Annie Proulx ha scritto il libretto dell'opera tratta dal suo famoso racconto, "Brokeback Mountain". "Ms. Proulx has written the libretto for Charles Wuorinen’s long-awaited
new opera of “Brokeback Mountain,” based on her story of the doomed love
of two cowboys, which will have its world premiere Jan. 28 at the Teatro Real in
Madrid. Ms. Proulx said in a statement that one of her goals in writing
it was “to preserve the dry and laconic western tone” of the story", nyt.
Negli anni '70 Woody Allen scrisse per il New Yorker una serie di parodie dei racconti hasidici di Buber. Ora David Remnick le ripropone, e vale veramente la pena leggerle. "Buber has been criticized for romanticizing Hasidism, for failing to
confront what critics see as its obscurantism, but his service to the
literature is immense. Also, his scholarly work led to a sublime bit of
parody: Woody Allen’s re-telling and parody of those knotty, earthy,
enigmatic stories—“Hassidic Tales, With a Guide to Their Interpretation by the Noted Scholar”—was engaged with their zaniness and the deadpan tone of interpretation", new yorker.
Among the big works of literary fiction coming out this month is Jonathan Lethem’s new novel, “Dissident Gardens” (Doubleday, out September 10th).
Set in New York City and spanning from the nineteen-thirties to the
present day, it follows a mother-daughter pair—Rose Zimmer, a fierce
radical nicknamed the Red Queen of Sunnyside, and her daughter, Miriam,
who migrates from Queens to Greenwich Village—and their left-wing
milieu.
... e molti altri ... newyorker.
One Friday evening in March, I took the train to Columbia University and
walked into one of the strangest and most interesting classes I’d ever
seen. It was the Laboratory of Literary Architecture,
part of the Mellon Visiting Artists and Thinkers Program at Columbia
University School of the Arts, and a multimedia workshop in which
writing students, quite literally, create architectural models of
literary texts. For the past four years, Matteo Pericoli has led the
workshop at the Turin-based Scuola Holden creative writing school, and
this year, he brought the concept to New York. While the idea seems
intuitive enough—each student chooses a text he or she knows inside out,
and then builds it—the challenges arise in interpretation. Sadie Stein su theparisreview.
Twerking, the rump-busting up-and-down dance move long beloved on
America's hip-hop scene, has officially gone mainstream. It's got the
English dictionary entry to prove it. ...
"Twerk" will be added to the dictionary as part of its quarterly update,
which includes words such as "selfie," the word typically used to
describe pouty smartphone self-portraits, "digital detox" for time spent
way from Facebook and Twitter, and "Bitcoin," for the nationless
electronic currency whose gyrations have also caught the world's eye. bigstory.
Ed ecco l'opinione della presidentessa di Brown University, Christina Paxson, sempre sull'importanza delle Humanities. "We don’t want a nation of technical experts in one subject. We want a
scintillating civil society in which everyone can talk to everyone. That
was a quality that Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of when he visited the
United States at the beginning of the 1830s. Even in that era before
mass communication, before the telegraph, before the Internet, we were
engaged in an American conversation that stretched from one end of the
country to another. In a similar manner, Martin Luther King Jr. sketched
a “web of mutuality” in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” fifty years
ago this year. We want politicians who have read Shakespeare—as Lincoln
did. We want bankers and lawyers who have read Homer and Dante. We want
factory owners who have read Dickens". newrepublic.
Si ricomincia. Da dove eravamo rimasti, in un certo senso. Dal declino delle Humanities, negli USA e un po' ovunque. Ecco un bell'articolo sull'argomento di Adam Gopnik. "Whence, and where, and why the English major? The subject is in every
mouth—or, at least, is getting kicked around agitatedly in columns and
reviews and Op-Ed pieces. The English major is vanishing from our
colleges as the Latin prerequisite vanished before it, we’re told, a
dying choice bound to a dead subject. The estimable Verlyn Klinkenborg reports in the Times
that “At Pomona College (my alma mater) this spring, 16 students
graduated with an English major out of a student body of 1,560, a
terribly small number,” and from other, similar schools, other, similar
numbers. ... So why have English majors? Well, because many people like books. Most
of those like to talk about them after they’ve read them, or while
they’re in the middle. Some people like to talk about them so much that
they want to spend their lives talking about them to other people who
like to listen. Some of us do this all summer on the beach, and others
all winter in a classroom. One might call this a natural or inevitable
consequence of literacy. And it’s this living, irresistible,
permanent interest in reading that supports English departments, and
makes sense of English majors". newyorker.
New York Arbor è il titolo di un bellissimo libro di fotografie in bianco e nero degli alberi di New York. L'autore è il fotografo americano Mitch Epstein. Con questa foto - non estiva, ma suggestiva - auguro ai mie lettori una buona estate. Nei mesi di luglio e agosto non riuscirò ad aggiornare il blog con regolarità. Riprenderò a settembre.
The Algonquin Hotel, known for its rich literary
roots and famous former Round Table regulars (including Dorothy Parker
and Robert Benchley) and Simon & Schuster announced a partnership
that will bring hotel guests and New Yorkers an enhanced visit.
The two brands are celebrating the partnership by unveiling the
Simon & Schuster Suite and a series of author events. A Simon &
Schuster package will offer guests the chance to book a stay in the
suite to enjoy its creature comforts from its well-stocked bookcase of
classics and advanced copies of new releases as well as book
memorabilia. pw.
More than a century ago, the president of Harvard, A. Lawrence Lowell,
issued a warning to America’s colleges and universities. “Institutions,”
he said, “are rarely murdered. They meet their end by suicide … They
die because they have outlived their usefulness, or fail to do the work
that the world wants done.” Most of the institutions he had in mind
are still around today, but the doomsday talk is back. William J.
Bennett, secretary of education under President Reagan, and Jeffrey
Selingo, an editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education, believe our
system is self-destructing. Their tones are different — Bennett and his
co-author, David Wilezol, write in an expectant mood of good riddance,
while Selingo is sympathetically alarmed — but their views are grimly
consistent. College costs are up. Learning and graduation rates are
down. nyt.
I libri di cui si parla sono: William J.
Bennett e David Wilezol, Is College Worth It? (Thomas Nelson); e Jeffrey
Selingo, College Unbound (New Harvest).
