Nomi di moda

In America il nome maschile più popolare è Jacob, e detiene questo primato dal 1999. Secondo il database del Social Security Administration il nome femminile più scelto è Isabella. "Andrew Gelman, a statistics professor at Columbia and an amateur name-ologist, argues that many parents want their boys to seem mature and so pick classic names. William, David, Joseph and James, all longtime stalwarts, remain in the Top 20. With girls, Gelman says, parents are attracted to names that convey youth even into adulthood and choose names that seem to be on the upswing". nytmag.

Intervista a Philip Roth

Un'intervista a Philip Roth è cosa rara, quindi preziosa. Questa, di Jan Dalley (Financial Time) contiene una bella descrizione della casa e della dépendence/studio di Roth in Connecticut, una serie di date della biografia letteraria della scrittore alla fine (sempre utile), e nel corpo dell'articolo molte parole di Dalley e pochi, laconici commenti di Roth. Ma alcuni sono memorabili, come - parlando dei suoi romanzi ambientati a Newark - "I think [in those books] I am presenting America to myself, trying to make the moment come back to life, and remember. And what I don't remember I go back to Newark and look for. I look at old newspapers. I get pleasure from doing that", e poi aggiunge – with a roar of easy laughter – "Well, I have to get some pleasure". ft.

Scrittori e incidenti d'auto

Bill Morris (The Millions) fa un elenco, lungo in modo sconcertante, degli scrittori che sono morti in seguito a un incidente d'auto. Sembra una causa ricorrente di morte per gli scrittori, in effetti anche il nostro Svevo... Nell'elenco c'è T.E. Lawrence, Nathanael West, Margaret Mitchell, Albert Camus, W. G. Sebald e molti altri. themillions.

NYPL

Ho letto un articolo molto interessante sulle innovazioni tecnologiche - nell'Internet information ecosystem come viene chiamato - create e adottate dalla New York Public Library che non solo la stanno facendo crescere (in un periodo in cui le biblioteche, come i giornali, sembrano essere diventate obsolete), ma sono esemplari di come istituzioni culturali pubbliche possano essere da guida nel trovare soluzioni innovative a servire meglio gli utenti. Se solo potesse succedere anche da noi! (dovremmo far leggere questo articolo a Pisapia) "With all this change - not to mention a possible $40 million budget cut looming - it would be no surprise if the library was floundering like the music industry, newspapers, or travel agents. (Hey, man, we all get disintermediated sooner or later.) But that's the wild thing. The library isn't floundering. Rather, it's flourishing, putting out some of the most innovative online projects in the country. On the stuff you can measure - library visitors, website visitors, digital gallery images viewed - the numbers are up across the board compared with five years ago. On the stuff you can't, like conceptual leadership, the NYPL is killing it.

The library clearly has reevaluated its role within the Internet information ecosystem and found a set of new identities. Let's start from here: One, the New York Public Library is a social network with three million active users and two, the New York Public Library is a media outfit". theatlantic.

Le nuove parole dell'OED

Ecco alcune delle nuove parole di giugno dell'Oxford English Dictionary: 

auto-complete n. A software feature that uses text already entered in a given field to predict or generate the characters the user is likely to enter next; familiar to anyone who has used predictive text or search boxes on websites. [First recorded in 1992]

brain candy n. Broadly appealing, undemanding entertainment which is not intellectually stimulating. OED already has eye-candy and ear candy. [1968]

gender reassignment n. The process of a person adopting the physical characteristics of the opposite sex by means of medical procedures such as surgery or hormone treatment. [1969]

to laugh it up at laugh v. Used in imperative (with ironic or sarcastic force) to suggest an impending reversal of fortune: ‘laugh while you can.’ [1971] OED

Reich in America

Negli anni Quaranta e Cinquanta Wilhelm Reich era molto di moda tra gli intellettuali americani. "Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Dwight Macdonald, J.D. Salinger, Paul Goodman, William Burroughs and other bohemian culture heroes were among his followers: examples of what Lionel Trilling unsettlingly called 'the moral urgency, the sense of crisis and the concern with personal salvation that mark the existence of American intellectuals.' Reich won a particular following among intellectuals, artists and cultural spokesmen who were looking for a new revolution after becoming disillusioned with communism" dice Henry Allen in una lunga e istruttiva recensione su un nuovo libro che si occupa dell'argomento, Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America, di Christopher Turner (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). wsj.

