Margaret Atwood in the Twungle

When I first started Twittering, back in 2009 ... I was, you might say, merely capering on the flower-bestrewn fringes of the Twitterwoods. All was jollity, with many a pleasantry being exchanged. True, some of those doing the exchanges represented themselves in masks, or as pairs of feet, or as rubber ducks, or as onions, or as dogs - quite a few dogs. But having had an early career in puppetry and a somewhat later phase during which I amused small children by giving voices to the salt and pepper shakers, I was aware of the fact that anything can talk if you want it to. My Twitter friends were not only sportive but helpful, informing me about Twitpic, letting me in on the secrets of acronyms such as "LMAO," [Laughing My Ass Off] analyzing the etymology and deep symbolic meaning of "squee," [adorable] and teaching me to make many an emoticon, such as the vampire face, represented thus: >:>} (Though other vampire-face options are available.) ... To this day I rely on my Twitter followers for arcane information, most recently some updates on the vernacular speech of the young. Who knew that "sick" is the new "awesome," and that "epic" is the rightful substitute for "amazing?" Twitter knew. nybooks.

Appreciation, Rivka Galchen

Il racconto di Rivka Galchen "Appeciation", uscito questa settimana sul New Yorker (e purtroppo non accessibile su Internet) e molto bello, molto divertente, e nasce da un'idea interessante - raccontare il rapporto di una madre e una figlia in termini di soldi, guadagnati, spesi, prestati, regalati... Ecco quel che dice l'autrice, intervistata da Willing Davidson. 

This story hinges on a pun, or a duality - that "appreciation" can be used in a financial as well as a kind of moral sense. What got you thinking about that? And what made you decide to describe a mother-daughter relationship through the prism of money?

I was reading a lot of Trollope, and also some Dickens, and also re-reading "Madame Bovary." (It was winter.) And all that nineteenth-century literature - often the best shorthand for plot in those novels is just to follow the money. Who has it? Who's gambled it away? Who's marrying into it? How much was spent on silk slippers? Who is surprised with an inheritance, or disinheritance? Money is the prime mover; it explains near on everything. But only near on. Sometimes it seems to fail as an explanation, to fall down into being just a description. newyorker.

P.D. James e il Proust Questionnaire

P.D. James ha 91 anni e risponde al Proust Questionnaire con un aplomb quintessenzialmente inglese: assolutamente meraviglioso:

What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Walking by the sea with my two daughters on a perfect summer day.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Impatience.

On what occasion do you lie?
To save someone’s life, but I am grateful to say that this necessity has never arisen.

What do you dislike most about your appearance?
I would have liked longer legs.

Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
"Please answer the phone, someone - say I'm busy."

Where would you like to live?
Where I live now, in London.

What is your favorite occupation?
Writing.

What is the quality you most like in a man?
Generosity.

What is the quality you most like in a woman?
Humor.

How would you like to die?
At a great age in my sleep.

What is your motto?
One we all had during the war years, "Keep calm and carry on." Also, "Enjoy." vanityfair.

Geografia letteraria

Mi piacciono molto le cartine, così vi propongo questa mappa letteraria, disegnata nel 1933 dal cartografo Paul M. Paine. Si chiama The Booklovers Map of America Showing Certain Landmarks of Literary Geography e mostra le città più significative dal punto di vista letterario. Luogo di nascita della letteratura, secondo l'autore, è Boston. brainpickings.

Chris Hughes New Owner of The New Republic

The newest owner of The New Republic magazine is Chris Hughes, a new-media guru who co-founded Facebook and helped to run the online organizing machine for Barack Obama's presidential campaign. ... Mr. Hughes, 28, will become publisher and the editor in chief of the magazine, and Richard Just will remain the editor. Martin Peretz, who was editor in chief from 1975 until 2010, when his title was changed to editor in chief emeritus, will become a member of the magazine's advisory board. nyt.

