James Thurber is most famous as a cartoonist and writer for The New Yorker in the 1930s and 40s. He published "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" in The New Yorker in March of 1939. It tells the story of an aging man who, though inept and bumbling in real life, passes his day with a series of fantasies in which he takes on the role of any number of powerful, bold, decisive men. The story has become an American classic, and Mitty a famous literary character. The word "Mittyesque" can even be found in The American Heritage Dictionary. (It refers to someone who is an absent-minded dreamer.)
Why Should I Care?
Who hasn't gotten through a boring day by imagining they were somewhere else, someone else, doing something different? Whether you pretend you're decoding spy codes when finishing your calculus homework, or that you're a dangerous Mafioso when your mother makes you take out the garbage, or that you're an FBI agent gathering intel when you're waiting at line at the supermarket, you probably know what we're talking about. The imagination is something we all use – possibly something we all need – to make our lives more interesting.
Some view "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" as the endearing story of a loveable man whose rather humorous, dramatic fantasies are harmlessly employed to get him through a dull day of errands. Others see darker themes at work here. Perhaps the story's message is that a dreamer can't survive in this world; or maybe that dreams are insufficient to compensate for what bothers us in reality. Any way you cut it, there are tough questions and hilarity to be found in "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty."
James Thurber is one of America's best known humorists, and "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" is his best known story. The story was first published in 1939 in the New Yorker magazine to great acclaim. It was reprinted in Thurber's 1942 collection, My World—And Welcome To It and in Reader's Digest in 1943. The story's main character is a middle-aged, middle-class man who escapes from the routine drudgery of his suburban life into fantasies of heroic conquest. Upon the story's publication, Walter Mitty became an archetypal American figure. Today, people still describe a certain kind of neurotic, daydreaming man as a "Walter Mitty type.'' In 1947, Hollywood released a movie of the same title, starring Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo. Although his humorous stories, sketches, and illustrations were well-known during his lifetime, Thurber has received little scholarly attention. Some critics dismissed his work as little more than formulaic and whimsical. More recently, critics have become attentive to Thurber's literary prowess, such as his use of wordplay and attention to narrative form. They have also discussed the darker themes of his work which lurk underneath the hilarity. Others, referring to his tendency to portray domineering women, like Mrs. Mitty, and unhappy, ineffectual men, like Walter, fault his treatment of women and views of marriage. - See more at: http://www.enotes.com/topics/secret-life#sthash.zXI0Vuhh.dpuf
James Thurber has been called "one of our great American institutions' (Stanley Walker), "a magnificent satirist (Boston Transcript), and "a Joyce in false-face" (New York Times). The New York Herald Tribune submits that he is "as blithe as Benchley...as savage as Swift...surprisingly wise and witty," while the Times of London, out of enthusiasm and a profound regard for truth, proclaims that "Thurber is Thurber." In Fables for Our Time, Thurber the Moralist is in the ascendancy. Here are a score or more lessons-in-prose dedicated to conventional sinners and proving--what you will. The fables are imperishably illustrated, and are supplemented by Mr. Thurber's own pictorial interpretations of famous poems in a wonderful and joyous assemblage.
About the Author
James Thurber (1894)-1961) created some thirty volumes of humor, fiction, children's books, cartoons, and essays in just about as many years. A founding member of The New Yorker staff, Thurber wrote and illustrated such enduring books as The Thurber Carnival and My Life and Hard Times, which have appeared in countless editions and dozens of languages throughout the world.
Product Details
Paperback: 144 pages
Publisher: Harper Perennial (March 23, 1983)
The Great American Humorist James Thurber 1894 - 1961 Left Us With Some Great Stories and Illustrations Here are some of his works from "Fables For Our Times"
*** 早再數十年前 有識之士就開始鼓吹女性當主管的優點 請參考Lewis Thomas 先生的一些著作 The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine-Watcher (Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Series) (9780140243277): Lewis Thomas ****
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Lewis Thomas (November 25, 1913–December 3, 1993) was a physician, poet, etymologist, essayist, administrator, educator, policy advisor, and researcher. ...
Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony
Lewis Thomas
I cannot listen to Mahler's Ninth Symphony with anything like the old melancholy mixed with the high pleasure I used to take from this music. There was a time, not long ago, when what I heard, especially in the final movement, was an open acknowledgement of death and at the same time a quiet celebration of the tranquility connected to the process. I took this music as a metaphor for reassurance, confirming my own strong hunch that the dying of every living creature, the most natural of all experiences, has to be a peaceful experience. I rely on nature. The long passages on all the strings at the end, as close as music can come to expressing silence itself, I used to hear as Mahler's idea of leave-taking at its best. But always, I have heard this music as a solitary, private listener, thinking about death. Now I hear it differently. I cannot listen to the last movement of the Mahler Ninth without the door-smashing intrusion of a huge new thought: death everywhere, the dying of everything, the end of humanity. The easy sadness expressed with such gentleness and delicacy by that repeated phrase on faded strings, over and over again, no longer comes to me as old, familiar news of the cycle of living and dying. All through the last notes my mind swarms with images of a world in which the thermonuclear bombs have begun to explode, in New York and San Francisco, in Moscow and Leningrad, in Paris, in Paris, in Paris. In Oxford and Cambridge, in Edinburgh. I cannot push away the thought of a cloud of radioactivity drifting along the Engadin, from the Moloja Pass to Ftan, killing off the part of the earth I love more than any other part. I am old enough by this time to be used to the notion of dying, saddened by the glimpse when it has occured but only transiently knocked down, able to regain my feet quickly at the thought of continuity, any day. I have acquired and held in affection until very recently another sideline of an idea which serves me well at dark times: the life of the earth is the same as the life of an organism: the great round being possesses a mind: the mind contains an infinite number of thoughts and memories: when I reach my time I may find myself still hanging around in some sort of midair, one of those small thoughts, drawn back into the memory of the earth: in that peculiar sense I will be alive. Now all that has changed. I cannot think that way anymore. Not while those things are still in place, aimed everywhere, ready for launching. This is a bad enough thing for the people in my generation. We can put up with it, I suppose, since we must. We are moving along anyway, like it or not. I can even set aside my private fancy about hanging around, in midair. What I cannot imagine, what I cannot put up with, the thought that keeps grinding its way into my mind, making the Mahler into a hideous noise close to killing me, is what it would be like to be young. How do the young stand it? How can they keep their sanity? If I were very young, sixteen or seventeen years old, I think I would begin, perhaps very slowly and imperceptibly, to go crazy. There is a short passage near the very end of the Mahler in which the almost vanishing violins, all engaged in a sustained backward glance, are edged aside for a few bars by the cellos. Those lower notes pick up fragments from the first movement, as though prepared to begin everything all over again, and then the cellos subside and disappear, like an exhalation. I used to hear this as a wonderful few seconds of encouragement: we'll be back, we're still here, keep going, keep going. Now, with a pamphlet in front of me on a corner of my desk, published by the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, entitled MX Basing, an analysis of all the alternative strategies for placement and protection of hundreds of these missiles, each capable of creating artificial suns to vaporize a hundred Hiroshimas, collectively capable of destroying the life of any continent, I cannot hear the same Mahler. Now, those cellos sound in my mind like the opening of all the hatches and the instant before ignition. If I were sixteen or seventeen years old, I would not feel the cracking of my own brain, but I would know for sure that the whole world was coming unhinged. I can remember with some clarity what it was like to be sixteen. I had discovered the Brahms symphonies. I knew that there was something going on in the late Beethoven quartets that I would have to figure out, and I knew that there was plenty of time ahead for all the figuing I would ever have to do. I had never heard of Mahler. I was in no hurry. I was a college sophomore and had decided that Wallace Stevens and I possessed a comprehensive understanding of everything needed for a life. The years stretched away forever ahead, forever. My great-great grandfather had come from Wales, leaving his signature in the family Bible on the same page that carried, a century later, my father's signature. It never crossed my mind to worry about the twenty-first century; it was just there, given, somewhere in the sure distance. The man on television, Sunday midday, middle-aged and solid, nice-looking chap, all the facts at his fingertips, more dependable looking than most high-school principals, is talking about civilian defense, his responsibility in Washington. It can make an enormous diffference, he is saying. Instead of the outright death of eighty milliom American citizens in twenty minutes, he says, we can, by careful planning and practice, get that number down to only forty million, maybe even twenty. The thing to do, he says, is to evacuate the cities quickly and have everyone get under shelter in the countryside. That way we can recover, and meanwhile we will have retaliated, incinerating all of Soviet society, he says. What about radioactive fallout? he is asked. Well, he says. Anyway, he says, if the Russians know they can only destroy forty million of us instead of eighty million, this will deter them. Of course, he adds, they have the capacity to kill all two hundred and twenty million of us if they try real hard, but they know we can do the same to them. If the figure is only forty million this will deter them, not worth the trouble, not worth the risk. Eighty million would be another matter, we should guard ourselves against losing that many all at once, he says. If I were sixteen or seventeen years old and had to listen to that, or read things like that, I would want to give up listening and reading. I would begin thinking up new kinds of sounds, different from any music heard before, and I would be twisting and turning to rid myself of human language.
