How to Research Like a Dog

Written toward the end of Franz Kafka’s life, “Investigations of a Dog” is one of the lesser-known and most enigmatic works in the author’s oeuvre. Kafka didn’t give the story a title, writing it in the autumn of 1922 but leaving it unpublished and unfinished. It was published posthumously in 1931 in a collection edited by his friend and biographer Max Brod, who named it Forschungen eines Hundes — which could also be translated as “Researches of a Dog,” to give it a more academic ring. [...] “Investigations of a Dog” presents a brilliant and sometimes hilarious parody of the world of knowledge production, what the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called “the university discourse.” Aaron Schuster, The MIT Press

confrontarsi con Kafka, sempre. Buon Natale e Hanukkah!

Untold Lessons

It is 1970 in the northern Italian city of Biella, and a teacher has gone missing. The disappearance of Silvia seems to be linked to the death of her pupil Giovanna, a girl who was beaten at home ... John Self, The Guardian

è stata una sorpresa trovare sul Guardian - tra i libri recentemente tradotti in inglese - il romanzo di Maddalena Vaglio Tanet, che in Italia si intitola Tornare nel bosco ed è edito da Marsilio. Non lo conosco, ma l'ho cercato in versione kindle. Mi incuriosisce, così come mi incuriosisce l'autrice. Tra l'altro si svolge sulle colline e nei boschi della mia infanzia.

Q&A with Dr. Michael Silverstein: How social media can impact child health

 

Q: Can you help put the social media phenomenon in context? How does it compare to previous phenomena that were assumed to have negative effects on children’s mental health, such as violent television programs or video games? 

Unlike, say, the video games of yesteryear, social media follows you from school to soccer practice to your friend's house to your house; from the kitchen to the bedroom to the bathroom. This phenomenon can exist and persist in most physical spaces, as well as in a person’s mental space. Let’s say a classmate is being mean to a student at school. Well, the student can get away from that, at least temporarily, by coming home. But if a classmate is being mean to a student over text or social media, they can’t get away from it, even if they leave school. They will still be confronted or reminded by it whenever they turn on or even look at the computer, the phone or the watch they use to interact with others online. That makes it uniquely powerful in terms of potential mental health effects.  Corrie Pikul, Brown University

How the Ivy League Broke America

 The Six Sins of the Meritocracy

1. The system overrates intelligence.  
2. Success in school is not the same thing as success in life. 
3. The game is rigged. 
4. The meritocracy has created an American caste system.
5. The meritocracy has damaged the psyches of the American elite. 
6. The meritocracy has provoked a populist backlash that is tearing society apart.   David Brooks, The Atlantic
   

Can AI replace translators?

As anyone who has tried pointing their phone’s camera at a menu in a foreign country lately will know, machine translation has improved rapidly since the first days of Google Translate. The utility of AI-powered translation in situations like this is unquestionable – but the proposed use of AI in literary translation has been significantly more controversial. Keza MacDonald, The Guardian

The Position of Spoons and Other Intimacies

Few British writers are as adept as Deborah Levy at enacting Hilary Mantel’s advice to writers: to make the reader “feel acknowledged, and yet estranged”. Levy’s approachable but oblique novels look like realism, but come riddled with psychological trapdoors and unstable narratives, while her trilogy of memoirs takes the reader in hand more directly. Her new book – a collection of 34 essays, stories and short texts too unclassifiable to be labelled – combines the best of both approaches. John Self, The Guardian

Alan Bennett at 90

Bennett has come to accept that “old age is a subject. You write about what you’re given. And I hadn’t expected to have anything to write about by now.” Killing Time is set in a home for the elderly. He started it a few years ago but set it aside because Allelujah! (2018), his most recent stage play, was set in a hospital elderly care ward: “I didn’t want to become the bard of geriatric medicine!” Mark Lawson, The Guardian

e poi Alan Bennett continua a parlare, parlare di tutto e tutti...

Meet the Italian ‘Fruit Detective’

When Isabella Dalla Ragione assesses a Renaissance painting, she doesn’t immediately notice the brushstrokes or the magnificence of the imagery. The first thing she notices is the fruit.

