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.