Spike Lee. If God Is Willing

Nancy Franklin esamina il bel documentario di Spike Lee su New Orleans cinque anni dopo Katrina. "Spike Lee’s documentary about Hurricane Katrina, is a masterpiece. Lee has made another film to mark the fifth anniversary of Katrina: 'If God is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise' will première this week on HBO. newyorker.

Words

WORDS from Everynone on Vimeo.

Made by Everynone (in Collaboration with WNYC's Radiolab & NPR)

Directed by Daniel Mercadante & Will Hoffman

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...

The Glamour of Grammar

Roy Peter Clark, The Glamour of Grammar. A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English (Little, Brown). Clark (nella foto) spiega che il suo libro è "a grammar of purpose, a grammar of effect, a grammar of intent. It doesn’t shout at you, 'No, no, no,' but gives you a little push and says, 'Go, go, go.'". nytbr.

Dice l'autore, "At one time in the history of the language 'glamour' and 'grammar' were the same word. ... The link turns out to be magic. Back in the day, grammar had a much broader meaning. It stood for language knowledge connected to all kinds of learning, including the dark arts. That connection between language and magic may be clearer in the word 'spell'. It denotes both the order of letters to form words and an incantation to show your mystical power and influence." papercuts.

Seamus Heaney, Human Chain

Seamus Heaney, Human Chain (Faber). "Human Chain is about inheritance – in the fullest sense of the word. ... what makes Seamus Heaney's writing so fortifying is, partly, his temperament: his human chain is tolerant, durable, compassionate and every link is reinforced by literature". Kate Kellaway, g/o.

WIKI

wiki: significa "veloce" in hawaiano. Il prefisso "wiki" è onnipresente da quando è sorta wikipedia, nel 2001, ma il suo uso risale al 1995, quando l'Oxford Dictionary lo definiva: "a type of web page designed so that its content can be edited by anyone who accesses it, using a simplified markup language". Qualche derivato: wikification, wikitorial, wall-wiki, wiktionary, wikiality. good.

Alice McDermott, Dopo tutto questo

Alice McDermott, Dopo tutto questo (Einaudi). Una famiglia cattolica nella New York degli anni Cinquanta e Sessanta. Una New York interessante, vista attraverso una lente culturale assai diversa da quella a cui siamo abituati: non estrema, nevrotica, violenta, ma piccolo borghese, modesta e sottomessa, governata da piccole virtù: da una bontà spesso velata di piccineria, una tragicità sopportata con una certa stizza. Raccontata però con voce forte e autorevole che fa scuola e un’orchestrazione degli episodi originale e abile.

Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

Jonathan Franzen, Freedom (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Del nuovo romanzo di Franzen (al centro dell'attenzione mediatica in questi giorni, Franzen è infatti sulla copertina di Time magazine di questa settimana, primo scrittore da un decennio ad avere questo onore) Michiko Kakutani dice: "With this book, he’s not only created an unforgettable family, he’s also completed his own transformation from a sharp-elbowed, apocalyptic satirist focused on sending up the socio-economic-political plight of this country into a kind of 19th-century realist concerned with the public and private lives of his characters". nyt.

Come scrivere nell'era dell'Internet?

Come scrivere nell'era dell'Internet? E' da poco uscita la sedicesima edizione di The Chicago Manual of Style (Chicago University Press), ma anche Yahoo ha prodotto un guida simile: The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World (St. Martin's Griffin). La maggior parte dei consigli riguardo l'efficacia commerciale della scrittura. Madeleine Schwartz commenta, "I wonder too, at the book’s use of the word 'content.' The word has exploded as writing has gone digital. The Oxford English Dictionary even added an extra definition to its 'content' entry in 2004. Will content replace writing? Or are the two fundamentally different?" newyorker.

The Pope Wears Prada

Colm Tóibín, "The Pope Wears Prada", sull'omosessualità nella chiesa cattolica. LRB.


Tony Judt, "Meritocrats", un ultimo articolo dello storico sulla sua esperienza a Cambridge negli anni Sessanta. nybooks. (Nella foto Trinity College, Cambridge, 1958.)