Peter Matthiessen

Lo scrittore Peter Matthiessen è morto a 86 anni il 5 aprile. Jeff Jimmelman ne fa un bel ritratto sul NYT. Come spesso mi accade, sono attratta in particolare dalla descrizione della casa: "The home used to be the garage and outbuildings of a larger estate, and there is an improvised, of-the-earth sprawl to the place. One side of the main house is grown over with ivy, and under the portico, in between two piles of chopped firewood, an immense finback whale skull balances on blocks. Just to the left of the front door sits a tree stump covered stupalike with shells and other found objects. After I ring the doorbell and rap a few times on the glass, Matthiessen emerges from his living room and waves me in". nyt.

Il caso Ayaan Hirsi Ali e Brandeis University

Brandeis University’s decision to withdraw an honorary degree from the activist and writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali is yet another shameful reminder of how limp the commitment of Jewish institutions to open discourse has grown, and how threatened we’ve all become by a public conversation that permits the expression of nuanced, complicated, even at times offensive ideas—meaning, any ideas at all worth their salt. tablet

Vera Nabokov

Tutti gli scrittori avrebbero bisogno di una Vera Nabokov. "Vera not only performed all the duties expected of a wife of her era—that is, being a free live-in cook, babysitter, laundress, and maid (albeit, she considered herself a “terrible housewife”)—but also acted as her husband’s round-the-clock editor, assistant, and secretary. In addition to teaching his classes on occasion (in which Nabokov openly referred to her as “my assistant”), Vera also famously saved Lolita, the work that would define her husband’s career, several times from incineration, according to Stacy Schiff ‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2000 biography, Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov). With Vera by his side, Nabokov published 18 novels between 1926 and 1974 (both in Russian and English)". Koa Beck, theatlantic.

Woman of Valor

Lihi Lapid, Woman of Valor (Gefen Publishing House). “I realized I have two women living inside of me. One is the donut from Hanukkah, and the other is the champagne from New Year’s. The champagne wants to party all night and the donut needs to wake up tomorrow for the kids. The donut wants the kids to eat only food that she made. And the champagne stopped on the way and bought cold pizza, because she didn’t have time.” 
Lihi Lapid ha 46 anni, è israeliana ed è la moglie del ministro delle finanze di Israele. Tiene una rubrica per Yediot Aharonot che parla di ricette e aneddoti di amore e bambini (un'idea che mi piace molto).  tablet.

Casebook

Mona Simpson, Casebook (Knopf): In the opening scene of Simpson’s new novel, Miles Adler-Hart is hiding under his parents’ bed. He’s trying to eavesdrop on his mother (“the Mims,” he calls her), convinced that she is having vital conversations with the moms of the other kids in his fourth-grade class to decide how much TV he will be allowed to watch. Instead, he stumbles into the breakup of his parents’ marriage. Their divorce and relationships with new partners are shown through the eyes of Miles, who snoops deep into his parents’ adult lives, but has limited understanding of what he discovers there. There’s warm humor and deep feeling in its portrayal of the vulnerability and messiness of family life. newyorker.

Infisitesimal

Amir Alexander, Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World (Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux): The paradoxical idea of infinitesimal quantities preoccupied ancient Greek mathematicians, especially Archimedes, who used the concept to calculate volumes of circles, cylinders, and spheres. But the mathematical mysteries the idea presented were largely ignored until the fifteen-hundreds, when the problem of the infinitesimal became a source of philosophical dispute. In his new book, Alexander, a professor of history at U.C.L.A., explains how the mathematical debate was a battle over differing visions for modern Europe, between those who sought to protect the status quo and those who embraced progress and reform. newyorker.

Odd Job Man

Odd Job Man: Some Confessions of a Slang Lexicographer (Cape), è il memoriale di Jonathon Green, lessicografo britannico appassionato di slang. "Slang represents humanity at its most human - writes Jonathon Green in one of his signature declarative sentences, which leave a slight sense of the author looking around, whiskers a-quiver, to see if anyone is going to yell out “scuzzball” or “swamp-breath”, before he plunges on to supply us with a further definition: slang is the lexis of “our less admirable but absolutely unavoidable selves”. telegraph.

