Sleep and dust

Sleepless (Pas Dormir in the original French), a book that is – what? A memoir/interrogation/painting/song of insomnia, her own and that of others. It’s a book about where, why, how we sleep and don’t sleep; about how to find a place in the world where sleep can happen, a stable for the worn-out horse. Samantha Harvey, The Guardian 

Sleepless è edito da Fitzcarrald, mentre l'originale francese da Folio. L'autrice è Marie Darrieussec.

Owens’s own fascination with dust started as a student in 2008, when she contemplated the sisyphean task of housekeeping. (“I was neither balding nor scrofulous … where was this material come from?”) But her journey doesn’t actually begin until 2015, with a road trip through California. Owens is transfixed and outraged by the story of Los Angeles, whose growth and modern existence was only possible through the systematic and outrageous theft of water and the creation of a dust desert to the east. Oliver Franklin-Wallis, The Guardian

Dust di Jay Owens è pubblicato da Hodder & Stoughton. 

Walter Benjamin’s radio tales

No audio recordings of Walter Benjamin have survived. His voice was once described as beautiful, even melodious—just the sort of voice that would have been suitable for the new medium of radio broadcasting that spread across Germany in the 1920s. If one could pay the fee for a wireless receiver, Benjamin could be heard in the late afternoons or early evenings, often during what was called “Youth Hour.” His topics ranged widely, from a brass works outside Berlin to a fish market in Naples. In one broadcast, he lavished his attention on an antiquarian bookstore with aisles like labyrinths, whose walls were adorned with drawings of enchanted forests and castles. For others, he related “True Dog Stories” or perplexed his young listeners with brain teasers and riddles. He also wrote, and even acted in, a variety of radio plays that satirized the history of German literature or plunged into surrealist fantasy. One such play introduced a lunar creature named Labu who bore the august title “President of the Moon Committee for Earth Research.” [...]

Now transcripts of these broadcasts have been assembled and translated into English in a new volume edited by Lecia Rosenthal, whose incisive introduction assists the reader in appreciating their true significance. Peter E. Gordon,
The Nation

Flirting With Danger

In April 1920 a Baltimore heiress was arrested in Russia, accused of being a secret agent. Marguerite Harrison (1879-1967), whose wedding trousseau had numbered 40 outfits, now wore lice-infested clothes and a pair of men’s shoes. Imprisoned without trial, she would spend 10 months in Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka jail, including time in solitary confinement. [...]

In “Flirting With Danger: The Mysterious Life of Marguerite Harrison, Socialite Spy,” Janet Wallach presents a compelling story that pulsates with the energy of a thriller.  Moira Hodgson, WSJ

Flirting With Danger è pubblicato da Doubleday.

Things started getting weird

Let’s start off, as most good books do, with an inciting incident. In this case, that’s the arrival of an 87,000-word manuscript, an unpublished novel, in someone’s email inbox. The title of the document is “Bad Summer People”, and the setting of the book seems familiar to the person who receives the email. Some of the character names do, too. Because of this, the document gets forwarded to someone else who may find it interesting. Who then sends it to another person. And another. Eventually, this unpublished work causes a cascade of small-town mayhem, ending up as a tabloid story with a headline that reads “Media exec’s novel about murder, sex and lies in the moneyed town of Saltaire has sent residents into a spin.”

Sounds like the plot of a good beach read, right? Well, unfortunately for the media exec in question – me – that juicy plotline happened in real life, not between the pages of a book. Emma Rosenblum, The Guardian

le avventure di un libro e una lettura per l'estate (l'ho raccomandata anche sul mio boxino per Internazionale). Anche la foto è adatta all'estate! Il giallo di Emma Rosenblum, Bad Summer People, è pubblicato da Penguin.

Jazz e Talmud

« Dans son ouvrage His Own Words, Selected Writings, Oxford University Press, paru en 2001, «Louis Armstrong parle en termes élogieux de la famille Karnofsky qu’il avait abondamment fréquentée dans sa jeunesse à La Nouvelle-Orléans. En effet, c’est Morris Karnofsky qui lui avait prêté l’argent pour son premier cornet et ce sont les berceuses russes qu’il entend chez eux qu’il rend responsables de son amour du judaïsme. Il dédie ce même ouvrage à son agent Joe Glaser. Sa reconnaissance vis-à-vis des Juifs s’exprime aussi par une dédicace au Dr Gary Zucker, son sauveur de l’hôpital Beth Israël de New York.»

