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".