Things started getting weird

Let’s start off, as most good books do, with an inciting incident. In this case, that’s the arrival of an 87,000-word manuscript, an unpublished novel, in someone’s email inbox. The title of the document is “Bad Summer People”, and the setting of the book seems familiar to the person who receives the email. Some of the character names do, too. Because of this, the document gets forwarded to someone else who may find it interesting. Who then sends it to another person. And another. Eventually, this unpublished work causes a cascade of small-town mayhem, ending up as a tabloid story with a headline that reads “Media exec’s novel about murder, sex and lies in the moneyed town of Saltaire has sent residents into a spin.”

Sounds like the plot of a good beach read, right? Well, unfortunately for the media exec in question – me – that juicy plotline happened in real life, not between the pages of a book. Emma Rosenblum, The Guardian

le avventure di un libro e una lettura per l'estate (l'ho raccomandata anche sul mio boxino per Internazionale). Anche la foto è adatta all'estate! Il giallo di Emma Rosenblum, Bad Summer People, è pubblicato da Penguin.

Jazz e Talmud

« Dans son ouvrage His Own Words, Selected Writings, Oxford University Press, paru en 2001, «Louis Armstrong parle en termes élogieux de la famille Karnofsky qu’il avait abondamment fréquentée dans sa jeunesse à La Nouvelle-Orléans. En effet, c’est Morris Karnofsky qui lui avait prêté l’argent pour son premier cornet et ce sont les berceuses russes qu’il entend chez eux qu’il rend responsables de son amour du judaïsme. Il dédie ce même ouvrage à son agent Joe Glaser. Sa reconnaissance vis-à-vis des Juifs s’exprime aussi par une dédicace au Dr Gary Zucker, son sauveur de l’hôpital Beth Israël de New York.»

C’est ainsi que commence l’article de Jean Szlamowicz, Juifs américains et Afro-Américains, Convergences et divergences dans le champ social du jazz, paru dans la revue Pardès en 2008.

il musicista jazz Julien Grassen Barbe (nella foto) parla della sua musica con Marc-Alain Ouaknin in Talmudiques

Capote’s Women

The biggest tragedy of Truman Capote’s altogether tragic life was that he never got to write Answered Prayers, the novel of high society shenanigans that he and the rest of the world knew would be his masterpiece.[...]

The main characters in Answered Prayers would be a group of high-society women whom Capote referred to in real life as his “swans”. They included Babe Paley, Lee Radziwill, Slim Keith and CZ Guest, as well as Gloria Guinness, Marella Agnelli and Pamela Harriman. They were immensely rich, clever if not intellectual, better with horses than children and never off the best-dressed list. They all also adored Truman Capote, the tiny, camp southern journalist who loved nothing better than a bibulous lunch at Elaine’s or La Côte Basque larded with some vicious gossip, typically concerning whichever swan had just left the table to powder her nose. Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian

nella foto: Truman Capote con Lee Radziwill nel 1966. Il libro di cui si parla è: Laurence Leamer, Capote’s Women (Hodder & Stoughton).

The Students Who Went to Sea

What could possibly go wrong? More than three hundred overprivileged American students travelling the world on a hastily converted troopship, led by a recently sacked university professor determined to prove that travel could be as educational as any university course and keen to make money in the process.

Underfunded, under-recruited and poorly run, the ‘Floating University’ circumnavigated the world over a seven-month period, generating appalling headlines almost everywhere it went. William Whyte, Literary Review

il libro di cui si parla, e che deve essere molto interessante, è Tamson Pietsch, The Floating University: Experience, Empire, and the Politics of Knowledge (University of Chicago Press).

cambiando completamente argomento, questo sembra un altro libro molto interessante, questa volta sui gufi, Jennifer Ackerman, What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds (Oneworld), recensito sul Guardian da Simon Worral.

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.