She steers us to one more Madonna with Child, the center of an altarpiece painted by Bernardino di Betto, better known as Pintoricchio, in 1495 or 1496. It is all glimmering blues and reds and golds. “Look, there,” she exclaims, pointing to the bottom of the painting. At the Madonna’s feet, just off the gold hem of her azure robe, are three gnarly looking apples—oddly shaped varieties you’d never see in a market today. 

For most viewers, they would be an afterthought. For Dalla Ragione, the apples, including a variety known in the fruit science lexicon as api piccola, represent a key to restoring Italy’s disappearing fruit agriculture, with characteristics not found in today’s apples: Crunchy and tart, they are capable of being stored at room temperature for about seven months and maintain their best qualities outside the fridge. Mark Schapiro, Smithsonian

Sonny Boy

Al Pacino, whose nickname “Sonny Boy” comes from the Al Jolson song of that title, begins this fine memoir in 1943 when he is three and his mother, Rose, a pretty, sensitive factory worker, starts smuggling him into the local picture house. Together they drink in the stories unspooling from the silver screen, doubly delicious since their own lives are so bleak. Rose’s impossibly handsome boy-husband has already skedaddled to another marriage and Rose has taken little Alfredo back to the South Bronx to live with her parents. Sonny delights in the role of provider and protector, buying his mother Kotex from the drugstore and shouting at the construction workers who dare to leer. Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian

Sonny Boy: A Memoir by Al Pacino is published by Century

Bookselling Out

My daughter and I were the only browsers in a small bookstore when a woman entered to ask how to find a nearby donut shop. “So I’m in the wrong place altogether,” she replied to the bookseller’s instructions. “Unless you’d like to buy a book,” said the bookseller. The woman laughed and left. [...]

Bookstores are struggling. We might say The Bookshop is the story of a rise and fall. Friss offers a bleak analysis in his final pages, explaining how the vaunted indie comeback of the last few years depends on misleading data from the ABA. According to the U.S. Census, “between 2012 and 2021, the number of bookstores dropped by 34 percent.”  Dan Sinykin, The Baffler

The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore by Evan Friss (Viking).

The Jazz Singer

Il primo film sonoro – prodotto dalla stessa Warner e proiettato per la prima volta il 27 ottobre 1927 – fu Il cantante di jazz (The Jazz Singer) nel quale, oltre a varie canzoni, si udivano una frase rivolta al pubblico dal protagonista e un breve dialogo tra questi e la madre. Il protagonista, interpretato da Al Johnson, è un ragazzo ebreo che non vuole cantare in sinagoga, come hanno fatto tutti i maschi di famiglia prima di lui, perché ama il jazz. Nel film canta però Kol Nidre, in una versione molto commovente. A proposito del Kippur appena trascorso.

7 ottobre, un anno dal pogrom

This is a story of two political cultures. One of them shapes the attitudes that dominate political discussion in American colleges. The other culture persists among a broad and reasonably well-informed public outside colleges and their government and philanthropic tributaries. When, in the academic year 2023-24, the two cultures faced each other with expressions of mutual dismay, the moment had been coming for a long time. On October 7, 2023, scores of Hamas fighters broke through the boundaries of Gaza, killed around 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped more than 200 others: the worst terror attack in Israel’s history. Within hours, 34 student groups at Harvard University had circulated a public letter affirming that “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” (The word “unfolding” covered the violence of the past, the present, and the future.) “Today’s events,” the letter went on to say, “did not occur in a vacuum,” and it added: “The apartheid regime [of Israel] is the only one to blame.” The signers concluded by urging solidarity with the Palestinian suffering which was sure to follow once the Israeli retaliation in Gaza had commenced.

What shocked many people about the student letter was its heartlessness. Even as the bodies were being counted, the signers told us not to blame the killers but to redirect our gaze, and fix all responsibility on Israel. The Chronicle of Higher Education

Rebecca Watson: ‘What are siblings: twisted reflections of ourselves? Allies? Enemies?

