Over the Wall

Leggo con ritardo un bell'articolo di Roger Angell - 92enne redattore e collaboratore del New Yorker - sulla moglie morta di recente. Si intitola "Over the Wall", ed è uscito sulla rivista il 19 di novembre, ma purtroppo non è disponibile on-line. Esprime con garbo sentimenti sinceri; sentimenti che riconosco, primo fra tutti lo stupore, soprattutto al tempo che passa di fronte all'eternità. E poi cita una bella poesiola del suo step-father, E.B. White (nella foto Roger Angell con la moglie Carol nel 1966):


Hold a baby to your ear
As you would a shell:
Sounds of centuries you hear
New centuries foretell.

Who can break a baby's code?
And which is the older -
The listener or his small load?
The held or the holder?

Alice Munro sul suo nuovo libro

Alice Munro parla del suo nuovo libro di racconti, Dear Life (Knopf), con Deborah Treisman.

You’ve written so much about young women who feel trapped in marriage and motherhood and cast around for something more to life. You also married very young and had two daughters by the time you were in your mid-twenties. How difficult was it to balance your obligations as a wife and a mother and your ambitions as a writer?

It wasn’t the housework or the children that dragged me down. I’d done housework all my life. It was the sort of open rule that women who tried to do anything so weird as writing were unseemly and possibly neglectful. I did, however, find friends—other women who joked and read covertly and we had a very good time.

The trouble was the writing itself, which was often NO GOOD. I was going through an apprenticeship I hadn’t expected. Luck had it that there was a big cry at the time about WHERE IS OUR CANADIAN LITERATURE? So some people in Toronto noticed my uneasy offerings and helped me along. newyorker.

It wasn’t the housework or the children that dragged me down. I’d done housework all my life. It was the sort of open rule that women who tried to do anything so weird as writing were unseemly and possibly neglectful. I did, however, find friends—other women who joked and read covertly and we had a very good time.
The trouble was the writing itself, which was often NO GOOD. I was going through an apprenticeship I hadn’t expected. Luck had it that there was a big cry at the time about WHERE IS OUR CANADIAN LITERATURE? So some people in Toronto noticed my uneasy offerings and helped me along.


Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/on-dear-life-an-interview-with-alice-munro.html#ixzz2D9SwUSv3

You’ve written so much about young women who feel trapped in marriage and motherhood and cast around for something more to life. You also married very young and had two daughters by the time you were in your mid-twenties. How difficult was it to balance your obligations as a wife and a mother and your ambitions as a writer?

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/on-dear-life-an-interview-with-alice-munro.html#ixzz2D9Smn8SJ

You’ve written so much about young women who feel trapped in marriage and motherhood and cast around for something more to life. You also married very young and had two daughters by the time you were in your mid-twenties. How difficult was it to balance your obligations as a wife and a mother and your ambitions as a writer?
It wasn’t the housework or the children that dragged me down. I’d done housework all my life. It was the sort of open rule that women who tried to do anything so weird as writing were unseemly and possibly neglectful. I did, however, find friends—other women who joked and read covertly and we had a very good time.
The trouble was the writing itself, which was often NO GOOD. I was going through an apprenticeship I hadn’t expected. Luck had it that there was a big cry at the time about WHERE IS OUR CANADIAN LITERATURE? So some people in Toronto noticed my uneasy offerings and helped me along.


Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/on-dear-life-an-interview-with-alice-munro.html#ixzz2D9S5FoZY

You’ve written so much about young women who feel trapped in marriage and motherhood and cast around for something more to life. You also married very young and had two daughters by the time you were in your mid-twenties. How difficult was it to balance your obligations as a wife and a mother and your ambitions as a writer?
It wasn’t the housework or the children that dragged me down. I’d done housework all my life. It was the sort of open rule that women who tried to do anything so weird as writing were unseemly and possibly neglectful. I did, however, find friends—other women who joked and read covertly and we had a very good time.
The trouble was the writing itself, which was often NO GOOD. I was going through an apprenticeship I hadn’t expected. Luck had it that there was a big cry at the time about WHERE IS OUR CANADIAN LITERATURE? So some people in Toronto noticed my uneasy offerings and helped me along.


Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/on-dear-life-an-interview-with-alice-munro.html#ixzz2D9S5FoZY

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/on-dear-life-an-interview-with-alice-munro.html#ixzz2D9S5FoZY

You’ve written so much about young women who feel trapped in marriage and motherhood and cast around for something more to life. You also married very young and had two daughters by the time you were in your mid-twenties. How difficult was it to balance your obligations as a wife and a mother and your ambitions as a writer?
It wasn’t the housework or the children that dragged me down. I’d done housework all my life. It was the sort of open rule that women who tried to do anything so weird as writing were unseemly and possibly neglectful. I did, however, find friends—other women who joked and read covertly and we had a very good time.
The trouble was the writing itself, which was often NO GOOD. I was going through an apprenticeship I hadn’t expected. Luck had it that there was a big cry at the time about WHERE IS OUR CANADIAN LITERATURE? So some people in Toronto noticed my uneasy offerings and helped me along.


Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/11/on-dear-life-an-interview-with-alice-munro.html#ixzz2D9S5FoZY

Guida alla punteggiatura

Molto carina la guida alla punteggiatura di Elodie Olson-Coons:

Hyphen. An incredibly popular mark, particularly amongst hipsters and domesticated fowl. This is the sexiest punctuation mark. Use generously, especially if you might self-define as ‘sinewy,’ ‘urbane’ or ‘saturnine.’
 mcsweeneys.

Word's We Are Thankful For

Here on the OxfordWords blog we’re constantly awed and impressed by the breadth and depth of the English language. As this is a great week to be appreciative, we’ve asked some fellow language-lovers which word they’re most thankful for. From quark to quotidian, ych a fi to robot, here’s what they said:
stillicide
Of incredible value to the crime writer or anybody else wishing to build suspense into a landscape, stillicide is the falling of water, especially in drops, or a succession of drops. Inexplicably underused — every day brings a new way to employ it.
- Zadie Smith, author. oupblog.

Tradizioni natalizie

Our post-prandial Thanksgiving stroll, around 9:30, took my daughter and me up Broadway from 63rd. Every few blocks we passed pairs of big flatbed trucks with North Carolina plates, loaded with pine trees to create an instant mini street-forest. (Copse? Spinney?) Through year’s end, Christmas tree sellers line the avenue. There is a precise starting time for this amiable institution: midnight after Thanksgiving. Green Friday. All the way home the air was redolent of pine. I’ve smelled a lot worse along this stretch of Broadway. 

Randy Cohen, l'ex ethicist del New York Times, ve lo ricordate? Questo è un suo post su Facebook.

E a Milano, quando innalzano l'albero di Natale in piazza Duomo?

Terry Eagleton on Derrida

Benoit Peters, Derrida (Wiley): di questa recente biografia sul filosofo francese, Terry Eagleton dice, "I suspect that one reason Derrida enjoyed travelling the world so much was because it allowed him some respite from the bitchy, sectarian, backstabbing, backscratching climate of Parisian intellectual life, which this superb biography faithfully records. What the book fails to underline quite as heavily is how waspish the maitre himself could be". guardian.

Names in Fiction

Alastair Fowler, Literary Names: Personal Names in English Literature (Oxford UP). "More than most literary phenomena, names in fiction seem very straightforward until you start to think about them. The simple question, ‘why does a name sound right?’ leads to a whole range of questions. Are there rules about how names are given to characters? Do naming practices differ in different periods? Are they specific to particular genres? Do different authors use names in entirely different ways... One of the many things Alastair Fowler shows in the course of this fantastically learned and occasionally perverse book is that to think about literary names you have to think about more or less the whole literary system; and when you do so, individual instances of literary names rarely turn out to exemplify general tendencies". LRB.

A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay è il titolo di un film che Michael Maren - giornalista e sceneggiatore per film - sta girando, e che contiene una scena al Kos Kaffe di Park Slope, Brooklyn, in cui è riunita una decina di scrittori. "At one table, Jennifer Egan sat scribbling on a yellow legal pad, not far from Roxana Robinson, Philip Gourevitch, John Burnham Schwartz and Jane Green. Across the room, Michael Cunningham chatted with Nick Flynn, while Mary Morris sat with a battered notebook and a pile of printouts and Darin Strauss checked ESPN.com on his laptop.
The occasion was the shooting of a scene in Michael Maren’s forthcoming film, “A Short History of Decay,” that aims to show off the most impressive mass literary cameo in recent film history. ... And that doesn’t even count the reporters who were on hand to document this very meta Brooklyn literary moment. As Ms. Egan put it, “Someone should write about all the writers who have come to write about us writing.” nyt.

Reading in Electronic Times

Leggere ai tempi dell'elettronica ovviamente non è la stessa cosa. Lo dice Andrew Piper nel suo libro, Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times (University of Chicago Press), argomentando la sua tesi in modo interessante, "Amid the seemingly endless debates today about the future of reading, there remains one salient, yet often overlooked fact: Reading isn’t only a matter of our brains; it’s something that we do with our bodies. Reading is an integral part of our lived experience, our sense of being in the world, even if at times this can mean feeling intensely apart from it. How we hold our reading materials, how we look at them, navigate them, take notes on them, share them, play with them, even where we read them—these are the categories that have mattered most to us as readers throughout the long and varied history of reading. They will no doubt continue to do so into the future ..." slate.

A Roman Cat Fight

Sulla New York Review of Books si occupano della lotta che Repubblica sta ingaggiando contro le cat ladies. Massimo Gatto si chiede il perché, "Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi must have finally lost all claim to our attention, because La Repubblica has decided to change the target of its latest crusade. Since 1993, a former opera singer named Silvia Viviani has maintained a sanctuary for cats in the center of town, in a Fascist-era archaeological excavation called the Area Sacra di Largo Argentina, or Largo di Torre Argentina. The cat sanctuary has sterilized tens of thousands of animals, healed and vaccinated thousands more. But La Repubblica has suddenly decided to be outraged that cats might find refuge among these unprepossessing ruins. ... " nybooks.