Nora Ephron, I Remember Nothing

I think there's always a portrait of you as very unflappable and impermeable. This is a very warm book. I'm wondering if that's something you've read about yourself from other people and you've taken notice of it.

Well, I think you know this: That very few people end up knowing who you are. I don't mean me. I just mean that most people are misunderstood in some way. I don't mean in a bad way. I just mean that they're not comprehended. But I don't really think about it a whole lot. And if I do think about it, I think I must do something to make them misunderstand me. But, what's for dinner?
La spiritosa Nora Ephron intervistata da Kerry Lauerman sul suo ultimo libro in uscita in questi giorni, I Remember Nothing: and Other Reflections (Knopf). salon.

The Nutty Professor and the "Institutional Fit" Professor

Dove sono finiti i professori un po' pazzi? In un articolo divertente Robert Klose si lamenta del fatto che siano scomparsi. E dopo un colorito elenco di esempi della sua gioventù, cerca di dare una spiegazione: "But I miss these people. Or better said, I lament not having colleagues like them in my teaching environment. Where have the outlandish characters gone? My sense is that the nature of the university beast has changed and has had a leveling effect on the spectrum of personalities. As higher education has striven to define itself as a business ('Students are our customers!' chirps a perky poster), there is less tolerance for professors who might — heaven forbid — embarrass the institution and drive the paying public away. The result has been a more rigid screening of applicants for conformity, or, in the lingo of current hiring practices, 'institutional fit.' This is a catch-all phrase that colleges and universities use to trump all other qualifications and acquire the person they had their eye on all along. In other words, a brilliant eccentric who can simultaneously write Greek with one hand and Latin with the other while captivating his students has less institutional fit than a bland monotone who sticks to the text and is grateful to the administration for giving him a job. insidehighered.

La storia del mondo in 100 oggetti

Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects (Allen Lane). MacGregor è il direttore del British Museum di Londra da otto anni e ne ha profondamente modificato la concezione. "This year, first with a radio series and now with a book, Neil MacGregor has set the seal on his vision of the British Musem as the world's supreme memory palace. One hundred objects have been selected from its unrivalled collections to illustrate the entire sweep of humanity's history: from a 2-million-year-old stone chopping tool [nella foto], ... to a solar-powered lamp, which McGregor optimistically casts as embodying the technology of tomorrow. g/o.


Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (Allen Lane). Such "Eureka" moments are controversial. Steven Johnson's new book ... argues strongly against epiphanies and flashes of inspiration. Chance breakthroughs, says Johnson, come from "the connected mind", operating in a kind of intellectual coffee house. He convincingly demonstrates that ideas, especially scientific ideas, derive from networks. But he never gets to grips with the wellsprings of literary motivation, or with the most poignant truth of literary life ... g/o.

Toni Judt's New York

Toni Judt è morto lo scorso agosto per la sclerosi laterale amiotrofica. Anche durante la paralisi causata dalla malattia ha continuato a lavorare e a dettare dei brevi saggi basati su ricordi, capitoli di un libro di memorie che viene ora stampato da Penguin con il titolo di The Memory Chalet, uno chalet svizzero che aveva molto amato da bambino e in cui idealmente riponeva i suoi ricordi per poterli ritrovare meglio. Il New York Times di oggi pubblica uno di questi testi in cui Judt parla di New York, città che amava molto e in cui si era trasferito nel 1987 per andare a insegnare a NYU. "And yet, New York remains a world city. It is not the great American city — that will always be Chicago. New York sits at the edge: like Istanbul or Mumbai, it has a distinctive appeal that lies precisely in its cantankerous relationship to the metropolitan territory beyond. It looks outward, and is thus attractive to people who would not feel comfortable further inland. It has never been American in the way that Paris is French: New York has always been about something else as well." nyt.

Blue Roses

"Blue Roses" è un racconto di Frances Hwang, uscito recentemente sul New Yorker.

Decisamente bello e pieno di humor. Lin Fanghui, la narratrice, una signora anzianotta, grassoccia, benestante, di origini cinesi, distrugge con toni pacati il legame con i figli e si permette di amare un'amica nevrotica e malata che le apre un mondo di sogni. Del suo racconto Hwang dice: "For me, the humor of this story arises from the characters. There's something funny to me about people being who they are and behaving the way that they do. They can't escape themselves and betray their biases, fears, and obsessions with their every word and action." newyorker.

