How A Woodpecker Pecks Wood

If you’ve heard the hammering of a woodpecker in the woods, you might have wondered how the birds can be so forceful. What does it take to whack your head against a tree repeatedly, hard enough to drill a hole? A team of researchers wondered that too and set out to investigate, by putting tiny muscle monitors on eight downy woodpeckers and recording them with high-speed video as they pecked away in the lab. Science Friday

A team of researchers at Brown has pecked away at the mysterious force of woodpeckers, revealing how the birds combine breathing and whole-body coordination to drill into trees with extraordinary force. “I think one of the most stunning things that we found in this study was that… they’re engaging everything from head and neck muscles, which you might expect, all the way down to muscles in their tail and hips as they push forward during these strikes,” said lead author Nicholas Antonson, a postdoctoral research fellow in ecology, evolution and organismal biology at Brown. 

finiamo l'anno con notizie curiose 

Death of a Tree

Some years ago I published a book called New York City of Trees. On facing pages of photographs and text, it presented portraits of fifty-five trees in the city’s five boroughs. One was of a Callery pear in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. A mid-sized tree covered in white blossoms each spring, glossy green leaves in the summer, and a mass of orange-yellow leaves in the fall, the species is a familiar sight in cities across the US. At the time of my book’s publication it was the second most widely planted species in Manhattan, after the honey locust. [...]

As I noted in my book, one day in 2008 I drove by and the Callery pear was gone. From friends at the Parks Department I learned that it had been cut down at the request of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority as part of the planned extension of the 7 subway line to Hudson Yards, then in development. Three new buildings necessary for the subway would be built on the lot behind the tree. The Parks Department had approved the removal in exchange for a restitution payment of $22,500, which would cover the cost of planting thirty new trees elsewhere in the neighborhood. Benjamin Swett, The New York Review of Books

 

Comunicare

There’s no time like the present to revisit the warning of forgotten media theorist Harold Innis: “Enormous improvements in communication have made understanding more difficult.” Nicholas Carr, The New Atlantis

questo il sottotitolo di un bell'articolo dal titolo "The Tyrrany of Now". Forse è più facile comunicare con gli animali o con le piante. Da leggere anche questo articolo "A Radical New Proposal For How Mind Emerges From Matter", di Sally Adee, Noema. Eccone l'incipit:

From a snarl of roots that grip dry, shallow soil, the knobbly trunk of an ancient olive tree twisted into a surprisingly lush crown of dense, silvery-green leaves. Far above, the retrofuturistic pattern of a geodesic dome framed the blue sky outside. Dan Ryan considered the tree: “It’s probably close to 1,800 years old.” When it was still a shoot, the Roman Empire was at the height of its influence. Ptolemy was drawing epicycles in a doomed effort to model the paths of the planets and the sun as they revolved around the Earth. For nearly two millennia, this tree managed to evade death by drought or predation or pestilence, forging alliances with alien species in the soil below and the air above.

Colm Tóibín on writing a sequel to Brooklyn

Long Island returns Eilis, now in her 40s, to Ireland in the 1970s and the possibility of rekindling the romance she left behind all those years ago. While most of the book takes place in Enniscorthy, the small town in County Wexford where Tóibín grew up and where half his novels are set, it opens in Long Island. It is here that Eilis has settled with her husband, Tony, and their two children, until a knock at the door changes everything. [...] ‘Long Island is the first novel I’ve written in which no one dies’ Lisa Allardice, The Guardian

Long Island is published by Picador.

What Orwell Really Feared

The Isle of Jura is a patchwork of bogs and moorland laid across a quartzite slab in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides. Nearly 400 miles from London, rain-lashed, more deer than people: All the reasons not to move there were the reasons George Orwell moved there. Directions to houseguests ran several paragraphs and could include a plane, trains, taxis, a ferry, another ferry, then miles and miles on foot down a decrepit, often impassable rural lane. It’s safe to say the man wanted to get away. From what? Stephen Metcalf, The Atlantic

The Students Who Went to Sea

What could possibly go wrong? More than three hundred overprivileged American students travelling the world on a hastily converted troopship, led by a recently sacked university professor determined to prove that travel could be as educational as any university course and keen to make money in the process.

Underfunded, under-recruited and poorly run, the ‘Floating University’ circumnavigated the world over a seven-month period, generating appalling headlines almost everywhere it went. William Whyte, Literary Review

il libro di cui si parla, e che deve essere molto interessante, è Tamson Pietsch, The Floating University: Experience, Empire, and the Politics of Knowledge (University of Chicago Press).

cambiando completamente argomento, questo sembra un altro libro molto interessante, questa volta sui gufi, Jennifer Ackerman, What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds (Oneworld), recensito sul Guardian da Simon Worral.

