“Change comes very slowly, but then happens all at once,” observed David Carr, the New York Times’ media reporter, about the television business last year. As usual, his words proved prescient, capturing not only the upheavals that are now typical of this trade, but also the turn of his own life, and the paper he now leaves behind. On February 12th Mr Carr died at the Times offices, due to complications with lung cancer. At 58 he was one of the Times’ best-known reporters http://econ.st/1MuQgpE
Jean Baptiste Poquelin, better known as Molière, was one of France's greatest playwrights. He wrote, directed and starred in his plays, including Tartuffe, The Misanthrope, and The Miser. Baptized on this date in 1622, Molière was considered the father of modern French comedy and of the comédie–ballet. A man who lived for his craft, Molière died in 1673 after collapsing during a production of his play The Imaginary Invalid. Members of his troupe created the Comédie Française six years later; the chair in which he was seated during that last production still sits in the hall of the theater.
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"It infuriates me to be wrong when I know I'm right."— Molière
Four Quartets is a set of four poems written by T. S. Eliot that were published individually ....In Part III, the meditation experience becomes darker as night come on, and by ..... "Four Quartets: Music, Word, Meaning and Value" in The Cambridge ...
Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot is a work of four poems: Burnt Norton (1935), East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941), and Little Gidding (1942) which has been acclaimed by many as one of the greatest works of mystical poetry ever written, and one of the greatest poetic compositions of the twentieth century.
Four Quartets is the culminating achievement of T.S. Eliot's career as a poet. While containing some of the most musical and unforgettable passages in twentieth-century poetry, its four parts, 'Burnt Norton', 'East Coker', 'The Dry Salvages' and 'Little Gidding', present a rigorous meditation on the spiritual, philosophical and personal themes which preoccupied the author. It was the way in which a private voice was heard to speak for the concerns of an entire generation, in the midst of war and doubt, that confirmed it as an enduring masterpiece.
With an introduction by Michael Symmons Roberts, Lord David Alton and Gail McDonald.
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Serious readers will prefer their Eliot without ellipses.--The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot, p.238 He did not want his executors" to facilitate or countenance the writing of any biography of me." p.242
One of the 20th century's most influential poets, Eliot died 50 years ago this month. He often wrote of the fragility of memory, but much do you recall about his work?
- [ 翻譯此頁 ]A hypertext presentation of TS Eliot's poem, 'The Waste Land'. ...Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in ...
T.S. Eliot was born on this date in 1888. The author of The Waste Land (1922), he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. Eliot was born in Missouri, but moved to England in 1914, where he remained until his death. His plays include Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949). One of Eliot's most famous poems is his early work, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915). Eliot's children's book, OldPossum's Book of Practical Cats (1939), was the inspiration for the hit musical Cats. He has said, "When a Cat adopts you there is nothing to be done about it except put up with it until the wind changes."
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"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go."— T.S. Eliot
瓦萊麗·艾略特|1926-2012
詩人T·S·艾略特之妻去世
BRUCE WEBER報道2012年11月16日
瓦萊麗·艾略特(Valerie Eliot)在T·S·艾略特(T. S. Eliot)人生的末期與他結婚，之後堅定地維護他的文學遺產，長達約半個世紀之久。她於周五（11月9日）在倫敦去世，享年86歲。 艾略特遺產委員會宣布了她的死訊。
How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011 by Eric J. Hobsbawm In the 144 years since Karl Marx's Das Kapital was published, the doctrine that bears his name has been embraced by millions in the name of equality, and just as dramatically has fallen from grace with the retreat of communism from the western world. But as the free market reaches its extreme limits in the economic and environmental fallout, a reassessment of capitalism's most vigorous and eloquent enemy has never been more timely. Eric Hobsbawm provides a fascinating and insightful overview of Marxism. He investigates its influences and analyses the spectacular reversal of Marxism's fortunes over the past thirty years. (less) Hardcover, 470 pages Published January 1st 2011 by Little Brown and Company
作者：艾瑞克•霍布斯邦
