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Filmmaker Karen Thorsen gave us James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket, the award-winning documentary that is now considered a classic. First broadcast on PBS/American Masters in August, 1989—just days after what would have been Baldwin’s 65th birthday—the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1990. It was not the film Thorsen intended to make. Beginning in 1986, she and Baldwin had been collaborating on a very different film project: a “nonfiction feature” about the history, research, and writing of Baldwin’s next book, Remember This House. It was also going to be a film about progress: how far we had come, how far we still had to go, before we learned to trust our common humanity. The following memoir explores how and why their collaboration began. This recollection will be serialized in two parts, with the second installment appearing in James Baldwin Review’s seventh issue, due out in the fall of 2021.
Filmmaker Karen Thorsen gave us James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket, the award-winning documentary that is now considered a classic. First broadcast on PBS/American Masters in August, 1989—just days after what would have been Baldwin’s sixty-fifth birthday—the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1990. It was not the film Thorsen intended to make. Beginning in 1986, Baldwin and Thorsen had been collaborating on a very different film project: a “nonfiction feature” about the history, research, and writing of Baldwin’s next book, “Remember This House.” It was also going to be a film about progress: about how far we had come, how far we still have to go, before we learn to trust our common humanity. But that project ended abruptly. On 1 December 1987, James Baldwin died—and “Remember This House,” book and film died with him. Suddenly, Thorsen’s mission changed: the world needed to know what they had lost. Her alliance with Baldwin took on new meaning. The following memoir—the second of two serialized parts—explores how and why their collaboration began. The first installment appeared in the sixth volume of James Baldwin Review, in the fall of 2020; the next stage of their journey starts here.
Rather than write a classic biography of James Baldwin in the last cycle of his life—from his arrival in 1970 as a black stranger in the all-white medieval village of Saint-Paul, until his death there in 1987—I sought to discover the author through the eyes of people who knew him in this period. With this optic, I sought a wide variety of people who were in some way part of his life there: friends, lovers, barmen, writers, artists, taxi drivers, his doctors and others who retained memories of their encounters with Baldwin on all levels. Besides the many locals, contact was made with a number of Baldwin’s further afield cultural figures including Maya Angelou, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Angela Davis, Bill Wyman, and others. There were more than seventy interviews in person in places as distant as Paris, New York or Istanbul and by telephone spread over four years during the preparatory research and writing of the manuscript. Many of the recollections centred on “at home with Jimmy” or dining at his “Welcome Table.”
Flames . This omission is thought-provoking, because of the importance of Durrant’s work in the criticism of Abani’s output as one of the rare research pieces that tackles Abani’s prose as a whole and does not focus on just one single novel or novella. Our investigation of the novel in Chapter 6 fills that gap and situates The Secret History of Las Vegas in line with Abani’s previous works and their focus on the body, marginality, and the grotesque as lenses to reflect on the human, further exploring the Mbembean notion
experience’ (Den Dulk, 2019 : 155). Building upon this perspective, it may be argued that Wallace considered pornography not merely as a theme but as a device or vehicle prompting literary conversation by addressing how the entanglement of addiction and entertainment can ensnare human beings through fatal viewing practices. In pornography the aim of being entertained and need for immediate satisfaction have a strong connection with technology predicated on progressive disconnection from the outside world. Wallace started his research on pornography
). Despite such affinities between Wallace and Dostoevsky, however, connections in their fiction have so far remained under-researched. 1 To begin, it is worth noting that Wallace worked on his Dostoevsky article throughout 1995, including during his cruise experience that spring. The essay resulting from this cruise was published in January 1996 (around the same time that Infinite Jest came out) and bears clear traces of Wallace's immersion in Dostoevsky, especially in its
increasing specialisation of British dantisti who had turned the study of Dante into the sole and legitimate object of their ‘creative research’ and ‘original’ scholarship ( Lubenow, 2015 : 33). As much as the former phenomenon benefited from the 1860s university reforms that were bringing much-needed modernisation to the curriculum and to academic teaching practices, many felt quelled by the tyranny of examinations, which left little space for
. 7 Paul Nash , Dorset Shell Guide ( London : Architectural Press , 1936 ). 8 ‘Dozens of prehistoric, Roman and medieval sites discovered by archaeology volunteers working at home during lockdown.’ University of Exeter Research and Innovation , www.exeter.ac.uk/research
necessity for empathy on the part of the historian is stressed by her and others. 19 Indeed, discussing the ways in which a historian's emotions are ‘enlisted’ by the process of research, Michael Roper argues that conscious empathy and affectivity should form part of historians’ methodologies. 20 In common with other modern readers of the Book , I experienced a strong reaction to Margery the first time I read it. 21 Rather
. 6 On the topic see A. G. Hartwiger, ‘Strangers in/to the world: the unhomely in Chris Abani’s GraceLand ’, Matatu , 45 (2014) , p. 241; S. Harrison, ‘Suspended city: personal, urban, and national development in Chris Abani’s Graceland ’, Research in African Literatures , 43:2 (2012) , p. 99; A. Aycock, ‘An interview with Chris Abani’, Safundi: The Journal of South Africa and American Studies , 10:1 (2009) , 1–10; M. Feldner, Narrating the New African Diaspora: 21st Century