If you've never seen this and you're a Baldwin fan, you have to check it out

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Author, playwright, and editor Stein discussed his book, Native Sons: A Friendship That Created One of the Greatest Works of the Twentieth Century: Notes of A Native Son. The author reflected on his friendship with the late author James Baldwin, and described their collaboration on the book, Notes of a Native Son. Professor Gates

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/177303-1

It has everything. Baldwin's collaborator, members of his family, his literary descendants, Skip Gates gives an amazing tribute. It's the 80th anniversary of Baldwin's birth. From Aug 2004, about an hour fifteen. Wow.

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1. good stuff!

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2. When I was an English grad in the early 90s, it was theory, theory, theory

until you wanted to put your eyes out from the forcing of ideas and literature into templates . . . except no one in the academy knew, they couldn't figure, what to do with the work of these black women novelists and poets who seemed intent on doing their own work and to hell with the boxes and who were putting out the best work. That was before Morrison got her prize and before anyone thought there would be courses on her work.

Seeing this was like a little window into where that generation of writers got their courage, their independence, their own best thing.

It was also really moving to watch people like Sol Stein and Skip Gates who knew Baldwin and to see how much, above and beyond everything else, they loved him.

[Number23]

3. I think one of the reasons that so many of these black, especially black women, artists

were so good and so passionate is because they EXPECTED to be ignored by the larger culture. There is something fairly liberating, actually in knowing that you can scream to the moon and that the vast majority of the people who will hear you share your cultural understandings while those who don't will barely know of your existence.

I'm sure it's the rationale behind such things as the Soul Train Music Awards. :) It might look crazy as hell from the outside looking in, but black people have always understood that we won't get the praise and the recognition that we deserve. If we don't do it for ourselves, it won't get done. It's part of the reason that we are FIERCELY protective of our history and culture -- not that it seems to do us much good.

By the way, I absolutely adore Toni Morrison. We had a discussion here about a movie called "Precious" which I was saying sounded a bit like Toni's book, The Bluest Eye. Have you heard of or seen this movie??

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4. I never have. Will have to check out the novel.

I'm more of a Sula type, myself. Btw, did you see this? There's a video at the link and the photographs seem to be a chronicle of the black community there in Ft. Worth.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x4157738

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7. i got into a huge fight when in grad school

about a poem i wrote: Never Trust the White Man
it was an online creativity course, so all the students had virtual rooms where we could post our work. the poem is about my great grandmother, a very fair-skinned woman who always told my cousins: never trust the white man. in the poem, i describe how confused my cousins were when relatives would come to their house on holidays. the neighborhood kids would tell them: you have white people in your house :7 so my cousins would run inside and look in the closet and under the beds in search of the dreaded white people. this is texas in the 1950's and 1960's, so little black children thought white people were the people who kidnapped and killed black people, and others advocating civil rights for african-americans. they thought white people used dogs and water hoses to maintain their superior status in society. they lived under segregation, for pete's sake.
back to the fight: several clueless folks objected to my poem: they thought is was racist. so i told them: how in the fuck can you object to the truth or my experience, or my great-grandmother's or my cousins'? my only supporter was the other black student in the class, john. so, we waged war against those who were offended by my experience, and it got so bad that the professor had to intervene and tell them: you have no right to object to the truth of her experience. he was from italy, so he told them about the division between southern and northern italians, and how some italians considered that division racism. he also told them not to take my poem personally. he said it was more about the dominant, white, male cultural paradigm than any individual. couldn't believe that shit was happening at a very, liberal, alternative college in SF, CIIS, in the 1990's.

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8. There seems to be no limit to human myopia.

It's amazing.

I started reading black, especially women, poets, novelists and then theorists in the late 80s and it turns out, that's where the real action was in the field of English letters. It was funny because the old white professors at Berkeley, who were nearly to a man lovely, sensitive, smart people with a deep fund of intellectual curiosity, avoided that fact as long as they possibly could because they didn't know what to do with it. lol

I still haven't read much Du Bois and after watching David Levering Lewis talk about him, that's at the top of my list.

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5. Native Son was required reading in my Eng. lit class in

high school. I was pleasantly surprised that it was one of the few novels required that I understood with minimal interpretation. Chatting with the author, however, was quite the opposite, as I recall. He did the chatting and I did the listening. The man was way too deep for me at my young age but I was thrilled and honored to be in his company.

Toni Morrison's writing is not my cup of tea. I started TRYING to read her novels after seeing her on Oprah. Very heavy lady but I can't seem to get through her work. If Beloved had not been a movie, I wouldn't know what that was about either.

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6. Beloved is one of the most difficult novels I've ever read

and I did graduate English for six years. I'd try something else like "Sula" before you give up on her or you. :)