“If you’re young and have the time, go and study. Study anthropology, sociology, economy, geopolitics. Study so that you’re actually able to understand what you’re photographing. What you can photograph and what you should photograph.”
The Argentinian fiction writer, essayist, and librarian Jorge Luis Borges selected the following titles for two series, "The Library of Babel" and "A Personal Library."
The Library of Babel
Jack London, The Concentric Deaths
Jorge Luis Borges, August 25 1983
Gustav Meyrink, Cardinal Napellus
Léon Bloy, Discourteous Tales
Giovanni Papini, The Escaping Mirror
Oscar Wilde, The Crime of Lord Arthur Savile
Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, The Guest at the Last Banquet
Pedro de Alarcón, The Friend of Death
Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener
William Beckford, Vathek
H. G. Wells, The Door in the Wall
P'u Sung-Ling, The Tiger Guest
Arthur Machen, The Shining Pyramid
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Island of the Voices
G. K. Chesterton, The Eye of Apollo
Jacques Cazotte, The Devil in Love
Franz Kafka, The Vulture
Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter
Leopoldo Lugones, The Statue of Salt
Rudyard Kipling, The House of Desires
The Thousand and One Nights, according to Galland
The Thousand and One Nights, according to Burton
Henry James, The Friends of Friends
Voltaire, Micromegas
Charles H.Hinton, Scientific Romances
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Great Stone Face
Lord Dunsany, The Country of Yann
Saki, The Reticence of Lady Anne
Russian Tales
Argentine Tales
J. L. Borges & A. Bioy Casares, New Stories of Bustos Domecq
Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Dreams
Jorge Luis Borges, Borges A/Z
A Personal Library
Julio Cortázar, Stories
& 3. The Apocryphal Gospels
Franz Kafka, Amerika; Short Stories
G. K. Chesterton, The Blue Cross and Other Stories
& 7. Wilkie Collins, Moonstone
Maurice Maeterlink, The Intelligence of Flowers
Dino Buzzati, The Desert of the Tartars
Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt; Hedda Gabler
J. M. Eça de Queiroz, The Mandarin
Leopoldo Lugones, The Jesuit Empire
André Gide, The Counterfeiters
H. G. Wells, The Time Machine; The Invisible Man
Robert Graves, The Greek Myths
& 17. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons
E. Kasner & J. Newman, Mathematics and the Imagination
Eugene O'Neill, The Great God Brown; Strange Interlude; Mourning Becomes Electra
Ariwara no Narihara, Tales of Ise
Herman Melville, Benito Cereno; Billy Budd; Bartleby the Scrivener
Giovanni Papini, The Tragic Everyday; The Blind Pilot; Words and Blood
Arthur Machen, The Three Imposters
Fray Luis de León, tr., The Song of Songs
Fray Luis de León, An Explanation of the Book of Job
Joseph Conrad, The End of the Tether; Heart of Darkness
Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Oscar Wilde, Essays and Dialogues
Henri Michaux, A Barbarian in Asia
Hermann Hesse, The Bead Game
Arnold Bennett, Buried Alive
Claudius Elianus, On the Nature of Animals
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class
Gustave Flaubert, The Temptation of St. Anthony
Marco Polo, Travels
Marcel Schwob, Imaginary Lives
George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra; Major Barbara; Candide
Francisco de Quevedo, Marcus Brutus; The Hour of All
Eden Phillpots, The Red Redmaynes
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
Gustav Meyrink, The Golem
Henry James, The Lesson of the Master; The Figure in the Carpet; The Private Life
& 44. Herodotus, The Nine Books of History
Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo
Rudyard Kipling, Tales
William Beckford, Vathek
Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders
Jean Cocteau, The Professional Secret and Other Texts
Thomas De Quincey, The Last Days of Emmanuel Kant and Other Stories
Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Prologue to the Work of Silverio Lanza
The Thousand and One Nights
Robert Louis Stevenson, New Arabian Nights; Markheim
Léon Bloy, Salvation for the Jews; The Blood of the Poor; In the Darkness
The Bhagavad-Gita; The Epic of Gilgamesh
Juan José Arreola, Fantastic Stories
David Garnett, Lady Into Fox; A Man in the Zoo; The Sailor's Return
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
Paul Groussac, Literary Criticism
Manuel Mujica Láinez, The Idols
Juan Ruíz, The Book of Good Love
William Blake, Complete Poetry
Hugh Walpole, Above the Dark Circus
Ezequiel Martinez Estrada, Poetical Works
Edgar Allan Poe, Tales
Virgil, The Aeneid
Voltaire, Stories
J. W. Dunne, An Experiment with Time
Atilio Momigliano, An Essay on Orlando Furioso
& 71. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience; The Study of Human Nature
"English literature has no shortage of eccentrics, but the author of Confessions of an English Opium Eater must rate among the strangest. Measuring only 4 foot 11 inches, De Quincey was described by Thomas Carlyle thus: 'When he sate, you would have taken him, by candlelight, for the beautifullest little child; blue eyed, sparkling face, had there not been something, too, which said, "Eccovi – this child has been to hell."' His voice was as 'extraordinary, as if it came from dreamland,' noted the Germanist R. P. Gillies, and his conversation ranged 'at will from the beeves to butterflies and thence to the soul’s immortality' and on to Plato, Kant, Schelling, Milton, Homer, and Aeschylus."
It has been said that Victor Hugo has a street named after him in virtually every town in France. A major reason for the singular celebrity of this most popular and versatile of the great French writers is Les Misérables (1862). In this story of the trials of the peasant Jean Valjean—a man unjustly imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously malevolent police detective Javert—Hugo achieves the sort of rare imaginative resonance that allows a work of art to transcend its genre. Les Misérables is at once a tense thriller that contains one of the most compelling chase scenes in all literature, an epic portrayal of the nineteenth-century French citizenry, and a vital drama—highly particularized and poetic in its rendition but universal in its implications—of the redemption of one human being. READ an excerpt here: http://knopfdoubleday.com/book/240071/les-miserables/
Poisonous pen … detail from portrait of Charles Baudelaire by Gustave Courbet (1847). Photograph: De Agostini/Getty Images
Victor Hugo, revered author of Les Misérables and towering French literary giant, was also something of a nuisance – at least according to his contemporary and fellow poet Charles Baudelaire.
In a January 1860 letter to an unknown correspondent, Baudelaire bemoans how Hugo "keeps on sending me stupid letters", adding that Hugo's continuing missives have inspired him "to write an essay showing that, by a fatal law, a genius is always an idiot". The letter is being auctioned by Christie's in New York, alongside a first edition of Baudelaire's celebrated poetry collection Les Fleurs du Mal, containing the six poems that were deleted from the second edition. The set is expected to fetch up to $100,000 (£60,000), according to the auction house.
Detail from Baudelaire's letter, containing his private opinion of the 'stupid' Les Misérables author. Photograph: Christie's
Publication of the first edition of Les Fleurs du Mal in 1857 was followed by Baudelaire's prosecution for "offending public morals", with the judge ordering his publisher to remove six poems from the collection. Hugo supported Baudelaire after the prosecution in August 1857, telling him that "your Fleurs du mal shine and dazzle like stars", and, in 1859, that "you give us a new kind of shudder".