The Eight Mountains – a movie with air in its lungs and love in its heart

This rich, beautiful and inexpressibly sad film is about the friendship between men who can’t talk about their feelings and about winning and losing at the great game of life. It is set in the breathtaking and wonderfully photographed Italian Alpine valley of Aosta, which includes the slopes of Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn. But the “eight mountains” of the title refers to the eight highest peaks of Nepal: a mysterious symbol of worldly ambition and conquest. Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

insomma, è piaciuto molto!

The Golden Mole

But this is a 21st-century bestiary, and rather than trying to slot animals, birds and fish into a Christian worldview, Rundell – author of wondrous children’s books and recently a thrilling biography of John Donne – is arguing urgently for their survival. Samantha Ellis, The Guardian

si parla di The Golden Mole and Other Living Treasure, di Katherine Rundell (Faber).

What will we be reading next year?

 

Five biggest trends from the London book fair. [...]

1. Celebrity-authored fiction is on the up
2. Books about Ukraine are in demand
3. Greek myths rumble on
4. Women’s stories are getting darker
5. Self-help books are taking on new relevance. Sarah Shaffi, The Guardian

e anche:

Top 10 books about gardening
Going beyond how-to guides, these books encompass fiction, history, poetry and ecology to show how gardens can be places of liberation as well as beauty. Lulah Ellender, The Guardian

 

Balene

Le balene mi hanno sempre affascinato. Allora prendiamoci un break da guerra e brutte notizie e seguiamo questo curioso viaggio di una madre e un figlio per le vie delle balene. Il libro di cui si parla è Soundings: Journeys in the Company of Whales (Virago), di Doreen Cunningham.

Cunningham adroitly sidesteps much of the male-dominated narratives about whales and whaling, and clearly takes inspiration more from Inuit mythology than from Herman Melville. She and her son make for an unconventionally heroic pair, travelling by
plane, train, bus and boat, and incurring disapproving looks and small humiliations in their quest to spot grey whales. Initially it seems that nothing fits, including lifejackets, and at times the landscape seems irredeemably hostile (even cacti appear to give them the finger). Whale mothers and their calves, meanwhile, surface and dive alongside the pair, and Cunningham movingly describes their bonds of cooperation, which find pointed echoes and contrasts in her travelling companions and personal relationships. Her sensuous descriptions of grey whales and humpbacks provide some of the book’s richest passages; she looks at the whales and then looks at her son, looking at whales, which look back. Edward Posnett, The Guardian

"Fauci ouchie"

“Fauci ouchie”, the rhyming phrase for a Covid-19 vaccine dreamed up in honour of Dr Anthony Fauci, has been named the “most creative word or phrase of the year” by the American Dialect Society.

Founded in 1889, the society is made up of linguists, lexicographers, etymologists and scholars dedicated to the study of the English language in North America. More than 300 members took part in this year’s annual meeting, at which “Fauci ouchie” beat “chin diaper” – defined as a “face mask worn below the chin instead of properly covering the nose and mouth” – to the accolade.

The meeting also saw “insurrection” named the overall word of 2021, beating vax/vaxx. Alison Flood, The Guardian

e per continuare a parlare di lingua, ecco un bell'articolo sul "not":

Every language has negatives, and every writer needs them. They need them for formal logic, for quantum leaps, for the existential gloom of Being and Nothingness. “Without Contraries,” writes the poet William Blake, “is no progression.” Yet the literary effects of these negatives are hard to pin down, even mysterious: What happens really when someone says not? The mystery may be because the very idea of negation is hard in itself, or perhaps because we have not yet got the right emphasis. Max Byrd, The American Scholar

Case

From Charlotte Brontë’s Norton Conyers to Alan Hollinghurst’s Canford Court – the little known locations that inspired the most famous homes in literature. Phyllis Richardson, House of Fiction: From Pemberley to Brideshead, Great British Houses in Literature and Life (Unboun, 2017). Phyllis Richardson, The Guardian 

e un lungo articolo sulla traduzione, che in realtà mi ha attratto per la descrizione iniziale di una casa londinese: 

A couple of years ago we rented a beautiful apartment in London, a large flat where we must have stayed four or five times. It was perfectly comfortable and perfectly private, and the location, directly behind the British Museum, was ideal for visits to theaters and museums. It was decorated in the taste of a refined gay man of my parents’ generation. It had good Chinese porcelain, carefully chosen oriental rugs, witty French prints. It also contained the kind of photographs which, in that mysterious way, have grown dated without becoming quite old — gently pushed, by an accumulation of tiny changes, into the past. Some minute evolution in eyewear, some invisible reformulation of lipstick, some arcane improvement in cameras, betrayed their age. They did not look ancient. But though I couldn’t say exactly why, I knew that the pretty young bride was now middle-aged, and that a lot of the jolly middle-aged folks at Angkor Wat were now dead. 

