The Struggle and the Scramble

During a 1971 debate on feminism at Town Hall in Manhattan, immortalized in Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Town Bloody Hall (1979), a small, ladylike person stands up to ask the moderator, Norman Mailer, a question. It is in regard to something she says he wrote in The Prisoner of Sex, to wit: “A good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls.” Gently, to howls of laughter, she says, “For years and years I’ve been wondering, Mr. Mailer, when you dip your balls in ink, what color ink is it?” The tone is a perfect, respectful deadpan, the rhythm lilting, the facial expression the picture of faux innocence. This is Cynthia Ozick. Cathleen Schine, The New York Review

Pretend It's a City

 

Is there anything more delightful than watching Martin Scorsese enjoy someone? One of the best things about his new documentary series, “Pretend It’s a City,” is getting to see the filmmaker react to his subject, the author and humorist Fran Lebowitz, who is also his good friend. Ten years ago, Scorsese made “Public Speaking,” his first documentary about Lebowitz, which was an ode to a vanishing breed of New York celebrity, as well as a portrait of the city itself. Sitting in a booth at the Waverly Inn, Lebowitz expounded on her various hobbyhorses, including her rejection of technology, her love of talking, and her addiction to smoking. (“The clerk said, ‘Oh, you know, Marlboro Lights, they’re on sale.’ And I thought, Really? Why? . . . They could be a million dollars, I don’t care.”) Now Scorsese and Lebowitz have made a kind of sequel, which comes, in the manner of the hour, as a streaming Netflix series rather than a feature-length film. Naomi Fry, The New Yorker

Adrienne Kennedy

 

Kennedy, who is eighty-nine, is one of our greatest and least definable living playwrights, restlessly inventive and ruthlessly unshy about the pressures exerted by history upon our lives. If one motif hums through her work (besides herself: she is our foremost artist of theatrical autobiography), it is a nagging, sometimes unbearable suspicion that the past has hijacked the present. Vinson Cunningham, The New Yorker

In Memory of Primo Levi

Eileen Battersby dell'Irish Times racconta il suo incontro con Primo Levi, un anno prima della morte dello scrittore. "So Levi at 66 had asked me if I was Jewish and on hearing no, he smiled and said that the Jewish community had always criticised him for not being Jewish enough. “I see myself as Italian, or at least I did before.” It was obvious what he meant by “before”. irishtimes.

Colonel Harland Sanders

Colonel Harland Sanders, the fried-chicken magnate, who seems in public to be as jolly and serene as Santa Claus, is actually one of the world’s foremost worriers,” William Whitworth wrote in The New Yorker in 1970. “The Colonel maintains a vigilant fretfulness in the face of overwhelming good fortune. He has won money, fame, and the affection of his fellow-citizens”—and yet, all the same, he is “haunted by the fear that someone, somewhere, is doing something to hurt his chicken.” Such is the life of the businessperson. The competition never ends. Success leads to fear. Then, ideally, fear leads to invention". 

Dura è la vita di Colonel Harland Sanders ... e dei suoi polli.

Il New Yorker propone dei vecchi articoli su businessmen. newyorker.

Felicia Nimue Ackerman

“Felicia Nimue is a double first name like Mary Jane, and I’m called the whole thing”—is a short-story writer and a philosophy professor at Brown, and she excels at crafting arguments concisely. Since 1987, the Times has printed more than two hundred of her letters, which is either a record or close to one. Tom Feyer, the letters editor, doesn’t keep count, but he named Ackerman as a top contender for first place. ...
She responds to articles on a variety of topics—ageism, fatism, “society’s tendency to medicalize virtually everything”—but her underlying interest is in personal freedom. Employers should stop telling employees what to do with their free time; self-righteous people should stop “monitoring their friends and neighbors for environmental purity”; parents should stop worrying about whether violent video games have redeeming social value (“Isn’t it high time we directed our attention to the world’s real ills and stopped policing people’s fantasy lives?”). The most fundamental freedom is the freedom to stay alive, and Ackerman argues that “death with dignity” is often a euphemism for coercion. She insists that everyone, no matter how ill or decrepit, is equally justified in clinging to life. (March 13, 2005: “I would like to know why so many of my fellow bioethicists are so ready to say that someone else’s life is not worth living.”). Andrew Marantz, newyorker.