毫不反省蘇聯政治路線 出版日期：2014/11/29 *所謂的「災難的年代」（Age of Catastrophe），十九世紀的資本主義與資產階級社會在這段時期逐漸崩解。這場危機嚴重到令許多人懷疑資本主義是否還有可能恢復。資本主義不是已經註定被社會主義經濟所取代嗎？就連完全不屬於馬克思主義者的約瑟夫‧熊彼得（Joseph Schumpeter）也於一九四○年代做了這樣的預測。事實上，資本主義確實起死回生了，但再也不是過去的形式。同一時間在蘇聯，另外一條社會主義道路似乎已無崩潰之虞。在一九二九年到一九六○年間，人們（就連那些反對蘇聯政權政治措施的非社會主義者也如此認為）其實有理由相信，資本主義已經耗盡動力，而蘇聯正證明它的生產力可以超邁資本主義。在蘇聯史普尼克（Sputnik）人造衛星發射那年，這些想法聽起來並不荒謬。蘇聯經濟成果變調的各種證據一直要到一九六○年後才紛紛出爐。任何一種強調由社會控制的經濟模式都隱含著「計畫」概念，但馬克思並未具體說明計畫是什麼，因此當革命後蘇聯開始嘗試計畫經濟時，只能走一步算一步。理論上來說，要進行計畫經濟必須設計一套概念（例如雷昂鐵夫［Leontief〕的投入產出分析）與提供相關的統計數據。這些想法後來被非社會主義經濟廣泛採用。在實踐上，要進行計畫經濟必須遵循同樣也是在邊做邊想中產生的第一次世界大戰戰時經濟模式，尤其是德國模式。德國模式特別關注電力產業，而一些在政治上同情列寧的德國與美國電力公司的執行人員，向列寧提供了相關建議。戰時經濟一直是蘇聯計畫經濟的基本模式，亦即預先訂定目標——超高速的工業化，贏得戰爭，製造原子彈或把人送上月球——然後不管短期成本的多寡而將資源完全投入於實現計畫的經濟模式。這裡面完全沒有一點社會主義的成分。朝著武斷擬定的目標努力，並且或多或少獲得一點進展，但蘇聯經濟基本上一直停留在這種武斷層次上。此外，蘇聯從未放棄讓市場符合官僚指令結構的做法，此舉使得蘇聯經濟陷入困境，儘管一九六○年後它開始嘗試做出一些調整。 ......馬克思自己相當謹慎，他從未對社會主義的經濟內容與經濟制度提出明確陳述，也未說明共產主義社會的具體形貌，不過他曾表示共產主義社會並非藉由建構或計畫產生，而是從社會主義社會中自然發展出來。馬克思針對這個主題提出的一般性陳述，與他在《哥達批判綱領》（Critique of the Gotha Programme）中對德國社會民主主義份子的批評一樣，幾乎未給予後繼者明確的指引，事實上，這些一般性陳述並未對後繼者所思考的學術問題或烏托邦式實踐賦予嚴肅的思索，一切的思索都要等到革命之後才開始。我們可以說，這些思索立基於——引用著名的英國工黨黨章第一章第四項規定——「生產工具共有」的基礎上，一般認為要實現共有，必須將國內產業予以國有化。
In 1976, a good many people in the West thought that Marxism had a reasonable case to argue. By 1986, most of them no longer felt that way. What had happened in the meanwhile? Were these people now buried under a pile of toddlers? Had Marxism been unmasked as bogus by some world-shaking new research? Had someone stumbled on a lost manuscript by Marx confessing that it was all a joke?
We are speaking, note, about 1986, a few years before the Soviet bloc crumbled. As Eric Hobsbawm points out in this collection of essays, that wasn’t what caused so many erstwhile believers to bin their Guevara posters. Marxism was already in dire straits some years before the Berlin Wall came down. One reason given was that the traditional agent of Marxist revolution, the working class, had been wiped out by changes to the capitalist system – or at least was no longer in a majority. It is true that the industrial proletariat had dwindled, but Marx himself did not think that the working class was confined to this group. In Capital, he ranks commercial workers on the same level as industrial ones. He was also well aware that by far the largest group of wage labourers in his own day was not the industrial working class but domestic servants, most of whom were women. Marx and his disciples didn’t imagine that the working class could go it alone, without forging alliances with other oppressed groups. And though the industrial proletariat would have a leading role, Marx does not seem to have thought that it had to constitute the social majority in order to play it.
Even so, something did indeed happen between 1976 and 1986. Racked by a crisis of profits, old style mass production gave way to a smaller scale, versatile, decentralised ‘post-industrial’ culture of consumerism, information technology and the service industries. Outsourcing and globalisation were now the order of the day. But this did not mean that the system had essentially changed, thus encouraging the generation of 1968 to swap Gramsci and Marcuse for Said and Spivak. On the contrary, it was more powerful than ever, with wealth concentrated in even fewer hands and class inequalities growing apace. It was this, ironically, which sparked the leftist rush for the exits. Radical ideas withered as radical change seemed increasingly implausible. The only public figure to denounce capitalism in the past 25 years, Hobsbawm claims, was Pope John Paul II. All the same, another couple of decades later, the fainthearted witnessed a system so exultant and impregnable that it only just managed to keep the cash machines open on the high streets.
Eric Hobsbawm, who was born in the year of the Bolshevik revolution, remains broadly committed to the Marxist camp – a fact worth mentioning as it would be easy to read this book without realising it. This is because of its judiciousness, not its shiftiness. Its author has lived through so much of the political turbulence he portrays that it is easy to fantasise that History itself is speaking here, in its wry, all-seeing, dispassionate wisdom. It is hard to think of a critic of Marxism who can address his or her own beliefs with such honesty and equipoise.
Hobsbawm, to be sure, is not quite as omniscient as the Hegelian World-Spirit, for all his cosmopolitan range and encyclopedic knowledge. Like many historians he is not at his sharpest in the realm of ideas, and he is wrong to suggest that the disciples of Louis Althusser treated Marx’s Capital as though it were primarily a work of epistemology. Nor would Hegel’s Geist treat feminism, not least Marxist feminism, with such cold-eyed indifference, or consign one of the most fertile currents of modern Marxism – Trotskyism – to a few casual asides. Hobsbawm also thinks that Gramsci is the most original thinker produced by the West since 1917. Perhaps he means the most original Marxist thinker, but even that is dubious. Walter Benjamin is surely a better qualified candidate for that title.
