What distinguishes war from genocide?

What distinguishes war from genocide? When does state violence tip over from horrific yet legally sanctioned displays of military force into “the crime of all crimes,” according to both international law and the popular imagination?

This question has been much on Omer Bartov’s mind in recent months. A professor at Brown University and a leading historian of the Holocaust, the Israeli-born Bartov has devoted his scholarly career to studying acts of mass murder. Jacob Mikanowski, The Chronicle of Higher Education

buona fine 2023 e buon 2024!

Buon Natale!

One of our editors remarked that your cover looked like an advent calendar, and I thought, that’s what every cover should feel like, the anticipation of what’s going to be inside. How did you come up with the idea of staging a kitchen?

I found the assignment inspiring: nothing too sweet or seasonal, no Santa, nothing too predictable. Drawing scenes from the everyday fascinates me. The isometric perspective had to be there too, so I can put as much as possible into in an illustration. I love to look in every corner of a room and peek through an open door or window. My idea was to look behind the scenes: the preparing and cleaning of the home for guests. The other—annoying—side of the holidays. So I thought showing a kitchen with all the cooking and shopping and setting the table, all this going on at the same time as the owner has to answer the door to receive parcels from the postman, would best illustrate the “Holidays.” Sophia Martineck, illustratrice berlinese, intervistata da Leanne Shapton, The New York Review of Books

auguro a tutti un buon Natale in cucine allegre, calde, disordinate, rumorose e odorose!

Beware the sensitivity read

In addition to the aforementioned hick, hayseed, clodhopper, ridge runner, and towelhead, I was to omit, regardless of context, third world, homeless, white trash, whore, slut, slave, the Blacks, beaners and noble savages. Outlawed were Nazi, minstrel, blackface, homosexuals, boy, skinheads, dead animals, Rooskie, kike, spic, exotic and gumbo. Also Indians (cowboys and), dementia, shame, crazy, insane, ape, goddam moose, make love, fart, hell, goddam, screw up, asshole, along with some stronger expletives. Janet Burroway, Chronicle of Higher Education

la censura in America (ma non si può più veramente dire America) ai nostri giorni.

What Yale Has in Common With Hamas

Higher education, one of the last remaining industries in which the U.S. is still the unquestioned global leader, has proven particularly expert in shielding its favorite deep-pocketed investor from public scrutiny. In a new series of reports, a research consortium organized by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy found that some $2.7 billion in Qatari funding made it to American colleges and universities between 2014 and 2019 without public acknowledgement from the institutions themselves. The universities only divulged these contributions, which also included some $1.2 billion from China and $1.06 billion from Saudi Arabia, through a Department of Education online portal set up in 2019 to track previously unreported foreign funding. Armin Rosen, Tablet

molto inquietante ... e spiegherebbe alcuni comportamenti altrettanto inquietanti

The Greatest Dictionary Collection in the World et al

Madeline Kripke’s first dictionary was a copy of Webster’s Collegiate that her parents gave her when she was a fifth grader in Omaha in the early 1950s. By the time of her death in 2020, at age 76, she had amassed a collection of dictionaries that occupied every flat surface of her two-bedroom Manhattan apartment—and overflowed into several warehouse spaces. Many believe that this chaotic, personal library is the world’s largest compendium of words and their usage. April White, Atlas Obscura

altro articolo interessante questa settimana:

In the first decade of the 20th century, it was both virtually impossible and virtually unheard of for a Jewish person, irrespective of their individual talents, to be hired for any job at a major American publishing company—even if they were Ivy League graduates, heirs to family fortunes, and had brilliant literary minds. They couldn’t get hired on the editorial staff of a widely circulated American magazine, or be granted a professorship in an English department at a prestigious university, either. But all that started to change in the decades after the 1910s, when Jews entered the industry en masse. In addition to founding many of the today’s largest publishing companies, Jews became so influential throughout the industry that by the 1960s American writers as different as Truman Capote, Jack Kerouac, Katherine Anne Porter, and Mario Puzo began to complain about a “Jewish literary mafia.” In short, a minority group went from almost complete exclusion to full literary enfranchisement in a matter of decades. Josh Lambert, Public Books