She loved lightning

She loved lightning. It wasn’t her favorite weapon—fire was, or knives. But lightning has a brutal, beautiful efficiency, and she used it to good effect, once frying alive a pair of lovers. Lightning seemed to seek her out, too. It struck her houses repeatedly, and on one occasion caused a nearby bell tower to come crashing down into her bathroom. The lightning entered her bedroom, she said, and danced across her upper lip. 

Si tratta di Muriel Spark, nel bel ritratto che ne fa Parul Seghal sul newyorker.

Peter Matthiessen

Lo scrittore Peter Matthiessen è morto a 86 anni il 5 aprile. Jeff Jimmelman ne fa un bel ritratto sul NYT. Come spesso mi accade, sono attratta in particolare dalla descrizione della casa: "The home used to be the garage and outbuildings of a larger estate, and there is an improvised, of-the-earth sprawl to the place. One side of the main house is grown over with ivy, and under the portico, in between two piles of chopped firewood, an immense finback whale skull balances on blocks. Just to the left of the front door sits a tree stump covered stupalike with shells and other found objects. After I ring the doorbell and rap a few times on the glass, Matthiessen emerges from his living room and waves me in". nyt.

Evgeny Morozov

Dato che di solito sono io a tradurre gli articoli di Morozov per il Corriere, ho letto con interesse il profilo di questo giovane e geniale iconoclasta del mondo tecnologico. "Depending on whom you ask, Evgeny Morozov is either the most astute, feared, loathed, or useless writer about digital technology working today. Just 29 years old, from an industrial town in Belarus, he appeared as if out of nowhere in the late aughts, amid the conference-goers and problem solvers working to shape our digital futures, a hostile messenger from a faraway land brashly declaring the age of big ideas and interconnected bliss to be, well, bullshit.
To say that Morozov has gone out of his way to irritate powerful and influential people in the tech world doesn’t quite capture it. Doing so is his primary occupation. In the Morozovian worldview, New York University professor and social-media theorist Clay Shirky is a “consultant-cum-intellectual”; Google’s mission is to “monetize all of the world’s information and make it universally inaccessible and profitable”; and Tim O’Reilly, the Silicon Valley publisher and venture capitalist who coined “Web 2.0,” is an Orwellian “meme hustler” and the main culprit behind “the enduring emptiness of our technology debates.” To millions of viewers, TED talks are inspirational speeches about “ideas worth spreading” in science and technology. To Morozov they are a “sinister” hyping of “ideas no footnotes can support.” columbiajournalismreview.

The Most of Nora Ephron

The MOST of Nora Ephron (Knopf) racchiude tutti gli scritti, giornalistici e non, della scrittrice, che viene descritta acutamente da Heather Havrilesky, in contrapposizione a Joan Didion. 
"When life gave Ephron lemons, in other words, she made a giant vat of really good vodka-spiked lemonade and invited all of her friends and her friends’ friends over to share it, and gossip, and play charades. Whereas when life gave Joan Didion lemons, she stared at them for several months, and then crafted a haunting bit of prose about the lemon and orange groves that were razed and paved over to make Hollywood, in all of its sooty wretchedness—which is precisely what this mixed-up world does to everything that’s fresh and young and full of promise. ...
Didion’s preoccupation with the cultural tides might naturally seem to dwarf Ephron’s concern with the mundane dilemmas that haunt urban aristocrats—why bother with egg-white omelets, exactly? how would we live without Teflon?—but Ephron was just as skilled at identifying the ever-changing mood around her. Who else but Ephron could express the fickle tastes of the Manhattan bourgeoisie through their shifting opinions of salad? “This was right around the time endive was discovered, which was followed by arugula, which was followed by radicchio, which was followed by frisée, which was followed by the three M’s—mesclun, mâche, and microgreens—and that, in a nutshell, is the history of the last forty years from the point of view of lettuce.” bookforum.

Tama Janowitz

Tama Janowitz, ve la ricordate? L'autrice di Slaves of New York sembra dimenticata. Ho trovato questo ritratto/intervista che ci aggiorna su di lei. "Like others, I had long wondered what had happened to the author of Slaves of New York, A Certain Age, Peyton Amberg, Area 212, and other classics of this breakout star of the 1980s. Meanwhile, the rest of the Literary Brat Pack continues to be up to the usual antics. Jay McInerney has a book out on wine. Bret Easton Ellis recently wrote the script for The Canyons, a film by Paul Schrader about a porn star, starring Lindsay Lohan and James Deen. (Ellis also spent last fall hyping himself via Twitter as the right person to write the movie adaptation of E.L. James’ best-selling erotic trilogy, Fifty Shades of Grey, only to lose out to British producer Kelly Marcel.) Janowitz, too, has published regularly since Slaves of New York, the collection of short stories about struggling artists that made her an overnight sensation in 1986. But unlike her counterparts who seem to court the gossip column, she doesn’t have a website or a Twitter feed, or lengthy search results on Perez Hilton. Batya Ungar-Sargon su tablet.

