1.
Reading books? Listening to books? Both are good.

According to research reported by Frederic Bernard, levels of comprehension did not differ significantly whether a text is read or listened to. The same story, whether it's read or listened to, activates the same regions of the brain in adults.

Other research indicates that you gain a deeper level of understanding through reading, but that's largely because you can control the speed. Listening, on the other hand, makes it easier to access the emotion of the text.

Upshot: Do both, as and when.

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2.
Garth Greenwell highlights the affirmatory elements of Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin.

I always love a new take on a book I've enjoyed.

In this essay, Greenwell deals with charges that Baldwin's novel roundly fails the test for "affirming art" (that is, art that makes people, especially marginalized people, feel emotionally supported or encouraged). While acknowledging the book's bleakness -- "nowhere does the novel suggest gay people might have access to anything like full or satisfying lives" -- Greenwell insists that Baldwin's novel saved his life. How so? One reason is that if art is to offer affirmation, it must be the kind of affirmation that can "acknowledge the possibility of failure and the inevitability of death... [because] art cannot collaborate in the larger culture's denial of the irreparable". Another is the larger-than-life prose: "David and Giovanni's romance will not last; but that meaning is scored to a music of rapture." For Greenwell personally, conditioned by homophobia to feel "out of scale", Baldwin's book "promised -- not in its story but in its styles, its sounds -- a world in which I might be intelligible". That was the affirmation Greenwell needed: "The most powerful affirmation art can offer is beauty... Baldwin's novel at once acknowledged doom and offered me equipment for doom's navigation... When I say that Giovanni's Room saved my life, what I mean is that it gave me art."

Beautifully put. Bravo!


Recent travels. Kunming

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3.
Henry Eliot's book group, Read the Classics, tackled Toni Morrison's Beloved.

Again, great to revisit something memorable, this time in the company of others (the posts start here). We all agreed it was a bleak read from the point of view of content; a tough read from the point of view of style; and a must read from the point of view of conscience.

Worth noting for future reference:

-- In Bloom's Guide, Susan Bowers says: "Beloved is a novel about collecting fragments and welding them into beautiful new wholes, about letting go of pain and guilt but also recovering what is lost and loving it into life." Such an apposite way of expressing what this book does... (I wasn't familiar with Bloom's Guides, but will now certainly look out for them.)

-- Eliot quoted another lovely summing-up by Afua Hirsch: "She revealed the sins of her nation, while profoundly elevating its canon. She suffused the telling of blackness with beauty, while steering us away from the perils of the white gaze. That’s why she told her stories. And why we will never, ever stop reading them."

-- He also drew our attention to an article by Cheryl Hall that explores the ways Beloved reflects oral tradition and jazz. Excerpt: "Morrison’s indebtedness to oral/musical tradition is reflected in a variety of ways in her work, and her insistence upon the reader as 'part of the creative process' is one more link to that tradition and its manifestation in jazz. While Morrison’s authoritative position for this particular text is undisputed, the implication is there that the Beloved experience differs for every audience, and with each successive performance. Just as a jazz audience may influence the performance by its response, so are our readings of Beloved shaped by what we bring to it. When we come to the text entrenched in our 'literary habit', Beloved may overwhelm us, appall us, even frighten us. When we come with an understanding of oral/musical traditions, the novel’s capacity for frenetic movement, for harmony and discord, purity and excess, engages us in a (re)memorable performance." Interesting idea...


The mountains and rivers bear witness...

-- Eliot also made us aware of The Bench by the Road Project. Morrison said in a 1989 interview that the lack of markers helping us remember the lives of enslaved Africans was part of the motivation to write Beloved: "There is no suitable memorial, or plaque, or wreath, or wall, or park, or skyscraper lobby. There's no 300-foot tower, there's no small bench by the road... And because such a place doesn't exist... the book had to." In response, this project places benches and plaques "at sites commemorating significant moments, individuals, and locations within the history of the African Diaspora".

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4.
And, a propos of slavery, Ana Lucia Araujo reminds us that it's important to look at practices in the Americas more generally, rather than focusing overwhelmingly on what happened in the US (as we tend to do).

Latin American slavery had many different features: "Understanding these differences allows us to recognise that race is historical, and changes from place to place and in different times. The US framework is not the only way the idea of race works, even in the Americas. Still today, Brazil has the largest population of African descent of all the Americas. In times when the illness of nationalism is growing across the world, and when the teaching of slavery is being attacked by the far Right and by white nationalist politicians and lawmakers, recognising the foundational role of slavery to the history of all of the Americas may help us understand one another and ourselves a little bit better."



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5.
Maria Ramirez urges Spain to remember its not-so-distant past.

The Velvet Cushion has featured a couple of books that are backgrounded by the Spanish Civil War and/or the subsequent period of dictatorship: The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon; Secret Haven by Maria Oruna; Nothing by Carmen Laforet.

Fifty years after the death of Franco, Ramirez argues: "In seeking to balance justice and reconciliation, Spain leaned heavily towards the latter. Few of the dictatorship’s crimes were prosecuted, and as the years passed, amnesty turned into amnesia."

An open and public rendition of the history of Francoism has been missing in her country for way too long, she says, and it's vital to start redressing the balance: "In Spain we are not good at dealing with the past, as other dark chapters in more recent history show, particularly regarding terrorism. But when you don’t fully reckon with the past, it can return to haunt you."