I also knew, as soon as I walked inside, that the house belonged to an American. Benjamin Moser, Liberties

 

 

Verrua Savoia sul NYT

Qualche giorno fa il NYT ha dedicato un lungo articolo a Verrua Savoia, il villaggio piemontese (provincia di Torino) più cablato d'Italia.

"After all, roughly a third of Italians have never used the Internet, giving the country one of the lowest rates of usage in Europe. Residents can recall providers laughing over the phone at their request for an Internet hookup, or the perplexed look of technicians upon arriving in Verrua Savoia, where just 1,500 residents live in dozens of small settlements spread over nearly 20 miles of valleys and steep hillsides in northern Italy.

Even so, some here believed they had the right to join the digital world, to pay their bills, do their banking or make a doctor’s appointment online.

One was Daniele Trinchero, a professor at the nearby Polytechnic University of Turin, who helped set up a nonprofit association that started last week and that offers fellow citizens what both the state and telecommunications companies have so far failed to deliver. The group may be the first of its kind in Italy". Gaia Pianigiani, nyt.

BUONE VACANZE!

Vado in vacanza. Riprenderò a pubblicare i miei post su novità varie nel mondo dei libri in USA, e nel mondo anglofono in generale, all'inizio di settembre.

Buone vacanze a tutti!

Primavera a New York

A Roman Cat Fight

Sulla New York Review of Books si occupano della lotta che Repubblica sta ingaggiando contro le cat ladies. Massimo Gatto si chiede il perché, "Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi must have finally lost all claim to our attention, because La Repubblica has decided to change the target of its latest crusade. Since 1993, a former opera singer named Silvia Viviani has maintained a sanctuary for cats in the center of town, in a Fascist-era archaeological excavation called the Area Sacra di Largo Argentina, or Largo di Torre Argentina. The cat sanctuary has sterilized tens of thousands of animals, healed and vaccinated thousands more. But La Repubblica has suddenly decided to be outraged that cats might find refuge among these unprepossessing ruins. ... " nybooks.

Genevieve Jones

La vita di Genevieve Jones, ornitologa dell'età vittoriana, che studiò e dipinse le uova e i nidi degli uccelli dell'Ohio, è raccontata in un bel libro di Joy Kiser, America's Other Audubon (Princenton Architectural Press). "When she was only six years old, Genevieve Jones, known to her friends as Gennie, began accompanying her father Nelson, a medical student and amateur ornithologist, on buggy rides into the wilderness, searching for birds’ nests and collecting eggs to add to their make-shift cabinet of natural history. One spring morning in the 1850s, Gennie found an intricate bird’s nest that neither her father nor Howard, her younger brother, could identify. An inquisitive mind, she set out to find a book that would solve the mystery, only to find that no one had ever written one to help people differentiate the nests and eggs of various birds. What followed was a remarkable story of art, science, and entrepreneurship, full of tragedy and triumph, as the Jones family embarked upon filling that void in natural history. brainpickings.

A passeggio per Central Park

Una bella iniziativa, quella di John Cotner, artista e poeta newyorkese: passeggiare e chiacchierare. L'appuntamento di oggi è a Central Park e John Cotner parlerà di Frederick Law Olmsted, architetto dei paesaggi e uno degli artefici di Central Park. "Recreation is a new interactive walk designed by Jon Cotner. To celebrate National Landscape Architecture Month, as well as the legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted, Cotner will lead dialogues with participants as they stroll through Central Park. Olmsted’s architectural philosophy will be put into play, bringing everyone closer to the Park’s physical and social landscapes".

Dirty Life

Ho scelto il post di oggi per l'immagine di questa copertina. Sembra un quadro di Hopper. The Dirty Life. On Farming, Food, and Love di Kristin Kimball (Scribner). Kristin Kimball era una giornalista newyorkese, quando, nel 2003, ha avuto l'incarico di intervistare un agricoltore "molto alto e carismatico" che gestiva un'azienda agricola sostenibile Upstate New York. Si è innamorata, l'ha sposato e gli si è affiancata nel lavoro in fattoria. "As much as you transform the land by farming, farming transforms you. It seeps into your skin along with the dirt that abides permanently in the creases of your thickened hands, the beds of your nails. It asks so much of your body that if you’re not careful it can wreck you as surely as any vice by the time you’re fifty, when you wake up and find yourself with ruined knees and dysfunctional shoulders, deaf from the constant clank and rattle of your machinery, and broke to boot. But farming takes root in you and crowds out other endeavors, makes them seem paltry. Your acres become a world." newyorker.