Roth Unbound: A Writer and his Books, di Claudia Roth Pierpoint (Jonathan Cape) è una sorta di biografia di Philip Roth e di critica dei suoi libri. Tra l'altro parla del profondo rapporto tra lo scrittore americano e Primo Levi. Ian Thomson dice:
"From
the late 1950s to the present, says Pierpont, Roth has remained
faithful to the theme of America and the vagaries of American Jewish
life. Not exclusively, though: his novel Operation Shylock
(1993), set partly in Israel, pays anguished if comic tribute to the
Italian writer and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, whom Roth had long
admired.
Roth met Levi in the spring of 1986. If Levi was unprepared for
Roth’s engagingly gentle presence, Roth found Levi surprisingly
sociable. (“With some people you just unlock,” Roth recalled.) As they
said goodbye outside the Italian Cultural Institute in London, Levi told
Roth: “You know, this has all come too late.” The encounter
nevertheless proved to be one the most important in 20th-century
literature. Roth afterwards interviewed Levi for the New York Times and
helped to consolidate Levi’s reputation across the Atlantic. Accompanied
by Bloom, Roth had called on Levi in September 1986 at the paint and
varnish factory outside Turin where he had worked as an industrial
chemist. The staff were warned not to mention Portnoy’s Complaint, as Roth was apparently no longer so fond of his “masturbation novel”.
Seven months later, Levi was dead. The effect on Roth of Levi’s
suicide in 1987 was “staggering”, Roth told Pierpont, adding: “It hit me
like the assassinations of the sixties.” Although Roth had cultivated
friendships with other European writers, notably Ivan Klíma and Milan
Kundera, his friendship with Levi, Pierpoint says, had gone “remarkably
deep”. ft.
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| Interrobang |
Avviamo l'anno 2014 con un post sulla punteggiatura, uno degli argomenti che ci è caro. Anche se il segno @ si può ascrivere alla punteggiatura?
"If popularizing a punctuation mark is difficult, the task seems to be at
least marginally easier if the symbol has historical roots. Unlike the
interrobang, whose conception, creation, rise, and fall were all
observable within a decade, the @ symbol has been around for centuries
and is now enjoying widespread resurgence thanks to the Internet. While
its exact origins are unknown, the earliest recorded use of the @ symbol
is in a letter sent from Seville to Rome, dated May 4, 1536. In it, a
Florentine merchant named Francesco Lapi discusses ships arriving in
Spain from the New World and the price at which they sold one amphora of wine. An amphora
was a standard Roman commercial measure (equivalent to about 26 liters)
and seems to have set the precedent for the symbol’s use: From all
other extant records, “@” has related the quantity of a product sold @ a
certain price. weeklystandard.
Auguro a tutti BUON ANNO NUOVO con la segnalazione di un curioso libro di cucina, The
Modern Art Cookbook, di Mary Ann Caws (Reaktion). Ecco quel che ne dice Alex Danchev:
"Connecting the senses is what The
Modern Art Cookbook is all about. For Mary Ann Caws, the larger purpose
of this delectable anthology is the association of reading, looking and
cooking. It is a potpourri (or perhaps a bouillabaisse) of literary texts in
verse and prose, recipes and images: paintings, for the most part, spiced
with photographs and film stills – Salvador Dalí photographed by Luis
Buñuel, Cadaqués, 1929, opposite Pablo Picasso’s Scramble in Sea Urchin
Shells (sixteen sea urchins, six very fresh eggs, two soup spoons of crème
fraiche, twelve chervil sprigs, salt and pepper); Edward Weston, “Pepper
No.30” (1930), opposite Nancy Willard’s “How To Stuff a Pepper”; Bogart and
bottle in Casablanca, opposite a recipe for Maryse Condé’s
Planter’s Punch; the servants at table, below stairs, in The
Rules of the Game, opposite a recipe for Jean Renoir’s Potato Salad,
from that same film".TLS.
L'aggiornamento del blog riprenderà il 10 gennaio 2014.
Auguro ai miei lettori buon Natale con un articolo interessantissimo - una sorta di giallo - su un racconto di Dorothy Parker intitolato "Lolita", uscito sul New Yorker alla fine dell'agosto del 1955, pochi giorni prima che Lolita di Nabokov uscisse in Francia, dopo esser stato rifiutato da tutti gli editori newyorchesi.
"By 1955, the writing careers of Vladimir Nabokov and Dorothy Parker were headed in opposite directions. Parker’s was in a deep slump. The New Yorker—a
magazine she had been instrumental in founding—had not published her
fiction in fourteen years. Nabokov, by contrast, was becoming a literary
sensation. The New Yorker had published several of his short stories as well as chapters of his autobiography Conclusive Evidence and of his novel Pnin. His next novel, Lolita,
would bring him worldwide recognition for its virtuosic prose and the
shocking story of a middle-aged man’s relationship with his pubescent
stepdaughter and her aggressive mother. It was a manuscript that Nabokov
circulated very little because he feared the controversy that would
erupt when it was published.
Yet three weeks before Lolita arrived in bookstores in France,
where it first came out that September, Parker published a story—in The New Yorker,
of all places—titled “Lolita,” and it centered on an older man, a teen
bride, and her jealous mother. How could this have come to pass?" Galya Diment su vulture.
