Toni Morrison wrote an obituary for James Baldwin in The New York Times, published December 20, 1987 and online for you to read. “Jimmy, there is too much to think about you, and too much to feel. The difficulty is your life refuses summation – it always did – and invites contemplation instead. Like many of us left here I thought I knew you. Now I discover that in your company it is myself I know.” Justin Campbell reflects on Baldwin, race, and fatherhood.
Reflecting on Baldwin
Revisiting the Archive
Recommended Listening: Esquire has a new podcast on classic stories from their archive. The latest installment features Nick Flynn on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up, which first appeared in the magazine in 1936.
It’s Not TV. It’s F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Deadline reports that Hunger Games screenwriter Billy Ray has plans to adapt F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final, unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, into a series for HBO.
On the Mark
One Of Us, One Of Us
“But even among its peers, Louie is an outlier. It is a show that, more than any other, both caters to this new kind of audience — the Laptop Loners — and has, as its creator, a member of the club…we are living in the iGeneration, in which the self is projected back toward the world via social media. But whereas many Americans weave their public personas from curated chains of cultural signifiers — think of the popular web platform tumblr, where users ‘express themselves’ by posting digital reproductions of existing images — [Louis] C.K. aims for something more penetrating, a filmic representation of his own psyche,” claims the Los Angeles Review of Books.