Il triste declino delle discipline umanistiche

Indeed, Russian culture itself has become a target. Russian artists who lived long before the birth of Putin, or the creation of the Soviet secret police that trained him, have been cancelled. In Italy, writer Paolo Nori’s lectures on Dostoevsky were “postponed.” “This is to avoid any controversy,” explained the email he received, “especially internally, during a time of strong tensions.” Nori responded: “I realize what is happening in Ukraine is horrible, and I feel like crying just thinking about it. But what is happening in Italy is ridiculous. . . . Not only is being a living Russian wrong in Italy, but also being a dead Russian. That an Italian university would ban a course on an author like Dostoevsky is unbelievable.” After a backlash, the university reversed its decision.

But numerous cancellations have not been reversed. Gary Saul Morson, First Things

io credo che continuare a studiare la letteratura russa, così come tutte le letterature, sia un modo di combattere i dispotismi. E' questo che dico ai miei studenti. Dobbiamo rivendicare il ruolo fondamentale delle materie umanistiche nella formazione di cittadini pensanti e pacifici. Invece le cose stanno andando diversamente, purtroppo, come si vede da questo articolo:

Hiring in the humanities last peaked in 2007-2008, when the MLA’s jobs report recorded 3,506 openings across English and other languages. By 2019-2020, that number had fallen to 1,411. Jacob Brogan, The Washington Post Magazine

Books Against Bombs

During Covid, Ukraine’s population bought books, thanks to a government vaccine initiative. Now there is no time to read, they can still be useful... Katerina Sergatskova, The Guardian

tristissimo.... ma poetico. Ho sempre amato molto poco il turismo e quindi ho letto con interesse questo articolo intitolato "The Big Idea: Is Tourismo Bad for Us?"

If Covid’s impact ameliorates as hoped, it will be replaced by a new virus – wanderlust. Millennials, according to one survey, would rather travel than have sex – and not only because they’re probably doing the latter wrong. [...] But the value of tourism, like sex, depends on how you do it. Cruise ships generate 21,000 gallons of sewage per day per vessel, much of it ending up in the sea. In 2019, transport-related emissions from tourism were responsible for 5% of human-made global carbon dioxide emissions, according to UNWTO. Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian

 

 

Elizabeth Strout e Elena Ferrante

 

Dear Elena Ferrante,
Thank you for all of your work. I am a huge fan, and I have read all your books, and by reading them I was able to take new risks with my own work. So thank you for that as well. 

Dear Elizabeth,
Thank you for your kind words about In the Margins. I really loved your novels Amy and Isabelle, The Burgess Boys, and naturally the amazing Olive Kitteridge.
But, I must tell you, I value your opinion of In the Margins especially because of your novel My Name Is Lucy Barton, or, to be precise, because of the fleeting but memorable relationship between Lucy and the writer Sarah Payne. The Guardian

interessante scambio epistolare tra due grandi scrittrici, Elena Ferrante ed Elizabeth Strout. 

Inoltre: Yiyun Li, scrittrice dall'inconsueto cv (è immunologa as well), discute del neologismo, da lei creato, "beforemath", parlando dello scrittore Jon McGregor.

Yiyun Li: I love reading dictionaries, getting to know words beyond their everyday usage: etymologies, definitions that have gone obsolete, meanings that have been added over the years.

Last year, as I was rereading McGregor’s entire body of work, I looked up aftermath and was surprised to find that it’s derived from aftermowth, which refers to the second crop of grass that grows after the first has been mown or harvested. Instantly my interest was piqued, as we don’t tend to talk about beforemath—we don’t even have it as a word. As I thought through how McGregor approaches dramatic and tragic events in fiction, it became clear to me that some of his books focus on the beforemath, and others approach aftermath at a slanted angle. The New York Review

Ezra Pound e Joseph Brodsky

To be buried here is a signal honor, and no one can deny Pound’s influence on twentieth-century poetry. But this is a case in which the very condition of the two gravestones indicates a moral and artistic hierarchy. Pound, with his obsession with the strong man of action and manly virtù, now represents the authoritarian vision, lately manifested by Russia’s Vladimir Putin, whose political and economic shadow continues its ascent over Europe. Contrarily, Brodsky, the dissident Russian, concerned with universalism and the personal life of the individual, represents a Europe of sovereign, mutually respectful nations, and the rule of law over arbitrary fiat. Here in this Venetian cemetery, two iconic forces stand a few feet apart from each other. Here are the two paths that Europe can tread. May it choose the right one. Robert D. Kaplan, New Criterion

Robert D. Kaplan is the author of Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age, to be published in April by Random House. He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Mi sembrava doveroso, questa settimana, partecipare in qualche modo al dramma dell'invasione dell'Ucraina da parte della Russia. Ho scelto questo bell'articolo che contrappone due poeti sepolti accanto a Venezia, due visioni del mondo opposte.

Blurbs

Blurbs. Few parts of the publishing process cause more anxiety for writers. As a blurb requester, it’s stressful and a bit pathetic to beg for praise from writers you may have never met. As a potential blurber, the number of requests can be overwhelming and blurbing is always time consuming. Hell writers have been complaining about blurbs since the dawn of, well, blurbs. Lincoln Michel, Counter Craft

Segue una disamina sui blurbs (a proposito, come si traduce in italiano?)

E una bella recensione di un libro che sembra interessante. Chi l'avrebbe mai detto che Stalin fosse un lettore vorace? Il libro è, Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin's Library (Yale UP).

Stalin was a voracious reader, who set himself a daily quota of between 300 and 500 pages. When he died of a stroke in his library in 1953, the desk and tables that surrounded him were piled high with books, many of them heavily marked with his handwriting in the margins. [...] During his life he amassed a personal library estimated at about 20,000 books ... Amelia Gentleman, The Guardian

 

The Order of Things

La difficoltà a essere fedeli alla sintassi, nella traduzione:

Let’s think about syntax, why it’s hard to translate (why there are mixed opinions in translation studies about how to handle it), why it matters and possible ways to move forward.

