聽NPR 訪問'How to Read the Bible' by Marc Zvi Brettler ，想起應該介紹加拿大的著名文評家Professor Herman Northrop Frye, (July 14, 1912 – January 23, 1991) was a Canadian literary critic, one of the most distinguished of the twentieth century….In 2000, he was honoured by the government of Canada with his image on a postage stamp. A festival devoted to Frye's works takes place every April in Moncton, New Brunswick.
作品大要及其翻譯
◎Works by Northrop Frye【各書的另外翻譯和簡介，參考《弗萊文論選集》北京大學出版社， 1998 之附錄】
The following is a list of his books, including the volumes in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye, an ongoing project under the editorship of Alvin A. Lee.
《弗萊研究：中國與西方》中國社會科學， 1996
《弗萊研究：現狀與展望》（英文本）上海外語教育出版社， 2001
《弗萊文論選集》北京大學出版社， 1998
‧ Fearful Symmetry
‧ Anatomy of Criticism 《批評的剖析》天津：百花文藝， 1998 修正版 2006
‧ The Educated Imagination 《想像力的修養》
‧ The Well-Tempered Critic 《創造與再創造》
‧ Creation and Recreation 《穩練的批評家》
以上三書合一書由內蒙古大學出版社， 2003
‧ Fables of Identity
‧ T.S. Eliot
‧ A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance
‧ The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton's Epics
‧ Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy
‧ The Modern Century 《現代百年》盛寧譯(譯自The Modern Century) 。香港：牛津大學出版社，1998；遼寧教育
‧ A Study of English Romanticism
‧ The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society
‧ The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination
‧ The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism 《批評之路》
‧ The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance
‧ Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society
‧ Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature: A Collection of Review Essays
‧ The Great Code: The Bible and Literature 《偉大的代碼：聖經與文學》北京大學出版社， 1998
‧ Words with Power: Being a Second Study of The Bible and Literature 《神力的語言》北京：社會科學文獻出版社， 2004
‧ Divisions on a Ground: Essays on Canadian Culture
‧ The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on Shakespeare's Problem Comedies
‧ Harper Handbook to Literature (with Sheridan Baker and George W. Perkins)
‧ On Education
‧ No Uncertain Sounds
‧ Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays
‧ Reading the World: Selected Writings
‧ The Double Vision of Language, Nature, Time, and God
‧ A World in a Grain of Sand: Twenty-Two Interviews with Northrop Frye
‧ Reflections on the Canadian Literary Imagination: A Selection of Essays by Northrop Frye
‧ Mythologizing Canada: Essays on the Canadian Literary Imagination
‧ Northrop Frye in Conversation (an interview with David Cayley)
‧ The Eternal Act of Creation
‧ The Collected Works of Northrop Frye
‧ Northrop Frye on Religion
「當『離去』（away）的觀念不再起作用之後，
我們也就不需要『路』（way）了。」（N. Frye《神力的語言》（Being a Second Study of "The Bible and Literature"） 吳持哲譯，北京：中國社會科學文獻出版社，2004，p.105）
***** 了不起的翻譯再造：《批評的剖析》
我們介紹過加拿大的著名文評家Professor Herman Northrop Frye, (July 14, 1912 – January 23, 1991)著作及其中譯情形。
《弗萊研究：中國與西方》中國社會科學， 1996 /
《弗萊研究：現狀與展望》（英文本）上海外語教育出版社， 2001/
《弗萊文論選集》北京大學出版社， 1998/Anatomy of Criticism 《批評的剖析》天津：百花文藝， 1998 修正版 2006/ The Educated Imagination 《想像力的修養》/ The Well-Tempered Critic 《創造與再創造》/ Creation and Recreation 《穩練的批評家》
其中經典《批評的剖析》（Anatomy of Criticism）（天津：百花文藝，1998 ）今年有修正版（2006），很難得。除了內容修正，最重要的是將原注翻譯出來—它們可以讓讀者追討作者之博學深思。可惜翻譯上還可以更確切些。 譬如說，第199頁：「……他一生中某種值得大書特書的事（rite de passage）」--我猜這是人類學-社會學中之「成年-啟蒙 之儀式」。
譬如說，第206頁：「說起人類的焚燒，不妨參考D. H. Lawrence的『伊特魯亞名勝』一書中關於朱紅油漆的一番話。」 --恰巧這本書最近有新星出版社的翻譯『伊特魯亞的靈魂』，我們查一下，它/他是說伊特魯亞人和印地安人將身上漆紅彩仿太陽神….
Canada has two celebrated savants: the flashy fellow who calls himself Marshall McLuhan, and the sober and redoubtable Northrop Frye, probably the best literary critic of his generation. The magic word in Frye is ""archetypes,"" around which run the structural principles of Western literature as they present themselves through the context of classical and biblical values, myths, and symbols. But Frye's approach is ultimately scientific in the Aristotelian sense, and his method presupposes a belief in a ""total literary history,"" basically both atemporal and asocial, though not without an ""implicit moral standard."" He might, therefore, seem an unlikely candidate to make so chaotic and slippery a subject as ""the modern century"" come alive for us. Happily, his Whidden Lectures on this theme, delivered recently at McMaster University in honor of the Canadian Centennial, show Frye in splendid form--indeed, his aerial view of culture from Baudelaire to Genet, from a hierarchical aesthetic to an absurdist or apocalyptic one, makes a genuinely sound and attractive summing up. His sense of hidden relationships is always provocative, as when he notes the odd interplay between socio-political decentralization and ""attempts to 'purify' a language,"" or as he develops the notion of an evolving open mythology and the prophetic function modern art has unconsciously assumed. A short work written with economy and grace.
In this classic book, the resouces of an exceptional critic are brought to bear on questions of prime importance in modern life. Frye presents a brilliant array of ideas and observations on the methodology of our day and its central elements, alienation, and progress; the effects of anthology on the structured society; characteristics commonly associated with the `modern'; antisocial attitudes in modern culture; the role of the arts in informing the contemporary imagination; and finally the way in which the creative arts are absorbed into society through education.
Publisher: Oxford University Press; New Edition edition (Oct 1 1991)
Product Description
In this classic book, the resouces of an exceptional critic are brought to bear on questions of prime importance in modern life. Frye presents a brilliant array of ideas and observations on the methodology of our day and its central elements, alienation, and progress; the effects of anthology on the structured society; characteristics commonly associated with the `modern'; antisocial attitudes in modern culture; the role of the arts in informing the contemporary imagination; and finally the way in which the creative arts are absorbed into society through education.
About the Author
Northrop Frye, late Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto.
现代百年
作者: Frye 出版: 辽宁教育出版社 - 1998年出版
全文目录
前言 1事物之末端的城市 作者小引 2改良的双筒望远镜 3智性的月光 4加拿大的文化发展
The modern century is a book-length example of “ethical criticism.” In it Frye attempts to describe the modern “mythology,” which he defines as the “structure of ideas, images, beliefs, assumptions, anxieties, and hopes which express the view of man's situation and destiny generally held” in our time. The first chapter of the book, called “City of the End of Things,” describes “the alienation of progress,” one of the elements which constitute the modern mythology. Modern consciousness, in this reading, ends in despair because of its obsessive need to “keep up” with an impossibly fast stream of events. Its mythical analogue is the medieval legend of the Wild Hunt, “in which souls of the dead had to keep marching to nowhere all day and all night at top speed.” In modern times, the conception of alienation has become psychological, and its “central symbol” is “the overkill bomb.”
In a world where the tyrant-enemy can be recognized, even defined, and yet cannot be projected on anything or anybody, he remains part of ourselves, or more precisely of our own death-wish, a cancer which gradually disintegrates the sense of community.
It is also Frye's contention that modern technology has created a new sense of time. Technology involves “the continued sacrificing of a visible present to an invisible future”:
. . . progress is a social projection of the individual's sense of the passing of time. But the individual, as such, is not progressing to anything except his own death. Hence the collapse of belief in progress reinforces the sense of anxiety which is rooted in the consciousness of death. Alienation and anxiety become the same thing. . . .
For all its concision and clarity, this description of the modern situation ignores those political or historical facts which are the causes and consequences of alienation and anxiety. A radical distrust of the benevolence of progress is indeed one of the emotions which constitute the modern mythology. But that this distrust can issue in a new set of moral choices and political actions is a fact which Frye's vocabulary of cultural forms can engage only in a peripheral way. He can deal with such choices and actions only insofar as they can be “placed” in conceptual space, either juxtaposed or in opposition to other “elements” or “phenomena” that have been sim ilarly isolated and defined by his vocabulary.
