soundingonlyatnightasyousleep
replied to your post “platoapproved replied to your post: In which I finish Kings
GOD’S…”
Giovanni’s room by baldwin might be of interest if you’re looking for david and jonathan-referencing lit
Wow hey you know what, startled to realize, I’ve read that. Well I’ve read an excerpt of it, back when I used to subscribe to Lapham’s Quarterly like a reeeaaal posh one. A couple pages of Giovanni’s Room were included in the ‘Youth’ issue, Summer 2014, which is about to get further interesting for us, because Summer 2014 is when, you may recall, Captain America: The Winter Soldier was released, like a great flood over tumblr dot com, and so when I read such bits as
“I remember walking down the dark, tropical Brooklyn streets with heat coming up from the pavement and banging from the walls of the houses with enough force to kill a man…, with my arm around Joey’s shoulder. I was proud, I think, because his head came just below my ear. We were walking along and Joey was making dirty wisecracks and we were laughing.”
—and
“When we came back along those streets it was quiet; we were quiet too, We were very quiet in the apartment and sleepily got undressed in Joey’s bedroom and went to bed. I fell asleep—for quite a while, I think. But I woke up to find the light on and Joey examining the pillow with great, ferocious care.”
—and very much
“I realized that my heart was beating in an awful way and that Joey was trembling against me and the light in the room was very bright and hot. I started to move and to make some kind of joke but Joey mumbled something and I put my head down to hear. Joey raised his head as I lowered mine and we kissed, as it were, by accident. … We had our arms around each other. It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to find.”
—and oh certainly
“I feel in myself now a faint, dreadful stirring of what so overwhelmingly stirred in me then, great thirsty heat, and trembling, and tenderness so painful I thought my heart would burst. But out of this astounding, intolerable pain came joy; we gave each other joy that night. It seemed, then, that a lifetime would not be long enough for me to act with Joey the act of love.”
—I thought, drowsy in the endless heat of my own New York summer in a cheap un-air-conditioned apartment, “wow that’s quite pre-serum Steve & Bucky of you, James Baldwin.”
And of course there’s ONE, SPECIFIC constant now in all this, repeatedly popping up in this cultural bloodline, and I really do not know what to do with the fact that when David & Jonathan-referencing works appear in my life, one Sebastian Stan never seems to be far away.
