Pedro E. Guerrero

The Living Garage, 1959

Pedro E. Guerrero, who will turn 95 later this year, for many years was Frank Lloyd Wright’s favorite lensman.

It is particularly welcome then, that the Julius Shulman Institute at the Woodbury School of Architecture in Burbank has organized Pedro E. Guerrero: Photographs of Modern Life, the first major retrospective of his work, which traces his career from the late 1930s through the 1960s.  

We can see why America’s greatest architect favored Guerrero, for no other photographer has better understood how Wright integrated his buildings into their natural settings. But the architect’s sustained patronage was not enough to support Guerrero and his growing family, and after serving in the army during World War II he turned to commercial photography in New York City and moved to New Canaan, Connecticut - then the epicenter of Modernist residential design - though he always remained on call to shoot his mentor’s latest creations. Martin Filler, nybooks.

"Kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump."

"Kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump," è decisamente una frase notevole: linguisticamente creativa, piena di ritmo, magica. Chi l'ha scritta? James Joyce o il rapper surrealista Kool Keith? Cliccate qui per vedere se riuscite a riconoscere una serie di frasi di Joyce e Keith.

Perché leggere Omero oggi

E come leggerlo e tradurlo. Di queste interessanti questioni discute Daniel Mendelsohn.

How are the classics relevant to our times? What insights into modern life and politics do they give?

I’m going to quote my dad here, who is a scientist and has spent the last few years reading the classics, for the first time in many cases. He put it brilliantly when he said: “As long as human nature doesn’t change, which it never will, the classics have something to tell us.” People aren’t different now, they just have better gadgets. If you want to know about war, or about the manipulation of language in the service of political agendas, it’s all there. There is nothing that happened in 2003 AD that is substantively or qualitatively different from what happened in 431 BC. It’s only the details which have changed. Good literature always illuminates human nature and human action, and this is a literature that precedes everything else. So as long as people are the same, the classics are always relevant. thebrowser.

The Politics of the Polysyllabic

Un'interessante intervista a Mark Dery sull'uso ricercato della lingua - delle parole polisillabe, appunto - in inglese. "Poetic excess takes the devil's side, in the Anglo-American mind, of the Artificiality/Authenticity binary, and thus is highly suspect. In the same way that English fiction used the polymorphous perversity of gothic ornamentation in Italian architecture and art, as well the operatic excesses of the Catholic mass, to signify decadence and depravity, Anglo-American culture, from Samuel Johnson through Orwell's Politics and the English Language and on, into Strunk and White, and those 'Rules for Writing' manifestos from bestselling novelists that get handed around the Web, views with deep-dyed suspicion prose style that embraces arcane vocabulary, self-conscious wordplay, linguistic experimentation (for example, neologisms), complex Proustian syntax, lengthy Jamesian paragraphs, arch or ironic tone, and a discursive, flaneur-like approach to getting from here to there, rather than the shortest distance between point A and point B preferred by our age of time famine, Twitter attention spans, and corporatist, PowerPoint pedagogy". acceler8or.

Di Mark Dery è appena uscito un libro sull'argomento, dal titolo I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams (University of Minnesota Press).

I diari di Susan Sontag

Sontag nel 1962

Esce proprio oggi il secondo volume dei diari di Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1963-1980 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a cura di David Rieff. Adam Kirsch li commenta in un lungo saggio, molto interessante. "For the truth is that Sontag spends very little time, in the diaries as edited by David Rieff at any rate, worrying about her career, or about what the public thinks of her. She is far too intent on her own inner experience, on the creation of her self, to care about her image—something that might have surprised Paglia or Ozick, for whom that image seemed so carefully cultivated. And the utter sincerity of the diaries, the sense that Sontag is always able to speak honestly to and about herself, is what makes them such compelling documents. The contrast with the recently published diaries of Alfred Kazin is striking: Where Kazin is always exhorting and dramatizing himself, Sontag seems genuinely to explore and challenge herself". tablet. 

Parole bandite

Divorce. Dinosaurs, Birthdays. Religion. Halloween. Christmas. Television. These are a few of the 50-plus words and references the New York City Department of Education is hoping to ban from the city’s standardized tests.
In its request for proposal, the NYC Department of Education explained it wanted to avoid certain words if the "the topic is controversial among the adult population and might not be acceptable in a state-mandated testing situation; the topic has been overused in standardized tests or textbooks and is thus overly familiar and/or boring to students; the topic appears biased against (or toward) some group of people." cnn.

On Fact-checking, Again

Christian Lorentzen, giornalista newyorchese che ora lavora a Londra, mette alla berlina l'ossesione degli americani per il fact-checking. Dopo aver riportato una conversazione a un party con una conoscente che lavora nell'editoria, commenta, "If I were writing this for an American publication, I'd be under the burden of revealing the woman's identity, and a fact-checker would call her to confirm what she said and what I said, what magazine she wrote for, whether our conversation ended with her going to get a new drink, what sort of drink it was, whether we were talking alone, whether I might have left anyone out of the conversation. ... A real go-getter, the auteur type, might go so far as to figure out what bar we were at, at what time, the colour of the woman's hair, what she was wearing, her height, whether she had written any books, how they were received, how many they sold, her marital status, the dress she wore to her wedding, the names of her children, what sort of horses she rides, what sort of crowd it was, the level of anxiety in the room, whether we were upstairs or downstairs and what colour the wallpaper was. lrb.

L'Iliade rivisitata

Come avevo osservato in un post precedente, l'Iliade gode di grande popolarità in questo periodo, sia in America che in Inghilterra. In un post sul New York Review of Books, Christopher Carroll parla, male, di un recente (si è concluso il 1 aprile) monologo basato sull'Iliade e recitato da Denis O'Hare al New York Theater Workshop. Trova che la lingua della traduzione - per voler essere alla portata di tutti - sia insipida. 

Di tutt'altra natura, invece, l'esperimento poetico della grande poetessa inglese Alice Oswald in Memorial (Faber). "In this short volume of verse, Oswald attempts to convey an aspect of the poem that she feels is often ignored - its enargeia,' which,' she writes, 'means something like bright unbearable reality. It's the word used when the gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves.' Like O'Hare and Peterson, she attempts to capture the Iliad's relentless depiction of the waste of war. She does this by gutting the entire Trojan War narrative  - no stolen brides, no quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon - leaving behind only Homer's pastoral similes and biographies of the hundreds of soldiers slain". nybooks.

Literary Magazines

In un'intervista al Johns Hopkins Magazine Lorin Stein, il direttore della Paris Review, parla del ruolo, ancora importante, delle riviste letterarie.

"We don't need to find a mass market, - Stein says.  - The Paris Review needs to be trusted enough that you make the time [to read it] because we are always going to publish things that are a little bit spiky, a little bit outside one’s comfort zone. We’re a laboratory for fiction and poetry. And if you want to do that and not publish stuff that is easy to publish, then you really need to have a very strong identity [and] people need to trust that brand." jhu.

Flash Fiction

Defined as stories of 1,000 words or less, flash fiction has also spawned microfiction, hint fiction, short short fiction, and a host of other indistinguishable subtypes. Flash fiction is not really a new innovation - a hundred years ago, Franz Kafka and Robert Walser wrote pieces that could fit the label - but it's the kind of cultural product that's easily hawked as suited for our age.

L'articolo di fatto si occupa del bravo scrittore israeliano, Etgar Keret, ma a me interessava soprattutto l'espressione flash fiction, per me nuova. capitalnewyork.