Even the most erudite students of Marxism, however, will find themselves learning from these essays. It is, for example, part of the stock-in-trade of historical materialism that Marx broke decisively with the various utopian socialists who surrounded him. (One of them believed that in an ideal world the sea would turn into lemonade. Marx would probably have preferred Riesling.) Hobsbawm, by contrast, insists on Marx’s substantial debt to these thinkers, who ranged from ‘the penetratingly visionary to the psychically unhinged’. He is clear about the fragmentary nature of Marx’s political writings, and rightly insists that the word ‘dictatorship’ in the phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, used by Marx to describe the Paris Commune, means nothing like what it means today. Revolution was to be seen not simply as a sudden transfer of power but as the prelude to a lengthy, complex, unpredictable period of transition. From the late 1850s onwards, Marx did not consider any such seizure of power either imminent or probable. Much as he cheered on the Paris Commune, he expected little from it. Nor was revolution to be simplemindedly opposed to reform, of which Marx was a persistent champion. As Hobsbawm might have added, there have been some relatively bloodless revolutions and some spectacularly bloody processes of social reform.
An absorbing chapter on Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in Englandclaims it as the first study anywhere to deal with the working class as a whole, not merely with particular sectors or industries. In Hobsbawm’s view, its analysis of the social impact of capitalism is still in many respects unsurpassed. The book does not paint its subject in too lurid a colour: the charge that it depicts all workers as starving or destitute, or living purely at subsistence level, is groundless. Nor is the bourgeoisie presented as a bunch of black-hearted villains. As so often, it takes one to know one: Engels himself was the son of a wealthy German manufacturer who ran a textile mill in Salford, and used his ill-gotten gains to help keep the down-at-heel Marx family afloat. He also enjoyed a spot of fox-hunting, and as a champion of both the proletariat and the colonial Irish maintained a unity of theory and practice by taking a working-class Irish woman as his mistress.
Did Marx see the victory of socialism as inevitable? He says so in The Communist Manifesto, though Hobsbawm denies that it is a deterministic document. Yet this is partly because he does not inquire into what kind of inevitability is at stake. Marx sometimes writes as if historical tendencies had the force of natural laws; but it is doubtful even so that this is why he saw socialism as the logical outcome of capitalism. If socialism is historically predestined, why bother with political struggle? It is rather that he expected capitalism to become more exploitative, while the working class grew in strength, numbers and experience; and these men and women, being moderately rational, would then have every reason to rise up against their oppressors. Rather as for Christianity the free actions of human beings are part of God’s preordained plan, so for Marx the tightening contradictions of capitalism will force men and women freely to overthrow it. Conscious human activity will bring revolution about, but the paradox is that this activity is itself in a sense scripted.
You cannot, however, speak of what free men and women are bound to do in certain circumstances, since if they are bound to do it they are not free. Capitalism may be teetering on the verge of ruin, but it may not be socialism that replaces it. It may be fascism, or barbarism. Hobsbawm reminds us of a small but significant phrase in The Communist Manifesto which has been well-nigh universally overlooked: capitalism, Marx writes ominously, might end ‘in the common ruin of the contending classes’. It is not out of the question that the only socialism we shall witness is one that we shall be forced into by material circumstance after a nuclear or ecological catastrophe. Like other 19th-century believers in progress, Marx did not foresee the possibility of the human race growing so technologically ingenious that it ends up wiping itself out. This is one of several ways in which socialism is not historically inevitable, and neither is anything else. Nor did Marx live to see how social democracy might buy off revolutionary passion.
Few works have sung the praises of the middle classes with such embarrassing zest as The Communist Manifesto. In Marx’s view, they have been by far the most revolutionary force in human history, and without harnessing for its own ends the material and spiritual wealth they have accumulated, socialism will prove bankrupt. This, needless to say, was one of his shrewder prognostications. Socialism in the 20th century turned out to be most necessary where it was least possible: in socially devastated, politically benighted, economically backward regions of the globe where no Marxist thinker before Stalin had ever dreamed that it could take root. Or at least, take root without massive assistance from more well-heeled nations. In such dismal conditions, the socialist project is almost bound to turn into a monstrous parody of itself. All the same, the idea that Marxism leads inevitably to such monstrosities, as Hobsbawm observes, ‘has about as much justification as the thesis that all Christianity must logically and necessarily always lead to papal absolutism, or all Darwinism to the glorification of free capitalist competition’. (He does not consider the possibility of Darwinism leading to a kind of papal absolutism, which some might see as a reasonable description of Richard Dawkins.)
Hobsbawm, however, points out that Marx was actually too generous to the bourgeoisie, a fault of which he is not commonly accused. At the time of The Communist Manifesto, their economic achievements were a good deal more modest than he imagined. In a curious garbling of tenses, the Manifesto described not the world capitalism had created in 1848, but the world as it was destined to be transformed by capitalism. What Marx had to say was not exactly true, but it would become true by, say, the year 2000, and it was capitalism that would make it so. Even his comments on the abolition of the family have proved prophetic: about half of the children in advanced Western countries today are born to or brought up by single mothers, and half of all households in large cities consist of single persons.
