Most Well-Read Cities

Childrens Garden at the Atlanta Botanical Garden

Amazon ha pubblicato l'elenco delle città con più di 100.000 abitanti che hanno ordinato più libri  e quindi, si suppone, i cui abitanti leggono di più. In cima alla lista c'è Cambridge, Mass. Seguita da Alexandria, Va., Berkeley, Calif., Ann Arbor, Mich.,  Boulder, Colo. Ma la ragione per cui pubblico questa notizia è l'immagine che compare in cima all'articolo del New Yorker da dove l'ho tratta. Bella, vero? newyorker.

What Is Left the Daughter

Howard Norman

Quanti romanzi interessanti e quanto poco tempo per leggerli! What Is Left the Daughter, di Howard Norman (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) sembra uno di questi, almeno dalla bella recensione che ne fanno Martin Greenberg e Paula Fox. Un libro pieno di passioni forti, di amore e morte e confusione, ambientato a Witless Bay, nelle Newfoundlands."What Is Left the Daughter consists of a long letter written by Wyatt Hillyer to his daughter Marlais, whom he last saw when she was six. It begins: Marlais, today is March 27, 1967, your twenty-first birthday. I'm writing because I refuse any longer to have my life defined by what I haven't told you. I've waited until now to relate the terrible incident that I took part in on October 16, 1942, when I was nineteen". nyrb.

Figlie della rivoluzione

Carolyn Cooke

Carolyn Cooke, Daughters of the Revolution  (Knopf). Sembra un romanzo interessante. E' ambientato in una prep school del New England (mi piacciono molto i romanzi ambientati nelle scuole e nei college), la Goode School, una scuola molto snob, solo maschile e cristiana, il cui direttore, Goddard Byrd, è chiamato God. Per questioni finanziarie viene deciso di aprire la scuola anche alle ragazze, di renderla coed(ucational), e poi, per errore di una segretaria, viene accettata la prima ragazza, Carole Faust, una brillante e intrattabile quindicenne nera. Jonathan Yardley, wp.

Love Child

Katie Roiphe

Come si direbbe in italiano? Figlio naturale? Figlio dell'amore? Katie Roiphe traccia la storia di quest'espressione, "The word itself dates back to at least 1805. In The Nuns of the Desert, Eugenia De Acton writes of a 'Miss Blenheim' being 'what in that country is denominated a love-child,' and the term appears again a little later in Percy Bysshe Shelley's Posthumous Poems. Another important touchstone in the word's history is, of course, the 1968 Diana Ross and the Supremes song Love Child, with the truly transcendent rhyme 'Love child never meant to be/ Love child scorned by society'." 

Ne commenta le ambigue connotazioni, "Since our bigotries are less openly and exuberantly expressed than they were in past decades, they take refuge in subtle, shifting word choices. Love child is definitely more friendly or tactful than the more Shakespearean bastard but it nonetheless cloaks a certain discomfort with the facts. Love child is both tolerant (that is, more tolerant than other terms) and mocking; it contains within it our contradictions; it passes judgment in an ironic way - indirectly, playfully, but also plainly".  

E il potenziale trasgressivo, "Stepping back, though, what is a tiny bit subversive and possibly appealing about the term is the faint suggestion that the love child has something more to do with love than the baby born in wedlock, who is in a certain sense just doing his job, fulfilling the natural and upstanding function of holy matrimony. On some level, the existence of the love child is testimony to some special energy on the planet ..." slate.

In difesa di una parola tabù

La grande Jenny Diski scrive sul NYT in difesa di una parola che il NYT non pubblicherebbe neppure in forma di lettera iniziale/asterischi/lettera finale. E si augura che le donne se ne riapproprino. "What have writers got but words? And what have people got but their own bodies to inhabit? What then if you're a writer and the kind of person who has a body part that could be named by a word that can't be used? At any rate, the word can't be used in this magazine, nor can it be represented by a couple of letters with asterisks in between (too risqué, those stars) ... Its that dangerous, that offensive. So for a writer and a woman, what could be more alluring and commanding than to write and vocalize the private part that dare not speak its name except in Latin and/or euphemism?" nyt.

Di che college sei?