Baudelaire had, in his turn, dedicated three poems in Les Fleurs du Mal to Hugo, but the Pulitzer prize-winning poet CK Williams has written of how despite this, "Baudelaire secretly despised Hugo". Rosemary Lloyd, meanwhile, writes of the "corrosive envy" of Hugo revealed by Baudelaire in his letters, in her Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire.The author, while praising Les Misérables in public in an 1862 review in Le Boulevard, described it as "immonde et inepte"– vile and inept – in a letter to his mother, adding, "I have shown, on this subject, that I possessed the art of lying".
The first edition of Les Fleurs du Mal, tooled in gold and silver, colored inlays of flowers and symbols of death and evil, similiarly tooled. Photograph: Christie's
"Baudelaire, to his chagrin and perhaps as a factor in his ultimate self-destruction, had to contend with Victor Hugo: poet, novelist, essayist, polemicist of unreal energy and fluency … literally the most famous man in the world, with his own admirable social and political projects, his own vast ego, his domination of poetry and culture," writes Williams.
Williams has it that while Hugo praised Baudelaire, he "surely underestimated the significance" of his fellow poet's work, "and never in his dreams would have imagined that for the future Baudelaire would define the aesthetics of the century that followed him, and that he, Hugo, as an influence, as a genius, would become more an item of nostalgia than a symbol of artistic power and significance".
In VICTOR HUGO Graham Robb examines two major aspects of Hugo’s life: his amorous adventures and his gradual transformation from a political conservative who supported the monarchy into a social activist who defended democratic values. Robb’s stress on the adulterous affairs of both Victor Hugo and his wife Adele is perhaps misplaced, but it does demonstrate that the Hugo family was quite dysfunctional. Juliette Drouet was Victor Hugo’s mistress from 1833 until 1883, but Victor and his wife maintained for decades the public facade of a loving and happy couple. Near the end of his life, Victor Hugo even published a very sentimental book about being a grandfather. Robb shows that he was a devoted grandfather only in this work of personal mythmaking.
Robb’s analysis of Victor Hugo’s political evolution is fascinating. Victor Hugo’s father had been a general in the army of Napoleon I. Perhaps as a reaction to his father’s abdication of his paternal responsibilities, Hugo rejected the First Empire and became a fervent supporter of the monarchy. By the end of the 1840’s, however, he changed his political beliefs and became the most eloquent voice of opposition to the dictatorship of Napoleon III during the 1850’s and 1860’s. During the almost two decades of his political exile, Hugo became a profound social critic and composed his masterpiece LES MISERABLES (1862).
This superb biography also includes a thirty-page bibliography to help readers discover for themselves the rich complexity of Victor Hugo’s life and works.
****
"In His Nightmare City"The New York Review of Books 54/11 (28 June 2007) : 52-54 [reviews Mario Vargas Llosa, The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Misérables, translated from the Spanish by John King]
It has been said that Victor Hugo has a street named after him in virtually every town in France. A major reason for the singular celebrity of this most popular and versatile of the great French writers is Les Misérables (1862). In this story of the trials of the peasant Jean Valjean—a man unjustly imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously malevolent police detective Javert—Hugo achieves the sort of rare imaginative resonance that allows a work of art to transcend its genre. Les Misérables is at once a tense thriller that contains one of the most compelling chase scenes in all literature, an epic portrayal of the nineteenth-century French citizenry, and a vital drama—highly particularized and poetic in its rendition but universal in its implications—of the redemption of one human being. READ an excerpt here:http://knopfdoubleday.com/book/240071/les-miserables/
nata 鉈 A novel 懂得翻譯成長篇小說? 腕くらべRIVALRY: A GEISHA'S TALE
http://hcbooks.blogspot.tw/2010/03/blog-post.html
Gary Snyder (born May 8, 1930) is an American poet (originally, often associated with the Beat Generation), essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist. Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Quotes
As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the upper Paleolithic: the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.
"Statement for the Paterson Society" (1961), as quoted in David Kherdian, Six Poets of the San Francisco Renaissance: Portraits and Checklists (1967), p. 52. Snyder repeated the first part of this quote (up to "... common work of the tribe.") in the introduction to the revised edition of Gary Snyder, Myths & Texts (1978), p. viii.
I never did know exactly what was meant by the term "The Beats," but let's say that the original meeting, association, comradeship of Allen Ginsberg, myself, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, who's not here, Lew Welch, who's dead, Gregory Corso, for me, to a somewhat lesser extent (I never knew Gregory as well as the others) did embody a criticism and a vision which we shared in various ways, and then went our own ways for many years.
The Beat Vision (1974)
Better, the perfect, easy discipline of the swallows dip and swoop, without east or west.
On open form poetry in "Some Yips & Barks in the Dark" in Naked Poetry : Recent American Poetry in Open Forms (1976) edited by Stephen Berg
If, after obtaining Buddhahood, anyone in my land gets tossed in jail on a vagrancy rap, may I not attain highest perfect enlightenment.
Burning, from No Nature; New and Selected Poems (1992)
I recalled when I worked in the woods and the bars of Madras, Oregon. That short-haired joy and roughness— America—your stupidity. I could almost love you again.
I Went into the Maverick Bar, from No Nature; New and Selected Poems (1992)
在我寫給也斯先生的悼詩里，最後以引用W.H.奧登(W. H. Auden)《悼葉芝》(In Memory Of W.B. Yeats)的句子作結，是因想起了古今詩人傳承的同一命運。我想起了也斯先生在2002年曾經給我和女友寫過一首詩《葯膳》，在他來北京大學看望我們之後，收於組詩《北京戲墨》里。他寫到我們那天晚上走過的路：“校園黑暗的小路兩旁屋裡透出燈光/照亮我們的路。那是林庚住過的地方？/那邊是金克木？還有 朱光潛呢！/不要擔心，患了感冒的小情人/那麼多愛詩的靈魂/他們會庇護你們的”，今天我才明白那小路兩旁的燈光就來自愛詩的靈魂。而今天，也斯也加入了 這些美麗的靈魂行列中，成為護佑詩歌繼續前行的燈光。
A new exhibition looks at the upheaval in the visual culture of Baudelaire’s Paris.
François Biard, Four Hours at the Salon, 1847.
In puritanical America, the intellectual tradition is in exile from the luxury of the senses: Americans hold steadfast to the idea that the right kind of knowledge comes from the Word of books. Harold Bloom’s omnipresent theory of the anxiety of influence would have you think that writers did nothing else but read the work of their forefathers in Oedipal distress, ignoring the sensual theater which makes a part of any lived life. In post-revolutionary Paris, where the optic regime underwent a series of explosive changes as the Romantics and post-Romantics pressed against all limits of language, to ignore the visual influence on literature is to misread it. Images flooded homes in books, keepsake albums, lithographs, small paintings, and photographs; they plastered the streets with, as Baudelaire described it, a “monstrous nausea of posters,” and crowded shop-windows and studios. They covered museums like doilies covered the bourgeois interior; they were in the dark rooms of stereoscopes, erotic printers, and panoramic theaters. It comes as no surprise that the theories of literature of the era made metaphoric use of mirrors (Stendhal), decals (Sand), and screens (Zola).