Di nuovo sulla noia

Joseph Epstein

Joseph Epstein - spiritoso scrittore di Chicago - fa un lungo, e assai poco noioso, articolo sulla noia, che è anche un mini-saggio e contiene una discreta bibliografia sull'argomento. Tra i testi citati, il discorso di Joseph Brodsky per il Commencement del 1989 a Dartmouth College. Ai giovani neo laureati Brodsky decide di parlare di noia e dice, "When hit by boredom, go for it. Let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom". Epstein continua, "The lesson boredom teaches, according to Brodsky, is that of one's own insignificance, an insignificance brought about by one's own finitude. We are all here a short while, and then - poof! - gone and, sooner or later, usually sooner, forgotten. Boredom 'puts your existence into perspective, the net result of which is precision and humility.' Brodsky advised the students to try 'to stay passionate,' for passion, whatever its object, is the closest thing to a remedy for boredom". commentary.

A proposito di noia; che cosa c'è di meno noioso del pettegolezzo? Joseph Epstein ha appena scritto un saggio sull'argomento dal titolo Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit, che uscirà in autunno presso Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Assolutamente da leggere.

Maira Kalman

Di Maira Kalman, illustratrice per bambini e adulti, parla con entusiasmo Cathleen Schine, recensendo una mostra in corso al Jewish Museum di New York a lei dedicata, Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World). Oltre alla mostra, Schine parla di un libro di Kalman, uscito lo scorso autunno presso Penguin Press, e che raccoglie una serie di blog pubblicati dall'artista sul New York Times. Sia il libro che i blog si chiamano And the Pursue of Happiness. Andate a vederli, cliccando qui, sono meravigliosi. "Perhaps Kalman's greatest gift is that her work embodies both the ironic and the earnest at their best, at the place where they come together and create lyrical, personal truth. She is such a magnanimous artist. She invites us, welcomes us, into the most intimate, unprotected place of all: daydreams". nybr.

Erica Jong su sesso e potere

Time ha intervistato Erica Jong sui recenti scandali sessuali che hanno coinvolto uomini di potere. 

It seems like the season of sex scandals lately. Why that might be the case?
I think that there have always been sex scandals. I think that now, people are reporting them more accurately than before. What strikes me about all these so-called scandals is how far we have not come since feminism. I mean, when you look at Anne Sinclair paying a fortune to take care of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, you wonder why on earth a woman with her own profession, with an inherited fortune, would be doing that for a man who's so obviously a sick puppy, and totally narcissistic. What does she get out of the relationship? Is she going to spend her fortune defending this man who everybody in France knew was like a chimpanzee in rut?

...

You've written so much about women enjoying sex, but women don't get into these scandals. Why not?
Well, occasionally women get into sex scandals when you have teachers seducing students and things like that. But I don't think that women make the assumption that men make. The assumption that these men make is that their power will protect them. Women know they won't be protected and that they'll be exposed. And it has to do with how much power men have in society and how little women have. So they don't take these risks, which to men like DSK don't even seem like risks. They feel they will be protected by the establishment because they sit atop the establishment. time.

Scienziate

Tal Rabin

Un gruppo di scienziate affermate (tra cui un'italiana, Elena Aprile, che insegna fisica alla Columbia) parla al New York Times delle difficoltà che ha incontrato nel mondo del lavoro. Curiosamente nessuna di loro consiglierebbe ai figli di fare lo stesso mestiere. E quasi tutte mettono in rilievo la necessità di essere (o diventare) durissime, d'acciaio, anzi di titanio, dice una di loro. Una sola, sostiene che il suo è il mestiere più bello del mondo. E' Tal Rabin, ricercatrice di crittografia all'IBM, di origini israeliane. "I think that the life of a scientist is a fantastic life. I think it is exciting because every day there is something new that you can go and think of. There are challenges, no doubt, and the times when you can’t solve things. So I think it is all a wonderful life. And not to mention even things like time flexibility, traveling around the world, meeting a lot of exciting people. I think that these are fantastic jobs". nyt.

The Marriage Plot

E' il titolo del nuovo - e molto atteso - romanzo di Jeffrey Eugenides, che uscirà in autunno presso Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Sul fascicolo di questa settimana del New Yorker ne è uscito uno stralcio dal titolo "Asleep in the Lord". Parla di un giovane appena laureato che va a Calcutta a lavorare con madre Teresa. Una cosa che anche Eugenides ha fatto. Ecco quel che Eugenides dice a Cressida Leyshon, fiction editor del New Yorker, a proposito del suo nuovo romanzo. "I’m ashamed to say that 'Asleep in the Lord' is the most autobiographical thing I've ever written. Ashamed because I don't especially prize autobiographical writing (why write fiction if you want to talk about yourself?) and also because it took me so long to figure out how to do it. The difficulty of writing autobiographical fiction, for me, at least, is that you feel compelled to be faithful to your memory, and so you end up putting in characters and scenes that you don’t need." newyorker.