Hobsbawm’s essay on the Manifesto speaks of its ‘dark, laconic eloquence’, and notes that as political rhetoric it has ‘an almost biblical force’. ‘The new reader,’ he writes, ‘can hardly fail to be swept away by the passionate conviction, the concentrated brevity, the intellectual and stylistic force of this astonishing pamphlet.’ The Manifesto initiated a whole genre of such declarations, most of them from avant-garde artists such as the Futurists and the Surrealists, whose outrageous wordplay and scandalous hyperbole turn these broadsides into avant-garde artworks in themselves. The manifesto genre represents a mixture of theory and rhetoric, fact and fiction, the programmatic and the performative, which has never been taken seriously enough as an object of study.
Marx, too, was an artist of sorts. It is often forgotten how staggeringly well read he was, and what painstaking labour he invested in the literary style of his works. He was eager, he remarked, to get shot of the ‘economic crap’ of Capital and get down to his big book on Balzac. Marxism is about leisure, not labour. It is a project that should be eagerly supported by all those who dislike having to work. It holds that the most precious activities are those done simply for the hell of it, and that art is in this sense the paradigm of authentic human activity. It also holds that the material resources that would make such a society possible already exist in principle, but are generated in a way that compels the great majority to work as hard as our Neolithic ancestors did. We have thus made astounding progress, and no progress at all.
In the 1840s, Hobsbawm argues, it was by no means improbable to conclude that society was on the verge of revolution. What was improbable was the idea that within a handful of decades the politics of capitalist Europe would be transformed by the rise of organised working-class parties and movements. Yet this is what came to pass. It was at this point that commentary on Marx, at least in Britain, began to shift from the cautiously admiring to the near hysterical. In 1885, no less devout a non-revolutionary than Balfour commended Marx’s writings for their intellectual force, and for their economic reasoning in particular. A whole raft of liberal or conservative commentators took his economic ideas with intense seriousness. Once those ideas took the form of a political force, however, a number of ferociously anti-Marxist works began to appear. Their apotheosis was Hugh Trevor-Roper’s stunning revelation that Marx had made no original contribution to the history of ideas. Most of these critics, I take it, would have rejected the Marxist view that human thought is sometimes bent out of shape by the pressure of political interests, a phenomenon commonly known as ideology. Only recently has Marxism been back on the agenda, placed there, ironically enough, by an ailing capitalism. ‘Capitalism in Convulsion’, aFinancial Times headline read in 2008. When capitalists begin to speak of capitalism, you know the system is in dire trouble. They have still not dared to do so in the United States.
There is much else to admire in How to Change the World. In a suggestive passage on William Morris, the book shows how logical it was for a critique of capitalism based on the arts and crafts to spring up in England, where advanced industrial capitalism posed a deadly threat to artisanal production. A chapter on the 1930s contains a fascinating account of the relations between Marxism and science – it was the only period, Hobsbawm points out, when natural scientists were attracted to Marxism in significant numbers. As the threat of an irrationalist Fascism loomed, it was the ‘Enlightenment’ features of the Marxist creed – its faith in reason, science, progress and social planning – which attracted men like Joseph Needham and J.D. Bernal. During Marxism’s next historical upsurge, in the 1960s and 1970s, this version of historical materialism would be ousted by the more cultural and philosophical tenets of so-called Western Marxism. In fact, science, reason, progress and planning were now more enemies than allies, at war with the new libertarian cults of desire and spontaneity. Hobsbawm shows only qualified sympathy for the 1968ers, which is unsurprising in a long-term member of the Communist Party. Their idealisation of the Cultural Revolution in China, he suggests with some justice, had about as much to do with China as the 18th-century cult of the noble savage had with Tahiti.
‘If one thinker left a major indelible mark on the 20th century,’ Hobsbawm remarks, ‘it was he.’ Seventy years after Marx’s death, for better or for worse, one third of humanity lived under political regimes inspired by his thought. Well over 20 per cent still do. Socialism has been described as the greatest reform movement in human history. Few intellectuals have changed the world in such practical ways. That is usually the preserve of statesmen, scientists and generals, not of philosophers and political theorists. Freud may have changed lives, but hardly governments. ‘The only individually identifiable thinkers who have achieved comparable status,’ Hobsbawm writes, ‘are the founders of the great religions in the past, and with the possible exception of Muhammad none has triumphed on a comparable scale with such rapidity.’ Yet very few, as Hobsbawm points out, would have predicted such celebrity for this poverty-stricken, carbuncle-ridden Jewish exile, a man who once observed that nobody had ever written so much about money and had so little.
Most of the pieces collected in this book have been published before, though about two-thirds of them have not appeared in English. Those without Italian can therefore now read a number of important essays by Hobsbawm which first appeared in that language, not least three substantial surveys of the history of Marxism from 1880 to 1983. These alone would make the volume uniquely valuable; but they are flanked by other chapters, on such topics as pre-Marxian socialism, Marx on pre-capitalist formations, Gramsci, Marx and labour, which broaden its scope significantly. How to Change the World is the work of a man who has reached an age at which most of us would be happy to be able to raise ourselves from our armchairs without the aid of three nurses and a hoist, let alone carry out historical research. It will surely not be the last volume we shall be granted by this indomitable spirit.
André Breton’s poem “The Verb to Be” originally appeared in our Spring 1985 issue.
