Writing and Dementia
True confessions time: I’m a fan of mystery novels – most often British. And so naturally my eye is grabbed by a portrait of Dame Agatha Christie in The New York Times Sunday Magazine recently. I was even more drawn by the headline Literary Alzheimer’s. Apparently last March a pair of academic researchers analyzed the text of Christie’s fourteen novels and determined that “Christie’s lexicon dcreased with age, while both the number of vague words she employed and phrases she repeated increased”. Authors Lancashire and Hirst suggest “”the question is not early style versus late style. but the late style of someone who is elderly but healthy versus the late style of someone who is elderly but not cognitively healthy’”. Lancashire and Hirst intend to analyze the work of P.D. James (80+ and healthy) as well as authors such as Ross MacDonald (known to have suffered from dementia).
This is all the more interesting in light of the Nun’s Study and its insights into lanaguage sophistication in youth and the likelihood of developing observable signs of dementia in later life.
Confessions of the episodic
It’s been awhile. But maybe that’s my character: sometime inspirations crowd in from everywhere. Other times they seem to disappear into the hurly-burly of the everyday. It isn’t that I care less about creativity and aging and dementia. I do. But the inspiring events, readings, thought come back and therefore so am I.
Summer Blockbusters, Creative Aging style
I’m not a fan of most blockbuster movies but somehow summer and movies are inexorably linked in my mind. Beach books too (but I’ll save that for another post!). And so movies were already on my mind when recently several caught my attention.
The first was a few weeks ago in the Washington, D.C. area as I came across the American Film Insitute’s festival, SilverDocs. Three movies were singled out as being particularly worthy of attention in reviews and all three were about the experience of aging! How lucky can we be. As one review was titled : Close-up On the Elderly.
The next reminder about movies and aging in a e-mail when someone I know admitted seeing Away From Her over the weekend. Entertainment can simply be that, entertaining but it is special when entertainment can teach as well as amuse or titillate. Away From Her is just such.
Another recent tap was in my local paper with a notice about a graduate student at a local university whose made a personal story into documentary on living with Alzheimer’s Disease and front lobal dementia. Dear Dad I haven’t been able to see but it is gaining local (and or regional) acclaim. Let’s hope it gets shown nearby, and soon!
Opportunity Extraordinaire
Once in a while an opportunity come around that appears it might refresh the spirit and inspire the heart as well as educate the mind. For me this is The MetLife Foundation Creativity Matters: A Health and Wellness Symposium, Creating Programs for People with Dementia and Their Caregivers. And after a great deal of thought and a bit of last minute planning I’ll be there, for most of it.
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