FashionEast

In un recente, bel libro, FashionEast: The Spectre that Haunted Socialism (MIT Press), Djurdja Bartlett ha studiato la moda in Unione Sovietica e nei paesi che le ruotavano intorno. "The Bolshevik revolution in 1917 was in many ways a modernist project. Lenin’s Western suit and his tie demonstrated a dynamic and still open relationship with the West, while Stalin’s uniform, resembling a traditional Russian peasant tunic tolstovka, was an iconographic symbol of the society freezing back into conservative and immutable forms. Socialism eventually dressed men in conservative, monumental suits, which visually corresponded to its totalitarian ideology and aesthetics. Men's fashion was much less controversial, as it is, in general, less prone to change. Socialism was mostly afraid of women’s fashion and its penchant for seasonal changes. As a system, socialism could not deal with change. Once the revolutions settled into quiet societal patterns, the regimes were not interested in change any longer." newyorker.

In difesa delle Humanities

Il presidente di Cornell, David Skorton, ha affermato di voler lanciare una campagna nazionale in favore delle Humanities. "I have been disappointed not to see sufficient national dialogue on the humanities - he said - I don't hear a national conversation about funding for the humanities." As a result, Skorton said he would focus on humanities issues in major public addresses like Friday's on campus and in others off campus, and that he would be working to involve leaders of other universities in doing the same. For a start, he said that it was time for university leaders to push for a halt to the erosion of the budgets of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, and to articulate a vision for the importance of the humanities. insidehighered.

Sex, Ok, Chatwin

Todd Levin, Scott Jacobson, Jason Roeder, Ted Travelstead and Mike Sacks, Sex: Our Bodies, Our Junk (Broadway). Parodia dei manuali sul sesso. "Sex is really the most ridiculous thing you can do, - Levin says - The mechanics of sex are kind of funny. ... It seems funnier the more you try to explain it and the more you try to take it seriously." sfc.


Allan Metcalf, Ok. The Improbable History of America's Greatest Word (Oxford UP). Le strane e vaghe origini della paroletta più nota dell'americano, e le sue evoluzioni. wp.

Bruce Chatwin, Under the Sun. The letters of Bruce Chatwin, edited by Elizabeth Chatwin and Nicholas Shakespeare (Cape). Nonostante i vari amori omosessuali, queste lettere rivelano il profondo legame tra Chatwin e la moglie Elizabeth. tls.

Alice Munro

Lisa Dickler Awano intervista Alice Munro sulla Virginia Quarterly Review.
LDA: It seems as though in your more recent collections, when you use material from your own life, the resulting story is less directly autobiographical than it was in your earlier stories, such as Miles City, Montana, or Walker Brothers Cowboy, or The Ottawa Valley, or Who Do you think You Are . . . .

AM: That's right. Those stories are more nakedly personal. I think this is a matter of age. When youre younger theres a kind of breathlessness about 'I can write about this.' It's very exciting to realize what you can do. You're discovering, along with the reader, what you felt. But I think now I'm writing - not at all in a more guarded way, but just in a way of having seen more, or maybe retreating a little from the personal. There's not been any decision to do this. You never know why you do what you're doing. And you don't know what you're doing until either someone points it out, or you see it yourself.

Corsi universitari sul web

M.I.T.'s announcement in 2001 that it was going to put its entire course catalog online gave a jump-start to what has now become a global Open Educational Resources Movement whose goal, said Susan D’Antoni of Athabasca University, in Canada, is "to try to share the world’s knowledge."
Harvard, Yale, Stanford and the University of Michigan all now offer substantial portions of their courses online. In Britain, the Open University, which has been delivering distance learning for over 40 years, offers free online courses in every discipline on the OpenLearn Web site; the Open University also maintains a dedicated YouTube channel and has often had courses listed on the top 10 downloads at iTunes University. There, students can gain access to beginner courses in French, Spanish and German as well as courses in history, philosophy and astronomy — all free. nyt.