To be sure, Frye's vocabulary also brings him to a number of fine critical insights. “Improved Binoculars,” the second chapter of The Modern Century, is concerned to define what is “modern” in modern art and literature. Modern art, Frye says, is “born on a battlefield, where the enemies are the anti-arts of passive impression.” Frye claims that the militant situation in which modern art finds itself has created a radical split, even an antagonism, between the artist and his audience. From this situation has derived the modern affinity for extreme states of feeling, for primitivism, for the outcast, the criminal, and the sadistic, for whatever threatens a passive or a bourgeois response to experience. The adversary position of the artist requires, therefore, that he engage his audience in an intensely active response to his creation.
Northrop Frye - 1976 - Bibles - 199 頁 Northrop Frye's thinking has had a pervasive impact on contemporary interpretations of our literary and cultural heritage.
我 並非西方文學理論的專家，只能把個人經驗誠實道出，公諸同行。記得多年前初入此道時，也的確痛苦不堪，買了大堆理論書回來，卻不知如何著手。我本來學的 是歷史，後來改行教文學，時當20世紀70年代末80年代初，美國學界剛開始吹“法國風”——福柯和德里達的著作逐漸被譯成英文出版，而“解構” （Deconstruction）這個詞也開始風行。不久又听到有所謂“耶魯四人幫”的說法，其中除希利斯‧米勒和哈特曼等人外，尚有一位怪杰保羅‧德‧ 曼（Paul de Man），他的那本反思理論的名著《不察與洞見》（Blindness and Insight）人文學者開始了另—個“轉向”（paradigm shift）——從“結構”到“解構”，從人類學到語言學。然而這個“轉向”背後的歷史是什麼？是否也有一個“譜系”（genealogy）可尋？
于 是，我想到另一種完全不同的閱讀經驗︰20世紀60年代我初抵美國留學時，偶爾買到幾本文學理論的書，包括威爾遜（Edmund Wilson）、特里林（Lionel Trilling）、史丹納（George Steiner）和韋勒克（Rend Wellek）等名家的著作，亦曾瀏覽過。這些名家的文史知識十分豐富，廣征博引，似乎早已遍讀群籍，他們所作的“批評”（criticism）並不僅僅 是對某一經典名著詳加分析而已，而是把一本本書、一個個作家評淪一番，逐漸形成一己的觀點和主題，我認為這是一種西方人文批評的傳統，它可以追溯到英國的 約翰遜（Samuel Johnson）和阿諾德（MatthewArnold），但他們較這兩位以捍衛文化為己任的1 8世紀保守派批評家更為自由（liberal）。特里林有一本書就叫做《自由的想像》（The Liberal Imagination），書名中的“自由”指的當然是人文知識，用當代的話說，就是“通識”教育。特里林的另一本書《誠與真》（Sincerity and Authenticity）則把西方文學史和哲學史上關于主觀和個人的傳統這兩個問題分析得淋灕盡致。
我當 年私淑兩位大師，一是威爾遜，一是史丹納。威爾遜早已是美國文壇的巨人，其評論具有權威性，在文壇交游廣闊，是美國東岸評論界的霸主。我讀了他的《阿 克瑟爾的城堡》（Axel’s Castle）和《到芬蘭車站》（To the Finland Station），佩服得五體投地，因為兩書談的皆非美國文學——前者討論的是法國的象征主義，後者則是描述俄國大革命，而威爾遜足不出戶（指美國），竟 然可以把視野推到蘇聯，大談列寧，而且所書文字優美，讀來猶如小說。可以說，第二本書也是我了解俄國近代史的啟蒙課本，它引起了我對俄國思想史的極大興 趣。幾乎人手一冊。我買來一本看，也不甚了了，只是覺得美國人文學界已經
James Clifford is an historian and Professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Clifford and Hayden White were among the first faculty directly appointed to the History of Consciousness Ph.D. program in 1978, which was originally the only graduate-only department at UC-Santa Cruz. The History of Consciousness department continues to be an intellectual center for innovative interdisciplinary and critical scholarship in the U.S. and abroad, largely due to Clifford and White's influence, as well as the work of other prominent faculty who were hired in the 1980s. Clifford served as Chair to this department from 2004-2007. Clifford is the author of several widely cited and translated books, including The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (1988) and Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late 20th Century (1997), as well as the editor of Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, with George Marcus (1986). Clifford's work has sparked controversy and critical debate in a number of disciplines, such as literature, art history and visual studies, and especially in cultural anthropology, as his literary critiques of written ethnography greatly contributed to the discipline’s important self-critical period of the 1980s and early 1990s. Clifford's dissertation research was conducted at Harvard University in History (1969–1977), and focused on anthropologist Maurice Leenhardt and Melanesia. However, because of his impact on the discipline of anthropology, Clifford is sometimes mistaken as an anthropologist with graduate training in cultural anthropology. Rather, Clifford's work in anthropology is usually critical and historical in nature, and does not often include fieldwork or extended research at a single field site. A geographical interest in Melanesia continues to influence Clifford's scholarship, and his work on issues related to indigeneity, as well as fields like globalization, museum studies, visual and performance studies, cultural studies, and translation, often as they relate to how the category of the indigenous is produced. Originally, Cllifford intended to write his dissertation on the French School of ethnography. He came to the Institute of Ethnology,in Paris, where the director, professor Jean Guiart, won him over to the idea of a monograph on Maurice Leenhardt.
Published works
Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World (University of California Press, 1982; Duke University Press, 1992)
Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited with George Marcus (University of California Press, 1986)
The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Harvard University Press, 1988)
原住民立委Kolas Yotaka是社會學碩士，她日前與某出版社合作，翻譯美國人類學家James Clifford的著作《Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century（暫譯：後20世紀的旅行與翻譯）？？？》，近期正重新閱讀，以利年底在台灣出版。
In 1981, Maya Lin was a 21-year-old Yale student when she won a public design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Her conception — a black stone wall carved with the names of more than 57,000 fallen soldiers — suggests that their loss wounded the earth itself. “The common thread that runs through all of my work is the love and respect I have for the natural world,” the mother of two writes in “Maya Lin: Topologies,” a monograph covering more than 30 years of her art and architecture. Fresh from a family trip that included roaming a forest in Panama and a mountain climb in Italy, Lin will speak at LIVE from the New York Public Library on April 6. Here are four books that have become part of the brick and mortar of her life.
In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki 陰鬱禮讚
I read this when I was studying architecture. It talks about the nuanced beauty hidden in spaces that are not much seen in bright daylight. It also talks about how, in Japanese culture, there’s beauty to be found in everyday, often overlooked objects and how things of humble origin can [yield] aesthetic delight.
Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees by Lawrence Weschler
Robert Irwin is a conceptual artist who often uses our perception of subtle differences in light to create paintings, installations and sculptures that play with our ability to experience subtle edges of visual experiences. Weschler’s book [shows] the way in which art can bring you to a point of pure empathetic connection.
A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
A beautiful wander in which Solnit describes the many ways in which one can lose oneself — and in so doing begin to find something you may not know about the world and yourself. The nature of experience should require the art of letting go to find part of yourself you do not know.
The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert
This is about the current mass species extinction this planet is experiencing. Since I’m so focused on this subject as part of my last memorial, What Is Missing?, I found Kolbert’s book a brilliant and moving account both of the nature of extinction and firsthand, specific accounts by scientists about this worldwide biodiversity crisis.
如今看來，1991年還是個單純的年代。那年，羅伯特·萊希（Robert Reich，又譯羅伯特·萊克）出版了《國家的作用》（The Work of Nations）一書，影響深遠，這本書也是萊希得以成為克林頓政府內閣成員的原因之一，在當時，的確意義非凡——然而現在，時代已經發生了變化。比起這本書里相對樂觀的態度，萊希在新書《拯救資本主義》（Saving Capitalism）裡則悲觀了許多，前後兩種態度差異表明，美國的發展狀況並不樂觀。
羅伯特·萊希從未隱藏自己的野心。《國家的作用》（The Work of Nations）書名就有意暗指亞當·斯密的著作《國富論》(The Wealth of Nations)；他也明確表示，希望讀者不要僅把他的作品視為實用指南，而應當作基礎性的閱讀文本。《拯救資本主義》雖短小緊湊，卻顯得更雄心勃勃。萊希將他對市場經濟根本性的重新考量納入他對收入不平等的新思考。他堅稱自己並非主張制定新政策來限制和削弱市場的運轉；確切地說，他認為自由市場的定義是一個政治決策，而政府可以製定完全不一樣的遊戲規則：“政府不是乾涉自由市場，政府要創造市場。”
Back in 1991, in what now seems like a far more innocent time, Robert Reich published an influential book titled The Work of Nations, which among other things helped land him a cabinet post in the Clinton administration. It was a good book for its time—but time has moved on. And the gap between that relatively sunny take and Reich’s latest, Saving Capitalism, is itself an indicator of the unpleasant ways America has changed.