I know the general outline of despair. Despair has no wings, it doesn’t necessarily sit at a cleared table in the evening on a terrace by the sea. It’s despair and not the return of a quantity of insignificant facts like seeds that leave one furrow for another at nightfall. It’s not the moss that forms on a rock or the foam that rocks in a glass. It’s a boat riddled with snow, if you will, like birds that fall and their blood doesn’t have the slightest thickness. I know the general outline of despair. A very small shape, defined by jewels worn in the hair. That’s despair. A pearl necklace for which no clasp can be found and whose existence can’t even hang by a thread. That’s despair for you. Let’s not go into the rest. Once we begin to despair we don’t stop. I myself despair of the lampshade around four o’clock, I despair of the fan towards midnight, I despair of the cigarette smoked by men on death row. I know the general outline of despair. Despair has no heart, my hand always touches breathless despair, the despair whose mirrors never tell us if it’s dead. I live on that despair which enchants me. I love that blue fly which hovers in the sky at the hour when the stars hum. I know the general outline of the despair with long slender surprises, the despair of pride, the despair of anger. I get up every day like everyone else and I stretch my arms against a floral wallpaper. I don’t remember anything and it’s always in despair that I discover the beautiful uprooted trees of night. The air in the room is as beautiful as drumsticks. What weathery weather. I know the general outline of despair. It’s like the curtain’s wind that holds out a helping hand. Can you imagine such a despair? Fire! Ah they’re on their way … Help! Here they come falling down the stairs … And the ads in the newspaper, and the illuminated signs along the canal. Sandpile, beat it, you dirty sandpile! In its general outline despair has no importance. It’s a squad of trees that will eventually make a forest, it’s a squad of stars that will eventually make one less day, it’s a squad of one-less-days that will eventually make up my life.
Translated from the French by Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow.
Division of Child Psychiatry Univ. of Wash. School of Medicine
Seattle, Washington 98105
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PSYCHOANALYSIS, ORIGINATING IN VIENNA and in the mind of a single brilliant man, has come to have worldwide recognition (if not acceptance) and has influenced the development of concepts in such diverse fields as anthropology, art, history, sociology, literary criticism, and law. One of the clearest examples of such an effect may be found in the work of André Breton, the founder of Surrealism.
In 1916 Breton served as a medical aide in the psychiatric center at Saint-Dizier where he came in contact with mental patients evacuated from the front. It was here that he first heard of psychoanalysis and began to read Freud's works. He recorded patients' hallucinations and delusional experiences and subsequently tried to "interpret" them, relying on psychoanalytic principles. After the war, Breton along with other Dadaists experimented with what came to be known as automatic writing. This consisted of writing rapidly without pausing to reread or correct, or writing while i
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Dec 6th 2007 From The Economist print edition
本期 The Economist 開始每季闢幾頁作商業書籍介紹2011.7.2
Worldwide business bestsellers
Busy, busy
How to make a fortune
Jun 30th 2011 | from the print edition
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TO BECOME a world-ranking business writer, who sells thousands of books a month and charges squillions to make after-dinner speeches, it helps to be a) American, b) young and c) a man. Of the ten most successful business books sold through Amazon’s websites around the world over the past three months, only one was written by a woman (Suze Orman), one by an author in his late 70s (Stephen Covey) and one by a non-American native. David Brooks was born in Canada, but rectified that mistake soon afterwards by relocating to New York and then Bethesda, Maryland, where he now writes conservative commentary for the New York Times. If you haven’t had the forethought to be born in America, then at least pick your subject with care. Tom Rath, a motivational writer with two books in the world top ten, knows that readers like the evangelical touch mixed into a 12-step programme. He, like others on this list, offers readers advice on how to identify their hidden strengths, become highly effective, learn how to talk the talk, make a tonne of money—and above all avoid becoming sad, dysfunctional and poor. Now, start writing.
General Motors
Maximum Bob dishes it out
Car guys and creativity
Jun 30th 2011 | from the print edition
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Car Guys vs Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business. By Bob Lutz. Portfolio; 241 pages; $26.95. Buy from Amazon.com AFTER two of America’s “Big Three” car companies plunged into bankruptcy, the idea of a management book from an executive who worked for them all seems implausible. But Bob Lutz is a legend. The cigar-chomping former marine began his career with General Motors (GM) nearly 50 years ago and worked for both BMW and Ford. But it was a stint at Chrysler from 1986 to 1998 that confirmed his hero status. During that time he delivered a succession of flashy, fast-selling cars and trucks that concealed the company’s underlying weaknesses just long enough to convince Daimler (disastrously) to pay $36 billion for it. Mr Lutz could have rested on his laurels. However, in 2001, at the age of nearly 70, while running Exide, a troubled battery-maker, he answered the call to return to his alma mater, GM.