Jews of Discretion

Let me start with an expression I made up in Call Me by Your Name. It refers to Jews who live in an entirely gentile world and who, without concealing their Jewishness, are, nevertheless, reluctant to proclaim it. There is, or so they think, no real imperative to proclaim their religion; they may even live in a world where Christians and Jews are quite secular, may even intermarry, and have grown to tolerate each other. You are not ashamed or fearful to be Jewish but you know better than to stand out when it’s not exactly necessary to do so. You may not tell everyone you are Jewish; at best, you allow some to infer it. After at least 2,000 years of antisemitic persecution, your difference is something you learn instinctively not to say too much about. I called these Jews “Jews of discretion.” Not nervous, not even apprehensive—just discreet. Or to use another word, prudent. André Aciman, Tablet

dal discorso fatto dall'autore il 5 novembre scorso all'University of Virginia in occasione della Conference on Jewish Life in the Diaspora: Sephardic Lives

Days of The Jackal

How Andrew Wylie turned serious literature into big business. Andrew Wylie is agent to an extraordinary number of the planet’s biggest authors. His knack for making highbrow writers very rich helped to define a literary era – but is his reign now coming to an end? Alex Blasdel, The Guardian

 

e per continuare a esplorare il lato commerciale della letteratura, da leggere è quest'altro articolo sui premi letterari:  "What 35 Years of Data Can Tell Us about Who Will Win the National Book Award", Alexander Manshel & Melanie Walsh, Public Books

Verdi’s Jewish Opera Grandly Staged at the Metropolitan

Nabucco is widely seen as a political opera. But while Verdi’s nationalist operas have mostly dropped out of the repertory of major venues, Nabucco is still performed widely, in part because it has better music, and also because it is not so much a nationalist opera as a religious one. With the arguable exception of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Nabucco is the most Jewish of operas, with a deeply sympathetic portrayal of the First Exile. David P. Goldman, Tablet

Baritone George Gagnidze makes his Met role debut as the imperious king Nabucco, alongside soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska reprising her thrilling turn as his vengeful daughter Abigaille. Mezzo-soprano Maria Barakova and tenor SeokJong Baek, in his company debut, are Fenena and Ismaele, whose love transcends politics, and bass Dmitry Belosselskiy repeats his celebrated portrayal of the high priest Zaccaria. Daniele Callegari conducts Verdi’s exhilarating early masterpiece, which features the ultimate showcase for the great Met Chorus, the moving “Va, pensiero.” Al Metropolitan fino al prossimo 26 gennaio.

Lord Jim at Home

Born into privilege somewhere in Cornwall in the 1920s, Giles Trenchard receives a bizarre yet commonplace induction into the upper middle class life of the time. His sense of worth is depleted before he leaves the nursery, by the interlocking efforts of a drunken, bleakly dismissive and mostly absent father and a nanny determined to control his bodily processes. He is expected to struggle towards personal agency but always punished for demonstrating it. He is separated from the mother he adores. He’s forced to eat food he can’t stomach. Nevertheless, he visualises himself as “the Prince”. It’s an emotional miseducation that can be completed only by a public school – in this case Rugby, where, already fragile and floundering, he learns to survive through mediocrity, dissociation and doing as little as possible; while beneath the vague, compliant surface that so irritates his teachers, all the suppressed needs, greeds and ambitions of early childhood still writhe. Inevitably, this contradiction will shape his adult life, which Brooke unrolls across the body of her novel, exactly like one of the fouled nappies the nanny draped across Giles’s face at six months old to teach him right from wrong in the context of bowel movements. John Harrison, The Guardian

ritorna nelle librerie un inquietante libro di culto degli anni '70, Lord Jim at Home, di Dinah Brooke (Daunt Books), da noi mai tradotto, mi pare.