The Work of Nations was in some ways a groundbreaking work, because it focused squarely on the issue of rising inequality—an issue some economists, myself included, were already taking seriously, but that was not yet central to political discourse. Reich’s book saw inequality largely as a technical problem, with a technocratic, win-win solution. That was then. These days, Reich offers a much darker vision, and what is in effect a call for class war—or if you like, for an uprising of workers against the quiet class war that America’s oligarchy has been waging for decades.
1.
To understand the difference between The Work of Nations and Saving Capitalism, you need to know about two things. One, which is familiar to most of us, is the increasingly ugly turn taken by American politics, which I’ll be discussing later. The other is more of an insider debate, but one with huge implications for policy and politics alike: the rise and fall of the theory of skill-biased technological change, which was once so widely accepted among economists that it was frequently referred to simply as SBTC.
The starting point for SBTC was the observation that, around 1980, wages of college graduates began rising much more rapidly than wages of Americans with only a high school degree or less. Why?
One possibility was the growth of international trade, with rising imports of labor-intensive manufactured goods from low-wage countries. Such imports could, in principle, cause not just rising inequality but an actual decline in the wages of less-educated workers; the standard theory of international trade that supports such a principle is actually a lot less benign in its implications than many noneconomists imagine. But the numbers didn’t seem to work. Around 1990, trade with developing countries was still too small to explain the big movements in relative wages of college and high school graduates that had already happened. Furthermore, trade should have produced a shift in employment toward more skill-intensive industries; it couldn’t explain what we actually saw, which was a rise in the level of skills within industries, extending across pretty much the entire economy.
Many economists therefore turned to a different explanation: it was all about technology, and in particular the information technology revolution. Modern technology, or so it was claimed, reduced the need for routine manual labor while increasing the demand for conceptual work. And while the average education level was rising, it wasn’t rising fast enough to keep up with this technological shift. Hence the rise of the earnings of the college-educated and the relative, and perhaps absolute, decline in earnings for those without the right skills.
This view was never grounded in direct evidence that technology was the driving force behind wage changes; the technology factor was only inferred from its assumed effects. But it was expressed in a number of technical papers brandishing equations and data, and was codified in particular in a widely cited 1992 paper by Lawrence F. Katz of Harvard and Kevin M. Murphy of the University of Chicago.1 Reich’s The Work of Nations was, in part, a popularization of SBTC, using vivid language to connect abstract economic formalism to commonplace observation. In Reich’s vision, technology was eliminating routine work, and even replacing some jobs that historically required face-to-face interaction. But it was opening new opportunities for “symbolic analysts”—people with the talent and, crucially, the training to work with ideas. Reich’s solution to growing inequality was to equip more people with that necessary training, both through an expansion of conventional education and through retraining later in life.
It was an attractive, optimistic vision; you can see why it received such a favorable reception. But while one still encounters people invoking skill-biased technological change as an explanation of rising inequality and lagging wages—it’s especially popular among moderate Republicans in denial about what’s happened to their party and among “third way” types lamenting the rise of Democratic populism—the truth is that SBTChas fared very badly over the past quarter-century, to the point where it no longer deserves to be taken seriously as an account of what ails us.
The story fell apart in stages.2 First, over the course of the 1990s the skill gap stopped growing at the bottom of the scale: real wages of workers near the middle stopped outpacing those near the bottom, and even began to fall a bit behind. Some economists responded by revising the theory, claiming that technology was hollowing out the middle rather than displacing the bottom. But this had the feel of an epicycle added to a troubled theory—and after about 2000 the real wages of college graduates stopped rising as well. Meanwhile, incomes at the very top—the one percent, and even more so a very tiny group within the one percent—continued to soar. And this divergence evidently had little to do with education, since hedge fund managers and high school teachers have similar levels of formal training.
Something else began happening after 2000: labor in general began losing ground relative to capital. After decades of stability, the share of national income going to employee compensation began dropping fairly fast. One could try to explain this, too, with technology—maybe robots were displacing all workers, not just the less educated. But this story ran into multiple problems. For one thing, if we were experiencing a robot-driven technological revolution, why did productivity growth seem to be slowing, not accelerating? For another, if it was getting easier to replace workers with machines, we should have seen a rise in business investment as corporations raced to take advantage of the new opportunities; we didn’t, and in fact corporations have increasingly been parking their profits in banks or using them to buy back stocks.
In short, a technological account of rising inequality is looking ever less plausible, and the notion that increasing workers’ skills can reverse the trend is looking less plausible still. But in that case, what is going on?
2.
Economists struggling to make sense of economic polarization are, increasingly, talking not about technology but about power. This may sound like straying off the reservation—aren’t economists supposed to focus only on the invisible hand of the market?—but there is actually a long tradition of economic concern about “market power,” aka the effect of monopoly. True, such concerns were deemphasized for several generations, but they’re making a comeback—and one way to read Robert Reich’s new book is in part as a popularization of the new view, just as The Work of Nations was in part a popularization of SBTC. There’s more to Reich’s thesis, as I’ll explain shortly. But let’s start with the material that economists will find easiest to agree with.
Market power has a precise definition: it’s what happens whenever individual economic actors are able to affect the prices they receive or pay, as opposed to facing prices determined anonymously by the invisible hand. Monopolists get to set the price of their product; monopsonists—sole purchasers in a market—get to set the price of things they buy. Oligopoly, where there are a few sellers, is more complicated than monopoly, but also involves substantial market power. And here’s the thing: it’s obvious to the naked eye that our economy consists much more of monopolies and oligopolists than it does of the atomistic, price-taking competitors economists often envision.
But how much does that matter? Milton Friedman, in a deeply influential 1953 essay, argued that monopoly mattered only to the extent that actual market behavior differed from the predictions of simple supply-and-demand analysis—and that in fact there was little evidence that monopoly had important effects.3 Friedman’s view largely prevailed within the economics profession, and de facto in the wider political discussion. While monopoly never vanished from the textbooks, and antitrust laws remained part of the policy arsenal, both have faded in influence since the 1950s.
It’s increasingly clear, however, that this was both an intellectual and a policy error. There’s growing evidence that market power does indeed have large implications for economic behavior—and that the failure to pursue antitrust regulation vigorously has been a major reason for the disturbing trends in the economy.
Reich illustrates the role of monopoly with well-chosen examples, starting with the case of broadband. As he notes, most Americans seeking Internet access are more or less at the mercy of their local cable company; the result is that broadband is both slower and far more expensive in the US than in other countries. Another striking example involves agriculture, usually considered the very model of a perfectly competitive sector. As he notes, a single company, Monsanto, now dominates much of the sector as the sole supplier of genetically modified soybeans and corn. A recent article in The American Prospect points out that other examples of such dominance are easy to find, ranging from sunglasses to syringes to cat food.4
There’s also statistical evidence for a rising role of monopoly power. Recent work by Jason Furman, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Peter Orszag, former head of the Office of Management and Budget, shows a rising number of firms earning “super-normal” returns—that is, they have persistently high profit rates that don’t seem to be diminished by competition.5
Other evidence points indirectly to a strong role of market power. At this point, for example, there is an extensive empirical literature on the effects of changes in the minimum wage. Conventional supply-and-demand analysis says that raising the minimum wage should reduce employment, but as Reich notes, we now have a number of what amount to controlled experiments, in which employment in counties whose states have hiked the minimum wage can be compared with employment in neighboring counties across the state line. And there is no hint in the data of the supposed negative employment effect.
Why not? One leading hypothesis is that firms employing low-wage workers—such as fast-food chains—have significant monopsony power in the labor market; that is, they are the principal purchasers of low-wage labor in a particular job market. And a monopsonist facing a price floor doesn’t necessarily buy less, just as a monopolist facing a price ceiling doesn’t necessarily sell less and may sell more.
Suppose that we hypothesize that rising market power, rather than the ineluctable logic of modern technology, is driving the rise in inequality. How does this help make sense of what we see?
Part of the answer is that it resolves some of the puzzles posed by other accounts. Notably, it explains why high profits aren’t spurring high investment. Consider those monopolies controlling local Internet service: their high profits don’t act as an incentive to invest in faster connections—on the contrary, they have less incentive to improve service than they would if they faced more competition and earned lower profits. Extend this logic to the economy as a whole, and the combination of a rising profit share and weak investment starts to make sense.
Jim Young/ReutersJeb Bush, Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Ted Cruz at the Republican presidential debate in Milwaukee, November 2015
Furthermore, focusing on market power helps explain why the big turn toward income inequality seems to coincide with political shifts, in particular the sharp right turn in American politics. For the extent to which corporations are able to exercise market power is, in large part, determined by political decisions. And this ties the issue of market power to that of political power.
3.
Robert Reich has never shied away from big ambitions. The title of The Work of Nations deliberately alluded to Adam Smith; Reich clearly hoped that readers would see his work not simply as a useful guide but as a foundational text. Saving Capitalism is, if anything, even more ambitious despite its compact length. Reich attempts to cast his new discussion of inequality as a fundamental rethinking of market economics. He is not, he insists, calling for policies that will limit and soften the functioning of markets; rather, he says that the very definition of free markets is a political decision, and that we could run things very differently. “Government doesn’t ‘intrude’ on the ‘free market.’ It creates the market.”