The author of I Will Crash, about an estranged brother and sister, looks at other books on difficult sibling relationships, from authors including Sally Rooney and Julia Armfield. Rebecca Watson, The Guardian

I Will Crash by Rebecca Watson is published by Faber.

The 2024 Booker prize shortlist

Among the shortlisted women are “real heavyweight writers” who are “perhaps undersung” in terms of the “massive commercial success that they should have had”, added Collins, pointing to British writer Samantha Harvey and her fifth novel Orbital; Canadian poet and novelist Anne Michaels, shortlisted for Held; and Australian novelist Charlotte Wood, chosen for Stone Yard Devotional.

Shortlisted alongside them are American writer Rachel Kushner with Creation Lake and Yael van der Wouden, the first Dutch writer to be shortlisted and lone debut novelist to feature with The Safekeep. Completing this year’s shortlist is Percival Everett with James, his retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the enslaved Jim. The Guardian

Tell me everything

“Tell me everything” is a credo of sorts, a statement of the writer’s voracious need to know, to solve the human case. But that Strout’s oblique approach to matters of the heart works so well is partly due to her judicious use of silence and omission to suggest the complexity of our closest connections. Elizabeth Lowry, The Guardian

sempre sul Guardian, un elenco dei libri di narrativa e saggistica in uscita quest'autunno

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

For Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, translating together extended naturally from their relationship as husband and wife. Now, it is their life’s work.

The first time Pevear, 81, and Volokhonsky, 78, translated a Russian novel together, it felt as though another man had joined their marriage: Dostoyevsky.
“It was a mariage à trois,” Volokhonsky said. “Dostoyevsky was always in our mind. We just lived with him.”

Since that first translation published in 1990 — it was “The Brothers Karamazov,” Dostoyevsky’s immense final novel — Pevear and Volokhonsky have become reigning translators of Russian literature, publishing an average of one volume per year. Their work includes classics by Tolstoy and Chekhov, as well as lesser-known books and works by contemporary writers like the Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich. In their reach, the couple are making vast swaths of Russia’s written word available to the West, for which they have received both adulation and full-throated condemnation. Instagram New York Times

Science meets art in Brown engineering course

Using the scientific principles behind fluid mechanics, students in a School of Engineering course produced stunning imagery brought to life via high-speed photography.

Conducting the experiment as part of Engineering 0350: Art Fluid Engineering, the students’ goal was to capture stunning imagery, using high-speed photography, of the different ways liquids can splash. The end product is meant to show how the work of scientists and engineers, and the fundamental laws and principles they rely on, can also be applied to artistic creation. News from Brown

Katerina

Appelfeld’s 1989 novel Katerina (translated by Jeffrey M Green) is stranger still than Badenheim 1939, but ultimately no less satisfying. It opens in simple, fable-like style – “My name is Katerina, and I will soon be 80 years old” – as it tells the story of her life as a Ruthenian (eastern Slav) growing up in the 1880s. She is taught suspicion of Jews – “there’s nothing easier than to hate the Jews” – but when she becomes pregnant and is taken in by a Jewish family, she questions her prejudices. Yet antisemitism, we know, does not lie down quietly. John Self, The Guardian

in questo articolo vengono recensiti tre libri di Appelfeld di recenti usciti presso Penguin, Badenheim 1939, Katerina and The Story of a Life

Tamara

In 1949, as Nabokov was working on “Lolita,” he published a short story in The New Yorker called “Tamara.” As in the novel that followed, the narrator is a middle-aged European, and the title character a young girl—fifteen, in this case—who is recalled as a formative object of desire during his adolescence. (Both stories also begin with a pointed focus on the female character’s name.) Like in “Lolita,” time and circumstance block the protagonist’s pursuit of the young girl, and the story evolves into an exploration, in part, of memory, mood, and perspective. The New Yorker

buona lettura di mezz'estate!

