Author | Lightnews

Little James Baldwin

@nnemmanuels.bsky.social

6K followers 14K following 700 posts

I should have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, but I could not stop pressing my phone.

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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · Nov 17

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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · Jun 21

No epiphany is worse than realising that you do not matter in the grand scheme of things. Like dust on a window pane—something to be wiped off without second thoughts, something forcibly left to brood in an untamed emptiness. Your first and only mistake was believing you mattered

Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · Jun 21

To watch an Iranian movie is to become a tissue wrapped inside a wet cloth. Oh Children of Heaven, pity me, I am still a hard man, so you have no right to make me weep.

Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · Jun 21

Guillaume Apollinaire’s Zone is a complete masterpiece. You appreciate its brilliance more when the reading is done on transit. A whole new planet of linguistic/imagistic possibilities captured in 4k by a wandering French maddie.

Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · Jun 21

"Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider."—bacon

Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · Jun 21

Cupid laughed in my face and told me that I should buck up and be a man. Freaking Ovidian gusto.

Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · Jun 21

Sometimes you take a picture of a house down the street and spend the rest of the day wondering what the owner was doing at the exact second the camera light shined on the house. Here, a house is a memento. A secret verb. Something so ordinary yet full of extraordinary questions.

Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · Jun 14

And the days are not full enough

And the nights are not full enough

And life slips by like a field mouse

Not shaking the grass

-Ezra Pound

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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · Jun 14

On nights like this I crave aloneness with a demystifying touch of belonging.

Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · Jun 13

If you are awake reading Deleuze on a creaky bed while the world goes to bunkers, I want to say “congratulations, my friend, you just discovered the secret recipe for ruin.

Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · May 29

Beautiful, rainy morning swaddled by a nostalgic husk. Got remembered of one of my earliest poems published in 2019 via Praxis Magazine.

Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · Apr 21

Adding something is enough.

Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · Apr 10

Brian Gyamfi

Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · Apr 10

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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · Mar 23

We never truly realize we are living in a sort of historical bubble until it becomes history. Time is whatever we say it is. The man existing outside time’s kinetic space lives more freely, more beautifully, more rebelliously against the immortally dark-hearted purveyors of nature.

Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · Mar 23

I have a yearly ritual of sharing this Keith Leonard’s poem, almost like a personal tradition. Some poems are perfect, beatific things you want to wear for the rest of your life. If you have ever wondered about the navel at which philosophy joins with poetry, here’s your answer.

Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · Mar 19

The wound was eternal, but the mind was God.

Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · Mar 19

Stay alive, learn, study, think, read, build, invent, create, speak, write, dream, design. Stay alive, stay alive inside you, stay alive also outside, fill yourself with colors of the world, fill yourself with peace, fill yourself with hope. Stay alive with joy.

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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · Mar 19

Joan Didion

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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · Mar 17

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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · Mar 15

Dreams are as much relevant as your nightmares. Trust whatever it is you have been shown, told, and dealt. Your God doesn’t need a shuteye as well as the devil you so much despise, and their knowledge is eternal. They may not have equal power, but what power have you on earth?

Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · Mar 15

My love story resides between constant awe and arrant nudity.

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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · Feb 28

“My doubts stand in a circle around every word. I see them before I see the word.”—Kafka

Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · Feb 27

Subscribe for free, people.

open.substack.com/pub/sparetim...

The Naming of Ghost Lettermen

Resisting the demise of African literary tradition

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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · Feb 26

As a young writer, you want your writing to change the world, or someone, or something other than yourself. But then you hit a certain age of sustained experience, and you realize that the person you ought to change is you. That somehow the world will always reflect the trueness of our spirit.

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