Why Cemeteries Matter

As Americans increasingly opt out of burial, cemeteries very well may become obsolete. It’s worth asking, then, especially at a time of year when graveyards loom large in our cultural imagination, what purpose do they serve? Aside from the practical need to dispose of corpses in a sanitary way, do they serve any higher good for the community? Rachel K. Alexander, Tablet

Amo molto passeggiare per i cimiteri, soprattutto quelli americani, o quelli monumentali. L'idea che stiano scomparendo mi turba molto.

Scompaiono anche le città? 

Can you hear the death rattle of the skyscraper? It’s the sound of the free candyfloss cart being wheeled past the rows of empty desks, and the lonely drip of the beer-keg tap by the water cooler. In a desperate attempt to lure employees back to their offices, companies are laying on all manner of novelty treats, from monogrammed water bottles to personalised notebooks. It is hoped that these perks might convince people to leave the house, get on packed trains and jostle for the lifts, all in the name of teamwork and productivity. Oliver Wainwright, The Guardian

The Chastity Plot

Austen’s novel [Pride and Prejudice] is a brilliantly ironic take on what Lisabeth During calls “the chastity plot.” The course of true love never does run smooth, at any rate not in the English social novel of the nineteenth century, in which misunderstandings, missed opportunities, and plain missteps ensure that it doesn’t all end too soon—that there is, in fact, a plot. For your longed-for love match to get fouled up by someone else’s indiscretion (with a third party) seems particularly harsh. It is, however, the inevitable consequence of a system in which women’s sexual virtue acts as a guarantee of the legitimacy of social reproduction. Clair Wills reviews, Lisabeth During, The Chastity Plot (University of Chicago Press). nybooks.

Can music give you an orgasm? The short answer is yes. A longer answer will unlock the secrets of the evolution of music. But let’s begin with orgasms. Sam Dresser, Aeon

Interessante, no?

Smells

If all our genius lies in our nostrils, as Nietzsche remarked, the nose is an untrained genius, brilliant but erratic. The human nose can detect a dizzying array of smells, with a theoretical upper limit of one trillion smells—yet many of us are incapable of describing these smells in words more precise than smelly and fragrant. Jude Stewart, The Believer

Un bell'articolo sugli odori, un altro su come si legge un libro (sono sempre stata incuriosita da come si legge!). 

The 20-page rule: Novelist Mark Billingham advises readers to angrily launch a book across the room after 20 non-gripping pages – but almost 40% of people will keep going right to the end, The Guardian

infine Hannah Arendt, sempre affascinante:

As her friend Mary McCarthy once said, Arendt was “a magnificent stage diva”.  Christopher Bray, The Critic

Dogopolis

Dog mess once had medicinal uses. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, physicians used it as an astringent in the form of album Graecum (dried and whitened canine excrement).

It was hard for some observers to discuss the canine excrement that was now visible within the modern cityscape. In a letter to the Times of London, Bristol-based Dr. G. Knowles acknowledged the difficulty of discussing the foul matter: “I can only think that people have been comparatively silent regarding this disgusting nuisance out of a sense of delicacy.” Excerpt reprinted from Dogopolis: How Dogs and Humans Made Modern New York, London, and Paris by Chris Pearson, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2021 by the University of Chicago Press. Lapham's Quarterly

Oltre alla cacca dei cani, questa settimana segnaliamo anche il cambiamento che sta avvenendo nelle autobiografie: 

Rather than prioritizing confession and catharsis, today’s authors are focusing on the question of who gets to share their version of things and interrogating the form, along with themselves.  Megan O’Grady, NYT

Performative

We have more than enough language policing these days, even though it is now devoted more to varieties of social and political correctness than to matters of grammar, diction, or usage. The most assiduous guardians of the latter considerations—including William Safire (of the famous “On Language” column in the New York Times) and Richard Mitchell (a.k.a. “The Underground Grammarian”)—have long gone the way of all flesh. But there are times when one sees senseless violence being done to a word, and one must speak up. The inner Edwin Newman (to invoke another member of that quixotic Old Guard) can be denied for only so long.

I’ve come to that point with the word performative, which has managed to insinuate itself in record time into the discourse of academics and journalists, seemingly overnight becoming an infestation as annoying as body lice and as worthless as a pile of wooden nickels. Wilfred M. McClay, The Hedgehog Review

e sempre su The Hedgehog Review, Richard Hughes Gibson: 

The historian Joe Moran begins his 2018 style guide, First You Write a Sentence, by outlining a comic routine unfortunately familiar to many of us:

First I write a sentence. I get a tickle of an idea for how the words might come together, like an angler feeling a tug on the rod’s line. Then I sound out the sentence in my head. Then I tap it on my keyboard, trying to recall its shape. Then I look at it and say it aloud, to see if it sings. Then I tweak, rejig, shave off a syllable, swap a word for a phrase or phrase for a word. Then I sit it next to other sentences to see how it behaves in company. And then I delete it all and start again. 