Keeping a diary

By 1600 or so in England there’s a play written, Volpone by Ben Jonson, in which two of the characters talk about diaries, and one of them reads the other’s diary out loud on stage. You have that horrible emotionally naked feeling of having your feelings displayed in public, awful, by 1600, and it’s happening on stage. So, by then everyone knows what a diary is in England, but absolutely not the case in Europe. It spreads over the following century or so. John Dickerson, Slate

recensione al libro di Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (Faber) che racconta la storia dei diari e di come siano passati a essere semplicemente degli elenchi al diventare racconti di storie personali.

Paris ’44

This enthralling, cinematic study of the occupation and recapture of the French capital reads like an epic thriller. Andrew Martin, The Guardian

si parla di Paris ’44: The Shame and the Glory di Patrick Bishop (Penguin/Viking)

Mechanical Intelligence

Before miniaturization made them all but disappear, computers were experienced as physical things. [...] But their magic had its limits because they didn’t work very well. Any illusion of spiritual embodiment was shattered when you had to clear up a jammed paper tape. If you were on a first-name basis with the mechanic who oiled the gears and adjusted the set screws, you were unlikely to attribute transcendent qualities to the machine even on the days when it worked perfectly.

But people were beginning to converse with computers without seeing them, and it turned out that even the flimsiest screen—between Dorothy the user and Oz the computer—seduced people into regarding the machine as human, or even wizardly.

ELIZA was the original chatbot, created by MIT’s Joseph Weizenbaum in the mid-1960s. Named after the reprogrammed flower girl of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Harry R. Lewi, Harvard Magazine

breve storia dell'intelligenza artificiale

 

Farewell to Academe

After 42 years of academic life—not counting five years spent getting a Ph.D.—I am hanging it up.[...]

My more than four decades, interrupted by stints of public service in the Defense and State Departments, were spent at just three academic institutions. Harvard formed and launched me; the Naval War College exposed me to America’s senior officer corps and its leadership culture; and Johns Hopkins, where I spent 34 years, gave me the opportunity to teach wonderful students, build a department, and become a dean. In all three places, I was given extraordinary freedom to think, write, speak, and serve my country, alongside remarkable colleagues, superiors, and, above all, students.

And yet I leave elite academe with doubts and foreboding that I would not have anticipated when I completed my formal education in 1982.  Eliot A. Cohen, The Atlantic

condivido

The history of the footnote

“The history of the footnote may well seem an apocalyptically trivial topic,” writes historian Anthony Grafton. “Footnotes seem to rank among the most colorless and uninteresting features of historical practice.” And yet, Grafton—who has also written The Footnote: A Curious History (1999)—argues that they’re actually pretty important.

“Once the historian writes with footnotes, historical narrative becomes a distinctly modern” practice, Grafton explains. History is no longer a matter of rumor, unsubstantiated opinion, or whim.

“The text persuades, the note proves,” he avers. Footnotes do double duty, for they also “persuade as well as prove” and open up the work to a multitude of voices. Matthew Wills, Jstor Daily

 

 

Writers Analyze Sigmund Freud

The book is the clever idea of the literary agent Andrew Blauner. He commissioned 25 of his favourite authors to write about Freud. [...]

But why bother putting Freud on the couch? Aren’t his Victorian views about women, homosexuality and much else besides as outmoded as crocheted covers for sexually arousing piano legs? It’s notable that it is the women here who make the strongest cases for the dead patriarch’s relevance to us. The sociologist Sherry Turkle calls for a return to Freud as cure for our age of inauthenticity, in which we are reduced to exploitable datasets that deny our inwardness, not to mention our polysemous perversity. Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian

il libro in questione è: On the Couch: Writers Analyze Sigmund Freud, edited by Andrew Blauner (Princeton University Press).

The Language of War

Oleksandr Mykhed and his wife Olena lost their home when the Russians invaded Ukraine. Before February 2022 he had never held a gun in his hands. But a week before the invasion, fearing the worst, he trained with a Kalashnikov assault rifle. And after helping to make a bomb shelter out of a university library in Chernivtsi, he enlisted in the armed forces of Ukraine.

