E' il nuovo libro di Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree of Codes (Visual Editions), in uscita il prossimo gennaio. Partendo dal suo libro preferito, The Street of Crocodiles di Bruno Schulz, e tagliuzzandolo, Foer ne ricava un'altra storia. "Imagine a book - in this case the 1934 novel The Street of Crocodiles, a surrealistic set of linked stories by the Polish Holocaust victim Bruno Schulz - whose pages have been cut out to form a latticework of words. The result is a new, much shorter story and a paper sculpture, a remarkable piece of inert, unclickable technology: the anti-Kindle. Reading it is a little like going through an FBI document full of blacked-out passages, except that the excised portions are now holes through which you get glimpses of subsequent text. The format slows your eye down (though it helps if you slightly lift the page you're on), but the book is so brief that it can still be read in half an hour." Boris Kachka su nymag.
Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain. Volume 1. Edited by Harriet Elinor Smith, et al. (University of California Press). Twain's Autobiography offers a mélange of childhood reminisces, vitriolic diatribes, portraits of individuals admired and despised, eulogies (most movingly of his daughters Susy and Jean), political and religious exegesis and, everywhere, evidence of his astonishing, lightning-quick wit. We learn what emotionally moved him: his elegy of his youngest daughter, Jean, is heartbreaking in its expressed anguish; what angered him: Countess Massiglia apparently was the most corrupt and evil landlady in history; and of his delight with the eccentricities of language, in particular the beauties and beasts of German.
Lend Me Your Ears. Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations. Edited by Anthony Jay (Oxford UP). Da Spiro Agnew, "If you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all", a Tom Wolfe, "A liberal is a conservative who's been arrested". wp.
"I, Dante, will tell you the story of my trip to the after world... but will I come back?" So begins Seymour Chwast's noirish graphic adaptation of what is perhaps the world's most famous tale of spiritual tourism, the Divine Comedy. The list of artists who have tried their hand at visually interpreting Dante's epic is both long and distinguished, but it would be safe to say that Chwast, a co-founder of Push Pin Studios and a longtime contributor to The New Yorker, may have had the most fun with the subject since Dante himself. newyorker.
Cynthia Ozick, il cui ultimo romanzo, Foreign Bodies (Houghton Mifflin), si rifa a The Ambassadors, parla del suo rapporto con Henry James. "My first encounter with James was when I was seventeen. My brother brought home from the public library a science fiction anthology, which included 'The Beast in the Jungle'. It swept me away. I had a strange, somewhat uncanny feeling that it was the story of my life. thedailybeast.
E la storia della parola gay. "As far as we can tell, 'gay' only started meaning homosexual in the early 1940s. Earlier citations only appear that way retroactively, like this 1922 quotation from Gertrude Stein: 'Helen Furr and Georgina Keene lived together then ... They were together then and traveled to another place and stayed there and were gay there ... not very gay there, just gay there. They were both gay there'." good.
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Oliver Sacks, The Mind's Eye (Knopf). Raccolta di saggi su piccoli e grandi problemi neurologici che affligono molti. nytbr.
Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies. A Biography of Cancer (Scribner). La storia del cancro e delle cure. nytbr.
Keith Richards with James Fox, Life (Little, Brown & Company). Da boy-scout a chitarrista dei Rolling Stones. nytbr.
Azar Nafisi, Chenjerai Hove, e Edwidge Danticat parlano dei vantaggi dello scrivere in esilio. Azar Nafisi: "... you have to feel a little bit restless, a little bit not at home to begin with in order to be able to write. And then the feeling of exile and lost of home is all about loss and absence. And through memory, and through literature, you retrieve what you have lost. You make presence then absence and you create a portable world that neither tyrants nor nature can take away from you. And I think that, for me, that's the safest place to be." npr.
Refudiate: è la parola dell'anno per l'Oxford American Dictionary. E' stata coniata da Sarah Palin, combinando i termini "refuse" e "repudiate". Anni fa Bush aveva coniato con lo stesso processo il termine "misunderstimate". urbandictionary.
Paul Auster, Sunset Park (Henry Holt). "Sunset Park, like many of Paul Auster's books, is full of stories about destiny and chance, stories about 'the imponderables of fate, the strangeness of life, the what-ifs-and-what-might-have-beens'." Troy Jollimore sul sfc. Da leggere anche l'intervista allo scrittore sull'Indipendent, in cui Auster racconta del proprio passato.
E' una piccola casa editrice di libri per bambini, fondata da Matthew Swanson and Robbi Behr, ex graphic designers, che la gestiscono dalla loro casa di campagna in Maryland. "There they live, work and raise two children. Swanson writes and Behr illustrates, and together they distribute their snide, satirical works through a bimonthly subscription service. (Titles include The Baby Is Disappointing, a sarcastic paean to parenting, and Facial Features of French Explorers, a microanalysis of the craniofacial quirks of adventurers like Samuel de Champlain.) They also maintain a blog about their lives." papercuts.
Zadie Smith commenta il film su Mark Zuckerberg, il creatore di Facebook, The Social Network, e anche You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (Knopf), un libro di Jaron Lanier. Del film dice, tra l'altro, "Watching this movie, even though you know Sorkin [lo sceneggiatore] wants your disapproval, you can't help feel a little swell of pride in this 2.0 generation. They've spent a decade being berated for not making the right sorts of paintings or novels or music or politics. Turns out the brightest 2.0 kids have been doing something else extraordinary. They've been making a world".
Mentre del libro, che sembra molto interessante, dice, "Lanier is interested in the ways in which people 'reduce themselves' in order to make a computer's description of them appear more accurate. 'Information systems,' he writes, 'need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality. In Lanier's view, there is no perfect computer analogue for what we call a 'person.' In life, we all profess to know this, but when we get online it becomes easy to forget. In Facebook, as it is with other online social networks, life is turned into a database, and this is a degradation, Lanier argues, which is based on [a] philosophical mistake…the belief that computers can presently represent human thought or human relationships. These are things computers cannot currently do."
Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain. Volume 1. Edited by Harriet Elinor Smith, et al. (University of California Press). Twain's Autobiography offers a mélange of childhood reminisces, vitriolic diatribes, portraits of individuals admired and despised, eulogies (most movingly of his daughters Susy and Jean), political and religious exegesis and, everywhere, evidence of his astonishing, lightning-quick wit. We learn what emotionally moved him: his elegy of his youngest daughter, Jean, is heartbreaking in its expressed anguish; what angered him: Countess Massiglia apparently was the most corrupt and evil landlady in history; and of his delight with the eccentricities of language, in particular the beauties and beasts of German.
