“Despite all this looking, few people, aside from Claudia, bear witness to much. To do so would be to think critically about the society that formed them and be moved to effect change.”
Hilton Als on Toni Morrison’s début novel, “The Bluest Eye.” New Yorker, 2020.
Colm Tóibín’s The Pitch of Passion, adapted from On James Baldwin.
In essays and interviews Baldwin needed to unloose himself from easy categories, but it was also central to his procedures as an artist to share James’s interest in consciousness as shifting and unconfined but also hidden and secretive, and his concern with language as both pure revelation and mask. Baldwin was fascinated with eloquence itself, the soaring phrase, the rhythm pushed hard, the sharp and glorious ring of a sentence, as much as with the plain, declarative line.
[…]
For Baldwin, the past was bound up with place, and since his sense of place was bound up with displacement, the past did not come simply. What is strange is how stories from the past represent the very center of Go Tell It on the Mountain, enough to make it a novel about how the displacement caused by the Great Migration entered into the spirit of these characters and their relationships. The novel has a shadow world where the past happened, where the earlier generation came from, and where much that was unresolved had been left behind.
[…]
I imagine him waiting
for the cover of darkness
to let down his hinged drawbridge.
He wanted, after so many
protracted years of caution,
to dance naked and nimble
as a flame under the moon—
even if dancing just once
was all that the teeth
of the forest would allow.
Jeff Worley, On Finding a Turtle Shell in Daniel Boone National Forest
I want to be a passenger
in your car again
and shut my eyes
while you sit at the wheel,
awake and assured
in your own private world,
seeing all the lines
on the road ahead,
down a long stretch
of empty highway
without any other
faces in sight.
I want to be a passenger
in your car again
and put my life back
in your hands.
December, Michael Miller
“With the success of medicine and public health initiatives, architecture seemingly no longer had a role to play, and its separation from health was consummated.” Reinier de Graaf
take advantage of the quiet time that a failure allows you.
life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through.
Because true collaborators in this life are rare.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: A novel, Gabrielle Zevin
or—more simply—the speaking voice prompting the reader/witness/man who first sees the body in the thames to imagine adam—to try gobeyond the page/thames and understand who adam is.
The Lyric Adam, Gboyega Odubanjo, 2024.
