American Public Libraries

In the course of eighteen years, beginning in 1994, the California-based photographer Robert Dawson took pictures of hundreds of public libraries across the United States. The results are collected in his new book, The Public Library: A Photographic Essay (Princeton Architectural Press). newyorker. 
Nella foto: Peterborough Town Library; Peterborough, New Hampshire

Parentology

Dalton Conley, Parentology: Everything You Wanted to Know About the Science of Raising Children but Were Too Exhausted to Ask (Simon & Schuster). Di lui  Rebecca Traister dice: "His name is Dalton Conley, and he’s a sociologist at New York University who’s taken his own fatherhood, put it in the blender with his professional interest in scientific inquiry, and produced “Parentology.” He characterizes his technique as the opposite of everything uptight, including “old-world parenting; traditional parenting; textbook parenting; tiger mothering; bringing up bébé.” He’s not into that ponderous, prescriptive stuff. His brand, he says, is more like “jazz parenting,” an “improvisational approach.” nyt.

The adjunct intellectual

Ho trovato un articolo interessante su AlJazeera America  sul presente/futuro degli intellettuali, "At their best, intellectuals do more than package their research into digestible bits for policymakers or the public. They force us to think beyond the limits of the day, to ask the questions no one is asking. They are an invitation to imaginative excess and political trespass. Academic experts in the mainstream media reassure us with their authority; young intellectuals in the little magazines arrest us with their divinations.
It may be, however, that the economics that make little magazines and blogs possible also make them unsustainable. Many of these outlets rely on the volunteer or nearly free labor of writers and grad students or middle-aged professors like me. The former live cheaply and pay their rent with a precarious passel of odd jobs, fellowships and university teaching; the latter have tenure.
But grad students graduate, 20-somethings make families, and rents go up. Struggling writers in 1954 could flee to tenured positions in academia; their counterparts in 2014 will find no such refuge. Nearly three-quarters of all instructional staff at colleges and universities today are not on the tenure track. They’re insecure, contingent workers, an army of cheap and casual labor that make the universities go. While young writers can afford to do the kind of intellectual journalism we see at the little magazines, older adjuncts teaching five classes can’t". Corey Robin, america.aljazeera.

Life among the toffs

John Carey parla della sua vita a Oxford, tra i super snob: "And there were also, of course, “toffs” everywhere. When Carey was asked to take over the teaching of English literature at Christ Church, then considered Oxford’s most aristocratic and exclusive college, for the academic year 1958-59, he says now, “it really was like Brideshead Revisited. The snobbery was astonishing". timeshighereducation.
John Carey, The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life (Faber & Faber).

A Secret History of Confession

 

 

John Cornwell, The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession: Confession in the Catholic Church (Profile Books). "John Cornwell’s history of confession is preoccupied with sex, which always helps the pages riffle past. ... the reason why The Dark Box (his sizzling title) dwells on such matters is because they’ve always been an obsession in the Church". Thomas W. Hodgkinson su spectator.

Why do we find some languages more beautiful than others?

"Languages have been described as sounding “decent,” “terrible,” “whiny,” “obnoxious,” and even “like a headache.” They are praised as “efficient,”  “advanced” and “modern,” or “sweet” and “poetic,” or accused of having “too much vowels” or just sounding “strange” – whatever that means. One critic even condemned a language as “annoying,” which sounds like a forthright statement, if a bit judgmental". Bernd Brunner riflette sulla musicalità delle lingue. thesmartset.

La rabbina italiana

Tablet dedica un interessante articolo a Barbara Aiello, l'unica rabbina italiana.
"When Rabbi Barbara Aiello founded the synagogue Ner Tamid del Sud six years ago in Serrastretta, a mountain town of 3,600 in Italy’s Calabria region, there weren’t many self-identified Jews around. The closest congregation was in Naples, a four-hour drive away.
But Aiello—an Italian-American whose father was born in Serrastretta, and who moved from Florida back to her ancestral village in 2006—suspected many locals had Jewish roots, even if they didn’t know it. ... 
As Aiello traveled throughout the region, she was astounded to discover that many local Catholic families kept Jewish traditions: candles lit on Friday night, mirrors covered for mourning, a red string tied around a baby’s wrist to ward off evil—a Kabbalistic ritual. To her, it was evidence that despite centuries of persecution, mass conversion, and forced exile, Judaism had managed to survive in Italy". tablet.

"Bark" di Lorrie Moore

E' uscito - dopo 15 anni - un nuovo libro di racconti di Lorrie Moore, Bark (Knopf), ma pare sia deludente.
"Most of the stories in “Bark” are set in the tundra of middle age, and deal with divorce, death, disillusion or other sorts of hurt. There are some deeply affecting moments here — mostly involving children — but they remain just that: moments, islands in stories that, for the most part, are heavy-handed and forced. Many of the characters come across as synthetic types, instead of as specific people delineated intimately from within. And all too often, Ms. Moore’s custom blend of jokes, inner road maps and social observation devolve into what read like imitation Lorrie Moore stories". Michiko Kakutani, naturalmente, sul nyt.

Gli sceneggiati tv sono i nuovi romanzi?

A questa domanda rispondono due scrittori. 

Adam Kirsch: "Spectacle and melodrama remain at the heart of TV, as they do with all arts that must reach a large audience in order to be economically viable. But it is voice, tone, the sense of the author’s mind at work, that are the essence of literature, and they exist in language, not in images. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be grateful for our good TV shows; but let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that they give us what only literature can". 

Mohsin Hamid: "I now watch a lot of TV. And I’m not alone, even among my colleagues. Ask novelists today whether they spend more time watching TV or reading fiction and prepare yourself, at least occasionally, to hear them say the unsayable.

That this represents a crisis for the novel seems to me undeniable. But a crisis can be an opportunity. It incites change. And the novel needs to keep changing if it is to remain novel. It must, pilfering a phrase from TV, boldly go where no one has gone before. nytbr.

English literature and rain

English literature has for centuries courted the rain. The Canterbury Tales, the first great epic of English daily life, starts out with the sweet showers of April which bathe the dry land. This first shower is an alluringly sensual one, piercing the earth, finding its way into every bodily "veyne" of plants and people alike. If Mediterranean writers found their hot dry climate conducive to love songs, the English were not going to miss out on the competing erotic potential of rain. For Edmund Spenser, too, launching The Faerie Queene from a standing start as Una and the Redcrosse Knight go gently "pricking on the plain", rain is the beginning of narrative. Weather breaks into the stillness: "The day with clouds was sudden overcast, / And angry Jove a hideous storm of rain / Did pour." The change has been made; the action begun. Moving to shelter, the protagonists find themselves in Faerieland, with adventure springing up around them. These rainy beginnings loosen language and storytelling into life. Rain, being rained on, and finding shelter will become central subjects and structuring principles of British writing. ... Alexandra Harris, guardian.