Specie in via di istinzione

Il titolo di questo post si riferisce alle librerie indipendenti, indie-bookshops, che in questo periodo sembra siano riuscite non solo a sopravvivere, ma anche ad avere un notevole successo, grazie a idee cretive.

The Reading Tree is one of 54 new independent bookshops to have opened in the UK and Ireland over the last year, from Rare Birds Books in Edinburgh to The Ivybridge Bookshop in Devon, and from The Athlone Bookshop in County Westmeath, Ireland, to Storyville Books in Rhondda Cynon Taf. For the first time in almost a decade, more than 1,000 indies are open for business: it is a sector thriving against the odds. Alison Flood, The Guardian

E si riferisce, sempre il titolo del post, alle lingue minori, che un progetto di Brown University, cerca di salvare.

At Brown, Indigenous students are keeping their native languages alive. An independent study project organized through the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative is enabling students to strengthen their knowledge of international Indigenous languages, from Narragansett to Yoruba. Jill Kimball, Brown

 

Why Eating Chinese Food on Christmas Is a Sacred Tradition for American Jews

The predominant groups in the area were Eastern European Jews, Italians, and Chinese. According to Matthew Goodman, author of Jewish Food: The World at Table, Italian cuisine and especially Italian restaurants, with their Christian iconography, held little appeal for Jews. But the Chinese restaurants had no Virgin Marys. And they prepared their food in the Cantonese culinary style, which utilized a sweet-and-sour flavor profile, overcooked vegetables, and heaps of garlic and onions. Sound familiar? [...]

Beyond the trappings and the cuisine, Chinese restaurants offered poor Eastern European Jewish immigrants the opportunity to feel cosmopolitan and sophisticated (food of the Orient!). It also let them feel superior, a truism that has achieved the most definitive canonization available: its own Philip Roth quotation. “Yes, the only people in the world whom it seems to me the Jews are not afraid of are the Chinese,” Alexander Portnoy tells us. “Because one, the way they speak English makes my father sound like Lord Chesterfield; two, the insides of their heads are just so much fried rice anyway; and three, to them we are not Jews but white and maybe even Anglo Saxon. No wonder they can’t intimidate us. To them we’re just some big-nosed variety of WASP.” Marc Tracy, Tablet

Incominciamo l'anno con qualche profonda domanda (e risposta): 

Why Is My Eyelid Twitching? Christina Caron, NYT

 

Auguri!

 “I dedicate this book to the many children who had no chance to grow up because of stupid wars and cruel persecutions which devastated cities and destroyed innocent families. I hope that when the readers of these stories become men and women they will love not only their own children but all good children everywhere.” Isaac Bashevis Singer, Zlateh la capra, con le illustrazioni di Maurice Sendak.

Un libro magico e meraviglioso. Con queste belle parole auguro a tutti un Buon Natale e un Felice Anno Nuovo. Al 2022!

I love you, I love you, I love you

For such a simple sentence, three monosyllables arranged in the lock-step syntax of subject, verb and object, “I love you” can fall on the ears of its chosen recipient in unpredictable ways. These words capture both our need for love and our reliance on language, and our often fraught attempts to marry these two things up. Joe Moran, The Guardian (2016)

e un ricordo di Christopher Hitchens, morto dieci anni fa:

Christopher’s output, in columns, essays and books, was voluminous. He was one of very few foreign journalists to transplant to the United States and make an impact within the Beltway. He also had many detractors and enemies, notably but far from exclusively, among his former comrades on the radical left.  Oliver Kamm, Prospect

Case

From Charlotte Brontë’s Norton Conyers to Alan Hollinghurst’s Canford Court – the little known locations that inspired the most famous homes in literature. Phyllis Richardson, House of Fiction: From Pemberley to Brideshead, Great British Houses in Literature and Life (Unboun, 2017). Phyllis Richardson, The Guardian 

e un lungo articolo sulla traduzione, che in realtà mi ha attratto per la descrizione iniziale di una casa londinese: 

A couple of years ago we rented a beautiful apartment in London, a large flat where we must have stayed four or five times. It was perfectly comfortable and perfectly private, and the location, directly behind the British Museum, was ideal for visits to theaters and museums. It was decorated in the taste of a refined gay man of my parents’ generation. It had good Chinese porcelain, carefully chosen oriental rugs, witty French prints. It also contained the kind of photographs which, in that mysterious way, have grown dated without becoming quite old — gently pushed, by an accumulation of tiny changes, into the past. Some minute evolution in eyewear, some invisible reformulation of lipstick, some arcane improvement in cameras, betrayed their age. They did not look ancient. But though I couldn’t say exactly why, I knew that the pretty young bride was now middle-aged, and that a lot of the jolly middle-aged folks at Angkor Wat were now dead. 

I also knew, as soon as I walked inside, that the house belonged to an American. Benjamin Moser, Liberties

 

 

Why Does Coffee Make Me Poop?

Coffee is a complex beverage containing more than 1,000 chemical compounds, many of which have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. And determining how they affect the intestines is challenging. Alice Callahan, NYT

una domanda molto più inquietante:

Why do dead Jews play such a large role in the world’s imagination, and how does that distortion still affect us today? In her Tablet Studios podcast, Adventures with Dead Jews, author and host Dara Horn takes you on a ride through some of the most bizarre, disturbing, wondrous, tragic, and accidentally hilarious moments of Jewish history, and dives deep into their repercussions in the present.

infine una domanda bizzarra:

Is Superman Circumcised?, a study of the superhero’s Jewish influences, has resoundingly won the competition to be named “oddest book title of the year”. Alison Flood, The Guardian

Stanno uscendo gli elenchi dei migliori libri del 2021, qui i migliori di cucina:

The best food books of 2021, The Guardian

 

 

Robot

But an exhibition marking the 700th anniversary of the Italian poet’s death will be showcasing the work of a rather more modern devotee: Ai-Da the robot, which will make history by becoming the first robot to publicly perform poetry written by its AI algorithms.

The ultra-realistic Ai-Da, who was devised in Oxford by Aidan Meller and named after computing pioneer Ada Lovelace, was given the whole of Dante’s epic three-part narrative poem, the Divine Comedy, to read, in JG Nichols’ English translation. She then used her algorithms, drawing on her data bank of words and speech pattern analysis, to produce her own reactive work to Dante’s. Alison Flood, The Guardian

e anche la lunga storia della fascinazione degli umani per le macchine intelligenti:

Robots have histories that extend far back into the past. Artificial servants, autonomous killing machines, surveillance systems, and sex robots all find expression from the human imagination in works and contexts beyond Ovid (43 BCE to 17 CE) and the story of Pygmalion in cultures across Eurasia and North Africa. This long history of our human-machine relationships also reminds us that our aspirations, fears, and fantasies about emergent technologies are not new, even as the circumstances in which they appear differ widely. Situating these objects, and the desires that create them, within deeper and broader contexts of time and space reveals continuities and divergences that, in turn, provide opportunities to critique and question contemporary ideas and desires about robots and artificial intelligence (AI). E.R. Truitt, The MIT Press

Books Do Furnish a Civilization

IN THEIR NEW BOOK, The Library: A Fragile History, a splendid study of the institution of the library from its origins until today, Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen recount the initiation, the innovations, and the dissolution of library after library, personal as well as public, scholarly as well as lending, over the centuries. The word “fragile” in their subtitle touches on the unsettled conditions of libraries throughout history. For books have everywhere and at all times been lost, stolen, vandalized, spoiled by neglect, while entire libraries have been abandoned, systematically despoiled, set afire, even deliberately bombed. Joseph Epstein, Commentary

interessanti riflessioni sulle biblioteche, e anche sui classici, con qualche sorprendente scoperta, e altre considerazioni più à la page:

Historically, in America, the true strength of the Classics and of a Classical education has not been among the elite but among the rising middle class. Naomi Kanakia, LA Review of Books

 

University of Austin, una nuova università

Grade inflation. Spiraling costs. Corruption and racial discrimination in admissions. Junk content (“Grievance Studies”) published in risible journals. Above all, the erosion of academic freedom and the ascendancy of an illiberal “successor ideology” known to its critics as wokeism, which manifests itself as career-ending “cancelations” and speaker disinvitations, but less visibly generates a pervasive climate of anxiety and self-censorship. [...] That is why this week I am one of a group of people announcing the founding of a new university — indeed, a new kind of university: the University of Austin. [...] Trigger warnings. Safe spaces. Preferred pronouns. Checked privileges. Microaggressions. Antiracism. All these terms are routinely deployed on campuses throughout the English-speaking world as part of a sustained campaign to impose ideological conformity in the name of diversity. As a result, it often feels as if there is less free speech and free thought in the American university today than in almost any other institution in the U.S. Niall Ferguson, WP

Nel suo lungo e appassionato articolo Niall Ferguson spiega il programma di questa nuova università, un progetto che sembra molto interessante. Auguri!

Tatum O’Neal

Amazing as Tatum is in this performance, and iconic and penetrating as the film may be, the blockbuster slips into the same old car chase, between the same old cops and robbers. It’s all about stuntmen doing the fancy driving. And yet, Paper Moon has the face, neck, shoulders, hair, subtle morphing expressions, and very punchy attitude of Tatum O’Neal—and it has therefore held up beautifully. Later in life, Tatum would appear for a few seconds now and then on camera between points up in the stands watching her husband, John McEnroe, play tennis at Wimbledon, and she would leave the same sort of indelible impression—by virtue of her gaze and the mystery of her concentration. Jeremy Sigler, Tablet

Adorabile! L'articolo parla, però, soprattutto di Polly Platt, art director del film di Bogdanovich e anche sua ex moglie.

Inoltre:

Is Superman Circumcised? favourite to win Oddest book title of the year, Alison Flood, The Guardian