Spie e dintorni

According to popular lore, a woman spy known only as Agent 355 helped George Washington win the American Revolution, serving as a key member of the Manhattan-Long Island intelligence network later dubbed the Culper Spy Ring. Bill Bleyer Smithsonian Magazine

sempre sul Smithsonian Magazine, un altro articolo interessante su una normalissima coppia del New Mexico che rubò un De Kooning per metterselo in soggiorno.

She was a retired speech pathologist, and he was a retired music teacher. For all intents and purposes, Rita and Jerry Alter were a totally normal couple living in the New Mexico suburbs—except for one thing. They had a stolen Willem de Kooning painting worth $160 million hanging behind their bedroom door.

The couple’s purported double lives as high-stakes art thieves has made headlines ever since their prized painting was identified as a missing de Kooning in 2017. Jane Recker, Smithsonian Magazine

infine, per chi ama John Le Carré, come me, è in arrivo il suo epistolario: 

A collection of letters by the late novelist John le Carré is to be published later this year. A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré 1945-2020 spans almost eight decades, from the author’s childhood in wartime Britain to just days before his death in 2020. It contains letters to le Carré’s family and friends as well as to high-profile fans such as Hugh Laurie, Ralph Fiennes, Stephen Fry, Alec Guinness and Tom Stoppard. Lucy Knight, The Guardian

 

Il triste declino delle discipline umanistiche

Indeed, Russian culture itself has become a target. Russian artists who lived long before the birth of Putin, or the creation of the Soviet secret police that trained him, have been cancelled. In Italy, writer Paolo Nori’s lectures on Dostoevsky were “postponed.” “This is to avoid any controversy,” explained the email he received, “especially internally, during a time of strong tensions.” Nori responded: “I realize what is happening in Ukraine is horrible, and I feel like crying just thinking about it. But what is happening in Italy is ridiculous. . . . Not only is being a living Russian wrong in Italy, but also being a dead Russian. That an Italian university would ban a course on an author like Dostoevsky is unbelievable.” After a backlash, the university reversed its decision.

But numerous cancellations have not been reversed. Gary Saul Morson, First Things

io credo che continuare a studiare la letteratura russa, così come tutte le letterature, sia un modo di combattere i dispotismi. E' questo che dico ai miei studenti. Dobbiamo rivendicare il ruolo fondamentale delle materie umanistiche nella formazione di cittadini pensanti e pacifici. Invece le cose stanno andando diversamente, purtroppo, come si vede da questo articolo:

Hiring in the humanities last peaked in 2007-2008, when the MLA’s jobs report recorded 3,506 openings across English and other languages. By 2019-2020, that number had fallen to 1,411. Jacob Brogan, The Washington Post Magazine

Books Against Bombs

During Covid, Ukraine’s population bought books, thanks to a government vaccine initiative. Now there is no time to read, they can still be useful... Katerina Sergatskova, The Guardian

tristissimo.... ma poetico. Ho sempre amato molto poco il turismo e quindi ho letto con interesse questo articolo intitolato "The Big Idea: Is Tourismo Bad for Us?"

If Covid’s impact ameliorates as hoped, it will be replaced by a new virus – wanderlust. Millennials, according to one survey, would rather travel than have sex – and not only because they’re probably doing the latter wrong. [...] But the value of tourism, like sex, depends on how you do it. Cruise ships generate 21,000 gallons of sewage per day per vessel, much of it ending up in the sea. In 2019, transport-related emissions from tourism were responsible for 5% of human-made global carbon dioxide emissions, according to UNWTO. Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian

 

 

Elizabeth Strout e Elena Ferrante

 

Dear Elena Ferrante,
Thank you for all of your work. I am a huge fan, and I have read all your books, and by reading them I was able to take new risks with my own work. So thank you for that as well. 

Dear Elizabeth,
Thank you for your kind words about In the Margins. I really loved your novels Amy and Isabelle, The Burgess Boys, and naturally the amazing Olive Kitteridge.
But, I must tell you, I value your opinion of In the Margins especially because of your novel My Name Is Lucy Barton, or, to be precise, because of the fleeting but memorable relationship between Lucy and the writer Sarah Payne. The Guardian

interessante scambio epistolare tra due grandi scrittrici, Elena Ferrante ed Elizabeth Strout. 

Inoltre: Yiyun Li, scrittrice dall'inconsueto cv (è immunologa as well), discute del neologismo, da lei creato, "beforemath", parlando dello scrittore Jon McGregor.

Yiyun Li: I love reading dictionaries, getting to know words beyond their everyday usage: etymologies, definitions that have gone obsolete, meanings that have been added over the years.

Last year, as I was rereading McGregor’s entire body of work, I looked up aftermath and was surprised to find that it’s derived from aftermowth, which refers to the second crop of grass that grows after the first has been mown or harvested. Instantly my interest was piqued, as we don’t tend to talk about beforemath—we don’t even have it as a word. As I thought through how McGregor approaches dramatic and tragic events in fiction, it became clear to me that some of his books focus on the beforemath, and others approach aftermath at a slanted angle. The New York Review