Pretend It's a City

 

Is there anything more delightful than watching Martin Scorsese enjoy someone? One of the best things about his new documentary series, “Pretend It’s a City,” is getting to see the filmmaker react to his subject, the author and humorist Fran Lebowitz, who is also his good friend. Ten years ago, Scorsese made “Public Speaking,” his first documentary about Lebowitz, which was an ode to a vanishing breed of New York celebrity, as well as a portrait of the city itself. Sitting in a booth at the Waverly Inn, Lebowitz expounded on her various hobbyhorses, including her rejection of technology, her love of talking, and her addiction to smoking. (“The clerk said, ‘Oh, you know, Marlboro Lights, they’re on sale.’ And I thought, Really? Why? . . . They could be a million dollars, I don’t care.”) Now Scorsese and Lebowitz have made a kind of sequel, which comes, in the manner of the hour, as a streaming Netflix series rather than a feature-length film. Naomi Fry, The New Yorker

The Light Ages

The Light Ages, by Seb Falk (Norton). The figure at the heart of this exploration of medieval astronomers, philosophers, and physicians is John of Westwyk, a brilliant fourteenth-century Benedictine monk who created an equatorium, a kind of analog computer for determining the positions of the planets. As John passes in and out of the historical record, Falk provides an expansive survey of Eastern polymaths, squabbling theorists, political schemers, and optimistic overreachers. Those dreamers can be the most beguiling: the eleventh-century monk Eilmer of Malmesbury leaped from an abbey tower with wings attached to his hands and feet, flying two hundred metres before plunging to earth. Falk, always generous, applauds him for having “piloted an experimental glider, not wholly without success.” The New Yorker

Adrienne Kennedy

 

Kennedy, who is eighty-nine, is one of our greatest and least definable living playwrights, restlessly inventive and ruthlessly unshy about the pressures exerted by history upon our lives. If one motif hums through her work (besides herself: she is our foremost artist of theatrical autobiography), it is a nagging, sometimes unbearable suspicion that the past has hijacked the present. Vinson Cunningham, The New Yorker

Unconventional Essays

 

This Is Not a Novel by David Markson

Something of the everyday frustration of working as a writer is captured for me in an Amazon review of This is Not A Novel, which begins, “This is not really a novel …” This book is an exquisite meditation on art-making and mortality, rendered in a series of carefully curated details from the lives and deaths of various artists. Throughout, the author offers suggestions of what this work might be – a “heap of riddles”, “an epic poem”, “a mural”, “an autobiography” and, most intriguing to me, “a kind of verbal fugue”. Eula Biss, The Guardian 

E ci sono vari altri titoli interessanti, anche sul lavoro dello scrittore.

I fell in love with Elio and Oliver

I started writing Call Me by Your Name as a diversion. I had absolutely no idea it was going to be a story, much less a novel. One April morning I was dreaming about being in an imaginary Italian villa overlooking the sea. It was a real-estate fantasy: a swimming pool, a tennis court, wonderful family and friends, plus the attendant personnel: a cook, a gardener and a driver. I had even picked the house from a painting by Claude Monet. André Aciman sulla genesi del suo Call Me by Your Name, Guardian.

2021 in Books

 

January

4 Winners of five Costa category awards announced.
8 The Father released – Florian Zeller directs an adaptation of his own play, starring Anthony Hopkins.
11 TS Eliot prize for poetry.
19 Centenary of the birth of Patricia Highsmith, queen of psychological suspense.
22 Netflix adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s Booker winner The White Tiger [see picture]
Release of film Chaos Walking, based on first book of Patrick Ness’s eponymous trilogy.
26 Costa awards ceremony, with book of the year announced. The Guardian.

 Buon 2021!