Over the Wall

Leggo con ritardo un bell'articolo di Roger Angell - 92enne redattore e collaboratore del New Yorker - sulla moglie morta di recente. Si intitola "Over the Wall", ed è uscito sulla rivista il 19 di novembre, ma purtroppo non è disponibile on-line. Esprime con garbo sentimenti sinceri; sentimenti che riconosco, primo fra tutti lo stupore, soprattutto al tempo che passa di fronte all'eternità. E poi cita una bella poesiola del suo step-father, E.B. White (nella foto Roger Angell con la moglie Carol nel 1966):


Hold a baby to your ear
As you would a shell:
Sounds of centuries you hear
New centuries foretell.

Who can break a baby's code?
And which is the older -
The listener or his small load?
The held or the holder?

Alice Munro sul suo nuovo libro

Alice Munro parla del suo nuovo libro di racconti, Dear Life (Knopf), con Deborah Treisman.

You’ve written so much about young women who feel trapped in marriage and motherhood and cast around for something more to life. You also married very young and had two daughters by the time you were in your mid-twenties. How difficult was it to balance your obligations as a wife and a mother and your ambitions as a writer?

It wasn’t the housework or the children that dragged me down. I’d done housework all my life. It was the sort of open rule that women who tried to do anything so weird as writing were unseemly and possibly neglectful. I did, however, find friends—other women who joked and read covertly and we had a very good time.

The trouble was the writing itself, which was often NO GOOD. I was going through an apprenticeship I hadn’t expected. Luck had it that there was a big cry at the time about WHERE IS OUR CANADIAN LITERATURE? So some people in Toronto noticed my uneasy offerings and helped me along. newyorker.

It wasn’t the housework or the children that dragged me down. I’d done housework all my life. It was the sort of open rule that women who tried to do anything so weird as writing were unseemly and possibly neglectful. I did, however, find friends—other women who joked and read covertly and we had a very good time.
The trouble was the writing itself, which was often NO GOOD. I was going through an apprenticeship I hadn’t expected. Luck had it that there was a big cry at the time about WHERE IS OUR CANADIAN LITERATURE? So some people in Toronto noticed my uneasy offerings and helped me along.


Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/on-dear-life-an-interview-with-alice-munro.html#ixzz2D9SwUSv3

You’ve written so much about young women who feel trapped in marriage and motherhood and cast around for something more to life. You also married very young and had two daughters by the time you were in your mid-twenties. How difficult was it to balance your obligations as a wife and a mother and your ambitions as a writer?

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/on-dear-life-an-interview-with-alice-munro.html#ixzz2D9Smn8SJ

You’ve written so much about young women who feel trapped in marriage and motherhood and cast around for something more to life. You also married very young and had two daughters by the time you were in your mid-twenties. How difficult was it to balance your obligations as a wife and a mother and your ambitions as a writer?
It wasn’t the housework or the children that dragged me down. I’d done housework all my life. It was the sort of open rule that women who tried to do anything so weird as writing were unseemly and possibly neglectful. I did, however, find friends—other women who joked and read covertly and we had a very good time.
The trouble was the writing itself, which was often NO GOOD. I was going through an apprenticeship I hadn’t expected. Luck had it that there was a big cry at the time about WHERE IS OUR CANADIAN LITERATURE? So some people in Toronto noticed my uneasy offerings and helped me along.


Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/on-dear-life-an-interview-with-alice-munro.html#ixzz2D9S5FoZY

You’ve written so much about young women who feel trapped in marriage and motherhood and cast around for something more to life. You also married very young and had two daughters by the time you were in your mid-twenties. How difficult was it to balance your obligations as a wife and a mother and your ambitions as a writer?
It wasn’t the housework or the children that dragged me down. I’d done housework all my life. It was the sort of open rule that women who tried to do anything so weird as writing were unseemly and possibly neglectful. I did, however, find friends—other women who joked and read covertly and we had a very good time.
The trouble was the writing itself, which was often NO GOOD. I was going through an apprenticeship I hadn’t expected. Luck had it that there was a big cry at the time about WHERE IS OUR CANADIAN LITERATURE? So some people in Toronto noticed my uneasy offerings and helped me along.


Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/on-dear-life-an-interview-with-alice-munro.html#ixzz2D9S5FoZY

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/on-dear-life-an-interview-with-alice-munro.html#ixzz2D9S5FoZY

You’ve written so much about young women who feel trapped in marriage and motherhood and cast around for something more to life. You also married very young and had two daughters by the time you were in your mid-twenties. How difficult was it to balance your obligations as a wife and a mother and your ambitions as a writer?
It wasn’t the housework or the children that dragged me down. I’d done housework all my life. It was the sort of open rule that women who tried to do anything so weird as writing were unseemly and possibly neglectful. I did, however, find friends—other women who joked and read covertly and we had a very good time.
The trouble was the writing itself, which was often NO GOOD. I was going through an apprenticeship I hadn’t expected. Luck had it that there was a big cry at the time about WHERE IS OUR CANADIAN LITERATURE? So some people in Toronto noticed my uneasy offerings and helped me along.


Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/on-dear-life-an-interview-with-alice-munro.html#ixzz2D9S5FoZY

Guida alla punteggiatura

Molto carina la guida alla punteggiatura di Elodie Olson-Coons:

Hyphen. An incredibly popular mark, particularly amongst hipsters and domesticated fowl. This is the sexiest punctuation mark. Use generously, especially if you might self-define as ‘sinewy,’ ‘urbane’ or ‘saturnine.’
 mcsweeneys.

Word's We Are Thankful For

Here on the OxfordWords blog we’re constantly awed and impressed by the breadth and depth of the English language. As this is a great week to be appreciative, we’ve asked some fellow language-lovers which word they’re most thankful for. From quark to quotidian, ych a fi to robot, here’s what they said:
stillicide
Of incredible value to the crime writer or anybody else wishing to build suspense into a landscape, stillicide is the falling of water, especially in drops, or a succession of drops. Inexplicably underused — every day brings a new way to employ it.
- Zadie Smith, author. oupblog.

Tradizioni natalizie

Our post-prandial Thanksgiving stroll, around 9:30, took my daughter and me up Broadway from 63rd. Every few blocks we passed pairs of big flatbed trucks with North Carolina plates, loaded with pine trees to create an instant mini street-forest. (Copse? Spinney?) Through year’s end, Christmas tree sellers line the avenue. There is a precise starting time for this amiable institution: midnight after Thanksgiving. Green Friday. All the way home the air was redolent of pine. I’ve smelled a lot worse along this stretch of Broadway. 

Randy Cohen, l'ex ethicist del New York Times, ve lo ricordate? Questo è un suo post su Facebook.

E a Milano, quando innalzano l'albero di Natale in piazza Duomo?

Terry Eagleton on Derrida

Benoit Peters, Derrida (Wiley): di questa recente biografia sul filosofo francese, Terry Eagleton dice, "I suspect that one reason Derrida enjoyed travelling the world so much was because it allowed him some respite from the bitchy, sectarian, backstabbing, backscratching climate of Parisian intellectual life, which this superb biography faithfully records. What the book fails to underline quite as heavily is how waspish the maitre himself could be". guardian.

Names in Fiction

Alastair Fowler, Literary Names: Personal Names in English Literature (Oxford UP). "More than most literary phenomena, names in fiction seem very straightforward until you start to think about them. The simple question, ‘why does a name sound right?’ leads to a whole range of questions. Are there rules about how names are given to characters? Do naming practices differ in different periods? Are they specific to particular genres? Do different authors use names in entirely different ways... One of the many things Alastair Fowler shows in the course of this fantastically learned and occasionally perverse book is that to think about literary names you have to think about more or less the whole literary system; and when you do so, individual instances of literary names rarely turn out to exemplify general tendencies". LRB.

A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay è il titolo di un film che Michael Maren - giornalista e sceneggiatore per film - sta girando, e che contiene una scena al Kos Kaffe di Park Slope, Brooklyn, in cui è riunita una decina di scrittori. "At one table, Jennifer Egan sat scribbling on a yellow legal pad, not far from Roxana Robinson, Philip Gourevitch, John Burnham Schwartz and Jane Green. Across the room, Michael Cunningham chatted with Nick Flynn, while Mary Morris sat with a battered notebook and a pile of printouts and Darin Strauss checked ESPN.com on his laptop.
The occasion was the shooting of a scene in Michael Maren’s forthcoming film, “A Short History of Decay,” that aims to show off the most impressive mass literary cameo in recent film history. ... And that doesn’t even count the reporters who were on hand to document this very meta Brooklyn literary moment. As Ms. Egan put it, “Someone should write about all the writers who have come to write about us writing.” nyt.

Reading in Electronic Times

Leggere ai tempi dell'elettronica ovviamente non è la stessa cosa. Lo dice Andrew Piper nel suo libro, Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times (University of Chicago Press), argomentando la sua tesi in modo interessante, "Amid the seemingly endless debates today about the future of reading, there remains one salient, yet often overlooked fact: Reading isn’t only a matter of our brains; it’s something that we do with our bodies. Reading is an integral part of our lived experience, our sense of being in the world, even if at times this can mean feeling intensely apart from it. How we hold our reading materials, how we look at them, navigate them, take notes on them, share them, play with them, even where we read them—these are the categories that have mattered most to us as readers throughout the long and varied history of reading. They will no doubt continue to do so into the future ..." slate.

