The rankness of bad faith supposes the availability of more direct, honest ways to express need, whereas everyone knows that the only socially credible subject is the stoic who, whatever his gender, obeys the gag rule incumbent on being a
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“Rebecca Solnit says in The Faraway Nearby, “There is a serenity in illness that takes away all the need to do and makes just being enough,” which has not been my experience. After all, prolonged and chronic illness stitches itself into life in a different way than acute illness does. With chronic illness, life persists astride illness unless the illness spikes to acuity; at that point, surviving from one second to the next is the greatest ambition I can attempt. The absolution from doing more and dreaming big that I experience during surgeries and hospitalization is absent during chronic illness.”
― The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays
― The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays
“Baldwin's words can sound harsh, as if he's throwing away millions of Americans and declaring them irrelevant to the life and future of our democracy. It's easy to read him that way, and sometimes, when his rage boils, he might actually mean it. But in the end, he wanted us to see that whiteness as an identity was a moral choice, an attitude toward the world based on ugly things. People can, if they want to, choose to be better. We need only build a world where that choice can be made with relative ease. If we--and I mean all of us who are committed to a New America--organize and fight with every ounce of energy we have to found an America free from the categories that bind our feet, implement policies that remedy generations-old injustices, and demonstrate in our living and political arrangements the value that every human being is sacred, we can build a New Jerusalem where the value gap [between whites and people of color] cannot breathe.”
― Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own
― Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own
“Tucker highlights that 'white names and sensibilities are used as lube for the ears and sensibilities of white audiences dying to be penetrated by Black experience'.”
― Camp!: The Story of the Attitude that Conquered the World
― Camp!: The Story of the Attitude that Conquered the World
“The enemy is conventional language; the antidote is poetry and mild intoxicants.”
― Attack of the Copula Spiders: Essays on Writing
― Attack of the Copula Spiders: Essays on Writing
“I composed balanced sentences and periodic sentences and practiced, till I was blue in the face, the English department adage, Vary your sentence structure. Amazingly enough, having a mix of long and short sentences, along with topic-body-conclusion paragraph structure, did not automatically make my prose interesting.”
― Attack of the Copula Spiders: Essays on Writing
― Attack of the Copula Spiders: Essays on Writing
Silver Screen Book Club
— 421 members
— last activity Apr 21, 2026 06:46PM
For anyone interested in black and white movies, actors from the dawn of film through the 1960s, or the culture of the era, this is the book club for ...more
Angel’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Angel’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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