Some Vision All His Own: James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues"

Our first guest episode in the Cordelives Club! My friend Brian—poet, professor, lover of Paris—joins to talk about James Baldwin’s brilliant short story “Sonny’s Blues", and tunes in an absolute tour de force.

Brian takes us through the story from the sentence level out to the wider context of Baldwin’s life; we cover everything from the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s to Baldwin’s influences from painting and music to the Parisian art scene to Biblical allegory to the way imagery and metaphor function in “Sonny’s Blues” to mediate identity and meaning. Fortunately for everyone, I pretty quickly understood just how well prepared Brian was for this conversation, and mostly got out of the way!

Check out Brian’s website, and order one of his books! We also have some links for further reading that came from our talk:

• The text of the story itself
• Baldwin’s Art of Fiction in The Paris Review
• A review of a new book about Baldwin and Beauford Delany
• An article on T. S. Eliot’s essay “Ulysses, Order, and Myth”

I hope everyone enjoys this excellent discussion; I know I did. We’ll definitely have Brain back on the show, and we’ve got another fun episode coming on Saturday. In the meantime—stay critical.

Merci !