Yoram Kaniuk

Di Yoram Kaniuk, morto qualche giorno fa, fa un bel ritratto Nicole Krauss. "After receiving a hundred of his letters, meeting him fifteen times, either at his apartment on Bilu Street or at a Tel Aviv café, and receiving too many calls from his cell phone to ever hope to return, I gave up trying to count the number of times that Yoram Kaniuk had died. For a while, after the first letter I received from him, in 2010, I’d kept track: He used to say that in 1941, he was killed by the Einsatzgruppen in Ternopil, Ukraine, even though he was eleven at the time, and busy eating sour cream on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv. When he was seventeen, he volunteered for the Palmach, the strike force of the Haganah, fought bloody battles for Israel’s independence in the Judean hills, was shot in the leg, and died in the arms of a nun who quoted the second century rabbi Ben-Azzai in Germanic Hebrew. Later he moved to New York, was treated for his wounds in Mount Sinai Hospital, befriended Charlie Parker, kissed Billie Holiday, stayed for a decade, and died there when he gave up being a painter and returned home.
Back in Tel Aviv, he became one of Israel’s greatest and least celebrated writers, and with each of his seventeen novels and seven short-story collections he died of being neither loved nor read, died the slow and painful death of rejection, poverty, and obscurity. In the last fifteen years of his life, he made a regular habit of dying at Ichilov hospital from various kinds of cancers and their complications—viruses, strokes, infections, pneumonias. Most recently, he died there this past Saturday, following a last meal of oranges, which he loved, after a long and painful struggle with bone-marrow cancer". newyorker.

Chris Hughes e The New Republic

Di Chris Hughes - cofondatore di Facebook, e ora a 29 anni, proprietario e direttore di The New Republic che spera di rivitalizzare - parla Carl Swanson sul New York magazine. "For Hughes, the advantage of trying to fix journalism by fixing The New Republic is that, in addition to its good breeding, it’s always been small and will remain small: He wasn’t taking the helm of a grand, listing superliner like, say, Newsweek. (Though, a source says, he did ask around first about buying The New York Review of Books, which isn’t for sale and is, actually, profitable.)
Certainly he can afford this experiment. But it is an experiment, his goals noble if abstract. Hughes wants to produce what thoughtful people ought to read, as opposed to churning out what most people like to “like.” And while he’s completely upfront about not having a business-side “silver bullet,” he has confidence that there’s a way to make it work and faith that the magazine’s relaunch, scheduled for February, will make enough influential people want to pay to read it on their phones. nymag.

The Duke in His Domain

"The Duke in His Domain" è il titolo del profilo di Marlon Brando scritto da Truman Capote per il New Yorker e uscito sulla rivista il 9 novembre del 1957. 
"What transpired between Brando and Capote over the course of their hours alone together in that hotel room has long been a subject of historical curiosity. Just how did Capote get the taciturn Brando to talk? Was Brando (as he later claimed) tricked by the devious Capote? Or was the star a willing participant in the unmaking of his own image? Was there (as Capote dubiously claimed) some sort of sexual history between the two? What is clear is that more than a half-century after it appeared, "The Duke in His Domain" remains the yardstick by which celebrity profiles are measured—an early harbinger of the New Journalism that would come into full flower in the 1960s. With its profusion of intimate details, confessional tone, and novelistic observation of Brando’s character, the story marked a clear evolution of celebrity journalism and heralded the arrival of the invasive, full-immersion pop culture of today", dice Douglas McCollam in "In Cold Type", uscito sul numero di novembre-dicembre della Columbia Journalism Review (v. il post di ieri). 
Per leggere "The Duke in His Domain", cliccare qui.

In Cold Type

Una lezione di giornalismo: Douglas McCollam parla di come Truman Capote sia riuscito a intervistare Marlon Brando, in Giappone, sul set di Sayonara, nel lontano 1957, e di come il profilo della star - apparso sul New Yorker del 9 novembre 1957 - abbia cambiato il giornalismo.

