The Greatest Dictionary Collection in the World et al

Madeline Kripke’s first dictionary was a copy of Webster’s Collegiate that her parents gave her when she was a fifth grader in Omaha in the early 1950s. By the time of her death in 2020, at age 76, she had amassed a collection of dictionaries that occupied every flat surface of her two-bedroom Manhattan apartment—and overflowed into several warehouse spaces. Many believe that this chaotic, personal library is the world’s largest compendium of words and their usage. April White, Atlas Obscura

altro articolo interessante questa settimana:

In the first decade of the 20th century, it was both virtually impossible and virtually unheard of for a Jewish person, irrespective of their individual talents, to be hired for any job at a major American publishing company—even if they were Ivy League graduates, heirs to family fortunes, and had brilliant literary minds. They couldn’t get hired on the editorial staff of a widely circulated American magazine, or be granted a professorship in an English department at a prestigious university, either. But all that started to change in the decades after the 1910s, when Jews entered the industry en masse. In addition to founding many of the today’s largest publishing companies, Jews became so influential throughout the industry that by the 1960s American writers as different as Truman Capote, Jack Kerouac, Katherine Anne Porter, and Mario Puzo began to complain about a “Jewish literary mafia.” In short, a minority group went from almost complete exclusion to full literary enfranchisement in a matter of decades. Josh Lambert, Public Books

Jews of Discretion

Let me start with an expression I made up in Call Me by Your Name. It refers to Jews who live in an entirely gentile world and who, without concealing their Jewishness, are, nevertheless, reluctant to proclaim it. There is, or so they think, no real imperative to proclaim their religion; they may even live in a world where Christians and Jews are quite secular, may even intermarry, and have grown to tolerate each other. You are not ashamed or fearful to be Jewish but you know better than to stand out when it’s not exactly necessary to do so. You may not tell everyone you are Jewish; at best, you allow some to infer it. After at least 2,000 years of antisemitic persecution, your difference is something you learn instinctively not to say too much about. I called these Jews “Jews of discretion.” Not nervous, not even apprehensive—just discreet. Or to use another word, prudent. André Aciman, Tablet

dal discorso fatto dall'autore il 5 novembre scorso all'University of Virginia in occasione della Conference on Jewish Life in the Diaspora: Sephardic Lives

Days of The Jackal

How Andrew Wylie turned serious literature into big business. Andrew Wylie is agent to an extraordinary number of the planet’s biggest authors. His knack for making highbrow writers very rich helped to define a literary era – but is his reign now coming to an end? Alex Blasdel, The Guardian

 

e per continuare a esplorare il lato commerciale della letteratura, da leggere è quest'altro articolo sui premi letterari:  "What 35 Years of Data Can Tell Us about Who Will Win the National Book Award", Alexander Manshel & Melanie Walsh, Public Books

Verdi’s Jewish Opera Grandly Staged at the Metropolitan

Nabucco is widely seen as a political opera. But while Verdi’s nationalist operas have mostly dropped out of the repertory of major venues, Nabucco is still performed widely, in part because it has better music, and also because it is not so much a nationalist opera as a religious one. With the arguable exception of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Nabucco is the most Jewish of operas, with a deeply sympathetic portrayal of the First Exile. David P. Goldman, Tablet

Baritone George Gagnidze makes his Met role debut as the imperious king Nabucco, alongside soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska reprising her thrilling turn as his vengeful daughter Abigaille. Mezzo-soprano Maria Barakova and tenor SeokJong Baek, in his company debut, are Fenena and Ismaele, whose love transcends politics, and bass Dmitry Belosselskiy repeats his celebrated portrayal of the high priest Zaccaria. Daniele Callegari conducts Verdi’s exhilarating early masterpiece, which features the ultimate showcase for the great Met Chorus, the moving “Va, pensiero.” Al Metropolitan fino al prossimo 26 gennaio.

Lord Jim at Home

Born into privilege somewhere in Cornwall in the 1920s, Giles Trenchard receives a bizarre yet commonplace induction into the upper middle class life of the time. His sense of worth is depleted before he leaves the nursery, by the interlocking efforts of a drunken, bleakly dismissive and mostly absent father and a nanny determined to control his bodily processes. He is expected to struggle towards personal agency but always punished for demonstrating it. He is separated from the mother he adores. He’s forced to eat food he can’t stomach. Nevertheless, he visualises himself as “the Prince”. It’s an emotional miseducation that can be completed only by a public school – in this case Rugby, where, already fragile and floundering, he learns to survive through mediocrity, dissociation and doing as little as possible; while beneath the vague, compliant surface that so irritates his teachers, all the suppressed needs, greeds and ambitions of early childhood still writhe. Inevitably, this contradiction will shape his adult life, which Brooke unrolls across the body of her novel, exactly like one of the fouled nappies the nanny draped across Giles’s face at six months old to teach him right from wrong in the context of bowel movements. John Harrison, The Guardian

ritorna nelle librerie un inquietante libro di culto degli anni '70, Lord Jim at Home, di Dinah Brooke (Daunt Books), da noi mai tradotto, mi pare.

