiad reminds me of the dyspeptic letter that Arnold Schoenberg, exiled to Brentwood, California, wrote in 1938 complaining, perversely, that his fellow Jews had never shown any interest in his music. Show business is tough; everyone has bad days. full: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100301/schiff ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