To be honest, I have mixed feelings about this sales pitch. In some ways it seems to concede too much, accepting the orthodoxy that free markets are good even while calling for major changes in policy. And I also worry that the attempt to squeeze everything into a grand intellectual scheme may distract from the prosaic but important policy actions that Reich (and I) support.
Whatever one thinks of the packaging, however, Reich makes a very good case that widening inequality largely reflects political decisions that could have gone in very different directions. The rise in market power reflects a turn away from antitrust laws that looks less and less justified by outcomes, and in some cases the rise in market power is the result of the raw exercise of political clout to prevent policies that would limit monopolies—for example, the sustained and successful campaign to prevent public provision of Internet access.
Similarly, when we look at the extraordinary incomes accruing to a few people in the financial sector, we need to realize that there are real questions about whether those incomes are “earned.” As Reich argues, there’s good reason to believe that high profits at some financial firms largely reflect insider trading that we’ve made a political decision not to regulate effectively. And we also need to realize that the growth of finance reflected political decisions that deregulated banking and failed to regulate newer financial activities.
Meanwhile, forms of market power that benefit large numbers of workers as opposed to small numbers of plutocrats have declined, again thanks in large part to political decisions. We tend to think of the drastic decline in unions as an inevitable consequence of technological change and globalization, but one need look no further than Canada to see that this isn’t true. Once upon a time, around a third of workers in both the US and Canada were union members; today, US unionization is down to 11 percent, while it’s still 27 percent north of the border. The difference was politics: US policy turned hostile toward unions in the 1980s, while Canadian policy didn’t follow suit. And the decline in unions seems to have major impacts beyond the direct effect on members’ wages: researchers at the International Monetary Fund have found a close association between falling unionization and a rising share of income going to the top one percent, suggesting that a strong union movement helps limit the forces causing high concentration of income at the top.6
Following his schema, Reich argues that unions aren’t so much a source of market power as an example of “countervailing power” (a term he borrows from John Kenneth Galbraith) that limits the depredations of monopolists and others. If unions are not subject to restrictions, they may do so by collective bargaining not only for wages but for working conditions. In any case, the causes and consequences of union decline, like the causes and consequences of rising monopoly power, are a very good illustration of the role of politics in increasing inequality.
But why has politics gone in this direction? Like a number of other commentators, Reich argues that there’s a feedback loop between political and market power. Rising wealth at the top buys growing political influence, via campaign contributions, lobbying, and the rewards of the revolving door. Political influence in turn is used to rewrite the rules of the game—antitrust laws, deregulation, changes in contract law, union-busting—in a way that reinforces income concentration. The result is a sort of spiral, a vicious circle of oligarchy. That, Reich suggests, is the story of America over the past generation. And I’m afraid that he’s right. So what can turn it around?
4.
Anyone hoping for a reversal of the spiral of inequality has to answer two questions. First, what policies do you think would do the trick? Second, how would you get the political power to make those policies happen? I don’t think it’s unfair to Robert Reich to say that Saving Capitalism offers only a sketch of an answer to either question.
In his proposals for new policies, Reich calls for a sort of broad portfolio, or maybe a market basket, of changes aimed mainly at “predistribution”—changing the allocation of market income—rather than redistribution. (In Reich’s view, this is seen as altering the predistribution that takes place under current rules.) These changes would include fairly standard liberal ideas like raising the minimum wage, reversing the anti-union bias of labor law and its enforcement, and changing contract law to empower workers to take action against employers and debtors to assert their interests against creditors. Reich would also, in a less orthodox move, seek legislative and other changes that might move corporations back toward what they were a half-century ago: organizations that saw themselves as answering not just to stockholders but to a broader set of “stakeholders,” including workers and customers.
Would such measures be enough? Individually, none of them sounds up to the task. But the experience of the New Deal, which was remarkably successful at creating a middle-class nation—and for that matter the success of the de facto anti–New Deal that has prevailed since the 1970s at creating an oligarchy—suggest that there might be synergistic effects from a program containing all these elements. It’s certainly worth trying.
But how is this supposed to happen politically? Reich professes optimism, citing the growing tendency of politicians in both parties to adopt populist rhetoric. For example, Ted Cruz has criticized the “rich and powerful, those who walk the corridors of power.” But Reich concedes that “the sincerity behind these statements might be questioned.” Indeed. Cruz has proposed large tax cuts that would force large cuts in social spending—and those tax cuts would deliver around 60 percent of their gains to the top one percent of the income distribution. He is definitely not putting his money—or, rather, your money—where his mouth is.
Still, Reich argues that the insincerity doesn’t matter, because the very fact that people like Cruz feel the need to say such things indicates a sea change in public opinion. And this change in public opinion, he suggests, will eventually lead to the kind of political change that he, justifiably, seeks. We can only hope he’s right. In the meantime, Saving Capitalism is a very good guide to the state we’re in.
1
“Changes in Relative Wages, 1963–1987: Supply and Demand Factors,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 107, No. 1 (February 1992). ↩
2
A good overview of the decline of SBTC is Lawrence Mishel, Heidi Shierholz, and John Schmitt, “Don’t Blame the Robots: Assessing the Job Polarization Explanation of Growing Wage Inequality,” EPI - CEPR working paper, November 2013. ↩
3
“The Methodology of Positive Economics,” in Essays in Positive Economics (University of Chicago Press, 1953). ↩
Jason Furman and Peter Orszag, “A Firm-Level Perspective on the Role of Rents in the Rise of Inequality,” October 2015, available at www.white house.gov. ↩
6
Florence Jaumotte and Carolina Osorio Buitron, “Union Power and Inequality,” www.voxeu.org, October 22, 2015. ↩
When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.
Cheese - milk's leap toward immortality.
A bottle of wine begs to be shared; I have never met a miserly wine lover.
“To take wine into our mouths is to savor a droplet of the river of human history” “[Wine is] poetry in a bottle.” The New Lifetime Reading Plan: The Classic Guide to World Literature, Revised and Expanded by Clifton Fadiman, John S. Major 費迪曼、梅傑 陳蒼多 ， 時報出版 ，出版日期：2005-08-29 Now in print for the first time in almost 40 years, The New Lifetime Reading Plan provides readers with brief, informative and entertaining introductions to more than 130 classics of world literature. From Homer to Hawthorne, Plato to Pascal, and Shakespeare to Solzhenitsyn, the great writers of Western civilization can be found in its pages. In addition, this new edition offers a much broader representation of women authors, such as Charlotte Bront, Emily Dickinson and Edith Wharton, as well as non-Western writers such as Confucius, Sun-Tzu, Chinua Achebe, Mishima Yukio and many others. This fourth edition also features a simpler format that arranges the works chronologically in five sections (The Ancient World; 300-1600; 1600-1800; and The 20th Century), making them easier to look up than ever before. It deserves a place in the libraries of all lovers of literature.(less)
“I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.” ― Ray Bradbury
Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.
Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.
You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
Of course I intended it primarily as a satire on the Russian revolution. But I did mean it to have a wider application in so much that I meant that that kind of revolution (violent conspiratorial revolution, led by unconsciously power-hungry people) can only lead to a change of masters. I meant the moral to be that revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job. The turning-point of the story was supposed to be when the pigs kept the milk and apples for themselves (Kronstadt). If the other animals had had the sense to put their foot down then, it would have been all right. If people think I am defending the status quo, that is, I think, because they have grown pessimistic and assume that there is no alternative except dictatorship or laissez-faire capitalism.
Cover of Snowball’s Chance, 2002. Cover of Why Orwell Matters, 2002. Timeline to this Timeline September 9, 2001, I’m walking down Lafayette Street with my wife. We’re close to my apartment, with the Tribeca sky,...
It is now 65 years since George Orwell died, and he has never been bigger. His phrases are on our lips, his ideas are in our heads, his warnings have come true. How did this happen?
今日是香港學生舉行為期一周的罷課活動的第二天，學生們坐在香港政府附近的區域聆聽有關民主和公民社會的演講。 在香港嶺南大學教授歷史的David Lloyd Smith做了有關喬治•奧威爾(George Orwell)的演講并將香港的民主發展比作朝鮮，朝鮮有正式的普選，但只有經過政府審查的人才能參選。 現年21歲、就讀香港科技大學(Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)商業專業的學生Christine Tong說，有關喬治•奧威爾的演講引起了她的共鳴。她說，香港政府就好比《動物莊園》(Animal Farm)裡的豬，利用自己的權力來壓制其他動物，違背自己的原則。 另一場關於莫罕達斯•甘地(Mohandas Gandhi)和公民抗命的演講也吸引了學生以及其他一些佩戴黃絲帶、支持“佔中”運動的人。
Animal Farm was the first animated film made by the British film industry in 1954. But what nobody realised at the time, least of all the producers, was that the film was financed by the CIA as part of the Cold War effort... Listen to The Film Programme: http://bbc.in/1wOW7MU
Fashion designer Agnes B discusses her directorial debut My Name Is Hmmm...