His book, much of it written during his 100 days in the barracks, is less a record of armed service than a reflection on the impact of war – how it has changed him and others, too, not least children. It’s a ferociously angry book, borne of “rage, love for homeland, revenge”. Where his compatriot Andrey Kurkov’s reports from Ukraine are nuanced and sometimes comic, Mykhed’s are bitter and indignant. “This is a book about things one can never forget. Or forgive,” he says, recalling the free and happy life he enjoyed before the Russian army and “a gigantic net of saboteurs” destroyed it. Blake Morrison, The Guardian

recensione al romanzo dello scrittore ucraino, Oleksandr Mykhed, The Language of War (Penguin).

Qualche giallo per l'estate

The Midnight Feast by Lucy Foley; Death in the Air by Ram Murali; The Burial Plot by Elizabeth Macneal; French Windows by Antoine Laurain; The Man in Black & Other Stories by Elly Griffiths, recensiti da Laura Wilson, The Guardian

e anche:

Deep-sea divers feel the pressure, Stephen King returns with some masterly tales, a mother fears her own son, and a Dorset resort isn’t as restful as it seems, Allison Flood, The Guardian

When Espionage Was Amateur

In the 17th century, the Uffizi offered its visitors a rather more diverse range of exhibits than it does now, among them weapons made by some distant precursor of Q Branch. The Scottish traveller James Fraser on a visit to Florence in the 1650s recorded what he saw: ‘A rarity, five pistol barrels joined together to be put in your hat, which is discharged at once as you salute your enemy & bid him farewell … another pistol with eighteen barrels in it to be shot desperately and scatter through a room as you enter.’ Peter Davidson, Literary Review

recensione al libro: Nadine Akkerman & Pete Langman. Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration (Yale University Press).

The Uptown Local

One night in July 2013, Leadbeater, then 24, was drinking and smoking with his older brother and friends outside his parents’ house in Kearny, N.J., when he opened an email from the poet James Fenton, his mentor at the time in the MFA program at Columbia University. Earlier in the day, Fenton had sent a cryptic email about an unnamed “well-known writer” searching for an assistant, and Leadbeater had immediately expressed interest; now, Fenton revealed that Leadbeater would be interviewed by Joan Didion. “Whatever criminal gamble my father had made — desperately poor, abused horrifically, thirty years of manual labor, a few years of wire fraud — had paid off,” Leadbeater writes. “In one generation, we’d gone from the basement of the gas station next to the junkyard in New Jersey to the Upper East Side, Madison Avenue, Joan.” Kristen Martin, The Washington Post

What Is Noise?

"Noise” is a fuzzy word—a noisy one, in the statistical sense. Its meanings run the gamut from the negative to the positive, from the overpowering to the mysterious, from anarchy to sublimity. The negative seems to lie at the root: etymologists trace the word to “nuisance” and “nausea.” Noise is what drives us mad; it sends the Grinch over the edge at Christmastime. (“Oh, the Noise! Noise! Noise! Noise!”) Noise is the sound of madness itself, the din within our minds. The demented narrator of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” jabbers about noise while he hallucinates his victim’s heartbeat: “I found that the noise was not within my ears. . . . The noise steadily increased. . . . The noise steadily increased.” Alex Ross, The New Yorker

What Is an Editor?

“What editors do for writers is mysterious, and does not, contrary to general belief, have much to do with titles and sentences and ‘changes.’ The relationship between an editor and a writer is much subtler and deeper than that, at once so elusive and so radical that it seems almost parental.” Thus spake the venerable Joan Didion in a eulogistic essay about the late Henry Robbins, her editor first at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and then at Simon & Schuster. Elroy Rosenberg, Tablet

Colm Tóibín on writing a sequel to Brooklyn

Long Island returns Eilis, now in her 40s, to Ireland in the 1970s and the possibility of rekindling the romance she left behind all those years ago. While most of the book takes place in Enniscorthy, the small town in County Wexford where Tóibín grew up and where half his novels are set, it opens in Long Island. It is here that Eilis has settled with her husband, Tony, and their two children, until a knock at the door changes everything. [...] ‘Long Island is the first novel I’ve written in which no one dies’ Lisa Allardice, The Guardian

Long Island is published by Picador.