Franco Moretti e l'Amleto

Recentemente Franco Moretti, professore di letteratura comparata a Stanford, si è occupato dell'Amleto di Shakespeare. Usando il suo nuovo metodo basato su diagrammi e algoritmi ha tracciato una mappa delle relazioni dei personaggi nel dramma di Shakespeare. Ha pubblicato i risultati in un articolo, "Network Theory, Plot Analysis," nel fascicolo di Marzo/Aprile 2011  della New Left Review. Ha fatto delle scoperte interessanti. Per esempio che di tutti i personaggi che parlano sia ad Amleto che a Claudio solo due sopravvivono e che Rosencrantz e Guildenstern non parlano mai fra di loro. 

Il Boston Globe intervista Moretti sul suo nuovo lavoro:

IDEAS: What did you learn about "Hamlet" as you watched this network take shape?

MORETTI: One thing is the discovery of how central Horatio is to the play. And that is interesting in itself, because Horatio is usually not one of the characters on whom people focus. He’s a very bland character, and he usually speaks very blandly….Usually we think of central characters as important in every possible way, but this is not the case here.

IDEAS: Meaning what?

MORETTI: We have to re-think our idea of character altogether. It disproves our thinking about characters in binary terms: i.e., they're either a protagonist or a minor character. They're either round or flat. Now there seem to be more positions along this continuum. bg.

Come leggiamo

Leggere è un'esperienza così diversa, e personale, per ciascuno di noi. Mi interessa sempre molto sapere come, quando, perché si legge, oltre a che cosa. Ecco quel che dice Jhumpa Lahiri in una breve riflessione sull'argomento uscita sull'ultimo numero del New Yorker (dedicato ai racconti dell'estate e quindi molto interessante, con grandi nomi): "Bengali was my first language, what I spoke and heard at home. But the books of my childhood were in English, and their subjects were, for the most part, either English or American lives. I was aware of a feeling of trespassing. I was aware that I did not belong to the worlds I was reading about: that my family's life was different, that different food graced our table, that different holidays were celebrated, that my family cared and fretted about different things. And yet when a book was in my possession, and as I read it, this didn't matter. I entered into a pure relationship with the story and its characters, encountering fictional worlds as if physically, inhabiting them fully, at once immersed and invisible." newyorker.

Le parolacce e il New Yorker

La storia del New Yorker: Calvin Trilllin, uno dei collaboratori più spiritosi dell'elegante rivista, racconta come è riuscito a far pubblicare alcune parolacce , ma solo perché erano citazioni... Ecco come comincia l'articolo, "In 1993, when The New Yorker for the first time ran a photograph of a bare-breasted actress, a subscriber wrote me to express outrage at what had happened to a magazine once known for its elegant, understated prose. The only defence I could think of was that they were small breasts, so you could say that the tradition of understatement was still alive. But then I started wondering, 'Why did she write me?' Was she implying that it was because of people like me that a once high-minded magazine had come to this?" globeandmail.

Man With a Pan

Man With a Pan. Culinary Adventures of Fathers Who Cook for Their Families, a cura di John Donohue (Algonquin Press). Il titolo è molto carino, e questa volta è il motivo per cui scelgo questo post. Carina è anche la copertina. Si tratta di un'antologia di padri, famosi e non, che raccontano delle loro esperienze in cucina, farcendo le loro storie con aneddoti vari e a volte dando anche delle ricette. "Mr. Donohue, the editor, lashes things together with an essay that notes that, with more women working, men do about one-third of the household cooking today. There are side benefits. He mentions a survey indicating that men who cook are more likely to have spouses who are in the mood for sex". nyt.

Contraddizioni dell'università

David Brooks analizza i messaggi che le università trasmettono agli studenti e che emergono dai discorsi dei Commencements da poco conclusi; e nota quanto siano in contraddizione con la vita che aspetta i giovani laureati. "This year's graduates are members of the most supervised generation in American history. Through their childhoods and teenage years, they have been monitored, tutored, coached and honed to an unprecedented degree.

Yet upon graduation they will enter a world that is unprecedentedly wide open and unstructured. Most of them will not quickly get married, buy a home and have kids, as previous generations did. Instead, they will confront amazingly diverse job markets, social landscapes and lifestyle niches. Most will spend a decade wandering from job to job and clique to clique, searching for a role. ...

Worst of all, they are sent off into this world with the whole baby-boomer theology ringing in their ears. If you sample some of the commencement addresses being broadcast on C-Span these days, you see that many graduates are told to: Follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams and find yourself. This is the litany of expressive individualism, which is still the dominant note in American culture.

But, of course, this mantra misleads on nearly every front. ..." nyt.