Culture

The doll has never represented Christ for Robert Harrison, the owner of Loretta’s Authentic Pralines.

Traditions like this can change over time and mean different things to different people.

In a 1984 Times-Picayune article, the reporter Millie Ball specifically referred to “a porcelain baby symbolizing Jesus.”

The idea that the plastic baby represented the Christ Child did not gain popularity until the early 1980s.

Mr. Entringer popularized the custom.

Morrison is up there for good reason.

Serpell uses the occasion of “The Bluest Eye,” a book imagining the psychological blast radius of incest and rape, to wonder about an assortment of cultural maladies — censorship, identity politics run amok.

Her “Beloved” chapter includes a passage on the multiple judgments among the characters of Sethe’s murder — some would say her sparing — of her infant daughter and surmises that “the reader is left without a clear position” on whose judgment is right.

He could detect in her writing some Woolf, some Faulkner, and when he lost their trace in “Beloved,” the book lost him, because it ceased to obediently correspond with the traditional Western literary frameworks as erected by him.

Stanley Crouch, in a famously dyspeptic and fairly typical heave-ho, from 1987, declaimed “Beloved” a “blackface Holocaust novel.”

In 1994, Harold Bloom held forth on Charlie Rose’s old show about his Western canon project and inveighing against Maya Angelou, Alice Walker and Morrison, disparaging the artistic merit of their work.

Knopf has just published, with notes and an introduction by the literary scholar and Princeton professor Claudia Brodsky, a new collection of Morrison’s lectures on the great books: “Language as Liberation: Reflections on the American Canon.”

Serpell performs mini-disquisitions on anthropological syncretism.

Bloom seemed most alarmed at what had, in his estimation, befallen Morrison.

He informed Rose that Morrison “began as a very strong writer and reached a kind of culmination in ‘Song of Solomon’,”

He went on: “She has been, I believe, victimized by the times, in trying to give the age what she feels the age demands.”

The author realized the act of sweeping reflected the accumulation of the day while working as a custodian at David Zwirner.

The author connected painting to excavating or treating a surface instead of making an image.

Kenny Rivero is an artist.

In London, I’d go to Ronnie Scott’s [in Soho] and stay until 3 or 4 in the morning, and when I brought the play to Broadway, I did the same thing with jazz clubs here.