Gaslighting

These days, it seems as if everyone’s talking about gaslighting. In 2022, it was Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year, on the basis of a seventeen-hundred-and-forty-per-cent increase in searches for the term. In the past decade, the word and the concept have come to saturate the public sphere. In the run-up to the 2016 election, Teen Vogue ran a viral op-ed with the title “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America.” Its author, Lauren Duca, wrote, “He lied to us over and over again, then took all accusations of his falsehoods and spun them into evidence of bias.” In 2020, the album “Gaslighter,” by the Chicks (formerly known as the Dixie Chicks), débuted at No. 1 on the Billboard country chart, offering an indignant anthem on behalf of the gaslit: “Gaslighter, denier . . . you know exactly what you did on my boat.” (What happened on the boat is revealed a few songs later: “And you can tell the girl who left her tights on my boat / That she can have you now.”) The TV series “Gaslit” (2022) follows a socialite, played by Julia Roberts, who becomes a whistle-blower in the Watergate scandal, having previously been manipulated into thinking she had seen no wrongdoing. The Harvard Business Review has been publishing a steady stream of articles with titles like “What Should I Do if My Boss Is Gaslighting Me?” Leslie Jamison, The New Yorker

Diaries of Franz Kafka

This new edition restores the variegated richness – and, at times, the tedium – of the diaries: an account of a trip to the theatre might be followed by a story draft, a gnomic half-sentence, the description of a prostitute, time spent watching a ski-jumping competition, relationship problems, dreams of a writing career in Berlin, a list of mistakes made by Napoleon in the Russian campaign, thoughts on the size of a fellow train traveller’s trouser bulge. The muddled presentation of all these elements, contextualised by thorough notes, gives the sense of Kafka not just as “the representative genius of the modern age”, as Benjamin describes him, but also a youngish man finding his way, hungry for experience and inspiration, venting his frustrations and following his interests. Here Kafka seems both genius and ingenue, and the contradiction brings him closer to us. Chris Power, The Guardian

Diaries by Franz Kafka is published by Penguin Classics

Harlem on My Mind

In January 1969, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened an exhibition dedicated to the vibrant history of Harlem—the institution’s first attempt at displaying and interpreting African American culture. “Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968” came to life at the tail end of the civil rights movement and on the cusp of Black Power. [...]

Instead, “Harlem on My Mind” represented Harlem via floor-to-ceiling photomurals, archival ephemera, and street soundscapes alongside interpretive text. It was the cutting edge of immersive exhibition design; the Met had never put on an exhibition like it before (and hasn’t since). Yet from the perspective of many Black artists, critics, academics, and organizers, the show was woefully retrograde. Despite concerns raised by community representatives during the exhibition’s development, the Met had reduced the culture of Harlem to an object of sociological, or even ethnographic, inquiry. Black people were once again the subjects, rather than the authors of their representation. [...]

Today, the legacy of “Harlem on My Mind” lies in the organizing that its failures prompted. In response to the exhibition, artists formed the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and picketed the show, carrying signs that read “Harlem on Whose Mind?” and “Whose Image of Whom?” The BECC, which remained active through the 1970s, would go on to demand that the Met and other art institutions hire Black curators and administrators and display work by Black artists. It would not be an overstatement to suggest that the new Met show “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism,” curated by Denise Murrell, is a descendant of this activism.  Rachel Hunter Himes, The Nation

la mostra "The Harlem Renaissance" è al Met fino al 28 giugno

What Orwell Really Feared

The Isle of Jura is a patchwork of bogs and moorland laid across a quartzite slab in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides. Nearly 400 miles from London, rain-lashed, more deer than people: All the reasons not to move there were the reasons George Orwell moved there. Directions to houseguests ran several paragraphs and could include a plane, trains, taxis, a ferry, another ferry, then miles and miles on foot down a decrepit, often impassable rural lane. It’s safe to say the man wanted to get away. From what? Stephen Metcalf, The Atlantic

Latin American authors on rise

Today’s boom in Latin American literature is spearheaded by women, from Fernanda Melchor, to Mariana Enriquez, to Samanta Schweblin, who engage with femicide, trauma and violence through horror and speculative fiction. Madeleine Feeny, The Guardian

 

Nella foto: Fernanda Melchor, Mariana Enriquez and Samanta Schweblin

 

si parla dell'International Booker prize 2024

Crosswords

Word games are knotty, paradoxical devices. They offer players the illusion of control: What could be tidier than a Scrabble board, or the orderly grid of a crossword puzzle? But they are possible only because language is untamable, flush with connotations and insinuations that we cannot hope to systematize.

