Marilynne Robinson

E' una scrittrice che amo molto. Charles Petersen ne fa un ritratto interessante su Bookforum. "But who is Marilynne Robinson? Where does she come from? The answers may seem obvious. With the publication of Gilead (2004) and Home (2008), Robinson went from cult-style renown as the author of a single novel, Housekeeping (1980), and the writer of occasional polemics for Harper's and Salmagundi, to a household name—one of the best-known, and likely best-loved, writers in America. This recognition, however, has, if anything, obscured Robinson's origins. Her ardor for the Puritan and abolitionist traditions, expressed in her recent novels and essays, may make it seem like she must have been born fully formed from the exhumed forehead of John Winthrop or Theodore Weld. But Robinson, despite her years of teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, is not a native of the Midwest—nor does she come from New England, the homeland of most of the classic writers and theologians to whom she continually refers. She was, rather, born and raised in northern Idaho, thousands of miles from the landscapes that loom largest in her writing now. bookforum.

Il bulllismo ai tempi dei social networks

Tyler Clementi, la vittima

Sul New Yorker c'è un lungo articolo su un caso molto inquietante di bullismo che, nell'era dei social network e dei new media, assume dimensioni catastrofiche: un freshman omosessuale, molto timido, viene - forse - indotto dal suo compagno di stanza a suicidarsi, dopo che questo spiava con la videocamera del computer i suoi incontri sessuali e li diffondeva tra gli amici dei social media. Il compagno di stanza colpevole - forse - (o solo molto superficiale), ora deve affrontare un processo e una possibile condanna a parecchi anni di galera. "A recent paper by two scholars of new media - Alice Marwick, of Harvard, and Danah Boyd, of N.Y.U.- describes the tendency of teen-age girls to categorize even quite aggressive behavior as mere 'drama,' in the same category as online gossip and jokes. Policy-makers and television anchors talk of 'bullies' and the 'bullied,' but teen-agers tend not to, in part because 'teens gain little by identifying as either,' the scholars explain. 'Social stigmas prevent teens from recognizing that they are weak, and few people are willing to admit that they purposefully hurt others. . . . 'Drama' also implies something not to be taken seriously, to be risen above, while the adult-defined 'bullying' connotes childishness or immaturity to teenagers." newyorker.

Master in Crime Fiction Writing

La City University di Londra

Volete diventare scrittori di gialli? Iscrivetevi al Master in scrittura creativa per giallisti della City University di Londra. "City University in London is turning to crime, with the launch of an MA devoted to teaching crime fiction and thriller writing. Launched in response to student demand, and to the growing popularity of the genre, the UK's first creative writing masters dedicated to crime and thriller novels is another harbinger of a 'second golden age of crime writing'.The genre is the second biggest in the UK, according to official data, with sales of £87.6m in 2011. guardian.

Nick Hornby on Robert Harris

Robert Harris fotografato da Annie Leibovitz

Non sapevo fossero parenti. Bello il profilo che Nick Hornby fa del cognato, Robert Harris, "The man who would one day become my sister's husband ticked all the right boxes, when I first met him. He was clearly smart. He looked as though he would prefer to spend the evening in an expensive but unpretentious London restaurant than in a crack house. He was warm, friendly, funny. If there was one tiny thing that might give a concerned brother pause for thought, it was the enormous bookshelf given over more or less entirely to books about the Third Reich: there were more swastikas in his one-bedroom Shepherd's Bush flat than in the whole of occupied France. But what was a brother supposed to do? It wasn't as though he was hiding them from my sister. She'd presumably seen them. I decided not to interfere. A few years later, in 1992, his first novel, Fatherland, was published, to enormous acclaim and grotesque international success, and it all started to make sense". vanityfair.

Marginalia

"In getting my books," Edgar Allan Poe wrote in 1844, "I have always been solicitous of an ample margin; this is not so much through any love of the thing in itself, however agreeable, as for the facility it affords me of penciling in suggested thoughts, agreements, and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general."

For a 2010 Talk of the Town piece, Ian Frazier wrote about a trip he took to the New York Public Library to view the annotated former possessions of various literary luminaries.

In a copy of 'Fifty-five Short Stories from The New Yorker, 1940-1950' once owned by Nabokov, he observed that the former Cornell literature professor had taken the trouble to give each story a grade, neatly penciled in beside its title in the table of contents. Only two stories in the anthology were awarded an A+ grade: J. D. Salinger’s 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish' and Nabokov's own 'Colette.'" newyorker.

Stereogranimator

Stereogranimator, a graphic tool that allows users to try their hand at bringing the more than 40,000 digitized stereographs from its collection back to flickering life."It's a nice example of the cool things that can happen when you put library collections online in free, repurposable forms," Ben Vershbow, the manager of NYPL Labs, the unit responsible for the project, said in a telephone interview. nyt. Forse è una cavolata, ma è divertente!

Someone

"Someone" è il titolo di un racconto molto bello di Alice McDermott, uscito sul New Yorker, ma purtroppo non disponibile online. Fa parte di un libro che McDermott sta scrivendo, ambientato a Brooklyn negli anni Trenta.

You mentioned that this piece was taken from a novel-in-progress. Is the rest of the book about Marie, the heroine of “Someone”?

Yes. Over time, I have honed what began as a teeming novel into the story of one unremarkable woman. I did this with some trepidation: teeming novels do strike me as so much more impressive. And novels about unremarkable women, especially those written by unremarkable women, seem a thing of the past. But that’s what the novel wanted to be. I suppose I’m drawn to the stories that the more sophisticated, critical chorus in my brain warns against. It’s the contrarian in me, I’m afraid. newyorker.

Speaking American

Speaking American. A History of English in the United States, del lingista Richard W. Bailey (Oxford University Press), è un libro da tener presente. "The history of American English has been presented in more detailed and precise fashion elsewhere - by J. L. Dillard, and even, for the 19th century, by Bailey himself, in his under­read ­Nineteenth-Century English. Still, his handy tour is useful in imprinting a lesson sadly obscure to too many: as Bailey puts it, 'Those who seek stability in English seldom find it; those who wish for uniformity become laughingstocks.'" nyt.

Tartle

In un post di una certa Maria, che viene descritta come poliglotta e traduttrice, ho trovato un elenco di parole intraducibili in inglese (e anche in italiano). Per lo più non mi pare che mi capiterà di averne bisogno, se non nel caso di una, che in effetti descrive una situazione in cui mi capita relativamente spesso di trovarmi. Si tratta di Tartle: A Scottish verb meaning to hesitate while introducing someone due to having forgotten his/her name. altalang.

Sheila Heti e Joan Didion

La scrittrice Sheila Heti intervista Joan Didion su Believer.

THE BELIEVER: When you were a little girl you wanted to be an actress, not a writer?

JOAN DIDION: Right.

BLVR: But you said it’s okay, because writing is in some ways a performance. When you’re writing, are you performing a character?

JD: You’re not even a character. You’re doing a performance. Somehow writing has always seemed to me to have an element of performance. believermag.