Icarus Crashes and Rises from His Own Ashes

Part 3 includes 17 essays. Included in the section is the essay “Painting and Poetry,” in which Major merges the disciplines of visual art and writing, discussing letters written by Vincent van Gogh. “Thanks for the Lunch, Baby,’” imagines a posthumous Paris lunch with Major’s friend, James Baldwin, while “A Paris Fantasy Transformed” focuses on ex-pat Major’s observations of the complications in the European mecca-utopia. “Necessary Distance” can be seen more as a memoir; in it, Major recounts his captivation with painting, a scholarship he received as a teenager to attend sketch classes at Chicago’s Art Institute, his awareness of the absence of African American work from the walls of mainstream galleries, his fascination with form over content, and his frustration with critical pigeon-holing. The essays profiling renowned writers (James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright) are deliberately narrow, addressing aspects of the authors that have been rarely glimpsed. In “Don, Here Is my Peppermint Striped Shirt,” the reader is invited into a virtual 1970s Greenwich Village Moveable Feast: a Christmas party at which Major meets the subject of his essay. “Rhythm: A Hundred Years of African American Poetry” provides a detailed overview of a broad range of black poets, from slavery through the mid-1990s.