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"Anyone who writes is a seeker. You look at a blank page and you're seeking. The role is assigned to us and never removed. I think this is an unbelievable blessing. I mean, to be seventy-eight years old and still looking -- this amazes me."

-Louise Glück 

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Louise Glück, from “Unpainted Door”, Poems 1962-2012

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My favorite part about being sapphic is when the things I love about other women become things I love about myself. One day I was tracing another woman’s stretch marks in a dim bedroom light. And then, seemingly by accident, I was doing it to myself in my bathroom mirror. I loved the feeling of a full hand of flesh when I grabbed a woman’s hips, and then mine didn’t need to be so skinny anymore. I looked at a woman’s lower stomach pudge and thought it was so soft and cute, then never wanted a flat stomach again. Loving women can be so healing when you come from a world that doesn’t.

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tumblr is so intimate like… i do not act like this around people i know…

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Only grownups think that the things children say come out of nowhere. We know they come from the deepest parts of ourselves.

bell hooks, Bone Black.

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Etel Adnan, Beirut 1982, in We Begin Here. Poems for Palestine and Lebanon, Edited by Kamal Boullata and Kathy Engel, Interlink Books, Northampton, MA, 2007, pp. 226-233

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Magali Cazo (French, b. 1979, Lyon, France) - Paysage (Landscape) 16, Paintings: Inks on Paper

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Reblog if you had a Tumblr for 5+ years

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free online james baldwin stories, essays, videos, and other resources

**edit

James baldwin online archive with his articles and photo archives.

---NOVELS---

Giovanni's room"When David meets the sensual Giovanni in a bohemian bar, he is swept into a passionate love affair. But his girlfriend's return to Paris destroys everything. Unable to admit to the truth, David pretends the liaison never happened - while Giovanni's life descends into tragedy. This book introduces love's fascinating possibilities and extremities."

Go Tell It On The Mountain"(...)Baldwin's first major work, a semi-autobiographical novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves."

+bonus: film adaptation on youtube. (if you’re a giancarlo esposito fan, you’ll be delighted to see him in an early preacher role)

Another Country and Going to Meet the Man Another country: "James Baldwin's masterly story of desire, hatred and violence opens with the unforgettable character of Rufus Scott, a scavenging Harlem jazz musician adrift in New York. Self-destructive, bad and brilliant, he draws us into a Bohemian underworld pulsing with heat, music and sex, where desperate and dangerous characters betray, love and test each other to the limit." Going to meet the Man: " collection of eight short stories by American writer James Baldwin. The book, dedicated "for Beauford Delaney", covers many topics related to anti-Black racism in American society, as well as African-American–Jewish relations, childhood, the creative process, criminal justice, drug addiction, family relationships, jazz, lynching, sexuality, and white supremacy."

Just Above My Head"Here, in a monumental saga of love and rage, Baldwin goes back to Harlem, to the church of his groundbreaking novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, to the homosexual passion of Giovanni's Room, and to the political fire that enflames his nonfiction work. Here, too, the story of gospel singer Arthur Hall and his family becomes both a journey into another country of the soul and senses--and a living contemporary history of black struggle in this land."

If Beale Street Could Talk"Told through the eyes of Tish, a nineteen-year-old girl, in love with Fonny, a young sculptor who is the father of her child, Baldwin's story mixes the sweet and the sad. Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and imprisoned. Their families set out to clear his name, and as they face an uncertain future, the young lovers experience a kaleidoscope of emotions-affection, despair, and hope. In a love story that evokes the blues, where passion and sadness are inevitably intertwined, Baldwin has created two characters so alive and profoundly realized that they are unforgettably ingrained in the American psyche."

also has a film adaptation by moonlight's barry jenkins

Tell Me How Long the Train's been gone At the height of his theatrical career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly felled by a heart attack. As he hovers between life and death, Baldwin shows the choices that have made him enviably famous and terrifyingly vulnerable. For between Leo's childhood on the streets of Harlem and his arrival into the intoxicating world of the theater lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame and rage. An adored older brother vanishes into prison. There are love affairs with a white woman and a younger black man, each of whom will make irresistible claims on Leo's loyalty. 

---ESSAYS---

Baldwin essay collection. Including most famously: notes of a native son, nobody knows my name, the fire next time, no name in the street, the devil finds work- baldwin on film

--DOCUMENTARIES--

Take this hammer, a tour of san Francisco.

Meeting the man

--DEBATES:--

Debate with Malcolm x, 1963 ( on integration, the nation of islam, and other topics. )

Debate with William Buckley, 1965. ( historic debate in america. )

Heavily moderated debate with Malcolm x, Charles Eric Lincoln, and Samuel Schyle 1961. (Primarily Malcolm X's debate on behalf of the nation of islam, with Baldwin giving occassional inputs.)

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apart from themes obvious in the book's descriptions, a general heads up for themes of incest and sexual assault throughout his works.

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But I ask you to consider whether these great unhappinesses did not rather pass through you. Whether much within you has not changed, whether somewhere, in some part of your being, you were not transformed while you were unhappy?

- Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke

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I believe that love remains so strong and powerful in your memory because it was your first deep experience of solitariness and the first inner work that you undertook on your life.

- Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke

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If you hold close to nature, to what is simple in it, to the small things people hardly see and which all of a sudden can become great and immeasurable; if you have this love for what is slight, and quite unassumingly, as a servant, seek to win the confidence of what seems poor- then everything will grow easier, more unified and somehow more conciliatory, not perhaps in the intellect, which, amazed, remains a step behind, but in your deepest consciousness, watchfulness and knowledge.

- Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke

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Things are not all as graspable and sayable as on the whole we are led to believe; most events are unsayable, occur in a space that no word has ever penetrated, and most unsayable of all are works of art, mysterious existences whose life endures alongside ours, which passes away.

- Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke

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“The spiralling stair of my ascent adultward- or is it descent?”

- Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath.

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“If I get through this year, no matter how badly, it will be the biggest victory I’ve ever done.”

- Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath.

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Sylvia Plath, “Mirror”

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“August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.”

- Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath.