Words

vorrei segnalare una serie di interviste a docenti e critici letterari sul proprio mestiere. Sono uscite su   The Point Magazine a cura di Jessica Swoboda. Qui è l'introduzione all'intervista a Terry Eagleton, professore di letteratura a Oxford, Manchester e Lancaster.

Our conversation traversed the worlds of Derrida and Foucault, the political arena of the Sixties and Seventies, the decline of theory and the value in writing for public venues. Many jokes were made, laughs were shared, and I left encouraged to try on different writing styles. I also left convinced that one of the most important habits we can develop as writers is doing justice to our opponents’ arguments. That doesn’t mean, though, that we have to stop throwing punches.

Eagleton, a Marxist literary critic, has written eighty essays for the London Review of Books alone and published over fifty books, with four more books in the pipeline. His book Literary Theory: An Introduction is even an academic best seller, having sold over 750,000 copies. It’s no wonder, then, that the Independent has referred to him as “the man who succeeded F R Leavis as Britain’s most influential academic critic.” Our conversation confirms that the question uniting his many publications is: What is the meaning of literature? We talked over the phone in March and April. 

sempre a proposito di scrittura, segnalo la lettera di Ali Smith a George Orwell sul perché scriviamo.

Dear George Orwell,

Why do we write? Given that words and reality, as you once put it, are so often « no liker » to each other « than chessmen to living beings ».

Because I’m writing to you now from a future no-one could have seen coming –– except maybe yourself, and H G Wells, and J G Ballard and the furthest-seeing writers over the centuries from Sophocles to Margaret Atwood.

Because everything you wrote gifts us with the knowledge that words are the chesspieces by which the powers that be will play their games with our lives. You know, as the current UK Prime Minister puts it, that « human beings are creatures of the imagination », that « people live by narrative ». Ali Smith, European Review of Books

 

I'm A Fan

The protagonist of Sheena Patel’s corrosive, brilliant debut, a 30-year-old arts freelancer living in south London, is fanatical about two individuals: “the man I want to be with” “the woman I am obsessed with”, who is also having an affair with “the man I want to be with”.[...]

Patel offers no way out from the brutal arena of fandom into which she organises human life. But what makes I’m a Fan so successful is the protagonist’s ability to interpret and critique the toxicity of these structures even as she is caught inside them. She recognises, with shattering clarity, that if she goes on like this she could “turn out to be the man I want to be with in all the ways I don’t want to be”. Lamorna Ash, The Guardian

il romanzo di cui si parla è I'm A Fan, di Sheena Patel (Rough Trade Books). Inoltre un bell'articolo (purtroppo solo per abbonati) sui lessicografi dietro l'Oxford English Dictionary. 

From aardvark to woke: inside the Oxford English Dictionary The OED’s task – to define every part of the world’s most spoken language – is as ambitious as it was 150 years ago. 

The team at the Oxford English Dictionary felt some nervousness about writing the definition for “Terf”, an acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist, which this month has been added to its pages. “To a certain extent, it is like any other word,” says Fiona McPherson, a 50-year-old lexicographer from Grangemouth, Stirlingshire, who has worked at the dictionary since 1997. “But it would be disingenuous to say that it is exactly the same. There seems more at stake. You want to be accurate, you want to be neutral. But it’s a lot easier to be neutral about a word that isn’t controversial.” Pippa Bailey, The New Statesman

 

What Makes Censors Tick?

[...] a “censor is one who seeks to exert control over the culture through law, based on the idea that he or she, speaking for the community, has a right to draw the boundary lines for speech.” The censor is convinced that “some forms of expression are so vile or dangerous that they should be restricted, or so valuable that they should be compelled.” Consequently, censors “claim the moral sanction to speak for the collective, either by enforcing ‘community standards’ against evil expression or by mandating speech that they believe serves the ‘public interest.’” Stephen Rohde, LARB

di fatto Stephen Rohde cita un paragrafo di un libro sulla censura uscito alla fine dello scorso anno, Robert Corn-Revere, The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder: The First Amendment and the Censor’s Dilemma (Cambridge University Press)

un altro libro curioso, uscito alla fine dell'anno scorso, è quello di  Jonathan Purkis, Driving With Strangers: What Hitchhiking Tells Us About Humanity (Manchester University Press)

The earliest known written account of hitchhiking was by a student named Charles Brown Jr, who in 1916 described his 800-mile journey from Fort Wayne, Indiana to New York City. He got rides from, among others, a priest, an artist, a teacher and a doctor, the last of these so fascinated by Brown’s adventure that, despite being en route to a medical emergency, he overshot his destination by ten miles.  Mike Jay, LRB

L'understatement e il sorriso

The essence of adulthood, I suddenly grasped, was internalizing understatement. It meant sublimating one’s raw, emotional insides to something drier on the outside, something more even-tempered and hence more sophisticated. To put aside childish things, one had to ditch not only the tantrums of the toddler years but the gushing of the early teens.

Today the opposite is true, even—particularly—on applications for colleges, internships and jobs. It’s not enough to be an all-state musician or varsity athlete, with the years of commitment that represents. Now applications all insist that you “tell us about your passion.” As with teenage Instagram posts, the pressure to be passionate encourages the applicant to flaunt and exaggerate, to make grandiose claims—to remain, in other words, a hyperbolic adolescent rather than taking a step toward becoming an adult capable of seeing one’s own life in a broader context. Caitlin Macy, WSJ

e una storia del sorriso:

The smile as we know it was thus out and about in the Western world from the 13th century onwards. Literature demonstrates that, in the centuries that followed, it evoked much of the range of feelings that we attach to it in our own culture. [...] Yet if the smile was alive and well in Western culture, it was not yet our own. In Western art, it differed in one highly significant respect: the smiling mouth was almost always closed. Teeth appear in facial representations extremely rarely. One can scan drawings, paintings and sculptures from before the 19th century in art galleries and museums the world over without finding a single example of a tooth-baring smile of the kind that is so common in our own day.

