Bob Hope

Ora dimenticato, Bob Hope sembra fosse un grande comedian. "When Bob Hope died in 2003 at the age of one hundred, attention was not widely paid. The “entertainer of the century,” as his biographer Richard Zoglin calls him, had long been regarded by many Americans (if they regarded him at all) “as a cue-card-reading antique, cracking dated jokes about buxom beauty queens and Gerald Ford’s golf game.” A year before his death, The Onion had published the fake headline “World’s Last Bob Hope Fan Dies of Old Age.” Though Hope still had champions among comedy luminaries who had grown up idolizing him—Woody Allen and Dick Cavett, most prominently—Christopher Hitchens was in sync with the new century’s consensus when he memorialized him as “paralyzingly, painfully, hopelessly unfunny". Frank Rich, nybooks.

Hope: Entertainer of the Century, Richard Zoglin (Simon and Schuster).

Jane Austen's Juvenilia

Escono gli scritti giovanili di Jane Austen, che, come scrive la curatrice Kathryn Sutherland  nell'introduzione ai volumi, sono "violent, restless, anarchic and exuberantly expressionistic. Drunkenness, female brawling, sexual misdemeanour and murder run riot across their pages”.

Jane Austen, VOLUME THE FIRST, VOLUME THE SECOND, VOLUME THE THIRD. In Her Own Hand. Edited by Kathryn Sutherland (Abbeville Press).
LOVE AND FREINDSHIP AND OTHER YOUTHFUL WRITINGS. Edited by Christine Alexander (Penguin). Paula Byrne, tls.

Landmarks

Landmarks è il titolo di un libro di Robert Macfarlane, naturalista e scrittore di viaggi (Hamish Hamilton). "Landmarks is about the language of landscape, built around glossaries, words concerned with water, mountains, woods, plains, edgelands, and so on. Inspired by a collection of peat vocabulary, then expanded into a trove of place-language from The Hebrides, the book arranges and displays a cornucopia of terms from Gaelic, Irish, Manx, Welsh and dozens of British county dialects. The languages of forestry, mountaineering, archaeology and geology mix with the coinages of poets". Horatio Clare, telegraph.

Sprezzatura and the Sincere Mustache

Un divertente racconto sullo scrivere, per il New Yorker soprattutto. "I said of a person I was writing about that he had a “sincere” mustache. This brought Bingham, manuscript in hand, out of his office and down the hall to mine, as I had hoped it would. A sincere mustache, Mr. McPhee, a sincere mustache? What does that mean? Was I implying that it is possible to have an insincere mustache?
I said I could not imagine anything said more plainly.
The mustache made it into the magazine and caused me to feel self-established as The New Yorker’s nonfiction mustache specialist. Across time, someone came along who had “a no-nonsense mustache,” and a Great Lakes ship captain who had “a gyroscopic mustache,” and a North Woodsman who had “a timber-cruiser’s guileless mustache.” A family practitioner in Maine had “an analgesic mustache,” another doctor “a soothing mustache,” and another a mustache that “seems medical, in that it spreads flat beyond the corners of his mouth and suggests no prognosis, positive or negative". John McPhee, newyorker.

Reading Posture

Il sesso nelle università

Se ne parla molto, in questi giorni, da quando Harvard ha proibito i rapporti sessuali tra professori e studenti. Ne parla Laura Kipnis, docente di comunicazione alla Northwestern University.
"These days the desire persists, but what’s shifted is the direction of the arrows. Now it’s parents—or their surrogates, teachers—who do all the desiring; children are conveniently returned to innocence. So long to childhood sexuality, the most irksome part of the Freudian story. So too with the new campus dating codes, which also excise student desire from the story, extending the presumption of the innocent child well into his or her collegiate career. Except that students aren’t children.
Among the problems with treating students like children is that they become increasingly childlike in response. ...
Lastly: The new codes sweeping American campuses aren’t just a striking abridgment of everyone’s freedom, they’re also intellectually embarrassing. Sexual paranoia reigns; students are trauma cases waiting to happen. If you wanted to produce a pacified, cowering citizenry, this would be the method. And in that sense, we’re all the victims". chronicleofhighereducation.

The Novel as Protestant Art

Un saggio interessante, ma non riconosce il ruolo fondamentale avuto dalla cultura ebraica - dall'abitudine di cercare risposte alle grandi domande attraverso storie. 
"So, here's a proposition: The novel was an art form—the art form—of the modern Protestant West, and as the main strength of established Protestant Christendom began to fail in Europe and the United States in recent decades, so did the cultural importance of the novel". Joseph Bottum, books&culture.

Alphabetical

Alphabetical: How Every Letter Tells a Story, Michael Rosen (Counterpoint).
“Alphabetical” is organized into 26 chapters (surprise), each devoted to one letter. They begin  identically, with a brief explanation of a letter’s origins, name, uses and pronunciations. ...
But with each letter, Rosen also veers off course, using the chapters as excuses to explore whatever he finds instructive or entertaining. In the chapter “D is for Disappeared Letters,” for example, he uses the opening lines of “Beowulf” to show how letters such as “yogh” and “wynn” have left us. In “J is for Jokes,” he explains why the alphabet has only 25 letters at Christmastime (“No-el, no-el, no-el, no-e-e-el”). And in “U is for Umlaut,” he destroys my faith in ice cream by explaining that the corporate name Häagen-Dazs “doesn’t mean anything to anyone anywhere in any language.” There’s a scoop for you". Carlos Lozada, wp.

Campus Novel and More

"... the university has been the key institution in Lodge’s life, and here his biography is a microcosm of the much vaunted social mobility experienced by many of those who came to adulthood in the decades immediately after 1945. At first sight, it would be tempting to say that he is not an academic novelist but a novelist who happens to be an academic. However, that not only understates the extent to which his critical and theoretical work has informed his fiction (his skilful exposition of the role of metaphor and metonymy in Nice Work is an obvious instance): it may also misrepresent his identity. Lodge doesn’t just ‘happen to be’ an academic: he owed his writing voice to the university, just as in a more material way he owed the opportunity to establish himself as a writer to the financial security provided by his academic career". Stefan Collini su due nuovi libri di David Lodge, un'autobiografia e una raccolta di saggi, Quite a Good Time to Be Born: A Memoir (Harvill Secker), Lives in Writing: Essays (Vintage). lrb.

Oliver Sacks My Own Life

"A MONTH ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver. ...

It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can. In this I am encouraged by the words of one of my favorite philosophers, David Hume, who, upon learning that he was mortally ill at age 65, wrote a short autobiography in a single day in April of 1776. He titled it “My Own Life.”

“I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution,” he wrote. “I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company.” nyt.