Post dedicato ai docenti di scuole americane, che devono essere challenging (che significa poi in pratica?) e sviluppare il critical thinking (che è?). Ecco come quest'ultimo concetto viene definito da Paul Gary Wyckoff, professore di scienze politiche all'Hamiltono College, NY.
1. The ability to think empirically, not theoretically.
2. The ability to think in terms of multiple, rather than single, causes.
3. The ability to think in terms of the sizes of things, rather than only in terms of their direction.
4. The ability to think like foxes, not hedgehogs. 5. The ability to understand one's own biases. insidehighered.
... the most allegedly “difficult” novelist of our generation [David Foster Wallace] spending
time with a crap paperback thriller. You could say that Wallace, here,
was just doing the same kind of thing he did when he spent hours
watching television, a medium he once likened, in its pure embodiment of
desire, to “sugar in human food.” But he seemed to think there was
something else there. In his syllabi, which are all over the web, it
turns out he assigned these books to his students. He assigned Joan
Collins and Mary Higgins Clark and Thomas Harris. And he cautioned students:
“Don’t let any potential lightweightish-looking qualities of the texts
delude you into thinking this is a blow-off type class. These ‘popular’
texts will end up being harder than more conventionally ‘literary’ works
to unpack and read critically.”Even if we are not talking
“literary merit,” whatever that is, the soothing effect of getting lost
might in itself have critical value. Some people, when they’re lost,
read the Bible; others go for a walk; still others houseclean. Me, like
Wallace and his mother, I read an allegedly “bad” book, often one I’ve
read before. Michelle Dean, therumpus.
Oyster è un'app per leggere libri sul proprio telefono. E' un spotify for books. "Members receive unlimited access to an ever-growing collection of books for a single monthly price", dicono i fondatori - Eric Stromberg, Andrew Brown, e Willem Van Lanckersul loro blog.
When
we started working this summer, we were inspired by the belief that the
transformation from the print book to digital is still in its earliest
phase. We knew it was important to find partners who feel the same way
and believe in our vision as much as we do".
Non è un esperimento nuovo, ma è pur sempre divertente. Il Guardian ha sfidato alcuni scrittori a scrivere un racconto in 140 caratteri. Eccone alcuni:
David Lodge:
"Your money or your life!" "I'm sorry, my dear, but you know it would
kill me to lose my money," said the partially deaf miser to his wife.
Hari Kunzru:
I'm here w/ disk. Where ru? Mall too crowded to see. I don't feel safe.
What do you mean you didn't send any text? Those aren't your guys? theguardian.
The Millions (TM) intervista Daniel Mendelsohn (DM) sulle recensioni.
TM: There is a formula for criticism in the piece
which says that knowledge + taste = meaningful judgment, with an
emphasis on meaningful. What makes a critique meaningful? As you point
out, a lot of people have opinions who are not really critics and there
are lots of people who are experts on subjects who don’t write good
criticism. If everyone is not really a critic, where is the magic?
DM: It’s a very interesting question. It is magic,
it’s a kind of alchemy. We all have opinions, and many people have
intelligent opinions. But that’s not the same. Nor is it the case that
great experts are good critics. I come out of an academic background so
I’m very familiar with that end of the spectrum of knowledge. I spent a
lot of my journalistic career as a professional explainer of the
Classics—when I first started writing whenever there was some Greek
toga-and-sandals movie they would always call me in—so I developed the
sense of what it means to mediate between expertise and accessibility.
You use the word magic, which I very well might make part of my stock
Homeric epithet about criticism. It’s intangible, what goes on. I know a
good critic when I read one.
It’s a hard thing to nail down, but that’s why I described it as a
kind of recipe. Look, it’s exactly like a recipe. Three people can make
grandma’s noodle kugel but only Grandma’s noodle kugel tastes like
Grandma’s noodle kugel. themillions.
This author [Mo Yan], born in 1955 into a peasant family in northern China, sets a
groaning table of brutal incident, magic realism, woman-worship, nature
description, and far-flung metaphor. The Chinese novel, perhaps, had no
Victorian heyday to teach it decorum; certainly both Su Tong and Mo Yan
are cheerfully free with the physical details that accompany sex,
birth, illness, and violent death.
New Yorker, 9 maggio 2005.
Marilynne Robinson, Casa (Einaudi), traduzione di Eva Kampmann. Un romanzo molto bello, e duro che mette in scena il brutale scontro tra la debolezza umana e la spietatezza della bontà puntando l'attenzione - quasi maniacalmente - sul contorno delle azioni quotidiani in cui ha luogo. L'azione si svolge a Gilead, Iowa, negli anni Cinquanta e i personaggi sono più o meno gli stessi del romanzo precedente che prendeva il nome dalla cittadina. Cambiano le prospettive e i toni.
Un lungo articolo di Howard Jacobson (di cui è appena uscito il nuovo romanzo, Zoo Time, Bloomsbury), sui bad boy's books, ovviamente a favore, e spiritoso. Inizia così, "I was once told by a publisher that a novel I'd submitted "lacked
redemption". I could not contain my excitement. At last, I said to my
agent, I'd written, and been recognised for writing, a bad boys' book.
She looked at the carpet for what seemed like hours. "I think what
they're trying to say," she replied, when the silence could go on no
longer, "is that they don't like it." guardian.
Today the Oxford English Dictionary announces the launch of OED Appeals, a dedicated community space on the OED website where OED editors
solicit help in unearthing new information about the history and usage
of English. The website will enable the public to post evidence in
direct response to editors, fostering a collective effort to record the
English language and find the true roots of our vocabulary. oup.
When Marina Keegan died, tragically, at the age of twenty-two, in a
car accident in May, she had just graduated from Yale University and was
about to start a job on the editorial staff of The New Yorker. ... She was also at the beginning of a promising career as a writer—of
plays, of journalism, and of fiction. ... Her story “Cold Pastoral,” in which a college student is forced to
reassess her relationship and herself when she reads her boyfriend’s
diary after his death, has a skillfully controlled comedy to it ... At the same time, it shows an acute, almost clinical understanding of
the mixture of arrogance and vulnerability, of pretense and emotion,
with which its twenty-something characters pursue and evade real
attachment.
Per leggere questo bel racconto cliccare qui.
