Un genere che mi appassiona, non solo perché mi ricorda anni molto divertenti passati in diversi campus degli USA come studentessa e come prof., ma anche perché il campus rappresenta un microcosmo adattissimo alla creazione di storie, un villaggio protetto e privilegiato abitato da gente interessante, vitale e molto disposta a intrecciare ogni genere di rapporto reciproco.
Un articolo raccoglie la voce di cinque prof. di letteratura che analizzano cinque campus novels: "Former Wellesley College and Cornell University lecturer Vladimir
Nabokov is cited twice, for two different books, while ex-University of
Sydney, University of Cambridge and Wolverhampton Polytechnic academic
Howard Jacobson also figures prominently". timeshighereducation.
Il sottotitolo dice: "Academics who don’t retire are greedy, selfish, and bad for students". Anche in America il corpo docenti sta invecchiando. In America i professori non hanno limiti d'età per andare in pensione e di solito tendono a continuare a insegnare fino a tarda età. Secondo Laurie Fendrich, prof. emerita di arte a Hofstra University questo è un gran problema:
"The average age for all tenured professors nationwide is now approaching 55 and creeping upward; the number of professors 65 and older more than doubled between 2000 and 2011. In spite of those numbers, according to a Fidelity Investments study
conducted about a year ago, three-quarters of professors between 49 and
67 say they will either delay retirement past age 65 or—gasp!—never
retire at all. They ignore, or are oblivious to, the larger implications
for their students, their departments, and their colleges". chronicleofhighereducation.
Le password dicono molto di noi, creano problemi e li risolvono, sono sbarramenti o porte di accesso a mondi segreti. Possono avviare storie... come questa: "Howard Lutnick, the chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, one of the
world’s largest financial-services firms, still cries when he talks
about it. Not long after the planes struck the twin towers, killing 658
of his co-workers and friends, including his brother, one of the first
things on Lutnick’s mind was passwords. This may seem callous, but it
was not ...". Ian Urbina, newyorktimesmagazine.
Un titolo interessante, che pone una domanda che anch'io mi sono chiesta molte volte (in Italia il clima intellettuale è particolarmente soffocante). Vale la pena leggere l'articolo del critico d'arte newyorkese Jerry Saltz.
"First and foremost, the art world is a place that says it wants
people to be free. This extraordinary openness is what gives art its
ever-changing adaptable agency. Or gave.
Flexibility is life, but lately I keep thinking that the art world
has gotten a lot less flexible, and the freedom that I've always thought
of as completely foundational — freedom to let our freak flags fly and
express ourselves, even bizarrely — has constricted considerably. And
it’s happening at such mutated and extreme rates that we must ask if the
art world is not now one of the more self-policing areas of
contemporary culture. How did we come to live in an insular tribal
sphere where unwritten rules and rigid moralities — about whom to like
and dislike, what is permissible to say and what must remain unsaid —
are strictly enforced via social media and online disapproval, much of
it anonymous? When did this band of gypsies and relentless radicals get
so conservative?" volture.
La "Moby Dick Marathon" si è tenuta dal 14 al 16 novembre in vari locali di Manhattan dove scrittori e non hanno letto l'intero romanzo di Melville. A Joshua Ferris è toccato leggere un punto particolarmente ostico. "The novelist Joshua Ferris was standing in the basement of the Ace Hotel
in Midtown on Friday night, looking frustrated. He had just read ten
minutes of “Moby-Dick” to a crowd of more than a hundred devotees. He
was pretty sure he hadn’t nailed his passage. “I was confronted with a
shit-ton of tribal names!” Ferris said. He opened his copy of the book
and pointed to the passage, which read: “But, besides the Feegeeans,
Tongatobooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians, and Brighggians, and,
besides the wild specimens of the whaling-craft which unheeded reel
about the streets, you will see other sights still more curious,
certainly more comical.” He shook his head. “That word has three ‘g’ ’s
in it and only three consonants! And this one has four ‘e’ ’s in it.” newyorker.
Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (Palgrave Macmillan)
David Rose, Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things (Scribner)
Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy (Patrick Brewster)
Jim Dwyer, More Awesome Than Money: Four Boys and Their Heroic Quest to Save Your Privacy from Facebook (Viking)
Strano non ci sia Morozov. Comunque, se volete saperne di più sull'argomento, leggetevi Sue Halpern, nybooks.
Social topics—personal relationships, likes and dislikes, anecdotes
about social activities—made up about two-thirds of all conversations in
analyses
done by evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar. The remaining one-third
of their time not spent talking about other people was devoted to
discussing everything else: sports, music, politics, etc.
“Language in freely forming natural conversations is principally used
for the exchange of social information,” Dunbar writes. “That such
topics are so overwhelmingly important to us suggests that this is a
primary function of language.” He even goes so far as to say: “Gossip is
what makes human society as we know it possible.” Julie Beck, theatlantic.
PEN America has launched a new website for First Editions/Second Thoughts, for which seventy-five authors and artists personally annotated their own books. Highlights include Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, Angela Davis’s If They Come in the Morning, John Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath, Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Ed Ruscha’s Past Stuff. Some of the handwritten annotations are quite elaborate, such as the ones on the TOC page of George Saunders’s Civilwarland in Bad Decline, which incorporates footnotes and various colors of ink. The works will be auctioned at Christie’s on December 2.
Richard Ford parla del suo nuovo libro, Let Me Be Frank with You (Ecco) con Deborah Treisman.
Eight years ago, you thought “The Lay of the
Land” would be the final book in the Frank Bascombe series. What do you
think has made you go back to Frank again (and again)?
A
number of forces were acting on me. First, of course, was the force
that Thoreau was referring to when he said that a writer is someone with
nothing to do who finds something to do. I qualified, as I
mostly have for years. Second was that during the promotional tour for
my last novel, “Canada,” a surprising number of people who showed up to
have books signed said, quite touchingly (to me), that they wished I’d
write another Frank Bascombe book. Now, neither of these things ought to compel anybody to write a book, and they probably didn’t. But they affected me.
What
did compel me was Hurricane Sandy. My wife, Kristina, and I were in New
York when the storm came along, though we didn’t suffer. Afterward, we
drove down to the Jersey Shore—the scene of many Bascombe episodes—and I
was so affected by the storm’s destruction of human life and
expectancy. I drove home that day with sentences skirling in my
head—sentences that I recognized as Frank Bascombe sentences. Neruda
said of the instigating experience of a piece of imaginative writing,
“Something kicked in my soul.” And, although I don’t believe in souls, I
do believe in something kicking somewhere that becomes a call to
language. That happened to me. And what that kicking was about, I
decided, was a curiosity regarding the effects of the storm on peoples’
lives—effects that the broadcast media wouldn’t uncover. And that’s what
I set out to do with these four stories. Emerson said that “nature does
not like to be observed.” I thought that the imagination—mine, in this
case—could perhaps do some observing of what otherwise wouldn’t be
noticed. newyorker.
Rereading “Portnoy’s Complaint” 45 years on, I am shocked and pleased:
shocked that I could have been so reckless, pleased that I was so
reckless. I certainly didn’t understand while at work that henceforth I
was never to be free of this psychoanalytic patient I was calling
Alexander Portnoy — indeed, that I was on the brink of swapping my
identity for his and that, subsequently, in many minds, his persona and
all its paraphernalia would be understood to be mine and that my
relations with people known and unknown would shift accordingly. Philip Roth, nytimesmagazine.
