Writers' Bloc

E' il titolo di una rubrica lanciata dalla rivista online Guernica e curata dalla scrittrice Zadie Smith. Alcuni scrittori sono stati invitati a fare un reportage creativo, soggettivo, emotivo, ecc. sui paesi poveri, di solito descritti in modo impersonale o paternalistico dalle organizzazioni umanitarie. Ecco quel che dice Zadie Smith, "But it seemed to me a shame that between the highly technical, acronym-heavy documents written within the world of development and the often saccharine self-descriptions of the church workers, there were so few people writing development stories from a human perspective. Stories that were not especially concerned with a man’s eternal soul or his statistical representation, but with his life. ... The idea for Writers Bloc came from this perceived gap. ... The other thing that seems, to me, useful about Writers Bloc, is its tone of subjectivity, of passion. It is natural that development organizations should attempt a “neutral” voice, express little outrage, and try not to offend the governments with whom they work. But it is also natural, upon entering the gap between first world and the third, to feel something, to be moved, and to have opinions, to express anger". guernicamag.

Alla ricerca di chi parla più lingue...

... si dedica un libro uscito di recente, Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners (Free Press), di Michael Erard. "On a quest to find the person we could say spoke the most languages in the world, I stumbled on the online personae of a language learning guru and hyperpolyglot, Alexander Arguelles, who invited me to Berkeley, California, where he was living at the time. It was my first introduction to the life of the contemporary hyperpolyglot. On many mornings, once Alexander has greeted the sun doing extensive writing exercises in Chinese, Arabic, Latin, Russian, Persian, German, and other languages, he goes for a long run in the arid hills of the park above his neighborhood, while listening to a German audiobook tape on his Walkman. (So far, he eschews the MP3." thedailybeast.

Miss S.

Miss S. è il titolo del divertente gialletto di Cathleen Schine (Mondadori). L'ho letto con piacere durante le vacanze. Nulla di che. Ma l'ambientazione è affascinante: una vecchia casa su un'isola lungo le coste del Maine. E uno dei personaggi è notevole: Miss Skattergoods, una vecchia segaligna, sbevazzona, lesbica e trasgressiva (non solo in quanto lesbica), spiritosa e naturalmente la detective - dilettante ma sagace. Bella la copertina.

Hitchens su Dickens

L'ultimo articolo di Christopher Hitchens parla di Dickens, ed è molto bello. "No, he [Dickens] was drawing on much wider and deeper sources of potency. The main one was the sheer stubborn existence of so many people whom the system had disregarded. Begin thinking about it and you start to whisper a list to yourself: the pathetic Jo, the crossing sweeper; Smike; Mr. Micawber; Amy Dorrit; Mr. Dick - all of them with pain to feel and a life to lead, and many of them kept going (like poor Dick Swiveller) only by a certain unique sense of humor and the absurd. Dickens was able to mine this huge resource of London life, becoming its conductor and chronicler like nobody since Shakespeare himself, and always remembering, as he noted in the last stages of The Old Curiosity Shop, to 'keep the child in view.'" vanityfair.

George Steiner e la letteratura

George Steiner parla di letteratura e di altro in un'interessante intervista.

Does the complicity between literature and philosphy still pertain today?
In my view, both forms are under threat today. Literature has chosen the domain of small scale personal relationships, and no longer deals with great metaphysical themes. We no longer have writers like Balzac and Zola, geniuses of human comedy who could explore every domain. Proust also created an inexhaustible world, and Joyce’s Ulysses is still very close to Homer... Joyce is the bridge between the two great worlds of classicism and chaos. In the past, philosophy could also claim to be universal. The entire world was open to the thought of a philosopher like Spinoza. Today an immense part of the universe is closed to us. presseurop.

What if we occupied language?

"A movement that challenges the power structure of language could help foster the sort of equality the protests aim to achieve".Questo e altri interessantissimi articoli sulle lingue (tra dui uno sulla creazione della lingua scritta per il N'Ko, un gruppo di lingue parlate in diversi paesi dell'Africa Occidenale), si trovano su bookforum.

Felice Anno Nuovo!

Buon Natale!

Buon Natale!

Dear Prime Minister, Merry Christmas!

Dear Prime Minister,
Merry Christmas! I mean it. All that "Happy Holiday Season" stuff, with "holiday" cards and "holiday" presents, is a tiresome import from the US, where it has long been fostered more by rival religions than by atheists. A cultural Anglican (whose family has been part of the Chipping Norton Set since 1727, as you'll see if you look around you in the parish church), I recoil from secular carols such as "White Christmas", "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and the loathsome "Jingle Bells", but I'm happy to sing real carols, and in the unlikely event that anyone wants me to read a lesson I'll gladly oblige - only from the King James Version, of course. ... Richard Dawkins. newstatesman.

Creative People Cheat

Questo è quanto ha appurato una ricerca fatta a Harvard: "creative people are more likely to cheat than their less creative counterparts. Researchers at Harvard and Duke have found that creative thinkers are more likely to take unethical shortcuts for gain, possibly because their talents make them better at rationalizing bad behavior. And don't creative people also believe they can win us back with a creative apology, a creative excuse or a creative defense in court? 'This is an interesting possibility,' says the lead researcher, Dr. Francesca Gino. But the bottom line, Gino said, is that 'creativity makes people more morally flexible'." nytmag.