A black quar­ter­back refus­es to stand dur­ing the nation­al anthem—a song, inci­den­tal­ly, writ­ten by a “patri­ot” who was also a “big­ot” and slave­own­er, “vehe­ment­ly opposed to abo­li­tion.” The quar­ter­back declares that he will not “show pride in a flag for a coun­try that oppress­es black peo­ple and peo­ple of col­or.” The quar­ter­back is told he has dis­re­spect­ed the coun­try, the police, and the mil­i­tary. His crit­ics become enraged, apoplec­tic. He is told he should leave the coun­try. He is mocked by thou­sands of peo­ple who point to his wealth and priv­i­leged, adop­tive upbring­ing. An upbring­ing among white peo­ple. Such suc­cess, the under­ly­ing log­ic goes, and such a child­hood should have made the quar­ter­back patri­ot­ic, grate­ful, col­or­blind.…

What if the quar­ter­back had not grown up priv­i­leged, but in one of many com­mu­ni­ties of col­or that bear the brunt of well-doc­u­ment­ed but most­ly ignored police vio­lence and insti­tu­tion­al dis­crim­i­na­tion and impov­er­ish­ment? How would his actions be received then? We can imag­ine much the same, giv­en the reac­tion to ear­li­er, less-priv­i­leged sports fig­ures, to Black Lives Mat­ter pro­test­ers around the coun­try, and to move­ments of the past. (Until last year, nine men in South Car­oli­na still bore con­vic­tions for tres­pass­ing after their sit-in protests in 1961.) Protest­ing the country’s racist past and present—like protest­ing the country’s wars, inequal­i­ty, or envi­ron­men­tal depredations—is crim­i­nal, we’re told, blas­phe­mous, tan­ta­mount to trea­son… or ter­ror­ism. The nation is inno­cent of all charges, and the pro­tes­tors are bit­ter, naive, hate­ful, and worse. For read­ers of James Bald­win, it all sounds ter­ri­bly famil­iar.

Bald­win’s is a dif­fi­cult lit­er­ary lega­cy: while we rejoice that he is still so often read, we lament that so many of his con­tem­po­rary obser­va­tions remain rel­e­vant. In 1962, Bald­win pub­lished an essay in The Pro­gres­sive in the form of a let­ter to his nephew, James. Lat­er col­lect­ed in The Fire Next Time, the let­ter pro­vid­ed the inspi­ra­tion for Ta-Nehisi Coates’ recent best­seller, Between the World and Me, writ­ten as a let­ter to his then 15-year-old son. In the video above—from this January’s star-stud­ded MLK Now cel­e­bra­tion—Chris Rock reads Baldwin’s pas­sion­ate let­ter, itself an act of protest, unpa­tri­ot­ic, if you like, in which he levies the same charges against the nation as Col­in Kaeper­nick has fifty-four years lat­er.

“This is the crime of which I accuse my coun­try and my coun­try­men,” writes Bald­win, “and for which nei­ther I nor time nor his­to­ry will ever for­give them, that they have destroyed and are destroy­ing hun­dreds of thou­sands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.”

Now, my dear name­sake, these inno­cent and well mean­ing peo­ple, your coun­try­men, have caused you to be born under con­di­tions not far removed from those described for us by Charles Dick­ens in the Lon­don of more than a hun­dred years ago. I hear the cho­rus of the inno­cents scream­ing, “No, this is not true. How bit­ter you are,” but I am writ­ing this let­ter to you to try to tell you some­thing about how to han­dle them, for most of them do not yet real­ly know that you exist. I know the con­di­tions under which you were born for I was there. Your coun­try­men were not there and haven’t made it yet. Your grand­moth­er was also there and no one has ever accused her of being bit­ter. I sug­gest that the inno­cent check with her. She isn’t hard to find. Your coun­try­men don’t know that she exists either, though she has been work­ing for them all their lives.

