Coffeehouses and Proust

Coffeehouses had existed for centuries in the Muslim Ottoman realms before they spread to Christian Europe in the mid 17th century. They were introduced by merchants and migrants with links between the two worlds. The first was established on St Mark’s Square in Venice in 1647. Five years later Pasqua Rosée, a Greek, set up London’s first coffeehouse in St Michael’s Alley in the City of London. Armenians played decisive roles in establishing the first cafés in Paris (at the St Germain fair in 1671) and Vienna (a spy in the post-siege Habsburg capital set up its first kaffeehaus in 1685). Organised around the consumption of a stimulant, these places contrasted with the raucous intoxication associated with taverns. Coffeehouses soon emerged as centres of exchange, information and debate.  Jeremy Cliffe, New Statesman

e anche di dolcetti si parla, parlando di Proust:

Over the course of Villa Albertine’s Proust Weekend, a series of talks, workshops, and readings celebrating the forthcoming English translation of the last volume of the Recherche and the centenary of Proust’s death, I ate more cakes per diem than usual: on Sunday afternoon, a miniature pistachio financier, a Lego-shaped and moss-textured cake that reminded me of the enormous chartreuse muffins at my college cafeteria; on Saturday morning, a crisp, disc-like, almond-sliver-sprinkled shortbread cookie with a hole, which reminded me of a Chinese coin; and, on Friday night, at a holiday party, a dish of Reddi-wip and sour cream studded with canned mandarin slices and maraschino cherries apparently called ambrosia salad. It reminded me of the music video for Katy Perry’s “California Gurls.” But these were really only preliminary research exercises for the episode in which Proust Weekend was to culminate: a “Proust-inspired madeleine event with surprise guests”!

Leggere

 the joy of reading slowly:

Elizabeth Strout, the Booker-shortlisted author of Olive Kitteridge and the Lucy Barton books, is also taking books at a more tranquil pace. “I was never a fast reader [but] I think I read more slowly than I used to. This is partly to savour every word. The way a sentence sounds to my ear is so important to me in the whole reading experience, and I always want to get it all – like when you read poetry.” Susie Mesure, The Guardian

the joy of reading everything:

n the summer of 2011, during the quieter days that followed hurricane Irene, the writer Phyllis Rose headed to the New York Society Library on the Upper East Side of the city in search of a 1936 novel by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall. Hurricane [...] Once it was in her hand, however, her enthusiasm for it began to trickle away. [...] The question was: what should she read instead? [...] This was unnerving. It made her mildly anxious, her sudden awareness of all these unknown authors and their unknown books, and perhaps as a means of assuaging this unease, she began to formulate a plan. What if she was to pick, at random, a fiction shelf and read her way through its contents? What, if anything, would she learn? Rachel Cooke, The Guardian

Colette, Pig-Pen and Intelligence

che cos'hanno in comune Colette, Pig-Pen e l'intelligenza? Che sono tutti qui, questa settimana. Di Colette, che sta godendo di grande popolarità in America al momento, ci parla Michael LaPointe sul New Yorker:

Physical beauty was always important to Colette. She prized the body over the mind—as suggested by the title of Judith Thurman’s excellent biography, “Secrets of the Flesh”—and believed that focussing on the physical was essential to writing “like a woman, without anything moralistic or theoretical.” 

di Pig-Pen ci parla Elif Batuman su Astra: 

Readers’ love of Pig-Pen was reportedly a burden to Charles M. Schulz. Much as Arthur Conan Doyle attempted to kill off Sherlock Holmes in 1893 only to bring him back nine years later, so did Schultz write Pig-Pen out of the series from 1967 to 1976. Pig-Pen himself is not uninfluenced by Conan Doyle: he is, in essence, a walking clue. “I can tell just where you’ve been all week from the dirt on your clothes,” Charlie Brown tells a consternated Pig-Pen in August 1965, proceeding to rattle off a series of dusty locations.] [... Discussion of genetics and intelligence is particularly fraught because of how it’s been twisted by racists to justify oppression and violence. Simply typing the words “genes” and “intelligence” in the same sentence can be enough to raise eyebrows.

infine Tom Bartlett affronta la controversa questione del rapporto genetica-intelligenza umana:

Research on human intelligence tends to be a magnet for controversy, with papers leading to protests and speakers drawing scorn. [...] Discussion of genetics and intelligence is particularly fraught because of how it’s been twisted by racists to justify oppression and violence. Simply typing the words “genes” and “intelligence” in the same sentence can be enough to raise eyebrows. The Chronicle of Higher Education

 

The Singularities by John Banville

Here comes John Banville’s 20th novel under his own name, a wild masked ball rife with gossip about the books that have preceded it. We are in the world of 2009’s The Infinities, with which The Singularities shares an Irish country-house setting and a handful of characters. But here, too, is Freddie Montgomery, the violent protagonist of an earlier trilogy of novels – The Book of Evidence, Ghosts and Athena – itself seeded by a real-life murder in 1982 that not only horrified Ireland but scandalised it when links to the country’s political class emerged. Alex Clark, The Guardian

un nuovo libro di Banville è sempre un piacere!

