Name: The Opening Passage of 'Giovanni's Room,' written by James Baldwin, read by RM. by ViciousMinutesHour in Talks/Speeches/Profound Words/Thought Pieces
Duration: 6 min 10 s
Description: The first three pages of James Baldwin's novel, 'Giovanni's Room.

Talks/Speeches/Profound Words/Thought Pieces

Then came a time of caesuras. The lakes
the land, the soul-blue earth, listened.
Some dream, long sealed in the ice of stars,
awakened, tinkling like a crystal glass
under a knife — the dream that all men
dreamed, lying in wet grass under comets,
or thighs vacant in the back of brothels —
a lust for another planet of another hue,
redder than the Red square in Moscow.

Of course, it felt just like a joke, this false
reverie of a false country, but it covered it all,
the heat thicker than honey into which
bears dived and died, bees lost in poppies,
nightingales missing at dawn, their songs,
their small decisions, their inscrutable innocence
filling pages of books never to be read
again. And no one could say if it mattered much
or not, to live under of a birdless sky,
when there wasn’t a creature on this earth,
flapping its wings out of illustrations,
for whom one would gladly give his life.

When the word extinction flooded the news,
everyone felt the roots of his own world
move but sat on, with pictures, pictures
and nothing else, pinned on retinas like moths.
— men falling from boats or towers of steel,
selfies longing to drown in popularity.
A horror so deep only a new ritual could absorb it
— with no icons nor incense, but laughs
and porn halting the mind via telephones.

Oracles hardly depicted such terminal,
that pit of iron oxide, hung like a ruby
in the sky. Never mind — the City of Light
now drifted as a glacier in the distance,
the last trumpet — or was it the whole
Revelation ? — just a broken gutter pipe.
There are so many ways to decline
a miracle, not the jasper flying through the air,
but the air itself. Not the gold but the water.
Heaven was blue. The dream, of blood.

Honey I’m losing you, played the song on repeat.
I can feel it in the air, it’s there everywhere.

During the interval, between the sapphire
and the record, the picture and the eye,
a disk tried not to break in the sunless oceans,
— whales, linked as children in a circle,
danced the perfect dance of Ezekiel’s wheels.
Watching it roll at the surface of water,
for a moment, was enough to unfold
the lungs like newspapers in the wind.

Something in their cry pierced the bones.
It carried the cold ordinary world.
The wild memories that swallowed us all.
The silence of islands and the height of cities.
The mother’s womb and the cruel clock ticking,
the trucks unloading skinned animals
from beds of ice, and the high heels
walking down the same street at dawn.

They were, these colossuses, the sense
of pride and the sense of guilt. Sex,
passion, breath, boredom — gift.
They turned and turned indifferent to greed.

From that rusty ball, you will remember
their grey loneliness, the chant that can’t
reach you, so high up in this vertiginous
Hell. You will crave the modern landscapes,
those you prefered to ignore, the deserts
which contained all human scorn.
The shopping mall, the suburbs, the freeways,
the asylum — all with a kind of softness
in the bone. You will picture the dirty lane,
and the lover you kissed in the dark.

Everything is gone, will play the song
but not the way love is done.

And in the world below, the whales
will achieve their dance in silence
for we only forgive those we understand.

Album de karen mary

Mars, written and read by Karen Mary Berr

The first three pages of James Baldwin's novel, 'Giovanni's Room.

The Opening Passage of 'Giovanni's Room,' written by James Baldwin, read by RM.

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https://soundcloud.com/viciousminuteshour/a-quote-on-suicide-written-by?in=viciousminuteshour/sets/personal-favourites
My dear, I don’t know what to do today, help me decide. 
Should I cut myself open and pour my heart on these pages? 
Or should I sit here and do nothing, nobody’s asking anything of me after all. Should I jump off the cliff that has my heart beating so and develop my wings on the way down? Or should I step back from the edge, and let the others deal with this thing called courage. Should I stare back at the existential abyss that haunts me so and try desperately to grab from it a sense of self? Or should I keep walking half-asleep, only half-looking at it every now and then in times in which I can’t help doing anything but? 
Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee? Falsely yours, Albert Camus

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The Closing Passage of 'Giovanni's Room,' written by James Baldwin, read by RM.

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In Another Life (Edit)

As part of his mission to make sure artists are financially supported, Toronto-based fundraising consultant Rahim Ladha has taken it upon himself to fund and award three new cash prizes for underrepresented writers in Canada, ranging from BIPOC writing poetry to non-binary illustrators working in SFF. In this month's episode, we talk to Rahim about his intentions for the monthly/quarterly awards, how it's going so far, and his plans for growing the program.

(Find the transcript here: https://www.booknetcanada.ca/blog/2018/7/30/podcast-shoot-for-the-moon-awards-for-underrepresented-writers).

Full details on the Spark, Nova, and Echo awards, including eligibility and how to get in touch with Rahim, can be found at https://shootforthemoon.art. The 'racism in CanLit' article that Rahim mentions in the episode can be found at http://yilinwang.com/racism-in-canlit.

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The audio archives for VMH (http://viciousminuteshour.com) Contact - rahim@viciousminuteshour.com

The Opening Passage of 'Giovanni's Room,' written by James Baldwin, read by RM.

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