Why Dickens still endures on page, stage and screen

All Dickens’s fiction – and any good adaptation – makes you laugh in the midst of what is horrible or sad. In Oliver Twist, Dickens commended “good murderous melodrama”, loved by Victorians, for presenting “the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon”. His audacious alternations of tragedy and comedy – or, in Great Expectations, terror and absurdity – provide the entertaining shocks essential to popular entertainment. John Mullan, The Guardian

in effetti i romanzi di Dickens sono delle macchine narrative ingegnosissime, dei veri modelli per chiunque voglia scrivere. Nell'immagine Olivia Colman nella nuova versione della BBC di Great Expetations.

The End of the English Major

During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent, Townsend found. What’s going on? The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Coöperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade. But that brings little comfort to American scholars, who have begun to wonder what it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before. Nathan Heller, New Yorker

un articolo molto interessante, che collega il declino delle humanities ai costi stellari delle università americane e ai conseguenti debiti che gli studenti devono ripagare alla fine degli studi, ma anche a molti altri fattori, come al fatto che molti studenti hanno idee vaghe su che cosa siano le humanities. Colpa nostra, anche. Comunque da leggere.

sempre sul New Yorker, un bell'articolo sui mondi di Italo Calvino, Mavellous Things, Merve Emre.

ancora su Old Babes in the Wood (Chatto & Windus),  Lisa O'Kelly interevista Margaret Atwood, The Guardian

e anche:  

Growing numbers of women in UK are joining forces with friends to run independent bookshops, Nadia Khomami, The Guardian

e la longlist dell'International Booker Prize, sempre sul Guardian

 

The Real Work

What does it mean to master a skill – drawing, dancing or driving – and how do you actually do it? That is the question New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik asks in The Real Work, and it becomes the springboard for a discussion of art, family, empathy, mortality. Via memoir, analysis and criticism he assembles a celebration of the flaws that make us human. Matthew Cantor, The Guardian

The Real Work è pubblicato da Quercus. Un altro libro degno di nota, questa settimana, è Old Babes in the Wood di Margaret Atwood (Penguin, recensito da Sam Leith, sempre sul Guardian.

Intelligenza umana, animale, artificiale

But rather than being our crowning glory as a species, is it possible that human intelligence is in fact a liability, the source of our existential angst and increasingly apparent talent for self-destruction? This is the question Gregg sets out to answer in his entertaining and original book. PD Smith, The Guardian

il libro di cui parla Smith è: If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity di Justin Gregg. E sull'intelligenza artificiale, vi proponiamo questo articolo, che rimanda ad altri:

ChatGPT in late November, people began wondering what it would mean for teaching and learning. A widely read piece in The Atlantic that provided one of the first looks at the tool’s ability to put together high-quality writing concluded that it would kill the student essay. Since then, academics everywhere have done their own experimenting with the technology — and weighed in on what to do about it. Some have banned students from using it, while others have offered tips on how to create essay assignments that are AI-proof. Ben Chrisinger, The Chronicle of Higher Education

Forbidden Notebook

Published in Italy in 1952, this intimate, quietly subversive novel is told through the increasingly frantic secret diary entries of a woman named Valeria. Against a backdrop of postwar trauma and deprivation, Valeria struggles with her household’s finances, a romance with her boss, her husband’s professional dissatisfactions, and her grownup children’s love affairs. Confiding these tensions to her diary—the only outlet for expression in her cramped life—she awakens to society’s treatment of working wives and confronts a deep ambivalence toward her husband and children. She concludes that all women, to make sense of their world, “hide a black notebook, a forbidden diary. And they all have to destroy it.” New Yorker

Forbidden Notebook, by Alba de Céspedes, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Astra House).

“Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?”

In 2014, The New Yorker showcased “Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?,” an excerpt from Chast’s illustrated memoir about her parents’ challenging final years. Well into their nineties, the elder Chasts, a pair of retired Brooklyn teachers, resisted any acknowledgment of their own mortality, as well as efforts to prepare. With tenderness and humor, irritation and dismay, Chast captures a difficult stage of the child-parent relationship in a manner that will resonate with anyone who has cared for aging relatives, and with those who haven’t. The full-length version won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography, and exemplifies one of Chast’s many gifts: what her colleague Adam Gopnik describes as the “weight beneath apparent whimsy” of her work. Roz Chast, The New Yorker

sempre piacevole (ri)leggere Roz Chast. 

Story Killers

 

Killing the journalist won’t kill the story. We are a network of journalists whose mission is to protect, pursue and publish the work of other journalists facing threats, prison, or murder. It is the only existing program with this mission. Story Killers

si tratta di un sito molto interessante e inquietante che presenta le indagini di un centinaio di giornalisti provenienti da tutto il mondo sulla disinformazione  e l'uso che se ne fa in politica, finanza e altri settori. 

The Defiance of Salman Rushdie

Recalling his first few months in New York, Rushdie told me, “People were scared to be around me. I thought, The only way I can stop that is to behave as if I’m not scared. I have to show them there’s nothing to be scared about.” One night, he went out to dinner with Andrew Wylie, his agent and friend, at Nick & Toni’s, an extravagantly conspicuous restaurant in East Hampton. The painter Eric Fischl stopped by their table and said, “Shouldn’t we all be afraid and leave the restaurant?”

“Well, I’m having dinner,” Rushdie replied. “You can do what you like.” David Remnick, The New Yorker

la prima intervista che Rushdie rilascia dopo l'attacco della scorsa estate

The Miraculous Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie’s new novel, Victory City, purports to be the summary of a long-lost, 24,000-verse epic poem from 14th-century India. The hero and author of the poem is Pampa Kampana, who as a girl becomes the conduit for a goddess, channeling her oracular pronouncements and wielding her magical powers.  Judith Shulevitz. The Atlantic 

del nuovo libro di Rushdie Judith Shulevitz dice che è "enchanting" e anche che è un trionfo. Mi sembra una bellissima notizia, dopo tutto quel che Rushdie ha passato. Su un piano più frivolo, eccovi la storia dei tote bags e di come un'umile borsa di tela sia diventata uno status symbol:

In the 1880s, a newspaper owner named Jasper Meek was looking out the window of his print shop in Coshocton, Ohio, when he saw a young girl drop her school books. As the story now goes, the sight inspired him to fashion a burlap bag in which people could carry books. But Meek also had an entrepreneurial mind, and he figured out a way to maximize his profit: he’d charge local businesses to print their names on the bags, which then served as tiny billboards as they were carried across town. Maija Kappler, The Walrus

Edward Hopper’s New York

A lot of things go missing in the paintings of Edward Hopper. Most notably, it’s people. In the first half of the 20th century, he painted New York when it was the largest city in the world, yet his streets are often empty, or haunted by only a few isolated figures. New York was then, as it is now, a diverse city, rich with racial and ethnographic diversity, but that, too, is absent in Hopper’s imagination. Philip Kennicott, WP

Edward Hopper’s New York Through March 5 at the Whitney Museum of American Art.