Summer of '38

Questa settimana ci imbattiamo spesso in Colm Tóibín, e con grande piacere. Molto bello il suo racconto, "Summer of '38" sul New Yorker: rivela nel suo modo chiaro, pacato e come pudico un lato profondo e inusuale del rapporto uomo/donna/figli. In un'intervista l'autore dice:

Montse’s eldest child, Rosa, is the product of her affair. Why does Paco, her husband, who is not Rosa’s father, always seem to love this child better than his own, even though he is laughed at by the townspeople for doing so?
Paco is the hero of the story. He knows what he wants. He wants to be married to Montse. He has no pride. He wants her. He is sure about that. If it weren’t for Rosa, he knows, he would not have Montse. He is grateful to the child for giving him the happy domesticity he wanted. newyorker.

Proust alla Morgan Library

La Morgan Library di New York celebra i 100 anni dalla pubblicazione di La strada di Swan con una mostra di taccuini, foto e altri documenti della Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Colm Tóibín coglie l'occasione per fare delle considerazioni interessanti su Marcel e sua mamma e le conseguenze che il loro rapporto hanno sulla scrittura di Marcel. "A specter haunts the exhibition of Proust’s notebooks, manuscripts, and correspondence currently running at the Morgan Library. It is the specter of Proust’s mother. As you move from left to right in the room, the photograph of maman with her two sons, which appears first, sends a shiver down your spine. ... 

The first letter sets the scene. It is written to Marcel from his mother in 1895 when he is twenty-four and in Dieppe with Reynaldo Hahn. She is concerned about what time he goes to bed and what time he rises. Her letter is a demand for precise information. So she writes Couche and leaves a blank for him to fill in and then Leve and leaves another blank. Perhaps it is too fanciful to suggest that when he did begin to explain himself in his long novel, started a few years after his mother’s death, he had the lovely idea that his mother, by dying, had left an enormous blank for him to fill in. She wanted all the details, she wanted to be spared nothing as she sat on her chair in heaven, her eyes cast down, and he would do anything to please her. nybooks.

See Now Then

See Now Then è il titolo del nuovo libro di Jamaica Kincaid, uscito in questi giorni per Farrar, Straus e Giroux. "See Now Then is about the failing marriage between a writer and a composer living in a small New England village. The writer, Mrs. Sweet, is black and from the Caribbean, and her husband, Mr. Sweet, is white and comes from a princely faction of New York “entitled to doormen, no matter what.” The book’s premise appears to be borrowed from Kincaid’s own life: In 2002, her 20-year marriage to the composer Allen Shawn ended in divorce. Kincaid continues to live in the Bennington home they shared". tabletmag.

Anti-Semitism and Anti-Judaism

David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (Norton).
"What is the difference, then, between anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism? The answer, as it unfolds in Nirenberg’s scholarly tour de force, could be summarized this way: Anti-Semitism needs actual Jews to persecute; anti-Judaism can flourish perfectly well without them, since its target is not a group of people but an idea". Adam Kirsch, tabletmag.

The Tricky Art of Writing about Dreams

Della necessità di introdurre dei sogni in un romanzo parla Nicholson Baker,

"I used to think that it was a bad thing to mention dreams in fiction. ... But I rejected that notion ages ago. Dreams are part of the truth of life and the job of a book is to feel its way forward through a character’s days and nights. ... 

The letter O is a good dream letter. It begins the word “oneiric,” which is a dark interesting sharp-edged word that college professors used to use in class in place of “dreamlike.” nybooks.

The Tricky Art of Writing about Love

Egan ed Eugenides

Benjamin Nugent riflette su come alcuni scrittori riescano a parlare d'amore, evitando di essere zuccherosi. "A number of my favorite novels of the last decade ... get away with great warmth — courtship stories that aren’t so different from Hollywood romantic comedies, stories that flirt with cheesiness, triviality, sentimentalism — by using a particular cold vocabulary, the vocabulary of theory. The novels include Leaving the Atocha Station, by Ben Lerner, The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides, A Visit From the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan, Indecision, by Benjamin Kunkel, and The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach..."

Per es. in The Marriage Plot di Eugenides, "... theory provides the language that enables the lovers to communicate". salon.

The Upper East Side Cookbook

The Upper East Side Cookbook series, a set of faux memoirs (and recipes), was launched in 2009 with the publication of “The Upper East Side Cookbook: Setting the Table in a Time of Slender Means.” That volume was followed, in 2011, by “The Upper East Side Cookbook: Main Course”; the third and most recent volume, “Parsley Does Thyme,” was released last month. The series chronicles the progress of its heroine, the chef Parsley Cresswell, through the worlds of fashion journalism and high-end kitchens, but more particularly the series is a beautiful demonstration of both the ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit required by New York freelance life, and the kind of eccentric undertaking that electronic self-publishing makes possible. newyorker.

The Tricky Art of Writing about Sex

Della difficile arte di scrivere di sesso scrive Sam Lipsyte, e dice tra l'altro, "The conventional wisdom says that less is more, and I generally agree ...
Sometimes, though, you have to face the multi-spined beast head on. Be brave, and trust in your love of language and your love of sex. (Or lack of it.) Trust in the modern gods who guide your hand: Sad and Funny. Like it or not, these are the twin poles for most of our tiny thoughts and doings. Sad and Funny are both the world and how we withstand it. newrepublic.

Miti sulla grammatica

You’ve probably heard the old story about the pedant who dared to tinker with Winston Churchill’s writing because the great man had ended a sentence with a preposition. Churchill’s scribbled response: “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.”
It’s a great story, but it’s a myth. And so is that so-called grammar rule about ending sentences with prepositions. ...
Where did these phony rules originate, and why do they persist?
For some of them, we can blame misguided Latinists who tried to impose the rules of their favorite language on English. smithsonianmag.

How to Not Write Bad

How to Not Write Bad è il titolo di un bel libro sulla scrittura di Ben Yagoda, professore di giornalismo alla University of Delaware (Riverhead Trade). Il sottotitolo spiega bene di che cosa si tratta, "the most common writing problems and the best way to avoid them".
"I found much to be grateful for in the Yagoda. I learned the term “epicene pronoun,” meaning the genderless plural “they” or “their” when its antecedent calls for the singular (and gendered) “he or she” or “his or hers”, dice Mary Norris sul newyorker.