Author: Ros

A 7-11 Where Everybody Knows Your Name [poem]

Every day I drink eleven large cups of coffee
that I buy from the gas station, and
every night I drink three forties
that I buy from the gas station.
Double that on the weekend.
Triple it on public holidays.
Quadruple it when I’m feeling bad,
which is most of the time:
this kind of lifestyle isn’t conducive
to feeling good. But it suits my needs.
It’s preferable to the other kinds of life
I’ve tried.
Things’ll be different when I die.
Drunk in heaven–how redundant!

The poem’s final line–the best line, I think, and certainly the one that makes it “work”–is taken directly from Achewood, so I felt weird about trying to publish it. Maybe I shouldn’t: when I emailed Chris Onstad to ask if it was okay, he said that he liked the piece and gave me permission to use the line. (He also added, “lots of walking and water are an escape route from such familiar misery”). But it still doesn’t really feel right to me. That’s okay; sometimes poems are destined for blogs, or living rooms, or personal letters rather than for publication.

The poem was inspired by Fallen Leaves (2023, dir. Kaurismäki). I told my friend Evan that and he said, “It could have been inspired by any Kaurismäki movie.”

Finally, if you read this on mobile, be sure to read it in landscape; otherwise, the enjambment is fucked up. I don’t know how to do hanging indents on here. (I’m not very good with computer).

April 2024. San Diego, CA.

“He Feared His Life Had Been ‘A Jonah’s Life'”: David Leeming’s biography of James Baldwin [review]

It’s hard to care when a biography is about the story of someone’s life. For the genre to really “work,” biographers have to move beyond accounting for the life of their subject, using the thematic depth drawn out of that life to illuminate some of the world around it. David Garrow’s Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Leadership Conference is a good biography because of how it tracks the arc of King’s life, because of the depth and complexity with which it traces the development of his philosophical and political thought over time, and because of the superb social history it offers to contextualize King’s political activity. However, the book is raised into greatness by the subjects which Garrow views through the focal point of King’s life: by treating the Albany Movement and Birmingham Campaign as tactical case studies, as well as by emphasizing King’s role as a mediator between different groups within the broader Civil Rights Movement, Bearing the Cross is extremely enlightening as a book about the nuts and bolts of political organizing. Similarly, the thrilling accounts of Alexander von Humbolt’s globetrotting adventures and clear explanation of von Humbolt’s intellectual achievement make The Invention of Nature a good biography–but it’s a great biography because of how Andrea Wulf traces von Humbolt’s conception of nature rippling outward to reshape common sense. By these standards, David Leeming’s James Baldwin is certainly a good biography—even a very good biography—but one that falls short of greatness because of an unfortunate inattention to the world through which James Baldwin moved.

The longtime personal and professional relationship between Leeming and Baldwin afforded Leeming certain advantages as a biographer, not the least of which being his access to Baldwin’s private papers and family. Much of this intimate, thorough portrait’s power stems directly from the close relationship between biographer and subject. Only occasionally slogged down by the sheer weight of detail, Leeming moves adroitly from Baldwin’s childhood in Harlem through the streets of expatriate Paris, from the writing of the early works through the later Baldwin’s engagement with the Black Power movement of the 1970s. Leeming’s reconstruction of Baldwin’s inner life and interpersonal relationships throughout this narrative is eminently readable, and, given the autobiographical nature of even his fictional writing, should be of interest to any of Baldwin’s readers.

Leeming’s skill as a critic is another advantage; much of the book’s strength lies in its treatment of Baldwin’s literary output. Leeming does a good job contextualizing the social and economic circumstances specific to the composition of each piece, summarizing the respective critical response each received, and offering his own (usually compelling) readings. Key to the success of this critical dimension is Leeming’s acceptance of Baldwin’s self-conception as a kind of prophet in the Old Testament mode, stemming from Baldwin’s experience as a young preacher, bearing witness to the truth and standing alone in anger against a nation hellbent on failing to keep the faith. This perspective allows Leeming to trace Baldwin’s literary and political development with a clear sense of continuity and purpose, giving Leeming an important bridge to connect Baldwin the person with Baldwin the writer. It also affords Leeming the key conceptual tool for excavating the systematic social philosophy which undergirds Baldwin’s writing, probably the book’s single most important achievement.

However, the biography begins to falter when it attempts to situate Baldwin into a social context. Leeming does a good job reconstructing the dispute between Baldwin and Richard Wright over the role of literature in voicing social protest, but fails to place Baldwin’s vision of Black culture anywhere within the broader context and history of these debates. The reader learns a lot about Baldwin’s relationships with key figures in the Civil Rights movement and the Black Power movement without learning much either movement, let alone about the historical/political relationship between the two. And, although the book is both forthright and respectful in its treatment of Baldwin’s sexuality, its treatment of the homophobia Baldwin faced is conspicuously sparse and only incidental. Baldwin’s mission as witness of social injustice is served poorly by the book’s inability to use his life as a vantage point from which to survey these issues.

The Great Migration must be one of the book’s most striking contextual elisions. Elsewhere, Isabel Wilkerson makes the case for thinking about The Great Migration as a kind of skeleton key for understanding 20th century American social history; certainly, as a Harlem child of migrant parents from the South, Baldwin’s life and writing needs to be situated within this context. All we get from Leeming, however, is a brief aside detailing Baldwin’s visit to his preacher stepfather’s old church while writing “Nobody Knows My Name: A Letter from the South.” Compare this to the treatment of the Great Migration in Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, which is one of the few great film biographies: the documentary uses the story of Morrison’s family’s flight from Alabama to illustrate the danger of Southern life, which, in part, spurred the migration as a whole, while simultaneously constructing Morrison’s specific life story in such a way as to allow for holistic consideration of her body of novels. Having Morrison narrate the story of her family over images from Jacob Lawrence’s Great Migration series also reinforces the themes of the film vis-a-vis the importance of Black art. The failure to place Baldwin’s life, work and thought into the appropriate contexts in a similar way is the biography’s most significant limitation.

Even so, I got a lot out of reading  James Baldwin: A Biography. Baldwin was an interesting man who lived an interesting life, material that only a profoundly incompetent writer could render uninteresting. Thankfully, Leeming is far from incompetent, and his account, despite its limitations, is compelling, informative, and deeply moving.

Rosalind
September 2021. Spokane, WA.
lightly revised, March 2025. San Diego, CA.