C’est ainsi que commence l’article de Jean Szlamowicz, Juifs américains et Afro-Américains, Convergences et divergences dans le champ social du jazz, paru dans la revue Pardès en 2008.

il musicista jazz Julien Grassen Barbe (nella foto) parla della sua musica con Marc-Alain Ouaknin in Talmudiques

Capote’s Women

The biggest tragedy of Truman Capote’s altogether tragic life was that he never got to write Answered Prayers, the novel of high society shenanigans that he and the rest of the world knew would be his masterpiece.[...]

The main characters in Answered Prayers would be a group of high-society women whom Capote referred to in real life as his “swans”. They included Babe Paley, Lee Radziwill, Slim Keith and CZ Guest, as well as Gloria Guinness, Marella Agnelli and Pamela Harriman. They were immensely rich, clever if not intellectual, better with horses than children and never off the best-dressed list. They all also adored Truman Capote, the tiny, camp southern journalist who loved nothing better than a bibulous lunch at Elaine’s or La Côte Basque larded with some vicious gossip, typically concerning whichever swan had just left the table to powder her nose. Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian

nella foto: Truman Capote con Lee Radziwill nel 1966. Il libro di cui si parla è: Laurence Leamer, Capote’s Women (Hodder & Stoughton).

The Students Who Went to Sea

What could possibly go wrong? More than three hundred overprivileged American students travelling the world on a hastily converted troopship, led by a recently sacked university professor determined to prove that travel could be as educational as any university course and keen to make money in the process.

Underfunded, under-recruited and poorly run, the ‘Floating University’ circumnavigated the world over a seven-month period, generating appalling headlines almost everywhere it went. William Whyte, Literary Review

il libro di cui si parla, e che deve essere molto interessante, è Tamson Pietsch, The Floating University: Experience, Empire, and the Politics of Knowledge (University of Chicago Press).

cambiando completamente argomento, questo sembra un altro libro molto interessante, questa volta sui gufi, Jennifer Ackerman, What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds (Oneworld), recensito sul Guardian da Simon Worral.

Virago Press compie 50 anni

It was the early 70s, and in a tiny flat above a synagogue in Chelsea, London, decorated with lime-green paint, red tiles and an alternative cover for Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch on the wall, a group of women sat talking around a dining table.The attic bedsit soon became the first office of the feminist publisher Virago. Ella Creamer, The Guardian

mi piace la foto, mi piace molto la descrizione del piccolo appartamento sopra una sinagoga a Chelsea... e naturalmente: auguri Virago!

The Casual Ignominy of the Book Tours of Yore

Then dawned the day of the book tour. Literary stars and the authors of blockbusters, the Norman Mailers and the Frederick Forsyths, had always been swaggering about the world touting their wares. Now the rest of us, poor moles digging away in the dark of obscurity, were hauled up into the light and sent abroad to appear before live audiences and pretend to be a more or less plausible and if possible entertaining version of ourselves. [...] every reading, as every writer will tell you, attracts at least a couple of maniacs. John Banville, Esquire

voglio anche segnalare una nuova traduzione del romanzo di Natalia Ginzburg, The Road to the City, New Directions. Dalla copertina, "An almost unbearably intimate novella, The Road to the City concentrates on a young woman barely awake to life, who fumbles through her days: she is fickle yet kind, greedy yet abashed, stupidly ambitious yet loving too—she is a mass of confusion".

The Sullivanians

At its peak, in the mid- to late seventies, the psychoanalytic association known as the Sullivanian Institute had as many as six hundred patient-members clustered in apartment buildings that the group bought or rented on the cheap on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. They also ran an experimental theatre troupe, called the Fourth Wall, on the Lower East Side. The Sullivanians adhered to the same principles and traditions as many of the ashrams and rural intentional communities of the era: polyamory, communal living, group parenting, socialist politics. But they came to their belief system through the gateway of psychoanalysis, the self-actualization tool of the urbane intellectual. And they enacted their beliefs on a crowded concrete island of nearly eight million people, often while holding down high-status jobs as physicians, attorneys, computer programmers, and academics. The institute’s co-founder and reigning tyrant, Saul Newton, who sat atop the organization from the mid-nineteen-fifties until the mid-nineteen-eighties (he died in 1991), may have come closer than any of his far more notorious peers to establishing a truly metropolitan cult—its members visible but its practices obscure. Jessica Winter, The New Yorker

rensione dell'ultimo libro di Alexander Stille, The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), che sembra molto interessante!