At the Museum of Romantic Life, in Paris, curators have set about trying to capture this flurry of imagery. “The Eye of Baudelaire,” commemorating the 150th anniversary of his death, recreates the visual culture in which he was immersed with a collection of paintings, photographs, sketches, and frontispieces. The museum, a stone’s throw from Pigalle, occupies the house where George Sand lived, wrote, and wore her men’s clothes. The rooms, painted in rich, warm colors of burgundy and deep red, replicate the look of an old salon; the architecture, virtually untouched, requires that you cross the courtyard and climb several spiral staircases to enter.
*
Baudelaire spent his childhood visiting artists’ studios; his father, a priest by profession, sketched and painted in his spare time. “When I was young, I couldn’t feed my eyes with enough printed or engraved images,” Baudelaire wrote of this picture-drunken reverie. “I thought these worlds would have to end and their ruins strike me before I would ever turn into an iconoclast.” But iconoclast he would become. Though he hated the press for its thoughtless dogmatism (a Satanic “black beast,” he called it), he took up his first job as a journalist and art critic in the 1840s, and the experience of looking hard at paintings shaped his aesthetics just as much as the experience of translating Edgar Allen Poe. Ingres, whose realism he likened to the new false positivism, he didn’t like; nor did he like the “ever so pretty” portraits of bourgeois housewives by Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin. He enjoyed Eugène Delacroix, whose fury of brushstrokes escaped the “tyranny of straight lines.” In his small exile of an apartment on the Île Saint-Louis, Baudelaire hung Femmes d’Algers dans leur appartement, an allegorical head representing Pain, and the series of Hamlet lithographs (with whom, if it wasn’t already obvious, Baudelaire self-identified)—all by Delacroix, who he deemed “the poet of painting.”
Frontispiece for Les fleurs du mal, by Félix Bracquemond. Baudelaire didn't like the image and chose to publish the book with his photograph instead.
The difference between Baudelaire and the generation before him was the loss of hope (“Hope, vanquished, weeps”) and the general sense that material improvements for some did not make for the good of all. The revolution of 1848 destroyed the belief in the bourgeois-middle class as progressive, along with the illusion of language as a realist reflection of the world. Baudelaire ridiculed Victor Hugo, godhead of French Romanticism, and his “belief in progress, the salvation of mankind by the use of balloons, etc.” But even as he founded the tradition that Wallace Stevens dubbed “the poetry of the poor and dead,” Baudelaire—something of a military milksop—remained “physiquement dépolitiqué,” as he put it. His only direct action during the turmoil was to fire one shot, at random. Later he tried to siphon off revolutionaries for the collaborative murder of his stepfather. (The plan was not successful.)
This was a time when new democratic ideals, social mobility, and a succession of ideologically conflicting regimes overthrew the visual status quo, upsetting the given meaning of physical cues and gestures. The way one interpreted this semiotic chaos—the way you looked at the world—took on profound political import. In this context, a gaze—or the gaze, I should say, as it was pretty much ubiquitously upper-class and male—came to constitute authority. Visual description—of the woman’s body, of the workman’s hands—was thought to be one and the same with moral and medical prescription. Sociologists claimed that prostitutes could be expected to behave themselves only if they were kept under vigilant watch. The destruction of the old Paris and its replacement with broad, straight boulevards was implemented not only under the pretense of improving hygiene and sanitation, but so that the maintenance of such could be properly surveyed by those that lived in the apartments above them.
Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1865.
Baudelaire's self portrait, 1860. "Here the mouth is better," he wrote in the margin.
Baudelaire revolted against this omniscient frame of vision—what he called “the modern lantern which throws its gloom against all objects of knowledge”—with shadow. The apertures of his poems are circumscribed, with obsessively recurring images giving the sense of a narrowing line of sight, as if the speaker were going blind or close to death. There’s light there, but it’s indirect, seeping through a fog or disappearing with the day’s end, another reverie turning out to be mirage. At the exhibit, I was struck by what I could not see, the half-lit figures and sharply detailed foregrounds fading into sky or chiaroscuro. Whenever I picked out Baudelaire’s favorite paintings in a given room, they seemed to be the ones that most forcefully kept their secrets.
Because the material world was used to classify and control, to turn subjects into objects, it was the unseen which came to constitute a radical subjectivity. “When I look at a good portrait,” Baudelaire wrote, “I guess (divine) at that which is self-evident, but I also guess at that which is hidden.” An empathy rooted in the imagination was the only means of relating to the human being interred beneath the fleshy materialism and false market values of the age. “How convenient it is to declare that everything is totally ugly within the habit [dress] of the époque, rather than applying oneself to extract from it the dark and cryptic beauty, however faint and invisible it is.” Neoclassical ideals and ideas about what did and did not merit artistic treatment still ruled strong; in this context Baudelaire insisted that every culture’s signs are relative, as are its aesthetic criteria. “What is a critic schooled in the traditions supposed to do in front of a modern product from China?” he would ask.
This kind of embodied vision had its basis in Descartes, who had rooted the process of perception in the retinae’s film rather than in the “pure” senses. Goethe, whom Baudelaire read fastidiously, discovered that when he was shut in a dark room, images stayed in his eyes even when he looked away from them. The turn from emission-based, corpuscular theories to wave-motion explanations of sight further embedded the mind in the body. Baudelaire incorporated these ideas into his work, but he didn’t lose himself in the relativist inferno—“the abyss, the unbridled course”—as the Romantics had, with their extreme subjectivity. He seems to locate truth in the relationship mediated by a reciprocal gaze, between subject and object; between the painting, its painter, and the viewer; between two people walking past each other on the street. Rather than the omniscient, Minerva-like sight implicit in much of Western art, Baudelaire’s “forest of symbols” looks at you “with familiar eyes.”
*
This quality would characterize two of the biggest art scandals of the era. Édouard Manet was one of Baudelaire’s closest friends, and though the poet made a point never to write about his art—Manet was presumably too close of a semblable-frère—he would complete the revolution in paint that Baudelaire had started with words. In Olympia and Déjeunersur l’herbe, it was not the nakedness of the woman deemed offensive; it was her reversal of the viewer’s gaze, reminding him that she “cannot be [visibly] understood from any point of view” as Théophile Gautier observed. Unknowable, she guards her subjectivity; only she can understand herself. Manet and Baudelaire were not feminists—I still cringe when I read the poems in which the speaker bites, scratches, or gets drunk off of a woman’s hair. But the essentially private, clouded nature of their subjects would be crucial for the idea that the flâneur-about-town maybe didn’t know all that much about what he was observing on the streets.
