Elena Ferrante, sempre

The enormous attention to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet—first the books published in the US between 2012 and 2015 and then the HBO series that has so far covered the first two titles, My Brilliant Friend and The Story of a New Name—has obscured the fact that in Ferrante’s novelistic output as a whole, female friendship has not been a primary theme. The three intense and at times phantasmagorical novels she published before the Neapolitan quartet dealt with friendship almost not at all. Troubling Love (1992) is about the relationship between a middle-aged woman and her recently deceased mother; in The Days of Abandonment (2002) a mother of two young children is abruptly left by her husband; and while The Lost Daughter (2006) concerns two women who meet on a beach vacation, it has more to do with the narrator’s odd, impulsive theft of a doll beloved by the other woman’s daughter. Messy familial bonds have been the focus of Ferrante’s work: bonds between grown daughters and their mothers, mothers and their young children, and women and their husbands. She is interested in intimacy and betrayal, merging and separation, the peril of togetherness on the one hand and solitude on the other. Either losing oneself in another or remaining too distant can threaten the stability of her first-person, female narrators. Above all, in Ferrante’s novels, close relationships, whether hostile or loving, never truly end. Pamela Erens, VQR

Weaponizing the Web

A few weeks before the publication in early February of This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends, Nicole Perlroth’s disquieting account of the global trade in cyberweapons, multiple US government agencies and major corporations learned that they had been hit with one of the biggest cyberattacks in history. By all accounts, the operation—discovered in early December by the security firm FireEye, whose own closely guarded hacking tools were stolen—had been going on for at least nine months. Hackers believed to be agents of the Russian foreign intelligence service, SVR, appear to have embedded malware into a routine software upgrade from SolarWinds, a Texas-based IT company. When hundreds of the 18,000 users of the firm’s Orion network management system downloaded the upgrade, the malware opened those systems to the hackers. Further analysis revealed that about a third of the victims had not been SolarWinds clients, and thus the hackers must have been using other tactics in addition to the “trojanized” Orion software. Another point of entry may have been a backdoor in software developed by a Czech company called JetBrains, run by Russian nationals, that supplies its software testing product, TeamCity, to 300,000 businesses around the world, one of which is SolarWinds. Sue Halpern, The New York Review

Il mondo delle spie mi ha sempre intrigato, ma la vera ragione per cui pubblico questo post è l'immagine. 

The Struggle and the Scramble

During a 1971 debate on feminism at Town Hall in Manhattan, immortalized in Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Town Bloody Hall (1979), a small, ladylike person stands up to ask the moderator, Norman Mailer, a question. It is in regard to something she says he wrote in The Prisoner of Sex, to wit: “A good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls.” Gently, to howls of laughter, she says, “For years and years I’ve been wondering, Mr. Mailer, when you dip your balls in ink, what color ink is it?” The tone is a perfect, respectful deadpan, the rhythm lilting, the facial expression the picture of faux innocence. This is Cynthia Ozick. Cathleen Schine, The New York Review

When the Barbizon Gave Women Rooms of Their Own

On the corner of East Sixty-third Street and Lexington Avenue, in a building where the apartments sell for anywhere from one million to thirteen million dollars, there is a woman who pays around a hundred and thirteen dollars a month in rent. She lives on the fourth floor, and has maid service two days a week, a front-desk staff to take her messages, and a private bricked terrace at the end of her hall. Casey Cep, The New Yorker

Il Barbizon, che nostalgia!

Black Spirituals as Poetry and Resistance

Ellis Wilson’s “The Funeral Procession” (circa 1950).

SO THERE IS the spiritual as it was performed for white people and there is the spiritual as our own poetry, as a way to understand the interiority of enslaved people, who were repeatedly assumed to have none. In the middle of the 20th century, Howard Thurman, the great theologian (and mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.) chronicled the imagery embodied in Black spirituals. He found that they provide us with a glimpse of thoughts and feelings of enslaved people that were otherwise erased from recorded history. Spirituals are a key primary source in understanding how enslaved people made meaning from the world around them. With their references to the natural world, they offer a glimpse of the experiences enslaved people had outside of labor — what it may have felt like to watch the sun rise, to walk beside a river, to hear water flow, to watch a sparrow fly. In recognizing this aspect of the spiritual, we honor the consciousness of the enslaved and thus continue the resistance to the enslaver’s definition of reality. Kaitlyn Greenidge, NYT

Un bellissimo, e lungo, saggio sugli spiritual.