A Roman Cat Fight

Sulla New York Review of Books si occupano della lotta che Repubblica sta ingaggiando contro le cat ladies. Massimo Gatto si chiede il perché, "Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi must have finally lost all claim to our attention, because La Repubblica has decided to change the target of its latest crusade. Since 1993, a former opera singer named Silvia Viviani has maintained a sanctuary for cats in the center of town, in a Fascist-era archaeological excavation called the Area Sacra di Largo Argentina, or Largo di Torre Argentina. The cat sanctuary has sterilized tens of thousands of animals, healed and vaccinated thousands more. But La Repubblica has suddenly decided to be outraged that cats might find refuge among these unprepossessing ruins. ... " nybooks.

The Duke in His Domain

"The Duke in His Domain" è il titolo del profilo di Marlon Brando scritto da Truman Capote per il New Yorker e uscito sulla rivista il 9 novembre del 1957. 
"What transpired between Brando and Capote over the course of their hours alone together in that hotel room has long been a subject of historical curiosity. Just how did Capote get the taciturn Brando to talk? Was Brando (as he later claimed) tricked by the devious Capote? Or was the star a willing participant in the unmaking of his own image? Was there (as Capote dubiously claimed) some sort of sexual history between the two? What is clear is that more than a half-century after it appeared, "The Duke in His Domain" remains the yardstick by which celebrity profiles are measured—an early harbinger of the New Journalism that would come into full flower in the 1960s. With its profusion of intimate details, confessional tone, and novelistic observation of Brando’s character, the story marked a clear evolution of celebrity journalism and heralded the arrival of the invasive, full-immersion pop culture of today", dice Douglas McCollam in "In Cold Type", uscito sul numero di novembre-dicembre della Columbia Journalism Review (v. il post di ieri). 
Per leggere "The Duke in His Domain", cliccare qui.

In Cold Type

Una lezione di giornalismo: Douglas McCollam parla di come Truman Capote sia riuscito a intervistare Marlon Brando, in Giappone, sul set di Sayonara, nel lontano 1957, e di come il profilo della star - apparso sul New Yorker del 9 novembre 1957 - abbia cambiato il giornalismo.

"Two nights after arriving in Japan, Capote showed up at Brando’s door wearing a tan cardigan and carrying a bottle of vodka for what in Brando’s estimation was to be a quick dinner and an early night (indeed, Brando instructed his assistant to call in an hour so he’d have an excuse to get rid of Capote). Instead, when Capote left Brando’s room six hours later, he was convinced that he had the raw material for a groundbreaking profile of the reclusive star".

sorpresa, sorpresa... Anche Marella Agnelli era un'amica e confidente di Truman Capote. "One of his female confidants, Marella Agnelli, would later recall how Capote observed people, probing for their soft spots. “I found myself telling him things I never dreamed of telling him”. columbiajournalismreview.

Katie Roiphe su Sweet Tooth

Le recensioni di Katie Roiphe (nella foto) sono sempre molto intelligenti, mai banali. Ecco quel che dice dell'ultimo romanzo di Ian McEwan (anche lui sempre molto intelligente e mai banale), Sweet Tooth: "There is no shortage of excellent, richly imagined books about female protagonists written by male novelists (think of Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady, or Norman Rush’s Mating, or Ian McEwan’s Atonement), but there are very few instances of male novelists writing about writing about female protagonists.

In Ian McEwan’s tricky and captivating new novel Sweet Tooth, he takes as his complex subject the male writer entering a woman’s consciousness (or it might be more accurate in this case to say breaking and entering a woman’s consciousness). ...
Even the sensitive, artistically attuned, intellectually sophisticated male writer sees a woman in a very different way than she would see herself. The gap McEwan investigates is enormous and fascinating, and if we truly want to understand sexual politics, we need to read, instead of ironic blogs and Caitlin Moran and faux sociology, more novels like this one". slate.

Demeter

Aggiungi didascalia

"Demeter" è la storia del New Yorker di questa settimana. E' di Maile Meloy ed è così descritta dalla scrittrice: "I first read the Demeter and Persephone story as a kid, in the D’Aulaires’ “Book of Greek Myths,” when my brother and I—and all our friends—were shuttling back and forth between our divorced parents’ houses, and it always struck me as a joint custody story. This summer, the writer and editor Kate Bernheimer asked me to contribute to a collection of stories based on myths (forthcoming, Penguin 2013), and Demeter seemed like the obvious choice. In the myth, as I understood and remembered it, the harvest goddess goes into mourning when she has to give up her daughter, and in her grief she lets the world go barren. It’s an origin story about the seasons, but also a story about separation and compromise. Joint custody, when I was a kid, seemed like the great solution to the problem of divorce, and it was, but it had its own consequences: it set up opposition, and produced ingrained habits, and carved up the year very vividly in your brain..." newyorker.