John le Carré's serial philandering

“My infidelities,” he wrote to me at a time when, for better or worse, the issue had come to dominate our discussions, “produced in my life a duality & a tension that became almost a necessary drug for my writing, a dangerous edge of some kind … They are not therefore a ‘dark part’ of my life, separate from the ‘high literary calling,’ so to speak, but, alas, integral to it, & inseparable.” Dan Fesperman, WP

citazione dalla nuova biografia di le Carré di Adam Sisman, The Secret Life of John le Carré (Harper), che promette di rivelare molti pettegolezzi, tralasciati nella precedente bio.

Louise Glück by Colm Tóibín

Louise Glück was reticent, careful about what she said. She could be distant. There was always a sense that her real life was lived in dreams and memories, in her imagination, in her time alone. With students, sometimes she suggested that they try silence, not working at all. That, she believed, might be best for someone who was writing the wrong poems or producing too much.

In her own poems, she worked with silence, breaking it, creating more space for it, leaving gaps, writing lines that would hold as much implication as they could. Colm Tóibín, The Guardian

Bring No Clothes

When Virginia Woolf invited TS Eliot down for a country weekend in 1920 she concluded with “Please bring no clothes”. This was not a suggestion that “Tom” should arrive in East Sussex naked. Such a possibility was unlikely anyway since at this point the poet was still working as a buttoned-up clerk at Lloyds Bank. Eliot was famously wedded to his three-piece suit to the point where, Woolf joked, he would have worn a four-piece one if such a thing existed. What she meant by “bring no clothes” was that at Monk’s House they did not dress for dinner, change for church (there was no church), or worry about getting their best clothes grubby in the garden. This was Bloomsbury, albeit a rural version, and the clothing conventions to which the rest of upper-middle-class society had returned after the first world war had no place there. Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian

recensione di un libro su come si vestiva Virginia Woolf e il suo gruppo, Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion, di Charlie Porter (Particular).

Jhumpa Lahiri e Moravia

 

Can you talk about your new collection of stories. You have borrowed the title and concept from Alberto Moravia, who published his own set of Roman stories in 1954. What made you want to do that?
I have read and admired Moravia’s work for many years. Racconti romani struck me as both a fresco and a portrait of the city: a dense assembly of stories that is epic in scope. In fact, his stories were my first encounter with Rome, long before I ever visited. Many years later, Moravia was the first writer I read directly in Italian and fully understood, and when I began to write in Italian, I turned to him to guide me. The clarity of his style and the control and precision of his language taught me how to arrange words and sentences, in a new language, on the page. My title is in part a homage to him, but I also wish to signal some of the differences between his Rome of postwar Italy and the Rome I have lived in and known for the past decade. That said, his characters, like mine, are outsiders or people who have lost their way, almost always in crisis, and often living on the edge. Geneva Abdul, The Guardian

in questa bella interevistsa Jhumpa Lahiri parla di traduzioni, lingue e Italia.

English has always evolved by mistake

Perhaps the world’s most famous lexicographer, Susie Dent is certainly one of the most positive people on British TV. For 31 years the queen of dictionary corner on Channel 4’s Countdown, she puts just as much energy into her books: from her first, the 2003 Language Report for Oxford University Press, to Weird Words (2013), an unapologetic compendium of farting and squelching. She even finds the fun in current events, through her regular “word of the day” posts on Twitter. Recent examples include “‘boodlery’ (19th century): unprincipled behaviour in public office”, and, on the day Donald Trump was arrested, “‘mugshot’: the use of ‘mug’ for a face looks back to 18th-century drinking mugs that often represented a grotesque human face … ”

We meet in a cafe on a rainy July day, where she is sitting – as is her habit – in a corner, enthusiastically digging into a second breakfast. She often sits quietly on her own in a coffee shop, she says. “It’s probably against the law to eavesdrop as much as I do. It really is for linguistic purposes, not for gossip. But you can pick up some gems.” Katy Guest, The Guardian

sull'interessante lavoro del/la lessicografo/a. E anche il profilo dei finalisti al Booker Prize (nella foto): Esi Edugyan, The Guardian 

The Making of the OED

Henry Spencer Ashbee owned the largest collection of pornography and erotica in the world. Born in 1834, he began collecting clandestine material as a teenager and eventually amassed so much that he had to store it in a dedicated bachelor pad at Gray’s Inn, where he would invite fellow pornophiles to peruse the collection every Saturday. Ashbee’s unorthodox hobby went further: he sent in words related to genitals, pornography and bondage to the fledgling Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to be included in its pages.