John le Carré's serial philandering

“My infidelities,” he wrote to me at a time when, for better or worse, the issue had come to dominate our discussions, “produced in my life a duality & a tension that became almost a necessary drug for my writing, a dangerous edge of some kind … They are not therefore a ‘dark part’ of my life, separate from the ‘high literary calling,’ so to speak, but, alas, integral to it, & inseparable.” Dan Fesperman, WP

citazione dalla nuova biografia di le Carré di Adam Sisman, The Secret Life of John le Carré (Harper), che promette di rivelare molti pettegolezzi, tralasciati nella precedente bio.

Louise Glück by Colm Tóibín

Louise Glück was reticent, careful about what she said. She could be distant. There was always a sense that her real life was lived in dreams and memories, in her imagination, in her time alone. With students, sometimes she suggested that they try silence, not working at all. That, she believed, might be best for someone who was writing the wrong poems or producing too much.

In her own poems, she worked with silence, breaking it, creating more space for it, leaving gaps, writing lines that would hold as much implication as they could. Colm Tóibín, The Guardian

Bring No Clothes

When Virginia Woolf invited TS Eliot down for a country weekend in 1920 she concluded with “Please bring no clothes”. This was not a suggestion that “Tom” should arrive in East Sussex naked. Such a possibility was unlikely anyway since at this point the poet was still working as a buttoned-up clerk at Lloyds Bank. Eliot was famously wedded to his three-piece suit to the point where, Woolf joked, he would have worn a four-piece one if such a thing existed. What she meant by “bring no clothes” was that at Monk’s House they did not dress for dinner, change for church (there was no church), or worry about getting their best clothes grubby in the garden. This was Bloomsbury, albeit a rural version, and the clothing conventions to which the rest of upper-middle-class society had returned after the first world war had no place there. Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian

recensione di un libro su come si vestiva Virginia Woolf e il suo gruppo, Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion, di Charlie Porter (Particular).

Jhumpa Lahiri e Moravia

 

Can you talk about your new collection of stories. You have borrowed the title and concept from Alberto Moravia, who published his own set of Roman stories in 1954. What made you want to do that?
I have read and admired Moravia’s work for many years. Racconti romani struck me as both a fresco and a portrait of the city: a dense assembly of stories that is epic in scope. In fact, his stories were my first encounter with Rome, long before I ever visited. Many years later, Moravia was the first writer I read directly in Italian and fully understood, and when I began to write in Italian, I turned to him to guide me. The clarity of his style and the control and precision of his language taught me how to arrange words and sentences, in a new language, on the page. My title is in part a homage to him, but I also wish to signal some of the differences between his Rome of postwar Italy and the Rome I have lived in and known for the past decade. That said, his characters, like mine, are outsiders or people who have lost their way, almost always in crisis, and often living on the edge. Geneva Abdul, The Guardian

in questa bella interevistsa Jhumpa Lahiri parla di traduzioni, lingue e Italia.

English has always evolved by mistake

Perhaps the world’s most famous lexicographer, Susie Dent is certainly one of the most positive people on British TV. For 31 years the queen of dictionary corner on Channel 4’s Countdown, she puts just as much energy into her books: from her first, the 2003 Language Report for Oxford University Press, to Weird Words (2013), an unapologetic compendium of farting and squelching. She even finds the fun in current events, through her regular “word of the day” posts on Twitter. Recent examples include “‘boodlery’ (19th century): unprincipled behaviour in public office”, and, on the day Donald Trump was arrested, “‘mugshot’: the use of ‘mug’ for a face looks back to 18th-century drinking mugs that often represented a grotesque human face … ”

We meet in a cafe on a rainy July day, where she is sitting – as is her habit – in a corner, enthusiastically digging into a second breakfast. She often sits quietly on her own in a coffee shop, she says. “It’s probably against the law to eavesdrop as much as I do. It really is for linguistic purposes, not for gossip. But you can pick up some gems.” Katy Guest, The Guardian

sull'interessante lavoro del/la lessicografo/a. E anche il profilo dei finalisti al Booker Prize (nella foto): Esi Edugyan, The Guardian