七十年代听說友工在哥倫比亞、普林斯頓教中國小說、戲曲，教得很成功，教出了幾個學生。這本書里友工自己說︰“我對中國藝術美典興趣已久，發表《中國抒情 美典》就初稿構思算來已逾十年。但它的姊妹篇，即《中國戲曲美典》始終不能完工。”這可真是十年磨一劍，十年再磨一劍。文學要按照體類(genre)之別 來研究。抒情詩和戲曲是中國文學的兩大體類[此外想來還有小說、變文等以敘事(narrative)為宗旨的體類]。這兩個體類各有各的“美典”。書中 兩套文章，一套講中國抒情美典，其中包括《律詩的美學》、《律體詩︰抒情詩之一典型》、《律詩美典︰意的形構》、《草書美典︰氣的質現(materialization of life force》、《文人畫的抒情美典》。另一套就是十年以後寫成的《中國戲曲美典初論》、《中國之戲曲美典》等。加上《詞體之美典(演講節要)》，友工的文 學理論可以說是輪廓分明。
《唐诗三论》收 录了美国普林斯顿大学高友工教授和康奈尔大学梅祖麟教授合作的三篇论文：Tu Fu’s “Autumn Meditations”: An Exercise in Linguistic Criticism （Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 28, 1968）；Syntax, Diction, and Imagery in T’ang Poetry （Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 31, 1971）；Meaning, Metaphor, and Allusion in T’ang Poetry （Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 38, 1978） 。最初的中文译本名为《唐诗的魅力》，是上海古籍出版社1989年出版的，转眼之间，二十五年已经过去了。
美国著名诗人 庞德（Ezra Pound）对中国古典诗歌十分倾倒，中国古典文学中的意向和隐喻曾给他的创作带来明显的影响。他那首最著名的属意象派名作《地铁车站》就用寥寥十四个 字，勾画了一副经典的场景：“这些面庞在人群中幻景般闪现；湿漉漉的黑树枝上花瓣数点。（The apparition of these faces in the crowd；Petals on a wet, black bough.）”在这里，“湿漉漉的黑树枝上花瓣数点”让那些“浮现的脸庞”变得鲜活生动；而相关意象的选取，则暗含了作者微妙的态度。而类似的意象组 合，在汉语中，尤其是古典诗歌中则是俯拾皆是，例如，“波漂菰米沉云黑，露冷莲房坠粉红”、“香稻啄余鹦鹉粒，碧梧栖老凤凰枝”、“月落乌啼霜满天，江枫 渔火对愁眠”、“泉声咽危石，日色冷青松”、“香雾云鬟湿，清辉玉臂寒”…….所有这些我们司空见惯诗句，在高友工、梅祖麟两位先生的分丝剖缕的解析下， 展示了许多在人们习惯性阅读中被有意无意忽略的信息，也为古往今来的许多传统审美体验找到了可查证的语言学依据，会心之处，常常让人有一种“原来如此”的 了悟，恍然之间，确实加深我们了对唐诗魅力的领会。
為了回答這個問題﹐“中國實時報”欄目請教了《人民文學》（People's Literature Magazine）英文版雜志《路燈》（Pathlight）的編輯。《路燈》致力於翻譯《人民文學》雜志與翻譯網站Paper Republic聯合出品的中國新小說與新詩歌。以下的五本中國書籍都由《路燈》工作人員力薦﹐第一本的作者是諾貝爾文學獎得主莫言。
《天堂蒜薹之歌》（Garlic Ballads）﹐作者：莫言
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Arcade Publishing
在埋頭開始完整地閱讀一部莫言的小說前﹐讀者若想對其作品風格有所瞭解﹐他的短篇小說集《師傅越來越幽默》（Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh!）也許是一個不錯的選擇﹐或者去看看張藝謀根據莫言小說改編拍成的電影《紅高粱》（Red Sorghum）。而對於那些熱衷於長篇小說的讀者而言﹐《天堂蒜薹之歌》是一個很好的選擇。諾貝爾文學獎評委會就曾建議﹐閱讀莫言應當從這部小說開始。
Endure是一本收錄了北島作品的最新英譯本詩集﹐由詩歌翻譯家克萊頓•埃什爾曼（Clayton Eshleman）與香港城市大學（City University in Hong Kong）助理教授、譯者盧卡斯•克萊因（Lucas Klein）合力譯成。收錄其中的詩歌均是精選之作﹐代表了1970年代至今這段時期北島最好、最重要的詩作。《Endure》汲取了之前英譯本的一些靈感﹐但在語句清晰度與詩學思想重建方面遠遠超過了他們的前輩。這本詩集甚至還在附錄中收集了克萊因與埃什爾曼在翻譯過程中交換意見、共同探討的電子郵件。Endure不單單是一本重要的書﹐更是一本好書。
Alexandre Dumas was born on this date in 1802. Most famous for his novels The Three Musketeers (1844) and The Count of Monte Cristo (1845), he greatly influenced the development of both the historical novel and the serial novel in France. Dumas' work was extremely popular and he amassed great wealth — spending it as fast as he made it. His extravagant lifestyle and his habit of surrounding himself with friends who were happy to be recipients of his largess left him in debt much of his life. His son, Alexandre Dumas fils, was also a writer; he did not adopt his father's free-wheeling lifestyle.
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"All human wisdom is summed up in two words — wait and hope."— Alexandre Dumas
The Three Musketeers (French: Les Trois Mousquetaires) is a novel by Alexandre Dumas, first serialized in March–July 1844. Set in the 17th century, it recounts the adventures of a young man named d'Artagnan after he leaves home to travel to Paris, to join the Musketeers of the Guard. D'Artagnan is not one of the musketeers of the title; those are his friends Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, inseparable friends who live by the motto "all for one, one for all" ("un pour tous, tous pour un"), a motto which is first put forth by d'Artagnan.[1] The story of d'Artagnan is continued in Twenty Years After and The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later. Those three novels by Dumas are together known as the d'Artagnan Romances. The Three Musketeers was first published in serial form in the newspaper Le Siècle between March and July 1844. When Alexandre Dumas wrote The Three Musketeers he also was a practising fencer and like many other French gentlemen of his generation he attended the schools for Canne de combat and Savate of Michel Casseux, Charles Lecour[2] and Joseph Charlemont (who had been a regular fencing instructor in the French army).
One half of one's sensibility is in a cast of mind that comes from belonging to a place, an ancestry, a history, a culture, whatever one wants to call it. But consciousness and quarrels with the self are the result of what Lawrence called ' the voices of my education'.--Belfast, Seamus Heaney PREOCCUPATIONS: Slected Prose 1968-1978, London:Faber and Faber1980, p.35
And yet the platform here feels more like a space station than a stepping stone, so that is why, for once in my life, I am permitting myself the luxury of walking on air. --Seamus Heaney– Nobel Lecture
昨天翻《希尼作品及研究目錄》，第一本詩集 Death of a Naturalist ，翻譯成《一個自然主義者的死亡》 ，這可能用類似YAHOO！字典：2. 【人】 自然主義者 ( naturalism ) /3. 【人】 博物學家 /1. 【人】 鳥商;狗商;動物標本剝製者 【注意：Yahoo的順序很奇怪】；Seeing Things 翻譯成《幻視》；The Spirit Level 翻譯成《酒精水準儀》；Opening Ground: Poems 1966-1996翻譯成 《開墾的土地》
不過，希尼給中文讀者的書信採信手書寫方式，
我認為值得花時間抄錄（有字讀不清楚），與朋友共享。我認為也許可以改善翻譯。
I would say to Chinese readers that I'm exhilarated to think that we can connect across the great distances – linguistic, geographic, cultural. That tells us something about poetry. The ongoing life of poetry is crucial for our continuing life as creatures of civilization and sensibility and as creatures of intimacy. Poetry is one of the basrious (???), one of the guardians of intimacy. But poetry is also wide-open, it's a public art form. And that is the paradox. A poem has to be available for inspection and at the same time, you know, it must be intimate to the poet. Think of writing a love letter and then think of writing a love poem, and of leaving them both on a table. If someone comes along later and reads the letters, it's an invasion, an intrusion, and the readers would probably be slightly embarrassed. But if love poem, however bad the love poem is, it is not an invasion. The poem is actually an address to you as a reader. It calls you towards it. It is there to be open with you. It is a made thing , but a thing made of inwardness. So the fact that there are Chinese readers means that our belief in the openness of the poem is justified, and secondly, that our sense of its necessity as a help to our continuing to be sensitively human is justified too.
在Oyster的書庫里，有一本名為《女人想要什麼》(What Women Want)的暢銷書，該書的推廣詞為「帶你了解女人所思所想，這樣你才能給她驚喜」。每一個點開該書的讀者都讀完了整本書。另一方面，小阿瑟·M·施萊辛 格(Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.)的《美國歷史的循環》(The Cycles of American History)卻沒能給任何人帶來驚喜：點開該書的讀者只有1%讀完了全書。
As New Services Track Habits, the E-Books Are Reading You
ByDAVID STREITFELDDecember 28, 2013
Scribd engineers, above, at work in San Francisco.
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO — Before the Internet, books were written — and published — blindly, hopefully. Sometimes they sold, usually they did not, but no one had a clue what readers did when they opened them up. Did they skip or skim? Slow down or speed up when the end was in sight? Linger over the sex scenes?
A wave of start-ups is using technology to answer these questions — and help writers give readers more of what they want. The companies get reading data from subscribers who, for a flat monthly fee, buy access to an array of titles, which they can read on a variety of devices. The idea is to do for books what Netflix did for movies and Spotify for music.
“Self-published writers are going to eat this up,” said Mark Coker, the chief executive of Smashwords, a large independent publisher. “Many seem to value their books more than their kids. They want anything that might help them reach more readers.”
Last week, Smashwords made a deal to put 225,000 books on Scribd, a digital library here that unveiled a reading subscription service in October. Many of Smashwords’ books are already on Oyster, a New York-based subscription start-up that also began in the fall.
The move to exploit reading data is one aspect of how consumer analytics is making its way into every corner of the culture. Amazon and Barnes & Noble already collect vast amounts of information from their e-readers but keep it proprietary. Now the start-ups — which also include Entitle, a North Carolina-based company — are hoping to profit by telling all.
