A Country Shaped By Poetry

In Somaliland, poems were often recited to pass the time by men leading camel trains and by women weaving mats to cover their domed huts. Like the lives of the nomadic people who spoke them, the poems were cyclical. When their speakers moved, they brought their animals and their poetry. At each stop along this annual migration, the women would reuse the verses as they built their thatched homes and the men would recite them as they moved their herds to water.

But poems also served a utilitarian, public purpose: they could be deployed to argue a court case or to make peace between warring families. And their lines were powerful in ways few other nations could understand. In Somaliland, an autonomous region perched at the northern tip of Somalia, poetry had sparked wars, toppled governments, and offered paths to peace. Nina Strochlic, Noema

Diane Arbus e Yuval Noah Harari

hanno molto poco in comune, se non che questa settimana ho trovato due articoli interessanti su di loro, e quindi si trovano, qui, in compagnia.

On the other hand, in Arbus’ case, the photograph might be the weapon. To enter Cataclysm—a facsimile of the Museum of Modern Art exhibition that so disturbed Sontag, staged on its 50th anniversary by the David Zwirner galley—is to be zapped across the room by the close-ups on the opposite wall. Tightly framed (or cropped), Arbus’ subjects typically stare directly into the camera. The show is something of a confrontation. J. Hoberman, Tablet

in occasione di una mostra: "Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited" at David Zwirner from September 14 through October 22, 2022, at 537 W 20th St, New York, NY 10011

e su Hariri:

The best-selling author is a gifted storyteller and popular speaker. But he sacrifices science for sensationalism, and his work is riddled with errors. Darshana Narayanan, Current Affairs

Mad Men

Per gli appassionati di Mad Men, un sito super intellettuale e notizie varie: "Since the beginning of Season Five, “Mad World,” a forum at the scholarly Web site Kritik, has been offering a lively if occasionally jargon-heavy discussion of the series, itself intended as an extended trailer for “Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s,” a collection of essays coming from Duke University Press later this year.

The contributors aren’t the first academic types to problematize, interrogate and otherwise analyze the series, which has also inspired courses at Northwestern and Berkeley as well as at least one scholarly podcast. But they may be among the most willing to use terms like “diagetic.” nyt.

Page-Turner

Page-Turner è una nuova rubrica del blog dedicato ai libri del New Yorker. "We’ll debate about books under-noticed or too much noticed, and celebrate writers we’ve returned to again and again. We’ll look to works in translation and at the politics of literary scenes beyond the English-speaking world. We’ll think about technology and the reading life. We’ll recommend and we’ll theorize. Daily essays will be the blog’s mainstay, with books as an anchor for wide-ranging cultural comment". pageturner.

Dovrebbe essere molto interessante.

Jennifer Egan Web Site

Il sito della scrittrice Jennifer Egan è particolarmente ben fatto. Oltre alle solite notizie, bio e bibliografiche, contiene una serie di links a date e luoghi che hanno dato l'avvio a storie. Upper West Side, December 2005: Why: It doesn’t usually happen for me this way, but I had an experience and it prompted me to begin a story. As experiences go, this one was brief: on Christmas Eve, my husband, kids and I were having cheeseburgers with my mom and stepfather at the bar of the Regency hotel (a kind of tradition with us). Washing my hands in the bathroom, I noticed a fat green wallet inside a wide-open bag beside the sink. I had a thought along the lines of: She’s lucky it’s me, seeing this wallet, and not a different kind of person. Which led to the question: What kind of person? Who is the woman who would look down while washing her hands, see a wallet, and take it? That question stayed with me. Although I wasn’t intending to work on stories — in fact, I was trying to begin a novel set in the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II — I sat down with that wallet in my head and a pen in my hand, to see what might happen. E così via...