Italy’s Great Historical Novel

Last month, the Modern Library added to its list “The Betrothed” (“I Promessi Sposi”), from 1842, by the Italian writer Alessandro Manzoni, in a new translation—the first in fifty years—by Michael F. Moore.In some respects, this is a curious choice. Most readers outside Italy will not have heard of the title, or even of the author. In Italy, the book is considered a pillar of the national literature, perhaps second only to the Divine Comedy. Joan Acocella, The New Yorker

ottima cosa, questa nuova traduzione e questa riscoperta di Manzoni. E visto che parliamo di classici, vi propongo il primo racconto di Nora Ephron sul New Yorker, "About (Almost Surely) New York", ovviamente. Risale al novembre del 1974.

Something has happened to telephone booths in New York. No one knows when it happened, and no one knows what it is that happened, but something has happened. Telephone booths in New York are different. They have changed. There are people who say it has to do with what they look like, and there are people who say that it has to do with whether they are out of order, and there are people who say that all that is beside the point. What matters, they say, is that something has happened to telephone booths in New York. Nora Ephron, The New Yorker

 

Book Clubs e traduzioni

Book clubs, by their nature, interfere with the way a book is meant to be experienced. By removing enjoyment as an explicit factor in picking up or sticking with the book (because you’re reading it for the book club), they call into question the worth of the exercise as a whole. Naomi Kanakia, LA Review of Books

una lunga discussione sul perché i book club sono noiosi e come si dovrebbe discutere di un libro. E un'altra lunga discussione sull'arte della traduzione,"The Art of Betrayal: Translation in an Age of Suspicion"

Each language is a world unto itself and has been at least since the destruction of the Tower of Babel. It may share certain territories or weather systems with others, but it is not, nor ever can be identical to another. As Emily Apter pointed out in her introduction to the Dictionary of Untranslatables, “Nothing is exactly the same in one language as in another, so the failure of translation is always necessary and absolute. Apart from its neglect of the fact that some pretty good equivalencies are available, this proposition rests on a mystification, on a dream of perfection we cannot even want, let alone have.” Tess Lewis, The Hudson Review

Cancel Culture

When the Pew Research Center recently asked working journalists to pick one word to describe the media, the overwhelming plurality, nearly 50 percent, picked words such as chaos and struggling—with financial insecurity, with organizational dysfunction. Gone is the age when independent writers could make a living reporting; gone is the age when veteran editors knew how to market books; gone even is the recent age when Twitter celebrity sold books. Eve Fairbanks, The Atlantic

un bell'articolo sulla cancel culture. 

Inoltre: il progresso morale avanza di pari passo a quello scientifico e tecnologico? Un bel libro esplora la questione: MacAskill, What We Owe the Future (Basics).

Oxford philosopher William MacAskill thinks morality requires us to take care of the future. His new book, What We Owe the Future, seeks to explain what this obligation amounts to, and intervenes in various philosophical debates about morality and moral status. What We Owe the Future is written in a simple style, a shining example of the conventions of the analytic philosophy tradition—conventions from which many philosophers quickly depart when writing for the public. His views are stated so clearly as to resemble slogans but defended so rigorously as to seem the opposite. “You can shape the course of history,” MacAskill writes—and, he adds, you ought to. Oliver Traldi, City Journal

Diane Arbus e Yuval Noah Harari

hanno molto poco in comune, se non che questa settimana ho trovato due articoli interessanti su di loro, e quindi si trovano, qui, in compagnia.

On the other hand, in Arbus’ case, the photograph might be the weapon. To enter Cataclysm—a facsimile of the Museum of Modern Art exhibition that so disturbed Sontag, staged on its 50th anniversary by the David Zwirner galley—is to be zapped across the room by the close-ups on the opposite wall. Tightly framed (or cropped), Arbus’ subjects typically stare directly into the camera. The show is something of a confrontation. J. Hoberman, Tablet

in occasione di una mostra: "Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited" at David Zwirner from September 14 through October 22, 2022, at 537 W 20th St, New York, NY 10011

e su Hariri:

The best-selling author is a gifted storyteller and popular speaker. But he sacrifices science for sensationalism, and his work is riddled with errors. Darshana Narayanan, Current Affairs

The Golden Mole

But this is a 21st-century bestiary, and rather than trying to slot animals, birds and fish into a Christian worldview, Rundell – author of wondrous children’s books and recently a thrilling biography of John Donne – is arguing urgently for their survival. Samantha Ellis, The Guardian

si parla di The Golden Mole and Other Living Treasure, di Katherine Rundell (Faber).

Follow the Leader

Whether it’s because of the uncertain times in which we live, the dismal nature of our political leaders, or the rise of rightwing populism, we have had a spate of books in recent years on leadership in modern history. From Frank Dikötter’s How to Be a Dictator to Henry Kissinger’s Leadership, the format seems to be to string together chapters on various world leaders who changed the course of history, for good or bad, and reflect on the patterns between them.

The latest offering is Ian Kershaw’s Personality and Power, in which the great historian of Hitler and his movement pens a dozen lucid portraits of the leaders – half of them dictators, the others democrats, to varying degrees – who shaped Europe’s 20th century. Orlando Figes, The Guardian