I’ve been thinking about what it means to look at other people in a “post-truth” world, as would be the state of things according to the recent election and confirmed by the OED’s late word of the year. Once, going uptown on the New York subway, a friend told me that he didn’t like the people-watching on public transit. The crowd was ugly; to stare was to become a voyeur, often motivated by Schadenfreude. I found this so sad, imagining a city in which everyone blindfolded themselves in public, stumbling through the streets guided by noises and banisters, removing their masks only when alone or in the presence of people they knew. This isn’t so far from the reality in our world of strangers-as-passersby, where a capitalist infrastructure prescribes most social exchanges. It’s hard to see, really see, someone else from behind the windshield of your car, in the rush from job to gym to supermarket, surrounded by people who are doing the same, all the while being comforted by the intimacies afforded by Facebook. Speaking about the Baudelairean moment, Walter Benjamin would define modernity in terms of the loss of the ability to look.
Etienne Carat, Baudelaire with etchings, 1863.
When Baudelaire was on his deathbed, speechless and in the late stages of syphilis, his mother, looking for answers in his overcoat, found two photographs of her son; apparently he’d been keeping these on his person. It’s surprising that he let himself be photographed at all; he likened the camera’s lens to “a dictatorship of opinion,” interrupting the active self-questioning required on the part of the viewing subject so as to prevent his thinking he had mastery over the perceived object. A politics of sight encrypted in the medium itself—physiquement depolitiqué. In the pictures, he seems to be trying to compensate for this perceived defect. He stares at the camera with inflamed black pupils, his eyes making him appear aggressively unhinged, as if trying to pierce through the lens itself. The escape from the mise en abime of flat images and surfaces—what Angela Merkel recently called “the dangers of digitization,” which she likened to the social disruptions of Baudelaire’s own Industrial Age—hinges on the embodied vision for which he once asked. A gaze that appears to be physically depoliticized is dangerous precisely because it is political. The way you look at the stranger who passes you on the street matters; it determines whether or not you let her look back.
“L'oeil de Baudelaire” is on display through January 29 at the Le Musée de la Vie Romantique in Paris.
Madison Mainwaring is a graduate student at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, where she studies the way women responded to French Romantic ballet in the early nineteenth century. She has contributed to The Atlantic, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and VICE Magazine, among others.
We Love Paris
By BRENDA WINEAPPLE
Published: April 30, 2010
In 1900, Émile Zola climbed to the second platform of the Eiffel Tower, camera equipment in tow, so he could photograph Paris from every angle — because only photographs could record the panoramic city he had reconstructed in his novels. In 1940, Adolf Hitler, believing he too stood at the center of something, rose from the seat of his car as it slowly circled the Place de la Concorde before dawn; later, from the top of the Parvis du Sacré-Coeur, he gaped at the city he had fantasized about since boyhood, when he studied street maps and dreamed of reconstructing Paris in the heart of Berlin.
Unlikely bedfellows though they are, Zola and Hitler are denizens of Graham Robb’s “Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris,” a valentine to the City of Light. Robb is no stranger here. The acclaimed British author of biographies of Hugo, Balzac and Rimbaud, he first experienced the city as a boy, when his parents treated him to a week’s holiday as a birthday present. But, as Robb learned, Paris is too volatile and complicated, too historically dynamic, to be illuminated by any one person’s life. His solution: to write, as he explains it, “a history of Paris recounted by many different voices,” a series of character studies arranged to commemorate the shifting streets and sundry plot lines that give meaning to the city. 雨果傳/ Victor Hugo: A Biography ( Graham Robb)
Some of the figures in Robb’s Paris are familiar: Marie Antoinette, Baron Haussmann, Charles de Gaulle, even Nicolas Sarkozy. Some of Robb’s characters may be less well known — like Henry Murger, author of “La Vie de Bohème,” whom Robb satirizes as a proto-blogger dishing up “intimate slices of his life” and becoming, in effect, the “literary pimp” of his doomed mistress. Her unhappy life, the basis of his book, was his ticket out of the Latin Quarter and into a grand apartment on the Rue Notre-Dame de Lorette, a “new street with no history and a smooth asphalt surface,” as Robb pointedly notes, “built on wasteground at the point where the Right Bank rises up towards Montmartre.” Though Americans may not have heard of the ingenious criminal Eugène-François Vidocq, his portrait lies at the symbolic heart of Robb’s book. Employed by the police to track down other crooks, Vidocq spent 16 years as head of the Sûreté Brigade and then founded the Bureau of Universal Intelligence, a detective agency with a huge database of information on thousands of citizens. When the bureau closed in 1843, most of the documents vanished, as did the wily Vidocq. A master of surveillance and disguise, he turned up here and there, supposedly spying on Louis Napoleon even as he was advising him. After Vidocq died, his coffin was opened — to reveal not the master criminal but the body of an unknown woman. To Robb, the disappearance of Vidocq’s body and of his extensive files, some of which landed in secondhand bookshops, represent the nature of Paris itself, whose very streets come and go. The city was built on sand and swamp and from plugged-up sinkholes. Only a man like Vidocq would know “how many obscure dramas were wiped from the history of Paris by demolition and urban renewal.” No reliable map of Paris existed until the end of the 18th century. When Marie Antoinette fled the Tuileries in 1791, her carriage became lost as soon as it left the palace, turning right instead of left, crossing the Pont Royal to the dark lanes of the Left Bank. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte arrived in Paris carrying a map marked with nonexistent streets. By 1853, as Napoleon III, he had employed Georges-Eugène Haussmann to lay waste entire neighborhoods and construct open vistas with broad, leafy boulevards. Napoleon III “buried acres of history,” Robb writes. “A boulevard named after a battle obliterated the mementos of a million lives, and at the end of his reign, the Archives Nationales went up in flames.” Yet Robb is less interested in Napoleon III than in Charles Marville, official photographer of the Louvre, who was commissioned to photograph the quartiers Haussmann would soon demolish. “It might be seen as an archaeology in reverse,” Robb wryly notes. “First the ruins, then the city that covers them up.” However, in Marville’s photographs the streets are empty. Perhaps long exposures would have reduced any movement to a blur; maybe that’s why he chose to take his pictures in the early morning. In any case, the people of Paris have eerily evaporated, just as Marville would. He sold his business and was never heard of again. “Every living city is a necropolis,” Robb writes, “a settling mountain of populations migrating downwards into the soil.” We retrieve what we can. A century later, the president of the French Republic, Georges Pompidou imagined a Paris of tall towers (to him, the spires of Notre-Dame were too short) made of high-tensile steel, along with a modern museum that would look like an oil refinery. While the Pompidou Center was being built, the historian Louis Chevalier wrote his masterpiece, “The Assassination of Paris,” in a room at the Hôtel de Ville above the one in which Haussmann remapped the city. Yet Chevalier did more than denounce the wreckers and planners. He reconstructed his beloved city from memory. “Left to itself, History would forget,” he explained. “But fortunately, there are novels — loaded with emotions, swarming with faces, and constructed with the sand and lime of language.” Although Robb often narrates various sections from the point of view of his characters, inhabiting them and fudging, to a certain extent, the line between traditional history and make-believe, his characters don’t sound alike, which can be a hazard when a historian affects the pose of a novelist. Robb claims he wrote with “a flavor of the time in mind,” and insists he didn’t insert anything artificial into his stories. That “Parisians” required as much research as his earlier, more conventionally structured book “The Discovery of France” is evident on every page. Yet if “Parisians” resembles Simon Schama’s “Dead Certainties,” which is also about the limits of historical knowledge, Robb, in employing the techniques of the novelist, animates his characters mainly for “the pleasure of thinking about Paris.” That pleasure is also the reader’s. The Pompidou family inhabited a town house on the Île Saint-Louis next to the building Baudelaire lived in as a young man. It’s no accident that Robb mentions this, for the poet and the novelist (as well as the historian and the photographer, the con man and the archivist) are the true protagonists of his always changing, always vibrant Paris. Robb even imagines a Proust“acquainted with the law of modern life according to which one’s immediate surroundings remain a mystery while distant places seen in guidebooks and paintings are as familiar as old friends whose material presence is no longer required to maintain the friendship.” And so the miracles of modern life also include a novel, “À La Recherche du Temps Perdu,” that can’t be read between stops on the Métro and that, like Robb’s delightful mapping of Paris, captures living persons in time past, time passing and even time to come.
