The Catcher in the Rye at 75

The action takes place over three days and nights in December 1949. Our narrator, Holden Caulfield, is 17, chronicling events that befell him a year ago, when he was expelled from his boarding school, Pencey Prep, where the only thing he learned is that “All morons hate it when you call them a moron.” A restless, unknowingly witty Irish-American kid, he has a wry watchfulness that counterpoints his naivety. Flitting from Pencey a few days early, he bunks off to Manhattan, where his parents and sister live. The plan is to put up in a flophouse and assemble his excuses. A born fantasist, he can’t resist dissembling to anyone he meets along the way, but his gaucheness keeps tripping him up. “I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It’s awful. If I’m on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I’m going, I’m liable to say I’m going to the opera. It’s terrible.” Joseph O'Connor, The Guardian

The Catcher in the Rye (pubblicato in Italia con il titolo Il giovane Holden) è uscito negli Stati Uniti il 16 luglio 1951, pubblicato dalla casa editrice Little, Brown and Company. 

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

Hamartia

One of the most consequential misunderstandings in the history of literary criticism turns on a single Greek word. In Aristotle’s Poetics, that word is hamartia. It is usually rendered, in classrooms and handbooks, as “tragic flaw,” and on that translation an entire tradition of reading tragedy has been erected. Yet if we return to Aristotle’s Greek and trace the word’s history with some philological care, it becomes clear that this familiar formula rests on a slow but decisive mistranslation—less an error at a single moment than a long cultural drift in which a term meaning “mistake” gradually hardened into a doctrine of moral defect.

In classical Greek, hamartia belongs to the language of action rather than character. Its root sense is concrete and kinetic: to miss one’s mark, as an archer misses the target. By extension, it denotes an error, a misjudgment, a false step... Jonathan Bate, Jonathan Bat's Literary Remains

e, per finire febbraio e l'inverno, una bella foto della grande nevicata a Providence, in RI

 

 

How Sober Should a Writer Be?

Drinking in America has been on the decline. Myriad articles report this, some trendy, some clinical. [...] The first place I noticed this change was in confessional nonfiction. [...] Then I began to notice the same phenomenon in fiction, except in reverse. [...] Refreshingly, onto our sober bar cart lands On Booze, a slim showcase of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most spirited pieces, which will be reissued next month. [...] But there’s nothing quite like binging from the source. For all of Dorothy Parker’s quips about cocktails and Charles Bukowski’s bromides about beer, Fitzgerald’s prose alcohol content remains unparalleled—the irony being that he was a lightweight, forever trying to keep pace with Hemingway. As the critic John Lanchester wrote of him, “If ever there was someone who simply should not have drunk at all, it was Fitzgerald.” The prolific author’s life ended tragically, at forty-four, but damn if he couldn’t make a glamorous time seem regular. Sloane Crosley, The Yale Review

Animal Farm turns 80

Every evening, my father would read what he’d written to my mother under heavy blankets in bed. It was the only warm place in the flat. They would discuss the developing story and where it might go next. Lettice Cooper, the novelist and my mother’s Ministry of Food colleague, remembered my mother updating them every morning with the animals’ latest adventures. That my father and mother worked together so closely is no surprise. My father respected my mother’s talents greatly and later told a friend she had helped plan Animal Farm. [...]

But Animal Farm is more than just a satire of the Russian Revolution. This “fairy story” (as my father called it) is an eternal warning against political leaders who hijack potentially noble movements for their own selfish purposes. My father thought all politicians should be watched hawkishly, confronted truthfully (whatever the price) and kicked out when they put their interests before those of their country. Richard Blair, The Guardian 

Richard Blair è l'unico figlio (adottato) di George Orwell 

The many Machiavellis

Up to a point, to understand him [Machiavelli, n.d.r.] is to understand the Renaissance. But understanding Machiavelli has never been easy. Philosophers as different as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Carl Schmitt, and Antonio Gramsci all claimed him as a predecessor, but each seemed to embrace a different Machiavelli. To Rousseau, he was a republican; to Schmitt, a realist; to Gramsci, a guide for revolutionaries. All agreed, however, that his searching investigations of human agency had launched a new epoch in political thought. Julianne Werlin, The Chronicle of Higher Education

recensione al libro di Ada Palmer, Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age, uscito di recente per University of Chicago Press 

Epic win: why the Odyssey is having a moment

We live in an Odyssey time. The Greek epic about Odysseus’s tortuous, adventure-filled journey home after the end of the Trojan war, composed probably between the late eighth and late seventh century BC, is surfacing in our culture right now. Great artworks from the past, ones that are read and reread across centuries, have a way of doing that. You examine them on a particular day, and their intricacies look suddenly singular, different from how they seemed 20 years ago, 50 years ago, yesterday; they offer something new, something that illuminates the world afresh. It is the Odyssey’s moment to catch the light. Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian 

in particolare segnaliamo la nuova traduzione in inglese dell'Odissea di Daniel Mendelsohn, in uscita alla fine di aprile presso Penguin Classics

