{"id":1459,"date":"2024-10-27T14:46:03","date_gmt":"2024-10-27T18:46:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/?p=1459"},"modified":"2024-10-27T14:46:03","modified_gmt":"2024-10-27T18:46:03","slug":"giovannis-room-koolaids-and-queer-futures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/2024\/10\/27\/giovannis-room-koolaids-and-queer-futures\/","title":{"rendered":"“Giovannis Room,” “Koolaids” and Queer Futures"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Currently the two texts which will be the center of my Senior Thesis are Giovanni\u2019s Room <\/em>by James Baldwin, and Koolaids: The Art of War <\/em>by Rabih Alameddine. I first encountered Koolaids <\/em>my first semester of college in my English 101 course about American Postmodernism. This was the first book that I had read that truly refused to be confined by any standards of the novel format. That is, the story is composed of vignettes, most of which are less than a page, but some can be up to 3 pages long. The whole time I was reading Koolaids <\/em>I could not help but wonder, \u201cOkay, why is this like this?\u201d I think, also, I just really enjoy weird books and stories that open entirely new avenues of looking at the world. I certainly never would have thought that the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco and the Lebanese civil war had anything in common, or that writing about them in tandem could be so beautiful. Koolaids <\/em>is a book that is both weird and beautiful, and I would argue, it is beautiful because of its weirdness.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I encountered Giovanni\u2019s Room <\/em>for the first time last February. I had read Going to Meet the Man <\/em>and Go Tell It On the Mountain <\/em>over winter break and was absolutely enthralled by Baldwin\u2019s prose. As such I found myself in Whistlestop one afternoon looking for something interesting to read for fun and happened to look at the shelf with Baldwin\u2019s works on it and thought, \u201cIt would be cool to read some more Baldwin,\u201d so I grabbed Giovanni\u2019s Room <\/em>by chance. Mostly because I was certain I would enjoy anything that he had written. I was of course correct. Baldwin\u2019s prose, storytelling, and characters are all stunning.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The goal, or rather the question then, becomes how these seemingly very different texts come together. I was reading Koolaids <\/em>again over Fall Pause, and realized, that at the center of both of these novels is the simple fact that the openly gay, or queer, main characters of these books die at the end. So, the center of these novels in the question of the future, and what a life looks likes when one is left without the possibility of ever truly being oneself or is confronted with the slow and painfully death of all of your closest friends. Indeed, while these stories address different generations of queer men the ending, or rather the conclusion is the same: to be gay is to die.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Currently the two texts which will be the center of my Senior Thesis are Giovanni\u2019s Room by James Baldwin, and Koolaids: The Art of War by Rabih Alameddine. I first encountered Koolaids my first semester of college in my English 101 course about American Postmodernism. This was the first book that I had read … Continue reading “Giovannis Room,” “Koolaids” and Queer Futures<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5366,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[145914],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2024-blog-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5366"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1459\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}