Not Unpacking My Library

I have moved a lot in my life, too much, and in the chaos that every move entails, in the churning and trashing of possessions, in the reckoning with everything unfinished and forgotten that inevitably rises to the surface, it is the unpacking of books that always served as a kind of a ritual act, an alignment of physical and mental: I’d look at them and feel that I finally landed, that I’m back in the familiar. [...]

This time around, though, our books are not making me feel content or at home, and that’s why there are still 15 or so hefty boxes stacked atop of each other. [...]

Seriously: Is there another way for me to construct an outward-facing identity? As Walter Benjamin admitted, pacing around his own still-in-crates library, “what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?” Jake Marmer, Tablet

la complicata relazione con i libri e con la lettura. Ma anche la complicata relazione con la scrittura:

Still, the act of writing poses a predicament for anyone who recognizes the temptations of pride and self-aggrandizement. We simultaneously desire to attract recognition and seek to avoid it. We want to engage an audience, yet we see that approbation flatters our egos and that criticism is painful. Although wiser people tell us not to read comments, with today's technology, readers' responses are exceedingly difficult to evade. And try as we might to ignore them, the words of critics can still wound us.

How, then, should we think about displaying ourselves — or at least our thoughts and words — in public? And where does the allure of public writing leave the activity of scholarly writing? Elizabeth Corey, National Affairs

 

Joan Didion at 86

In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions – with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating – but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space. The Guardian.

Ode al punto e virgola

I don’t remember when I first learned about semicolons, nor do I have a mental list of remarkable semicolons in literature. I don’t want to have to treasure them, though the typical advice for writers of all levels is to use them sparingly, as if there’s a limited supply. This only breeds fear, which in turn breeds stigma: Semicolons are ugly, pretentious and unnecessary; they immaturely try to have it both ways. There are so many things to fear in life, but punctuation is not one of them. That semicolons, unlike most other punctuation marks, are fully optional and relatively unusual lends them power; when you use one, you are doing something purposefully, by choice, at a time when motivations are vague and intentions often denied. And there are very few opportunities in life to have it both ways; semicolons are the rare instance in which you can; there is absolutely no downside. Lauren Oyler, The New York Times.

L'importanza degli studi umanistici

 As a participant in the Graduate School’s first Summer Proctorship Program, religious studies Ph.D. student Tara Dhaliwal used her research and writing skills to introduce the work of Brown scientists to industry partners. Brown

Essere scrittori cattolici

Un saggio interessante di William Giraldi sull'essere uno scrittore cattolico. "It’s not altogether easy being a Catholic, and it’s immeasurably harder being a novelist, so you might imagine the myriad conundrums of being both. ... In Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Mary McCarthy admits: “I am not sorry to have been a Catholic”—“this sensuous life,” she calls it, and like Percy and O’Connor she speaks of “the sense of mystery and wonder,” of how in certain “exalted moments of altruism the soul was fired with reverence.” newrepublic.

Lo scrittore vuole essere letto?

Questa domanda, più o meno, viene fatta ad Adam Kirsch, il quale risponde di sì, naturalmente, ma poi articola la sua risposta in molti modi, per esempio, "Once indifference to audience is ruled out, however, we are left with the two choices DeLillo describes: The artist can lead or follow. This way of thinking about art is characteristic of modernity ...
The difference between leading and following partly overlaps the distinction between fine art and commercial art, but the two are not identical. It is easy to assume that a bad best seller is written cynically, that anyone could master the formula and please a large audience. In fact, artists who are immensely popular in their day are not “following” the audience in a mercenary sense. They are, rather, people whose spirits happen to find full expression in established, conventional forms. Such artists take their reward in the present, while the others, the “leaders,” have no choice but to postpone their reward into the hypothetical future. But the kingdom of this world and the kingdom to come are both kingdoms; and it might be impossible to be an artist without dreaming, however quietly, of sovereignty". nytbooks.

Tradurre l'Iliade

"But the magically appearing bathtubs at the end of Book 10 are a marker of a very deep-seated feature of Homeric poetry. Objects can be conjured out of the air by a set of rules for narrative plausibility which are not ours. Diomedes and Odysseus are rich and powerful. They are exhausted and they have been successful. Rich and powerful warriors have baths, so the bathtubs have to be there and must be ‘polished’. The way Homeric narrative deals with objects is determined not by probability or the laws of physics, but by social ambience, and by what a poet thinks an audience is likely to expect". Colin Burrow, LRB.

Homer: ‘The Iliad’ translated by Peter Green (University of California Press).

