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Little James Baldwin

@nnemmanuels.bsky.social
6.1K followers 14K following 702 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 · 05/07/2026
Quite relevant to the Artificial Intelligence uprising. PS: I have forgotten the author—
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 21/06/2025
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 21/06/2025
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
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 21/06/2025
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.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 21/06/2025
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.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 21/06/2025
"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
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 21/06/2025
Cupid laughed in my face and told me that I should buck up and be a man. Freaking Ovidian gusto.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 21/06/2025
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.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 14/06/2025
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 · 14/06/2025
On nights like this I crave aloneness with a demystifying touch of belonging.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 14/06/2025
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.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 29/05/2025
Beautiful, rainy morning swaddled by a nostalgic husk. Got remembered of one of my earliest poems published in 2019 via Praxis Magazine.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 10/04/2025
Brian Gyamfi
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 10/04/2025
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 23/03/2025
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.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 23/03/2025
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.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 19/03/2025
The wound was eternal, but the mind was God.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 19/03/2025
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 · 19/03/2025
Joan Didion
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 17/03/2025
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 15/03/2025
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?
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 15/03/2025
My love story resides between constant awe and arrant nudity.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 28/02/2025
“My doubts stand in a circle around every word. I see them before I see the word.”—Kafka
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 27/02/2025
Subscribe for free, people. open.substack.com/pub/sparetim...
open.substack.com
The Naming of Ghost Lettermen
Resisting the demise of African literary tradition
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 26/02/2025
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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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 12/02/2025
You must wash your bedsheets while they are still clean. If you wait till they’re glaringly dirty, it might be too late. You might never be able to get them clean.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 11/02/2025
Writing a profile of a dead author under the sweltering sun and pretending to know what I am doing with my life seems fine my favorite hobby. Now I think, like Kafka said of Joyce, I am washed by divine fire.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 11/02/2025
I have a theory that poetry died the moment political poetry became a genre of poetry.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 11/02/2025
Not every suffering is made of blood. Some are a handful of roses you keep in your pocket, then watch them die.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 11/02/2025
One day I woke up and found myself in a strange place, but I didn’t take a leap or beg to be saved from the approaching enemy. I think I was quite comfortable in my undefined love for self-condemnation than in the quest to be alive and free.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 10/02/2025
Please repost.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 10/02/2025
All fictions are ordinary inventions of our private truths, bending inward, branching out into multiple streams of consciousness. There are no absolute truths: Even what’s remembered can be a myth lodged between a dreamer’s song and a realist imagination.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 10/02/2025
Hello Booksky, I seriously need writing/editing/teaching gigs. I’m short on funds right now, and with bills mounting like bulls on heat, the pressure is somewhat inundating. Please if you have any job for me, or know anyone who does, or come across any job opportunity, please share with me. Thanks.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 10/02/2025
There is language, and there’s the theory of language. What borders both is attention.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 10/02/2025
Bark all you want in a poem, but if it doesn’t bite off my head with the delight and sensuality of its language or leave teethmarks on the soles of my feet and walls of my heart with awe or land me in a hospice for the inundation of hard thoughts, you are a walking contradiction.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 10/02/2025
Whenever the god of capitalism answers the call of death, I’ll surely be there to pour the first shovel of sand.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 10/02/2025
Bark all you want in a poem, but if it doesn’t bite off my head with the delight and sensuality of its language or leave teethmarks on the soles of my feet and walls of my heart with awe or land me in a hospice for the inundation of hard thoughts, you are a walking contradiction.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 10/02/2025
Birds at the window every morning don’t know how to knit a Mozart, they scream—chaos: noisy wingflaps, beaks violently pecking my glass window. Before you begin your vanity talk, there’s nothing poetic about the ordeal. Sometimes a poem can be a metaphorical attempt at escaping.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 10/02/2025
Affordance versus relevance. The risk of seeking relevance is that there’s always a tendency for self-abandonment. When you lose selfhood, which I have always believed is where the true image of God dwells, you are whatever the world deems you to be. I choose affordance, always.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 09/02/2025
I had to become aware that I had lost my soul. — Carl Jung
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 06/02/2025
Hey baby, love me in this minute of silence, so you can love me in the storm.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 05/02/2025
Back to writing poems after months of digging through slices of life with a toothless fork. Although right now my lines seem a little jagged, a little pretentious, I am delighted to make something out of the void. Oh god, maybe language doesn’t heal, but I can bet on my life it absolutely redeems.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 03/02/2025
Personally reading has become a chore. Lack of concentration is the ultimate propeller. But I do not blame myself. You don’t tell someone running away from rabid sharp-teethed dogs to sit down and perhaps ponder the metaphysical consequences of reading nineteenth-century Norwegian authors.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 03/02/2025
Don’t visit the library alone in the dark. Those books lined up on the old rickety wooden shelves see and hear you, and they know who you actually pressed the blue ink for during the last election, and they are coming for you.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 03/02/2025
If you haven’t noticed, people are utterly tired. Less posting, less drama on the timeline—just plain old inertia thrown in by the radical moment we live in. It looks like the teeth-baring wolves has finally won. But don’t be deceived: we are here, we are the other, and we shall prevail somehow.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 03/02/2025
The word is in the craft. The word lives in the craft. The word is God. Nothing else makes sense in life than the mastery of one’s god-given craft. The end isn’t always a circumference of perfection. Let the first walk wobble. Your job is to learn tricks to keep your feet firmly on the floorboard.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 24/01/2025
Another day to subscribe to my newsletter: open.substack.com/pub/sparetim...
open.substack.com
Spare Time | Njoku Nonso | Substack
recalcitrant ramblings on books, arts, orgasms, culture, modernity etc. Click to read Spare Time, by Njoku Nonso, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 21/01/2025
Endless January just added an extra queue.
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 20/01/2025
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Little James Baldwin @nnemmanuels.bsky.social · 18/01/2025
“My roommate raises a question, "Who do you think you are when there's no one watching?" I say nothing because I'm suddenly thinking about what the news headlines would look like if I go on and annihilate myself tonight, on my birthday.” A lil revamp. Subscribe. open.substack.com/pub/sparetim...
open.substack.com
Death Is Not a Bad Joke If Told the Right Way
"I'm closing the night / I'm helping the night."—Stephen Dunn
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