Rick Wagoner, a GM lifer, had just taken on the top job. Wrestling with the structural problems that finally propelled the world’s biggest car company into Chapter 11 in 2009, he at first wanted Mr Lutz to join him as a consultant, to sprinkle stardust over GM’s achingly dull range of passenger cars (by contrast its light trucks were competitive and still highly profitable). Mr Lutz said he would only return as head of global product development. He wanted the authority to shift GM’s culture away from penny-pinching mediocrity to one that put design before everything. Above all, he thought, the super-analytical approach favoured by GM’s senior management was fatally flawed. The best cars had to stir the emotions of potential buyers and for that you needed the creativity of right-brain types (“car guys” like him) rather than the clever, but left-brain “bean counters” that GM employed in droves. In this energetic account (there is no mention of a ghost writer), Mr Lutz takes some well-aimed shots at those who conspired to cripple the great American auto industry. He has special contempt for politicians who helped stifle engineering innovation by preferring undemanding, but market-distorting, fuel-efficiency standards to taxing petrol at the same kind of rates that apply in just about every other advanced industrial economy. But his main purpose is to tell the story of the battles he fought to convince the leviathan firm to start making cars that people actually wanted to own and would pay good money to buy. Although fond of blowing his own trumpet, he is not entirely unself-critical, admitting that he would not have made the big bet on China that was by far GM’s smartest move in the 1990s. Sadly, the revival of GM’s car-making skills that Mr Lutz inspired was too patchy and not sufficiently established in the minds of consumers (many of whom had given up buying American) to save it. A ground-breaking deal with the unions also came just too late. When the double-whammy of a huge spike in oil prices and the financial crisis struck in 2008, GM, which had lost more than $75 billion in the previous four years as Mr Wagoner struggled to streamline the business, was too weak to find a way through. Today, after the government bail-out and with its balance-sheet largely rinsed of debt, GM is both profitable and making some quite decent vehicles. One of those is the Chevrolet Volt, an innovative electric car that was Mr Lutz’s last great project before he retired. The Volt was not the result of the author’s passion for green causes; he once famously described man-made global warming as “a crock of shit”. Rather it was his determination to put one over on Toyota. What irked Mr Lutz was the halo conferred on every Toyota by the adulation for its Prius hybrid at a time when the Japanese maker was trying to steal what was left of Detroit’s lunch with ever more monstrous pickup trucks and SUVs. Perhaps the real lesson of Mr Lutz’s career is that it is not just a dash of creativity that big organisations need, but an implacable desire to beat the competition by building a better mousetrap.
Business books
Aiming high
We launch a quarterly review of business books by considering six of the best
Jun 30th 2011 | from the print edition
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THERE are few divisions of the book industry with a worse reputation than business publishing. Hundreds if not thousands of business books come out every year, all with glowing press releases and effervescent puffs. Literary editors tend to consign them straight to the bin. This is understandable. An astonishing number are worthless. Celebrity CEOs blow their trumpets, consultants market miracle cures, self-help gurus promise that you can grow rich by working four hours a week. Wait a few months: the CEOs have been caught with their hands in the till, the miracle cures are poisons, the self-help gurus bankrupt. What remains is a tangle of jargon-ridden prose. Understandable but wrong. It is silly to dismiss a whole genre just because so many business books are bad. There are some excellent titles in among the dross: CEO biographies that capture something essential about business, useful prescriptions for restoring companies to health, even self-help books that help make sense of the contradictory pressures of modern corporate life. The average employed person in the West spends more waking time in the office than at home, so it makes no sense to be so dismissive of writers who focus on such an important activity.
The best books provide an insight into how business revolutionises the world. Why is the centre of growth shifting from the developed to the developing countries? Why do some companies succeed and others fail? Why are we swapping the white collar for the no-collar workplace? Why do managers say the astonishing things that they say? The answers to these questions lie in the business books that many literary editors so casually toss out. Some business writers pass Karl Marx’s test of changing the world as well as interpreting it. Peter Drucker’s 1946 classic, “Concept of the Corporation”, made people think of companies as communities rather than just productive units. “The Machine That Changed the World” (1990) by James Womack et al popularised Toyota’s manufacturing system with its emphasis on just-in-time parts and proactive workers. Michael Hammer and James Champy’s “Reengineering the Corporation” (1993) encouraged companies to sack large numbers of workers even as their profits soared. This week The Economist launches a quarterly review which will highlight a selection of new business books. To introduce this feature we re-examine six classics published over the past half-century or so that illustrate the wide variety of books that march under the banner of business. They also show how the best books help both to shape the business world and to make sense of it.
Henry Ford is rightly credited with inventing the assembly line—and with it mass production. But it was his great rival at General Motors (GM), Alfred Sloan, who really invented modern professional management. Sloan organised his company into divisions that specialised in cars “for every purse and purpose” and he fashioned a managerial class that turned GM into the world’s biggest company. His 1964 book, My Years with General Motors, is a cool explanation of how he did it (“management has been my specialisation,” he wrote flatly). It is a book that puts subsequent business autobiographies to shame.