Who Writes Novels?

Tom Gauld, newyorker.

The Sketchbook Project

The Sketchbook Project è un interessante progetto della Brooklyn Art Library. "Zucker and Peterman started the Sketchbook Project out of frustration with a gallery culture that seemed exploitative and exclusive. “We wanted to create a community anti-gallery space that was inclusive of everyone that wanted to be a part of it,” Peterman told me. They were working on a few crowdsourced art projects at the time (they also tried soliciting photos, and mailing out canvases for people to paint on), but the sketchbook collection attracted a surprising amount of enthusiasm and quickly took over their business: now roughly thirty-four thousand sketchbooks line the walls of the Brooklyn Art Library, and about half of those are scanned in the online archive. In the project’s busiest years, the number of people requesting blank books has neared fourteen thousand". Jordan Kisner, newyorker.

Lavorare a casa

There is something embarrassing about working from home. You wonder what the UPS man thinks of you when he delivers advance copies of new books. So this guy just reads all day? You worry that the prominent figure you are interviewing by phone can hear the refrigerator door or the neighbors’ kids upstairs. (Skype video interviews are even worse; the trick is finding a camera angle that doesn’t reveal anything blatantly domestic.) Evan Hughes, newyorker.

William Zinsser

William Zinsser, a New York City newspaperman turned freelance magazine writer who had reinvented himself as a teacher of writing. ...
What Bill Zinsser had to offer was unlike anything else in the Yale course catalogue. He had arrived in 1970 ...
Officially, “Nonfiction Workshop” was a residential-college seminar, independent of the English department or any other department. Before long, word got around about this cheerful fellow Zinsser, not another eyebrow-arching pipe smoker in an elbow-patched tweed jacket but a real professional craftsman who had sneaked in the side entrance of the academy from the real world. Actually, Bill did own a tweed jacket (or maybe it was polished twill), and he favored button-down shirts, narrow neckties, unfancy shoes, and unironic hats (felt Borsalino or straw Panama). He wore glasses and was slightly built, a pleasant-looking, engaging, well-mannered optimist steeped in the tribal codes of privileged Wasp self-effacement.
We met for two hours every Thursday afternoon in a comfortably furnished lounge in Calhoun College. In that room, we mostly listened, as Bill read, along with examples from his own work, passages from writers I’d read but hadn’t properly considered (Thoreau, Orwell, Twain, E. B. White, Red Smith), or knew of but hadn’t much read (Mencken, Perelman, Wills, Didion, Talese). Some I already revered for their supreme coolness (Norman Mailer, Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe). Others, previously unknown to me (Alan Moorehead, Michael Arlen, Joseph Mitchell), proved to be more enduring influences. Mark Singer, newyorker.

The Perfection of the Paper Clip

It takes a confident writer to begin a book with a long discussion of the evolution of paper clips, push pins, and binder fasteners before even touching on sexier subjects like glue, sticky tape, and pencil erasers. Fortunately, James Ward, the author of the quirky history of stationery The Perfection of the Paper Clip (Touchstone), has a gift for isolating the kind of odd detail that counteracts the human eye’s tendency to glaze over. June Thomas, slate.

Wasting Time on the Internet

The 15 undergraduate students in “Wasting Time on the Internet,” an English course offered by the University of Pennsylvania, plus professor Kenneth Goldsmith, plus me, are participating in an activity. Actually, a few students opt out, but I don’t. For the exercise, which Goldsmith calls “30 seconds of heaven,” we rotate our laptops Lazy Susan-style around the long conference table. Everyone has 30 seconds with each laptop, to open whatever files they choose. The experience—surreal, funny, nerve-wracking—falls halfway between regretting an email and seeing a therapist. When I get my computer back, almost all of my applications are running. Katy Waldman, slate.
Un'altra idea, per un racconto, forse.

Sulla pazzia

"The number of those who actually do go insane is small. For Barbara Taylor, the trouble began when she got it into her head that her dissertation was going to be, in a literary sense, really good. Then a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Sussex in England, Taylor was writing about the Owenites, a minor group of nineteenth-century English utopians. As a socialist, a feminist, and a Canadian, she felt an affinity for these obscure and decent people. However, she didn’t know just what to say about them, which caused her great anxiety. This situation lasted for months, with the anxiety getting worse. Finally, in a scene reminiscent of the Muses inspiring a poet, her idea came to her, with dazzling suddenness; in her memoir, The Last Asylum: A Memoir of Madness in Our Times (University of Chicago, $20), Taylor dates the epiphany to a November evening in 1977, “at about eleven.” James Camp, bookforum.