Baldwin’s iron­ic insis­tence on the country’s “inno­cence” is com­plex, his lan­guage filled with the cos­mic imagery of the jere­mi­ad. The peo­ple Bald­win speaks of real­ly are in a sense “inno­cent,”  in that they too are vic­tims, “still trapped in a his­to­ry which they do not under­stand and until they under­stand it, they can­not be released from it.” Peo­ple, as Coates put it, trapped in an unre­al dream. “We can­not be free,” he writes, “until they are free.” With the com­ing of civ­il rights-era fights against racism, how­ev­er, “those inno­cents who believed that your impris­on­ment made them safe are los­ing their grasp of real­i­ty.”

Nonethe­less, he urges his nephew to stay and “with love… force our broth­ers to see them­selves as they are, to cease flee­ing from real­i­ty and begin to change it.” Despite the grim, prophet­ic tenor of his mes­sage, Bald­win ends on a note of hope, one that rec­og­nizes love of coun­try not as sen­ti­men­tal, rit­u­al­ized loy­al­ty pledges, but as a strug­gle and a reck­on­ing with that coun­try’s ugly truths:

For this is your home, my friend. Do not be dri­ven from it. Great men have done great things here and will again and we can make Amer­i­ca what Amer­i­ca must become.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

James Bald­win Debates Mal­colm X (1963) and William F. Buck­ley (1965): Vin­tage Video & Audio

James Baldwin’s One & Only, Delight­ful­ly-Illus­trat­ed Children’s Book, Lit­tle Man Lit­tle Man: A Sto­ry of Child­hood (1976)

Ralph Elli­son Reads from His Nov­el-in-Progress, June­teenth, in Rare Video Footage (1966)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

When we invoke the names of famous artists of the past, we refer to their most hal­lowed work—Orson Welles simul­ta­ne­ous­ly means Cit­i­zen Kane, for exam­ple, or War of the Worlds, and H.G. Wells means The Time Machine or…  War of the Words. It hap­pens that when these two artists got togeth­er in 1940, they found that their worlds, which had already met in Welles’ noto­ri­ous broad­cast, had quite a lot to say to each oth­er, genial­ly trad­ing sto­ries, ideas, and mutu­al admi­ra­tion.

Anoth­er his­toric meet­ing between two artists we might con­sid­er kin­dred, James Joyce of Ulysses fame and Mar­cel Proust of In Search of Lost Time, did not pro­duce such a rich exchange. As Irish crit­ic Arthur Pow­er remarked, “Here are the two great­est lit­er­ary fig­ures of our time meet­ing and they ask each oth­er if they like truf­fles.”

That, at least, is one account of the occa­sion in May of 1922, near the end of Proust’s life. The meet­ing took place at a par­ty for Igor Stravin­sky and Sergei Diaghilev at the Majes­tic Hotel. Though both nov­el­ists pro­pelled their great­est work for­ward by extrap­o­lat­ing from their favorite sub­ject, them­selves, the selves in their work are expan­sive and vast, tak­ing in whole cities, nations, and social worlds. Both were vora­cious read­ers with incred­i­ble mem­o­ries (as we cer­tain­ly know of Proust) and an intu­itive grasp of the cul­tur­al mech­a­nisms of moder­ni­ty. Such seri­ous con­ver­sa­tions the two of them might have.…

But one attendee, William Car­los Williams, paints a much more com­ic pic­ture.….

Joyce, writes Ben Jack­son at the Lon­don Review of Books, “arrived drunk and poor­ly dressed; Proust, draped in furs, opened the door.” Then, writes Williams, the two men sat in chairs side by side, while “par­ti­sans” wait­ed for “the wits to sparkle and flash.” Instead, they kvetched in the sports-and-weath­er small talk of two elder­ly men meet­ing in a doctor’s wait­ing room, or two Samuel Beck­ett char­ac­ters, beset by pet­ty com­plaints of ulti­mate impor­tance.