Da un'intervista a Daniel Mendelsohn su come concepisce la critica letteraria:
I want to end by asking you about
your experience of teaching. Do you think it might be worth teaching
undergraduates not only how to write academic essays but also how to
write criticism of the kind one finds in magazines and popular journals?
First of all, I think undergraduates
should be kept away from Theory at all costs. I don’t think people
should be allowed to even hear the word “theory” until they’re doing
graduate work—for the very good reason that it’s impossible to theorise
about texts before one has deep familiarity with them (not that that
stopped anyone in the 1980s when I was in grad school). Undergraduates
should be taught to have a clean appreciation of what texts say and how
they say them, and learn how to write intelligently and clearly about
that. If undergraduates had to have a model of criticism it ought to be
popular criticism rather than traditional academic criticism. prospectmagazine.
Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life è il titolo della biografia di Primo Levi scritta da Berel Lang (Yale UP). "Lang is an emeritus professor of philosophy at SUNY Albany who has
written widely on the Holocaust. His book on Levi is an intellectual
biography characterized by a somewhat schematic set of speculations on
some of the basic elements of Levi’s life, each one arranged around the
central experience of Auschwitz. Among the questions Lang ponders: If it
wasn’t for Auschwitz, would Levi have written at all? If it wasn’t for
Auschwitz, would he have become a self-conscious Jew? If it wasn’t for
Auschwitz, would he have killed himself? The book begins with the
question of Levi’s suicide, which Lang rightly says is almost always the
first thing people talk about when Levi’s name comes up". thenation.
The MOST of Nora Ephron (Knopf) racchiude tutti gli scritti, giornalistici e non, della scrittrice, che viene descritta acutamente da Heather Havrilesky, in contrapposizione a Joan Didion.
"When life gave Ephron lemons, in other words, she made a giant vat of
really good vodka-spiked lemonade and invited all of her friends and her
friends’ friends over to share it, and gossip, and play charades.
Whereas when life gave Joan Didion lemons, she stared at them for
several months, and then crafted a haunting bit of prose about the lemon
and orange groves that were razed and paved over to make Hollywood, in
all of its sooty wretchedness—which is precisely what this mixed-up
world does to everything that’s fresh and young and full of promise. ...
Didion’s preoccupation with the cultural tides might naturally seem to
dwarf Ephron’s concern with the mundane dilemmas that haunt urban
aristocrats—why bother with egg-white omelets, exactly? how would we
live without Teflon?—but Ephron was just as skilled at identifying the
ever-changing mood around her. Who else but Ephron could express the
fickle tastes of the Manhattan bourgeoisie through their shifting
opinions of salad? “This was right around the time endive was
discovered, which was followed by arugula, which was followed by
radicchio, which was followed by frisée, which was followed by the three
M’s—mesclun, mâche, and microgreens—and that, in a nutshell, is the
history of the last forty years from the point of view of lettuce.” bookforum.
Un eccentrico ricercatore statunitense che ora vive in Israele cerca di dimostrare che la lingua madre di tutte le lingue è l'ebraico biblico. Si tratta di Isaac E. Mozeson, fondatore del movimento chiamato "Edenics".
"It was a little birdie that whispered the Edenic concept into my ear back in 1978,” Mozeson wrote,
describing a time when he was a doctoral student of literature at New
York University (he never completed the degree). “I was stuck with a
boring linguistics requirement. One day our professor was demonstrating
the genius of what he said was the Indo-European root for the generic
bird word SPER. Suddenly my mind harkened back to my second-grade Hebrew
class when I first learned a similar generic word for bird … TSIPOR.”
This chance event set off in Mozeson a train of thought that would
consume him for the next 35 years as he came to believe—and set out to
prove—that Hebrew was the root of all languages. The lack of approval
from the linguistics establishment did not dampen Mozeson’s enthusiasm
for his theory, and he went on to publish two books on the subject. The Word: The Dictionary That Reveals the Hebrew Roots of English (1989), a 300-page book with some 20,000 English-Hebrew linked words, and The Origin of Speeches (2006), in which words from multiple languages are connected to Hebrew". Hezy Laing su tablet.
Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It è il titolo di un libro - sul suicidio e sulle ragioni per non commetterlo - di Jennifer Michael Hecht (Princeton UP).
"Jennifer Michael Hecht presents two big
counterideas that she hopes people contemplating potential suicides will
keep in their heads. Her first is that, “Suicide is delayed homicide.”
Suicides happen in clusters, with one person’s suicide influencing the
other’s. If a parent commits suicide, his or her children are three
times as likely to do so at some point in their lives. In the month
after Marilyn Monroe’s overdose, there was a 12 percent increase in
suicides across America. People in the act of committing suicide may
feel isolated, but, in fact, they are deeply connected to those around.
As Hecht put it, if you want your niece to make it through her dark
nights, you have to make it through yours.
Her second argument is that you owe it to your future self to live". David Brooks, nyt.
Il primo libro stampato in inglese d'America è "The Whole Booke of Psalmes". Alla fine di novembre una delle undici copie rimaste è stata venduta all'asta da Sotheby's a Manhattan per 14.2 milioni di dollari. A comprarla è stato David Rubenstein. "Rubenstein, a co-founder of the private equity firm the Carlyle Group,
whose worth Forbes has estimated at $2.5 billion, has given away tens of
millions, if not more, in philanthropy, and is famous for buying
important copies of iconic documents such as the Magna Carta, the
Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation and
loaning them to branches of the federal government". huffingtonpost.
