The Sphere Also Gazes Into You...

G is for Go Tell It on the Mountain

I think I finished this. No, I did. But sometimes it’s hard to remember. I’m not great at endings. I re-read Wicked just because I had a problem with how it ended, but I couldn’t remember what that problem was. I had trouble with the ending of Beloved. I just graded a student’s paper on Jazz, which I haven’t read (the trouble with independent reading assignments). It seems like I would have trouble with that ending too.

Thinking about endings, I’m reminded of my thoughts on Atonement. I liked the shift there at the end. I wonder if it’s the kind of shift that throws me off. I guess Atonement is a point of view shift as are (contained in) Beloved, Jazz, and Wicked. Atonement accompanies this shift with a structural shift, though, and I think that type of shift really resonates with me.

I’m not sure with Go Tell It on the Mountain. I don’t remember any specific shift at the end. It might just be that I was expecting more from the book than it delivered. It was well written and the characters were pretty strongly felt, but I just had a hard time connecting with…their conflicts. I don’t know?

I don’t remember actually reading Giovanni’s Room, but I know I liked it (although, apparently, not enough to remember it starts with a G as much as Go Tell It). I know Another Country had some insights I dwelt with and upon for awhile. I just don’t remember having the same deep experience with Go Tell It on the Mountain. Was this book about religion? I’m not sure if I have the right experiences to feel strongly what Baldwin’s exploring in that realm. And then it took me three months to read the last five or ten pages of this book. Anyway…

Another book I thought about doing for G was A Gesture Life (reminder: check the A’s and The’s in my inventory when trying to pick a book by alpha). Kind of similar experience. Chang-Rae Lee had more to say about race that I hadn’t heard before than did Baldwin in Go Tell It. Anyway, yeah. So G. I like that these books weren’t so much in my established wheelhouse. I want to talk about Baldwin more, but the novels don’t seem quite as important as the man, really. And I deal much better with novels.
- 1 month ago
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nevver:

James Baldwin illustrated
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Reblogged 3 months ago from lizghoulish (Originally from mappleton)

Source: appletonportfolio
"All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up."

James Baldwin (via darkdarkgirlvashti)
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Reblogged 4 months ago from notational (Originally from thethingsthatneverhappened)

Source: thethingsthatneverhappened
"It is December 27, 1949. James Baldwin, just released from a French prison, stands on a chair. He is sweating as he holds a sheet in his hand, and he twists it, with bitterness and desperation, into a rope. He has left his home, his church, and his country in order to discover himself. He has published a short story, a dozen reviews, and a pair of essays. He is twenty-five years old. He has spent the past eight days in jail because an acquaintance brought a stolen sheet into his room.

The water pipe above his head is as revolting as everything else in this fleabag hotel. As in the house of John Grimes, the protagonist of the novel his working on, there is dirt everywhere; dust rising all around him; no end to it. Even the City of Lights offers no hiding place from the world’s dirt, from the chaotic complexity of human consciousness. aware that black American men have been dying with nooses around their necks for centuries now, Baldwin fashions his own hanging rope with bitterness, with tears in his eyes. The young, black, bisexual, expatriate writer destined to become famous, to appear on the cover of Time magazine, to be known as the spokesman for his race in its crucial hour, to be regarded as a prophet, a witness, a transcendent spirit, tosses the twisted sheet over the rusty pipe, secures it around his neck, and jumps.

When the water pipe breaks in the Grand Hotel du Bac that day, Baldwin is saved, even ‘rebaptized by the flood,’ as biographer David Leeming says"

D. Quentin Miller, A Criminal Power: James Baldwin and the Law

There are a few things problematic with this, but the biggest question is still the “death” of the author. Does it matter if we know this about Baldwin? Does it change our perspective of “Equal in Paris”?
- 4 months ago
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Source: docs.google.com
"I was chilled by their merriment, even though it was meant to warm me. It could only remind me of the laughter I had often heard at home, laughter which I had sometimes deliberately elicited. This laughter is the laughter of those who consider themselves to be at a safe remove from all the wretched, for whom the pain of the living is not real. I had heard it so often in my native land that I had resolved to find a place where I would never hear it any more. In some deep, black, stony, and liberating way, my life, in my own eyes, began during that first year in Paris, when it was borne in on me that this laughter is universal and never can be stilled."

James Baldwin, “Equal in Paris”
- 4 months ago
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"It seemed that all the people who were sentenced that day had made, or clearly were going to make, crime their career. This seemed to be the opinion of the judge, who scarcely looked at the prisoners or listened to them; it seemed to be the opinion of the prisoners, who scarcely bothered to speak in their own behalf; it seemed to be the opinion of the lawyers, state lawyers for the most part, who were defending them. The great impulse of the courtroom seemed to be to put these people where they could not be seen…Any society inevitably produces its criminals, but a society at once rigid and unstable can do nothing whatever to alleviate the poverty of its lowest members, cannot present to the hypothetical young man at the crucial moment that so-well-advertised right path."

James Baldwin, “Equal in Paris”
- 4 months ago
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"I knew very well what Americans saw when they looked at me and this allowed me to play endless and sinister variations on the role which they had assigned me; since I knew that it was, for them, of the utmost importance that they never be confronted with what, in their own personalities, made this role so necessary and gratifying to them, I knew that they could never call my hand or, indeed, afford to know what I was doing; so that I moved into every crucial situation with the deadly and rather desperate advantages of bitterly accumulated perception, of pride and contempt. This is an awful sword and shield to carry through the world, and the discovery that, in the game I was playing, I did myself a violence of which the world, at its most ferocious, would scarcely have been capable, was what had driven me out of New York. It was a strange feeling, in this situation, after a year in Paris, to discover that my weapons would never again serve me as they had."

James Baldwin, “Equal in Paris”
- 4 months ago
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kvetchlandia:

Steve Schapiro James Baldwin, Harlem, New York 1963

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” James Baldwin, ”Me and My House,” Harper’s Magazine 1955
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Reblogged 6 months ago from kvetchlandia
"I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do."

James Baldwin (via thugzmansion)

This cat…sheer brilliance. In everything.

(via nezua)
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Reblogged 7 months ago from nezua (Originally from iamjudithbutler)

Source: iamjudithbutler
- #james baldwin
"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive."

James Baldwin (via jacoblnoble)
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Reblogged 7 months ago from ofmyloverthesea (Originally from gentlemanosophy)

Source: gentlemanosophy

The Sphere Also Gazes Into You...

G is for Go Tell It on the Mountain

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