William Whyte’s The Organisation Man (1956) is business journalism at its best, taking us inside the daily life of the giant corporations that dominated American capitalism during its heyday. Organisation men were conformists to their fingertips. They eschewed creativity in pursuit of pleasing their bosses, hitting the numbers and creating what Sloan called “objective organisations” as distinct from those that “get lost in the subjectivity of personalities”. Later authors, such as Richard Florida, have tried to examine the demise of “organisation man” and the rise of the creative class, but nobody matches Whyte’s ability to mix detailed anecdotes with broad generalisations. Drucker was the doyen of management gurus—a man who kept up a stream of insightful commentary on business from the 1940s until his death in 2005. Picking his best book is not easy; the inelegantly titled Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973) is as good an example as you can get. Drucker explains why “management may be the most important innovation of the 20th century”. He traces broad revolutions such as the rise of knowledge workers and the development of voluntary organisations, boosting his argument with stories about the growth of the East India Company and the development of Japanese art. In Search of Excellence by two McKinsey alumni, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, was the first business blockbuster, selling millions of copies and demonstrating that consultants could talk to a general as well as a business audience. Many of the companies they profiled performed badly in subsequent years and the book has been heavily criticised since it came out in 1982. But it was a powerful attack on the rationalist school of management which saw workers as mere numbers, and it provided a compelling portrait of how companies work. Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997) introduced one of the most influential modern business ideas—disruptive innovation—and proved that high academic theory need not be a disadvantage in a book aimed at the general reader. Mr Christensen showed that great companies can fail despite doing everything right: even as they listen to their customers and invest heavily in their most productive technologies, their markets can be destroyed by radical new technologies. C.K. Prahalad’s The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (2004) unleashed a business revolution that has done far more good than any number of “Live Aid” concerts. Using a wealth of vivid examples, from Indian eye clinics to Mexican cement companies, Prahalad made three powerful points: that consumers who live on less than $2 a day collectively represent billions of dollars-worth of demand, that together they will account for much of the growth in global demand in the future, and that companies that want to reach these markets need to start early and rethink their assumptions about design and distribution. Prahalad, who died last year, is one of the writers who is most admired by developing-world entrepreneurs, from Muhammad Yunus, who founded Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, to James Mwangi, CEO of Kenya’s Equity Bank. Companies and consultancies will buy thousands of books to flatter their CEOs or market their latest “breakthrough” ideas. The temptation for publishers to churn out rubbish should be resisted. Business is going through a particularly fascinating phase, as new technologies disrupt long-established business models, new economic giants shift the balance of economic power and new gurus, many of them from emerging markets, reinterpret the landscape. The need to separate the wheat from the chaff has never been greater.
When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report: “Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.” It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going. From its opening pages on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, On the Move is infused with his restless energy. As he recounts his experiences as a young neurologist in the early 1960s, first in California, where he struggled with drug addiction and then in New York, where he discovered a long forgotten illness in the back wards of a chronic hospital, we see how his engagement with patients comes to define his life.
With unbridled honesty and humor, Sacks shows us that the same energy that drives his physical passions—weightlifting and swimming—also drives his cerebral passions. He writes about his love affairs, both romantic and intellectual; his guilt over leaving his family to come to America; his bond with his schizophrenic brother; and the writers and scientists—Thom Gunn, A.R. Luria, W.H. Auden, Gerald M. Edelman, Francis Crick—who influenced him. On the Move is the story of a brilliantly unconventional physician and writer—and of the man who has illuminated the many ways that the brain makes us human.
Oliver Sacks is a practicing physician and the author of twelve books, including The Mind’s Eye, Musicophilia, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Awakenings (which inspired the Oscar-nominated film). He lives in New York City, where he is a professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine.
Oliver Sack’s An Anthropologist on Mars, Awakenings, Hallucinations, The Island of the Colorblind, The Mind’s Eye, Musicophilia, Seeing Voices, and Uncle Tungsten are available in Vintage paperback, as is Vintage Sacks, a collection of his finest work.
“I had intended, towards the end of 1997, to write a book on aging, but then found myself flying in the opposite direction, thinking of youth, and my own partly war-dominated, partly chemistry-dominated youth, in particular, and the enormous scientific family I had grown up in. No book has caused me more pain, or given me more fun, than writing Uncle T.–or, finally, such a sense of coming-to-terms with life, and reconciliation and catharsis.” -- Oliver Sacks on "Uncle Tungsten"
Long before Oliver Sacks became a distinguished neurologist and bestselling writer, he was a small English boy fascinated by metals–also by chemical reactions (the louder and smellier the better), photography, squids and cuttlefish, H.G. Wells, and the periodic table. In this endlessly charming and eloquent memoir, the author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings chronicles his love affair with science and the magnificently odd and sometimes harrowing childhood in which that love affair unfolded. In Uncle Tungsten we meet Sacks’ extraordinary family, from his surgeon mother (who introduces the fourteen-year-old Oliver to the art of human dissection) and his father, a family doctor who imbues in his son an early enthusiasm for housecalls, to his “Uncle Tungsten,” whose factory produces tungsten-filament lightbulbs. We follow the young Oliver as he is exiled at the age of six to a grim, sadistic boarding school to escape the London Blitz, and later watch as he sets about passionately reliving the exploits of his chemical heroes–in his own home laboratory. Uncle Tungsten is a crystalline view of a brilliant young mind springing to life, a story of growing up which is by turns elegiac, comic, and wistful, full of the electrifying joy of discovery. Read an excerpt here: http://ow.ly/yhxCT
"My own first love was biology. I spent a great part of my adolescence in the Natural History museum in London (and I still go to the Botanic Garden almost every day, and to the Zoo every Monday). The sense of diversity—of the wonder of innumerable forms of life—has always thrilled me beyond anything else." -- Oliver Sacks
Dubbed “the poet laureate of medicine” by The New York Times, Oliver Sacks is a practicing neurologist and a mesmerizing storyteller. His empathetic accounts of his patients’s lives—and wrily observed narratives of his own—convey both the extreme borderlands of human experience and the miracles of ordinary seeing, speaking, hearing, thinking, and feeling. Vintage Sacks includes the introduction and case study “Rose R.” from Awakenings (the book that inspired the Oscar-nominated movie), as well as “A Deaf World” from Seeing Voices; “The Visions of Hildegard” from Migraine; excerpts from “Island Hopping” and “Pingelap” from The Island of the Colorblind; “A Surgeon’s Life” from An Anthropologist on Mars; and two chapters from Sacks’s acclaimed memoir Uncle Tungsten.