Ashbee was one of thousands in the late 1800s who answered the OED’s global call to send in terms – along with examples of how the words were used in books and newspapers – for inclusion in the dictionary. The ambitious crowdsourcing project was “the Wikipedia of the 19th century”, says Sarah Ogilvie, whose book, The Dictionary People, profiles a selection of those who contributed terms. Ella Creamer, The Guardian

recensione di: The Dictionary People, di Sarah Ogilvie (Chatto & Windus).

Proust, ChatGPT and the case of the forgotten quote

The other day, I was looking for a quote in Proust, so I thought I would ask ChatGPT. Here’s how it went.

EB: Is there a passage in In Search of Lost Time when Proust talks about how love affairs repeat themselves, and says that when you’re writing about a love affair in the past, you’re often drawing inspiration from a different love affair in the present?

CHATGPT: Yes ... Elif Batuman, The Guardian

The Early History of Counting

Figuring out when humans began to count systematically, with purpose, is not easy. ...

così comincia l'estratto di un'interessante storia dei numeri, che  spiega perché un orologio ha 12 ore, un'ora ha 60 minuti, ecc. Si tratta di, Keith Houston, Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator (Norton) Lapham's Quarterly

What to read this autumn

Sara Pascoe’s new novel, rare Terry Pratchett, memoirs from Barbra Streisand and Britney Spears, plus the essential reading on today’s hot button topics – all the releases to look out for The Guardian

Sleep and dust

Sleepless (Pas Dormir in the original French), a book that is – what? A memoir/interrogation/painting/song of insomnia, her own and that of others. It’s a book about where, why, how we sleep and don’t sleep; about how to find a place in the world where sleep can happen, a stable for the worn-out horse. Samantha Harvey, The Guardian 

Sleepless è edito da Fitzcarrald, mentre l'originale francese da Folio. L'autrice è Marie Darrieussec.

Owens’s own fascination with dust started as a student in 2008, when she contemplated the sisyphean task of housekeeping. (“I was neither balding nor scrofulous … where was this material come from?”) But her journey doesn’t actually begin until 2015, with a road trip through California. Owens is transfixed and outraged by the story of Los Angeles, whose growth and modern existence was only possible through the systematic and outrageous theft of water and the creation of a dust desert to the east. Oliver Franklin-Wallis, The Guardian

Dust di Jay Owens è pubblicato da Hodder & Stoughton. 

Walter Benjamin’s radio tales

No audio recordings of Walter Benjamin have survived. His voice was once described as beautiful, even melodious—just the sort of voice that would have been suitable for the new medium of radio broadcasting that spread across Germany in the 1920s. If one could pay the fee for a wireless receiver, Benjamin could be heard in the late afternoons or early evenings, often during what was called “Youth Hour.” His topics ranged widely, from a brass works outside Berlin to a fish market in Naples. In one broadcast, he lavished his attention on an antiquarian bookstore with aisles like labyrinths, whose walls were adorned with drawings of enchanted forests and castles. For others, he related “True Dog Stories” or perplexed his young listeners with brain teasers and riddles. He also wrote, and even acted in, a variety of radio plays that satirized the history of German literature or plunged into surrealist fantasy. One such play introduced a lunar creature named Labu who bore the august title “President of the Moon Committee for Earth Research.” [...]

