Under the townhouse where the legendary writer Gay Talese and his
wife, Nan, have lived for over half a century is what Talese calls his
“subterranean think tank.” Every day, Talese leaves his home, locks his
door, walks down an elegantly curved outdoor staircase through a
separate entrance, and enters this lush underground office.
There are no windows, and no phones. It is, he says, “one place where I think a writer can work without any distractions.”
Per vedere Gay Talese che ci fa fare un giretto nel suo bunker cliccare qui.
Calvin Trillin ha recentemente vinto il Thurber Prize for American Humor. Ecco quel che dice in un'intervista:
Who are your favorite contemporary humorists?
I enjoy Sandy (Ian) Frazier from the New Yorker. He's already won a
Thurber or two I believe. Garrison Keillor is funny, Dave Barry always
makes me laugh. My daughters and I have a special appreciation for David
Sedaris. ...
Is immaturity essential for writers of humor?
If you're asking if all humor writers are childish, it reminds me of
something they say Woody Allen said. And I don't know that he said it,
but something about humor writers always have to eat at the children's
table. In our family people fight to eat at the children's table. There
are food fights at the children's table. We recently had to tell my
35-year-old daughter that she couldn't sit at the children's table
anymore. We had to make room for children. clevelandcom.
Su n+1 magazine c'è un bel ritratto di Shulamith Firestone, l'autrice di The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970), trovata morta la scorsa estate, il 28 agosto, nel suo appartamento a Manhattan, a 67 anni. "Although in later years a private and often isolated person, the writer,
artist, and feminist thinker Shulamith Firestone was at one time a
formidable public force. A founder of the first radical feminist
organizations in New York and co-editor of the first theoretical
journals of the Women’s Liberation Movement, she was one of the most
memorable characters of the second wave. Brilliant, passionate,
aggressive, and uncompromising in her beliefs, possessing an
intellectual confidence that lives on in her work, Firestone embodied
much of the radical energy of her era. She “dared to be bad”—as she
declared women ought to in an editorial for Notes from the Second Year—which meant not just disobedient, but willing to fail". Dayna Tortorici, nplusonemag.
Jackson Lander cerca l'origine evolutiva di questa comune espressione "tastes like chicken". "The range of species I’ve heard compared to chicken, flavor-wise, is
very broad across the evolutionary spectrum: various birds, of course,
but also snakes, lizards, small mammals, certain fish. Which made me
wonder: Can we trace the taste of chicken back down the evolutionary
tree to a common ancestor? What was the first creature in evolutionary
history that tasted like chicken? And for how long in the Earth’s
history has life been tasting like chicken? Something had to come first,
and I don’t think it was either the chicken or the egg". slate.
Are literary names always meaningful, or are some characters named quite
casually? Does each genre have a list of first names available only for
that sort of writing? Corydon, a stock-name for a shepherd, is obviously pastoral, whilst Hodge
is clearly georgic. (Thomas Hardy wrote of the farm labourer
‘personified by the pitiable picture known as Hodge’.) Is it necessary
for fictional characters to be named at all? After all, in romances a
name can be withheld for much or all of the story. When it does emerge
it may not be a full name. (Full names, complete with surname, have a
history of their own and deserve a dedicated blog post in their own
right.) Alastair Fowler su oupblog.
The Scientists: A Family Romance è il titolo del nuovo romanzo di Marco Roth (fondatore del magazine n+1), edito da Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Adam Kirsch lo definisce "magnificamente intelligente e commovente". "Roth’s childhood, he reveals, was the source of a
double trauma, one dramatic, one so subtle that it takes him much of
the book to fully understand it. The obvious trauma came when he was 14
years old and learned that his father had AIDS. Eugene Roth had been
infected, his son was told, in a laboratory accident: A medical
researcher working on sickle-cell anemia, he accidentally pricked
himself with a used needle. Four years later, Roth’s father died, too
early to be helped by the later-generation drugs that have made AIDS
into a manageable condition. In the interim, Roth writes, his life was
dominated by the need for secrecy: He had been instructed never to
mention to anyone that his father had this stigmatizing disease. ... This is the second trauma that Roth endured as a
child: the sense that he was growing up in a home that was secretive
and hypocritical". tabletmag.
Jonathan Franzen, Libertà (Einaudi), traduzione di Silvia Pareschi. L'ho letto d'un fiato e in generale mi è piaciuto, con qualche riserva. Lo definirei un feuilleton super sofisticato. Innanzitutto per la scelta dei personaggi, almeno di una parte di essi, ricchi e bizzarri newyorchesi. Poi perché dice tutto di tutti, facendoci entrare nelle case dei personaggi, tipo serial tv. Infine perché si conclude con un happy ending, facendo prevalere i buoni e le buone intenzioni (questo è forse l'elemento che mi è piaciuto meno. Avrei preferito un po' più di perversità, dal figlio di Patty, per es.). Tutto questo è raccontato benissimo, con una prosa raffinata e con molto acume nel capire i personaggi, gli snodi morali, psicologici, caratteriali che affrontano, le coordinate culturali che stanno dietro le loro scelte; e senza lasciare spazi vuoti, a differenza del modernismo che era tutto un lasciar spazio al lettore. Qui siamo all'equivalente del cannocchiale puntato sui palazzi di fronte, al fare appello al nostro desiderio di sapere come gli altri fanno le cose che facciamo anche noi ogni giorno. Ottima la traduzione di Silvia Pareschi che riesce a portare nell'italiano il ritmo e la natura sofisticata e naturale al contempo della prosa di Franzen.
Il 24 settembre era National Punctuation Day. Per l'occasione The Atlantic Wire chiede ad alcuni scrittori qual è il loro segno d'interpunzione preferito. Per Kurt Loder, critico cinematografico, sono i puntini, the ellipsis, "I am addicted to ellipses. The period, that totalitarian dot, implies a
certitude that can never be ours to have. The ellipsis acknowledges that
everything about any subject can never be said—that there is always the
possibility of deeper contemplation, the promise of further nattering;
that we are a-swim in the murky universe of modern communication. These
three sweet dots are a caution and a comfort, a safe haven for the
finicky soul. Surely you agree …" theatlanticwire.
On the third floor of the Strand the other night, women with streaks
of gray in their hair, women with lavender cardigans, women who brought
their husbands mingled cheerfully against a backdrop of richly hued
books. They talked and smiled and looked at the other women. They
huddled around a table with cheese and grapes, waiting for their pour of
the wine.
This was a reading for a new book of essays, “Drinking Diaries,” all
written by female authors and edited by Leah Odze Epstein and Caren
Osten Gerszberg, who started a blog by that name in 2009. The event was billed as “an evening full of drink,” and it was, even if ... newyorker.
Michael Chabon dice di sì e lo dimostra nel suo ultimo romanzo, Telegraph Avenue (Harper), "The book is a sprawling narrative about the intertwined lives of Archy
Stallings and Nat Jaffe, two proprietors, one black and one white, and a
used vinyl store trying to survive on the shifting, gentrifying
frontier between hippie-dippy Berkeley and its neighbor, the
historically black enclave of Oakland". slate. Nella foto: Mekhi Phifer in Clockers, un film Spike Lee basato su un romanzo di Richard Price.
