Le ultime parole famose

Robert K. Elder, Last Words of the Executed (University of Chicago Press). Le ultime parole pronunciate dai circa 1600 condannati a morte in America dal 1659. "Why last words?  ... Last words were the most riveting, and after a little digging I was appalled to find no modern study of last words. My curiosity was: If these are the most dangerous, outcast members of society, why does it remain a cultural value to record what they say? And what can we learn from them?". newyorker.

Silly Bandz

When does a fad become a meme? When people begin describing the world in terms of it. And so it is with Silly Bandz, which, for the uninitiated, are rubber bands made into shapes. newyorker.

Aleksandar Hemon, Il progetto Lazarus

Aleksandar Hemon, Il progetto Lazarus (Einaudi). Hemon è uno scrittore straordinario e qualsiasi cosa racconti si legge con piacere. Ed è questo, in un certo senso, il problema del suo ultimo romanzo: la storia mi convince poco. Anzi le storie; ce ne sono infatti due, che si alternano: quella di Lazarus, un povero ragazzino ebreo ucciso dal capo della polizia di Chicago all’inizio del Novecento, e il viaggio in Ucraina e Bosnia del narratore – alter ego dell’autore - insieme a un amico fotografo, in cerca delle radici della storia di Lazarus e anche per fare i conti con i suoi demoni interiori. Ma che cosa hanno i due in comune? Sono lontanissimi su tutti i piani, storico, culturale e soprattutto psicologico. Perché ricorrere alla tragedia di un ragazzino ebreo - scampato a un pogrom per poi soccombere in maniera assurda nel paese delle possibilità - per parlare dei propri problemi, che sono di natura tanto diversa (senso di impotenza, frustrazione, rabbia, una gran voglia di menar le mani)? Non è un modo di celarli (o cercare di nobilitare in qualche modo), invece che di affrontarli? E lo stesso vale per l’abilissima scrittura, usata, sembra, per celare invece che per indagare, analizzare, dissezionare, e diventa quindi un po’ gigionesca.

Snark

snark: (.~) a simple punctuation mark to place at the end of a sentence when that sentence means something other than it explicitly states. It signifies verbal irony in writing. C'è anche un sito dedicato allo snark

Nnedi Okorafor, Nadine Gordimer e Kathryn Schulz

FICTION
Nnedi Okorafor (nella foto), Who Fears Death (DAW). The result of rape, a girl wizard named Onyesonwu hopes to murder the racist warlord who sired her. Unlike Harry Potter, Onye's style of magic is Nomadic Shaman, not Medieval Mage. vv.


NONFICTION
Nadine Gordimer, Telling Times. Writing and Living, 1954-2008 (Norton). Raccolta di saggi. nytbr. 

Kathryn Schulz,  Being Wrong. Adventures in the Margin of Error (Ecco), e David H. Freedman, Wrong. Why Experts Keep Failing Us -- and How to Know When Not to Trust Them (Little, Brown). Perché ci sbagliamo (o gli esperti si sbagliano)? Ed è poi così male? wp.

DA LEGGERE
"Deconstructing Prince Charles", di Martin Filler: "Like Mount Vesuvius but at briefer intervals, Prince Charles erupts in high dudgeon over various and sundry affronts to his very particular and sometimes very peculiar notions of how life should be lived. The ghastliness of modern architecture and the superiority of homeopathic medicine—in 2004 he endorsed an alternative cancer treatment that prescribes, among other things, daily coffee enemas—are but the foremost of his many contrarian beliefs. Perhaps because mental illness runs in both sides of his highly inbred family, his state of mind has been questioned more than once". nybooks.

PAROLE
Moxibustion: is an ancient Chinese medical treatment like acupuncture. Alice Fulton, nella sua poesia  "Claustrophilia", uscita sul New Yorker di questa settimana, usa questo termine per parlare d'amore. E spiega il perché in un'intervista. newyorker.

Interrobang: is a combination of a question mark and an exclamation point. Many of us use this punctuation when we type ?!, but a real interrobang is a merger of these two symbols (v. foto). good.

DA LEGGERE
"The Beats: Pictures of a Legend", di Edmund White, a commento della mostra "Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg", alla National Gallery di Washington D.C., fino al 16 settembre. "Both Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs discovered late in life that making works of art is the way to get money. Literature just doesn’t do it. Speaking engagements pay, but eventually they become tiring—or one exhausts the market. Neither of the two had ever been money-mad, but old age requires a bit of a cushion. Burroughs turned to painting. ... Ginsberg had been taking snapshots of friends with a borrowed camera since the mid-1940s. In 1953 he bought a small Kodak Retina camera for $13 secondhand at a Bowery pawnshop, and for the next ten years he photographed all his friends and activities in a casual, spontaneous way." nybooks. (nella foto Jack Kerouac)

DA LEGGERE
Sto leggendo i New Yorker accumulati in queste settimane lontano da Milano. Continua la serie degli scrittori Under 40. Il 28 giugno è uscito un racconto notevole, "The Young Painters", di Nicole Krauss. Notevole soprattutto per la sicurezza ed eleganza della scrittura, per la padronanza con cui vengono evocati personaggi, luoghi ed eventi. "The room was spare, with only a bed and a wooden chair and a little altar with candles set up in one corner. There was a large window facing south, through which lower Manhattan hung suspended in the dark. The walls were blank except for one painting that was tacked up with pins, a vibrant picture out of whose many bright, high-spirited strokes several faces emerged, as if from a bog, now and then topped with a hat. The faces on the top half of the paper were upside down, as if the painter had turned the page around or circled it on his or her knees while painting, in order to reach more easily. It was a strange piece of work, unlike the style of the other things the dancer had collected, and I studied it for a minute or two..." Forse un po' moralistico il contenuto? newyorker.

FICTION
Rick Moody, The Four Fingers of Death (Little, Brown). Monumentale romanzo su uno scrittore in crisi che scrive la novelization di un film di fantascienza del 1963. lat.

NONFICTION
Philip Carr-Gomm, A Brief History of Nakedness (Reaktion Books). "Stop reading and start taking off your clothes." Così inizia questa storia del nudismo. vv.

Bernard DeVoto, The Hour. A Cocktail Manifesto (Tin House). "first published in 1948, is a paean to the restorative powers of a quiet drink at the end of the working day," dice Michael Dirda sul wp.

Sheila Rowbotham, Dreamers of a New Day. Women who invented the twentieth century (Verso). Femministe del Ventesimo secolo. tls.