Now transcripts of these broadcasts have been assembled and translated into English in a new volume edited by Lecia Rosenthal, whose incisive introduction assists the reader in appreciating their true significance. Peter E. Gordon,
The Nation

Flirting With Danger

In April 1920 a Baltimore heiress was arrested in Russia, accused of being a secret agent. Marguerite Harrison (1879-1967), whose wedding trousseau had numbered 40 outfits, now wore lice-infested clothes and a pair of men’s shoes. Imprisoned without trial, she would spend 10 months in Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka jail, including time in solitary confinement. [...]

In “Flirting With Danger: The Mysterious Life of Marguerite Harrison, Socialite Spy,” Janet Wallach presents a compelling story that pulsates with the energy of a thriller.  Moira Hodgson, WSJ

Flirting With Danger è pubblicato da Doubleday.

Things started getting weird

Let’s start off, as most good books do, with an inciting incident. In this case, that’s the arrival of an 87,000-word manuscript, an unpublished novel, in someone’s email inbox. The title of the document is “Bad Summer People”, and the setting of the book seems familiar to the person who receives the email. Some of the character names do, too. Because of this, the document gets forwarded to someone else who may find it interesting. Who then sends it to another person. And another. Eventually, this unpublished work causes a cascade of small-town mayhem, ending up as a tabloid story with a headline that reads “Media exec’s novel about murder, sex and lies in the moneyed town of Saltaire has sent residents into a spin.”

Sounds like the plot of a good beach read, right? Well, unfortunately for the media exec in question – me – that juicy plotline happened in real life, not between the pages of a book. Emma Rosenblum, The Guardian

le avventure di un libro e una lettura per l'estate (l'ho raccomandata anche sul mio boxino per Internazionale). Anche la foto è adatta all'estate! Il giallo di Emma Rosenblum, Bad Summer People, è pubblicato da Penguin.

Jazz e Talmud

« Dans son ouvrage His Own Words, Selected Writings, Oxford University Press, paru en 2001, «Louis Armstrong parle en termes élogieux de la famille Karnofsky qu’il avait abondamment fréquentée dans sa jeunesse à La Nouvelle-Orléans. En effet, c’est Morris Karnofsky qui lui avait prêté l’argent pour son premier cornet et ce sont les berceuses russes qu’il entend chez eux qu’il rend responsables de son amour du judaïsme. Il dédie ce même ouvrage à son agent Joe Glaser. Sa reconnaissance vis-à-vis des Juifs s’exprime aussi par une dédicace au Dr Gary Zucker, son sauveur de l’hôpital Beth Israël de New York.»

C’est ainsi que commence l’article de Jean Szlamowicz, Juifs américains et Afro-Américains, Convergences et divergences dans le champ social du jazz, paru dans la revue Pardès en 2008.

il musicista jazz Julien Grassen Barbe (nella foto) parla della sua musica con Marc-Alain Ouaknin in Talmudiques

Capote’s Women

The biggest tragedy of Truman Capote’s altogether tragic life was that he never got to write Answered Prayers, the novel of high society shenanigans that he and the rest of the world knew would be his masterpiece.[...]

The main characters in Answered Prayers would be a group of high-society women whom Capote referred to in real life as his “swans”. They included Babe Paley, Lee Radziwill, Slim Keith and CZ Guest, as well as Gloria Guinness, Marella Agnelli and Pamela Harriman. They were immensely rich, clever if not intellectual, better with horses than children and never off the best-dressed list. They all also adored Truman Capote, the tiny, camp southern journalist who loved nothing better than a bibulous lunch at Elaine’s or La Côte Basque larded with some vicious gossip, typically concerning whichever swan had just left the table to powder her nose. Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian

nella foto: Truman Capote con Lee Radziwill nel 1966. Il libro di cui si parla è: Laurence Leamer, Capote’s Women (Hodder & Stoughton).

The Students Who Went to Sea

What could possibly go wrong? More than three hundred overprivileged American students travelling the world on a hastily converted troopship, led by a recently sacked university professor determined to prove that travel could be as educational as any university course and keen to make money in the process.