"Two nights after arriving in Japan, Capote showed up at Brando’s door wearing a tan cardigan and carrying a bottle of vodka for what in Brando’s estimation was to be a quick dinner and an early night (indeed, Brando instructed his assistant to call in an hour so he’d have an excuse to get rid of Capote). Instead, when Capote left Brando’s room six hours later, he was convinced that he had the raw material for a groundbreaking profile of the reclusive star".

sorpresa, sorpresa... Anche Marella Agnelli era un'amica e confidente di Truman Capote. "One of his female confidants, Marella Agnelli, would later recall how Capote observed people, probing for their soft spots. “I found myself telling him things I never dreamed of telling him”. columbiajournalismreview.

Il bunker di Gay Talese

Under the townhouse where the legendary writer Gay Talese and his wife, Nan, have lived for over half a century is what Talese calls his “subterranean think tank.” Every day, Talese leaves his home, locks his door, walks down an elegantly curved outdoor staircase through a separate entrance, and enters this lush underground office.
There are no windows, and no phones. It is, he says, “one place where I think a writer can work without any distractions.” 
Per vedere Gay Talese che ci fa fare un giretto nel suo bunker cliccare qui.

Shulamith Firestone

Su n+1 magazine c'è un bel ritratto di Shulamith Firestone, l'autrice di The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970), trovata morta la scorsa estate, il 28 agosto, nel suo appartamento a Manhattan, a 67 anni. "Although in later years a private and often isolated person, the writer, artist, and feminist thinker Shulamith Firestone was at one time a formidable public force. A founder of the first radical feminist organizations in New York and co-editor of the first theoretical journals of the Women’s Liberation Movement, she was one of the most memorable characters of the second wave. Brilliant, passionate, aggressive, and uncompromising in her beliefs, possessing an intellectual confidence that lives on in her work, Firestone embodied much of the radical energy of her era. She “dared to be bad”—as she declared women ought to in an editorial for Notes from the Second Year—which meant not just disobedient, but willing to fail". Dayna Tortorici, nplusonemag. 

I diari di Susan Sontag

Sontag nel 1962

Esce proprio oggi il secondo volume dei diari di Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1963-1980 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a cura di David Rieff. Adam Kirsch li commenta in un lungo saggio, molto interessante. "For the truth is that Sontag spends very little time, in the diaries as edited by David Rieff at any rate, worrying about her career, or about what the public thinks of her. She is far too intent on her own inner experience, on the creation of her self, to care about her image—something that might have surprised Paglia or Ozick, for whom that image seemed so carefully cultivated. And the utter sincerity of the diaries, the sense that Sontag is always able to speak honestly to and about herself, is what makes them such compelling documents. The contrast with the recently published diaries of Alfred Kazin is striking: Where Kazin is always exhorting and dramatizing himself, Sontag seems genuinely to explore and challenge herself". tablet. 

Edith Wharton, Again

Un altro profilo - molto interessante anche nella scrittura e nell'organizzazione, non per caso l'autrice è Francine Prose - di Edith Wharton, della sua genialità, delle sue contraddizioni. "When Edith Wharton - then Edith Jones - was a little girl, her favorite game was called 'making up.' 'Making up' involved pacing around with an open book and (before she could read) inventing and then later half reading, half inventing stories about real people, narratives that she would chant very loud and very fast. The constant pacing and shouting were important parts of the game, which (according to Wharton's memoir, A Backward Glance) had an enraptured, trance-like, slightly erotic aspect. Her parents spied on her, and it made them nervous. Edith's Old New York, old-money-society mother tried to transcribe what Edith was saying, but she spoke too fast; Mrs. Jones's anxiety increased when Edith asked her to entertain children who came to play because she was too busy making up". nybooks.

Jill Abramson

At nine o’clock on the morning of September 6th, Jill Abramson was riding the subway uptown from her Tribeca loft. It was her first day as executive editor of the New York Times, and also the first time in the paper's hundred and sixty years that a woman's name would appear at the top of the masthead. Abramson described herself as "excited," because of the history she was about to make, and "a little nervous," because she knew that many in the newsroom feared her.

Abramson, who is fifty-seven, wore a white dress and a black cardigan with white flowers and red trim. Her usually pale complexion glowed from summer sun, but there were deep, dark lines under her eyes. ... e segue un interessante profilo della nuova direttrice del NYT e dei suoi piani di rinnovamento del giornale. Ken Auletta sul newyorker.