Philip Roth: O maior escritor americano vivo?

Um inquérito da "New York Magazine" sobre Philip Roth.

Literary Caucus: Salman Rushdie, James Franco, and 28 More Notables Assess Philip Roth’s Career

"Philip Roth turns 80 next month, with 27 novels behind him, but when he announced his retirement last November, it felt like he was actually cutting something short—possibly the most prolific, probably the most distinguished, and certainly the most debated career in postwar American fiction. Roth was never just a novelist to readers but an iconoclast and narcissist, a Jewish cultural hero (villain to some), a (probable) misogynist, a literary celebrity who folded his own life into novels like they were tabloids (or metafictions?) and, after Toni Morrison, our great American hope, The Man Who Should Win the Nobel Prize (If Any Man Should). Just ahead of Philip Roth: Unmasked, an intimate documentary airing on PBS next month, we asked a panel of 30 literati to assess his oeuvre."

Uma boca para alimentar com poesia

O poeta Simon Armitage pretende passar o Verão a caminhar pela costa inglesa sem dinheiro e a viver exclusivamente de leituras da sua poesia. Poemas em troca de cama e comida. Abaixo a notícia do "Guardian", assinado por Alison Flood.

Simon Armitage to walk south-west coast path, paying his way with poetry

Poet plans to travel from Minehead to the Scilly Isles this summer, giving poetry readings in return for food and shelter.

 

The award-winning poet Simon Armitage is preparing to throw himself on the hospitality of the people of south-west England this summer when he sets out to walk the coast path alone, paying his way with poetry.

Armitage, recovered from the challenge of walking the Pennine Way in 2010, will set out from Minehead on 29 August, intending to arrive in Land's End on 17 September, a distance of around 260 miles. He hopes to barter his way "from start to finish", giving poetry readings in local pubs, schools and village halls in return for food and shelter.

"The whole idea is that of the barter. All I've got to offer is my work, and the reading of it," said Armitage, who was awarded the CBE for services to poetry in 2010. "Will that be enough for people to say I can stay at their home, or that they'll give me some sandwiches? I'm looking for anyone who can tolerate me … In the Pennines there was never a night when I didn't have anywhere to stay, even if it was in someone's front room."

Armitage's Pennine walk gave rise to the book Walking Home, and he is planning to write a follow-up, Walking Away, about his journey through Somerset, Devon and Cornwall.

"The first book turned out to be about people and their stories, and that's what I'm hoping to find this time," he said. "I don't imagine as much jeopardy as there was in the Pennines, where I got lost quite a few times; but the south-west coast path has its own peculiarities and tricky sections: a lot of valleys and ravines. And it'll be a completely different rhythm – the rhythm of the tides, rather than the rhythm of the rain clouds in the Pennines. And there'll be this constant companion of the sea on one side."

Armitage also hopes that locals will be keen to walk along with him. "On the Pennine Way, quite often people turned up to walk with me, so I'd get unexpected expert analysis," he said. "That idea of the companion was my most valued aspect of the Pennine Way, although I was on my own a lot too. You do want those Wordsworthian moments of tranquility, although in this case it will be Coleridgian, but you also want the person from Porlock to interrupt you."
Once he reaches Land's End, Armitage will travel across to the Scilly Isles, where when the tide is lowest he hopes to walk between the islands of Tresco, Bryher and Samson. "The idea is to get there at the lowest tide on a full moon, which in theory means it's possible to walk between two or three of the islands," he said. "I hope they like poetry."

O peso dos livros

Para quem, como eu, já carregou muito livro escada-acima, escada abaixo.

The weight of books

By David L. Ulin
Books are about the interior journey. And yet, there is another side of books, their physical presence: the sheer weight of all those volumes, the space they occupy.

My wife calls me the scavenger of shelves. It’s not necessarily a term of endearment, uttered more in the spirit of toleration, or exasperated love. We’ve been together for a long time, more than thirty years, and she’s had no choice but to come to a reckoning with my book absorption, with a library that grows and grows again.
“The books are taking over the house,” she told me, not for the first time, after I had completed a massive reshelving project, close to 4,000 volumes and more than 100 shelves, stretching from the living room into our bedroom, then down the hall to the dining room and my home office, everything alphabetized by author, David Aaronovitch to Stefan Zweig.
It’s the kind of project I take on every seven years or so, usually precipitated by a move. This time, though, the inciting incident was my 50th birthday, for which I gave myself the only gift I truly wanted: a set of built-in, floor-to-ceiling shelves. [continua]

