Virago Press compie 50 anni

It was the early 70s, and in a tiny flat above a synagogue in Chelsea, London, decorated with lime-green paint, red tiles and an alternative cover for Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch on the wall, a group of women sat talking around a dining table.The attic bedsit soon became the first office of the feminist publisher Virago. Ella Creamer, The Guardian

mi piace la foto, mi piace molto la descrizione del piccolo appartamento sopra una sinagoga a Chelsea... e naturalmente: auguri Virago!

The Casual Ignominy of the Book Tours of Yore

Then dawned the day of the book tour. Literary stars and the authors of blockbusters, the Norman Mailers and the Frederick Forsyths, had always been swaggering about the world touting their wares. Now the rest of us, poor moles digging away in the dark of obscurity, were hauled up into the light and sent abroad to appear before live audiences and pretend to be a more or less plausible and if possible entertaining version of ourselves. [...] every reading, as every writer will tell you, attracts at least a couple of maniacs. John Banville, Esquire

voglio anche segnalare una nuova traduzione del romanzo di Natalia Ginzburg, The Road to the City, New Directions. Dalla copertina, "An almost unbearably intimate novella, The Road to the City concentrates on a young woman barely awake to life, who fumbles through her days: she is fickle yet kind, greedy yet abashed, stupidly ambitious yet loving too—she is a mass of confusion".

The Sullivanians

At its peak, in the mid- to late seventies, the psychoanalytic association known as the Sullivanian Institute had as many as six hundred patient-members clustered in apartment buildings that the group bought or rented on the cheap on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. They also ran an experimental theatre troupe, called the Fourth Wall, on the Lower East Side. The Sullivanians adhered to the same principles and traditions as many of the ashrams and rural intentional communities of the era: polyamory, communal living, group parenting, socialist politics. But they came to their belief system through the gateway of psychoanalysis, the self-actualization tool of the urbane intellectual. And they enacted their beliefs on a crowded concrete island of nearly eight million people, often while holding down high-status jobs as physicians, attorneys, computer programmers, and academics. The institute’s co-founder and reigning tyrant, Saul Newton, who sat atop the organization from the mid-nineteen-fifties until the mid-nineteen-eighties (he died in 1991), may have come closer than any of his far more notorious peers to establishing a truly metropolitan cult—its members visible but its practices obscure. Jessica Winter, The New Yorker

rensione dell'ultimo libro di Alexander Stille, The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), che sembra molto interessante!

Tremplin poetique

De l’autre côté

Qu’y a-t-il de l’autre côté ?
Je ne sais pas.
Mais pourquoi je ne peux pas passer ?
Je ne sais pas.

Les potagers sont-ils plus colorés là-bas ? Les vaches moins timides ?
Les coquelicots plus grands ?
Je ne sais pas.

Et pourquoi les oiseaux peuvent-ils passer sans être dérangés ?
Personne ne pense à les retenir ?
Je ne sais pas.

...

questa settimana un detour a Lione, a questa bell'iniziativa delle biblioteche pubbliche della città per stimolare la produzione e lettura della poesia. Quest'anno il tema era "le frontiere". Tremplin poetique

 

‘I’m just cruel. What can I tell you?’

It has been more than a decade since the American writer Lorrie Moore published her last novel [...] “I’m a very slow writer,” she says simply, on a video call from Berlin, where she has spent the winter. Her latest novel, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, is her fourth and she has published four collections of stories. She describes the new novel as “a political ghost story and a personal ghost story”. Lisa Allardice, The Guardian

in Gran Bretagna il nuovo romanzo di Moore è pubblicato da Faber & Faber, in America da Knopf.

Dictionary of Gestures

We might believe that the seat of speech (without considering ventriloquists and flatulists) has no need for the assistance of hand gestures when it comes to expressing emotions and sensations. Numerous adjectives confirm this to be true: foul, open, loud, smart, foaming, pouty, watering — the mouth can be all of these things and many more still.

Whereas in English, to have your heart in your mouth means to be very nervous, in French, it is inverted and has a different meaning. As Raymond Queneau puts it in “Loin de Rueil”: “He coldly left like in a transitional scene, just like that, in the night, mouth in heart, without a word.” Typically, in French, this means to put on airs or to simper. The MIT Press Reader

Questo è un estratto dal Dictionary of Gestures, di François Caradec, scrittore e fumettista francese, nato nel 1924 e morto nel 2008. Viene ora tradotto in inglese da Chris Clarke, MIT Press. Non mi risulta che sia stato tradotto in italiano.

The Party Is Cancelled

Every month, more than two hundred people from the media, academia, and other intellectual circles are invited to a private hangout in New York City, which is known as the Gathering of Thought Criminals. There are two rules. The first is that you have to be willing to break bread with people who have been socially ostracized, or, as the attendees would say, “cancelled”—whether they’ve lost a job, lost friends, or simply feel persecuted for holding unpopular opinions. Some people on the guest list are notorious: élite professors who have deviated from campus consensus or who have broken university rules, and journalists who have made a name for themselves amid public backlash (or who have weathered it quietly). Others are relative nobodies, people who for one reason or another have become exasperated with what they see as rampant censorious thinking in our culture.The second rule of the gatherings is that Pamela has to like you. Pamela is Pamela Paresky, the gathering’s organizer, a fifty-six-year-old psychologist who lives in Chelsea.Emma Green, The New Yorker

The Eight Mountains – a movie with air in its lungs and love in its heart

This rich, beautiful and inexpressibly sad film is about the friendship between men who can’t talk about their feelings and about winning and losing at the great game of life. It is set in the breathtaking and wonderfully photographed Italian Alpine valley of Aosta, which includes the slopes of Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn. But the “eight mountains” of the title refers to the eight highest peaks of Nepal: a mysterious symbol of worldly ambition and conquest. Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

insomma, è piaciuto molto!

In search of lost time

Forty years ago, on a spring night in April 1983, a thief bypassed security at the L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art in Jerusalem, entering the building under the cover of darkness. The burglar stole 106 rare clocks worth tens of millions of dollars, then vanished without a trace.

The crime had all the elements of a high-stakes drama: a mysterious theft, befuddled investigators, a romance that spanned decades and outlasted a prison sentence, and two bequeathments of valuable timepieces (among them a pocket watch commissioned for Marie Antoinette).

In the two decades following the theft, authorities made little progress on the investigation. The heist seemed like a mystery that would never be solved—until a deathbed confession by a career criminal led to the recovery of almost all of the missing timepieces. Fern Reiss, Smithsonian

e un'altra curiosità:

How Hannah Arendt’s Zionism helped create American gay identity, Blake Smith, Tablet

Judy Blume Forever

Suddenly Judy Blume is everywhere. Not that the author who carried so many of us through adolescence is ever far from our minds; she tends to be my personal Jiminy Cricket, a gentle conscience asking the same question of every sentence I type: Is it honest?

But now, the creator of “Superfudge,” “Deenie,” “The Pain and the Great One” and so many other beloved novels is having her biggest week since “In the Unlikely Event” came out in 2015. “Judy Blume Forever,” a documentary about her life, is streaming on Amazon Prime Video and the movie version of her 52-year-old novel, “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” came out on Friday.