Vengo a sapere dalla stampa anglosassone, dal Guardian in primis, che Dante probabilmente soffriva di narcolessia, secondo il prof. Giuseppe Plazzi dell'università di Bologna.
"Now, an Italian academic has come up with an explanation for why the
Florentine poet was apparently so obsessed with slumber – and it's not
all about literary technique. Dante, he argues, may have suffered from
the neurological disorder narcolepsy.
"I suggest that six
centuries before the first scientific report, Dante … depicted
narcolepsy with cataplexy (NC) in his literary works as an
autobiographical trait," writes Giuseppe Plazzi of the University of Bologna's department of biomedical and neuro-motor sciences in an article for the Sleep Medicine journal". guardian.
FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out. Non conoscevo questo acronimo. Lo usa Joshua Ferris (nella foto) in un'intervista sul New Yorker a proposito del suo racconto appena uscito, "The Breeze". L'intervistatore gli chiede infatti come abbia potuto scrivere un racconto sulla frenesia che prende la protagonista in una sera di primavera senza mai usare la parola FOMO. Ecco come risponde Ferris.
"I have lots of FOMO. I get FOMO just choosing what to have for breakfast. You’ve got to go outside, that’s what I’ve learned. Most of your FOMO
can be taken care of just by stepping outside and looking up at the
sunlight. That’s not possible at night. At night, you just have to seize
hold of something or someone that seems worthy of your undivided
attention regardless of where you are or what you’re doing. It’s not
easy. It’s learning to reconcile yourself. Like memory: have faith
you’ll remember what’s important. Have faith you’re in the right place,
doing the right thing. Ain’t easy, especially when you look around and
everything’s black, boring, and sucky. But it’s important for me to keep
in mind: in any given situation, if I can ignore the nagging FOMO, I might make something of the experience, take something meaningful away from it no matter the circumstances". newyorker.
Molto interessante, l'articolo di Alexander Stille su Pitigrilli, in particolare su Cocaina. "Behind Italy’s official façade of bourgeois morality, traditional family
life, and patriotism, Pitigrilli saw a world driven by sex, power and
greed, in which adultery, illegitimate children, and hypocrisy were the
order of the day and husbands and wives were little more than
respectable-seeming pimps and prostitutes. nybooks.
The word “sweet” appears eight hundred and forty times in your complete
Shakespeare. Or nearly a thousand times, if you accept close variants
(“out-sweeten’d,” “true-sweet,” “sweetheart”). This level of use comes
as no surprise to anyone who loves the sonnets and plays: whether in
moments of fondest coaxing and chiding (“When your sweet issue your
sweet form should bear”) or abject anguish and empathy (“Bless thy
sweet eyes—they bleed”), Shakespeare reliably repaired to a sugared
lexicon. ...
Every poet, every novelist has his or her pet words. Which words these
may be dawns on you gradually as you enter the world of a new writer.
The deeper you read, the more likely it is that a fresh line in effect
becomes an old line, as a signature vocabulary term rings out variations
on previous usages. Of course, with many major authors this process of
identifying pet words can be hastened and simplified by consulting a
concordance. Either way, you’ll likely discover that your author’s
personal dictionary contains an abundance of amiable acquaintances, but a
select few intimate friends. Brad Leithauser, newyorker.
Bookends è una nuova "feature" (come si potrebbe tradurre in italiano? aiutatemi amiche traduttrici!) della New York Review of Books. Nell'ultima pagina sarà chiamato a dibattere di un qualche argomento provocatorio un intellettuale da un elenco di 10 che vedete nell'illustrazione in alto (sapete riconoscerli?). "... each week two distinguished columnists (from a rotating cast of 10)
will address a provocative question from the world of books. First up,
Zoë Heller and Adam Kirsch answer the question: “Are novelists too wary of criticizing other novelists?”. nyt.
Annie Proulx ha scritto il libretto dell'opera tratta dal suo famoso racconto, "Brokeback Mountain". "Ms. Proulx has written the libretto for Charles Wuorinen’s long-awaited
new opera of “Brokeback Mountain,” based on her story of the doomed love
of two cowboys, which will have its world premiere Jan. 28 at the Teatro Real in
Madrid. Ms. Proulx said in a statement that one of her goals in writing
it was “to preserve the dry and laconic western tone” of the story", nyt.