Dante’s divine autofiction

Dante’s Commedia (or Divine Comedy, written in the opening decades of the 14th century) is already a heavily and explicitly political text, in which the poet at times exhibits a positively Trumpian relish in imagining the defeat and torment of his enemies. But its long-term reception is about a great deal more than politics. Rowan Williams, The New Statesman

che Dante continui a essere letto e discusso non solo dai dantisti ci fa molto piacere. L'articolo di Williams parla del recentemente uscito: Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography, di Joseph Luzzi (Princeton University Press)

On translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses

The term Ovid uses for the stones that Deucalion and Pyrrha are instructed to throw behind their backs is lapis, distinct from the saxum of Themis’s holy space. But as the episode unfolds, he uses lapis and saxum interchangeably. The ambiguity established between bones and stones — the fact that one can be read for, and also become, the other — is central to Ovid’s poetics in The Metamorphoses, a work in which change serves as plot, and pretty much anything can become something else. In the end, after Pyrrha is persuaded, she and Deucalion obey the oracle, and the earth is repopulated with other human beings. Jhumpa Lahiri, The Dial

The Jazz Singer

Il primo film sonoro – prodotto dalla stessa Warner e proiettato per la prima volta il 27 ottobre 1927 – fu Il cantante di jazz (The Jazz Singer) nel quale, oltre a varie canzoni, si udivano una frase rivolta al pubblico dal protagonista e un breve dialogo tra questi e la madre. Il protagonista, interpretato da Al Johnson, è un ragazzo ebreo che non vuole cantare in sinagoga, come hanno fatto tutti i maschi di famiglia prima di lui, perché ama il jazz. Nel film canta però Kol Nidre, in una versione molto commovente. A proposito del Kippur appena trascorso.

Katerina

Appelfeld’s 1989 novel Katerina (translated by Jeffrey M Green) is stranger still than Badenheim 1939, but ultimately no less satisfying. It opens in simple, fable-like style – “My name is Katerina, and I will soon be 80 years old” – as it tells the story of her life as a Ruthenian (eastern Slav) growing up in the 1880s. She is taught suspicion of Jews – “there’s nothing easier than to hate the Jews” – but when she becomes pregnant and is taken in by a Jewish family, she questions her prejudices. Yet antisemitism, we know, does not lie down quietly. John Self, The Guardian

in questo articolo vengono recensiti tre libri di Appelfeld di recenti usciti presso Penguin, Badenheim 1939, Katerina and The Story of a Life

Tamara

In 1949, as Nabokov was working on “Lolita,” he published a short story in The New Yorker called “Tamara.” As in the novel that followed, the narrator is a middle-aged European, and the title character a young girl—fifteen, in this case—who is recalled as a formative object of desire during his adolescence. (Both stories also begin with a pointed focus on the female character’s name.) Like in “Lolita,” time and circumstance block the protagonist’s pursuit of the young girl, and the story evolves into an exploration, in part, of memory, mood, and perspective. The New Yorker

buona lettura di mezz'estate!

Why Dickens still endures on page, stage and screen

All Dickens’s fiction – and any good adaptation – makes you laugh in the midst of what is horrible or sad. In Oliver Twist, Dickens commended “good murderous melodrama”, loved by Victorians, for presenting “the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon”. His audacious alternations of tragedy and comedy – or, in Great Expectations, terror and absurdity – provide the entertaining shocks essential to popular entertainment. John Mullan, The Guardian

in effetti i romanzi di Dickens sono delle macchine narrative ingegnosissime, dei veri modelli per chiunque voglia scrivere. Nell'immagine Olivia Colman nella nuova versione della BBC di Great Expetations.

The Written World and the Unwritten World

 

Can there be much material left in Italo Calvino’s desk drawers? Since the death of the puckish Italian polymath in 1985, no fewer than six collections of his nonfiction have appeared in English, gathered into the autobiographical (The Road to San Giovanni, Hermit in Paris) or the literary-critical (Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Why Read the Classics?).

So with this seventh collection, The Written World and the Unwritten World, covering a scattering of Calvino’s literary writings from 1952 to 1985 and translated by Ann Goldstein, we might expect scraps from the table. Sure enough, there’s some slight stuff here – a page on character names, say – but the surprise is that we get so much of substance. John Self, The Guardian

The Written World and the Unwritten World è pubblicato da Penguin.

