MEMBER BLOG TAG: james baldwin
| Wednesday, May 5, 2010 10:04AM | | | | Reading Baldwin's "Giovanni's Room" | Tags: James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room, Jan Castro
| | | | Jan Castro’s Blog on “Giovanni’s Room” by James Baldwin
Set in Paris, “Giovanni’s Room” is James Baldwin’s haunting early novel about a blonde American youth, David, who hides his homosexuality from his fiancé, from the boy he loves, and partly from himself. The interiority of the novel is striking. David tells the story, yet his name is mentioned only toward the end by the other American, Hella. Her name suggests both “hell” and the whole Hellenistic culture leading to Western civilization, in which women did not often play active roles in public life. In some cases, their roles as wives and mothers were masks for their spouses’ homosexual liaisons or alliances.
The narrative thread intermixes past events and a continuous present; the reader knows early on... | | | | | | | Wednesday, August 20, 2008 6:14PM | | | | From, Stealing Fire | Tags: Manhattan Project, Atomic Espionage, Saville Sax, Stealing Fire, James Baldwin
| | | The following is an excerpt from my memoir Stealing Fire: A Childhood in the Shadow of Atomic Espionage to be published in late 2008 by Ad Infinitum Press. I recount how my father Saville (or “Savy”) Sax became a spy for the Russians at the Manhattan Project, and how the practical and psychological consequences of espionage affected his childhood. Bluma Sax is the mother of Saville and my grandmother. She had emigrated with her husband from what is now the Ukraine at the end of the nineteenth century and become a Communist. Boria Sax
Old Ways in... | | | | | |
|
|