Quinn Loftis, a writer of romances, interacts with readers on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Goodreads, YouTube, Flickr and her website.
Justin Bolle for The New York Times
“We’re going to be pretty open about sharing this data so people can use it to publish better books,” said Trip Adler, Scribd’s chief executive.
Quinn Loftis, a writer of young adult paranormal romances who lives in western Arkansas, interacts extensively with her fans on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Goodreads, YouTube, Flickr and her own website. These efforts at community, most of which did not exist a decade ago, have already given the 33-year-old a six-figure annual income. But having actual data about how her books are being read would take her market research to the ultimate level.
“What writer would pass up the opportunity to peer into the reader’s mind?” she asked.
Scribd is just beginning to analyze the data from its subscribers. Some general insights: The longer a mystery novel is, the more likely readers are to jump to the end to see who done it. People are more likely to finish biographies than business titles, but a chapter of a yoga book is all they need. They speed through romances faster than religious titles, and erotica fastest of all.
At Oyster, a top book is “What Women Want,” promoted as a work that “brings you inside a woman’s head so you can learn how to blow her mind.” Everyone who starts it finishes it. On the other hand, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s “The Cycles of American History” blows no minds: fewer than 1 percent of the readers who start it get to the end.
Oyster data shows that readers are 25 percent more likely to finish books that are broken up into shorter chapters. That is an inevitable consequence of people reading in short sessions during the day on an iPhone.
A few writers might be repelled by too much knowledge. But others would be fascinated, as long as they retained control.
“Would we provide this data to an author? Absolutely,” said Chantal Restivo-Alessi, chief digital officer for HarperCollins Publishers. “But it is up to him how to write the book. The creative process is a mysterious process.”
Here is how Scribd and Oyster work: Readers pay about $10 a month for a library of about 100,000 books from traditional presses. They can read as many books as they want.
“We love big readers,” said Eric Stromberg, Oyster’s chief executive. But Oyster, whose management includes two ex-Google engineers, cannot afford too many of them.
This could be called the Sizzler problem. In the 1990s, the steak restaurant chain tried to beef up sales with an all-you-can-eat salad bar, which got bigger as it got more popular. But as more hungry customers came, the chain was forced to lower quality, which caused customers to flee, which resulted in bankruptcy.
“Sure, if you had a buffet and everyone ate everything, it wouldn’t be a profitable business,” said Mr. Adler of Scribd. “But generally people only eat so much.” Only 2 percent of Scribd’s subscribers read more than 10 books a month, he said.
These start-ups are being forced to define something that only academic theoreticians and high school English teachers used to wonder about: How much reading does it take to read a book? Because that is when the publisher, and the writer, get paid.
The companies declined to outline their business model, but publishers said Scribd and Oyster offered slightly different deals. On Oyster, once a person reads more than 10 percent of the book, it is officially considered “read.” Oyster then has to pay the publisher a standard wholesale fee. With Scribd, it is more complicated. If the reader reads more than 10 percent but less than 50 percent, it counts for a tenth of a sale. Above 50 percent, it is a full sale.
Both services say the response has been enthusiastic, but neither provided precise numbers.
Carl Sagan, an Astronomer Who Excelled at Popularizing Science, Is Dead at 62
By WILLIAM DICKE
Carl Sagan, an astronomer who became one of the nation's best-known scientists by enthusiastically conveying the wonders of the universe to millions of people on television and in books, died yesterday at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. He was 62 and lived in Ithaca, N.Y. The cause was pneumonia, a complication of the bone marrow disease myelodysplasia, said Susan Edmonds, a spokeswoman for the cancer center. He had been suffering from the ailment for two years and received a bone marrow transplant at the center in April 1995. Since then, he had returned several times for treatment. Dr. Sagan was David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University in Ithaca. Building on a foundation of respected scientific research, he became a best-selling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a telegenic popularizer of scientific research and space exploration. Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, said yesterday, ''Carl Sagan, more than any contemporary scientist I can think of, knew what it takes to stir passion within the public when it comes to the wonder and importance of science.'' A Longtime Belief In Extraterrestrial Life A persistent theme in his work was one practically guaranteed to capture public interest: the possibility that life exists elsewhere in the universe. He became an expert on the subject at a time when it was considered highly speculative, and prodded other scientists to consider it seriously. Civilized life must be common in the universe, he said, because stars are so abundant and the Sun is a fairly typical star. Dr. Sagan (pronounced SAY-gun) was probably best known as the host of ''Cosmos,'' a 13-part series on public television in 1980 that explored everything from the world of the atom to the vastness of the universe, and showed him looking awestruck as he contemplated the heavens. With an audience of 400 million people in 60 countries, it was considered the most widely viewed short-term public television series in history until it was eclipsed in 1990 by a series on the Civil War. He received critical acclaim as well as substantial financial awards for the series, which made him an international celebrity. The book he wrote to accompany it, also called ''Cosmos,'' was on the best-seller list for more than a year, and a company he formed, Carl Sagan Productions, promoted such things as ''The Music of the Cosmos'' with RCA Records. Dr. Sagan was also familiar to television viewers from 26 appearances in the 1970's and 80's on ''The Tonight Show'' with Johnny Carson, who was known to don a black wig and perform a Sagan impersonation. He and other comics delighted in parodying Dr. Sagan's references to ''billions and billions'' of stars in the universe. In an interview in 1977, Dr. Sagan said he turned down several hundred requests to give lectures every year but always tried to accept invitations to appear on ''The Tonight Show.'' ''The show has an audience of 10 million people,'' he said. ''That's an awful lot of people, and those aren't people who subscribe to Scientific American.'' Defending his activities in popularizing science, Dr. Sagan said in another interview: ''There are at least two reasons why scientists have an obligation to explain what science is all about. One is naked self-interest. Much of the funding for science comes from the public, and the public has a right to know how their money is being spent. If we scientists increase the public excitement about science, there is a good chance of having more public supporters. The other is that it's tremendously exciting to communicate your own excitement to others.'' While his leap from the scientific ivory tower into the television studio may have irritated some of his colleagues, there can be no doubt that Dr. Sagan was a serious and productive scientist. Early Observations Of Venus and Mars When he was still in his 20's, he deduced that mysterious radio emissions from Venus were caused by surface temperatures around 900 degrees Fahrenheit and that the planet had a crushing atmosphere. Years later, observations by a Soviet spacecraft substantially confirmed his conclusions. Early in his career, Dr. Sagan offered a new interpretation of color variations observed on Mars. Some scientists said the variations could be seasonal changes in some form of plant life, but Dr. Sagan and a colleague, James Pollack, said that shifts in Martian dust caused by wind storms could explain the observation. The theory was confirmed by a Mariner spacecraft in the 1970's. Dr. Sagan was deeply involved in NASA's missions to explore Mars and other planets. He was a member of the imaging team for the voyage to Mars by Mariner 9, a spacecraft launched in 1971 that was the first to orbit another planet; it transmitted 7,300 photographs of the Martian surface. He helped select the landing sites for Viking 1 and Viking 2, the first spacecraft to land successfully on Mars, in 1975. He also worked on Pioneer 10, which was launched in 1972 and was the first spacecraft to investigate an outer planet when it flew by Jupiter, and Pioneer 11, which was launched in 1973 and flew by Jupiter and Saturn. Dr. Sagan was a member of the scientific team that sent the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft to the outer solar system. The spacecraft, which visited Jupiter in 1979 and then Saturn, were the first to fly by Uranus, in 1986, and Neptune, in 1989, and took the first pictures of the solar system from beyond Pluto, in 1990. As a member of the Voyager team, Dr. Sagan conceived the idea of putting a message aboard the Voyager spacecraft on the chance that extraterrestrial beings will come upon it centuries from now, somewhere on its endless journey beyond the solar system. The message, which he called a ''bottle cast into the cosmic ocean,'' is in the form of a 12-inch copper phonograph record inserted in an aluminum protective jacket attached to the outside of the spacecraft. It included greetings from people in many languages and from whales, a 12-minute sound essay, 90 minutes of music and a series of blips to be decoded into black-and-white and color photographs. He also carried out extensive research relating to the origin of life, and was a member of a team that raised the specter that dust and smoke thrown up by explosions and fires in a nuclear war could lead to a devastating cooling of the atmosphere, or ''nuclear winter.'' Reaching for Stars As a Boy in Brooklyn Carl Sagan was born on Nov. 9, 1934, in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, where his father was a cutter in a clothing factory. He became interested in the stars as a child, read science fiction avidly, and said that by the time he was 8 he had arrived at the idea that there must be life on planets orbiting other stars. ''I didn't make a decision to pursue astronomy,'' he said. ''Rather, it just grabbed me, and I had no thought of escaping.'' He liked to recall that when he was 12, his grandfather asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up. ''An astronomer,'' he said. ''Fine,'' his grandfather said, ''but how will you make a living?'' Carl Sagan went off to the University of Chicago, from which he received bachelor's degrees in 1954 and 1955, a master's degree in physics in 1956 and a Ph.D. in astronomy and astrophysics in 1960. He accepted a fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley, became an assistant professor of astronomy at Harvard University, and then joined the Cornell faculty in 1968. He became a full professor in 1971. Dr. Sagan wrote more than 600 scientific papers and popular articles, and more than a dozen books, ranging outside his specialty; once he even turned to fiction. In The New York Times Book Review, the novelist James Michener described Dr. Sagan's book ''Cosmos'' as ''a cleverly written, imaginatively illustrated summary of his geological, anthropological, biological, historical and astronomical ruminations about our universe,'' and added, ''His style is iridescent, with lights flashing upon unexpected juxtapositions of thought.'' In 1978, Dr. Sagan won the Pulitzer Prize for ''The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence.'' In a review in The Times, John Leonard called the book ''a delight'' and described Dr. Sagan as ''a scientific Robert Redford, handsome and articulate and all business.'' In 1966, Dr. Sagan collaborated with a Soviet scientist, I. S. Shklovskii, on a book, ''Intelligent Life in the Universe,'' which showed that some scientists were willing to speculate about this topic. A Literary Lion With Cosmic Interests Dr. Sagan set off a stir in the literary world by signing a $2 million contract with Simon and Schuster for his first novel, ''Contact,'' a work of science fiction published in 1984 that also was a best seller. With his wife, Ann Druyan, he was working as co-producer of a movie based on the book; it is to be released by Warner Brothers next year. Among his other books were ''The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective'' (Doubleday, 1973); ''Other Worlds'' (Bantam, 1975); ''Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science'' (Random House, 1979); ''The Cold and the Dark: The World After Nuclear War'' (W. W. Norton, 1984), with several co-authors; ''Comet'' (Random House, 1984), written with Ms. Druyan; ''Shadows of Forgotton Ancestors: A Search for Who We Are'' (Random House, 1992), also written with Ms. Druyan; ''Pale Blue Dot'' (Random House, 1994), and ''The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark'' (Random House, 1995). Dr. Sagan held many positions, among them the chairmanship of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society. He also was editor in chief of Icarus, a journal of planetary studies, and president of the Planetary Society. He received numerous awards, including the National Academy of Sciences' highest honor, the Public Welfare Medal, and the NASA Medal for Distinguished Public Service twice. His first two marriages, to Lynn Margulis and Linda Salzman, ended in divorce. Besides his wife, he is survived by a sister, Cari Sagan Greene of League City, Tex.; four sons, Dorion, of Amherst, Mass., Jeremy, of Ithaca, Nicholas, of Los Angeles, and Sam, of Ithaca; a daughter, Alexandra, of Ithaca, and a grandchild.