The word “syntax” comes from the Ancient Greek “σύνταξις,” meaning “coordination”: “syn,” or “together,” and “táxis,” or “ordering.” Today, in English, it designates the “set of rules and principles in a language according to which words, phrases, and clauses are arranged to create well-formed sentences,” or “the ways in which a particular word or part of speech can be arranged with other words or parts of speech.” These are, respectively, the ethical and intersubjective aspects of the word. Jennifer Croft, Literary Hub

ancora sulla lingua, questa volta su come l'inglese sia diventato la lingua franca. Una bella recensione a Rosemary Salomone, The Rise of English (OUP):

An American law professor and linguist addresses the babel of controversy over the predominance of the English language as the world’s lingua franca. Kirkus

 

How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life

The​ appearance within a few months of each other of two books about the same four women is a bit startling, but on reflection the topic is so natural and interesting that one might even wonder why it hasn’t been treated before. Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot (née Bosanquet), Mary Midgley (née Scrutton) and Iris Murdoch all matriculated at Oxford in the late 1930s. When most of the men went off to war, they found themselves, as women philosophy students, in a very unusual situation – not in the minority and on the periphery, but central and predominant. (The rule in normal times had been that no more than a fifth of the undergraduates at Oxford could be women.) Midgley later wrote that the enhanced attention and absence of the usual competitive male atmosphere made it possible for her to find her voice as a philosopher. Distinctive and talented though each of them was, it seems no accident that such a stellar group emerged from this atypical moment. Thomas Nagel, London Review of Books

Interessante recensione di due libri usciti recentemente e che ci illuminano sullo spirito oxfordiano: The Women Are up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch Revolutionised Ethics,by Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb (Oxford), e, Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman (Chatto). 

Infine una scrittrice da scoprire, la britannica Elizabeth Taylor (1912-75),

In the words of one critic, Taylor is “best known for not being better known.” Burdened by her famous name, she has never achieved the level of mainstream appreciation that she is due. Yet a small band of critics and writers ranks her among the most psychologically penetrating English novelists of the twentieth century. Charlie Tyson, The New Yorker

White on White

The book that changed me as a teenager
I was 12 when I read The Catcher in the Rye. That and the movie Rebel Without a Cause, which I saw when I was 15, were the first works of art that spoke to me in my own language. That both were “rebellious” without being political suited a teen in the Eisenhower years. Edmund White. The Guardian

Edmund White parla dei libri della sua vita. Bella la sua libreria. 

Sempre sui libri che generano libri, e sul "white", un'interessante recensione del recente romanzo di Ayşegül Savaş, White on White (Harvill Secker):

A nameless student listens to her landlady’s embittered life story in a spare, oddly enthralling novel indebted to Rachel Cusk’s

Pressed to name the most influential novel of the past decade, you could do worse than Rachel Cusk’s Outline, which laid a blueprint for fashionably decluttered fiction about barely-there narrators wafting through random encounters in unspecified European cities. Anthony Cummins, The Guardian

infine una curiosità:

“Wussies and pussies” – those are the only kinds of people who care about plagiarism, according to Bob Dylan. That was his response to an interviewer who asked him about some rather suspicious similarities between lyrics on his 2001 album Love and Theft (pun intended, perhaps?) and a Japanese true-crime book from the ’90s. Works in progress

 

I baffi di Dickens

A sharp, detailed daguerreotype profile portrait of Dickens sporting his moustache was made in around 1852-55, when he was writing Bleak House and Hard Times. It was donated to the Charles Dickens Museum in London by a private collector last year, and the museum has put it on display for the first time, until 31 March, limiting the time it is shown to ensure its conservation. Alison Flood, The Guardian

sempre sul Guardian, l'arte della convalescenza (con una chiosa sul significato di "aftermath"): 

Getting better is rarely something that happens all the time. Whether we’ve been seriously ill or injured, everyone has to experience the complexities of recovery as the aftermath. Aftermath is an old agricultural term meaning “a second crop” growing unexpectedly in the space left by the main harvest and it can entail difficult decisions about what should be done with these remnants. Emily Mayhew, The Guardian

 infine un libro sulla difficile arte del vestirsi, Sofi Thanhauser, Worn (Allen Lane):

One of the great pleasures of this panoramic history of getting dressed is Sofi Thanhauser’s ability to spot moments like these where human desire and material culture collide.

"Fauci ouchie"

“Fauci ouchie”, the rhyming phrase for a Covid-19 vaccine dreamed up in honour of Dr Anthony Fauci, has been named the “most creative word or phrase of the year” by the American Dialect Society.

Founded in 1889, the society is made up of linguists, lexicographers, etymologists and scholars dedicated to the study of the English language in North America. More than 300 members took part in this year’s annual meeting, at which “Fauci ouchie” beat “chin diaper” – defined as a “face mask worn below the chin instead of properly covering the nose and mouth” – to the accolade.

The meeting also saw “insurrection” named the overall word of 2021, beating vax/vaxx. Alison Flood, The Guardian

e per continuare a parlare di lingua, ecco un bell'articolo sul "not":

Every language has negatives, and every writer needs them. They need them for formal logic, for quantum leaps, for the existential gloom of Being and Nothingness. “Without Contraries,” writes the poet William Blake, “is no progression.” Yet the literary effects of these negatives are hard to pin down, even mysterious: What happens really when someone says not? The mystery may be because the very idea of negation is hard in itself, or perhaps because we have not yet got the right emphasis. Max Byrd, The American Scholar