I'm A Fan

The protagonist of Sheena Patel’s corrosive, brilliant debut, a 30-year-old arts freelancer living in south London, is fanatical about two individuals: “the man I want to be with” “the woman I am obsessed with”, who is also having an affair with “the man I want to be with”.[...]

Patel offers no way out from the brutal arena of fandom into which she organises human life. But what makes I’m a Fan so successful is the protagonist’s ability to interpret and critique the toxicity of these structures even as she is caught inside them. She recognises, with shattering clarity, that if she goes on like this she could “turn out to be the man I want to be with in all the ways I don’t want to be”. Lamorna Ash, The Guardian

il romanzo di cui si parla è I'm A Fan, di Sheena Patel (Rough Trade Books). Inoltre un bell'articolo (purtroppo solo per abbonati) sui lessicografi dietro l'Oxford English Dictionary. 

From aardvark to woke: inside the Oxford English Dictionary The OED’s task – to define every part of the world’s most spoken language – is as ambitious as it was 150 years ago. 

The team at the Oxford English Dictionary felt some nervousness about writing the definition for “Terf”, an acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist, which this month has been added to its pages. “To a certain extent, it is like any other word,” says Fiona McPherson, a 50-year-old lexicographer from Grangemouth, Stirlingshire, who has worked at the dictionary since 1997. “But it would be disingenuous to say that it is exactly the same. There seems more at stake. You want to be accurate, you want to be neutral. But it’s a lot easier to be neutral about a word that isn’t controversial.” Pippa Bailey, The New Statesman

 

What Makes Censors Tick?

[...] a “censor is one who seeks to exert control over the culture through law, based on the idea that he or she, speaking for the community, has a right to draw the boundary lines for speech.” The censor is convinced that “some forms of expression are so vile or dangerous that they should be restricted, or so valuable that they should be compelled.” Consequently, censors “claim the moral sanction to speak for the collective, either by enforcing ‘community standards’ against evil expression or by mandating speech that they believe serves the ‘public interest.’” Stephen Rohde, LARB

di fatto Stephen Rohde cita un paragrafo di un libro sulla censura uscito alla fine dello scorso anno, Robert Corn-Revere, The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder: The First Amendment and the Censor’s Dilemma (Cambridge University Press)

un altro libro curioso, uscito alla fine dell'anno scorso, è quello di  Jonathan Purkis, Driving With Strangers: What Hitchhiking Tells Us About Humanity (Manchester University Press)

The earliest known written account of hitchhiking was by a student named Charles Brown Jr, who in 1916 described his 800-mile journey from Fort Wayne, Indiana to New York City. He got rides from, among others, a priest, an artist, a teacher and a doctor, the last of these so fascinated by Brown’s adventure that, despite being en route to a medical emergency, he overshot his destination by ten miles.  Mike Jay, LRB

L'understatement e il sorriso

The essence of adulthood, I suddenly grasped, was internalizing understatement. It meant sublimating one’s raw, emotional insides to something drier on the outside, something more even-tempered and hence more sophisticated. To put aside childish things, one had to ditch not only the tantrums of the toddler years but the gushing of the early teens.

Today the opposite is true, even—particularly—on applications for colleges, internships and jobs. It’s not enough to be an all-state musician or varsity athlete, with the years of commitment that represents. Now applications all insist that you “tell us about your passion.” As with teenage Instagram posts, the pressure to be passionate encourages the applicant to flaunt and exaggerate, to make grandiose claims—to remain, in other words, a hyperbolic adolescent rather than taking a step toward becoming an adult capable of seeing one’s own life in a broader context. Caitlin Macy, WSJ

e una storia del sorriso:

The smile as we know it was thus out and about in the Western world from the 13th century onwards. Literature demonstrates that, in the centuries that followed, it evoked much of the range of feelings that we attach to it in our own culture. [...] Yet if the smile was alive and well in Western culture, it was not yet our own. In Western art, it differed in one highly significant respect: the smiling mouth was almost always closed. Teeth appear in facial representations extremely rarely. One can scan drawings, paintings and sculptures from before the 19th century in art galleries and museums the world over without finding a single example of a tooth-baring smile of the kind that is so common in our own day.

Brooklyn o Manhattan?

In American cultural and intellectual life, New York City sets the tone. As the main hub for the country’s media and frequent originator of trends that percolate through US society, what’s “in” with the New York scene today is often central to American culture tomorrow. And politics, too ­– as US conservatives never tire of noting – is often downstream of culture.

But New York City’s intellectual landscape is increasingly split between two warring scenes, divided by geography, aesthetics and politics. Which of these prevails could affect whether America shifts right or remains where it is. Nick Burns, The New Stateman

e dieci libri sull'ascolto della natura:

From precise transliterations of birdsong to a quest for one square inch of silence, these stories teach us how to open our ears to the world. David George Haskell, The Guardian