Status Updates From The Devil Finds Work: An Essay

“In 1952, I was in America, just in time for the McCarthy era. I had never seen anything like it.” (p.85)

i just knewwww he was gonna trash on ‘lawrence of arabia’, i love what he said about it; specifically the mortification of the english schoolboy and his country’s manipulation of him towards these people he views as “lesser breeds”.

“Revenge is a human dream. There is no way of conveying to the corpse the reasons you have made him one—you have the corpse, and you are, thereafter, at the mercy of a fact which missed the truth, which means that the corpse has you.” p.46

so far he spends ch2 discussing the birth of a nation and in the heat of the night, and reading him shit talk in the ehat of the night was honestly really funny

brilliant. this is my first time reading james baldwin, and I love it. he turns punctuation into its own art, dropping colons and semi colons and em dashes… brilliant!!!!!! incredibly effective at outlining the frustration of a young Black american as well as the visual art surrounding him at the time. (ch 1)