Brenda Wineapple is the author, most recently, of “White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.” Her anthology, “Nineteenth-Century American Writers on Writing,” will be published next fall.
*****
Books of The Times
A Pointillist Tour, Revolution to Riots
From “Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris”
“Barricade on the Boulevard Saint-Germain near Rue Hautefeuille, May 1968,” a photograph by Alain Dejean.
If you’d like a status update on Britain’s tangled feelings about its neighbor France, you could do worse than study The Sunday Times of London’s current hardcover nonfiction best-seller list. At No. 9 is the book in front of us now: the British historian Graham Robb’s admiring “Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris.” More beloved by English readers, though, at No. 4, is a book by Stephen Clarke with this impish title: “1000 Years of Annoying the French.” Garçon, there’s some snark in my soup.
PARISIANS
An Adventure History of Paris
By Graham Robb
Illustrated. 476 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $28.95.
The appearance of one of Mr. Robb’s books on an English best-seller list, or any best-seller list, says good things about the state of British-French relations. It says even better things about the state of literary culture. That’s because Mr. Robb, over the course of a half-dozen books, including excellent biographies of Balzac, Victor Hugo and Rimbaud, and a volume called “The Discovery of France,” has proved himself to be one of the more unusual and appealing historians currently striding the planet. In a better world his books would be best sellers everywhere. To observe that Mr. Robb’s books are unusual is to say several things at once. Most obviously, they sometimes apply hardy, free-range kinds of research. “The Discovery of France” was given a jolt of life by his back-road explorations on a bicycle. (“This book,” he wrote, “is the result of 14,000 miles in the saddle and four years in the library.”) They also take unusual forms. In Mr. Robb’s new book one chapter is written like a screenplay, while another employs witty question-and-answer sections that function like lemon juice squeezed over a platter of oysters. Clearly Mr. Robb is restless, and he has little interest in being a droning, by-the-numbers tour guide. It’s not hard, however, to think up ways to write stunt history. What’s truly unusual about Mr. Robb is the amount of real feeling and human playfulness he smuggles into his books, those unmistakable signs of a mind that’s wide awake and breathing on the page. Did I mention that he is also jaggedly funny? His prose approximates Ian McEwan’s by way of Anthony Lane. In his new book a group of Parisians in the Latin Quarter in the 1840s don’t die from disease, they die from “various illnesses known collectively as ‘lack of money.’ ” “Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris” arrives with an odd subtitle (adventure history?) that makes it sound as if it were written on a skateboard and sponsored by Mountain Dew. Here’s what this book really is: a pointillist and defiantly nonlinear history of Paris from the dawn of the French Revolution through the 2005 riots in Clichy-sous-Bois, told from a variety of unlikely perspectives and focusing on lesser-known but reverberating moments in the city’s history. Among the set pieces here is an account of a young Napoleon losing his virginity to a prostitute in the Palais Royal; a portrait of the man who created the catacombs; and an investigation into how Marie Antoinette, while attempting to flee the city to save her life, became lost just a few yards from home. There’s much more: disquisitions on police work and photographers and playwrights and France’s strange DeLillo-ish history of faked political assassinations; a portrait of Émile Zola’s long-suffering wife; an inquiry into the links between alchemy and the early days of nuclear fission; an account of Hitler’s short tour of Paris’s landmarks; a view of the affair between Juliette Gréco, the actress and later singer, and a young Miles Davis; an assessment of the 1968 student riots; and a glimpse at the politics of Nicolas Sarkozy and the roiling discontents of recent French immigration. Mr. Robb builds his histories from small piles of angular details. The section on Napoleon begins by observing “the army of wet nurses who left their babies at home and went to sell their breast milk in the capital.” During an account of one policeman’s search for a criminal who is also a hunchback, Mr. Robb can’t help noting the difficulties: “there were something in the region of 6,135 hunchbacks in Paris.” Once Zola discovered cameras, he writes, he tended to “behave as though he was always about to be photographed.” Mr. Robb’s prose is fleet and ingenious. He describes the “sucking sound” of modern French police sirens, the “snickering” of certain neon signs, the melodious “parping of automobiles.” His good humor is infectious. When young men were finally allowed to visit young women in Parisian college dormitories in the 1960s, he writes that they brought “wine, cigarettes, Tunisian pâtisseries, hot dogs and erections.” Describing the soulless towers in immigrant suburban Paris, he notes dryly: “The planes coming in to land at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle always missed them, but the towers were falling apart anyway.” Mr. Robb pores over old newspapers, tour guides and photographs. (About one favorite picture, he writes: “So much information is contained in that split-second burst of photons that if the glass plate survived a holocaust and lay buried under rubble for centuries in a leather satchel, there would be enough to compile a small, speculative encyclopedia of Paris in the late second millennium.”) He is just as familiar with resources like CNN and eBay, and into a discussion of Quasimodo’s climbing abilities, he casually drops a mention of parkour. He extends his embrace to Paris’s new wave of Arab immigrants. “Their Paris was a rap litany of place names that only the most exhaustive guide book would have recognized as the City of Light: Clichy-sous-Bois, La Courneuve, Aubervilliers, Bondy,” he writes. But he adds: “They, too, were children of Paris, and, like true natives of the city, they expressed their pride in angry words that sounded like a curse.” Mr. Robb’s animating idea during the composition of “Parisians,” he declares, “was to create a kind of mini-Human Comedy of Paris, in which the history of the city would be illuminated by the real experience of its inhabitants.” Through friends in Paris, Mr. Robb writes, he learned things: “a certain Parisian art de vivre: sitting in traffic jams as a form of flânerie, parking illegally as a defense of personal liberty, savoring window displays as though the streets were a public museum.” He goes on: “They taught me the tricky etiquette of pretending to argue with waiters, and the gallantry of staring at beautiful strangers.” His book — argumentative, gallant, parked athwart oncoming historical traffic, as if on a dare — is as Parisian and as bracing as a freshly mixed Pernod and water.
Ralph Waldo Emerson died in Concord, Massachusetts, on this day in 1882 (aged 78).
"Thine Eyes Still Shined"
Thine eyes still shined for me, though far I lonely roved the land or sea: As I behold yon evening star, Which yet beholds not me. * This morn I climbed the misty hill And roamed the pastures through; How danced thy form before my path Amidst the deep-eyed dew! When the redbird spread his sable wing, And showed his side of flame; When the rosebud ripened to the rose, In both I read thy name.