“Yachts and Things”

A small piece of Truman Capote’s famously unfinished novel “Answered Prayers” has come to light. The six-page story, “Yachts and Things,” found among Capote’s papers in the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library, is published in the December issue of Vanity Fair, out now in New York and nationally next week. The story will be available online in mid-November.
Issued three years after Capote’s death, “Answered Prayers” was composed of three excerpts that had been separately published in Esquire in 1975 and 1976. Full of the thinly veiled (and unveiled) rich and famous, including Peggy Guggenheim, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Gloria Vanderbilt, the book lost Capote many friends. Before his death at 59 in 1984, he spoke of several other fragments that have never been found or published.
In Vanity Fair, Sam Kashner writes that, “In ['Yachts and Things'], the narrator is clearly Truman, and ‘Mrs. Williams’ is possibly The Washington Post’s publisher Katharine Graham.”  (nella foto con Capote). nyt.

Prendere appunti

"Take Note" è il titolo di un congresso che si è svolto a Harvard all'inizio di novembre. Dice Jennifer Schuessler, "The study of notes — whether pasted into commonplace books, inscribed on index cards or scribbled in textbooks — is part of a broader scholarly investigation into the history of reading, a field that has gained ground as the rise of digital technology has made the encounter between book and reader seem more fragile and ghostly than ever.

“The note is the record a historian has of past reading,” said Ann Blair, a professor of history at Harvard and one of the conference organizers. “What is reading, after all? Even if you look introspectively, it’s hard to really know what you’re taking away at any given time. But notes give us hope of getting close to an intellectual process.” nyt.

Autumnal Tints

E' un bellissimo saggio scritto da Thoreau 150 anni fa, mentre stava morendo di tubercolosi. Ne parla John-Manuel Andriote, "First published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1862, Autumnal Tints is a naturalist's guide to truly seeing nature. "We have only to elevate our view a little," wrote Thoreau, "to see the whole forest as a garden." Those who merely look will observe a maple, while those who see will marvel at "a living liberty-pole on which a thousand bright flags are waving." theatlantic.

La saga del meteo

Sulla saga del meteo e il suo linguaggio è dedicato un bel post di Avi Steinberg. "I was struck in particular by one of these descriptions. A satellite image of Manhattan appeared on the screen, and we were told that the bump at the southeast part of the island was being “reclaimed” by the water.
The word reclaim came up more than once to describe the rising tide. It is a revealing word, more narrative than simply descriptive: it hints at some larger backstory, some plot twist in a longer saga about our claims and the water’s counterclaims to the earth. It isn’t an accident that we give human names to our storms, that we regard them as identifiable characters. ..." newyorker.

Why Writers Should Learn Math

Perché la matematica diventa - dopo i primi passi - un linguaggio estremamente creativo e metaforico, come spiega bene Alexander Nazaryan, citando molti scrittori e qualche matematico. "As the mathematician Terence Tao has written, math study has three stages: the “pre-rigorous,” in which basic rules are learned, the theoretical “rigorous” stage, and, last and most intriguing, “the post-rigorous,” in which intuition suddenly starts to play a part. As Tao notes, “It is only with a combination of both rigorous formalism and good intuition that one can tackle complex mathematical problems; one needs the former to correctly deal with the fine details, and the latter to correctly deal with the big picture. Without one or the other, you will spend a lot of time blundering around in the dark.” newyorker.

Letture estive. Middlesex di Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (Mondadori, 2003), traduzione di Katia Bagnoli. Probabilmente il romanzone americano - letto con colpevole ritardo - che ho amato di più la scorsa estate. Mi sembra che catturi bene il ventre dell'America, quella vitalità fatta dal desiderio di ricominciare daccapo, mescolando culture, abilità, furbizia, energia, curiosità, fantasia che provengono soprattutto da gente comune. Molta fantasia e forti legami con il romanzo americano doc, tipo Twain. Personaggi e ambienti rimangono impressi, per esempio l'Oggetto.

E infine il romanzo...

In un'intervista A.M Homes parla del suo nuovo romanzo, May We Be Forgiven (Viking), che è nato da un racconto dallo stesso titolo uscito su Granta nel 2007.
To me it’s almost as if the book has the compression and intensity of a short story, but happens to be five hundred pages.
That goes back to the difference between grape juice and wine. If you let it sit for the right amount of time and add the right things and rotate the bottles in the right direction, hopefully it turns out not just drinkable but quite fine. granta.