The Grammar of Angels

Of all the great intellectuals of the Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola is surely the most personally captivating. [...] An Italian aristocrat who dabbled in magic and escaped from prison after eloping with the wife of a Medici lord, his books were burned on the orders of the pope. Edward Wilson-Lee’s new biography brings us the events of Pico’s short, blazing life, but also what is most strange and attractive about him: the wonder of a scholar who felt himself on the verge of being able to commune with angels. [...]

Once he had mastered the orthodox disciplines, Pico found himself hungry for more. He sought out Jewish scholars to teach him Hebrew and Arabic, and became convinced that there were secrets in the ancient texts of the east, accessible only only to those who knew how to interpret them. Writing excitedly to a friend, he declared that the first five books of the Hebrew Bible contained “the entire knowledge of all arts and wisdom both divine and human”. Unfortunately there was a catch: “This knowledge is hidden and concealed.” Dennis Duncan, The Guardian

recensione alla nuova biografia di Pico della Mirandola di Edward Wilson-Lee dal titolo affascinante, The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Language (William Collins).

Apocalypse, Constantly

But the fact that Eliot was already fantasizing about the end of the world a century ago suggests that the dread of extinction has always been with us; only the mechanism changes. Thirty years before “The Hollow Men,” H. G. Wells’s 1895 novel The Time Machine imagined the ultimate extinction of life on Earth, as the universe settles into entropy and heat death. Nearly 70 years before that, Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man imagined the destruction of the human race in an epidemic. And even then, the subject was considered old hat. One reason The Last Man failed to make the same impression as Shelley’s Frankenstein, Lynskey shows, is that two other works titled “The Last Man” were published in Britain the same year, as well as a poem called “The Death of the World.”

In these modern fables, human extinction is imagined in scientific terms, as the result of natural causes. But the fears they express are much older than science. Adam Kirsch, The Atlantic

Why 2024 was the year of the audiobook

Audiobooks aren’t new: the American Foundation for the Blind pressed recordings of books on to vinyl records in 1932. Later, books became popular on cassette tape and then CDs. But the smartphone era has given the format a new lease of life, and data from the Publishers Association (PA) shows that UK audiobook downloads increased by 17% in the year between 2022 and 2023.

The official statistics for 2024 won’t be released until the spring, but it’s already clear that “2024 has been another record year for audiobooks [...] Ellen Peirson-Hagger, The Guardian

The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan

Starnone’s prose captures the feverishness and weird juxtapositions of a child’s inner life. “Coherence doesn’t belong to the world of children, it’s an illness we contract later on, growing up,” he writes [...] Now he tries to cement his experiences in words: “The problem, if there is one, is that the pleasure of writing is fragile, it has a hard time making it up the slippery slope of real life.” The New Yorker

The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan, by Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky (Europa).

 

The books to look forward to in 2025

 

David Shariatmadari, The Guardian

BUON ANNO!

The Rise and Fall — and Rise? — of Close Reading

[...] But through it all, close reading remained a technique widely used by scholars and teachers, and it has become newly fashionable in recent years. Why exactly? Although the intellectual rewards it yields may seem obvious to those who have been properly initiated, it is, after all, not the only way to do interpretation. Critics from Aristotle to Samuel Johnson have appreciated and studied literature without it. What, then, has made it such a seemingly indispensable method in the past hundred years? What historical or institutional pressures were responsible for its emergence and growth? In his slim new volume, On Close Reading, John Guillory sketches out some possible answers to these questions. To explain why it has proved so serviceable to the discipline, he contends, we must first understand what exactly close reading is — which turns out to be more difficult than we might assume. Timothy Aubry, The Chronicle of Higher Education

buona fine anno e buon inizio anno nuovo!

How to Research Like a Dog

Written toward the end of Franz Kafka’s life, “Investigations of a Dog” is one of the lesser-known and most enigmatic works in the author’s oeuvre. Kafka didn’t give the story a title, writing it in the autumn of 1922 but leaving it unpublished and unfinished. It was published posthumously in 1931 in a collection edited by his friend and biographer Max Brod, who named it Forschungen eines Hundes — which could also be translated as “Researches of a Dog,” to give it a more academic ring. [...] “Investigations of a Dog” presents a brilliant and sometimes hilarious parody of the world of knowledge production, what the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called “the university discourse.” Aaron Schuster, The MIT Press

confrontarsi con Kafka, sempre. Buon Natale e Hanukkah!

Untold Lessons

It is 1970 in the northern Italian city of Biella, and a teacher has gone missing. The disappearance of Silvia seems to be linked to the death of her pupil Giovanna, a girl who was beaten at home ... John Self, The Guardian

è stata una sorpresa trovare sul Guardian - tra i libri recentemente tradotti in inglese - il romanzo di Maddalena Vaglio Tanet, che in Italia si intitola Tornare nel bosco ed è edito da Marsilio. Non lo conosco, ma l'ho cercato in versione kindle. Mi incuriosisce, così come mi incuriosisce l'autrice. Tra l'altro si svolge sulle colline e nei boschi della mia infanzia.

Q&A with Dr. Michael Silverstein: How social media can impact child health

 

Q: Can you help put the social media phenomenon in context? How does it compare to previous phenomena that were assumed to have negative effects on children’s mental health, such as violent television programs or video games? 

Unlike, say, the video games of yesteryear, social media follows you from school to soccer practice to your friend's house to your house; from the kitchen to the bedroom to the bathroom. This phenomenon can exist and persist in most physical spaces, as well as in a person’s mental space. Let’s say a classmate is being mean to a student at school. Well, the student can get away from that, at least temporarily, by coming home. But if a classmate is being mean to a student over text or social media, they can’t get away from it, even if they leave school. They will still be confronted or reminded by it whenever they turn on or even look at the computer, the phone or the watch they use to interact with others online. That makes it uniquely powerful in terms of potential mental health effects.  Corrie Pikul, Brown University

How the Ivy League Broke America

 The Six Sins of the Meritocracy

1. The system overrates intelligence.  
2. Success in school is not the same thing as success in life. 
3. The game is rigged. 
4. The meritocracy has created an American caste system.
5. The meritocracy has damaged the psyches of the American elite. 
6. The meritocracy has provoked a populist backlash that is tearing society apart.   David Brooks, The Atlantic