Sandro Veronesi, lavorare a Venezia e la storia dell'asterisco

Recensione entusiastica di The Hummingbird (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, tradotto da Elena Pala) del nostro Sandro Veronesi, "Everything that makes the novel worthwhile and engaging is here: warmth, wit, intelligence, love, death, high seriousness, low comedy, philosophy, subtle personal relationships and the complex interior life of human beings". Edward Docx, The Guardian

Sconfortante analisi del mercato del lavoro a Venezia, "Among the lousy job options for Venetians: serving pizza, selling fake local “artifacts,” and working at the Venice Biennal", Giulio Piovesan, Hyperallergic

Molto interessante questa recente storia dell'asterisco (Claire Cock-Starkey, Hyphens & Hashtags*: *The Stories Behind the Symbols on Our Keyboard, Bodleian Library Publishing), che lo fa risalire ad Aristarco di Samotracia, "Sumerian pictographic writing includes a sign for “star” that looks like a modern asterisk. These early writings from five thousand years ago are the first known depiction of an asterisk; however, it seems unlikely that these pictograms are the forerunner of the symbol we use today. Palaeographers know that Aristarchus of Samothrace (220–143 bc) used an asterisk symbol when editing Homer in the second century bc, because later scholars wrote about him doing so. Physical examples of Aristarchus’ asterisks have not survived, so we cannot know their physical shape, but as the word asterisk derives from the Greek asteriskos, meaning “little star,” an assumption has been made that they resembled a small star. Aristarchus used the symbols to mark places in Homer’s text that he was copying where he thought passages were from another source".  Claire Cock-Starkey, Lapham's

Biblioteche

From the British Library to the Brontë Parsonage Museum, a consortium of libraries and museums have come together in an “unprecedented” effort to raise £15m and save an “astonishingly important” set of literary manuscripts for the nation.

The plans were formed after the announcement last month that the “lost” Honresfield library was to be put up for auction at Sotheby’s this summer. Almost entirely inaccessible since 1939, the library was put together by Victorian industrialists William and Alfred Law at the turn of the 20th century, and is a literary treasure trove that had experts dancing with excitement – and warning that action needed to be taken to prevent it being sold piecemeal to private collectors. Alison Flood, The Guardian

Il controverso caso di Amy Chua, la Tiger Mother, docente di legge a Yale e ora accusata di party scatenati durante il Covid. "The question has arisen, in online comments sections and on Twitter, why anyone is even talking about Amy Chua. Who cares about a parenting memoirist’s removal from a law-school teaching roster? The answer is, in part, because this story manages to touch on seemingly every single cultural flashpoint of the past few years. Chua’s critics see a story about #MeToo—because of her husband, but also because Chua supported the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, even after he was accused of sexual assault. Meanwhile, Chua’s defenders see a morality tale about liberal cancel culture. “What they’ve done to you is SOP”—standard operating procedure—“for conservative allies but chills me to the bone nonetheless,” a supporter tweeted at her, earlier this month. Megyn Kelly weighed in, tweeting, “Make no mistake: this is retribution for her support of Brett Kavanaugh, & it is disgusting.” Chua’s allies have also suggested that anti-Asian bias is involved. “The woke academy reserves a special vitriol for minority faculty who don’t toe the line politically,” Niall Ferguson, a historian, tweeted". Lizzie Widdicombe, The New Yorker

Omero e Nerone sul New Yorker

Il nuovo numero del New Yorker si occupa di Nerone, che forse non era poi così terribile, "Nero, who was enthroned in Rome in 54 A.D., at the age of sixteen, and went on to rule for nearly a decade and a half, developed a reputation for tyranny, murderous cruelty, and decadence that has survived for nearly two thousand years.[...] All of this, according to some recent scholars, is at best an exaggeration and at worst a fabrication: a narrative derived from biased histories, written decades after Nero died, that relied on dubious sources". Rebecca Mead, New Yorker

E si occupa di Omero, che forse non è mai esistito, "We may not know when Homer was born, but we can say for certain that he ceased to exist in the early nineteen-thirties, when a young Harvard professor named Milman Parry published two papers, in the journal Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, with the seemingly innocuous title “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making.” Parry’s thesis was simple but momentous: “It is my own view, as those who have read my studies on Homeric style know, that the nature of Homeric poetry can be grasped only when one has seen that it is composed in a diction which is oral, and so formulaic, and so traditional.” In other words, the Iliad and the Odyssey weren’t written by Homer, because they weren’t written at all". Adam Kirsch, New Yorker

E ancora: What happened to Jan Kerouac, Jack’s forgotten daughter, David Barnett, The Guardian

 

New York’s Hyphenated History

In Pardis Mahdavi’s new book Hyphen, she explores the way hyphenation became not only a copyediting quirk but a complex issue of identity, assimilation, and xenophobia amid anti-immigration movements at the turn of the twentieth century. In the excerpt below, Mahdavi gives the little-known history of New York’s hyphenation debate.

“This thing—this hyphen—is like a gremlin which sneaks around in the dark … you should call a special meeting of City Council immediately and have a surgical operation on it! We won’t be hyphenated by anyone!” Pardis Mahdavi, The Paris Review

Sempre molto interessanti le discussioni sulla punteggiatura! 

Anche questa settimana: Blades, poisons, guns, bombs, defenestration, and plump cushions: Et Tu, Brute? Day of the Assassins: A History of Political Murder, Michael Burleigh (Picador), Jonathan Meades, Literary Review

Ancora sulla cancel culture: "Publishers today are teetering on a tightrope. Which voices should they amplify with a publishing deal – those their staff agree with, or those with an audience who agree with them? How far does an author have to go before their views are deemed unpublishable? What about when the personal views of an author, say JK Rowling, are condemned and staff object to working on her next children’s book? Where to draw the line?" Alison Flood, The Guardian