*
Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the best-loved figures in nineteenth-century American literature. Though he earned his central place in our culture as an essayist and philosopher, since his death his reputation as a poet has grown as well. Known for challenging traditional thought and for his faith in the individual, Emerson was the chief spokesman for the Transcendentalist movement. His poems speak to his most passionately held belief: that external authority should be disregarded in favor of one’s own experience. From the embattled farmers who “fired the shot heard round the world” in the stirring “Concord Hymn,” to the flower in “The Rhodora,” whose existence demonstrates “that if eyes were made for seeing, / Then Beauty is its own excuse for being,” Emerson celebrates the existence of the sublime in the human and in nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson died on April 27th 1882. A key figure in the American Transcendental Club—a group of "liberal thinkers, agreeing in nothing but their liberality"—Emerson's central doctrine was of the "infinitude of the private man"
讀Facebook 一文很想把它抄下......只好作點筆記.....
Ralph Waldo Emerson chose "Montaigne; or, the Skeptic" as a subject of one of his series of lectures entitled Representative Men, alongside other subjects such... 我許久以前讀過何欣翻譯的《代表性人物》,不過早就忘記他談論的蒙田
In 1571, on the death of his father, Montaigne, then thirty-eight years old, retired from the practice of law at Bordeaux, and settled himself on his estate. Though he had been a man of pleasure and sometimes a courtier, his studious habits now grew on him, and he loved the compass, staidness and independence of the country gentleman's life. He took up his economy in good earnest, and made his farms yield the most. Downright and plain-dealing, and abhorring to be deceived or to deceive, he was esteemed in the country for his sense and probity. In the civil wars of the League, which converted every house into a fort, Montaigne kept his gates open and his house without defence. All parties freely came and went, his courage and honor being universally esteemed. The neighboring lords and gentry brought jewels and papers to him for safekeeping. Gibbon reckons, in these bigoted times, but two men of liberality in France,- Henry IV and Montaigne.
Persian Empire. Persian Empire refers to any of a series of imperial dynasties centered in Persia (modern–day Iran). The first of these was established by Cyrus the Great in 550 BC with the conquest of Media, Lydia and Babnia. ... Several later dynasties "claimed to be heirs of the Achaemenids".
《長征記》的題材應該很適合以流浪漢和無賴為題材的故事，或是模仿英雄氣概的故事：經過偽裝的一萬名希臘傭兵受僱於波斯王子小居魯士（Cyrus the Younger），長征至小亞細亞的內陸，其真正目的是要驅逐居魯士的哥哥，阿爾泰薛西斯二世（Artaxerxes II）；不過他們在克納科薩（Cunaxa）的戰場被擊敗了，如今他們群龍無首，而且離鄉背井，必須在充滿敵意的人當中，找到歸鄉的路。他們只想歸鄉，可 是他們所做的一切都造成了公共威脅：他們一共是一萬人，全身武裝，可是卻缺乏糧食，所以他們像是蝗蟲過境般地肆虐、摧毀所到之處，並且擄走大批婦女。
The Cyrus Cylinder is one of the most famous objects to have survived from the ancient world. It was inscribed in Babylonian cuneiform on the orders of Persian King Cyrus the Great after he captured Babylon in 539 BC. Introduced by former Director of the British Museum Neil MacGregor, discover the story of this incredible object and its enduring legacy in this video.
這影片告訴我們Cyropaedia 對於Jefferson 與美國建國有大影響。 ------
How a German Archaeologist Rediscovered in Iran the Tomb of Cyrus
Lost for centuries, the royal capital of the Achaemenid Empire was finally confirmed by Ernst Herzfeld
Alexander the Great rode into the city of Pasargadae with his most elite cavalry in their bronze, muscle-sculpted body armor, carrying long spears. Some of his infantry and archers followed. The small city, in what is today Iran, was lush and green. Alexander had recently conquered India. Greece, Macedonia, Asia Minor and parts of Egypt were all part of his new empire. The people of Pasargadae likely expected the worst—when the world's most dangerous cavalry shows up on your street, you are probably going to have a bad day. But he hadn't come to fight (the city was already his).
The world's most powerful ruler had come to pay tribute to someone else.
The young conqueror was looking for a tomb containing the remains of Cyrus the Great. But it had recently been ransacked (probably for political reasons). Alexander the Great was furious. An investigation was launched, trials were held.
Alexander ordered the tomb's contents replaced and restored. According to one Greek historian, this included “a great divan with feet of hammered gold, spread with covers of some thick, brightly colored material, with a Babylonian rug on top. Tunics and a Median jacket of Babylonian workmanship were laid out on the divan, and Median trousers, various robes dyed in amethyst, purple, and many other colors, necklaces, scimitars, and inlaid earrings of gold and precious stones. A table stood by it, and in the middle of it lay the coffin which held Cyrus' body.”
Cyrus had been dead for about two hundred years. Alexander idolized him. In the year 559 BCE, Cyrus ordered the construction of Pasargadae.
Ernst Herzfeld arrived in 1928 to begin mapping and photographing the city. He was the world's first professor of middle east archaeology. (Sackler Gallery of Art)
This city became the first capital of the Achaemenid empire that Cyrus built. “It was the super power of its day,” says Massumeh Farhad, chief curator of the Smithsonian's Freer and Sackler Galleries of Art. “This is the first super power ever. It was Cyrus who captured Babylon. His empire reached from what is now Afghanistan, included much of Egypt and went as far as the Mediterranean.”
Cyrus' Persian-dominated empire would come to serve as both inspiration and eventual rival to Alexander. Cyrus created a template for not only military conquest but also the political infrastructure to manage and maintain an empire. A postal system, roads, taxation and irrigation systems; all begun years before the Roman Republic even existed.
Pasargadae was the capital of an empire known as well for its mercy and relatively liberal government as for its ability to invade and dominate. Cyrus made a point of allowing freedom of religion, language and culture within his empire.
Both the Christian and Jewish bibles laud him for issuing the Edict of Restoration. After years during which many Jews were kept as captives in Babylon, Cyrus captured Babylon, gave them their freedom and allowed them to return home. For this act, he is the only non-Jew in Jewish scripture who is referred to as 'messiah' or 'His anointed one' (Cyrus is presumed by many scholars to have been a Zoroastrian but it isn't clear that he followed any particular religion).
Yet somehow, both the city and the tomb were essentially misplaced. The buildings and gardens fell into disrepair and crumbled. The mausoleum remained standing but locals eventually became confused about who was buried in it. “The tomb was known as that of the mother of Solomon,” says Farhad.
Herzfeld was meticulous, scientific and careful. He soon produced maps of the site that showed how Pasargadae had been more than just an administrative capital. It was a miracle of design. (Sackler Gallery of Art)
“It's one of the most iconic buildings of the ancient world. But its function was forgotten.”
By the early 20th century, nobody was sure exactly where Cyrus had been buried and it wasn't clear where the former capital of his empire was.
