A Broken Hallelujah: Rock and Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen è il titolo della biografia di Leonard Cohen, scritta da Liel Leibovitz (Norton). "How do you write a Leonard Cohen song? That’s a
difficult question, even for Leonard Cohen. The lyrics aren’t the
problem; Cohen was a poet long before he wrote his first song. Nor has
it been a question of finding the right melody. The challenge in writing
a Leonard Cohen song came later, in the studio, when it was time to
figure out how the whole thing should sound". tablet.
Today, we are more likely to bestow the aura and perks of stardom on
speakers at "ideas" conferences like TED, which held its
30th-anniversary gathering last month, in Vancouver.
Among the speakers was Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at
Harvard University, who seems to have been born to give a TED talk. He
was one of a few dozen "all-stars" that TED’s curators invited to
Vancouver, to give hyper-compressed updates on their work. TED talks are
normally 18 minutes or so, but the all-stars got about five on the
stage, standing before blocky red stage-prop letters spelling out T-E-D,
wearing conspicuous headset mikes and peering through the bright stage
lights into the crowd of 1,200, each of whom had paid at least $7,500 to
attend. ... The newest versions of that lecture circuit hold out the prospect of
delivering ideas to a broader range of people, but they also privilege
some kinds of ideas over others. This year’s TED, for example, featured
research psychologists, analysts of technology, scientists, and a couple
of philosophers (David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett) with an interest in
neuroscience, the academic field du jour. But there were no literary scholars or academic historians or political scientists. chronicle.
What Would Lynne Tillman Do? è il titolo dell'ultimo libro di Lynne Tillman, una raccolta di saggi, edito da Red Lemonade. L'introduzione, apparsa sul New Yorker, è di Colm Tóibín. "Her aura as she moved onto the stage was both casual and nervous. It
was clear that she had done this before. She was not going to stumble or
fumble to get the audience on her side, but that confidence was matched
by a guardedness, an unease, and a way of maintaining a distance that
might have been theatrical. I was not sure. In one of her books, she
writes of a character: “Once she dreamed, on the night before a reading
she was to give, that rather than words on paper, there were tiny
objects linked one to another, which she had to decipher instantly, and
turn into words, sentences, a story, flawlessly, of course.”
She was wearing black; she had a glass of whiskey on the rocks in her hand. Her delivery was dry, deadpan, deliberate". newyorker.
“Felicia Nimue is a double first name like Mary Jane, and I’m called the
whole thing”—is a short-story writer and a philosophy professor at
Brown, and she excels at crafting arguments concisely. Since 1987, the Times
has printed more than two hundred of her letters, which is either a
record or close to one. Tom Feyer, the letters editor, doesn’t keep
count, but he named Ackerman as a top contender for first place. ...
She responds to articles on a variety of topics—ageism, fatism, “society’s tendency to medicalize virtually everything”—but
her underlying interest is in personal freedom. Employers should stop
telling employees what to do with their free time; self-righteous people
should stop “monitoring their friends and neighbors for environmental purity”; parents should stop worrying about whether violent video games have redeeming social value (“Isn’t it high time we directed our attention to the world’s real ills and stopped policing people’s fantasy lives?”).
The most fundamental freedom is the freedom to stay alive, and Ackerman
argues that “death with dignity” is often a euphemism for coercion. She
insists that everyone, no matter how ill or decrepit, is equally
justified in clinging to life. (March 13, 2005:
“I would like to know why so many of my fellow bioethicists are so
ready to say that someone else’s life is not worth living.”). Andrew Marantz, newyorker.
She loved lightning. It wasn’t her favorite weapon—fire was, or knives.
But lightning has a brutal, beautiful efficiency, and she used it to
good effect, once frying alive a pair of lovers. Lightning seemed to
seek her out, too. It struck her houses repeatedly, and on one occasion
caused a nearby bell tower to come crashing down into her bathroom. The
lightning entered her bedroom, she said, and danced across her upper
lip.
Si tratta di Muriel Spark, nel bel ritratto che ne fa Parul Seghal sul newyorker.
One of the most enjoyable parts of the
Passover ceremony is the singing, invariably full-throated in my
experience, of all 15 verses of “Dayenu”: ...
… Enough already!
The Dayenu is a series of self-generating
conditional clauses, composed, if you like, in that most kop-dreying of
all tenses, the Judaeo-hypothetic-preconditional, in which problems are
imagined in advance of their occurring, imagined, indeed, in spite of
their having been averted, and there is no fathoming the sequence of
causation: Do our travails precede our giving thanks, or does our giving
thanks occasion our travails? In one sense, our gratitude is forever
playing catch-up with His infinite magnanimity; but in another—driven on
by the rhythmic expectations of those clauses—it is we who are pushing
Him to go on showering us with more favors. ...
