How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life

The​ appearance within a few months of each other of two books about the same four women is a bit startling, but on reflection the topic is so natural and interesting that one might even wonder why it hasn’t been treated before. Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot (née Bosanquet), Mary Midgley (née Scrutton) and Iris Murdoch all matriculated at Oxford in the late 1930s. When most of the men went off to war, they found themselves, as women philosophy students, in a very unusual situation – not in the minority and on the periphery, but central and predominant. (The rule in normal times had been that no more than a fifth of the undergraduates at Oxford could be women.) Midgley later wrote that the enhanced attention and absence of the usual competitive male atmosphere made it possible for her to find her voice as a philosopher. Distinctive and talented though each of them was, it seems no accident that such a stellar group emerged from this atypical moment. Thomas Nagel, London Review of Books

Interessante recensione di due libri usciti recentemente e che ci illuminano sullo spirito oxfordiano: The Women Are up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch Revolutionised Ethics,by Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb (Oxford), e, Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman (Chatto). 

Infine una scrittrice da scoprire, la britannica Elizabeth Taylor (1912-75),

In the words of one critic, Taylor is “best known for not being better known.” Burdened by her famous name, she has never achieved the level of mainstream appreciation that she is due. Yet a small band of critics and writers ranks her among the most psychologically penetrating English novelists of the twentieth century. Charlie Tyson, The New Yorker

White on White

The book that changed me as a teenager
I was 12 when I read The Catcher in the Rye. That and the movie Rebel Without a Cause, which I saw when I was 15, were the first works of art that spoke to me in my own language. That both were “rebellious” without being political suited a teen in the Eisenhower years. Edmund White. The Guardian

Edmund White parla dei libri della sua vita. Bella la sua libreria. 

Sempre sui libri che generano libri, e sul "white", un'interessante recensione del recente romanzo di Ayşegül Savaş, White on White (Harvill Secker):

A nameless student listens to her landlady’s embittered life story in a spare, oddly enthralling novel indebted to Rachel Cusk’s

Pressed to name the most influential novel of the past decade, you could do worse than Rachel Cusk’s Outline, which laid a blueprint for fashionably decluttered fiction about barely-there narrators wafting through random encounters in unspecified European cities. Anthony Cummins, The Guardian

infine una curiosità:

“Wussies and pussies” – those are the only kinds of people who care about plagiarism, according to Bob Dylan. That was his response to an interviewer who asked him about some rather suspicious similarities between lyrics on his 2001 album Love and Theft (pun intended, perhaps?) and a Japanese true-crime book from the ’90s. Works in progress

 

I baffi di Dickens

A sharp, detailed daguerreotype profile portrait of Dickens sporting his moustache was made in around 1852-55, when he was writing Bleak House and Hard Times. It was donated to the Charles Dickens Museum in London by a private collector last year, and the museum has put it on display for the first time, until 31 March, limiting the time it is shown to ensure its conservation. Alison Flood, The Guardian

sempre sul Guardian, l'arte della convalescenza (con una chiosa sul significato di "aftermath"): 

Getting better is rarely something that happens all the time. Whether we’ve been seriously ill or injured, everyone has to experience the complexities of recovery as the aftermath. Aftermath is an old agricultural term meaning “a second crop” growing unexpectedly in the space left by the main harvest and it can entail difficult decisions about what should be done with these remnants. Emily Mayhew, The Guardian

 infine un libro sulla difficile arte del vestirsi, Sofi Thanhauser, Worn (Allen Lane):

One of the great pleasures of this panoramic history of getting dressed is Sofi Thanhauser’s ability to spot moments like these where human desire and material culture collide.

"Fauci ouchie"

“Fauci ouchie”, the rhyming phrase for a Covid-19 vaccine dreamed up in honour of Dr Anthony Fauci, has been named the “most creative word or phrase of the year” by the American Dialect Society.

Founded in 1889, the society is made up of linguists, lexicographers, etymologists and scholars dedicated to the study of the English language in North America. More than 300 members took part in this year’s annual meeting, at which “Fauci ouchie” beat “chin diaper” – defined as a “face mask worn below the chin instead of properly covering the nose and mouth” – to the accolade.

The meeting also saw “insurrection” named the overall word of 2021, beating vax/vaxx. Alison Flood, The Guardian

e per continuare a parlare di lingua, ecco un bell'articolo sul "not":

Every language has negatives, and every writer needs them. They need them for formal logic, for quantum leaps, for the existential gloom of Being and Nothingness. “Without Contraries,” writes the poet William Blake, “is no progression.” Yet the literary effects of these negatives are hard to pin down, even mysterious: What happens really when someone says not? The mystery may be because the very idea of negation is hard in itself, or perhaps because we have not yet got the right emphasis. Max Byrd, The American Scholar

Specie in via di istinzione

Il titolo di questo post si riferisce alle librerie indipendenti, indie-bookshops, che in questo periodo sembra siano riuscite non solo a sopravvivere, ma anche ad avere un notevole successo, grazie a idee cretive.