Thousands of years after Alexander paid his respects, Pasargadae was visited by another foreign adventurer looking for the same tomb as Alexander.
This time it was a German rather than a Macedonian. Ernst Herzfeld arrived in 1928 to begin mapping and photographing the city. He was the world's first professor of middle east archeaology. Herzfeld determined that the tomb was that of Cyrus, who had become a historical icon and a part of Iran's national identity.
Modern archeology was still a new replacement for the haphazard looting that had passed for exploration before. Herzfeld was meticulous, scientific and careful. He soon produced maps of the site that showed how Pasargadae had been more than just an administrative capital. It was a miracle of design. Herzfeld's journals, photographs and other materials are now found in the collections of Smithsonian's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, where an exhibition of his drawings, notes and photographs is now on view.
“It was an effort to create a palace city with gardens,” says Farhad. “The gardens play a critical role. The buildings were built around these gardens. There were pavilions... But they had integrated the landscape into the architecture, which was a novel and new idea. That's why the plans for Pasargadae are so important. It was a type of palace that didn't exist before.”
Herzfeld was no Indiana Jones. He was known for being dry, down-to-Earth and serious (although he did travel to Iran with a pet boar named Bulbul). (Sackler Gallery of Art)
“He was right in the middle of empire building,” says David Hogge, head of the Freer and Sackler Archives. “But the architecture that is there very much indicates the international character of the empire; Persian, Greek and even Egyptian elements in the architecture.”
Pasargadae was never a huge city, even by the standards of the time it was founded. But it was Cyrus' personal vision and probably a very pleasant place to visit. “There was a complex system of irrigation canals which Herzfeld discovered,” Hogge says. “It really was very novel when it was built.” The gardens may have contained almond, pomegranate and cherry trees. Clover, roses and poppies probably flowered. It would have been a fragrant place (the Persians also happened to be the first people known to use perfume).
Herzfeld methodically probed for the outlines of foundations and canals. He sketched reconstructions of shattered statues. And in his drawings and maps he brought Cyrus' city back to life for us, just a little bit. “He really made the foundation,” says Farhad. “You cannot do any research on the ancient world without going back to his work. He's not as well known as he should be.”
After Cyrus' death in 530 BCE, the empire's capital was moved to the nearby city of Persepolis (which was also probably founded by Cyrus). Some of the buildings that were still under construction at the time of his passing were never completed. The region gradually became less politically important. “What happened, clearly it was no longer the center of the empire,” says Farhad, “and then with the coming of Islam, the center of importance sort of shifted. . . Persepolis and Pasargadae represented the pre-Islamic period.”
In spite of his pre-war international archeological expeditions, Herzfeld was no Indiana Jones. He was known for being dry, down-to-Earth and serious (although he did travel to Iran with a pet boar named Bulbul). He was also Jewish. In 1935 he lost his support from the German government. The rise of the Nazi party forced him to seek employment and backing elsewhere. Ironically, the Jewish man who discovered the tomb of the emperor responsible for the Edict of Restoration was himself forced away from his home because of his religion.
Herzfeld ended up in the United States teaching at Princeton at the same time as Albert Einstein. He died in Switzerland in 1948 at the age of 68. Cyrus may have lived to be as old as 70 (his exact birth date is unclear) and is thought to have died in battle.
By the time Herzfeld found his tomb, it had been looted again and Cyrus' bones were gone.
Alexander's empire exceeded that of his hero but he died of a sudden illness believed by some to be the result of poisoning. He was only 32. Modern archaeologists are still searching for his tomb.
Whether he’s reading to kids at the White House, hitting up local bookstores on Black Friday, or giving recommendations to his daughters, President Barack Obama may as well be known as the Commander in Books.
POTUS is an avid reader and recently spoke to the New York Times about the significant, informative and inspirational role literature has played in his presidency, crediting books for allowing him to “slow down and get perspective.” With his presidency coming to an end this Friday, EW looked back at Obama’s lit picks over the years — because it can’t hurt to read like a great leader. #ObamaForBookClubPresident2017, anyone?
See a comprehensive list of every book Obama has recommended during his presidency:
Books for Daughters: When asked what books he recommended to his 18-year-old daughter Malia, Obama gave the Times a list that included The Naked and the Dead and One Hundred Years of Solitude. “I think some of them were sort of the usual suspects […] I think she hadn’t read yet. Then there were some books that are not on everybody’s reading list these days, but I remembered as being interesting.” Here’s what he included:
In November 2014, Obama took a trip to D.C. independent bookstore Politics and Prose to honor small businesses and add to his personal library. Accompanied by daughters Malia and Sasha, POTUS picked up novels from the Redwall fantasy series by Brian Jacques, as well as some from the Junie B. Jones series by Barbara Park. He also added these titles to his heavy bags:
During a trip to a public library in Washington’s Anacostia neighborhood in 2015, Obama shared some of his childhood favorites with a group of young students. He also read (and acted out) Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak to kids at the White House in 2014.
According to the president’s Facebook page and a 2008 interview with the New York Times, these titles are among his most influential forever favorites:
As a devoted reader, the president has been linked to a lengthy list of novels and poetry collections over the years — he admits he enjoys a thriller: “I thought Gone Girl was a well-constructed, well-written book,” he told the Times. Obama is also a fan of sci-fi titles like Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem for the escapism they provide. “The scope of it was immense,” he said. “So that was fun to read, partly because my day-to-day problems with Congress seem fairly petty — not something to worry about. Aliens are about to invade!”
The Oval office can be a lonely place, so reading about your forefather’s experience could only help. “The biographies have been useful, because I do think that there’s a tendency, understandable, to think that whatever’s going on right now is uniquely disastrous or amazing or difficult,” said President Obama in an interview. He’s turned to these books for advice:
Throughout his time in office, Obama has also recommended a dozen other authors and literary figures of note, even though he might not have named specific books. Check them out below:
1. Langston Hughes 2. Richard Wright 3. Mark Twain 4. Malcolm X 5. Philip Roth 6. Saul Bellow 7. Junot Díaz 8. Dave Eggers 9. Zadie Smith 10. Barbara Kingsolver 11. St. Augustine 12. Friedrich Nietzsche 13. Jean-Paul Sartre 14. Thomas Jefferson 15. Ralph Waldo Emerson 16. Abraham Lincoln 17. Paul Tillich 18. E.L. Doctorow
罗布（Graham Robb，1958— ），英国当代著名作家，著有《雨果传》（Victor Hugo，获1997 Whitehbread Book Award）、《伦勃朗传》（Rimbaud，获2001 Samuel Johnson Prize），《发现法国》（The Discovery of France，获2007 Duff Cooper Prize、2008 Ondaatje Prize）。
https://www.theguardian.com › Arts › Books › History
Apr 10, 2010 - A new account of Paris strips away illusions of elegance to reveal the rebel ... A glimpse into Parisian history reveals that this is an illusion: ..
Mar 28, 2015 - These are the Paris Catacombs: a network of old caves, quarries and tunnels stretching hundreds of miles, and seemingly lined with the bones of the dead. ... The Paris Catacombs have their origins in the limestone quarries situated on the outskirts of the city. ...
