Alone Together

E' il titolo di un libro di Sherry Turkle, prof. all'MIT. Si occupa dei cambiamenti sociali dovuto all'uso dei social media e soprattutto della scomparsa della conversazione. "I am a partisan for conversation. To make room for it, I see some first, deliberate steps. At home, we can create sacred spaces: the kitchen, the dining room. We can make our cars “device-free zones.” We can demonstrate the value of conversation to our children. And we can do the same thing at work. There we are so busy communicating that we often don’t have time to talk to one another about what really matters. Employees asked for casual Fridays; perhaps managers should introduce conversational Thursdays. Most of all, we need to remember — in between texts and e-mails and Facebook posts — to listen to one another, even to the boring bits, because it is often in unedited moments, moments in which we hesitate and stutter and go silent, that we reveal ourselves to one another". nytbr.

Ancora sui diari di Susan Sontag

“I want to be good.”
“Why?”
“I want to be what I admire.”
“Why don’t you want to be what you are?”
8/7/68, Stockholm

Susan Sontag appare sempre più interessante. E molto bella in fotografia. newyorker.

Questioningly

Questioningly è un gioco proposto dal New Yorker. Ogni settimana viene posta una domanda a cui i lettori sono invitati a rispondere, in modo divertente, via Facebook o Twitter. La domanda della scorsa settimana era: "If you could eliminate a single word from the English language, what would it be?" Il risultato è stato abbastanza inconsueto. "In the end, there was a runaway un-favorite: “moist.” People, particularly women, evidently prefer aridity". newyorker.

It's Dangerous to Be an Artist

La (o il?) Los Angeles Review of Books ha rinnovato il suo sito, arricchendolo con diverse funzioni e sezioni, tra cui una dedicata alle interviste. Dall'intervista a David Cronenberg, It's Dangerous to Be an Artist, "It's dangerous to be an artist. That's what we talk about in Naked Lunch. It's dangerous on many different levels. Politically it can be dangerous, but psychologically it can be quite dangerous too. You make yourself very vulnerable. You put yourself out there and of course you open yourself up to criticism and attack. And so you have to be strong if you're going to make movies. But once you accept that movies can come from anywhere, that a movie can come from a dream or a conversation or a newspaper article, or it could be based on real people, you can expand that and say it could come from a work of art that someone has already done. It could be a play, it could be a novel, it could be a remake of another movie, and of course I've done all those things, and in each case the satisfaction comes from making a good movie; not from where the movie comes from. I don't have to question it if I find the story interesting". larob.

Charlotte's Web compie 60 anni

White nel suo studio in Maine

White had loved Maine since early childhood, when his family began spending a glorious month there every summer, in part to discourage his hay fever. Rustic cabins with their rusty screened windows, a canoe in dawn fog, sun-warmed gray wooden docks, fishing from a boat while a moss-lidded bait can waited at his feet — the annual sojourns left such memories surrounded with a golden nostalgia White recalled all his life. ...

Often in his barn White stopped to admire the artistry of a particular spider, and one evening he watched her spin an egg sac in a web over the doorway. When she didn’t return during the next few nights, he cut down the sac, which seemed to be woven of peach-colored cotton candy, and took it along in a small box to his New York apartment. Eventually tiny air holes in the box served as escape hatches for hundreds of spiderlings who then drifted around the room on silken filaments. Michael Sims, nytbr.

Hand on the Shoulder

E' il titolo della nuova, bella storia di Ian McEwan, pubblicata questa settimana dal New Yorker. Deborah Treisman intervista lo scrittore: 

Your story in this week’s issue, “Hand on the Shoulder,” is about a twenty-one-year-old university student who is tapped for British secret intelligence by an older professor at Cambridge in 1972. What drew you to this subject?

It’s a very interesting period, I think—the Cold War—not only with respect to nuclear weapons and all the paranoia and suspicion in politics and the military but in the cultural sphere, too. It’s salutary to remember that the C.I.A. poured hundreds of millions into culture. For example, there was a festival of atonal music in Paris in 1950, entirely funded by the C.I.A. Can you imagine a less attractive festival? They paid for tours by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Abstract Expressionist art exhibitions. The aim was to persuade especially left-of-center European intellectuals that the United States was a powerhouse of culture, because there was a widespread assumption, so the C.I.A. believed, that Europeans thought America was just an empty-headed place of money and loudness, with no depth. So I wanted to try to construct a love story set against the background of this period—and the precise methods by which a young girl was drawn into the security service, MI5, were what fascinated me. newyorker.

La libreria di Churchill

One could hardly call the area around Fifty-second Street, between Park and Madison Avenues in Manhattan, off the beaten path. The sleekly designed New York City Ferrari dealership sits two blocks away on Fifty-fifth, the Cartier American flagship store is one block down in a six-story neo-Renaissance style, and the archbishop of New York conducts holy business at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral just a few skips down the road. Midtown West isn’t exactly a destination for book shoppers—not flush with indie shops like Brooklyn, bereft of the used-paperback vendors who line the streets along various parts of Greenwich Village. But 55 East Fifty-second’s marble lobby, inside the triangle-shaped office building with a Gotham-style green-glass facade, conceals an equitably valuable treasure in the world’s only standing bookstore dedicated to the works of England’s former prime minister, Winston Churchill - Chartwell Booksellers. And while the tiny bookstore might seem at odds with its location, it actually makes perfect sense that one of history’s best-dressed leaders would have a store in one of the world’s most upscale shopping districts. parisreview.

Di notte, in bagno...

Ferdinando Scianna, 1997

Has there ever been any survey conducted among those who lock themselves in the bathroom inquiring how they spend their time? Do they read, smoke, talk to themselves, think things over, say their prayers, or just stare into space? If not, how come? All those lights burning in bathrooms late at night in large and small cities must indicate someone is doing much more in them than just answering the call of nature. Wives slipping away from husbands who snore, husbands kept awake by their wives grinding their teeth, or just plain old insomniacs, they seek a refuge, a quiet place to read and meditate. Charles Simic sul nybooks.

Quante storie dietro le luci notturne che fuoriescono dalle finestre dei bagni.

 

A Girl and Her Pig

A Girl and Her Pig è il titolo del primo libro di cucina di April Bloomfield, chef e co-proprietaria di tre noti ristoranti di NYC, The Spotted Pig, The Breslin Bar & Dining Room (citati dalla guida Michelin) e The John Dory Oyster Bar. "The cookbook, which Bloomfield collaborated on with the food writer J. J. Goode, enthusiastically advocates for the oft-derided British cuisine, championing hearty, rustic dishes. Alongside recipes inspired by Marcella Hazan and England’s Mediterranean neighbors (gnudi, mussels stuffed with mortadella, carta da musica with bottarga), appear Anglo-Saxon classics like potato bread, beef-and-blue-cheese pie, trifle, liver and onions, “faggots” (baby-fist-size packets of pork cheeks), and Eton mess". newyorker.

Negative Space

E' il titolo di una bella growing-up story a New York negli anni Settanta, di Thomas Beller. "There is so much action in New York one is sometimes perversely excited by those moments, or those places, when one is not part of it. Where nothing is happening. These places, in turn, become little air-pockets of possibility - what I call negative space. They are unidentified, off the grid, the staging areas for trysts, seductions, encounters. They are the places where crimes are committed, of one kind or another. The most conspicuous, hiding-in-plain-sight negative space in New York is Central Park". nybooks.