Fact-Checking, Again

Jim Fingal and John D'Agata

Di nuovo sul libro di D'Agata e Fingal. Dan Kois, su Slate, si schiera dalla parte di Fingal, il fact-checker. Ma anche dalla parte della verità dei fatti, contro una supposta libertà artistica. Il linguaggio di tutti è molto colorito. "In my reading, I came to view Fingal as the hero of the book, desperately trying to protect the truth from a writer who didn't simply disregard accuracy but was openly contemptuous of it. Fingal looks the part of hero - he's big and muscular, with broad shoulders, a beard, and a deeply serious expression. Then a Believer intern, he's now a software designer in Massachusetts but still has strong feelings about the role of accuracy in writing. 'A writer's presenting these things as facts,' he said. 'I, the hypothetical reader, am putting my trust in him to give me the straight dope. What gives him the right to introduce bullshit as fact?'

D'Agata's response, when he heard Fingal's question? 'It’s called art, dickhead.'" slate.

Amanda Knox e gli editori

Gli editori si stanno chiedendo se le memorie sulla sua esperienza in carcere in Italia che Amanda Knox sta scrivendo possano piacere o no: "The surge of media attention that will surely accompany the book's release - normally good for publishers - comes with risks. To some members of the public, Ms. Knox was an innocent abroad who was imprisoned for a crime she did not commit. To others, she is a cunning femme fatale who got away with murder.

And that brings some difficult questions: do book-buying Americans see Ms. Knox as a sympathetic figure? And if the book commands a seven-figure advance, as is widely expected, will it be worth it" nyt.

William Carlos Williams

Vi consiglio di leggere questo bell'articolo su William Carlos Williams di Adam Kirsch. "If you look at the lingua franca of American poetry today - a colloquial free verse focused on visual description and meaningful anecdote - it seems clear that Williams is the twentieth-century poet who has done most to influence our very conception of what poetry should do, and how much it does not need to do.Why is it, then, that almost fifty years after his death, the reputation of William Carlos Williams still seems to be haunted by a ghost of uncertainty?" nybooks.

Fact-Checking

Hannah Goldfield, fact-checker al New Yorker, commenta un libro uscito recentemente, The Lifespan of a Fact, di John D'Agata e Jim Fingal (Norton), in cui D'Agata racconta le discussioni avute con il suo fact-checker, Fingal, per un articolo. "Much of the book's meta-text consists of Fingal's notes, which detail his careful, often interesting research. But D'Agata's responses are, rather than thoughtful and collaborative, hostile and delusional. He sees himself as an artist, not a reporter - even though he's written a reported story about something that very publicly happened in real life - and therefore completely exempt from the responsibility of fact-checking. 'Hi, Jim,' he writes, in the book's first e-mail excerpt. 'I think maybe there's some sort of miscommunication, because the' article,' as you call it, is fine. It shouldn't need a fact-checker…. I have taken some liberties … here and there, but none of them are harmful." newyorker.

The Modernist Journals Project

Una notizia che rallegrerà gli studiosi: le riviste americane che hanno pubblicato i primi testi modernisti sono state digitalizzate e sono ora disponibili in pdf, grazie a un progetto congiunto di Brown University e The University of Tulsa, The Modernist Journals Project.

Olive Oil

Tom Mueller, Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil (Norton): un'indagine sulla produzione dell'olio d'oliva da leggere. Ecco quel che ne dice l'autore, "I'd been living in Italy for about ten years when I happened to see footage of olive farmers blockading the ports of Bari and Monopoli, in southern Puglia, with their tractors, in protest of what they said were imports of vegetable oils from elsewhere in the Mediterranean that were being illegally turned into olive oil by unscrupulous olive-oil producers and merchants. This caught my eye, and when I spoke with my editor at The New Yorker a short time later I suggested a story on olive oil. During the reporting for the story, I immersed myself in the subject, discovering a historic, cultural, religious, anthropological, and - yes - criminal depth to olive oil that seemed to deserve fuller treatment in a book". newyorker.

Dorothea Tanning

Qualche giorno fa è morta Dorothea Tanning, a 101 anni. Di solito era ricordata come moglie di Max Ernst, ma pare fosse un'artista più vigorosa del marito. Ed era anche una scrittrice e una poetessa di talento. Dan Chiasson parla dell'ultimo libro di poesie da lei scritto lo scorso autunno e che rivela una sensibilità molto particolare: "What struck me - besides the extraordinary fact of having the sensorium of a centenarian represented for almost the first time in history - was the nonchalance of her poems, their modesty. It wasn't as if Tanning had been dying all this time to say anything in particular; there was no triumph or despair; these poems dispensed no great wisdom or inspiration. They were rather, in a lovely and surprising way, emotional weather reports. Her great subject was the paradox of having run out of reinventions; everything she had made up to then, she knew, would be followed by other 'takes' and views. These poems were true to her impressions, her final impressions. We'll wait a long time for another book precisely like it. newyorker.

The Recognitions

Today marks the re-release of William Gaddis’s classics The Recognitions and J R, published in 1955 and 1975, respectively. Once described by Cynthia Ozick as “the most overlooked important work of the last several literary generations,” The Recognitions was a commercial flop when it first came out. ... Still, despite rapturous reviews and two National Book Awards, Gaddis never found a popular readership. The title of his 1998 New York Times obituary read as follows: "William Gaddis, 75, Innovative Author of Complex, Demanding Novels, Is Dead". bookforum. In Italia è stato tradotto da Mondadori nel 1967 con il titolo di Le perizie. Non mi pare sia ancora in commercio.

Intimate Photos of Allen Ginsberg

Gordon Ball spent 28 years taking candid photos of Beat legend Allen Ginsberg and his colorful circle of friends. The Howl scribe’s life is well documented in over one thousand images that Ball captured from 1969 - at Ginsberg’s Cherry Valley, New York farm that the photographer managed for a time - to the author’s funerals in New York City in 1997. flavorwire.

Sono belle, simpatiche, significative, nostalgiche. Di fianco Cherry Valley, New York Thanksgiving 1969. Da sinistra, in piedi: Julius Orlovsky, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gordon Ball, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley. Davanti, seduti: Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky.

The Snowy Day

A proposito di neve... The Snowy Day è il titolo di un bel libretto per bambini di Ezra Jack Keats (Viking). E' uscito 50 anni fa ed è un libro importante, perché è stato uno dei primi a rappresentare un bambino africano-americano, senza metterlo in caricatura. "One morning many years ago, a little boy in Brooklyn named Peter woke up to an amazing sight: fresh snow. Peter is the hero of the classic children's book by Ezra Jack Keats, The Snowy Day, which turns 50 this year. Peter has a red snowsuit, a stick just right for knocking snow off of trees, and a snowball in his pocket. And, though this is never mentioned in the text, Peter is African-American.

'It wasn't important. It wasn't the point,' Deborah Pope tells. ... Pope is the executive director of the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation. 'The point is that this is a beautiful book about a child's encounter with snow, and the wonder of it,' Pope says. Peter was among the first non-caricatured African-Americans to be featured in a major children's book. But Pope says Keats - who was white - wasn't necessarily trying to make a statement about race when he created Peter." npr.