The Devil Finds Work by James Baldwin- I wrote a little bit more about this book in my Black Kos commentary last week. Having finished now, I am more convinced than ever that “James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work continues to become a touchstone for new and later generations of art and literary critics of color. The book will continue to become more popular and read than it was upon its’ initial release.”
I enjoyed reading this more than I did the first two or three times I read it (I think it’s because I have taking some literary and film theory classes).
TDFW is not simply about film or literary criticism or even about racism. The book is about how to see and to interpret the world around us and how differently we can see and interpret the same things. Baldwin’s review of The Exorcist remains one of the finest things that he’s ever written. He sees a lot of American cinema through the eyes and the patterns established in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation; probably the central text under discussion in TDFW. If one were to extend this argument 40 years after this book was written (1076), the same patterns and archetypes would remain, I suspect.
Now reading:
The American Language: An Inquiry Into the Development of English in the United States by H.L. Mencken- Finished Chapter 2, “The Material of Inquiry,” and almost finished with Chapter 3, “The Beginnings of American.” Mencken will probably have to go on that list of writers that I really, really like in spite of their faults (in Mencken’s case, racism and anti-Semitism, at the very least). Mencken’s thesis is that “America” presented a laboratory for the evolution and expansion of the English language that even England could not match (and that lexicographers and grammarians in England and America, in fact, resisted). Mencken chooses wonderful examples (i.e. intentional or unintentional examples of “Americanisms” in the speeches of Woodrow Wilson).
While one can acknowledge the influence of the Native American, French, and Spanish (and through Spanish, Arabic) languages on American English, given that some of the best writers of English have ethnic origins in England’s other big colony, I am not so sure that British English was (or is) as static as Mencken originally portrayed (which would have been outside of the parameters of his study, in any event).
I was also a little taken aback by the neo-romantic portrait that Mencken paints of “the common man” here, given what I’ve read of and by Mencken.
An Event in Autumn by Henning Mankell- Gave up looking for the lost Fred Vargas and this was the closest mystery that I could put my hands on. (I see my volume of Sherlock Holmes stories, some Patricia Cornwell, and Ian Rankin, though.). This is OK so far, skeleton of a woman found on a farm and Inspector Wallander is on the case...heavy subtext of aging thus far. The father-daughter relationship between Wallander and his daughter, Linda, is a little creepy...but, usually, set-ups of this type have a lot to do with the solution of the mystery so I’m paying attention...no spoilers, please!
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Good news for us book lovers: we tend to live longer lives!
Flaubert had it that “the one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy”. It turns out that reading doesn’t only help us to tolerate existence, but actually prolongs it, after a new study found that people who read books for 30 minutes a day lived longer than those who didn’t read at all.
The study, which is published in the September issue of the journal Social Science & Medicine, looked at the reading patterns of 3,635 people who were 50 or older. On average, book readers were found to live for almost two years longer than non-readers.
Respondents were separated into those who read for 3.5 hours or more a week, those who read for up to 3.5 hours a week, and those who didn’t read at all, controlling for factors such as gender, race and education. The researchers discovered that up to 12 years on, those who read for more than 3.5 hours a week were 23% less likely to die, while those who read for up to 3.5 hours a week were 17% less likely to die.
I’m reminded of the study that I read about a couple of months ago (and linked to it in the OND) that people who do math into older age tend to have better sex lives.
I guess there’s something about keeping and maintaining an active mind that’s a fountain of youth, on its own.