生於布宜諾斯艾利斯，先後在義大利、法國、英國、大溪地居住，1985年成為加拿大公民，現居法國，並獲授法國藝術及文學勳章的軍官勳位。青少年時期曾為 視力受損的名作家波赫士誦讀，大受啟發，後成為蜚聲國際的選集編者、翻譯家、散文家、小說家和編輯。有多部作品獲得重要獎項，《閱讀地圖》（A History of Reading，臺灣商務，聯合報讀書人版年度十大翻譯好書獎）、《意象地圖》（Reading Pictures: A History of Love and Hate，臺灣商務）、《虛擬處所辭典》（The Dictionary of Imaginary Places）曾入圍加拿大國家級總督文學獎「非小說類」決賽，其他作品有《棕櫚樹下的史蒂文森》（Stevenson Under the Palm Trees）、《吉卜齡小傳》（Kipling: A Brief Biography）、《走進鏡之森林》（Into The Looking-Glass Wood）、《同時，在森林的另一處》（Meanwhile, in Another Part of the Forest）、《黑水》（Black Water，二冊），以及《異國的消息傳到了》（News from a Foreign Country Came）、《跟波赫士一起》（With Borges）等多部著作。
這本漢譯缺索引 不過還是可以知道在末章引用Herbert A. Simon 的 一所工商學院的設計 (頁312 /英文 335) (prize-winning 翻譯成"備受贊譽"不好) 2008年哈佛大學商學院慶百年的討論主題之一 各著名管理學院的個案在2009年有一小段檢討
末篇討論Stanford的MBA 可參考: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_Graduate_School_of_Business 其經費一半由校友捐獻. In August 2006, the school announced what is believed to be the second largest gift ever to a business school – $105 million from Stanford alumnus Phil Knight, MBA '62, Founder and Chairman of Nike, Inc.[6] The gift went toward construction of a $375 million campus, called the Knight Management Center, for the business school. Construction was completed in 2011.
Schwab Residential Center, on campus residence for first year Sloan, PhD, and MBA candidates.
In June 2006, the School announced a dramatic change to its curriculum model. The new model, dubbed "The Personalized MBA Education", has four focus points. First, it aims to offer each student a highly customized experience by offering broader menus of course topics and providing personal course-planning mentoring from Stanford Business School faculty advisors. Second, the new program attempts to deepen the school’s intellectual experience through several smaller, high-impact seminars focused on critical analytical thinking. Third, the new program will increase global business education through both new course options and requiring international experience from all students. Finally, the new program expands the schools focus on leadership and communication through new courses that examine students’ personal strengths in the topic. Overall, the school sees the flexible program as an important point of differentiation that leverages the school’s smaller relative size versus most other top MBA programs. The graduating class of 2009 was the first class having gone through the new curriculum.
MBA教育再思考 :十字路口的工商管理教育Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads出版年: 2011-9頁數: 338定價: 58.00元ISBN: 9787300138251內容簡介 · · · · · ·工商管理教育的現狀解析和未來藍圖數十年來，MBA畢業生幾乎毫無懸念地可以在最優秀的企業謀到高薪工作。然而世易時移，MBA學位帶來的優越地位已經受到撼動。世界經濟在迅速轉型，學術界和企業界對商學教育的質疑甚囂塵上，全球金融危機爆發……這些因素都把工商管理教育推到了一個關鍵的十字路口。面對這些挑戰，商學院的應對措施將決定其未來的角色及其工商管理教育是否把握時代脈搏，密切聯繫實踐。在這本具有標誌性意義的書中，哈佛商學院三位學者研究了影響工商管理教育的三個趨勢：項目形式日趨多樣化；越來越多的雇主開始質疑MBA學位的價值；以及由此所導致的入學情況的變化。作者展開了廣泛的調研，訪談了數十位商學院院長和企業高管，並且詳細分析了11個頂尖MBA項目。以此為基礎，《MBA教育再思考》提出了8個目前亟待滿足的教學需求，分析指出每個需求都對應著一個機遇，商學院可以..作者簡介 · · · · · ·斯里坎特·M?·達塔爾（Srikant M. Datar） 哈佛商學院會計學教授（享有“Arthur Lowes Dickinson爵士”頭銜），在MBA項目、綜合管理項目和高級管理項目中任教，兼任資深副院長，主管高管培訓、教師招聘與培養以及科研工作。主要研究方向為管理控制和戰略執行。戴維·A·加文（David A. Garvin） 哈佛商學院工商管理教授（享有“C. Roland Christensen”頭銜），在MBA和高級管理項目中任教，負責選修課的製定，並擔任教學資源中心主任。主要研究方向為綜合管理和戰略變革。帕特里克·G·卡倫（Patrick G. Cullen） 哈佛商學院助理研究員，主要研究專業學院與相關各方的關係，尤其是商學院的發展。曾擔任AACSB助理研究副總裁。 ◆ 譯者簡介伊志宏中國人民大學商學院院長、教授。主要... 目錄 · · · · · ·第1章 導論：變革中的MBA學位第Ⅰ篇 MBA教育的現狀第2章 MBA市場形勢的變化第3章 詳探課程方案第4章 憂慮重重第5章迎接全球化、領導力和整合性的挑戰第6章 教學方法和課程設計的創新第Ⅱ篇 商學院的應對策略第7章芝加哥大學布斯商學院：靈活自主，以學科為基礎第8章歐洲工商管理學院：信條——全球化第9章創造性領導力中心：以領導力開發為核心第10章哈佛商學院：綜合管理和注重實踐第11章 耶魯管理學院：整合與大變革第12章斯坦福大學商學院：個性化與大變革第13章 結語：商學院，路在何方
HBS Press Book
Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads
"Business Schools Face Test of Faith.""Is It Time to Retrain B-Schools?" As these headlines make clear, business education is at a major crossroads. For decades, MBA graduates from top-tier schools set the standard for cutting-edge business knowledge and skills. Now the business world has changed, say the authors of Rethinking the MBA, and MBA programs must change with it. Increasingly, managers and recruiters are questioning conventional business education. Their concerns? Among other things, MBA programs aren't giving students the heightened cultural awareness and global perspectives they need. Newly minted MBAs lack essential leadership skills. Creative and critical thinking demand far more attention. In this compelling and authoritative new book, the authors: Document a rising chorus of concerns about business schools gleaned from extensive interviews with deans and executives, and from a detailed analysis of current curricula and emerging trends in graduate business education Provide case studies showing how leading MBA programs have begun reinventing themselves for the better Offer concrete ideas for how business schools can surmount the challenges that come with reinvention, including securing faculty with new skills and experimenting with new pedagogies Rich with examples and thoroughly researched, Rethinking the MBA reveals why and how business schools must define a better pathway for the future.
*****
Assessing Whether Entrepreneurs Should Get M.B.A.’s
ByCLIFF OXFORD December 30, 2013
Have you noticed how many universities are rushing to create entrepreneurship programs as part of their M.B.A. offerings? As The Wall Street Journal recently noted, the answer is quite a few. One might say better late than never — or even think that the traditional M.B.A. program is finally gaining some relevance and teaching people how to build a business. Think again.
In reality, many of the changes are window dressing with schools just trying to keep their cash cow M.B.A. programs alive by attempting to ride the entrepreneurial fever breaking out across the country. The truth is you have a better chance of getting the Tea Party to embrace the Affordable Care Act than getting traditional business schools to teach real-world, hard-knocks entrepreneurship.
Here is why: traditional M.B.A. programs are classroom-centric. They give students little real access to business leaders or to the places where business is done. And as best I can tell, many academics want to keep it that way. Their big idea has been to bring in retired entrepreneurs to teach in the classroom. This is like putting a catfish in a bathtub and calling it a river.