No one knows this better than Anna Shechtman, who confronts the waywardness of words both in her capacity as a literature professor at Cornell University and as a contributor of crosswords to the New Yorker. Shechtman was a precocious constructor, as authors of crosswords are called (at least when they are not called, somewhat grandiosely, cruciverbalists); her puzzles were first published in the New York Times when she was in college.[...] 

Crossword clues are supposed to draw on “common knowledge,” but who are the proprietors of this mystical article? Is there any such thing? And perhaps most important, can constructors neutralize the chaos of language, with its mad tumult of jostling meanings? Should they even try?

These are some of the questions Shechtman poses in “The Riddles of the Sphinx,” a book too mischievously multiform to classify. Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post

The Riddle of the Sphinx è pubblicato da HarperOne.

The Last Caravaggio

In May 1606, Caravaggio’s rackety life caught up with him. He already had a long list of misdemeanours against his name. He had been twice arrested for carrying a sword without a permit; put on trial by the Roman authorities for writing scurrilous verses about a rival, Giovanni Baglione (or “Johnny Bollocks” according to the poems); arrested for affray and assault, in one incident being injured himself (his testimony to the police survives: “I wounded myself with my own sword when I fell down these stairs. I don’t know where it was and there was no one else there”); arrested again for smashing a plate of artichokes in the face of a waiter; for throwing stones and abusing a constable (telling him he could “stick [his sword] up his arse”); and for smearing excrement on the house of the landlady who had had his belongings seized in payment of missed rent. There were more incidents, all meticulously recorded in the Roman archives. Michael Prodger, New Statesman

“The Last Caravaggio” shows at the National Gallery, London WC2, from 18 April to 21 July 2024

OLIVETTI

A magical typewriter brings healing, reconnection, and new friends to a hurting family. Olivetti, a silent but fully conscious typewriter, has been there since the beginning, living with parents Felix and Beatrice and their children, Ezra, Adalyn, Ernest, and Arlo, a “copper-colored family with eyes as rich as ink.” Olivetti, who even took part in Felix’s proposal to Beatrice, watched playfulness and creativity grow as the children arrived, and he faithfully remembers every single word the people have typed. Then, longing to communicate, he watched the family suffer through Everything That Happened. Which is exactly what seventh grader Ernest is still trying to forget. Kirkus

una storia per ragazzini delle elementari che sembra molto carina

Romantasy, AI and Palestinian voices

Palestine, artificial intelligence and romantasy were high on the agenda at this week’s London book fair.

Future publishing priorities also included sustainability, neurodivergent protagonists and new retellings of Greek mythology. Ella Creamer, The Guardian

me ne starò alla larga... 

When Marilynne Robinson Reads Genesis

[...] Robinson should be an ideal reader of Genesis, of its richly compacted human stories and their sharp details: Noah, drunk and naked in his tent, his state witnessed by his son Ham, although not by his two other sons, who walk into his tent backward to avoid the filial shame; or Jacob, tricking his elder brother, Esau, out of his birthright and winning his father’s blessing (“Do you have only one blessing, my father?” Esau cries on discovering what’s happened. “Bless me, too, my father!”); or the long story of Joseph and his envious brothers ... James Wood, The New Yorker

il nuovo libro di Marilynne Robinson si intitola Reading Genesis ed è uscito da Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The Delicate Art of Making Fictional Languages