Howard Jacobson. Che poi va avanti legando il dayenu con la visione del mondo - e l'umorismo - ebraici. Bello. Buon Pesach. tablet.
Lo scrittore Peter Matthiessen è morto a 86 anni il 5 aprile. Jeff Jimmelman ne fa un bel ritratto sul NYT. Come spesso mi accade, sono attratta in particolare dalla descrizione della casa: "The home used to be the garage and outbuildings of a larger estate, and
there is an improvised, of-the-earth sprawl to the place. One side of
the main house is grown over with ivy, and under the portico, in between
two piles of chopped firewood, an immense finback whale skull balances
on blocks. Just to the left of the front door sits a tree stump covered
stupalike with shells and other found objects. After I ring the doorbell
and rap a few times on the glass, Matthiessen emerges from his living
room and waves me in". nyt.
Brandeis University’s decision
to withdraw an honorary degree from the activist and writer Ayaan Hirsi
Ali is yet another shameful reminder of how limp the commitment of
Jewish institutions to open discourse has grown, and how threatened
we’ve all become by a public conversation that permits the expression of
nuanced, complicated, even at times offensive ideas—meaning, any ideas
at all worth their salt. tablet
Tutti gli scrittori avrebbero bisogno di una Vera Nabokov. "Vera not only performed all the duties expected of a wife of her
era—that is, being a free live-in cook, babysitter, laundress, and maid
(albeit, she considered herself a “terrible housewife”)—but also acted
as her husband’s round-the-clock editor, assistant, and secretary. In
addition to teaching his classes on occasion (in which Nabokov openly
referred to her as “my assistant”), Vera also famously saved Lolita,
the work that would define her husband’s career, several times from
incineration, according to Stacy Schiff ‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2000
biography, Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov). With Vera by his side, Nabokov published 18 novels between 1926 and 1974 (both in Russian and English)". Koa Beck, theatlantic.
Lihi Lapid, Woman of Valor (Gefen Publishing House). “I realized I have two women living inside of
me. One is the donut from Hanukkah, and the other is the champagne from
New Year’s. The champagne wants to party all night and the donut needs
to wake up tomorrow for the kids. The donut wants the kids to eat only
food that she made. And the champagne stopped on the way and bought cold
pizza, because she didn’t have time.”
Lihi Lapid ha 46 anni, è israeliana ed è la moglie del ministro delle finanze di Israele. Tiene una rubrica per Yediot Aharonot che parla di ricette e aneddoti di amore e bambini (un'idea che mi piace molto). tablet.
Mona Simpson, Casebook (Knopf): In
the opening scene of Simpson’s new novel, Miles Adler-Hart is hiding
under his parents’ bed. He’s trying to eavesdrop on his mother (“the
Mims,” he calls her), convinced that she is having vital conversations
with the moms of the other kids in his fourth-grade class to decide how
much TV he will be allowed to watch. Instead, he stumbles into the
breakup of his parents’ marriage. Their divorce and relationships with
new partners are shown through the eyes of Miles, who snoops deep into
his parents’ adult lives, but has limited understanding of what he
discovers there. There’s warm humor and deep feeling in its portrayal of
the vulnerability and messiness of family life. newyorker.
Amir
Alexander, Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the
Modern World (Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux): The paradoxical idea of infinitesimal quantities preoccupied ancient
Greek mathematicians, especially Archimedes, who used the concept to
calculate volumes of circles, cylinders, and spheres. But the
mathematical mysteries the idea presented were largely ignored until the
fifteen-hundreds, when the problem of the infinitesimal became a source
of philosophical dispute. In his new book, Alexander, a professor of
history at U.C.L.A., explains how the mathematical debate was a battle
over differing visions for modern Europe, between those who sought to
protect the status quo and those who embraced progress and reform. newyorker.
Odd
Job Man: Some Confessions of a Slang Lexicographer (Cape), è il memoriale di Jonathon Green, lessicografo britannico appassionato di slang. "Slang represents humanity at its most human - writes Jonathon
Green in one of his signature declarative sentences, which leave a
slight sense of the author looking around, whiskers a-quiver, to see if
anyone is going to yell out “scuzzball” or “swamp-breath”, before he plunges
on to supply us with a further definition: slang is the lexis of “our less
admirable but absolutely unavoidable selves”. telegraph.
