Mastodawn

#VendrediLecture 📚️ Bon, je me suis offert quelques livres… Bonne lecture, le monde ! #JoanDidion #ElifShafak #WilliamBurroughs #JamesBaldwin

Alexander Karn 2d ago

#JamesBaldwin #NoKings

Hunter Dansin 5d ago

I Am Not a Gun

Reconstructing Manliness with The Iron Giant and Mr. Darcy

“What is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me.”

— Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2.

When I was in college I decided to start a faith-based discussion group for men, about well, being a man. For some strange reason, I felt that it had to be very early in the morning, because getting up early was manly. In my campus-wide emails I also resorted to tasteless jokes about going out to chop down trees and break rocks with heads. Whatever this says about my social development is less relevant than the question that I was attempting to answer, however foolishly, with that group and those jokes: What does it mean to be a man?

This is a question that has tortured me since my adolescence, and tortures me still. Whether this essay will provide any relief remains to be seen. My small group, unsurprisingly, was not very popular, even with my Christian friends. Not many undergraduate guys were willing to get up for a discussion group that started at 6:30am on Friday mornings; or if they were willing, the flesh was weak. This does not mean that the group was a failure, because I had one regular attendee who I was able to talk quite deeply with, and I still think about him today. I was also told by a few people that they would have attended if it was at a less inconvenient time. This showed me that I was not the only one tortured by the question.

So, what does it mean to be a man? We will find out together, dear reader, whether I am any better equipped to answer this question than I was over a decade ago. But first I must define exactly what is meant by it. We could try to answer it by taking a survey of the men in our lives, and saying, “These examples show what it is to be a man.” But despite confounding us with wildly different conclusions, this method also reveals to us our bias. I think that most of us, consciously or unconsciously, have already taken a survey of the men in our lives, and the results have made us uneasy. That the question occurs to us reveals an insecurity about manhood that cannot be assuaged by the simple truth that no men are perfect. We would not be asking if there wasn't something resembling a real crisis. What I believe we really mean to ask is, “What does it mean to be a good man?”

[...]

https://blog.hdansin.com/i-am-not-a-gun

cath Mar 19

“Everyone you’re looking at is also you” #jamesbaldwin

From: @stefan
https://stefanbohacek.online/@stefan/113439103442820640

Stefan Bohacek (@[email protected])

Attached: 1 video "There may not be as much humanity in the world as one would like to see, but there is some. There's more than one would think." #humanity #JamesBaldwin

Stefan's Personal Mastodon Server

Katrina Katrinka

Mar 18

I am reading "Baldwin: A Love Story" right now. It's huge but very good, and very enlightening on issues of race and color and sexuality and how individuals navigate a world with cultures built to oppress them and do the introspective and interpersonal work to think about and write about those cultures both creatively and truthfully. Huge recommend.

I'm reading the audiobook and the reader does a great Baldwin voice without making it feel like an artifical or shallow impersonation.

https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9781250402004

#Bookstodon #JamesBaldwin

Sunyata Mar 17

Every bombed village is my hometown. And every dead child is my child. Every grieving mother is my mother. Every crying father is my father. Every home turned to rubble is the home I grew up in. Every brother carrying the remains of his brother across borders is my brother. Every sister waiting for a sister who will never come home is my sister. Every one of these people is ours, just like we are theirs. We belong to them, and they belong to us.

— James Baldwin

#JamesBaldwin #imperialism #war

Mbingu Mar 16

Baldwin writes very clear, people prefer to relate with obscenity rather than reality. But because obscenity doesn't reward they get bitter and mean.
It's like people want to believe in sex as the ultimate communication and are disappointed when the body they fuck does things that hurt them. No one should be surprised this happens if they don't bother or dare to relate to the actual individual and reality.
#jamesbaldwin #trueindividuality

John Autry Mar 10

#JamesBaldwin

Wisdom in Space Mar 7

Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.
-- James Baldwin

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #JamesBaldwin #Discipline #Endurance #Luck #Talent

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #WhiteRimTrail #Canyonlands #Utah