Brooklyn o Manhattan?

In American cultural and intellectual life, New York City sets the tone. As the main hub for the country’s media and frequent originator of trends that percolate through US society, what’s “in” with the New York scene today is often central to American culture tomorrow. And politics, too ­– as US conservatives never tire of noting – is often downstream of culture.

But New York City’s intellectual landscape is increasingly split between two warring scenes, divided by geography, aesthetics and politics. Which of these prevails could affect whether America shifts right or remains where it is. Nick Burns, The New Stateman

e dieci libri sull'ascolto della natura:

From precise transliterations of birdsong to a quest for one square inch of silence, these stories teach us how to open our ears to the world. David George Haskell, The Guardian

Not Unpacking My Library

I have moved a lot in my life, too much, and in the chaos that every move entails, in the churning and trashing of possessions, in the reckoning with everything unfinished and forgotten that inevitably rises to the surface, it is the unpacking of books that always served as a kind of a ritual act, an alignment of physical and mental: I’d look at them and feel that I finally landed, that I’m back in the familiar. [...]

This time around, though, our books are not making me feel content or at home, and that’s why there are still 15 or so hefty boxes stacked atop of each other. [...]

Seriously: Is there another way for me to construct an outward-facing identity? As Walter Benjamin admitted, pacing around his own still-in-crates library, “what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?” Jake Marmer, Tablet

la complicata relazione con i libri e con la lettura. Ma anche la complicata relazione con la scrittura:

Still, the act of writing poses a predicament for anyone who recognizes the temptations of pride and self-aggrandizement. We simultaneously desire to attract recognition and seek to avoid it. We want to engage an audience, yet we see that approbation flatters our egos and that criticism is painful. Although wiser people tell us not to read comments, with today's technology, readers' responses are exceedingly difficult to evade. And try as we might to ignore them, the words of critics can still wound us.

How, then, should we think about displaying ourselves — or at least our thoughts and words — in public? And where does the allure of public writing leave the activity of scholarly writing? Elizabeth Corey, National Affairs

 

The history of Nazism in Small Objects

‘I can’t cook,’ writes the historian Karina Urbach, ‘which is probably why it took me so long to realise that we had two cookbooks on our shelf at home with the same title’ – a 1938 edition by her grandmother Alice and one from the following year attributed to Rudolf Rösch. When she did notice, however, it provided a key to unlocking some fascinating family history and a little known strand of Nazi persecution. Matthew Reisz, Spectator

interessante recensione a due libri che attraverso oggetti comuni - un libro di cucina, un coltello - scrivono insolite storie del nazismo. I libri sono: Alice’s Book: How the Nazis Stole My Grandmother’s Cookbook, di Karina Urbach (MacLehose/Quercus); e My Grandfather’s Knife and Other Stories of War and Belonging (Joseph Pearson). Nella foto Alice Urbach - l'autrice del libro di cucina di cui si parla.

E, dagli archivi del Guardian, un articolo sull'importanza della letteratura nell'insegnarci a capire meglio i sentimenti altrui:

New research shows works by writers such as Charles Dickens and Téa Obreht sharpen our ability to understand others' emotions – more than thrillers or romance novels. Liz Bury, The Guardian

Bernard Malamud's Mistress

Dusty Sklar intervista Arlene Heyman, psicanalista newyorkese che, negli anni '60 fu l'amante di Malamud:

Dusty Sklar: When did you attend Bernard Malamud’s class? Why did you choose his particular class?

Arlene Heyman: In 1961 I was a sophomore at Bennington College, 19 years old, when I first heard that Bernard Malamud would be coming to Vermont to teach creative writing. He had already won the National Book Award for The Magic Barrel so he was known and respected in the literary world—which was the only world that mattered to many of us. Tablet Magazine

Old Bookstores

Marius Kociejowski opens his enthralling memoir, “A Factotum in the Book Trade,” (Biblioasis) by observing that bookstores have begun to follow record stores into nonexistence. “With every shop that closes so, too, goes still more of the serendipity that feeds the human spirit.” While there may be “infinitely more choice” in buying from online dealers, “to be spoiled for choice extinguishes desire.” As he says, “I want dirt; I want chaos; I want, above all, mystery. I want to be able to step into a place and have the sense that there I’ll find a book, as yet unknown to me, which to some degree will change my life.” Michael Dirda, WP

How to Be an Incipit

 

For a long time, the first sentence went to bed early, waiting discreetly under the cover of the book for someone to come and wake it up. Novel opened, first sentence awakened, it stood firmly in the front row to welcome readers with the heavy responsibility of taking them into a new world.

Then the first sentence had a craving for freedom. It took a liking to running away, proclaiming its autonomy, breaking its ties with the book that birthed it. Paul Vacca, berfrois

in effetti, che responsabilità, essere la prima frase!
E le finaliste al Women’s prize for fiction:

Six countries are represented on this year’s Women’s prize for fiction shortlist, with Meg Mason and Elif Shafak among those in the running for the £30,000 prize. The New Zealander and the Turkish-British author are up against two Americans, one American-Canadian and a Trinidadian debut novelist.  Lucy Knight, The Guardian