In 1348, John Thavie, a local armourer, “left a considerable Estate towards the support of the fabric forever”, a legacy which survived the English Reformation, was invested carefully through the centuries, and still provides for the church's current upkeep. In the 15th century, the wooden church was replaced by a medieval stone one.[5]
這是英國作家安德魯・考恩在《寫小說的藝術》中的一段話。阿克羅伊德頗像倫敦東區黑幫大哥，也是英倫排行前幾名的書評家，地位崇高。過去，推出《莎士比亞傳》之前，出版社就預付他四十萬英鎊！他早年推出《T S 艾略特傳》一炮而紅，內容提到艾略特的媽媽年輕時，認為自己寫不出好詩，是失敗的詩人，便從小培養兒子寫詩，日後他不負家人的期望！
In an original and evocative journey through modern Paris from the mid-eighteenth century to World War II, Patrice Higonnet offers a delightful cultural portrait of a multifaceted, continually changing city. In examining the myths and countermyths of Paris that have been created and re-created over time, Higonnet reveals a magical urban alchemy in which each era absorbs the myths and perceptions of Paris past, adapts them to the cultural imperatives of its own time, and feeds them back into the city, creating a new environment.
Paris was central to the modern world in ways internal and external, genuine and imagined, progressive and decadent. Higonnet explores Paris as the capital of revolution, science, empire, literature, and art, describing such incarnations as Belle Epoque Paris, the Commune, the surrealists' city, and Paris as viewed through American eyes. He also evokes the more visceral Paris of alienation, crime, material excess, and sensual pleasure.
Insightful, informative, and gracefully written, Paris illuminates the intersection of collective and individual imaginations in a perpetually shifting urban dynamic. In describing his Paris of the real and of the imagination, Higonnet sheds brilliant new light on this endlessly intriguing city.
世界知名的批判性知識分子。他有十本作品，包括《後現代性的狀況》（The Condition of Postmodernity）、《社會正義與城市》（Social Justice and the City）、《資本的空間》（Spaces of Capital）、《資本的限制》（The Limits to Capital）與《新帝國主義》（The New Imperialism）。之前多年任教於約翰?霍普金斯大學與牛津大學，現任教於紐約市立大學研究中心（CUNY Graduate Center）與倫敦經濟學院（London School of Economics）。
奧斯曼的現代性建構是問題的核心。《四百擊》裡的楚浮要我們緊盯艾菲爾鐵塔。這個不變的中心，這個與天地同在的符號，吸引著我們的目光。這個無用的東西，法蘭西的神話，歐洲的符號，十九世紀的營造，卻是結構整個二十世紀的精神：現代性霸氣。而巴黎經驗，已經等同經濟發展與城市建設的重要典範，往倫敦、曼徹斯特、利物浦、柏林、維也納等城市輸出。譬如說，緊隨巴黎身後，維也納拆除防禦土耳其人的城牆與緩衝區，闢建環城大道（Ringstrasse ）。現代性建構的過程經常十分粗暴，都市計畫就是開馬路！紐約的羅伯特．莫西斯（Robert Moses ），作為權力的掮客，由一九三○到一九六○年代，對紐約和長島進行創造性破壞。推動私人小轎車，排除公共交通，興建高速公路，打造城郊，摧毀傳統社區，尤其是貧窮少數民族的社區，數十萬人迫遷，是美國版本的城市建設與都市更新的典範。總算，在一九六○年代，貫穿曼哈頓下城區格林威治村的高速公路計畫，為珍．雅各（Jane Jacobs ）所代表的都市運動所阻，這就是《偉大美國城市之死與生》（The Death and Life of Great American Cities ）的作者，被胡晴舫譽為「都市之母」的故事，更是推動現代建築與都市計畫範型轉移的社會動力。可是，珍．雅各才剛去世，哥大建築史教授希拉蕊．包隆（Hilary Ballon ）女士做為策展人，和紐約市立博物館合作，在三個地點同時舉行莫西斯的建設紐約回顧展，全面肯定其貢獻。竟然拒絕邀請昔日打破莫西斯的紐約神話的名記者，長島《新聞日報》（Newsday）的羅伯特．卡洛（Robert A. Caro ）參加，但是一名捐款贊助回顧展的富豪堅持要找卡洛出來演講。結果，「今年七十一歲的卡洛是個有脾氣的人，也不屑與那些哥大學院派教授同台，他自己單獨發表演講，全場爆滿。」這真是當前美國的新保守主義的反挫嗎？一九七四年，卡洛的《權力掮客：羅伯特．莫西斯及紐約的衰落》（The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York ），直指莫西斯都市鴨霸的權力深處，徹底打破了神話。
現代建築在一九五○年代的冷戰歷史脈絡中移植台灣的過程，冷戰時期的世界強權對立，美國與台灣的依賴關係，塑造了現代建築移植台灣的主要性格。首先，台灣的學院與專業者對現代建築的理解過於表面。尤其是通過戰後美國的支配關係下所接受的現代建築，與二十世紀初歐洲各大城市造成風潮的現代運動（Modern Movement ）在內涵上已經相去甚遠，以機能主義為言辭主張的建築形式主義、技術與結構的╱倫理的取向（technology and structural/moral approach ）的建築形式主義、以及，大師的前衛角色，幾乎成為以美式建築工程技術教育移植為主要內容的現代建築論述的核心。在移植過程中，世紀初歐洲現代建築透過社會性住宅所揭櫫的社會正義與平等的進步意義，以及，對城市的烏托邦價值，都被消音。現代建築只剩下對歐美建築形式的模仿，這是「理性的」與「進步的」建築（rational and progressive architecture），以及，寄託了發展中國家對發達工業國家富裕社會的想像。其實，由歷史的角度思考，前述歐洲世紀初現代運動所揭櫫的社會理想，在一九五○年代的台灣，以至於台灣的建築學院，是沒有移植的社會條件的。對傳統建築言，現代建築在台灣自是一種斷裂。於是，以建築形式上的創新（the innovation of architectural form ）做為現代建築師的主要突破目標。現代建築的現代性深層性格，創造性破壞，最後，在台灣快速都市化激勵的房地產市場資本積累過程的催逼之下，埋葬了台灣城市原有的一切容貌。 我們從林秀姿重讀一九七○年代以後東區崛起的文學台北，由陳映真、黃凡、林耀德、朱天心等的作品，可以發現貫穿核心的經驗正是：消失與變動的節奏。等到《壹週刊》、《蘋果日報》、到「2100 全民開講」、「全民亂講」、以及「大悶鍋」等等電子媒體的五光十色包圍下，台灣的媒體，投射出新的地平線，「讓名人，celebirty ，被看見，被擁戴，被羨慕。」這是台灣版的《包法利夫人們》，林奕華說：「名媛現形，名媛就是時尚，時尚就像是海鮮，要每天不斷update 。」真是活生生的巴黎名媛台北版哪。
Detail from Baudelaire's letter, containing his private opinion of the 'stupid' Les Misérables author. Photograph: Christie's
The first edition of Les Fleurs du Mal, tooled in gold and silver, colored inlays of flowers and symbols of death and evil, similiarly tooled. Photograph: Christie's
