Love and sex in the age of apps

There is a scene in Annie Lord’s novel that will be instantly familiar to any young person who has spent time at a pub or nightclub recently. Daisy and Maya, two best friends in their mid-20s, are lamenting the paltry state of the dating market.

“It’s just shit out there,” Daisy says. “Every time we go out there’s, like, one decent single guy and then about 40 gorgeous women with master’s degrees and shag haircuts and what’s even the point in trying.”

“That so fits with my experience … dating is very bleak at the moment,” Lord laughs, when we sit down in an east London cafe. “Something’s got to give!” The 30-year-old writer has built a career out of observing the intracacies and intimacies of modern dating. Emma Loffhagen, The Guardian

il libro di cui si parla è: The Project, Annie Lord (Harvill)

On the Mark

How do you feel about exclamation marks? Otherwise known as gaspers, screamers, dog’s cocks, or shrieks. In his Modern English Usage, Fowler said that using too many betrays an “uneducated or unpractised writer”. Martin Amis called them “joke badges”, and Theodor Adorno “soundless cymbal-crashing”. The novelist Elmore Leonard specified that you were allowed only two or three every 100,000 words. He was being generous. Steven Poole, The Guardian

recensione di: On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World by Florence Hazrat is published by Basic 

What’s So Great About the Great Books?

What’s So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You) by Naomi Kanakia; Princeton University Press

It would be tempting to put Naomi Kanakia’s new book on the crowded shelf of recent works that have sought to defend the importance of a liberal arts education, particularly the humanities. Roosevelt Montás’s Rescuing Socrates (2021) is the most logical precursor to set it beside. But in championing Great Books, Kanakia is not staking out ground in campus curriculum debates. Instead, she addresses the lay reader, Virginia Woolf’s “common reader,” the nonacademic reader who, like Kanakia, may have spent formative years reading science fiction or fantasy more than literary fiction or philosophy. A convert to the Great Books in her 20s, Kanakia wants the Gone Girl reader (her example) to at least consider moving on to Proust and Middlemarch. Todd Shy, The American Scholar

Mel Brooks at 100

Mel Brooks’ story is that of the US and Jews and American Jewish comedy. He was born on the kitchen table of a tenement in Brooklyn a century ago in the same month Marilyn Monroe made her own entrance on the opposite coast. The son of European immigrants, Brooks was brought up by his mother after his father died when Melvin was just two years old. He was a small, sickly child and the youngest of four brothers, perhaps an explanation for an almost pathological desire for attention. In the words of his colleague Larry Gelbart: “Mel thought when he got slapped in the ass by the doctor who delivered him that was applause, and he has not stopped performing since.” [...]

He is the son of immigrants who fought the Nazis and ultimately triumphed in every area of showbusiness. He is the American dream made flesh. Brooks might not live to be 2,000, but 100 years looked equally implausible when he served in the 78th Infantry division. When asked the secret to a long life after a screening of Blazing Saddles I attended in London years ago, this icon of American entertainment offered some sage advice he has evidently lived by: “Don’t die.” Darren Richman, The Guardian 

auguri, Mel Brooks, avanti fino a 120 anni!