Lore Segal

Una simpatica intervista alla scrittrice Lore Segal, di cui è appena uscito un nuovo romanzo, Half the Kingdom (Melville House). "Ms. Segal’s fifth book in a career that has spanned across five decades is called Half the Kingdom. It begins at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in New York where all the patients over the age of 62 have suddenly developed dementia; Joe Bernstine of the Concordance Institute has been tasked with figuring out why. The narrative jumps between dozens of characters that shuffle in and out, many of which appear in Ms. Segal’s earlier fiction. She has always toyed with the contradictions and overlaps of the banal and the fantastical, and here is its culmination: a fairy tale about the elderly. Ms. Segal’s writing deconstructs the very idea of aging and never shies from the embarrassment that comes with trying to fit in or bearing disappointment. Her career has been a half-century struggle with the conventions of language and the humor inherent in pain, a long meta-commentary on the role of the author herself". observer.

James Wood on Alice Munro

Molto bella l'analisi di James Wood della storia di Alice Munro "The Bear Came Over the Mountain".

"But two additional elements, both characteristic of Munro’s careful art, make it a great story. First, there is Munro’s astounding lack of sentimentality ... The second very Munro-ish element is the formal freedom of the story, which compacts a lot of life into a short space, and moves backwards and forwards over a great deal of terrain." newyorker.

Alice Munro

Parla l'editor di Alice Munro del New Yorker, Deborah Treisman, "Editing Alice Munro’s stories is sometimes a lesson in feeling extraneous. As I’m preparing to tell her that the final paragraph isn’t landing right, she is already faxing a new ending; as I mark up page 5, to show that something hasn’t been properly set up, she is calling to say that she has put a new page 5 in the mail. Sometimes I see a paragraph on page 10 that seems an unnecessary diversion and cross it out; when I get to page 32, I understand why it was absolutely crucial to the story and have to retrace my steps. As we go through the proofs by phone, Alice throws each discussed page on the floor. Going back to an earlier scene requires scavenging. ..." da leggere per intero. newyorker.

Perché così poche donne nelle facoltà scientifiche?

Chiara Daraio, prof. di areonautica  a Pasadena

Un articolo interessante sulla scarsità di donne nelle facoltà scientifiche - fisica e matematica soprattutto - nelle grandi università americane. Un articolo pieno di dati statistici e testimonianze, come sempre, ma che sembra non cogliere del tutto il punto.  
Mi sembra che in Europa - e anche in Italia, un paese apparentemente assai più sessista degli USA - le cose vadano un po' diversamente. Magari le donne non riescono a trovare lavoro (ma neppure gli uomini), ma le facoltà scientifiche ora sono piene di donne.
"Last summer, researchers at Yale published a study proving that physicists, chemists and biologists are likely to view a young male scientist more favorably than a woman with the same qualifications. Presented with identical summaries of the accomplishments of two imaginary applicants, professors at six major research institutions were significantly more willing to offer the man a job. If they did hire the woman, they set her salary, on average, nearly $4,000 lower than the man’s. Surprisingly, female scientists were as biased as their male counterparts...." Eileen Pollack, nyt.

Scrivere di sesso

Il "Sunday Book Review" del New York Times della scorsa domenica è dedicato al sesso. Tra i vari articoli scelgo le riflessioni di Erica Jong, 40 anni dopo la pubblicazione del suo Fear of Flying. 
"Let’s go back to when I was writing “Fear of Flying.” What an amazing time the late ’60s and early ’70s was; you could follow a plume of smoke down the streets of Manhattan and get a contact high. Primitivism was the rage. So was magic. So was feminism. So were sex, open marriage, ethnic equality. We kvelled over books like “Man’s Rise to Civilization as Shown by the Indians of North America From Primeval Times to the Coming of the Industrial State” and “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”; “The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge,” by Carlos Castaneda; “Sisterhood Is Powerful,” edited by Robin Morgan; “Couples,” by John Updike; and “Portnoy’s Complaint,” by Philip Roth. Add to that the poems of Allen Ginsberg — who was already publishing in the ’50s but was suddenly famous in the ’60s because of his public protests against the Vietnam War. And thanks to the Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset and other brave souls, literary censorship had been defeated, and we could now read “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” or “Tropic of Cancer” without going to the locked rare book room at a university library". nytbr.

