Klara Posted October 16 Share Posted October 16 Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni’s extraordinary forgotten conversation about the language of love and what it takes to be truly empowered Quote In November of 1971, fifteen months after his remarkable conversation with Margaret Mead about race and identity, James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) sat down with another extraordinary woman, the poet Nikki Giovanni (b. June 7, 1943), for another conversation of astonishing timeliness today. The event was hosted by the PBS television series SOUL! and took place in London. Baldwin was forty-six and Giovanni only twenty-eight. For hours of absolute presence, intellectual communion, and occasional respectful rebuttal, they explored justice, freedom, morality, and what it means to be an empowered human being. The transcript was eventually published as A Dialogue (public library). A dialogue (PDF) GIOVANNI: Would you say, to sort of sum things up here, that you tend to be optimistic? BALDWIN: When I pick your kid up in my arms, yes. When I look at you, yes. GIOVANNI: Not me. I'm very pessimistic. BALDWIN: Oh no, you're not as pessimistic as you think you are. GIOVANNI: I'm pretty pessimistic, though. BALDWIN: No, I think you're pretty realistic. I think you're pretty cool. I think you're pretty clear. But pessimists are silent; pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they're better than other human beings. GIOVANNI: People really feel the need to feel better than somebody, don't they? BALDWIN: I don't know why, but they do. Being in competition with somebody is something I never understood. In my own life, I've been in competition with me. GIOVANNI: Which is enough. BALDWIN: Enough? It's overwhelming. Enough? GIOVANNI: Just by fooling yourself. BALDWIN: That'll keep you busy, and it's very good for the figure. GIOVANNI: It makes you happy, you know. BALDWIN: Well, it means that in any case you can walk into a room and talk to somebody, look them in the eye. And if I love you, I can say it. I've only got one life and I'm going to live my life, you know, in the sight of God and all his children. GIOVANNI: Maybe it's parochial, narrow-minded, bullheaded, but it takes up so much energy just to keep yourself happy. BALDWIN: It isn't even a question of keeping yourself happy. It's a question of keeping yourself in some kind of clear relationship, more or less, to the force which feeds you. Some days you're happy, some days you ain't. But somehow we have to deal with that on the simplest level. Bear in mind that this person facing you is a person like you. They're going to go home and do whatever they do just like you. They're as alone as you are. GIOVANNI: Because that becomes a responsibility, doesn't it? BALDWIN: Well, it's called love, you know. GIOVANNI: We agree. Love is a tremendous responsibility. 1 Link to comment
Hermetico Posted October 17 Share Posted October 17 "They are everywhere. The tragedy-sniffers are all about they get up in the morning and begin to find things wrong and they fling themselves into a rage about it, a rage that lasts until bedtime, where even there they twist in their insomnia, not able to rid their mind of the petty obstacles they have encountered. They feel set against, it’s a plot. And by being constantly angry they feel that they are constantly right. You see them in traffic honking wildly at the slightest infraction, cursing, spewing their invectives. You feel them in lines at banks at supermarkets at movies, they are pressing at your back walking on your heels, they are impatient to a fury. They are everywhere and into everything, these violently unhappy souls. Actually they are frightened, never wanting to be wrong they lash out incessantly it is a malady an illness of that breed. The first one I saw like that was my father and since then I have seen a thousand fathers, ten thousand fathers wasting their lives in hatred, tossing their lives into the cesspool and ranting on." -Charles Bukowski, They Are Everywhere Link to comment
Lena Posted Monday at 08:55 Share Posted Monday at 08:55 "Magija vode", Japan, 1951. Autor fotografije je Koji Takashima, fotograf amater, radnik Kawasaki kompanije za proizvodnju lokomotiva. Fotografjia je osvojila peto mesto u kategoriji crno-belih fotografija na međunarodnom takmičenju koje je organizovao Popular Photography Magazine 1951. 1 Link to comment
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