A Comma in the Blood

The Italian author Natalia Ginzburg examined a wide range of topics, but it was not until the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics that she chose to write about her Jewishness. Her piece, bluntly titled “The Jews” (“Gli Ebrei”), appeared in the daily La Stampa on Sept. 14, 1972, nine days after the killings, and has recently been translated into English for the first time. Its perspective on the tensions surrounding the relationship between Jews and the state of Israel is acutely relevant in the wake of Oct. 7. We also now have the immediate responses to her provocative essay from fellow Italian intellectuals and authors, including the likes of Alberto Moravia and Primo Levi. These can be found, translated into English and with commentary by the literary critic Domenico Scarpa, in the collection Natalia Ginzburg’s Global Legacies. Kenneth Sherman, Tablet

la compassione universale, schierarsi con i perdenti, è morale?

Why Cemeteries Matter

As Americans increasingly opt out of burial, cemeteries very well may become obsolete. It’s worth asking, then, especially at a time of year when graveyards loom large in our cultural imagination, what purpose do they serve? Aside from the practical need to dispose of corpses in a sanitary way, do they serve any higher good for the community? Rachel K. Alexander, Tablet

Amo molto passeggiare per i cimiteri, soprattutto quelli americani, o quelli monumentali. L'idea che stiano scomparendo mi turba molto.

Scompaiono anche le città? 

Can you hear the death rattle of the skyscraper? It’s the sound of the free candyfloss cart being wheeled past the rows of empty desks, and the lonely drip of the beer-keg tap by the water cooler. In a desperate attempt to lure employees back to their offices, companies are laying on all manner of novelty treats, from monogrammed water bottles to personalised notebooks. It is hoped that these perks might convince people to leave the house, get on packed trains and jostle for the lifts, all in the name of teamwork and productivity. Oliver Wainwright, The Guardian

What's Wrong With Sex Between Professors and Students?

Un articolo molto interessante sul problema annunciato dal titolo. 

Teachers, as teachers, understand how to do certain things; students, as students, want to understand how to do those things. The tacit promise of the classroom is that the teacher will work to confer on the student some of his knowledge and understanding. In the best case, the teacher-student relationship arouses in the student a strong desire, a sense of thrilled if inchoate infatuation. That desire is the lifeblood of the classroom, and it is the teacher’s duty to nurture and direct it toward its proper object: learning. The teacher who allows his student’s desire to settle on him as an object, or the teacher who actively makes himself the object of her desire, has failed in his role as a teacher. Amia Srinivasan, NYT

 Amia Srinivasan elabora ulteriormente questo concetto base e spiega perché ha deliberatamente usato il rapporto tra professore maschio e studentessa, da leggere!

Can Macron stem the tide of Islamism in France?

Just over a week ago, Emanuel Macron said he wanted to end ‘Islamic separatism’ in France because a minority of the country’s estimated six million Muslims risk forming a ‘counter-society’. On Friday, we saw yet another example of this when a  history teacher was decapitated in the street on his way home in a Paris suburb. [...] M Paty was murdered, Macron said, "because he taught the freedom of expression, the freedom to believe or not believe.” The president is now positioning himself as the defender of French values, determined to drain the Islamist swamp.

That Macron even gave an anti-Islamism speech was itself a sign of how fast the debate is moving in France. Five years ago, when Fox News referred to ‘no-go zones’ in Paris, the city’s mayor threatened to sue. Now we have an avowed centrist like Macron warning that the ‘final goal’ of the ‘ideology’ of Islamism is to ‘take complete control’ of society. Anyone making such arguments just a few years ago would have been condemned by the left as an extremist. Macron is promising a law on ‘Islamist separatism’, restricting home-schooling of Muslims and demanding that Islamic groups in receipt of French state funding will have to sign a ‘secular charter’. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Spectator.

Sull'immigrazione

Bell'articolo sull'immigrazione di David Brooks, che sfata molti luoghi comuni, "The nature of global migration is slowly evolving, too. We have an image of immigrants as the poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free. According to this stereotype, immigrants are driven from their homes by poverty and move elsewhere to compete against the lowest-skilled workers.

But immigrants do not come from the poorest countries. Nations like Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Niger — some of the poorest countries in the world — have some of the lowest outmigration rates. Less than 3 percent of their populations live outside their borders. Their citizens don’t have the resources to move.

Instead, immigrants tend to come from middle-class countries, and they migrate to rich, open ones.  ... Meanwhile, globalization, with all its stresses and strains, has created a large international class of middle-class dreamers: university graduates who can’t fulfill their aspirations at home and who would enrich whatever nation is lucky enough to have them". nyt.

L'evoluzione dell'inferno

"Hell has changed a lot over the years. The Old Testament refers exclusively to sheol, the traditional Hebrew underworld, a place of stillness in which both the righteous and the unrighteous wander in shadows. There’s no fiery torment, no wailing or gnashing of teeth. In the New Testament, several writers refer to this place under its Greek name, hades. There’s also a number of passages about Gehenna, literally “the Valley of Hinnom”, which was a real area outside Jerusalem that served as the city dump. Fires burned there constantly, to incinerate the garbage; it was also a place where the bodies of criminals were burned. The Jewish rabbinical tradition envisioned Gehenna as a purgatorial place of atonement for the ungodly. Another Greek term, tartarus, appears only once, when the author of 1 Peter writes about the angel rebellion that took place before the creation of the world. ...
Like so many formerly oppositional institutions, the church is now becoming a symptom of the culture rather than an antidote to it, giving us one less place to turn for a sober counter-narrative to the simplistic story of moral progress that stretches from Silicon Valley to Madison Avenue. Hell may be an elastic concept, as varied as the thousands of malevolencies it has described throughout history, but it remains our most resilient metaphor for the evil both around and within us".  Meghan O'Gieblyn, guardian.

Bookends

Bookends è una nuova "feature" (come si potrebbe tradurre in italiano? aiutatemi amiche traduttrici!) della New York Review of Books. Nell'ultima pagina sarà chiamato a dibattere di un qualche argomento provocatorio un intellettuale da un elenco di 10 che vedete nell'illustrazione in alto (sapete riconoscerli?). "... each week two distinguished columnists (from a rotating cast of 10) will address a provocative question from the world of books. First up, Zoë Heller and Adam Kirsch answer the question: “Are novelists too wary of criticizing other novelists?”. nyt.

Salman Rushdie sulla censura

Uno dei primi articoli usciti su Page-Turner è una conferenza sulla censura tenuta da Salman Rushdie il 6 maggio al PEN World Voices Festival. In essa Rushdie parla, ovviamente, della censura e dei suoi disastrosi effetti sulla creatività. Inizia dicendo che di censura gli scrittori non amano parlare. Poi elenca gli argomenti di cui gli piace parlare. Ed è questo che mi ha interessato: "And writers want to talk about how much they get paid, and they want to gossip about other writers and how much they get paid, and they want to complain about critics and publishers, and gripe about politicians, and they want to talk about what they love, the writers they love, the stories and even sentences that have meant something to them, and, finally, they want to talk about their own ideas and their own stories. Their things". pageturner.

Why Criticism Matters

The critic participates in the world of literature not as a lawgiver or a team captain for this or that school of writing, but as a writer, a colleague of the poet and the novelist. Novelists interpret experience through the medium of plot and character, poets through the medium of rhythm and metaphor, and critics through the medium of other texts. Adam Kirsch, nyt.