Entrepreneurs generally don’t do well outside their preferred environment (the real world), and the students don’t get any real sense of how fast the business world moves. I think we may even have reached the point where some M.B.A.’s actually damage up-and-coming entrepreneurs. Go sit in a classroom, then go work in a fast-growth company. Talk about the difference between night and day! You will see why the classroom is a dangerous place from which to view the business world.
For example, Gianine Abdallah, an entrepreneur based in Atlanta, recently started an online apparel company that was profitable in its first week. Like most fast-growth entrepreneurs, she wants to move fast. So when she asked me if I thought getting a classroom M.B.A. would be helpful, I responded that I did not think it made much sense for her, logistically or academically. Does she really have the time to drive across town to sit in a class or to spend hours with an online program that doesn’t give her real-world business experience?
What she needs, I think, is not years of studying business theory out of a textbook, but exposure and access to business leaders and partners that can help her now. She needs to connect and have her real-time questions answered by someone like Susan Nethero, who built and sold a lingerie company, Intimacy.
Yes, of course, Ms. Abdallah and all other entrepreneurial students could use some accounting and finance, but why not take them online? In past years this may have been a poor option, but technology and online teaching methods have improved so much that one study for the Department of Education found that “on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.”
When I got my M.B.A. from Emory in 1994, I was already an information technology leader at .U.P.S, and I was consumed with climbing the corporate ladder – just like most of my fellow students from other big companies. But today, many M.B.A. students want to do their own thing and start their own companies.
My general management M.B.A. was worthwhile for me while I was at U.P.S. because it gave me exposure to other disciplines beyond information technology, like marketing and strategy. The accounting and strategy courses were useful even when I was building my business.
But here is the biggest difference 20 years makes and why I think many M.B.A.’s haven’t been relevant since the ’90s: When I started my company, STI Knowledge, we had about three years to stay ahead of the competition. With today’s technology, entrepreneurs tell me they have about three months. Data that used to take days or even months to acquire can now be obtained in real time. With the new speed of business, the traditional M.B.A. and the classroom have been left in the dust.
After I sold STI Knowledge, I decided I wanted to address these changes by helping to create a new kind of M.B.A. I gave my alma mater money to transform its executive M.B.A. program into an entrepreneurial M.B.A. program. People at the school called me an educational visionary and gladly took my money. I was bright-eyed and big-headed — but totally naïve to think I could persuade a university to offer an entrepreneurship program that gets students out of the classroom. Talk about stirring up a hornet’s nest!
I kept saying, “O.K. guys, let’s get going.” But their feet were in academic cement, and they would not move. And here is why: Most business schools have labor unions, known as tenured faculty, that keep the curriculum the way they want to teach it, when they want to teach it and how they want to teach it. They really did not want to hear me tell them that my M.B.A. had been largely irrelevant in helping me push my company into the 21st century — or that what I had learned from my M.B.A. no longer applied.
You might ask where the academic leadership is. In every case where business schools have changed their M.B.A. programs to reflect the real world, you will find a strong dean whose vision and conviction have triumphed over academic entitlements. These deans could be successful entrepreneur themselves. But we are talking about the exceptions — most act more like union stewards than entrepreneurs. This why you have to get the entrepreneur out of the classroom.
Eventually, I began to offer my ideas to other institutions. What I got was a lot of interest and a lot of partners (22 universities), but little action. My vision of an entrepreneurial M.B.A. kept getting clobbered. Then, this past September, I partnered with Brenau University in Gainesville, Ga., to offer an accredited entrepreneurial M.B.A. Here’s what it took: a nontenured faculty, forward-thinking deans and an entrepreneurial president of the college.
We put all of the academics online and worked tirelessly to integrate students into the local business community. Students attend board meetings, commerce dinners and C.E.O. round tables to get to know business leaders and their businesses. M.B.A. apprentices spend three months working side by side with a chief executive, reporting only to them. So it is possible.
And now, when entrepreneurs ask me whether they should go get an M.B.A., here’s what I tell them: If you get in to Stanford, go. Stanford offers exceptional access to Silicon Valley, the best fast-growth ecosystem in the universe. The school’s work-study program hits the all-important three Rs: rigorous, relevant, and real-world. In many cases, Stanford students end up helping a Silicon Valley company grow while getting their M.B.A. at the same time.
And if you get into Harvard’s business school, go. It has been proved over and over that it can help you build a business, although I’m not convinced it has anything to do with the school’s well-known “case study” business curriculum. For my taste, the case study remains a classroom-centric model that has little to do with entrepreneurs trying to build a business today. But go to Harvard anyway — if only for the Harvard alumni network. The contacts you make during and after the program are worth the price of admission.
Beyond Stanford and Harvard, I would say this: Go only if you find a program that offers real-world experience, working alongside someone who is building a business. Otherwise, while I wouldn’t say the current traditional M.B.A. is useless, it is pretty much like having athletes studying game film but never practicing on the field.
你是否有注意到，有多少大學正急着將創業項目作為M.B.A.項目中的選擇之一？就像《華爾街日報》(The Wall Street Journal)最近報道的，這其中原因有很多。有人可能會說，遲到總比缺席好——甚至會覺得，傳統的M.B.A. 項目終於與時代有了一點相關性，終於開始教人們如何創立一份事業了。請再思量一下吧。
在現實生活中，有許多此類變革其實只是裝點門面而已，學校們想要讓 M.B.A.項目這棵搖錢樹保持活力，於是就趁着全國颳起的這一股創業風潮來趕時髦。事實是，讓傳統的商學院教在真實世界中艱難前行的創業方法，還不如讓 茶黨(Tea Party)接受平價醫療法案(Affordable Care Act)的可能性大。
是的，當然了，阿卜杜拉和其他創業的學生可以用得上一些會計與金融的知識，但為什麼不在網上學習呢？在過去，這可能算不上一個好選擇，但科技與在線教學技術現在已經進步了許多，美國教育部(Department of Education)的一個研究發現，「平均來說，在線學習的學生比那些接受面對面教學的學生要表現得更好。」
同情的理解的討論，或許還可以用..Milan Kundera的《不能承受的生命之輕》第9節(上海譯文本，pp.22-3)談compassion 拉丁語源Origin:: Middle English: via Old French from ecclesiastical Latin compassio(n-), from compati 'suffer with'
Milan KUNDERA（米蘭‧昆德拉） 《小說的藝術》（L'Art du Roman）慰遲秀譯，台北：皇冠，2004，第6章「73個詞」的譯注：「……作者為譯本刪去十個詞，因為這些文字牽涉到法文字詞的詞源分析，作者認為只有用法文陳述才能理解。所以事實上這裡只收了63個詞條。」（p.147）
【hc評論：這，初讀之下，或許是「似之而非」之論述。就好像說我上述引的種種「罔兩」的引文和作文，只能用中文寫（當然，《林語堂 當代漢英詞典》用spirits或demons of the wild 或'the penumbra'和'fringe shadow'翻譯「罔兩」，對我們母與是漢文的人，多少有點掃興……）。不過，昆德拉先生對於翻譯質量的講究和奮鬥過程，他的大陸譯者汪湄作的《愛是最難的事》（原載《讀書1995第9期，》收入《對話的靈光：米蘭‧昆德拉研究資料輯要》北京：中國有誼出版公司，1999）
亨利．詹姆斯對於「虛構的」很重視（「虛構與真理」是文學理論的一子題）。他說：「一部小說之所以存在，其唯一的理由就是它確實試圖表現生活（does attempt to represent life）。」（編者說，他原先發表時的用語是「與生活媲美」（does compete with life）。第5頁。）
附舊文： Milan KUNDERA（米蘭‧昆德拉） 《小說的藝術》（L'Art du Roman）慰遲秀譯，台北：皇冠，2004，第6章「73個詞」的譯注：「……作者為譯本刪去十個詞，因為這些文字牽涉到法文字詞的詞源分析，作者認為只有用法文陳述才能理解。所以事實上這裡只收了63個詞條。」（p.147）
【hc評論：這，初讀之下，或許是「似之而非」之論述。就好像說我上述引的種種「罔兩」的引文和作文，只能用中文寫（當然，《林語堂 當代漢英詞典》用spirits或demons of the wild 或'the penumbra'和'fringe shadow'翻譯「罔兩」，對我們母與是漢文的人，多少有點掃興……）。不過，昆德拉先生對於翻譯質量的講究和奮鬥過程，他的大陸譯者汪湄作的《愛是最難的事》（原載《讀書1995第9期，》收入《對話的靈光：米蘭‧昆德拉研究資料輯要》北京：中國有誼出版公司，1999）
> > The Curtain is a seven-part essay by Milan Kundera, along with The Art of > the Novel and Testaments Betrayed composing a type of trilogy of book-length > essays on the European novel. > > > > The Curtain was originally published as "Le Rideau", in French in April > 2005 by Gallimard. It is also available in Spanish as "El Telón", in German > as "Der Vorhang", in Portuguese as "A Cortina" in Polish as "Zasłona", in > Greek as "Ο πέπλος" (O peplos) and in Croatian as "Zavjesa". It was > published in English on January 30, 2007 by HarperCollins [1]. > > > > 歐巴桑 留言：「關於昆德拉的窗簾，從法國網站上找到的： > > 『《帷幕》是對小說的禮讚，是某種對世界、對藝術、對生活與對文學的看法，是倫理與美學不可分割的表達。 > > > > > 昆德拉說：「第一個撕毀這條『以神話編織而成的神奇帷幕』的就是塞萬提斯，這條帷幕遮蓋了派唐吉訶德去旅行的所有情事。而「世界在此遊俠騎士赤裸裸的滑稽散文面前得以開展」。』
----
Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work
Roth, a Pulitzer Prize winner who has also twice won National Book Critics Circle and National Book awards for his fiction, here presents conversations with and essays on contemporary writers (plus the artist Philip Guston). The interviews with Ivan Kl!ma and Milan Kundera give fascinating insight into the difficult history and political struggles of the former Czechoslovakia. The writers also discuss the dangers of the West's commercial and entertainment cultures, V clav Havel's place in political action, and the nature of totalitarianism. Roth's discussions on Isaac Bashevis Singer and Bruno Schulz illuminate the cultural history of Poland in the Thirties, while his essays on Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow examine their art, religious heritage, and literary importance. Interviews with Primo Levi and Aharon Appelfeld give insight into different writers' attempts to come to grips with the destruction of the European Jews. Finally, an interview with Edna O'Brien focuses on the importance of place in the life of a writer. Especially interesting is the insight into Roth's own literary concerns of narration, authenticity, and politics. Recommended for all literature collections. - Gene Shaw, NYPL Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Context: Jery is in love with Bätely, and has been courting her for a year. She is all cold-shoulder, and after he again tries to win her heart as they banter with each other, leaves the conversation, and goes on her way back to her father's farm. Jery then says:
"Gehe, verschmähe die Treue. Die Reue kommt nach!"
