James Wood sul suo nuovo libro

Il nuovo libro di James Wood - The Nearest Thing to Life (Jonathan Cape) - è quasi un'autobiografia: "Wood’s new book is as much autobiographical as critical: why should there be a difference, because the books whose vital “lifeness” he extols saved his own life when he was growing up as a minister’s son in Durham? The atmosphere at home was strict, high-minded, earnestly evangelical. “I was escaping from things,” Wood said, “hiding from things, but also discovering things that might be prohibited. Though my parents didn’t run a despotic regime, novels gave me a freedom to think and to be that was not found within the gospels.” Peter Conrad, guardian.

Invisibility

Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen (Chicago), by the British science writer Philip Ball. A former editor of Nature and the author of nineteen previous books (he should write about that superpower), Ball leads us on a very fun, largely chronological journey through invisibility, beginning with myth and early magicians, ending with quantum physics, and stopping along the way at Newton, Leibniz, microscopy, photography, spiritualism, B movies, and science fiction. He is lucid and interesting on every topic he touches, from the ghost in “Hamlet” to those unseen extra dimensions posited by string theory. But he is more a tour guide than a theorist, and he never entirely succeeds at pulling the category together, or illuminating our own ambivalent relationship to the prospect of becoming invisible. Kathryn Schulz, newyorker.

Skyscrapers

Will Self on the meaning of skyscraper. "When it comes to skyscrapers I am, in the proper sense of the word, ambivalent: I hate them for all the obvious reasons ... Yet I also love them – truly, I do. I love their Promethean swagger; I love their ability to transform our perception of the city by proposing a new parallax around which we instantly reorient as we tunnel along at ground level. And I love the way that they are seemingly purpose-built to accompany what Marshall McLuhan described as the “instantaneous medium” of electricity". theguardian.

Arendt sul pensare

"Education provides us with a protected space within which to think against the grain of received opinion: a space to question and challenge, to imagine the world from different standpoints and perspectives, to reflect upon ourselves in relation to others and, in so doing, to understand what it means to “assume responsibility”. She had observed at first hand how such opinion can solidify into ideology. For her, thinking was diametrically opposed to ideology: ideology demands assent, is founded on certainty, and determines our behaviours within fixed horizons of expectation; thinking, on the other hand, requires dissent, dwells in uncertainty and expands our horizons by acknowledging our agency. It is the task of education – and therefore of the university – to ensure that a space for such thinking remains open and accessible.
But the university can fulfil that task only if the space it provides remains uncluttered by what Arendt saw as barriers to thought". Da un bell'articolo su Hannah Arendt di Jon Nixon, timeshighereducation.

Libri d'arte gratis

Dal sito del Metropolitan Museum si possono scaricare più di 400 libri d'arte gratuitamente. Come:

The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry

Husband, Timothy Bates, with an essay by Margaret Lawson (2008)

This title is out of print. 

The Metropolitan Museum of Arts.

Una nuova biografia di Saul Bellow

This spring, on the centennial of his birth and the tenth anniversary of his death, Bellow will burst from posthumous detention. ... But the main event will be Zachary Leader’s biography The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune [Knopf], coming out in May, which portrays Bellow up to 1964. Orchestrated by Bellow’s literary executor, literary superagent Andrew Wylie (who replaced Wasserman), this massive life by Leader, also Wylie’s client, is transparently meant as a corrective to the authorized biography published by Atlas in 2000, which presented Bellow as a racist and a woman-hater, among other things, and accelerated Bellow’s fall from literary grace. Lee Siegel, volture.

8 libri da leggere a marzo

The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf)
The Sellout, Paul Beatty (FSG)
A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara (Doubleday)
Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, Erik Larson (Crown)  
Crow Fair, by Thomas McGuane (Knopf) 
Hausfrau, Jill Alexander Essbaum (Random House) 
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Jon Ronson (Riverhead) 
Ordinary Light, Tracy K. Smith (Knopf) 

Consigliati da Boris Kachka, voluture. 

Il mistero delle mappe medioevali

Come facevano a essere così accurate? Un cartografo cerca nella matematica un metodo per spiegarlo. "That first portolan mapmaker also created an enormous puzzle for historians to come, because he left behind few hints of his method: no rough drafts, no sketches, no descriptions of his work. “Even with all the information he had — every sailor’s notebook, every description in every journal — I wouldn’t know how to make the map he made,” says John Hessler, a specialist in modern cartography at the Library of Congress.

But Hessler has approached the question using a tool that is foreign to most historians: mathematics. By systematically analyzing the discrepancies between the portolan charts and modern ones, Hessler has begun to trace the mapmaker’s tracks within the maps themselves". Julie Rehmeyer, discovermagazine.

Sarah Braunstein

Sarah Braunstein è l'autrice del racconto della scorsa settimana sul New Yorker, "All You Have to Do". Dall'intervista di Willing Davidson:

In “All You Have to Do,” your story in this week’s issue, Sid Baumwell is a sixteen-year-old in a small town, who, as he puts it, needs “a grievance.” Why is Sid so perplexed by, and worried about, his own mildness?

I think Sid’s desire to leave this town, to grow up, is quite strong—and yet it’s not matched by his day-to-day affect. Isn’t this the scariest thing for a teen-ager, that brand of cognitive dissonance? A desire to run that’s matched only by a desire to be comfortable? He loves his mom. His mom loves him. How does one grow up, and manage the violence implicit in the act of growing, in the face of such steadiness and equilibrium? It may seem to Sid (and, sometimes, to me) that it’s only hysteria—in the form of grievance, or longing, or pain, or trangression—that motivates one, finally, to change. And by change I mean simply to move beyond the town, to become someone new. To grow up. newyorker.

Consigli a un aspirante scrittore

"When I had just finished my schooling and was looking for a job, a friend put me in touch with an absurdly well-connected British biographer who, she assured me, would help me find the professional position of my dreams. I wrote and asked him whether we might meet, explaining that I would appreciate his advice on securing literary work and enclosing some of my early efforts. He duly invited me for tea. The advice I had in mind sounded like this: “You must call so-and-so at this number and say I suggested it and he will publish you and give you loads of money.” After giving me a cup of weak tea—no sandwiches, no pastry, not even sugar or milk—he said, “I have only one piece of advice for you. Have a vision and cleave to it.” We then discussed the weather for twenty minutes". Andrew Solomon, newyorker.

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