Buon 2021!

On Sylvia Plath

 

Shifting the Focus From Sylvia Plath’s Tragic Death to Her Brilliant Life. 

Ottima cosa!

“I hope to free Plath,” Heather Clark writes in her new biography, “from the cultural baggage of the past 50 years and reposition her as one of the most important American writers of the 20th century.” Daphne Merkin, NYT.

Can Macron stem the tide of Islamism in France?

Just over a week ago, Emanuel Macron said he wanted to end ‘Islamic separatism’ in France because a minority of the country’s estimated six million Muslims risk forming a ‘counter-society’. On Friday, we saw yet another example of this when a  history teacher was decapitated in the street on his way home in a Paris suburb. [...] M Paty was murdered, Macron said, "because he taught the freedom of expression, the freedom to believe or not believe.” The president is now positioning himself as the defender of French values, determined to drain the Islamist swamp.

That Macron even gave an anti-Islamism speech was itself a sign of how fast the debate is moving in France. Five years ago, when Fox News referred to ‘no-go zones’ in Paris, the city’s mayor threatened to sue. Now we have an avowed centrist like Macron warning that the ‘final goal’ of the ‘ideology’ of Islamism is to ‘take complete control’ of society. Anyone making such arguments just a few years ago would have been condemned by the left as an extremist. Macron is promising a law on ‘Islamist separatism’, restricting home-schooling of Muslims and demanding that Islamic groups in receipt of French state funding will have to sign a ‘secular charter’. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Spectator.

L'importanza degli studi umanistici

 As a participant in the Graduate School’s first Summer Proctorship Program, religious studies Ph.D. student Tara Dhaliwal used her research and writing skills to introduce the work of Brown scientists to industry partners. Brown

Un bel ritratto di Louise Glück

Her poems are controlled and highly charged, restrained but also exposed, unafraid of and perhaps also terrified by outcry. [...] The sounds in her poems emerge tentatively and then bravely, and sometimes fiercely, from within their rhythms. Glück knows what a tone needs when it seeks to be truthful. She has a knowledge, both baleful and enabling, of how little can be said that is true, and how much dark energy that is then released in the effort to speak. In her poems, tone itself is both held in and released. Her work is filled with voice, often hushed and whispering, as though she is exploring a difficult aftermath or the shape of the soul.

If there is one poem by her that gives us a sense of her great talent and the bravery of her voice, it is the opening poem in her collection The Wild Iris, which begins:

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Colm Tóibín, The Guardian

the world's strangest books

Edward Brooke-Hitching grew up in a rare book shop, with a rare book dealer for a father. As the author of histories of maps The Phantom Atlas, The Golden Atlas and The Sky Atlas, he has always been “really fascinated by books that are down the back alleys of history”. Ten years ago, he embarked on a project to come up with the “ultimate library”. No first editions of Jane Austen here, though: Brooke-Hitching’s The Madman’s Library collects the most eccentric and extraordinary books from around the world... Alison Flood, The Guardian

Elena Ferrante parla di sé

Rispondendo a domande molto interessanti da parte di traduttori ed editor americani e inglesi.

For Lila and Elena, the experience of reading Little Women is extremely important. What (other) literary figures affected you as an adolescent? Stefanie Hetze, bookseller, Germany

[...] But the book I read and reread obsessively was Wuthering Heights. Today I still find extraordinary the way it describes love, mixing good and bad feelings without any break. Catherine is someone who should be revisited from time to time: she’s useful, when you write, for avoiding the danger of sickly-sweet female characters. The Guardian.

Reading Elena Ferrante in English

Millions of readers in thrall to Elena Ferrante, the secretive and wildly popular Italian novelist, must accept certain conditions.

[...]

And if they are reading Ferrante’s books in English, they are absorbing, whether they realize it or not, the nimble translation work of Ann Goldstein. Joumana Khatib, NYT.

The New American Status Symbol? A Second Passport

As the pandemic has ravaged the United States, some Americans are finding that a second citizenship or permanent residency has a renewed appeal. Valeriya Safronova, NYT.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

The first season of Amazon’s “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” about a brassy 1950s housewife-turned-stand-up-comic, debuted last fall to swoony reviews (including one from the The Times which described Midge Maisel’s “bon mots rattling like ice in a cocktail shaker”). Though the second season of the cult-favorite show has just landed, many fans have hurtled through it at breakneck speed and are already in withdrawal. If you’re one of them, we’ve got some books for you to read. Gal Beckerman and Tina Jordan, New York Times.

I libri consigliati sono: The Group di Mary McCarthy (of course), e poi Seriously Funny di Gerald Nachman (che non conosco), Crazy Salad di Nora Ephron (che adoro) e The Joy of Yiddish di Leo Rosten (This 1968 lexicon codified words like “kvetch” and “schlep” in American English). 

E con questi consigli di lettura per le vacanze e questa immagine piena di energia e allegria auguro a tutti BUON NATALE E FELICE ANNO NUOVO!