So the reading is simply one of him being frustrated, his faithful and unrelenting pursuit of her having been scorned once again, and he prophesies that she will regret not having warmed to him (or to any other suitor, apparently; propheticallly, I feel, the next scene is Jery talking with an old acquaintance of his, who is now a dashing soldier, and something of a womanizer. I haven't read beyond that, but I can sort of feel an inevitable development to the story ;)
But I'm afraid that context - as usual - makes the quote that much less interesting ;)
FILM
Playing the Seducer With a Little Help From Kierkegaard
By ALAN RIDING
Published: April 27, 1997
PARIS— DANIELE DUBROUX'S NEW movie, ''The Diary of a Seducer,'' takes its name from an essay by the 19th-century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, but fear not, the film is not a primer on existentialism. Neither is it as steamy as the title might suggest. Seduction, after all, is about power, not sex. It just happens that in Ms. Dubroux's comedy-thriller, Kierkegaard has strangely seductive powers.
In Kierkegaard's story, the seducer was a young esthete, Johannes, who set out ''scientifically'' to make the virginal Cordelia fall for him. It being 1843, a blush was proof of success. In Ms. Dubroux's film, however, it is Kierkegaard's book that takes on a life of its own, after Gregoire (Melvil Poupaud), who is writing a thesis on the book, recognizes its power to seduce young women, principally Claire (Chiara Mastroianni).
Everyone else who then reads the book -- including Gregoire's former high school teacher and Claire's psychoanalyst -- in turn becomes obsessed with the person who lent it. And since the passion never seems to be reciprocated, things turn violent.
The film, which opens Friday in New York, was not a box-office hit in France when it opened there last year but was well received by critics. Writing in the Paris daily Liberation, Olivier Seguret said the movie was difficult to describe, ''first because seduction cannot be explained, secondly because Daniele Dubroux has made a very, very, truly very seductive film.''
Almost as intriguing as the movie itself is how Ms. Dubroux, now 49, came to make it, after she herself was almost entrapped by a man obsessed with Kierkegaard's exploration of the esthetics of seduction.
A former critic for Cahiers du Cinema, she has so far made only three shorts and four low-budget feature films (''The Diary of a Seducer'' cost just $1.4 million). On the other hand, a modest output may be almost inevitable, since she researches, writes, directs and usually appears in her movies.
''I work like an artisan,'' she said in an interview in her apartment in the Belleville district of Paris. ''When I have an idea for a story, it's usually because I have met or heard of someone who interests me. I then work a bit like an academic, digging into the material, going back for more exploring. It takes a long time, but it interests me.
''I think I am above all a writer,'' she continued. ''And when I write, there is always the famous 'I' who is the narrator, which is why I often finish up appearing in my films.''
But with ''The Diary of a Seducer,'' the ''I'' became involved long before the film was conceived, when Ms. Dubroux met an attractive and decidedly mysterious man -- she calls him only Didier R. -- who was obsessed by Kierkegaard's book. He urged her to adapt it for the screen and, somewhat reluctantly, she agreed to try. Then, as she tells it, when she delivered her manuscript to his letter box, to her astonishment she found another adaptation of the book, by another woman.
''Slowly, I discovered a whole network of women and even some men whom he had asked to adapt 'The Diary of a Seducer,''' she recalled, ''even people like a dancer and a pharmacist with no writing experience.
''It was all very odd. He was very enigmatic. I was not allowed into his home, but I learned that he lived with his mother, an eccentric former actress. He was also trained as a doctor, and while he did not have his own practice, all his network were his patients. Me, too. If we were ill, he'd leave the medicine with the baker below his apartment.''
Ms. Dubroux laughed at the absurdity of the story. Nonetheless, her strange encounter with Kierkegaard became the basis for her first screenplay. The narrator -- her ''I'' -- was a psychoanalyst who, after the suicide of a patient, finds the patient's address book and traces Gregoire. Gregoire tells her what he knows and suggests that she read ''The Diary of a Seducer.'' From that point, the plot developed along lines that had become all too familiar to Ms. Dubroux.
Remarkably, she persuaded Catherine Deneuve to play the psychoanalyst -- while Didier R. agreed to play the screen version of himself as Gregoire. (''I think Catherine Deneuve was a bit hypnotized by Didier when they met,'' the director suggested.) Then, two weeks before shooting was to begin, the producer backed out and the project collapsed.
MS. DUBROUX, A LIVElY, good-humored woman, was dismayed, but a few months later she returned to the idea. In what eventually became ''The Diary of a Seducer,'' Ms. Deneuve would no longer involved, but her daughter, Ms. Mastroianni, would play Claire.
''I needed to do it in a fresh way in order to find the energy to do it again,'' she explained. ''I didn't want to make the same film. I lowered the age of the two main characters to that of Kierkegaard's Johannes and Cordelia. But I kept the idea of all these people under the influence of this book.''
In the film, there are echoes of both Kierkegaard's book and Didier R.'s life. For example, Sebastien (Mathieu Amalric) is a rather hopeless ''apprentice seducer'' who, like Johannes, records in a diary his (failed) attempt to seduce Claire and his (successful) fallback plan to seduce her mother, Anne, played by Ms. Dubroux. On the other hand, like Didier R., Gregoire uses the book as an instrument of seduction.
The film includes two kisses but nothing resembling a sex scene. ''What's interesting is what happens in the spirit and in behavior,'' Ms. Dubroux said. ''To be seduced is interesting because it involves an odd kind of alchemy, a sort of hypnosis, a sort of spell, in which you lose your critical sense, you lower your guard.''
The French director Andre Techine, who acknowledges that he is a friend of Ms. Dubroux's and an admirer of her work, said the combination of humor and suspense in ''The Diary of a Seducer'' reminded him of some films by the Spanish director Luis Bunuel. Other critics have noted certain similarities -- in their narrative line and psychological tension -- between Ms. Dubroux's work and that of Mr. Techine.
''She has a taste for telling stories that are at times fantastic, even surrealist,'' said Mr. Techine, whose latest film, ''Les Voleurs'' (''Thieves''), was released in the United States this winter. ''She has a taste for enigma, a taste for intrigue. But her films are also very funny.''
Ms. Dubroux said her next film, which she hopes to shoot this summer, is inspired by a newspaper story of ''a sort of peasant Robin Hood'' who leaves his wife and elopes with a young woman for whom he does ''crazy things.''
Once again, Ms. Dubroux expects to appear in the film, as a friend of the missing husband. The character, as an outsider to the immediate drama, can serve as narrator. But she is more interested in writing and directing than acting, she said.
''The problem is that it's very hard to find French actresses between the ages of 40 and 50,'' she said. ''There are three or four, and they are much in demand.''
''And there's another problem,'' she added. ''I need a funny actress, and there aren't many in France. That's not the case in the United States; there are lots of American actresses who are beautiful and funny. But I can assure you, there aren't many funny women here. So when I can't find anyone else, I have to do it myself.''
Photos: The director Daniele Dubroux. (Border Line)(pg. 1); Daniele Dubroux and Mathiew Amalric in ''Diary of a Seducer'' from France--Seduction as an expression of power, ''a sort of hypnosis.'' (Leisure Time Features)(pg. 18)
She sang beyond the genius of the sea. The water never formed to mind or voice, Like a body wholly body, fluttering Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry, That was not ours although we understood, Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The sea was not a mask. No more was she. The song and water were not medleyed sound Even if what she sang was what she heard. Since what she sang was uttered word by word. It may be that in all her phrases stirred The grinding water and the gasping wind; But it was she and not the sea we heard.
For she was the maker of the song she sang. The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea Was merely a place by which she walked to sing. Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew It was the spirit that we sought and knew That we should ask this often as she sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea That rose, or even colored by many waves; If it was only the outer voice of sky And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled, However clear, it would have been deep air, The heaving speech of air, a summer sound Repeated in a summer without end And sound alone. But it was more than that, More even than her voice, and ours, among The meaningless plungings of water and the wind, Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres Of sky and sea. It was her voice that made The sky acutest at its vanishing. She measured to the hour its solitude. She was the single artificer of the world In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, Whatever self it had, became the self That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we, As we beheld her striding there alone, Knew that there never was a world for her Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know, Why, when the singing ended and we turned Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights, The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there, As night descended, tilting in the air, Mastered the night and portioned out the sea, Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles, Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon, The maker's rage to order words of the sea, Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, And of ourselves and of our origins, In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15749#sthash.3IUW7AoS.dpuf
She sang beyond the genius of the sea. The water never formed to mind or voice, Like a body wholly body, fluttering Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry, That was not ours although we understood, Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The sea was not a mask. No more was she. The song and water were not medleyed sound Even if what she sang was what she heard. Since what she sang was uttered word by word. It may be that in all her phrases stirred The grinding water and the gasping wind; But it was she and not the sea we heard.