Joyce said, “I’ve headaches every day. My eyes are ter­ri­ble.”
Proust replied, “My poor stom­ach. What am I going to do? It’s killing me. In fact, I must leave at once.”
“I’m in the same sit­u­a­tion,’ replied Joyce. ‘If I can find some­one to take me by the arm. Good­bye!”
“Char­mé,” said Proust. “Oh, my stom­ach, my stom­ach.”

Ford Madox Ford con­firms the account, but the party’s host, nov­el­ist Syd­ney Schiff denied it, reports Joyce’s most respect­ed biog­ra­ph­er Richard Ell­mann. Ell­mann doesn’t seem to favor one ver­sion or anoth­er, but he does give us Joyce’s own ver­sion, mul­ti­ply attest­ed. The Ulysses author remem­bered that their “talk con­sist­ed sole­ly of the word ‘No.’ Proust asked me if I knew the duc du so-and-so. I said, ‘No.’” Proust was asked if he’d read Ulysses, and like­wise replied in the neg­a­tive. “The sit­u­a­tion,” Joyce remem­bered, “was impos­si­ble.” Oth­er guests remem­bered the meet­ing sim­i­lar­ly.

In yet anoth­er ver­sion, we see the after­math of their conference—in a sto­ry that resem­bles many an end-of-the-night-gone-sour sce­nario. Syd­ney Schiff’s wife Vio­let recalled Joyce drunk­en­ly invit­ing him­self into a taxi with the two of them and Proust, and prompt­ly open­ing the win­dow. “Know­ing Proust’s dead­ly fear of drafts,” writes a Proust site, Vio­let “imme­di­ate­ly closed the win­dow.” When the cab arrived at Proust’s apart­ment, the French nov­el­ist “urged the Irish­man to let the taxi take him home,” then “fled to his apart­ment.”

The many con­flict­ing ren­di­tions all seem to agree on one thing: the meet­ing was a wash. Nonethe­less, one author recent­ly pub­lished what pur­ports to be an entire book on the sub­ject. Even he con­cludes “no one can say for cer­tain exact­ly what they said to each oth­er.” It’s tempt­ing to think things might have gone oth­er­wise, had they met ear­li­er or in dif­fer­ent cir­cum­stances, giv­en Joyce’s ten­den­cy to get too drunk and Proust’s ill health and aver­sion to, well, com­pa­ny. The New Inquiry cites a remark Joyce made to Samuel Beck­ett about Proust: “If we had been allowed to meet and have a talk some­where….”

Although it’s said that both writ­ers con­fessed to not hav­ing read the oth­er, Jack­son notes that when Joyce “did admit to pass­ing his eyes over a few pages he declared that he did not see ‘any spe­cial tal­ent.’” He also con­fessed to some envy of Proust’s com­fort­able cir­cum­stances. Proust, who died six months lat­er, left no men­tion of their meet­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Orson Welles Meets H.G. Wells in 1940: The Leg­ends Dis­cuss War of the Worlds, Cit­i­zen Kane, and WWII

The His­toric Meet­ing Between Dick­ens and Dos­to­evsky Revealed as a Great Lit­er­ary Hoax

Edward Said Recalls His Depress­ing Meet­ing With Sartre, de Beau­voir & Fou­cault (1979)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

So maybe you didn’t take a class on James Joyce’s Ulysses in col­lege with a wiz­ened pro­fes­sor from Dublin who explained in excru­ci­at­ing detail, week after week, why the famed mod­ernist writer is the great­est nov­el­ist that ever lived and also some kind of sec­u­lar sage and con­duit of the col­lec­tive genius of human­i­ty. Maybe your encounter with Joyce began and end­ed with a few sto­ries from Dublin­ers or with the thin­ly veiled mem­oir, A Por­trait of an Artist as a Young Man. In that case, you may won­der why he inspires such cult-like devo­tion, even to the point of hav­ing his own hol­i­day, Blooms­day, in which, Jonathan Gold­man writes, “aca­d­e­mics and pro­fes­sion­als min­gle with obses­sives and cranks”—many of either camp-dressed in peri­od garb, quot­ing Ulysses from mem­o­ry, and re-enact­ing major scenes from the nov­el.