"El librero políglota de Líbano"

"Abu Ibrahim Sarouj tiene una de esas barbas de mil colores que esconde una sonrisa que habla cualquier idioma. "Sé algunas palabras de muchas lenguas, solo que del árabe sé más", se jacta tras una breve charla de saludo en español. El septuagenario clérigo ortodoxo regenta una sui generis librería, en Líbano, donde atesora casi 80.000 volúmenes apilados en un edificio que se cae a pedazos. El interior de la Librería del Viajero parece un laberinto de estanterías combadas, montañas de revistas y fascículos a ras de suelo y columnas que nacen en sillas. "Vamos al jardín", dice."

A história de um livreiro libanês publicada pelo "El País" cuja continuação pode ser encontrada aqui.

Paisagens árcticas de Subhankar Banerjee

Texto da New York Review of Books sobre o livro de Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point. O resto do texto pode ser visto aqui. A foto é do próprio feita num cemitério inupiat (povo nómada do Alasca)

"Among the wonders to appear in the changing Arctic in recent years is the India-born photographer and activist Subhankar Banerjee. Coming from Kolkata (Calcutta), where the average mean temperature is 80.4 degrees Fahrenheit, Banerjee has dedicated himself to recording and working for the preservation of Arctic places. It is safe to say that he has been colder than most people from his native country have occasion to be. In Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point, an anthology of writings by thirty-seven authors that he has compiled and linked with his commentary, pieces of autobiography sometimes jump out: for example, that he started traveling in Alaska only about a decade ago, and that he became a US citizen after his Arctic photographs raised so much controversy in Senate debates in 2003 that he feared he might be deported."

"Estará Bret Easton Ellis morto por dentro?"

Alguma vez esteve vivo?

Um artigo da "New York Magazine" sobre a nova vida no Twitter de Bret Easton Ellis.

Começa assim, o resto está aqui.

"“FYI: There. Is. No. New. Novel. Being. Written. Except for maybe The James Deen Story and something called ‘Come over at do bring coke now.’ ”
That’s a tweet from Bret Easton Ellis, a thing that, as an entity unto itself, may have less valence than most molecules in the universe. And yet it’s a well-crafted ­almost-sentence, a 140-character snip (complete with missing words) of Beat poetry, which flows out of Ellis in an endless roll. These days, instead of writing books—as he says, he isn’t working on a novel now, or even notes for one—he can stir up trouble with just a flick at his keyboard. It takes him “30 seconds to one minute,” or so he claims, to beam out pop-cultural observations, L.A. vignettes, and world-weary ­little outbursts, sometimes featuring his boyfriend (“the 26-year-old”) to a respectable 340,000 followers and the media at large, which often picks them up as gossip items. “I just have these random thoughts, go to bed, and then next day it’s sort of world news,” Ellis says, waving a hand."

Pistorius e Nadine Gordimer

"Nadine Gordimer’s 1998 novel The House Gun describes a familiar post-apartheid South Africa scenario: A white boy kills his housemate with “the house gun.” His parents cannot believe that he would do so deliberately. This narrative – white-on-white violence in a security-obsessed, gun-savvy, walled society – is in contrast to the other great narrative of white South African literature: arming oneself against the impoverished hordes outside the walls. And it is these two narratives – the “conflicting accounts” as the papers say – that are competing in the case of Oscar Pistorius."

Um olhar sobre o caso Oscar Pistorius partindo de um livro da Nobel sul-africana, o texto completo pode ser lido aqui.

Gabo

"En julio de 1955, a los veintiocho años de edad, Gabo viajó por primera vez en un avión intercontinental. Un Super Constellation, diseñado por Howard Hughes, lo llevó de Colombia, cruzando el Océano Atlántico, con escala en Bermudas y Lisboa, hasta Ginebra. Lo enviaban a Europa como corresponsal de El Espectador. Su primera tarea sería cubrir la reunión cumbre de jefes de Estado de Estados Unidos, la Unión Soviética, Gran Bretaña y Francia, a quienes, en aquellos días previos a la crisis de Suez, se les conocía como los Cuatro Grandes."


Um ensaio de Jon Lee Anderson sobre como Gabriel García Márquez conseguiu continuar a ser correspondente no estrangeiro durante a Guerra Fria publicado pela revista El Gatopardo. Ver o texto aqui.

There was once a dog

And then came the snow and eat it.