The Letters of J.F. Powers

J.F. Powers è un bravo scrittore americano di racconti da noi praticamente sconosciuto. Il suo interesse narrativo era soprattutto rivolto al mondo dei cattolici americani del dopoguerra, che descriveva con eleganza e una satira bonaria. E' stato collaboratore del New Yorker. Ora è uscita una raccolta di sue lettere, Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a cura di una dei suoi cinque figli, Katherine A. Powers. Adam Gopnik ne parla sul New Yorker, "... the book provides a wonderful picture of a now lost type: the radical-liberal Catholic of the forties and fifties, whose allegiance to the rules of the Church (all those children!) was part and parcel of his allegiance to what would now seem an extravagant, not to say extremist, egalitarian politics. Katherine Powers rightly calls this' the nearly forgotten American Catholic countercultural religious and social ferment of the mid-twentieth century'." newyorker.

Bookforum intervista Jules Feiffer

And yet he made an interesting film! And a lot of that film works. I was lucky to work with wonderful people. I also did a film with Alan Resnais.

Bookforum: That’s what I meant about the range!

Jules Feiffer: It seems like heady stuff, and of course it was heady. But primarily, it was work I was interested in and work I loved and work that was challenging, and problems that had to be solved, and how to make something better, and how you get it right, not in the first place or second, third, or fifteenth place.

What you learn when you work with first-rate people, whether it’s Mike Nichols or Arkin, is that they are, invariably, except for Altman, less temperamental and less difficult than second-rate people, who always make a problem. The first-rate people are never defensive. And they are quite willing and happy to blame themselves when things get fucked up. bookforum.

Dante narcolettico?

Vengo a sapere dalla stampa anglosassone, dal Guardian in primis, che Dante probabilmente soffriva di narcolessia, secondo il prof. Giuseppe Plazzi dell'università di Bologna.
"Now, an Italian academic has come up with an explanation for why the Florentine poet was apparently so obsessed with slumber – and it's not all about literary technique. Dante, he argues, may have suffered from the neurological disorder narcolepsy.
"I suggest that six centuries before the first scientific report, Dante … depicted narcolepsy with cataplexy (NC) in his literary works as an autobiographical trait," writes Giuseppe Plazzi of the University of Bologna's department of biomedical and neuro-motor sciences in an article for the Sleep Medicine journal". guardian.

FOMO

FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out. Non conoscevo questo acronimo. Lo usa Joshua Ferris (nella foto) in un'intervista sul New Yorker a proposito del suo racconto appena uscito, "The Breeze". L'intervistatore gli chiede infatti come abbia potuto scrivere un racconto sulla frenesia che prende la protagonista in una sera di primavera senza mai usare la parola FOMO. Ecco come risponde Ferris.
"I have lots of FOMO. I get FOMO just choosing what to have for breakfast. You’ve got to go outside, that’s what I’ve learned. Most of your FOMO can be taken care of just by stepping outside and looking up at the sunlight. That’s not possible at night. At night, you just have to seize hold of something or someone that seems worthy of your undivided attention regardless of where you are or what you’re doing. It’s not easy. It’s learning to reconcile yourself. Like memory: have faith you’ll remember what’s important. Have faith you’re in the right place, doing the right thing. Ain’t easy, especially when you look around and everything’s black, boring, and sucky. But it’s important for me to keep in mind: in any given situation, if I can ignore the nagging FOMO, I might make something of the experience, take something meaningful away from it no matter the circumstances". newyorker.

Pitigrilli di Alexander Stille

Molto interessante, l'articolo di Alexander Stille su Pitigrilli, in particolare su Cocaina. "Behind Italy’s official façade of bourgeois morality, traditional family life, and patriotism, Pitigrilli saw a world driven by sex, power and greed, in which adultery, illegitimate children, and hypocrisy were the order of the day and husbands and wives were little more than respectable-seeming pimps and prostitutes. nybooks.