If you don’t know Joyce at all, or haven’t read Ulysses, there’s no time like the present to dis­cov­er why you should. In his short School of Life ani­mat­ed video above, Alain de Bot­ton lays out just a few of the rea­sons for the Joyce-wor­ship, includ­ing the writer’s “devo­tion to some cru­cial themes” like “the idea of the grandeur of ordi­nary life” and “his deter­mi­na­tion to por­tray what actu­al­ly goes on through our heads moment by moment, what we now know, part­ly thanks to him, as the ‘stream-of-con­scious­ness.’” That phrase did not orig­i­nate with Joyce, how­ev­er, but with William James in the 1890s and his descrip­tion of the col­lec­tive char­ac­ter­is­tics of “per­son­al con­scious­ness.”

But since Joyce’s lit­er­ary use of inte­ri­or mono­logues that mim­ic the ran­dom asso­ci­a­tions of thought, we use “stream-of-con­scious­ness” to mean “the pre­sen­ta­tion of thoughts and sense impres­sions in a life­like fash­ion.” The “life­like­ness” of Joyce’s approach explains its appeal to so broad a range of read­ers, and its influ­ence upon so many writ­ers. Ulysses may prin­ci­pal­ly be a nov­el about Dublin, as are all of Joyce’s books, but it also retells the epic sto­ry of the Odyssey, a “pin­na­cle of high cul­ture,” Bot­ton pro­nounces, through the worka­day mean­der­ings, rou­tines, and dis­trac­tions of ordi­nary, undis­tin­guished peo­ple.

Ancient lit­er­a­ture like Homer gives us great men of action—archetypes ruled by fate—and the Vic­to­ri­an nov­el Joyce replaced offers extremes of aris­toc­ra­cy and des­ti­tu­tion. In Ulysses, shop­keep­ers, bar­tenders, seam­stress­es, stu­dents, and adver­tis­ing men become three-dimen­sion­al, psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly real actors in a his­tor­i­cal dra­ma, sim­ply by being who they are. Ulysses’ pro­tag­o­nist, Leopold Bloom, is “very unlike a tra­di­tion­al hero, but he is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of our aver­age, unim­pres­sive, frag­ile, but still rather like­able every­day selves.”

The novel’s cat­a­logue of Bloom’s thoughts and actions over the course of an unex­cep­tion­al day com­mu­ni­cate to us that “the appar­ent­ly lit­tle things that hap­pen in dai­ly life… aren’t real­ly lit­tle things at all. If we look at them through the right lens, they are revealed as beau­ti­ful, seri­ous, deep and fas­ci­nat­ing. Our own lives are just as fas­ci­nat­ing as those of the tra­di­tion­al heroes.” We must also note, how­ev­er, that Ulysses makes huge demands on its read­er. As one ear­ly review­er of the nov­el wrote, “few intu­itive, sen­si­tive vision­ar­ies may under­stand and com­pre­hend ‘Ulysses’… with­out going through a course of train­ing or instruc­tion.” Like Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy, which great­ly influ­enced Joyce, Ulysses is laden with local and his­tor­i­cal ref­er­ences, poet­ic allu­sions, and arcane philo­soph­i­cal and the­o­log­i­cal debates… one may need a Vir­gil to fin­ish the tour.