BBC.IN
George Orwell 1945 When Animal Farm was published in 1945, its British author George Orwell (a pseudonym for Eric Arthur Blair) had already waited a year and a half to see his manuscript in print. Because the book criticized the Soviet Union, one of England's allies in World War II, publication was delayed until the war ended. It was an immediate success as the first edition sold out in a month, nine foreign editions had appeared by the next year, and the American Book-of-the-Month Club edition sold more than a half-million copies. Although Orwell was an experienced columnist and essayist as well as the author of nine published books, nothing could have prepared him for the success of this short novel, so brief he had considered self-publishing it as a pamphlet. The novel brought together important themes — politics, truth, and class conflict — that had concerned Orwell for much of his life. Using allegory — the weapon used by political satirists of the past, including Voltaire and Swift — Orwell made his political statement in a twentieth-century fable that could be read as an entertaining story about animals or, on a deeper level, a savage attack on the misuse of political power. While Orwell wrote Animal Farm as a pointed criticism of Stalinist Russia, reviews of the book on the fiftieth-anniversary of its publication declared its message to be still relevant. In a play on the famous line from the book, "Some animals are more equal than others," an Economist reviewer wrote, "Some classics are more equal than others," and as proof he noted that Animal Farm has never been out of print since it was first published and continues to sell well year after year.
“I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.”
In 1995, more than twenty years after hisirreverent illustrations for Alice in Wonderland, the beloved British cartoonistRalph Steadman put his singular twist on a very different kind of literary beast, one of the most controversial books ever published. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first American publication of George Orwell’s masterpiece, which by that point had sold millions of copies around the world in more than seventy languages, Steadman illustrated a special edition titled Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (public library), featuring 100 of his unmistakable full-color and halftone illustrations.
Accompanying Steadman’s illustrations is Orwell’s proposed but unpublished preface to the original edition, titled “The Freedom of the Press” — a critique of how the media’s fear of public opinion ends up drowning out the central responsibility of journalism. Though aimed at European publishers’ self-censorship regarding Animal Farm at the time, Orwell’s words ring with astounding prescience and timeliness in our present era of people-pleasing “content” that passes for journalism:
The chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of … any official body. If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face.
Portrait of George Orwell by Ralph Steadman
Alas, this exquisite edition is no longer in print, but I was able to track down a surviving copy and offer a taste of Steadman’s genius for our shared delight.
Also included is Orwell’s preface to the 1947 Ukrainian edition, equally timely today for obvious geopolitical reasons. In it, he writes:
I understood, more clearly than ever, the negative influence of the Soviet myth upon the western Socialist movement.
And here I must pause to describe my attitude to the Soviet régime.
I have never visited Russia and my knowledge of it consists only of what can be learned by reading books and newspapers. Even if I had the power, I would not wish to interfere in Soviet domestic affairs: I would not condemn Stalin and his associates merely for their barbaric and undemocratic methods. It is quite possible that, even with the best intentions, they could not have acted otherwise under the conditions prevailing there.
But on the other hand it was of the utmost importance to me that people in Western Europe should see the Soviet régime for what it really was…
I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement.
Orwell concludes with a note on his often misconstrued intent with the book’s ultimate message:
I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure. But I should like to emphasize two points: first, that although the various episodes are taken from the actual history of the Russian Revolution, they are dealt with schematically and their chronological order is changed; this was necessary for the symmetry of the story. The second point has been missed by most critics, possibly because I did not emphasize it sufficiently. A number of readers may finish the book with the impression that it ends in the complete reconciliation of the pigs and the humans. That was not my intention; on the contrary I meant it to end on a loud note of discord, for I wrote it immediately after the Teheran Conference which everybody thought had established the best possible relations between the USSR and the West. I personally did not believe that such good relations would last long; and, as events have shown, I wasn’t far wrong.
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In the year 1570, at the age of thirty-seven, Michel de Montaigne gave up his job as a magistrate and retired to his château to brood on his own private grief - the deaths of his best friends, his father, his brother, and most recently his first-born child.
But finding his mind agitated rather than settled by this idleness, Montaigne began to write, giving birth to the Essays - short prose explorations of an amazing variety of topics. And gradually, over the course of his writing Montaigne began to turn his back upon his stoical pessimism, and engage in a new philosophy of life, in which living is to be embraced in all its sensory, exuberant vitality - the smell of his doublet, the pleasures of friendship, the intelligence of his cat and the flavour of his wine.
Saul Frampton offers a celebration of perhaps the most joyful and yet profound of all Renaissance writers, whose work went on to have a huge impact on Shakespeare, and whose writings offer a user's guide to existence even to the present day.
......Saul Frampton, in one of the best books I have read on Montaigne, takes as his starting point the moment, late on, when Montaigne erases from his ceiling an inscription from Lucretius – “There is no new pleasure to be gained by living longer” – and replaces it with this more affirmative one from Ecclesiastes: “You who do not know how the mind is joined to the body know nothing of the works of God.”
Montaigne’s project has shifted from the philosophy of death to the philosophy of life; from being not afraid to die to being not afraid to live. “Living happily,” Montaigne now believes, “not dying happily, that is the source of human contentment.”
De La Boétie had croaked on his death bed, as his jaw was forced open to insert medicine. “Is life worth so much?” Montaigne’s answer has taken a while in coming, but his response is unequivocal. “Yes!” – or as Frampton evocatively puts it: “Montaigne combs the shoreline where death claws at life and builds a shelter from what he finds there.”......
The vita activa, or active life, is necessarily distinguished by what has been more popular ... Labour is defined as the biological process of the human body, and ...
這本書我90年代末讀過，因為我習慣將精彩部分折頁. 不過 ，現在多忘記了. 或許受 I. Berlin 對她的評價之影響，我沒深入她的著作---過去十年，她的作品多已有翻譯本了. 2013年，更有她的電影，所以大家經常談她 2013.5 我把她與人弄成一詞條: Gershom Scholem A Life in Letters, 1914-1982 / Han... Gershom Scholem A Life in Letters, 1914-1982 / Hannah Arendt: “the banality of evil.” http://hcbooks.blogspot.tw/2012/06/gershom-scholem-life-in-letters-1914.html ----又有人說江宜樺是她的學說之專案.......
漢娜鄂蘭23歲博士論文是雅斯培指導的《奧古斯丁愛的概念》16. (後來，漢娜鄂蘭是其師之遺囑執行人，生命末期整理過其師之書信110......) Arendt wrote about love in her book The Human condition when she fell in love with Heidegger who was her professor.
Karl Jaspers死後，終生和他通信的學生輩和摯友鄂蘭(Hannah Arendt)在瑞士的追悼會上讀出以下一段的文字。 「當一個人死了，我們並不知道會發生甚麼。我們只知道，他離開了我們。我們依賴他的作品，但我們但知道作品並不需要我們。作品是人死後留在世界的東西——世界早於他來到世上，在他身後仍然存在。作品會變成怎樣，在乎世界變成怎樣。但是基本的事實是，這些書曾經是活著的生命，這個事實不會直接走入世界，或者免受遺忘。一個生命最短暫的人，而且也許最為偉大，他說過的話，他獨特的行為，隨著他而逝去，因而需要我們，需要我們想起他。想起他就把我們帶到和死者的關係裡去，在這關係裡，談起他的對話在世界裡重新湧現、響起。跟死者的關係——這必需學習，而要開展這種關係的話，我們現在要一起，在彼此分擔的悲傷裡聚首。」
‘Love, although it is one of the rarest occurrences in human lives, possesses an unequalled power of self- revelation and an unequalled clarity for the disclosure of who, precisely because it is unconcerned to the point of total unworldliness with what the loved person may be, with his qualities and shortcomings no less than with his achievements, failing and transgressions…Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason that it is not only apolitical but anti-political, perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political human forces.’