Underfunded, under-recruited and poorly run, the ‘Floating University’ circumnavigated the world over a seven-month period, generating appalling headlines almost everywhere it went. William Whyte, Literary Review

il libro di cui si parla, e che deve essere molto interessante, è Tamson Pietsch, The Floating University: Experience, Empire, and the Politics of Knowledge (University of Chicago Press).

cambiando completamente argomento, questo sembra un altro libro molto interessante, questa volta sui gufi, Jennifer Ackerman, What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds (Oneworld), recensito sul Guardian da Simon Worral.

Virago Press compie 50 anni

It was the early 70s, and in a tiny flat above a synagogue in Chelsea, London, decorated with lime-green paint, red tiles and an alternative cover for Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch on the wall, a group of women sat talking around a dining table.The attic bedsit soon became the first office of the feminist publisher Virago. Ella Creamer, The Guardian

mi piace la foto, mi piace molto la descrizione del piccolo appartamento sopra una sinagoga a Chelsea... e naturalmente: auguri Virago!

The Casual Ignominy of the Book Tours of Yore

Then dawned the day of the book tour. Literary stars and the authors of blockbusters, the Norman Mailers and the Frederick Forsyths, had always been swaggering about the world touting their wares. Now the rest of us, poor moles digging away in the dark of obscurity, were hauled up into the light and sent abroad to appear before live audiences and pretend to be a more or less plausible and if possible entertaining version of ourselves. [...] every reading, as every writer will tell you, attracts at least a couple of maniacs. John Banville, Esquire

voglio anche segnalare una nuova traduzione del romanzo di Natalia Ginzburg, The Road to the City, New Directions. Dalla copertina, "An almost unbearably intimate novella, The Road to the City concentrates on a young woman barely awake to life, who fumbles through her days: she is fickle yet kind, greedy yet abashed, stupidly ambitious yet loving too—she is a mass of confusion".

The Sullivanians

At its peak, in the mid- to late seventies, the psychoanalytic association known as the Sullivanian Institute had as many as six hundred patient-members clustered in apartment buildings that the group bought or rented on the cheap on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. They also ran an experimental theatre troupe, called the Fourth Wall, on the Lower East Side. The Sullivanians adhered to the same principles and traditions as many of the ashrams and rural intentional communities of the era: polyamory, communal living, group parenting, socialist politics. But they came to their belief system through the gateway of psychoanalysis, the self-actualization tool of the urbane intellectual. And they enacted their beliefs on a crowded concrete island of nearly eight million people, often while holding down high-status jobs as physicians, attorneys, computer programmers, and academics. The institute’s co-founder and reigning tyrant, Saul Newton, who sat atop the organization from the mid-nineteen-fifties until the mid-nineteen-eighties (he died in 1991), may have come closer than any of his far more notorious peers to establishing a truly metropolitan cult—its members visible but its practices obscure. Jessica Winter, The New Yorker

rensione dell'ultimo libro di Alexander Stille, The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), che sembra molto interessante!

Tremplin poetique

De l’autre côté

Qu’y a-t-il de l’autre côté ?
Je ne sais pas.
Mais pourquoi je ne peux pas passer ?
Je ne sais pas.

Les potagers sont-ils plus colorés là-bas ? Les vaches moins timides ?
Les coquelicots plus grands ?
Je ne sais pas.

Et pourquoi les oiseaux peuvent-ils passer sans être dérangés ?
Personne ne pense à les retenir ?
Je ne sais pas.

...

questa settimana un detour a Lione, a questa bell'iniziativa delle biblioteche pubbliche della città per stimolare la produzione e lettura della poesia. Quest'anno il tema era "le frontiere". Tremplin poetique

 

‘I’m just cruel. What can I tell you?’

It has been more than a decade since the American writer Lorrie Moore published her last novel [...] “I’m a very slow writer,” she says simply, on a video call from Berlin, where she has spent the winter. Her latest novel, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, is her fourth and she has published four collections of stories. She describes the new novel as “a political ghost story and a personal ghost story”. Lisa Allardice, The Guardian

in Gran Bretagna il nuovo romanzo di Moore è pubblicato da Faber & Faber, in America da Knopf.