The Reading Tree is one of 54 new independent bookshops to have opened in the UK and Ireland over the last year, from Rare Birds Books in Edinburgh to The Ivybridge Bookshop in Devon, and from The Athlone Bookshop in County Westmeath, Ireland, to Storyville Books in Rhondda Cynon Taf. For the first time in almost a decade, more than 1,000 indies are open for business: it is a sector thriving against the odds. Alison Flood, The Guardian

E si riferisce, sempre il titolo del post, alle lingue minori, che un progetto di Brown University, cerca di salvare.

At Brown, Indigenous students are keeping their native languages alive. An independent study project organized through the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative is enabling students to strengthen their knowledge of international Indigenous languages, from Narragansett to Yoruba. Jill Kimball, Brown

 

Why Eating Chinese Food on Christmas Is a Sacred Tradition for American Jews

The predominant groups in the area were Eastern European Jews, Italians, and Chinese. According to Matthew Goodman, author of Jewish Food: The World at Table, Italian cuisine and especially Italian restaurants, with their Christian iconography, held little appeal for Jews. But the Chinese restaurants had no Virgin Marys. And they prepared their food in the Cantonese culinary style, which utilized a sweet-and-sour flavor profile, overcooked vegetables, and heaps of garlic and onions. Sound familiar? [...]

Beyond the trappings and the cuisine, Chinese restaurants offered poor Eastern European Jewish immigrants the opportunity to feel cosmopolitan and sophisticated (food of the Orient!). It also let them feel superior, a truism that has achieved the most definitive canonization available: its own Philip Roth quotation. “Yes, the only people in the world whom it seems to me the Jews are not afraid of are the Chinese,” Alexander Portnoy tells us. “Because one, the way they speak English makes my father sound like Lord Chesterfield; two, the insides of their heads are just so much fried rice anyway; and three, to them we are not Jews but white and maybe even Anglo Saxon. No wonder they can’t intimidate us. To them we’re just some big-nosed variety of WASP.” Marc Tracy, Tablet

Incominciamo l'anno con qualche profonda domanda (e risposta): 

Why Is My Eyelid Twitching? Christina Caron, NYT

 

Auguri!

 “I dedicate this book to the many children who had no chance to grow up because of stupid wars and cruel persecutions which devastated cities and destroyed innocent families. I hope that when the readers of these stories become men and women they will love not only their own children but all good children everywhere.” Isaac Bashevis Singer, Zlateh la capra, con le illustrazioni di Maurice Sendak.

Un libro magico e meraviglioso. Con queste belle parole auguro a tutti un Buon Natale e un Felice Anno Nuovo. Al 2022!

I love you, I love you, I love you

For such a simple sentence, three monosyllables arranged in the lock-step syntax of subject, verb and object, “I love you” can fall on the ears of its chosen recipient in unpredictable ways. These words capture both our need for love and our reliance on language, and our often fraught attempts to marry these two things up. Joe Moran, The Guardian (2016)

e un ricordo di Christopher Hitchens, morto dieci anni fa:

Christopher’s output, in columns, essays and books, was voluminous. He was one of very few foreign journalists to transplant to the United States and make an impact within the Beltway. He also had many detractors and enemies, notably but far from exclusively, among his former comrades on the radical left.  Oliver Kamm, Prospect

Case

From Charlotte Brontë’s Norton Conyers to Alan Hollinghurst’s Canford Court – the little known locations that inspired the most famous homes in literature. Phyllis Richardson, House of Fiction: From Pemberley to Brideshead, Great British Houses in Literature and Life (Unboun, 2017). Phyllis Richardson, The Guardian 

e un lungo articolo sulla traduzione, che in realtà mi ha attratto per la descrizione iniziale di una casa londinese: 

A couple of years ago we rented a beautiful apartment in London, a large flat where we must have stayed four or five times. It was perfectly comfortable and perfectly private, and the location, directly behind the British Museum, was ideal for visits to theaters and museums. It was decorated in the taste of a refined gay man of my parents’ generation. It had good Chinese porcelain, carefully chosen oriental rugs, witty French prints. It also contained the kind of photographs which, in that mysterious way, have grown dated without becoming quite old — gently pushed, by an accumulation of tiny changes, into the past. Some minute evolution in eyewear, some invisible reformulation of lipstick, some arcane improvement in cameras, betrayed their age. They did not look ancient. But though I couldn’t say exactly why, I knew that the pretty young bride was now middle-aged, and that a lot of the jolly middle-aged folks at Angkor Wat were now dead. 

I also knew, as soon as I walked inside, that the house belonged to an American. Benjamin Moser, Liberties

 

 

Why Does Coffee Make Me Poop?

Coffee is a complex beverage containing more than 1,000 chemical compounds, many of which have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. And determining how they affect the intestines is challenging. Alice Callahan, NYT

una domanda molto più inquietante:

Why do dead Jews play such a large role in the world’s imagination, and how does that distortion still affect us today? In her Tablet Studios podcast, Adventures with Dead Jews, author and host Dara Horn takes you on a ride through some of the most bizarre, disturbing, wondrous, tragic, and accidentally hilarious moments of Jewish history, and dives deep into their repercussions in the present.

infine una domanda bizzarra:

Is Superman Circumcised?, a study of the superhero’s Jewish influences, has resoundingly won the competition to be named “oddest book title of the year”. Alison Flood, The Guardian

Stanno uscendo gli elenchi dei migliori libri del 2021, qui i migliori di cucina:

The best food books of 2021, The Guardian