Lorem Ipsum

Sometimes, when we’re putting together an issue of the LRB, we use Lorem Ipsum, a chunk of phoney Latin dummy text that’s been used by printers and typesetters since the 16th century. We paste it into a layout so we can tell what a page will look like before the copy’s ready. The practice is known as ‘greeking’ because the Latin’s so mixed up it’s all Greek.

Only it isn’t. The text itself has been designed not to communicate, to have the look of text but no meaning – but meaning bubbles up through it nonetheless. ... Nick Richardson sulle possibili traduzioni di "lorem ipsum", tls.

Sometimes, when we’re putting together an issue of the LRB, we use Lorem Ipsum, a chunk of phoney Latin dummy text that’s been used by printers and typesetters since the 16th century. We paste it into a layout so we can tell what a page will look like before the copy’s ready. The practice is known as ‘greeking’ because the Latin’s so mixed up it’s all Greek.
Only it isn’t. The text itself has been designed not to communicate, to have the look of text but no meaning – but meaning bubbles up through it nonetheless.
- See more at: http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/03/14/nick-richardson/translating-lorem-ipsum/#sthash.X3b9abwx.dpuf

Sometimes, when we’re putting together an issue of the LRB, we use Lorem Ipsum, a chunk of phoney Latin dummy text that’s been used by printers and typesetters since the 16th century. We paste it into a layout so we can tell what a page will look like before the copy’s ready. The practice is known as ‘greeking’ because the Latin’s so mixed up it’s all Greek.
Only it isn’t. The text itself has been designed not to communicate, to have the look of text but no meaning – but meaning bubbles up through it nonetheless.
- See more at: http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/03/14/nick-richardson/translating-lorem-ipsum/#sthash.X3b9abwx.dpuf

Sometimes, when we’re putting together an issue of the LRB, we use Lorem Ipsum, a chunk of phoney Latin dummy text that’s been used by printers and typesetters since the 16th century. We paste it into a layout so we can tell what a page will look like before the copy’s ready. The practice is known as ‘greeking’ because the Latin’s so mixed up it’s all Greek.
Only it isn’t. The text itself has been designed not to communicate, to have the look of text but no meaning – but meaning bubbles up through it nonetheless.
- See more at: http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/03/14/nick-richardson/translating-lorem-ipsum/#sthash.X3b9abwx.dpuf

Sometimes, when we’re putting together an issue of the LRB, we use Lorem Ipsum, a chunk of phoney Latin dummy text that’s been used by printers and typesetters since the 16th century. We paste it into a layout so we can tell what a page will look like before the copy’s ready. The practice is known as ‘greeking’ because the Latin’s so mixed up it’s all Greek.
Only it isn’t. The text itself has been designed not to communicate, to have the look of text but no meaning – but meaning bubbles up through it nonetheless.
- See more at: http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/03/14/nick-richardson/translating-lorem-ipsum/#sthash.X3b9abwx.dpuf

Sleep Donation

Sleep Donation è il titolo di un romanzo di Karen Russell, uscito solo in versione digitale da Atavist Books. E sembra un libro originale e molto bello, tra il mistery e la fantascienza. "Not that you will be reading Sleep Donation for the plot or even for the themes. You will be reading it for the pleasure of Russell’s language, which is acrid, luminous, and deft, and for the way she confuses the ordinary and the marvelous. She is a special kind of magical realist in that she is wholly committed to both registers". Katy Waldman su slate.

Should literary criticism be an art or a science?

Joshua Rothman cerca di rispondere a questa domanda, usando Franco Moretti e il suo metodo, "... my guess is that, while many critics will admire Moretti, relatively few will follow him. The technical skills are learnable; English majors can take computer-science courses. But the sacrifices, intellectually and, as it were, artistically, are too great. Moretti, it seems to me, has set out on a one-way mission. In ordinary literary criticism—the kind that splits the difference between art and science—there is a give-and-take between the general and the particular. You circle back from theory to text; you compromise, or ennoble, science with art. But Moretti’s criticism doesn’t work that way. Generality is the whole point. By the end of his journey, Moretti may be able to see all of literature, but he’ll see it as an astronaut on Mars might see the Earth: from afar, with no way home". newyorker.