Negli anni '70 Woody Allen scrisse per il New Yorker una serie di parodie dei racconti hasidici di Buber. Ora David Remnick le ripropone, e vale veramente la pena leggerle. "Buber has been criticized for romanticizing Hasidism, for failing to
confront what critics see as its obscurantism, but his service to the
literature is immense. Also, his scholarly work led to a sublime bit of
parody: Woody Allen’s re-telling and parody of those knotty, earthy,
enigmatic stories—“Hassidic Tales, With a Guide to Their Interpretation by the Noted Scholar”—was engaged with their zaniness and the deadpan tone of interpretation", new yorker.
Among the big works of literary fiction coming out this month is Jonathan Lethem’s new novel, “Dissident Gardens” (Doubleday, out September 10th).
Set in New York City and spanning from the nineteen-thirties to the
present day, it follows a mother-daughter pair—Rose Zimmer, a fierce
radical nicknamed the Red Queen of Sunnyside, and her daughter, Miriam,
who migrates from Queens to Greenwich Village—and their left-wing
milieu.
... e molti altri ... newyorker.
One Friday evening in March, I took the train to Columbia University and
walked into one of the strangest and most interesting classes I’d ever
seen. It was the Laboratory of Literary Architecture,
part of the Mellon Visiting Artists and Thinkers Program at Columbia
University School of the Arts, and a multimedia workshop in which
writing students, quite literally, create architectural models of
literary texts. For the past four years, Matteo Pericoli has led the
workshop at the Turin-based Scuola Holden creative writing school, and
this year, he brought the concept to New York. While the idea seems
intuitive enough—each student chooses a text he or she knows inside out,
and then builds it—the challenges arise in interpretation. Sadie Stein su theparisreview.
Twerking, the rump-busting up-and-down dance move long beloved on
America's hip-hop scene, has officially gone mainstream. It's got the
English dictionary entry to prove it. ...
"Twerk" will be added to the dictionary as part of its quarterly update,
which includes words such as "selfie," the word typically used to
describe pouty smartphone self-portraits, "digital detox" for time spent
way from Facebook and Twitter, and "Bitcoin," for the nationless
electronic currency whose gyrations have also caught the world's eye. bigstory.
Ed ecco l'opinione della presidentessa di Brown University, Christina Paxson, sempre sull'importanza delle Humanities. "We don’t want a nation of technical experts in one subject. We want a
scintillating civil society in which everyone can talk to everyone. That
was a quality that Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of when he visited the
United States at the beginning of the 1830s. Even in that era before
mass communication, before the telegraph, before the Internet, we were
engaged in an American conversation that stretched from one end of the
country to another. In a similar manner, Martin Luther King Jr. sketched
a “web of mutuality” in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” fifty years
ago this year. We want politicians who have read Shakespeare—as Lincoln
did. We want bankers and lawyers who have read Homer and Dante. We want
factory owners who have read Dickens". newrepublic.
Si ricomincia. Da dove eravamo rimasti, in un certo senso. Dal declino delle Humanities, negli USA e un po' ovunque. Ecco un bell'articolo sull'argomento di Adam Gopnik. "Whence, and where, and why the English major? The subject is in every
mouth—or, at least, is getting kicked around agitatedly in columns and
reviews and Op-Ed pieces. The English major is vanishing from our
colleges as the Latin prerequisite vanished before it, we’re told, a
dying choice bound to a dead subject. The estimable Verlyn Klinkenborg reports in the Times
that “At Pomona College (my alma mater) this spring, 16 students
graduated with an English major out of a student body of 1,560, a
terribly small number,” and from other, similar schools, other, similar
numbers. ... So why have English majors? Well, because many people like books. Most
of those like to talk about them after they’ve read them, or while
they’re in the middle. Some people like to talk about them so much that
they want to spend their lives talking about them to other people who
like to listen. Some of us do this all summer on the beach, and others
all winter in a classroom. One might call this a natural or inevitable
consequence of literacy. And it’s this living, irresistible,
permanent interest in reading that supports English departments, and
makes sense of English majors". newyorker.
