AUGURI!

Faccio a tutti coloro che mi seguono carissimi auguri di Buon Natale con questa divertente copertina del New Yorker, uscita il 17 dicembre (il giorno del mio compleanno, tra l'altro) 1988, firmata da R.O. Blechman, allora nostro ospite a Milano.

 

To Each His Own

 

 

adoro Roz Chast e il suo humor. La posto qui per il termine "chillax" che non conoscevo e che apprendo essere una fusione di chill e relax. Per vedere tutta la storiella, cliccate qui: New Yorker  

Colette, Pig-Pen and Intelligence

che cos'hanno in comune Colette, Pig-Pen e l'intelligenza? Che sono tutti qui, questa settimana. Di Colette, che sta godendo di grande popolarità in America al momento, ci parla Michael LaPointe sul New Yorker:

Physical beauty was always important to Colette. She prized the body over the mind—as suggested by the title of Judith Thurman’s excellent biography, “Secrets of the Flesh”—and believed that focussing on the physical was essential to writing “like a woman, without anything moralistic or theoretical.” 

di Pig-Pen ci parla Elif Batuman su Astra: 

Readers’ love of Pig-Pen was reportedly a burden to Charles M. Schulz. Much as Arthur Conan Doyle attempted to kill off Sherlock Holmes in 1893 only to bring him back nine years later, so did Schultz write Pig-Pen out of the series from 1967 to 1976. Pig-Pen himself is not uninfluenced by Conan Doyle: he is, in essence, a walking clue. “I can tell just where you’ve been all week from the dirt on your clothes,” Charlie Brown tells a consternated Pig-Pen in August 1965, proceeding to rattle off a series of dusty locations.] [... Discussion of genetics and intelligence is particularly fraught because of how it’s been twisted by racists to justify oppression and violence. Simply typing the words “genes” and “intelligence” in the same sentence can be enough to raise eyebrows.

infine Tom Bartlett affronta la controversa questione del rapporto genetica-intelligenza umana:

Research on human intelligence tends to be a magnet for controversy, with papers leading to protests and speakers drawing scorn. [...] Discussion of genetics and intelligence is particularly fraught because of how it’s been twisted by racists to justify oppression and violence. Simply typing the words “genes” and “intelligence” in the same sentence can be enough to raise eyebrows. The Chronicle of Higher Education

 

Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?

Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant? è il titolo del libro di Roz Chast (Bloombury USA); un libro di memorie sugli ultimi anni dei genitori. Molto toccante, spiritoso, ovviamente, e liberatorio. Sarah Lyall intervista la cartoonist nella sua casa a Ridgefield, Conn., dove, in un closet tiene le ceneri dei genitori. “I like having my parents in my closet,” is how she explains it in her new graphic novel, “Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?”, which chronicles the pair’s long, precipitous decline, starting from when her mother fell off a stepladder in 2005 to the time she died, in 2009 (Ms. Chast’s father died in the middle of all that). “I think it makes a nice home for them". E poi racconta altre cose interessanti e divertenti della sua vita. nyt.

I cartoon di Flannery O'Connor

I cartoon di Flannery O'Connor sono interessanti, e particolarmente interessante è l'articolo di Barry Moser che mette l'attività di cartoonist di O'Connor (svolta mentre era all'università) in relazione a quella, successiva, di scrittrice. "I suspect that most of them were done inside an hour’s time. If not, then she was dawdlin.’ This is very much in keeping with the medium. When worked warm, as on a hotplate, linoleum cuts like butter. The cutting tools meet little, if any, resistance. It cuts quick and easy. Later in her life she would say that the things that she worked on the hardest were usually her worst work. She also said that a story—or a linoleum print, if you will—has to have muscle as well as meaning, and the meaning has to be in the muscle. Her prints certainly have muscle, and a lot of it". 

Oppure, poco più avanti, Moser nota l'abilità di O'Connor a catturare i gesti. "This understanding of gesture flows over into her fiction. Take for example the problem she has about the final meeting of Mrs. May and the bull in her short story “Greenleaf”: “My preoccupations,” she wrote to her friend Betty Hester, “are technical. My preoccupation is how am I going to get this bull’s horns into this woman’s ribs?”. nybooks.

Sul New York Review of Books è uscita una bella intervista, in due parti, ad Art Spiegelman sulla genesi del suo Maus. Nella prima parte Spiegelman risponde a domande tipo, Why Maus? Nella seconda parla dei documenti che lo hanno ispirato. "Before embarking on Maus I consciously set about looking for material that could help me visualize what I needed to draw. The few collections of survivors’ drawings and reproductions of surviving art that I could get my hands on were essential for me. Those drawings were a return to drawing not for its possibilities of imposing the self, of finding a new role for art and drawing after the invention of the camera, but rather a return to the earlier function that drawing served before the camera - a kind of commemorating, witnessing, and recording of information-what Goya referred to when he says, 'This I saw.' The artists, like the memoirists and diarists of the time, are giving urgent information in the pictures, information that could be transmitted no other way, and often at great risk to their lives". Per leggere la prima parte dell'intervista, cliccare qui. Per la seconda qui.

Flannery O'Connor's Cartoons

Flannery O'Connor era anche una brava disegnatrice e ha composto una serie di cartoons notevoli di cui ne uscirà una raccolta alla fine dell'anno presso Fantagraphics Books. "The Cartoons are taken from her time as a high school student at Peabody and then an undergraduate at Georgia State, and would have been published in journals alongside news stories relating to the life of the school and college itself. Cut from linoleum with oil-based ink applied to the ridges, the drawings are rudimentary but charming, a stripped down version of what Marjane Satrapi did in Persepolis". guardian.