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

 

Italy’s Great Historical Novel

Last month, the Modern Library added to its list “The Betrothed” (“I Promessi Sposi”), from 1842, by the Italian writer Alessandro Manzoni, in a new translation—the first in fifty years—by Michael F. Moore.In some respects, this is a curious choice. Most readers outside Italy will not have heard of the title, or even of the author. In Italy, the book is considered a pillar of the national literature, perhaps second only to the Divine Comedy. Joan Acocella, The New Yorker

ottima cosa, questa nuova traduzione e questa riscoperta di Manzoni. E visto che parliamo di classici, vi propongo il primo racconto di Nora Ephron sul New Yorker, "About (Almost Surely) New York", ovviamente. Risale al novembre del 1974.

Something has happened to telephone booths in New York. No one knows when it happened, and no one knows what it is that happened, but something has happened. Telephone booths in New York are different. They have changed. There are people who say it has to do with what they look like, and there are people who say that it has to do with whether they are out of order, and there are people who say that all that is beside the point. What matters, they say, is that something has happened to telephone booths in New York. Nora Ephron, The New Yorker

 

Bernard Malamud's Mistress

Dusty Sklar intervista Arlene Heyman, psicanalista newyorkese che, negli anni '60 fu l'amante di Malamud:

Dusty Sklar: When did you attend Bernard Malamud’s class? Why did you choose his particular class?

Arlene Heyman: In 1961 I was a sophomore at Bennington College, 19 years old, when I first heard that Bernard Malamud would be coming to Vermont to teach creative writing. He had already won the National Book Award for The Magic Barrel so he was known and respected in the literary world—which was the only world that mattered to many of us. Tablet Magazine

Ezra Pound e Joseph Brodsky

To be buried here is a signal honor, and no one can deny Pound’s influence on twentieth-century poetry. But this is a case in which the very condition of the two gravestones indicates a moral and artistic hierarchy. Pound, with his obsession with the strong man of action and manly virtù, now represents the authoritarian vision, lately manifested by Russia’s Vladimir Putin, whose political and economic shadow continues its ascent over Europe. Contrarily, Brodsky, the dissident Russian, concerned with universalism and the personal life of the individual, represents a Europe of sovereign, mutually respectful nations, and the rule of law over arbitrary fiat. Here in this Venetian cemetery, two iconic forces stand a few feet apart from each other. Here are the two paths that Europe can tread. May it choose the right one. Robert D. Kaplan, New Criterion

Robert D. Kaplan is the author of Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age, to be published in April by Random House. He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Mi sembrava doveroso, questa settimana, partecipare in qualche modo al dramma dell'invasione dell'Ucraina da parte della Russia. Ho scelto questo bell'articolo che contrappone due poeti sepolti accanto a Venezia, due visioni del mondo opposte.

Tatum O’Neal

Amazing as Tatum is in this performance, and iconic and penetrating as the film may be, the blockbuster slips into the same old car chase, between the same old cops and robbers. It’s all about stuntmen doing the fancy driving. And yet, Paper Moon has the face, neck, shoulders, hair, subtle morphing expressions, and very punchy attitude of Tatum O’Neal—and it has therefore held up beautifully. Later in life, Tatum would appear for a few seconds now and then on camera between points up in the stands watching her husband, John McEnroe, play tennis at Wimbledon, and she would leave the same sort of indelible impression—by virtue of her gaze and the mystery of her concentration. Jeremy Sigler, Tablet

Adorabile! L'articolo parla, però, soprattutto di Polly Platt, art director del film di Bogdanovich e anche sua ex moglie.

Inoltre:

Is Superman Circumcised? favourite to win Oddest book title of the year, Alison Flood, The Guardian

Octavian Report: Why should we read the Odyssey?

Daniel Mendelsohn: There's a reason the classics are classics — and it's not because they have better agents than books that aren't classics. The classics are classics because they pose in a way that is lively and narratively interesting and challenging the most basic questions about human experience. The Greek and Roman classics are the foundation for our way of seeing the world. And therefore we read them because they tell us something true about life. In the case of the Odyssey, aside from everything else it is, it's one of the great family dramas. It's about homecoming, it's about the meaning of home, it's about how you know and how you prove your intimacy with members of your family. It's about the bonds that connect family members over many years despite time and distance. 

Dalla bellissima intervista a Daniel Mendelsohn sul perché leggere i classici, substack

 Inoltre ...

The word ‘hoax’ did not catch on till the early 19th century. Before that one spoke of a hum, a frump, a prat or a bilk. But 18th-century Britain, even if not rife with talk of ‘hoaxes’, was full of incautious souls at risk of being bilked. Ian Keable, The Century of Deception: The Birth of the Hoax in Eighteenth-Century England (Westbourne Press). Henry Hitchings, The Spectator