Amy Gideon > Recent Status Updates

Not even half way through the first lecture and this guy is literally saying Christianity and Christians are the last group where it's okay to persecute within our politically correct society. 🙄

This needs a second volume. Clearly both sets of friends need to be dating each other!!!!

I literally just screamed "you're a teacher" and felt validated when Ichinose said that in the first pane. Thank you.

From teachers to students, everyone in this school is cockblocking them 

Ohmi is a magnet for weirdos, and I love it.

I love thar he's following her fanfiction about him on Twitter.

I'm about halfway through, and I can't stop laughing. Finding out she only wrote about the bedroom scenes in her review nearly sent me.

He's doing everything wrong, unless he's delusional and none of its happening.

And him now stumbling on to a real death. Dude. Sometimes your imagination can be too much. If it is indeed his imagination.

For him to forget where he put the carpet...SMH.

I can't figure out what's real or not. Went into this blindly and am so confused.

Coming Out the Wilderness - So it does make me wonder if there's some hang-ups there by the author. I'll need to read more by him to see if this perception has merit. 

Like everything so far, it's well written and compelling. You feel with each of his protagonists. 

Coming Out the Wilderness - In the last short story the male protagonist is in an interracial relationship and there's no sense of shame with it. However. The protagonist was concerned when his white French friend and Arab friend were interested in a black woman they had all just met. Even the protagonist didn't quite understand why he was disturbed by it.

Coming Out the Wilderness - I can't decide if Baldwin recognized the double standards that his female protagonist is held to or not. I don't know enough about how he viewed women, particularly black women who are in interracial relationships, to really understand what he was trying to say with this character. 

Coming Out the Wilderness - The internalized misogyny and shame the heroine is dealing with is awful. I honestly just want to give her a hug and tell her she's worth so much more than how any of these men see her or even how she sees herself. I really wish there was a more hopeful ending to this one. 

The Morning, The Evening, So Soon - How the protagonist was kind of in the middle of these two groups and kind of had a loyalty to both.

Baldwin is really good at taking a normal everyday scenario and giving it so much weight and meaning even though it still remains ordinary. Like these two things exist at once.

This Morning, This Evening, So Soon - The exploration of black identity and how it compares to France and America while also exploring the tense relations between the Arabs and Frence was interesting. The complexity of the relationships between the protagonist who is a black American, who has found freedom in France, and a white Frenchman, and Tunisian Arab was fascinating.

This Morning, This Evening, So soon - Baldwin writes emotions and lived experiences so well. I love how love and family is portrayed in this short story. It's everything love and family should be, but realistically portrayed.

Sonny's Blues Cont - Also, the way he describes the jazz being performed at the end almost as a conversation and story is perfect. 

Sonny's Blues - this is the first of the stories in here where I feel like there is some hope. Although I feel like it wouldn't quite fit with the rest of the stories if that hope wasn't ambiguous and fragile, like it could be taken away at anytime. The Man knows how to write. The complicated feelings and guilt between siblings and the effects addiction has on everyone.

 I teared up multiple times at his desperation and an agony he couldn't adequately explain to his white Jewish friends, who could understand oppression and prejudice, but couldn't truly understand being black in America. How you can't hide from it and pass as white. How the system is suffocating and all around him. The isolation and loneliness reaches out from the page. It's heartbreaking. 

Previous Condition - this short story is just so fucking sad because of how so little has actually changed. You feel the protagonist's anger, fear, and utter exhaustion as he tries to just exist in a world that makes it so difficul for black people to exist.

The Man Child Cont - Like the atmosphere in this short story builds to where you know something is off and you're waiting in dread for something horrific to happen, but when it does finally happen you're still not quite ready. 

The Man Child - throughout the story there's this underlying tension between the adult characters and a child who is trying to make sense of what's going on around him. We're mostly in the child"s thoughts throughout which is especially horrifying towards the end.

The Outing - there's a whole lot going on in this short story. Grappling with religion and romantic attraction. That fear of knowing you might be different, but you're not quite sure what it means. There's a hint of parental abuse as well. It honestly feels like a snapshot in time.

The Rock Pile - the last line literally gave me chills. Even though the scene ends there, the line perfectly encapsulates what’s going to happen even though intentions aren’t clearly stated.