Ebooks Are an Abomination

Personalmente, ho adottato senza problemi, anzi con piacere, il kindle. Di seguito un interessante articolo sul perché c'è chi lo ama e chi o odia, e come questo ha a che fare con quel che significa per noi leggere.

Whether you love or hate ebooks is probably a function of what books mean to you, and why. [...] But what it means to read, what the experience of reading requires and entails, and what makes it pleasurable or not, is not so easy to pin down. Ian Bogost, The Atlantic

Trovare le parole giuste: From adoption to sexuality, early pregnancy to death, a palliative care doctor explores the discussions we often try to avoid. Joanna Cannon, Guardian

What's Wrong With Sex Between Professors and Students?

Un articolo molto interessante sul problema annunciato dal titolo. 

Teachers, as teachers, understand how to do certain things; students, as students, want to understand how to do those things. The tacit promise of the classroom is that the teacher will work to confer on the student some of his knowledge and understanding. In the best case, the teacher-student relationship arouses in the student a strong desire, a sense of thrilled if inchoate infatuation. That desire is the lifeblood of the classroom, and it is the teacher’s duty to nurture and direct it toward its proper object: learning. The teacher who allows his student’s desire to settle on him as an object, or the teacher who actively makes himself the object of her desire, has failed in his role as a teacher. Amia Srinivasan, NYT

 Amia Srinivasan elabora ulteriormente questo concetto base e spiega perché ha deliberatamente usato il rapporto tra professore maschio e studentessa, da leggere!

the 50 biggest books of autumn 2021

From new novels by Sally Rooney and Colson Whitehead to Michel Barnier’s take on Brexit, Bernardine Evaristo’s manifesto and diaries from David Sedaris – all the releases to look out for. Justine Jordan and Katy Guest, The Guardian

e anche: perché sempre più autori pubblicano su Substack:

 The subscription newsletter platform Substack announced on Wednesday it had signed an exclusive deal with Salman Rushdie – but he is just the latest in a growing number of authors making the leap to write serialised fiction delivered straight to the inboxes of subscribers who pay a monthly fee. [...] For Rushdie, the Substack deal is about finding “a slightly more complex connection” with readers, and to give him the space to talk about things that “are just too big to discuss in tweets … I think that new technology always makes possible new art forms, and I think literature has not found its new form in this digital age,” he told the Guardian earlier this week. “I’m just diving in here and que sera sera, you know. It will either turn out to be something wonderful and enjoyable, or it won’t.” David Barnett, The Guardian

Fran Lebowitz

One of the leitmotifs in Martin Scosese’s second and most recent documentary about her, Pretend It’s a City, are the shots of a solitary Lebowitz strolling around New York in her distinctive uniform of a long overcoat, Levi’s 501s and loafers, observing everything and detached from it all. So doesn’t she resent that her aversion to technology now makes her so dependent on others? “No, I just think, isn’t it lucky I have friends who have these things and can do them for me?” she says, with the smile of one who has arranged her life exactly as she wants it to be. Hadley Freeman, The Guardian

e anche:

David Grossman’s follow-up to the International Booker-winning A Horse Walks Into a Bar is a Russian doll of a novel, a book of secrets wrapped within secrets. It’s told by Gili, a film-maker, a damaged young woman who has already tried to end her life once. In a narrative that is teasingly digressive, threading back and forward between different time periods, between first- and third-person voices, we slowly learn the tragic story of Gili and her family, the way the brutal legacy of the 20th-century’s violence has written itself into the lives of these decent, wounded people. Alex Preston, The Guardian

 

Octavian Report: Why should we read the Odyssey?

Daniel Mendelsohn: There's a reason the classics are classics — and it's not because they have better agents than books that aren't classics. The classics are classics because they pose in a way that is lively and narratively interesting and challenging the most basic questions about human experience. The Greek and Roman classics are the foundation for our way of seeing the world. And therefore we read them because they tell us something true about life. In the case of the Odyssey, aside from everything else it is, it's one of the great family dramas. It's about homecoming, it's about the meaning of home, it's about how you know and how you prove your intimacy with members of your family. It's about the bonds that connect family members over many years despite time and distance. 

Dalla bellissima intervista a Daniel Mendelsohn sul perché leggere i classici, substack

 Inoltre ...

The word ‘hoax’ did not catch on till the early 19th century. Before that one spoke of a hum, a frump, a prat or a bilk. But 18th-century Britain, even if not rife with talk of ‘hoaxes’, was full of incautious souls at risk of being bilked. Ian Keable, The Century of Deception: The Birth of the Hoax in Eighteenth-Century England (Westbourne Press). Henry Hitchings, The Spectator