Dictionary of Gestures

We might believe that the seat of speech (without considering ventriloquists and flatulists) has no need for the assistance of hand gestures when it comes to expressing emotions and sensations. Numerous adjectives confirm this to be true: foul, open, loud, smart, foaming, pouty, watering — the mouth can be all of these things and many more still.

Whereas in English, to have your heart in your mouth means to be very nervous, in French, it is inverted and has a different meaning. As Raymond Queneau puts it in “Loin de Rueil”: “He coldly left like in a transitional scene, just like that, in the night, mouth in heart, without a word.” Typically, in French, this means to put on airs or to simper. The MIT Press Reader

Questo è un estratto dal Dictionary of Gestures, di François Caradec, scrittore e fumettista francese, nato nel 1924 e morto nel 2008. Viene ora tradotto in inglese da Chris Clarke, MIT Press. Non mi risulta che sia stato tradotto in italiano.

The Party Is Cancelled

Every month, more than two hundred people from the media, academia, and other intellectual circles are invited to a private hangout in New York City, which is known as the Gathering of Thought Criminals. There are two rules. The first is that you have to be willing to break bread with people who have been socially ostracized, or, as the attendees would say, “cancelled”—whether they’ve lost a job, lost friends, or simply feel persecuted for holding unpopular opinions. Some people on the guest list are notorious: élite professors who have deviated from campus consensus or who have broken university rules, and journalists who have made a name for themselves amid public backlash (or who have weathered it quietly). Others are relative nobodies, people who for one reason or another have become exasperated with what they see as rampant censorious thinking in our culture.The second rule of the gatherings is that Pamela has to like you. Pamela is Pamela Paresky, the gathering’s organizer, a fifty-six-year-old psychologist who lives in Chelsea.Emma Green, The New Yorker

The Eight Mountains – a movie with air in its lungs and love in its heart

This rich, beautiful and inexpressibly sad film is about the friendship between men who can’t talk about their feelings and about winning and losing at the great game of life. It is set in the breathtaking and wonderfully photographed Italian Alpine valley of Aosta, which includes the slopes of Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn. But the “eight mountains” of the title refers to the eight highest peaks of Nepal: a mysterious symbol of worldly ambition and conquest. Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

insomma, è piaciuto molto!

In search of lost time

Forty years ago, on a spring night in April 1983, a thief bypassed security at the L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art in Jerusalem, entering the building under the cover of darkness. The burglar stole 106 rare clocks worth tens of millions of dollars, then vanished without a trace.

The crime had all the elements of a high-stakes drama: a mysterious theft, befuddled investigators, a romance that spanned decades and outlasted a prison sentence, and two bequeathments of valuable timepieces (among them a pocket watch commissioned for Marie Antoinette).

In the two decades following the theft, authorities made little progress on the investigation. The heist seemed like a mystery that would never be solved—until a deathbed confession by a career criminal led to the recovery of almost all of the missing timepieces. Fern Reiss, Smithsonian

e un'altra curiosità:

How Hannah Arendt’s Zionism helped create American gay identity, Blake Smith, Tablet

Judy Blume Forever

Suddenly Judy Blume is everywhere. Not that the author who carried so many of us through adolescence is ever far from our minds; she tends to be my personal Jiminy Cricket, a gentle conscience asking the same question of every sentence I type: Is it honest?

But now, the creator of “Superfudge,” “Deenie,” “The Pain and the Great One” and so many other beloved novels is having her biggest week since “In the Unlikely Event” came out in 2015. “Judy Blume Forever,” a documentary about her life, is streaming on Amazon Prime Video and the movie version of her 52-year-old novel, “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” came out on Friday.

Meals and deals

Five biggest trends from London book fair 2023.

Over the course of three days in London, thousands of editors, publishers and agents, among others, decide what we’ll be reading in the coming year or so.