For she was the maker of the song she sang. The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea Was merely a place by which she walked to sing. Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew It was the spirit that we sought and knew That we should ask this often as she sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea That rose, or even colored by many waves; If it was only the outer voice of sky And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled, However clear, it would have been deep air, The heaving speech of air, a summer sound Repeated in a summer without end And sound alone. But it was more than that, More even than her voice, and ours, among The meaningless plungings of water and the wind, Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres Of sky and sea. It was her voice that made The sky acutest at its vanishing. She measured to the hour its solitude. She was the single artificer of the world In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, Whatever self it had, became the self That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we, As we beheld her striding there alone, Knew that there never was a world for her Except the one she sang and, singing, made. Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know, Why, when the singing ended and we turned Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights, The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there, As night descended, tilting in the air, Mastered the night and portioned out the sea, Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles, Arranging, deepening, enchanting night. Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon, The maker's rage to order words of the sea, Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, And of ourselves and of our origins, In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15749#sthash.3IUW7AoS.dpuf The Idea of Order at Key West- Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More 有朗誦 www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15749The Idea of Order at Key West. by Wallace Stevens. She sang beyond the genius of the sea. The water never formed to mind or voice, Like a body wholly body, ...
[edit] Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942). Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea Of this invention, this invented world, The inconceivable idea of the sun.
And for what, except for you, do I feel love? Do I press the extremest book of the wisest man Close to me, hidden in me day and night? In the uncertain light of single, certain truth, Equal in living changingness to the light In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest, For a moment in the central of or being, The vivid transparence that you bring is peace.
[...] It Must be Abstract
I
Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea Of this invention, this invented world, The inconceivable idea of the sun.
You must become an ignorant man again And see the sun again with an ignorant eye And see it clearly in the idea of it.
Never suppose an inventing mind as source Of this idea nor for that mind compose A voluminous master folded in his fire.
How clean the sun when seen in its idea, Washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven That has expelled us and our images . . .
The death of one god is the death of all. Let purple Phoebus lie in umber harvest, Let Phoebus slumber and die in autumn umber,
Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was A name for something that never could be named. There was a project for the sun and is.
There is a project for the sun. The sun Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be In the difficulty of what it is to be.
II
It is the celestial ennui of apartments That sends us back to the first idea, the quick Of this invention; and yet so poisonous
Are the ravishments of truth, so fatal to The truth itself, the first idea becomes A hermit in a poet’s metaphors,
Who comes and goes and comes and goes all day. May there be an ennui of the first idea? What else, prodigious scholar, should there be?
The monastic man is an artist. The philosopher Appoints man’s place in music, say, today. But the priest desires. The philosopher desires.
And not to have is the beginning of desire. To have what is not is its ancient cycle. It is desire at the end of winter, when
It observes the effortless weather turning blue And sees the myosotis on its bush. Being virile, it hears the calendar hymn.
It knows that what it has is what is not And throws it away like a thing of another time As the morning throws off stale moonlight and shabby sleep.
[...]
III
The poem refreshes life so that we share, For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies Belief in an immaculate beginning
And sends us, winged by an unconscious will, To an immaculate end. We move between these points: From that ever-early candor to its late plural
And the candor of them is the strong exhilaration Of what we feel from what we think, of thought Beating in the heart, as if blood newly came,
An elixir, an excitation, a pure power. The poem, through candor, brings back a power again That gives a candid kind to everything.
We say: at night an Arabian in my room, With his damned hoobla-hoobla-hoobla-how, Inscribes a primitive astronomy
Across the unscrawled fores the future casts And throws his stars around the floor. By day The wood-dove used to chant his hoobla-hoo
And still the grossest iridescence of ocean Howls hoo and rises and howls hoo and falls. Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.
IV
The first idea was not our own. Adam In Eden was the father of Descartes And Eve made air the mirror of herself,
Of her sons and of her daughters. They found themselves In heaven as in a glass; a second earth; And in the earth itself they found a green–
The inhabitants of a very varnished green. But the first idea was not to shape the clouds In imitation. The clouds preceded us
There was a muddy center before we breathed. There was a myth before the myth began, Venerable and articulate and complete.
From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.
We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues. The air is not a mirror but bare board, Coulisse bright-dark, tragic chiaroscuro
And comic color of the rose, in which Abysmal instruments make sounds like pips Of the sweeping meanings that we add to them.
V
The lion roars at the enraging desert, Reddens the sand with his red-colored noise, Defies red emptiness to evolve his match,
Master by foot and jaws and by the mane, Most supple challenger. The elephant Breaches the darkness of Ceylon with blares,
The glitter-goes on surfaces of tanks, Shattering velvetest far-away. The bear, The ponderous cinnamon, snarls in his mountain
At summer thunder and sleeps through winter snow. But you, ephebe, look from your attic window, Your mansard with a rented piano. You lie
In silence upon your bed. You clutch the corner Of the pillow in your hand. You writhe and press A bitter utterance from your writhing, dumb,
Yet voluble dumb violence. You look Across the roofs as sigil and as ward And in your centre mark them and are cowed . . .
These are the heroic children whom time breeds Against the first idea – to lash the lion, Caparison elephants, teach bears to juggle.
VI
Not to be realized because not to Be seen, not to be loved nor hated because Not to be realized. Weather by Franz Hals,
Brushed up by brushy winds in brushy clouds, Wetted by blue, colder for white. Not to Be spoken to, without a roof, without
First fruits, without the virginal of birds, The dark-brown ceinture loosened, not relinquished. Gay is, gay was, the gay forsythia
And yellow, yellow thins the Northern blue. Without a name and nothing to be desired, If only imagined but imagined well.
My house has changed a little in the sun. The fragrance of the magnolias comes close, False flick, false form, but falseness close to kin.
It must be visible, or invisible, Invisible or visible or both: A seeing and unseeing in the eye.
The weather and the giant of the weather, Say the weather, the mere weather, the mere air: An abstraction blooded, as a man by thought.
VII
It feels good as it is without the giant, A thinker of the first idea. Perhaps The truth depends on a walk around the lake,
A composing as the body tires, a stop To see hepatica, a stop to watch A definition growing certain and
A wait within that certainty, a rest In the swags of pine-trees bordering the lake. Perhaps there are times of inherent excellence,
As when the cock crows on the left and all Is well, incalculable balances, At which a kind of Swiss perfection comes
And a familiar music of the machine Sets up its Schwärmerei, not balances That we achieve, but balances that happen,
As a man and woman meet and love forthwith. Perhaps there are moments of awakening, Extreme, fortuitous, personal, in which
We more than awaken, sit on the edge of sleep, As on an elevation, and behold The academies like structures in a mist.
VIII
Can we compose a castle-fortress-home, Even with the help of Viollet-le-Duc, And set the MacCullough there as major man?
The first idea is an imagined thing. The pensive giant prone in violet space May be the MacCullough, an expedient,
Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis, Incipit and a form to speak the word And every latent double in the word,
Beau linguist. But the MacCullough is MacCullough. It does not follow that major man is man. If MacCullough himself lay lounging by the sea,
Drowned in its washes, reading in the sound, About the thinker of the first idea, He might take habit, whether from wave or phrase,
Or power of the wave, or deepened speech, Or a leaner being, moving in on him, Of greater aptitude or apprehension,
As if the waves at last were never broken, As if the language suddenly, with ease, Said things it had laboriously spoken.
IX
The romantic intoning, the declaimed clairvoyance Are parts of apotheosis, appropriate And of its nature, the idiom thereof.
They differ from reason’s click-clack, its applied Enflashings. But apotheosis is not The origin of the major man. He comes,
Compact in invincible foils, from reason, Lighted at midnight by the studious eye, Swaddled in revery, the object of
The hum of thoughts evaded in the mind, Hidden from other thoughts, he that reposes On a breast forever precious for that touch,
For whom the good of April falls tenderly, Falls down, the cock-birds calling at the time. My dame, sing for this person accurate songs.
He is and may be but oh! he is, he is, This foundling of the infected past, so bright, So moving in the manner of his hand.
Yet look not at his colored eyes. Give him No names, Dismiss him from your images. The hot of him is purest in the heart.
X
The major abstraction is the idea of man And major man is its exponent, abler In the abstract than in his singular,
More fecund as principle than particle, Happy fecundity, flor-abundant force, In being more than an exception, part,
Though an heroic part, of the commonal. The major abstraction is the commonal, The inanimate, difficult visage. Who is it?
What rabbi, grown furious with human wish, What chieftain, walking by himself, crying Most miserable, most victorious,
Does not see these separate figures one by one, And yet see only one, in his old coat, His slouching pantaloons, beyond the town,
Looking for what was, where it used to be? Cloudless the morning. It is he. The man In that old coat, those sagging pantaloons,
It is of him, ephebe, to make, to confect The final elegance, not to console Or sanctify, but plainly to propound.
Excerpts from "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" by Wallace Stevens
[Note to "Notes": Find the complete poem here, but preferably if you consider yourself a poet or a creature of culture, you must purchase a copy of the whole harmonium.] Do I press the extremest book of the wisest man, Close to me, hidden in day and night? In the uncertain light of single, certain truth, Equal in living changingness to the light In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest, For a moment in the central of our being....
It Must Be Abstract
I
Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea Of this invention, this invented world, The inconceivable idea of the sun.
You must become an ignorant man again And see the sun again with an ignorant eye And see it clearly in the idea of it....