Happy birthday Kisho Kurokawa! One of Japan's leading architects of the 20th century, Kurokawa was perhaps most well-known as one of the founders of the Metabolist movement of the 1960s. Learn more:http://bit.ly/25PaFiO
"I became evil for no reason. I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but my fall itself. My depraved soul leaped down from your firmament to ruin. I was seeking not to gain anything by shameful means, but shame for its own sake." --from "Confessions" (c. 397) by St Augustine
Born #onthisday in 354: St Augustine of Hippo. This engraving with hand colouring from around 1460 depicts the saint with St John's eaglehttp://ow.ly/E9tkm
Featured Artwork of the Day: Master of Saint Augustine (Netherlandish, ca. 1490) | Scenes from the Life of Saint Augustine of Hippo | ca. 1490 http://met.org/1dcVJny
Confessions (Latin: Confessiones) is the name of an autobiographical work, consisting of 13 books, by St. Augustine of Hippo, written in Latin between AD 397 and AD 398. Modern English translations of it are sometimes published under the title The Confessions of St. Augustine in order to distinguish the book from other books with similar titles. Its original title was "Confessions in Thirteen Books," and it was composed to be read out loud with each book being a complete unit.[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_(St._Augustine)
Harvard Classics, Vol. 7, Part 1
The Confessions of St. Augustine
Saint Augustine
The origin of the autobiographical tradition, the Confessions of one of the great Fathers of the Church traces a dialogue with his God and a journey toward rising above one’s self.
11 For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.12 What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us.
"This black-eyed, wide-mouthed girl, not pretty but full of life . . . ran to hide her flushed face in the lace of her mother’s mantilla—not paying the least attention to her severe remark—and began to laugh. She laughed, and in fragmentary sentences tried to explain about a doll which she produced from the folds of her frock." --from WAR AND PEACE \https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bbc+war+and+peace
Napoleon's determined bid to conquer Russia forms the background to War and Peace. The ensuing turmoil drives conflict and uncertainty for the books's core families. Paterson Joseph & John Hurt lead a stunning cast and Tolstoy provides the action in one of the world's greatest novels.
We can learn a lot about the art of living from Tolstoy's War and Peace but we can also learn from the life of the master novelist himself. Tolstoy was a member of the Russian nobility, and his early life of the young count was raucous, debauched and violent.
But he gradually weaned himself off his decadent, racy lifestyle and rejected the received beliefs of his aristocratic background, adopting a radical, unconventional worldview that shocked his peers. So how exactly might his personal journey help us rethink our own philosophies of life?
War and Peace, Tolstoy's epic drama set against Napoleon's invasion of Russia, took over the airwaves yesterday. It's an epic tale of love, loss, vanity, death, destruction and redemption. If you've always promised you'll read it but never quite got there - hear this.
Leo Tolstoy's 186th birthday: Here's War and Peace in 186 words
Because although we should read it from cover to cover, realistically…
What better way to celebrate the birthday of Leo Tolstoy than to read his monumentally weighty tome War and Peace…?
Well, for those who don't quite have time to get through all 561,093 words (Oxford World's Classics edition) of it,The Independent has produced its own marvellously abridged version.
Petersburg, 1805: glitzy party at Anna Scherer’s. Napoleon is on the march. Kuragins? Flashy, dodgy crowd, especially minx Helene. Rostovs? Nice, penniless Moscow clan, with headstrong son, Nikolai.
Gauche, thoughtful Pierre Bezukhov: a count’s bastard, super-rich (when dad dies) but adrift. Unhappily wed Andrey Bolkonsky’s the real warrior toff, but those dark nights of the soul! Pierre marries flighty Helene.
Catastrophe! Rows, affair, duel, break-up (and Helene’s bad end) guaranteed. Andrey, Nikolai confront Napoleon at Austerlitz: Russian debacle. Widowed, Andrey falls for blooming Natasha, who’s ensnared by married cad Anatol Kuragin.
Do-gooding Pierre tries to save the world: fails.
1812: here’s fateful Napoleon again, making history (but what is history?), invading Russia. Bloody slaughter at Borodino; Russia resists. Andrey’s injured, Pierre a fugitive, then PoW. Rostovs flee as Moscow fall.
Amid the misery, Natasha grows up fast; Pierre too, helped by saintly peasant. Nikolai rescues Maria, the dying Andrey’s sister. Napoleon retreats. Hurrah!
Liberated, Pierre bonds with Natasha; Nikolai and Maria spliced. Poor cousin Sonya, Nikolai’s long-suffering intended! Two new families: happily ever after?
Almost but what does it all (time, history, freedom, destiny) really mean?
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"What Is Art?" (Russian: Что такое искусство? [Chto takoye iskusstvo?]; 1897) is an essay by Leo Tolstoy in which he argues against numerous aesthetic theories which define art in terms of the good, truth, and especially beauty. In Tolstoy's opinion, art at the time was corrupt and decadent, and artists had been misled.
"Art is a human activity having for its purpose the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings to which men have risen." --from "What is Art?" (1896) by Leo Tolstoy
During the decades of his world fame as sage & preacher as well as author of War & Peace & Anna Karenin, Tolstoy wrote prolifically in a series of essays & polemics on issues of morality, social justice & religion. These culminated in What is Art?, published in 1898. Altho Tolstoy perceived the question of art to be a religious one, he considered & rejected the idea that art reveals & reinvents thru beauty. The works of Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Baudelaire & even his own novels are condemned in the course of Tolstoy's impassioned & iconoclastic redefinition of art as a force for good, for the improvement of humankind.
and to-day we are told by many that art has nothing to do with morality — that art should ... I went one day, with a lady artist, to the Bodkin Art Gallery, in Moscow. 第十卷 本卷包括根據英國倍因（Robert Nisbet Bain，通譯貝恩）的英譯本Russian Fairy Tales（一八九二年）選譯的《俄羅斯民間故事》，根據培因（即倍因）的英譯本Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk-Tales（一八九四年）選譯的《烏克蘭民間故事》，根據英國韋格耳（Arthur Edward Pearse Brome Weigall，通譯韋戈爾）所著傳記Sappho of Lesbos: Her Life and Times （一九三二年）編譯的《希臘女詩人薩波》，英國勞斯（William Henry Denham Rouse）著神話故事《希臘的神與英雄》（Gods, Heroes and Men of Ancient Greece，一九三四年），以及“其他英文和世界語譯作”。 《俄羅斯民間故事》譯於一九五二年五月，一九五二年十一月由香港大公書局出版，署“知堂譯”。一九五七年八月天津人民出版社重印此書，署“周啟明譯”。
"I asked myself: 'Is it possible to love a woman who will never understand the profoundest interests of my life? Is it possible to love a woman simply for her beauty, to love the statue of a woman?' But I was already in love with her, though I did not yet trust to my feeling." --from "The Cossacks" by Leo Tolstoy
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born at Yasnaya Polyana, a family estate located near Tula, Russia on this day in 1828.
“Olenin always took his own path and had an unconscious objection to the beaten tracks.” ― Leo Tolstoy, The Cossacks
A brilliant short novel inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s experience as a soldier in the Caucasus, The Cossacks has all the energy and poetry of youth while also foreshadowing the great themes of Tolstoy’s later years. His naïve hero, Olenin, is a young nobleman who is disenchanted with his privileged and superficial existence in Moscow and hopes to find a simpler life in a Cossack village. As Olenin foolishly involves himself in their violent clashes with neighboring Chechen tribesmen and falls in love with a local girl, Tolstoy gives us a wider view than Olenin himself ever possesses of the brutal realities of the Cossack way of life and the wild, untamed beauty of the rugged landscape. This novel of love, adventure, and male rivalry on the Russian frontier—completed in 1862, when the author was in his early thirties—has always surprised readers who know Tolstoy best through the vast, panoramic fictions of his middle years. Unlike those works, The Cossacks is lean and supple, economical in design and execution. But Tolstoy could never touch a subject without imbuing it with his magnificent many-sidedness, and so this book bears witness to his brilliant historical imagination, his passionately alive spiritual awareness, and his instinctive feeling for every level of human and natural life. READ an excerpt here:http://knopfdoubleday.com/book/179295/the-cossacks/
1912年生於加州帕沙第納，畢業於史密斯學院，二戰期間任職美國戰略情報局，先後派駐錫蘭及中國，因而結識夫婿保羅?柴爾德。兩人婚後遷居巴黎，茱莉雅於著名的藍帶學院學習烹飪，後與席夢?貝克及露伊瑟?貝賀多一同教授廚藝，並共同撰寫《精通法式料理藝術》。1963年，波士頓WGBH公共電視台開播〈法國廚師〉系列節目，茱莉雅從此馳名全國，1965年榮獲美國國家廣播協會皮巴地廣電大獎（Peabody Award），1966年榮獲艾美獎，2000年榮獲法國榮譽軍團勳章（French Legion of Honor），2003年獲美國總統布希頒發「總統自由勳章」（Presidential Medal of Freedom），以表彰其卓越貢獻。茱莉雅一生出版了無數食譜書籍並拍攝過多個電視料理節目，於2004年辭世時，美國總統布希親自為其撰寫悼詞，稱讚她「對生活的樂觀和熱情感染了數百萬美國觀眾，並教會他們享受烹飪的樂趣」。
約在一九九三年到二○○○年間，已邁入高齡（八十多歲）的茱莉雅．柴爾德與法國名廚賈克．貝潘（Jacques Pepin）仍一起主持美國的〈Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home 〉節目，這也是她最後的電視節目。我必須說那是我看過最動人精彩的烹飪節目之一，當時兩位都已年過半百多時的烹飪大師，每集在鏡頭前把同樣的食材用不同的手法做出類似的法國料理，有時為了奶油該早點放或晚點放、菜該切絲還是切條、該用木杵把香料打泥還是用電動調理機打泥等烹飪方法各作示範、鬥點小嘴，然後做出讓人讚嘆的法國料理，兩位大師表現可愛親切又細心，絕無一絲敷衍或一點虛偽。
茱莉雅．柴爾德對法國料理投入的熱情與用心，對於愛研究兼經營法國料理多年的我，除了無限敬佩之外，她更是我一位不曾會面的良師，也是我終生的學習對象，學習的不單是她高明巧妙的料理功夫，還有她認真、誠懇的做事態度。為了想多欣賞她早期的烹飪節目，我費盡心力才好不容易地找到她最早期的電視作品，於一九六三年到一九七三年間播出的烹飪節目〈法國廚師〉（The French Chef），雖然部份還是黑白畫面，拍攝手法與品質雖不可與今天同日而語，節奏感卻拿捏得奇佳，況且好料理就是有種神奇的力量，不受時光流逝幾十年的影響，看起來還是津津有味，精彩絕倫，不知是否自己愛法國料理的原故，一看再看，片子一直當作寶貝般的珍惜。
My Life in France is an autobiography by Julia Child, published in 2006. It was compiled by Julia Child and Alex Prud'homme, her husband's grandnephew, during the last eight months of her life, and completed and published by Prud'homme following her death in August 2004.[1]
In her own words, it is a book about the things Julia loved most in her life: her husband, France (her "spiritual homeland"), and the "many pleasures of cooking and eating." It is a collection of linked autobiographical stories, mostly focused on the years between 1948 and 1954, recounting in detail the culinary experiences Julia and her husband, Paul Child, enjoyed while living in Paris, Marseille, and Provence.[2]
The text is accompanied by black-and-white photographs taken by Paul Child, and research for the book was partially done using family letters, datebooks, photographs, sketches, poems and cards.[3]
My Life in France provides a detailed chronology of the process through which Julia Child's name, face, and voice became well known to most Americans.