Here’s our round-up from London book fair, which took place from 18 to 20 April, taking in the essentials of what the publishing landscape will look like for the next 12 months, from what we’re going to buy, to the big issues occupying the industry. Sarah Shaffi, The Guardian

 

Creative Nonfiction

What is “creative nonfiction,” exactly? Isn’t the term an oxymoron? Creative writers—playwrights, poets, novelists—are people who make stuff up. Which means that the basic definition of “nonfiction writer” is a writer who doesn’t make stuff up, or is not supposed to make stuff up. If nonfiction writers are “creative” in the sense that poets and novelists are creative, if what they write is partly make-believe, are they still writing nonfiction? [...]

One answer is suggested by Samuel W. Franklin’s provocative new book, “The Cult of Creativity” (Chicago). Franklin thinks that “creativity” is a concept invented in Cold War America—that is, in the twenty or so years after 1945. Before that, he says, the term barely existed. “Create” and “creation,” of course, are old words (not to mention, as Franklin, oddly, does not, “Creator” and “Creation”). But “creativity,” as the name for a personal attribute or a mental faculty, is a recent phenomenon. Louis Menand, The New Yorker

John le Carré visto da John Banville

David Cornwell, aka John le Carré, was tall, muscular, and physically forceful, even into old age, and possessed of what used to be called film-star good looks. He seemed, on the face of it, wholly at ease with the world and with himself. But what the camera so often revealed, behind the confidently winning smile, was the wounded man whose mother, when he was five, abandoned him without even saying good-bye, and who after he had become the successful novelist John le Carré was asked by his father to reimburse him for the cost of his education. The New York Review of Books

e anche, sempre sulla New York Review of Books, un interessante articolo sul nuovo libro di Adam Kirsch, The Revolt Against Humanity (Columbia Global Reports)

If humanity were to disappear from the Earth, what would be lost? On the human scale, the answer is everything; but on a planetary scale, it’s tempting to concede that such a loss might amount to a net gain. It is probably not necessary to enumerate the various ways that humanity has been unambiguously bad for the planet and pretty much every other living creature on it. But we tend not to think of our species, and the prospect of its extinction, in such bluntly utilitarian terms. We’d rather we weren’t so terrible, but we’d also like to think, even if it means fooling ourselves, that we might in time become less terrible—and either way, an enthusiastic embrace of our extinction would surely be taking things a bit far.

Or would it? This is the question that animates The Revolt Against Humanity, a brisk and bracing new book by the poet and critic Adam Kirsch. NYRB

 

Why Dickens still endures on page, stage and screen

All Dickens’s fiction – and any good adaptation – makes you laugh in the midst of what is horrible or sad. In Oliver Twist, Dickens commended “good murderous melodrama”, loved by Victorians, for presenting “the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon”. His audacious alternations of tragedy and comedy – or, in Great Expectations, terror and absurdity – provide the entertaining shocks essential to popular entertainment. John Mullan, The Guardian

in effetti i romanzi di Dickens sono delle macchine narrative ingegnosissime, dei veri modelli per chiunque voglia scrivere. Nell'immagine Olivia Colman nella nuova versione della BBC di Great Expetations.

The End of the English Major

During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent, Townsend found. What’s going on? The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Coöperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade. But that brings little comfort to American scholars, who have begun to wonder what it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before. Nathan Heller, New Yorker

un articolo molto interessante, che collega il declino delle humanities ai costi stellari delle università americane e ai conseguenti debiti che gli studenti devono ripagare alla fine degli studi, ma anche a molti altri fattori, come al fatto che molti studenti hanno idee vaghe su che cosa siano le humanities. Colpa nostra, anche. Comunque da leggere.

sempre sul New Yorker, un bell'articolo sui mondi di Italo Calvino, Mavellous Things, Merve Emre.

ancora su Old Babes in the Wood (Chatto & Windus),  Lisa O'Kelly interevista Margaret Atwood, The Guardian

e anche:  

Growing numbers of women in UK are joining forces with friends to run independent bookshops, Nadia Khomami, The Guardian

e la longlist dell'International Booker Prize, sempre sul Guardian