Новости за 13.06.2016

All Pasolini’s life is there in the travel diary that he wrote while driving around Italy in 1959. He fears the levelling effects of modernisation and television; he worries about the jukeboxes and Lambrettas on the Ligurian Riviera; he takes comfort from finding the island of Ischia “as it was two thousand years ago”. He visits Alberto Moravia in Fregene, Federico Fellini on the set of La Dolce Vita. “My journey drives me South, ever farther South. As in some delicious obsession, I have to keep... Читать дальше...

From the author’s handbook, What Every Texan Should Know. “Professional snake handlers use a pinning hook, but amateurs should employ snake tongs, a long bar with a handle and a set of jaws on the other end. Depending on the snake’s length (they range from 36 to 60 inches), use the tongs to grip it around its middle or a third of the way down from its head to limit the striking distance. With your other hand, grab its tail above the rattle and carefully guide the snake into a large, lidded bucket”

“Morality is often regarded as a creation of reason. It may be that the imagination is a more necessary foundation, because the injustices that we are asked to relieve are most often injustices that we ourselves have not known. We will never give help if we cannot picture need. YouTube is not the answer: it is proof that all the documentation in the world may not move people to action. Even when atrocities are available for viewing on the phones in our pockets, we may still do little or nothing”

Exploration of the ideology of Islamic State and of its formative influences. The essential text is The Management Of Savagery, published in 2004 by an author using the pen-name Abu Bakr Naji. “The argument is intricate and occasionally arcane; the style is sometimes forensic, sometimes poetic, sometimes prophetic. Many serious scholars of Salafi jihadism regard it as a vital source of inspiration in the creation of the Islamic State. So far as I am concerned, it is one of the most astonishing and... Читать дальше...

What is it like to be an animal? Charles Foster thinks the question overreaches: “People don’t know much about what it’s like to be another person, let alone a bat or a badger”. But you can try to see the world as an animal sees it — which Foster does by living in holes in the ground and eating slugs for weeks at a time. His account of these forays, Being A Beast, is appraised here kindly but coolly as “gonzo nature writing” — an “obviously demented” project pursued with “unhinged élan”.

Portrait of Max Perkins, whose authors included Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. “For a confrontation with his ultraconservative publisher, Charles Scribner, over the four-letter words in Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms, Perkins jotted the words he wanted to discuss — ‘s**t’, ‘f**k’, and ‘p**s’ — on his desk calendar, without regard to the calendar’s heading: Things to Do Today. Scribner remarked that he was in great trouble if he needed to remind himself to do those things”

Eccentric, discursive, lyrical, PG-rated essay which begins by considering the sex lives of birds, proceeds to compare certain birds with certain politicians, and somehow ends up as an appreciation of Katherine Hepburn in At Golden Pond. “You don’t see marauding gangs of male pigeons leaving behind them distraught female pigeons with bent feathers and broken wings. In pigeon society, it’s clearly female passion that counts, not male, and flirtatious male pigeons seem resigned to this”