In America il college ha un ruolo importante nel definire l'identità sociale. Lo stesso avviene in letteratura, dove il college è spesso usato per definire la personalità dei personaggi. Daniel de Vise del Washington Post traccia una mappa interessante degli stereotipi umani legati ai college: "Real colleges pop up all over our fictional landscapes, their names invoked to breathe life and depth into characters. The universities of Minnesota and Virginia serve as backdrops in Freedom, Jonathan Franzen's celebrated novel. The Simpsons caricatured the Seven Sisters in an episode touching on the collegiate aspirations of bookish daughter Lisa. ("Come to Radcliffe and meet Harvard men," they beckon. "Or come to Wellesley and marry them.") And the Oscar-winning film The Social Network essentially stars Harvard University ... A citation in fiction means an institution's brand is sufficiently familiar to help define a fictional character: Princeton preppy. Penn State party boy. MIT brainiac. Harvard kingmaker. Berkeley radical. Notre Dame jock". wp.

The Anatomy of Influence

E' il titolo del nuovo libro di Harold Bloom, uscito presso Yale UP. "For me, Shakespeare is God", dice Bloom a un certo punto. "Twice he asserts that Shakespeare's greatest creations are Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago and Cleopatra; twice that The Tempest and The Winter's Tale are tragicomedies and not ro­mances; three times that Titus Andronicus parodies the tragedies of Shakespeare's defeated rival Marlowe. Prospero, Bloom shrewdly observes, 'is one of those teachers who is always convinced his auditors are not quite attentive.' So too Bloom, himself a 'professional teacher' for 55 years now, has perhaps learned that the most efficient way to get your point across is to keep making it, the classroom sage's version of staying on message. But a repetitive Bloom, even in his late season of garrulity, still has many arresting things to say and says them, often, with exquisite precision. He is, by any reckoning, one of the most stimulating literary presences of the last half-century - and one of the most protean, a singular breed of scholar-teacher-critic-prose-poet-­pamphleteer... Sam Tanenhaus sul nytbr.

Una donna singolare

Questa settimana il libro di cui si è parlato di più è A Singular Woman (Riverhead), di Janny Scott, una biografia della madre di Barak Obama, Stanley Ann Dunham. "Twice, she married men from different cultures and races, then divorced them. With the help of her parents, she raised two biracial children as a single mother on the Pacific islands of two nations, got degrees in math and anthropology, spent years in peasant villages studying Javanese cottage industries, and pieced together grants and development work to make money and provide for her children’s education. Colleagues credit her with helping pioneer microcredit as a tool for lifting women out of poverty", Ann Gerhart sul Washington Post. Vedi anche Ian Buruma sulla New York Review of Books e Jacob Weisberg su Slate.

Un secondo addio a Elaine's

E' il titolo di un post di Macy Halford che con dispiacere comunica che il noto ristorante newyorchese - immortalato anche da Woody Allen in alcuni dei suoi film - ha tentato di sopravvivere alla morte della proprietaria, Elaine Kaufmann, ma non ce l'ha fatta. Chiuderà definitivamente il 26 maggio. La caratteristica principale di Elaine's era di essere un locale senza pretese, se così si può dire di un posto frequentato dalla miglior intellighenzia di Manhattan. Ecco quel che dice Halford, "As the Times puts it, 'Elaine's had become an anomaly, a single-owner restaurant in an age of deep-pocketed investors and celebrity chefs.' The triumph of such restaurants strikes me as in fact one of the chief disasters of this (New York) age. Soon, we could very well have no place where reading at the bar while sipping a martini or eating with books piled up next to the bread basket is 'appropriate,' since one's focus is expected to be always on the 'specialness' of the place itself. Elaine let her customers focus on what they wanted - which happened to be books and the literary life - and that's what made it special. Elaine's, you will be missed". newyorker.

In effetti, che noia questi locali milanesi con chef super blasonati.

40 termini letterari

che bisogna conoscere. Secondo The Centered Librarian. Al n. 6 c'è: Bowdlerize: Because of his numerous silly cuts and edits to Shakespeare (SHAKESPEARE!), Thomas Bowdler has become immortalized as the unintentional founder of yet another word for censorship and needless meddling. When American The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy editions replaced the f-dash-dash-dash word with "Belgium," it found itself on the receiving end of a serious bowdlerizing. centeredlibrarian.

Il punto va prima o dopo le virgolette? Dipende dal paese, e dal tipo di documento. Comunque si legga The Rise of "Logical Punctuation" di Ben Yagoda su Slate, "For at least two centuries, it has been standard practice in the United States to place commas and periods inside of quotation marks. This rule still holds for professionally edited prose: what you'll find in Slate, the New York Times, the Washington Post - almost any place adhering to Modern Language Association (MLA) or AP guidelines. But in copy-editor-free zones - the Web and emails, student papers, business memos - with increasing frequency, commas and periods find themselves on the outside of quotation marks, looking in.  A punctuation paradigm is shifting. slate.