If we’re spec­u­lat­ing about Joyce’s inten­tions in giv­ing us ordi­nary char­ac­ters through extra­or­di­nary lit­er­ary means, they may have been less didac­tic than ped­a­gog­i­cal. Yes, we can see our ordi­nary selves—the shape and form of our “per­son­al consciousness”—looking back at us from Ulysses’ pages. To use a cur­rent buzz­word, Joyce was a “mas­ter of lit­er­ary mind­ful­ness.” We must become bet­ter, more patient and dili­gent read­ers to appre­ci­ate the epic scope of human inte­ri­or­i­ty in his best known nov­el. In that regard, Joyce teach­es us not only to think of our­selves as heroes, but also to move through our seem­ing­ly banal mod­ern envi­ron­ment with the same lev­el of curios­i­ty, excite­ment, and awe that moves us through the world of Odysseus. They are ulti­mate­ly, he sug­gests, the same world.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Very First Reviews of James Joyce’s Ulysses: “A Work of High Genius” (1922)

James Joyce’s Dublin Cap­tured in Vin­tage Pho­tos from 1897 to 1904

Carl Jung Writes a Review of Joyce’s Ulysses and Mails It To The Author (1932)

Free Online Lit­er­a­ture Cours­es

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Edgar Allan Poe: any­one with an inter­est in scary stories—and not just scary, but deeply, whole-oth­er-lev­el scary stories—quickly learns the name. Pre­sum­ably they also learn the prop­er spelling of the name: “Allan” with two As, not “Allen” with an E. But despite using the incor­rect lat­ter, the good peo­ple at Spo­ti­fy have still man­aged to craft the most expan­sive Poeian playlist cur­rent­ly avail­able on the inter­net, whose four­teen hours con­sti­tute “the essen­tial Poe lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence, from vin­tage radio ver­sions to con­tem­po­rary read­ings.” (If you don’t have Spo­ti­fy’s free soft­ware, down­load it here.)

Though he com­posed his entire body of work in the first half of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, Poe lives on, for those who like their cock­tails of mys­tery and the macabre with a long-last­ing (and long-trou­bling) psy­cho­log­i­cal after­taste, as the sto­ry­teller to beat. As impres­sive a num­ber of his writ­ings—“The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Fall of the House of Ush­er,” “The Cask of Amon­til­la­do,” and “The Pit and the Pen­du­lum”—have tak­en a per­ma­nent place in not just the Amer­i­can but human con­scious­ness, none have attained as much uni­ver­sal­i­ty as “The Raven,” the poem of lone­li­ness and the super­nat­ur­al which jus­ti­fi­ably begins the playlist.

Giv­en its sheer length, Spo­ti­fy’s Essen­tial Edgar Allen Allan Poe does­n’t just play the hits: even avowed Poe appre­ci­a­tors will like­ly hear a few intrigu­ing lit­er­ary B‑sides they nev­er have before. They’ll cer­tain­ly hear more than a few pro­duc­tions and inter­pre­ta­tions of their favorite pieces from the Poe canon. The playlist would also make a fine, if intense, intro­duc­tion for those who have yet set­tled in with the work of the man who defined mod­ern psy­cho­log­i­cal hor­ror. If you crave more afterward—and get­ting his read­er­ship hooked ranked not least among Poe’s concerns—do delve into the copi­ous amount of Poe mate­r­i­al we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, a few selec­tions from which appear below. You’ll find it all endur­ing­ly and dread­ful­ly com­pelling, no mat­ter how you spell its author’s name.

The “Essen­tial Edgar Allan Poe” Playlist will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load The Com­plete Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Macabre Sto­ries as Free eBooks & Audio Books

5 Hours of Edgar Allan Poe Sto­ries Read by Vin­cent Price & Basil Rath­bone

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” Read by Christo­pher Walken, Vin­cent Price, and Christo­pher Lee

Iggy Pop, Deb­bie Har­ry, Jeff Buck­ley & Oth­er Celebs Read Tales by Edgar Allan Poe

William S. Bur­roughs Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”

Hear Orson Welles Read Edgar Allan Poe on a Cult Clas­sic Album by The Alan Par­sons Project

Edgar Allan Poe Ani­mat­ed: Watch Four Ani­ma­tions of Clas­sic Poe Sto­ries

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.