Potrebbe essere l'inizio di un romanzo, no?

La crisi del romanzo

More than 150 years later [l'articolo si riferisce a Dickens], the publishing industry is in the doldrums, yet the novel shows few signs of digging into its past and resurrecting the techniques that drove fans wild and juiced sales figures. The novel is now decidedly a single object, a mass entity packaged and moved as a whole. That’s not, of course, a bad thing, but it does create a barrier to entry that the publishing world can’t seem to overcome. Meanwhile, consumers gladly gobble up other media in segments — whether it’s a “Walking Dead” episode, a series of Karl Ove Knausgaard ’s travelogues or a public-radio show (it’s called “Serial” for a reason, people) — so there’s reason to believe they would do the same with fiction. What the novel needs again is tension. And the best source for that tension is serialization. Hillary Kelly, washingtonpost. Si veda anche Ferrante.

Consigli a un aspirante scrittore

"When I had just finished my schooling and was looking for a job, a friend put me in touch with an absurdly well-connected British biographer who, she assured me, would help me find the professional position of my dreams. I wrote and asked him whether we might meet, explaining that I would appreciate his advice on securing literary work and enclosing some of my early efforts. He duly invited me for tea. The advice I had in mind sounded like this: “You must call so-and-so at this number and say I suggested it and he will publish you and give you loads of money.” After giving me a cup of weak tea—no sandwiches, no pastry, not even sugar or milk—he said, “I have only one piece of advice for you. Have a vision and cleave to it.” We then discussed the weather for twenty minutes". Andrew Solomon, newyorker.

Se continuate a leggere, troverete anche altri saggi consigli.

The Last Literary Taboos

Questo è il tema discusso da due scrittori questa settimana sul New York Times. Gli scrittori sono Francine Prose e James Parker. Francine Prose, "One hears about manuscripts turned down for being too this, too that, too dark, too cerebral, too unsympathetic, too strange; about editors rejecting books that kept them awake all night reading — but in the cold light of morning, they couldn’t convince their colleagues that an audience for such a book existed". nyt.

The literary adventures of Stephen Greenblatt

L'Harvard Gazette intervista Stephen Greenblatt, professore di inglese a Harvard. 

Q: Tell me about your boyhood. What might have put you on your path to being a scholar?

A: One constant theme in my whole life is a fascination, somewhat compulsive fascination, with the power of stories. Anyone who works on the kinds of things I do must, I imagine, have something of the same compulsion. For me, as for most everyone else, the sense that stories are powerful and important has its origin at home, that is, locally and intimately. In different ways both my mother and father were storytellers — my mother quietly and rather shyly; my father in a much more florid, performative way. When we walked to his law office in Boston, it was very difficult to get up or down State Street in a reasonable amount of time because he would constantly run into people and they would immediately begin to trade stories — this being Boston in the 1950s they were largely ethnic stories, often with punch lines I did not understand.
I grew up with the rhythms of these stories in my ears, and on my mother’s side more intimate stories, made up specially for me, and in which I figured as a character. If I were to ask myself, why have I thought my whole life that stories are an enormously powerful way of conveying things that are most important to a human being, it must be this peculiar inculcation in the family and home. harvardgazette.

Scrittori che si invidiano

Il New York Times chiede a scrittori di indicare quali scrittori invidiano. Ecco come risponde Daniel Mendelsohn, "For all these reasons, the writer whose life and career seem to me most enviable is Sophocles, whose “Oedipus” — considered by many (not least, Aristotle) to be the greatest of all Greek tragedies and written, it’s worth pointing out, when the author was nearly 70 — ends with that dire warning about too-hasty appraisals of people’s lives. He himself had no cause for alarm. In his private life, he was almost uncannily blessed; in his art, even more so". nyt.

Should literary criticism be an art or a science?

Joshua Rothman cerca di rispondere a questa domanda, usando Franco Moretti e il suo metodo, "... my guess is that, while many critics will admire Moretti, relatively few will follow him. The technical skills are learnable; English majors can take computer-science courses. But the sacrifices, intellectually and, as it were, artistically, are too great. Moretti, it seems to me, has set out on a one-way mission. In ordinary literary criticism—the kind that splits the difference between art and science—there is a give-and-take between the general and the particular. You circle back from theory to text; you compromise, or ennoble, science with art. But Moretti’s criticism doesn’t work that way. Generality is the whole point. By the end of his journey, Moretti may be able to see all of literature, but he’ll see it as an astronaut on Mars might see the Earth: from afar, with no way home". newyorker.