Una vecchia storia di Stephen King, "Harvey's Dream", adatta all'estate. La ripresenta Josua Rothman, "Like many stories in The New Yorker, “Harvey’s Dream”
takes place in Connecticut. That said, Stephen King’s Connecticut is
very different from John Cheever’s. As the story begins, Janet Stevens
is in her kitchen, making hard-boiled eggs on “a summer morning in late
June.” Her husband, Harvey, is also there—a sixty-something guy in a
T-shirt and boxers, a little worse for wear. (“He looked like what the
goons on ‘The Sopranos’ called a mope,” Janet thinks.) She’s ruminating
about how well she sleeps in summertime, when, because of her allergies,
she and Harvey sleep in separate beds. Then Harvey pipes up. He had a
bad dream last night, he says; in fact, “I screamed myself awake.” He
continues..." newyorker.
Il racconto, dopo essere stato dominato da Updike, i minimalisti, ecc. sta ora esprimendo toni e forme nuove. "... it’s been a thrill in the last five years or so to watch the
revitalization of the genre by writers with more various and daring
emotional aims. There was the shock of seeing Lydia Davis’
unprogrammatic shorts collected in a single volume, for instance, and one reason I think George Saunders’ Tenth of December
was embraced with such joy, in fact nearly relief, is because it was
full of stories in which stuff actually happened (serial killers!
lottery victories!), with a kind of tender irony cutting back against
any resulting hazard of melodrama".
Poi Charles Finch passa a parlare - molto bene - di questo scrittore, Stuart Dybek (nella foto), che non conosco neanche di nome e di cui FS&G sta pubblicando una serie di raccolte di racconti. slate.
Two Serious Ladies è il titolo del romanzo scandaloso di Jane Bowles, la moglie di Paul Bowles. Uscito originalmente nel 1943, parla della relazione di una donna borghese di mezz'età con una giovanissima prostituta a Colon, Panama. "The recent reissue of the novel by HarperCollins, the second since
Bowles’s collected works were released in 1967, provides an occasion to
revisit the underknown half of a famous couple—she was married to the
considerably more prolific and ultimately more celebrated Paul Bowles.
Hard drinking, hard living, and neurotic, the outlines of Jane’s
exhaustingly dramatic persona very often overshadowed her art. At forty,
while living in Tangier, she suffered a debilitating stroke that would
send her into premature convalescence. She died sixteen years later,
alone, in a Spanish convent. And yet her literary output, small but
perfect, puts her on a stylistic planet all her own". Negar Azimi, newyorker.
Do Fathers Matter? è il titolo di un libro di Paul Raeburn, giornalista scientifico e padre di cinque figli (FS&G). Il punto del libro sta tutto nella domanda del titolo, la cui risposta in parta è ovvia - se non ci fossero i padri non esisteremmo - in parte molto complicata. Per es. "Raeburn’s book aims to dispel this uncertainty about fathers’ roles in
their children’s lives. It turns out, for example, that, just as the
healthfulness and mental state of a pregnant mother can influence her
child’s health and wellness, a father’s health at the time of conception
can affect his children’s health: stressed-out fathers tend to produce
more stressed-out children". Joshua Rothman, newyorker.
La situazione è più tragica di quel che si pensa. "Everyone knows that English departments are in trouble, but you can’t appreciate just how much trouble until you read the new report from the Modern Language Association.
(The M.L.A. is the professional association for teachers of literature
and language.) The report is about Ph.D. programs, which have been in
decline since 2008. These programs have gotten both more difficult and
less rewarding: today, it can take almost a decade to get a doctorate,
and, at the end of your program, you’re unlikely to find a tenure-track
job. Motivated by “concern about the future of humanistic study,” the
M.L.A. asked a committee of eight scholars to go on a listening tour,
talking to professors, administrators, students, and “employers outside
the academy” about how the system might be fixed. Professors are always
complaining about “committee work”; judging by the report this one
produced, this was the least fun committee imaginable". Joshua Roth, newyorker.
A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing è il titolo di un romanzo di Eimear McBride (Faber & Faber), una giovane scrittrice inglese che ha vinto il Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. E' un libro angosciante e scritto con una prosa molto sperimentale. Non amo questo tipo di libri, ma stranamente sono arrivata fino in fondo, trascinata dal ritmo della lingua più che dalla storia. Non so se è un libro che consiglierei, certamente sarebbe una sfida per un traduttore. Una delle frasi fa: "Have this yours mine his hers whose that and what's the matter don't you care at all?". nyt.
Michael S. Roth, presidente di Wesleyan University, ha scritto un libro interessante e non banale sulle humanities e la loro importanza, Beyond the University (Yale UP), sottotilo, Why Liberal Education Matters. Ce lo presenta Christopher B. Nelson, "The book’s supporting framework, which Roth borrows from the
education scholar Bruce Kimball, is the idea that two distinct
traditions of liberal education have “uneasily co-existed” in America.
The first is a philosophical tradition emphasizing preparation for
inquiry; its aim is freeing the mind to investigate the truth about
things physical, intellectual and spiritual. The second is a rhetorical
tradition emphasizing initiation into a common culture through the study
of canonical works; its aim is learning to participate in the culture,
to appreciate its monuments and to create new monuments inspired by the
old. Roth characterizes the philosophical thread as “skeptical” and the
rhetorical thread as “reverential.”
The central argument is that liberal education is some combination of
these two traditions that aims at serving the needs of the “whole
person.” washingtonpost.
L'Harvard Gazette intervista Stephen Greenblatt, professore di inglese a Harvard.
Q: Tell me about your boyhood. What might have put you on your path to being a scholar?
A: One constant theme in my whole life is a
fascination, somewhat compulsive fascination, with the power of stories.
Anyone who works on the kinds of things I do must, I imagine, have
something of the same compulsion. For me, as for most everyone else, the
sense that stories are powerful and important has its origin at home,
that is, locally and intimately. In different ways both my mother and
father were storytellers — my mother quietly and rather shyly; my father
in a much more florid, performative way. When we walked to his law
office in Boston, it was very difficult to get up or down State Street
in a reasonable amount of time because he would constantly run into
people and they would immediately begin to trade stories — this being
Boston in the 1950s they were largely ethnic stories, often with punch
lines I did not understand.
I grew up with the rhythms of these stories in my ears, and on my
mother’s side more intimate stories, made up specially for me, and in
which I figured as a character. If I were to ask myself, why have I
thought my whole life that stories are an enormously powerful way of
conveying things that are most important to a human being, it must be
this peculiar inculcation in the family and home. harvardgazette.
"Ailourophilia" è il titolo di un raccontino di Muriel Spark inserito in The Informed Air (New Directions), una raccolta di saggi dell'autrice appena uscito. Parla dell'amore per i gatti e inizia così, "If I were not a Christian I would worship the Cat. The ancient Egyptians
did so with much success. But at least it seems evident to me that the
domestic cat is the aristocrat of the animal kingdom, occupying a place
of quality in the Great Chain of Being second only to our aspiring,
agitated and ever-evolving selves". bookforum.
Il New York Times chiede a scrittori di indicare quali scrittori invidiano. Ecco come risponde Daniel Mendelsohn, "For all these reasons, the writer whose life and career seem to me most
enviable is Sophocles, whose “Oedipus” — considered by many (not least,
Aristotle) to be the greatest of all Greek tragedies and written, it’s
worth pointing out, when the author was nearly 70 — ends with that dire
warning about too-hasty appraisals of people’s lives. He himself had no
cause for alarm. In his private life, he was almost uncannily blessed;
in his art, even more so". nyt.
