anta dame da ne

 I suppose I’m in my middle-aged-and-older-women-and-their-memoirs-and-letters phase. Is this The Legacy of Q, strictly speaking, a memoir? I think it is, Helene Hanff probably would have been against that. It is only a pity that it is so short, though I couldn’t help thinking that Hanff somehow did not really believe her life would deserve a memoir – but maybe I am reading her all wrong and it’s all just false modesty.

I loved all the tiny little details about local histories: her work in the theatre, her work for television before the shows became properly scripted shortly after 1960 or so (I really need to read more about the history of television), her children’s books (although I would have hated them as a child). I loved the fad for “Nothing Books” in New York, and Hanff’s systematic planning of what she needs to read was extremely charming, somehow.

Her interactions with her fans were really crazy, though, especially from the point of view of an average European, clutching her pearls about privacy and privacy laws. Of course I do know European privacy laws are new even in Europe, and I do know as well that the rules about press reporting are less concerned with privacy in most anglophone countries, and I have read that book about press reporting in Japan in the 70s and 80s, with journalists basically camping on the lawns of politicians or suspects in criminal cases, and so on. But it’s still insane! Her fans knew her home address and telephone number. They would call her. They would send her letters. They would send her books to be signed (with no return postage, how rude!). Hanff quotes some of the letters and phone conversations, so one can see with one’s own eyes how wild this whole thing was. And well into the eighties!

It's a pity she didn’t write more about herself and some of her friends, like Genevieve Young, the literary editor and daughter of a Chinese diplomat murdered by Japanese fascists during the second world war. She seems an absolutely fascinating person, reaching leading positions in the industry when it was so hostile to women. But this is also where you can see how dated the book is: when Young got her US passport, Hanff writes in all innocence “The alien with the Chinese passport was finally an ordinary American citizen coming home” and then that Young was “as Chinese as General Motors”. Ouch.  

Stuff to think about! Vincenzo Latronico on the imperialism-like dominance of English-language literature. 
Primacy of English and the US/UK cultural hegemony is something I've mostly seen discussed in academic spaces, with colleagues who deal with topics that have little to do with US or UK being frequently dismissed by editors with claims of "irrelevance" (of course some parts of Europe are less peripheral than others). Lorenzo seems to be presenting an interesting and fascinating synthesis.
Also, I was familiar with the Minae Mizumura quote before. Maybe I'm overidentifying with being peripheral, but honestly, regretting the choice of your first language as you first language, and regretting not having given up that language in favour of English is just about the most tragic and heart-breaking thing I can at all imagine. I do real a lot in English, but I also read in other languages, and every time I am deprived of one of them for too long, I'm feeling the deepest existential angst! Who are we but the words that make us? 

Re: the American literary claims to the universalism of the American experience - all human experience has obviously the potential to be universal, but at the same time my American favourites have always been the very particular ones. The Legacy of Q was especially fascinating, because Helene Hanff wrote about her New York, and her experience in the New York theatre (and what a pity that she didn't write more about it!). 
I've also never liked David Foster Wallace. Maybe that's that. 

It's a pity that Latronico's book is about authenticity in the age of social media, as this is one of the least interesting things I can imagine. 

 In the exciting reading news for later:

Jana Matuszak has published a new and exciting Sumerian myth, which, as far as one can see, involves the (storm) god Ishkur being in imprisoned or for some reason sent to the netherworld. The text is very fragmentary, but it's also very much oldern than the majority of preserved Sumerian literary compositions (from the end of the 3rd or first half of the 2nd millennium, while this one is from the middle of the 3rd millennium). What is also very exciting about it is that there are very few mythological compositions about Ishkur at all: the storm gods seem to be more important in the Semitic pantheons of the 2nd millennium onwards. Or is Ishkur really a proper storm god or does he have more to do with irrigation? I'll have to read up. The paper is Open Access! 

A digital edition of the complete diaries of Anne Thornton, a 17th-century woman diarist. I haven't started on it yet, but it looks absolutely fascinating. It is supposed to deal with multiple child losses and births, though, so we will see. 

OMG!

1. How is it August already?

2. Read so many books, must post reviews O:

3. Moving countries in two weeks, full panic mode on O:

4. Gotta buy more books before the move O: O: O:

5. Also, must see the new Sherlock thing, since everybody says it's so awesome <3