Pretend It's a City

 

Is there anything more delightful than watching Martin Scorsese enjoy someone? One of the best things about his new documentary series, “Pretend It’s a City,” is getting to see the filmmaker react to his subject, the author and humorist Fran Lebowitz, who is also his good friend. Ten years ago, Scorsese made “Public Speaking,” his first documentary about Lebowitz, which was an ode to a vanishing breed of New York celebrity, as well as a portrait of the city itself. Sitting in a booth at the Waverly Inn, Lebowitz expounded on her various hobbyhorses, including her rejection of technology, her love of talking, and her addiction to smoking. (“The clerk said, ‘Oh, you know, Marlboro Lights, they’re on sale.’ And I thought, Really? Why? . . . They could be a million dollars, I don’t care.”) Now Scorsese and Lebowitz have made a kind of sequel, which comes, in the manner of the hour, as a streaming Netflix series rather than a feature-length film. Naomi Fry, The New Yorker

The Light Ages

The Light Ages, by Seb Falk (Norton). The figure at the heart of this exploration of medieval astronomers, philosophers, and physicians is John of Westwyk, a brilliant fourteenth-century Benedictine monk who created an equatorium, a kind of analog computer for determining the positions of the planets. As John passes in and out of the historical record, Falk provides an expansive survey of Eastern polymaths, squabbling theorists, political schemers, and optimistic overreachers. Those dreamers can be the most beguiling: the eleventh-century monk Eilmer of Malmesbury leaped from an abbey tower with wings attached to his hands and feet, flying two hundred metres before plunging to earth. Falk, always generous, applauds him for having “piloted an experimental glider, not wholly without success.” The New Yorker

Adrienne Kennedy

 

Kennedy, who is eighty-nine, is one of our greatest and least definable living playwrights, restlessly inventive and ruthlessly unshy about the pressures exerted by history upon our lives. If one motif hums through her work (besides herself: she is our foremost artist of theatrical autobiography), it is a nagging, sometimes unbearable suspicion that the past has hijacked the present. Vinson Cunningham, The New Yorker

Unconventional Essays

 

This Is Not a Novel by David Markson

Something of the everyday frustration of working as a writer is captured for me in an Amazon review of This is Not A Novel, which begins, “This is not really a novel …” This book is an exquisite meditation on art-making and mortality, rendered in a series of carefully curated details from the lives and deaths of various artists. Throughout, the author offers suggestions of what this work might be – a “heap of riddles”, “an epic poem”, “a mural”, “an autobiography” and, most intriguing to me, “a kind of verbal fugue”. Eula Biss, The Guardian 

E ci sono vari altri titoli interessanti, anche sul lavoro dello scrittore.

I fell in love with Elio and Oliver

I started writing Call Me by Your Name as a diversion. I had absolutely no idea it was going to be a story, much less a novel. One April morning I was dreaming about being in an imaginary Italian villa overlooking the sea. It was a real-estate fantasy: a swimming pool, a tennis court, wonderful family and friends, plus the attendant personnel: a cook, a gardener and a driver. I had even picked the house from a painting by Claude Monet. André Aciman sulla genesi del suo Call Me by Your Name, Guardian.

2021 in Books

 

January

4 Winners of five Costa category awards announced.
8 The Father released – Florian Zeller directs an adaptation of his own play, starring Anthony Hopkins.
11 TS Eliot prize for poetry.
19 Centenary of the birth of Patricia Highsmith, queen of psychological suspense.
22 Netflix adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s Booker winner The White Tiger [see picture]
Release of film Chaos Walking, based on first book of Patrick Ness’s eponymous trilogy.
26 Costa awards ceremony, with book of the year announced. The Guardian.

 Buon 2021!

On Sylvia Plath

 

Shifting the Focus From Sylvia Plath’s Tragic Death to Her Brilliant Life. 

Ottima cosa!

“I hope to free Plath,” Heather Clark writes in her new biography, “from the cultural baggage of the past 50 years and reposition her as one of the most important American writers of the 20th century.” Daphne Merkin, NYT.

Can Macron stem the tide of Islamism in France?

Just over a week ago, Emanuel Macron said he wanted to end ‘Islamic separatism’ in France because a minority of the country’s estimated six million Muslims risk forming a ‘counter-society’. On Friday, we saw yet another example of this when a  history teacher was decapitated in the street on his way home in a Paris suburb. [...] M Paty was murdered, Macron said, "because he taught the freedom of expression, the freedom to believe or not believe.” The president is now positioning himself as the defender of French values, determined to drain the Islamist swamp.

That Macron even gave an anti-Islamism speech was itself a sign of how fast the debate is moving in France. Five years ago, when Fox News referred to ‘no-go zones’ in Paris, the city’s mayor threatened to sue. Now we have an avowed centrist like Macron warning that the ‘final goal’ of the ‘ideology’ of Islamism is to ‘take complete control’ of society. Anyone making such arguments just a few years ago would have been condemned by the left as an extremist. Macron is promising a law on ‘Islamist separatism’, restricting home-schooling of Muslims and demanding that Islamic groups in receipt of French state funding will have to sign a ‘secular charter’. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Spectator.

L'importanza degli studi umanistici

 As a participant in the Graduate School’s first Summer Proctorship Program, religious studies Ph.D. student Tara Dhaliwal used her research and writing skills to introduce the work of Brown scientists to industry partners. Brown