Ieri John Banville ha letto un brano del libro che sta scrivendo a Brown University. Alex Beam del Boston Globe l'ha intervistato.
Q. What will you be reading at Brown?
A. I’ll be reading from a John Banville book that I've been working on for four years, not a Benjamin Black. It's part of a novel about a retired stage actor who is recalling an affair he had when he was 15, with the 35 year-old mother of his best friend, in a small town in Ireland. Not a very frequent occurrence, I would think. The passage describes his first seduction, and his appearance at confession afterward. It's quite funny and moving.
Q. How do Black and Banville divide their time?
A. I've got a schedule now. I do a Benjamin Black in the spring and early summer. I hate summer so this is a wonderful excuse to sit in my room and pound away at a crime book. I write those quickly on the computer, in three to four months. What I want from Benjamin Black is spontaneity; John Banville writes in longhand with a fountain pen. I can't do them both at the same time. Banville was never much interested in character, dialogue, and plot, and Black is entirely character and dialogue and plot. With the crime novels, it's delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. It's like having a fictitious family. bg.
Due nuovi dizionari dello slang: Jonathon Green, Green's Dictionary of Slang. Three volumes (Chambers); e John Simpson, The First English Dictionary of Slang (Oxford). TLS.
Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (Penguin Press). "Cities magnify people's strengths, Glaeser argues, because ideas spread more easily in dense environments. If you want to compete in a global marketplace it really helps to be near a downtown. Companies that are near the geographic center of their industry are more productive. Year by year, workers in cities see their wages grow faster than workers outside of cities because their skills grow faster. Inventors disproportionately cite ideas from others who live physically close to them", David Brooks recensisce entusiasticamente il saggio di Glaeser, professore di economia a Harvard, che è un elogio alla città in generale, e a Chicago in particolare. nyt.
I have no idea how many indefinite words there are, but certainly there are gobs - perhaps even oodles, especially when you consider words for thingamajigs such as "thingumbob" and "whangydoodle." Like euphemisms, nicknames, and slang in general, indefinite words are a testament to our collective creativity, which can never be contained by numbers or knowledge.
"Spillion" - coined in 2010 to express the enormity of the BP oil spill - is only the latest fanciful word to play on real numbers such as "million" and "billion." good.
Isaac Salazar, scultore del New Mexico, trasforma libri vecchi in sculture. "I like to take a book that would otherwise end up in a landfill and turn it into art. Rarely do I use new books, unless I am commissioned to. I like to watch Planet Green, and am into alternative energy, recycling and repurposing so it’s a good feeling to know my art can contribute to reducing waste. flickr.
Storigami: storie in forma di origami. E' il formato ideato da una piccola casa editrice indipendente, Featherproof Books, per dei libretti per bambini. Si possono scaricare da Internet, e poi costruire seguendo le istruzioni. Ma pare sia un'operazione piuttosto complicata.
The Center for Fiction ha lanciato una nuova rivista letteraria che sembra molto promettente, The Literarian. Si presentano così, "We'd love to develop an online community that is as crazy about The Center as our NY members and audiences are. So whether you are a reader, a writer, a book-group member, or a publishing type, welcome! Take some time to explore the site, read all the great content, and share your thoughts. If you like what you see - and we think you will! - please return often and, please, help us spread the word about this new online resource for readers and writers." Lo faccio con piacere e con i migliori auguri, perché effettivamente mi sembra molto interessante.
Il primo numero contiene, "New stories by Alan Cheuse (a rude - and heartbreakingly funny - awakening), Terese Svoboda (a hell of a honeymoon), Stuart Dybek (the poetry of laundry) and more... interviews with Cynthia Ozick and Yiyun Li... Martha McPhee's five favorite books about women behaving badly... " centerforfiction.
Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism (Little, Brown). Sedicesimo libro dello storico che ha compiuto 93 anni. Si tratta di una raccolta di articoli e saggi che "come close to providing an overview of the fortunes of Marxism in the (almost) 130 years since Marx's death in 1883". guardian.
James Kaplan, Frank: The Voice (Doubleday).
"James Kaplan’s Frank: The Voice is authentically a page-turner, a strident tabloid epic constructed out of facts - or more precisely out of the disparate and sometimes contradictory testimony of scores of participants in Frank Sinatra’s early life". Geoffrey O’Brien, nybooks.
Linda Grant, We Had It So Good (Virago Press). Una grande scrittrice poco conosciuta in Italia in un romanzo frammentato e complesso su una coppia che si forma alla fine degli anni Sessanta - sex and drug and rock'n roll - e procede tutto sommato in maniera convenzionale. guardian.
Whether or not you believe there is any connection between the first assassination attempt ever made on an American female politician and the gun-slinging rhetoric of the first Republican woman ever nominated for the vice presidency, what's undeniably true is that despite the vast philosophical and intellectual chasms between them, Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona and the former Alaska governor Sarah Palin have something in common: they are both cowgirl politicians. In this, they are symptomatic of the too-narrow ways in which the United States is willing to accept women as leaders.
America has no tales of Amazons or of Atalanta; our national narrative does not chronicle the defeat of an armada by a virgin queen nor a teenage Joan leading her army into battle.
What we do have, to serve as the foundational fantasy of female strength and individualism we've agreed upon as embodying American power, are cowgirls: Annie Oakley, Calamity Jane, the outlaws, frontier women and pioneers who pushed West, shot sharp, talked tough and sometimes drew blood. nytmag.