The book also contains an extremely detailed index cataloging every person, place, ingredient, recipe, topic and event discussed.[4]
About 20 years ago, historical novelist Ryotaro Shiba (1923-1996) visited Aomori Prefecture to write a series of travel essays titled "Kaido o Yuku" (On the highways街道をゆく（1971年9月 - 96年11月、朝日新聞社、43巻目で絶筆）). He noted, "Listening to the Tsugaru and Nanbu dialects, I sometimes feel they are poetry." I am sure this was not an idle observation of a sentimental traveler. Like well-used tools, all dialects enable their users to express themselves precisely.
Ryotaro Shiba, a writer known for his long historical novels, died on Monday after suffering from internal bleeding and lapsing into a coma two days earlier. He was 72. Mr. Shiba started writing historical novels after World War II and won the prestigious Naoki Prize for his 1959 novel, "Fukuro no Shiro" ("The Castle of an Owl"). His best-selling books include "Ryoma ga Yuku" ("Ryoma Is Going"), about the life of Ryoma Sakamoto, a major figure in Japan's transformation from feudal military rule in the 1860's. For the last quarter-century, Mr. Shiba's articles on his travels around Japan were printed weekly in the magazine Shukan Asahi in a series that reached 1,146 installments. He received the Government's Order of Cultural Merit in 1993.
讀 {蜂蜜與塵土}(Honey and Dust) 提到某敘利亞人有「高康大式鬍鬚」，翻譯者解釋一堆「高康大」何許人也，卻沒說這是什麼鬍子。
高康大應是十五、六世紀拉伯雷（F. Rabelais）《巨人傳》（Gargantua et Dantagruel）的主角，我十年前還提過：
鍾漢清《戴明領導手冊》譯序兼中文版導言： 這本書告訴你如何學習、鍛鍊出新領導者本事，它也是戴明哲學應用於現場領導改善、培訓大全。本書為作者休提士（Peter R. Scholtes）先生數十餘年經歷及用心的結晶。這本闡揚戴明領導哲學的名作《戴明領導手冊》（The Leader Handbook），應在人間多點知音。這是譯者心意。我要轉引十五、六世紀拉伯雷（F. Rabelais）《巨人傳》（Gargantua et Dantagruel）書後的吉特先生話：「他為我們寫下了這本書。它給讀者以生命，它也使作者精神永垂不朽。」我以為作者會以本書傳世。英國大文評家 John Ruskin說得好：「愛心得匠意，則傑作在望（When love and skill work together， expect a masterpiece）。」
Etymology After Gargantua, a voracious giant, the father of Pantagruel, in a series of novels by François Rabelais (c. 1490-1553)
Usage "Walls were built around Constantinople, gargantuan chains were set over the Bosporus and the Golden Horn to prevent any attempts by the enemy to enter."— Vercihan Ziflioglu; A Sole Burned Gate; Turkish Daily News (Istanbul); Mar 26, 2008.
"Readers, friends, if you turn these pages Put your prejudice aside, For, really, there's nothing here that's outrageous, Nothing sick, or bad — or contagious. Not that I sit here glowing with pride For my book: all you'll find is laughter: That's all the glory my heart is after, Seeing how sorrow eats you, defeats you. I'd rather write about laughing than crying, For laughter makes men human, and courageous. BE HAPPY!" --from "Gargantua and Pantagruel" (1532 - 1564) by François Rabelais
The unfettered exuberance of Gargantua and Pantagruel, the storms of phenomenal life it offers for our inspection, the honor it gives to the deformed, the cloacal, and the profane aspects of existence are at the very heart of Rabelais' genius. But the author of this fantasia on the lives of a father-and-son pair of giants was one of the most magnificent and magnificently learned products of the Renaissance; and he also represents, as well as any of its other great figures, that era's love of the human body and its exaltation of the human in the face of the divine.
(L.A.Times Editor's Note: Since 1963, the Jerusalem Prize has been awarded at the biennial Jerusalem International Book Fair to a writer whose work explores the freedom of the individual in society. Past recipients include Jorge Luis Borges, Simone de Beauvoir, Zbigniew Herbert, Graham Greene, Milan Kundera, J.M. Coetzee, and Don DeLillo. This year the award was given to Susan Sontag, who delivered the following remarks on May 9 in Jerusalem. )
We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we'd rather dwell or where we think we are already living. There can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit, will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down.
What do we mean, for example, by the word "peace"? Do we mean an absence of strife? Do we mean a forgetting? Do we mean a forgiveness? Or do we mean a great weariness, an exhaustion, an emptying out of rancor?
It seems to me that what most people mean by "peace" is victory. The victory of their side. That's what "peace" means to them, while to the others peace means defeat.
If the idea takes hold that peace, while in principle to be desired, entails an unacceptable renunciation of legitimate claims, then the most plausible course will be the practice of war by less than total means. Calls for peace will be felt to be, if not fraudulent, then certainly premature. Peace becomes a space people no longer know how to inhabit. Peace has to be re-settled. Re-colonized ....
And what do we mean by "honor"?
Honor as an exacting standard of private conduct seems to belong to some faraway time. But the custom of conferring honors--to flatter ourselves and one another--continues unabated.
To confer an honor is to affirm a standard believed to be held in common. To accept an honor is to believe, for a moment, that one has deserved it. (The most one should say, in all decency, is that one is not unworthy of it.) To refuse an honor offered seems boorish, unconvivial, pretentious.
A prize accumulates honor--and the ability to confer honor--by the choice it has made in previous years of whom to honor.
By this standard, consider the polemically named Jerusalem Prize, which, in its relatively short history, has been awarded to some of the best writers of the second half of the twentieth century. Though by any obvious criteria a literary prize, it is not called The Jerusalem Prize for Literature but The Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society.
Have all the writers who have won the prize really championed the Freedom of the Individual in Society? Is that what they--now I must say "we"--have in common?
I think not.
Not only do they represent a large spectrum of political opinion. Some of them have barely touched the Big Words: freedom, individual, society ....
But it isn't what a writer says that matters, it's what a writer is.
Writers--by which I mean members of the community of literature--are emblems of the persistence (and the necessity) of individual vision.
I prefer to use "individual" as an adjective, rather than as a noun.
The unceasing propaganda in our time for "the individual" seems to me deeply suspect, as "individuality" itself becomes more and more a synonym for selfishness. A capitalist society comes to have a vested interest in praising "individuality" and "freedom"--which may mean little more than the right to the perpetual aggrandizement of the self, and the freedom to shop, to acquire, to use up, to consume, to render obsolete.