II
But the priest desires. The philosopher desires.
And not to have is the beginning of desire. To have what is not is its ancient cycle....
III
The poem refreshes so that we share, For a moment, the first idea... It satisfies Belief in an immaculate beginning
And sends us, winged by an unconscious will, To an immaculate end....
Beating in the heart, as if blood newly came,
An elixir, an excitation, a pure power. The power, through candor, brings back a power again....
Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation....
IV
We are the mimics....
Abysmal instruments make sounds like pips Of the sweeping meanings that we add to them.
V
These are the heroic children whom time breeds Against the first idea--to lash the lion, Caparison elephants, teach bears to juggle.
VI
Not to be realized because not to Be seen...
Without a name and nothing to be desired If only imagined but imagined well....
It must be visible or invisible Invisible or visible or both: A seeing and unseeing in the eye....
An abstraction blooded, as a man by thought.
VII
not balances That we achieve but balances that happen....
Perhaps there are moments of awakening, Extreme, fortuitous, personal, in which
We more than awaken....
VIII
reading in the sound, About the thinker of the first idea, He might take habit...
moving in on him, Of greater aptitude and apprehension...
As if the language suddenly, with ease, Said things it had laboriously spoken.
X
The major abstraction is the idea of man....
What chieftain, walking by himself, crying Most miserable, most victorious,
Does not see these separate figures, one by one, And yet see only one...
Looking for what was, where it used to be? ...It is he.
A lot of us think of Connecticut’s capital as a generic New England way station between Boston and New York. A decent place to stop for pancakes? Sure. A wildly lyrical geyser of the American imagination? Not so much.
And yet, as I discovered on a recent weekend trip, Hartford could probably rival the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco as a wellspring of psychedelic imagery — thanks, in large part, to one man. Hartford is the place where the poet Wallace Stevens spent a substantial portion of his life, and he composed many of his verses — bizarrely exquisite blossoms unlike anything else in the canon of American literature — while migrating back and forth on foot between his comfortable house on Westerly Terrace and his office at an insurance company.
You can, as I did on a Saturday morning, stroll along the commute that helped dislodge the man’s subconscious musings. Thanks to a few advocates from an organization that’s cheekily known as the Friends & Enemies of Wallace Stevens, there is a marked walk that winds along for about 2.4 miles, starting at the white-columned colossus of the Hartford, the insurance giant where one of the most creative men in American letters ascended to the position of vice president, and ending at the white-clapboard house where the Pulitzer Prize winner lived.
Who knew? Hartford is like that: full of surprises.
There are more. Just a few blocks away, on Farmington Avenue, in a 25-room mansion that looks like something from “Downton Abbey: The American Years,” two of the greatest characters in American fiction — Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn — came to life.
Contrary to mythology, Mark Twain did not conjure up his masterpieces while puffing cigars on a Southern riverboat. He wrote them, or at least parts of them, at a table in a third-floor billiard room in his house in Hartford, where he and his family lived for about 17 years. (He also cranked out his books at a summer house in Elmira, N.Y., but either way the slow churn of the Mississippi River was nowhere in sight.)
If there were moments back then when “Sam,” as Hartford locals called him, felt a yearning to procrastinate with a little literary chitchat, he could pay a call on his next-door neighbor, Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had turned her into the most famous woman in America.
Twain, Stowe, Stevens — does Hartford have Sedona-like cosmic rays of genius passing through it? Are there magic pyramids of Parnassus buried beneath its landlocked streets? Scholars might know all about the city’s pivotal role in the evolution of American literature, but for most of us average readers, this all comes as news.
I called Wilson H. Faude, a Hartford historian who served as the first curator for the Mark Twain House, and told him that this highway stop in the middle of Connecticut seemed to qualify, at least from a literary standpoint, as a pretty important place.
“Bingo,” he said with a jolly tone that suggested I might also soon discover that chocolate is delicious and sunshine is nice. “Hartford is where Tom and Huck were born!”
If Hartford doesn’t crow about that, Mr. Faude attributes it to the region’s taciturn Yankee tendencies. “We don’t do enough talking,” he said. “We all know that it’s here. Why do we have to go public? This is reticent Connecticut.”
Even so, it wasn’t long before Mr. Faude was regaling me with historical morsels. “At one point, it was said that Hartford was the richest city in America,” he said. It became a vortex of American publishing, which is what originally attracted the likes of Twain in the 19th century, and its dominance in the insurance business is what provided Stevens with a well-kept bourgeois cocoon in the first part of the 1900s. Hartford also produced guns and banks, and a long, high tide of prosperity flooded the city with art and culture. The Wadsworth Atheneum, advertised as “the oldest public art museum in the United States,” was founded in 1842. It’s where Pablo Picasso had his first American retrospective.
I took a tour of the Mark Twain House on my weekend visit, and I found it unexpectedly opulent. (Our guide told us that Twain and his wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens, the daughter of a rich coal baron, had spent thousands of dollars a year on its upkeep; they were forced to move out in 1891 after a few lousy tech investments left the author bankrupt.)
But for a poetry obsessive like me, the Stevens walk was the main attraction.
This particular perambulation, though, is, like Hartford itself, quite modest. There are no tour guides; in keeping with the private enterprise of creating poetry, you’re on your own. Along the walk there are pale slabs of Connecticut granite engraved with verses from one of Wallace Stevens’s most indelible poems, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”
That’s about it.
Nevertheless, I found the walk to be deeply moving. After all, how often do we get to explore the cranial machinery of a literary titan by slipping into the groove of his daily commute?
Stevens never learned to drive. Even though many of his neighbors had no idea what he was up to, he would amble along Asylum Avenue methodically measuring the pace of his steps and murmuring phrases to himself — phrases that would become some of the most haunting lines in the English language.
“It seems as though Stevens composed poems in his head, and then wrote them down, often after he arrived at the office,” Prof. Helen Vendler, Harvard’s grande dame of poetry and the author of “Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire,” explained to me in an e-mail. “As for his commute, he enjoyed it profoundly. It was his only time out of doors, alone, thinking, receptive to the influx of nature into all the senses.”
It’s all too easy to assume that Stevens was some tortured artist forced into a life of Babbitt-y corporate drudgery. In fact, evidence suggests that he rather liked his peaceful routine in Hartford — his backyard garden, his wine cellar, even his job at the insurance company.
“Stevens enjoyed his work very much,” said James Longenbach, a poet, a professor at the University of Rochester, and the author of “Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things.”“It was crucial to his achievement. He turned down an offer to be the Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard because he didn’t want to leave his work. He continued to go to the office even when he was beyond the mandatory age of retirement. He never showed that he felt any conflict or tension between what might appear to be the different aspects of his life.”
Still, the poetry that poured forth from this burgher’s daily rendezvous with his “interior paramour” — to use a phrase from a Stevens lyric — can, for the casual reader, border on opaque. “People just throw up their hands and say, ‘I can’t understand this, it doesn’t make any sense,’ ” said Jim Finnegan, the president of the Friends & Enemies of Wallace Stevens, which has brought poets like Robert Pinsky and Mark Strand to town for events.
None of this deters the literary pilgrims. “I get e-mails from people from all over the world,” Mr. Finnegan said. “Stevens has this far-flung readership out there.”
It would be silly to suggest that a couple of hours of walking around gave me miraculous insight into a poem like “Peter Quince at the Clavier”— yet I did come to understand something simple but crucial about Stevens. What moved me about the walk, in the end, was that he had chosen to walk at all. In a car-mad country that prides itself in being perpetually in motion, the poet made a clear and conscious decision to stop, to slow down, to burrow into his imagination. And walking had opened his eyes and ears to a place that was full of surprises. As Stevens himself put it in a poem:
“It is like a region full of intonings./It is Hartford seen in a purple light.”
I Just as my fingers on these keys Make music, so the self-same sounds On my spirit make a music, too. Music is feeling, then, not sound; And thus it is that what I feel, Here in this room, desiring you, Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk, Is music. It is like the strain Waked in the elders by Susanna; Of a green evening, clear and warm, She bathed in her still garden, while The red-eyed elders, watching, felt The basses of their beings throb In witching chords, and their thin blood Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna.
II In the green water, clear and warm, Susanna lay. She searched The touch of springs, And found Concealed imaginings. She sighed, For so much melody. Upon the bank, she stood In the cool Of spent emotions. She felt, among the leaves, The dew Of old devotions. She walked upon the grass, Still quavering. The winds were like her maids, On timid feet, Fetching her woven scarves, Yet wavering. A breath upon her hand Muted the night. She turned -- A cymbal crashed, Amid roaring horns.
III Soon, with a noise like tambourines, Came her attendant Byzantines. They wondered why Susanna cried Against the elders by her side; And as they whispered, the refrain Was like a willow swept by rain. Anon, their lamps' uplifted flame Revealed Susanna and her shame. And then, the simpering Byzantines Fled, with a noise like tambourines.
IV Beauty is momentary in the mind -- The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing. So gardens die, their meek breath scenting The cowl of winter, done repenting. So maidens die, to the auroral Celebration of a maiden's choral. Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings Of those white elders; but, escaping, Left only Death's ironic scraping. Now, in its immortality, it plays On the clear viol of her memory, And makes a constant sacrament of praise.
憨山生平以「憨山生平」爲範圍探討的專著有:徐頌鵬《中國明代佛教領袖一憨山德清的生平與思想》 徐頌鵬 The Life and Thought of Han-shan Te-ching: 1546-1623 Sung-peng Hsu University Microfilms, 1978 654 pages 陳運星翻譯徐頌鵬對於憨山生涯所分之九個時期,其中的第六個時期,翻譯乃有錯誤。 *******
Image may be NSFW.
Image may be NSFW.
