Thrash

I can talk about the book I'm reading: James Baldwin's Another Country. I've read two more by him previously: Just Above My Head and Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone. My mom and my brother introduced me to him and my brother left me this one the last time he was here. I got the cheap paperback version of Tell Me How Long. . . for like 2 bucks at a used bookstore in Salem, Oregon a couple summers ago and read it soon after. He's fuckin' ridiculous. A black guy born in Harlem in the 20s - of the same era as the beats and Bukowski, notably, but Baldwin was black, and gay. He makes any of The Beats' or Bukowski's resistance seem whiny. Their personal and/or cultural revolutions peddly. He was, and through his writing, is, impossibly transcendent. His stuff is ahead of our time. Nothing is dated in his writing, which is so amazing. On the back of Another Country there's a quote by Langston Hughes which is perfect: "Baldwin uses words as the sea uses waves, to flow and beat, advance and retreat, rise and take a bow in disappearing. . . The thought becomes poetry and the poetry illuminates the thought." This book is an ocean, each paragraph a wave, and the weather changes, but Baldwin never strays far from the hurricane of how terrible love can be, never quite forgiving us, not letting us die, either.