I don't believe there is any inherent value in the cultivation of the self. And I think there is no culture (using the term normatively) without a standard of altruism, of regard for others. I do believe there is an inherent value in extending our sense of what a human life can be. If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader and then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other words, other territories of concern.
As a writer, a maker of literature, I am both a narrator and a ruminator. Ideas move me. But novels are made not of ideas but of forms. Forms of language. Forms of expressiveness. I don't have a story in my head until I have the form. (As Vladimir Nabokov said: "The pattern of the thing precedes the thing.") And--implicitly or tacitly--novels are made out of the writer's sense of what literature is or can be.
Every writer's work, every literary performance is, or amounts to, an account of literature itself. The defense of literature has become one of the writer's main subjects. But, as Oscar Wilde observed, "A truth in art is that whose contradiction is also true." Paraphrasing Wilde, I would say: A truth about literature is that whose opposite is also true.
Thus literature--and I speak prescriptively, not just descriptively--is self-consciousness, doubt, scruple, fastidiousness. It is also--again, prescriptively as well as descriptively--song, spontaneity, celebration, bliss.
Ideas about literature--unlike ideas about, say, love--almost never arise except in response to other people's ideas. They are reactive ideas.
I say this because it's my impression that you--or most people--are saying that.
Thereby I want to make room for a larger passion or different practice. Ideas give permission--and I want to give permission to a different feeling or practice.
I say this when you're saying that, not just because writers are, sometimes, professional adversaries. Not just to redress the inevitable imbalance or one-sidedness of any practice which has the character of an institution--and literature is an institution--but because literature is a practice which is rooted in inherently contradictory aspirations.
My view is that any one account of literature is untrue--that is, reductive; merely polemical. While to speak truthfully about literature is necessarily to speak in paradoxes.
Thus: Each work of literature that matters, that deserves the name of literature, incarnates an ideal of singularity, of the singular voice. But literature, which is an accumulation, incarnates an ideal of plurality, of multiplicity, of promiscuity.
Every notion of literature we can think of--literature as social engagement, literature as the pursuit of private spiritual intensities; national literature, world literature--is, or can become, a form of spiritual complacency, or vanity, or self-congratulation.
Literature is a system--a plural system--of standards, ambitions, loyalties. Part of the ethical function of literature is the lesson of the value of diversity.
Of course, literature must operate within boundaries. (Like all human activities. The only boundless activity is being dead.) The problem is that the boundaries most people want to draw would choke off the freedom of literature to be what it can be, in all its inventiveness and capacity to be agitated.
We live in a culture committed to unifying greeds, and one of the world's vast and glorious multiplicity of languages--the one in which I speak and write--is now the dominant language. English has come to play, on a world scale and for vastly larger populations within the world's countries, a role similar to that played in mediaeval Europe by Latin.
But as we live in an increasingly global, transnational culture, we are also mired in increasingly fractionalized claims by real or newly self-constituted tribes.
The old humanistic ideas--of the republic of letters, of world literature--are under attack everywhere. They seem, to some, naive, as well as tainted by their origin in the great European ideal--some would say Eurocentric ideal--of universal values.
The notions of "liberty" and of "rights" have undergone a striking degradation in recent years. In many communities, group rights are given greater weight than individual rights.
In this respect, what makers of literature do can, implicitly, bolster the credibility of free expression, and of individual rights. Even when makers of literature have consecrated their work to the service of the tribes or communities to which they belong, their accomplishment as writers depends on transcending this aim.
The qualities that make a given writer valuable or admirable can all be located within the singularity of the writer's voice.
But this singularity, which is cultivated in private and is the result of a long apprenticeship in reflection and in solitude, is constantly being tested by the social role writers feel called on to play.
I do not question the right of the writer to engage in debate on public matters, to make common cause and practice solidarity with like-minded others.
Nor is my point that such activity takes the writer far from the reclusive, eccentric inner place where literature is made. So do almost all the other activities that make up having a life.
But it's one thing to volunteer, stirred by the imperatives of conscience or of interest, to engage in public debate and public action. It's another to produce opinions--moralistic sound-bites--on demand.
Not: Been there, done that. But: For this, against that.
But a writer ought not to be an opinion-machine. As a black poet in my country put it, when reproached by some fellow African-Americans for not writing poems about the indignities of racism, "A writer is not a jukebox."
The writer's first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth ... and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation. Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification. The job of the writer is to make it harder to believe the mental despoilers. The job of the writer is to make us see the world as it is, full of many different claims and parts and experiences.
It is the job of the writer to depict the realities: the foul realities, the realities of rapture. It is the essence of the wisdom furnished by literature (the plurality of literary achievement) to help us to understand that, whatever is happening, something else is always going on.
I am haunted by that "something else."
I am haunted by the conflict of rights and of values I cherish. For instance that--sometimes--telling the truth does not further justice. That--sometimes--the furthering of justice may entail suppressing a good part of the truth.
Many of the twentieth century's most notable writers, in their activity as public voices, were accomplices in the suppression of truth to further what they understood to be (what were, in many cases) just causes.
My own view is, if I have to choose between truth and justice--of course, I don't want to choose--I choose truth.
Of course, I believe in righteous action. But is it the writer who acts?
These are three different things: speaking, what I am doing now; writing, what gives me whatever claim I have to this incomparable prize, and being, being a person who believes in active solidarity with others.
As Roland Barthes once observed: " ... who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is."
And of course I have opinions, political opinions, some of them formed on the basis of reading and discussing, and reflecting, but not from first-hand experience. Let me share with you two opinions of mine--quite predictable opinions, in the light of public positions I've taken on matters about which I have some direct knowledge.
I believe that the doctrine of collective responsibility, as a rationale for collective punishment, is never justified, militarily or ethically. I mean the use of disproportionate firepower against civilians, the demolition of their homes and destruction of their orchards and groves, the deprivation of their livelihood and their right to employment, schooling, medical services, untrammeled access to neighboring towns and communities ... all as a punishment for hostile military activity which may or may not even be in the vicinity of these civilians.
I also believe that there can be no peace here until the planting of Israeli communities in the Territories is halted, and is followed--sooner rather than later--by the dismantling of these settlements and the withdrawal of the military units amassed there to guard them.
I wager that these two opinions of mine are shared by many people here in this hall. I suspect that--to use an old American expression--I'm preaching to the choir.
But do I hold these opinions as a writer? Or do I not hold them as a person of conscience and then use my position as a writer to add my voice to others saying the same thing? The influence a writer can exert is purely adventitious. It is, now, an aspect of the culture of celebrity.
There is something vulgar about public dissemination of opinions on matters about which one does not have extensive first-hand knowledge. If I speak of what I do not know, or know hastily, this is mere opinion-mongering.
I say this, to return to the beginning, as a matter of honor. The honor of literature. The project of having an individual voice. Serious writers, creators of literature, shouldn't just express themselves differently than does the hegemonic discourse of the mass media. They should be in opposition to the communal drone of the newscast and the talk show.
The problem with opinions is that one is stuck with them. And whenever writers are functioning as writers they always see ... more.
Whatever there is, there is always more. Whatever is happening, something else is also going on.
If literature itself, this great enterprise that has been conducted (within our purview) for nearly three millennia, embodies a wisdom--and I think it does, and is the root of the importance we give to literature--it is by demonstrating the multiple nature of our private and our communal destinies. It will remind us that there can be contradictions, sometimes irreducible conflicts, among the values we most cherish. (This is what is meant by "tragedy.") It will remind us of the "also" and "the something else."
The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions. "Nothing is my last word about anything," said Henry James. Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions--whenever asked--cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to perceive complexity.
Information will never replace illumination. But something that sounds like, except that it's better than, information--I mean the condition of being informed; I mean concrete, specific, detailed, historically dense, first-hand knowledge--is the indispensable prerequisite for a writer to express opinions in public.
Let the others, the celebrities and the politicians, talk down to us; lie. If being both a writer and a public voice could stand for anything better, it would be that writers would consider the formulation of opinions and judgments to be a difficult responsibility.
Another problem with opinions. They are agencies of self-immobilization. What writers do should free us up, shake us up. Open avenues of compassion and new interests. Remind us that we might, just might, aspire to become different, and better, than we are. Remind us that we can change.
As Cardinal Newman said, "In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often."
And what do I mean by the word "perfection"? That I shall not try to explain but only say, Perfection makes me laugh. Not cynically, I hasten to add. With joy.
I am grateful to have been awarded the Jerusalem Prize. I accept it as an honor to all those committed to the enterprise of literature. I accept it in homage to all the writers and readers in Israel and in Palestine struggling to create literature made of singular voices and the multiplicity of truths. I accept the prize in the name of peace and the reconciliation of injured and fearful communities. Necessary peace. Necessary concessions and new arrangements. Necessary abatement of stereotypes. Necessary persistence of dialogue. I accept the prize--this international prize, sponsored by an international book fair--as an event that honors, above all, the international republic of letters.