Roots of Style

La geniale e bizzarra stilista cubana (ora residente a nyc) Isabel Toledo ha scritto un libro, Roots of Style: Weaving Together Life, Love, and Fashion (Celebra). " ... an idiosyncratic book that, like her clothing, doesn't fit neatly into a category. Her dressmaking can be lavish or stark; stately or subversive; tactile but conceptual; demi-couture or, in the case of her recent collaborations with Payless and Target, populist. Valerie Steele, the director of the museum at FIT, has called Toledo a 'genius,' noting that she can do the kind of spatial modeling in her head that a computer does.

Toledo seems to have approached the story of her life as she would a pattern - the pattern, say, for the coat-and-dress ensemble of lemongrass wool lace that Michelle Obama wore to her husband's Inauguration". Judith Thurman, newyorker. Nella foto Isabel Toledo con il marito, Ruben Toledo, artista e illustratore.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up Essays

Interessante il saggio di Patricia Hampl su The Crack-Up di Fitzgerald e la sua influenza sulla letteratura autobiografica americana, "Whitman had set American poetry on this road a few generations earlier: the voice of 'Song of Myself' belongs to a lyric essayist, contending with himself and his time, using the personal self as the representative of the national type, fusing the individual to history. And the presence of faux memoirists as narrators in American fiction - including Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, Hemingway's own Nick Adams, and before that the narrators of Huckleberry Finn and Moby-Dick - also betrays a preference for the first-person voice.

The 'Crack-Up' essays are a similar poetic project. Fitzgerald's strangled cry in them makes clear that a lyric impulse links the personal essay with poetry, even though essays are a prose form and seem to pose a chronic scourge (or companion) to their apparent kin  - narrative fiction. In fact, the essay inhabits an intermediate territory between story and poem. That may be its fundamental appeal. Tell a story and then think about it - all in the same work. theamericanscholar.

Donald Antrim, Ever Since

"Ever Since" è il titolo del racconto di Donald Antrim uscito questa settimana sul New Yorker. Parla di un party in onore della pubblicazione di un romanzo da parte di un noto scrittore. Ecco che cosa ne dice l'autore, intervistato da Deborah Treisman:

I love how you capture the party dynamics here. How true to your experience of New York literary shindigs is this one?

I really haven't been to that many literary shindigs, not in recent times, though it does seem to me that there may have been a few, far in the past, where dancing took place. Generally, those sorts of events are fairly tame, and over early. newyorker.

Evidentemente la scena mondan-letteraria di NYC è meno exciting di quel che si potrebbe credere. Oppure le grandi feste sono passate di moda. 

More Barney Rosset

Rosset nel 1958 a NYC

Interessante la lunghissima intervista al leggendario Barney Rosset, uscita sulla Paris Review. Ecco quel che dice dell'Amante di Lady Chatterley, che ha pubblicato, "I didn'’t really like it. It affronted me in certain odd ways. It was written from a very class-conscious point of view, which didn't particularly appeal to me. Lawrence's blood-and-thunder thing really did not excite me either - he regarded sex and death as mythological. The book was also about industrialization, which he detested". parisreview. E il profilo che ne fa Louisa Thomas sul Daily Beast.

Barney Rosset

Qualche giorno fa è morto, a 89 anni, Barney Rosset, il fondatore di Grove Press, un uomo coraggioso, libero e anticonformista che ha pubblicato e fatto conoscere molti scrittori controversi. "The fiery and publisher Rosset, who introduced the country to countless political and avant-garde writers and risked prison and financial ruin to release such underground classics as Tropic of Cancer and Lady Chatterley's Lover, has died ... A bon vivant who enjoyed long lunches and strong martinis, Rosset was a slightly built man with a brisk, peppery voice; and a breathless laugh, often at his own expense. His longtime editor in chief at Grove, Richard Seaver, would remember him as 'often irascible, a control freak, prone to panic attacks,' with a 'sadistic element' that shadowed his 'innate generosity.' Rosset, interviewed by The Associated Press in 1998, called himself an 'amoeba with a brain,' ever slipping into enemy territory.

Entro l'anno dovrebbe uscire presso Algonquin la sua autobiografia, dal titolo provvisorio di The Subject Was Left-Handed. wsj.