Engineered languages such as the one Chalamet speaks [in Dune, n.d.r] represent a new benchmark in imaginative fiction. Twenty years ago, viewers would have struggled to name franchises other than “Star Trek” or “The Lord of the Rings” that bothered to invent new languages. Today, with the budgets of the biggest films and series rivalling the G.D.P.s of small island nations, constructed languages, or conlangs, are becoming a norm, if not an implicit requirement. Breeze through entertainment from the past decade or so, and you’ll find lingos designed for Paleolithic peoples (“Alpha”), spell-casting witches (“Penny Dreadful”), post-apocalyptic survivors (“Into the Badlands”), Superman’s home planet of Krypton (“Man of Steel”), a cross-species alien alliance (“Halo”), time-travelling preteens (“Paper Girls”), the Munja’kin tribe of Oz (“Emerald City”), and Santa Claus and his elves (“The Christmas Chronicles” and its sequel). Manvir Singh, The New Yorker

A Country Shaped By Poetry

In Somaliland, poems were often recited to pass the time by men leading camel trains and by women weaving mats to cover their domed huts. Like the lives of the nomadic people who spoke them, the poems were cyclical. When their speakers moved, they brought their animals and their poetry. At each stop along this annual migration, the women would reuse the verses as they built their thatched homes and the men would recite them as they moved their herds to water.

But poems also served a utilitarian, public purpose: they could be deployed to argue a court case or to make peace between warring families. And their lines were powerful in ways few other nations could understand. In Somaliland, an autonomous region perched at the northern tip of Somalia, poetry had sparked wars, toppled governments, and offered paths to peace. Nina Strochlic, Noema

Reading is so sexy

They have killed skinny jeans and continue to shame millennials for having side partings in their hair. They think using the crying tears emoji to express laughter is embarrassing. But now comes a surprising gen Z plot twist. One habit that those born between 1997 and 2012 are keen to endorse is reading – and it’s physical books rather than digital that they are thumbing. Chloe Mac Donnell, The Guardian

Five of the best books about gossip

Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare

The play’s title is a triple entendre: in Elizabethan England, “nothing” was slang for “vagina”, and was pronounced as “no-ting”, suggesting “noticing” – a nod to the gossip and eavesdropping that carve the plot. A conversation about Beatrice’s “love” for Benedick is staged for Benedick to overhear, and vice versa, which leads to the pair getting together. Later, Borachio is overheard bragging about tricking Claudio by pretending to woo his love interest, Hero, and is arrested.

questo è uno dei cinque libri sui pettegolezzi consigliati da Ella Creamer, The Guardian

A Brief History of the United States’ Accents and Dialects

The United States may lack an official language, but a road trip across the country reveals dozens of different accents and dialects of English that serve as living links to Americans’ ancestors.

What’s the difference between these two linguistic terms? Accents center on the pronunciation of words, while dialects encompass pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. They both often vary by region. Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton, Smithsonian

(Nella foto: New Orleans)

The new generation of novelists writing about motherhood

Recent novels of motherhood explore work and identity, creation and loss, love, ambivalence, even regret. They are political without being didactic, furious and funny. If they could be said to have one thing in common, it is their corporeality. They are all unflinchingly of the body. Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, The Guardian

Exclamation Point!

If you’re a woman who works in a traditionally male-dominated industry, chances are high that you’ve heard some version of this advice: when you finish writing your email, go through and replace all the exclamation points with periods.

This well-intentioned advice is based on three regressive ideas [...] Anne Helen Petersen, Culture Study

The CIA’s Creative Writing Group

Last spring, a friend of a friend visited my office and invited me to Langley to speak to Invisible Ink, the CIA’s creative writing group.

I asked Vivian (not her real name) what she wanted me to talk about.

She said that the topic of the talk was entirely up to me.

I asked what level the writers in the group were.

She said the group had writers of all levels.

I asked what the speaking fee was.

She said that as far as she knew, there was no speaking fee.

I dwelled a little on this point.

She confirmed that there was no speaking fee.

When an organization has, say, financed the overthrow of the government of Guatemala, you would think there might be a speaking fee. But I was told that, in lieu of payment, the writing group would take me out to lunch in the executive dining room afterward. I would also have my picture taken in front of the CIA seal, and I could post that picture anywhere I wanted. Johannes Lichtman, The Paris Review

molto divertente!