讀了 Radio Benjamin by Walter Benjamin數篇，必須注解許多德國文化、史地： 譬如說 Chapter 10 Theodore Hosemann 可先參考 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Hosemann --- chapter 26 "The Railway Disaster at the Firth of Tay"很有趣的鐵路科技發展史。 現在Wikipedia 有很清楚的說明：
The Tay Bridge carries the main-line railway across the Firth of Tay in Scotland, between the city of Dundee and the suburb of Wormit in Fife. Its span is 2.75 ...
“Everything which fell under the scrutiny of his words was transformed, as though it had become radioactive.” —Theodor Adorno
“A complex and brilliant writer.” —J.M. Coetzee
“Walter Benjamin was one of the unclassifiable ones ... whose work neither fits the existing order nor introduces a new genre.” —Hannah Arendt
“Benjamin buckled himself to the task of revolutionary transformation … his life and work speak challengingly to us all.” —Terry Eagleton
“There has been no more original, no more serious critic and reader in our time.” —George Steiner
About the Author
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and is the author of Illuminations; The Arcades Project; and The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Lecia Rosenthal is the author of Mourning Modernism: Literature, Catastrophe, and the Politics of Consolation. She has taught at Columbia and Tufts.
“The German critic was not only a theorist of the media – he was a gifted broadcaster as well.” – Financial Times
Walter Benjamin was fascinated by the impact of new technology on culture, an interest that extended beyond his renowned critical essays. From 1927 to ’33, he wrote and presented something in the region of eighty broadcasts using the new medium of radio. Radio Benjamin gathers the surviving transcripts, which appear here for the first time in English. This eclectic collection demonstrates the range of Benjamin’s thinking and his enthusiasm for popular sensibilities. His celebrated “Enlightenment for Children” youth programs, his plays, readings, book reviews, and fiction reveal Benjamin in a creative, rather than critical, mode. They flesh out ideas elucidated in his essays, some of which are also represented here, where they cover topics as varied as getting a raise and the history of natural disasters, subjects chosen for broad appeal and examined with passion and acuity.
Delightful and incisive, this is Walter Benjamin channeling his sophisticated thinking to a wide audience, allowing us to benefit from a new voice for one of the twentieth century’s most respected thinkers.
Radio Benjamin Edited by Lecia Rosentha, book review: A new voice graces the airwaves
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Walter Benjamin's work for radio finds the German thinker in beguiling form
Walter Benjamin is a writer whose star has only brightened since his death on the French-Spanish border in 1940, in despairing flight from the Nazis. While most of that brightening has taken place inside academia, it is delightful to learn that, as well as his intense theoretical writings on literature and society, Benjamin also wrote for the radio – and often for children.
The surviving texts of his German radio broadcasts have been side-lined over the years, rather than forgotten, and as editor Lecia Rosenthal admits in her introduction to these translations (by Jonathan Lutes, Lisa Harries Schumann and Diana Reese), that's how Benjamin would have wanted it. His radio work was largely done for money, although he was also interested in the medium itself, which was still in its infancy when these broadcasts were aired, between 1927 and 1933.
The pieces included here range from talks and readings to dialogues and radio plays, and two oddities: a "novella", the rather impenetrable "Sketched in Mobile Dust", and what Benjamin called a "listening model"– a sort of didactic public information broadcast.
This "listening model" goes by the distinctly un-Benjamin-ish title "A Pay Raise?! Whatever Gave You That Idea!" and is essentially an acted-out "how-to guide" for employees wanting to know how to deal with their boss – which, in a bizarre coincidence, is also the subject of Georges Perec's The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise. It seems they really were on our side, those maverick European 20th-century thinkers!
In truth, however, students of Benjamin are likely to find less of interest in the pieces directed at adults than in some of those written for children, which make up the bulk of the book.
These transcripts, running to six or seven pages each, cover subjects such as real and fictional figures like Kaspar Hauser and Faustus, historical events such as the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the destruction of Pompeii, and, most pertinently, the life and history of Berlin, in pieces such as "Berlin Dialect", "Berlin Toy Tour" and "The Rental Barracks".
Although the tone is obviously different, these pieces can certainly be read alongside Benjamin's autobiographical writings on the city of his childhood, and might even be considered as sorts of primers for Benjamin's work on his mammoth Arcades Project: digging at the political and economic roots of what we think of as the purely cultural artefacts of the urban environment.
Through all of this runs a liberal humanist voice that is quite beguiling. The desire to incorporate even the harshest workings of the world into an optimistic and progressive narrative is at one with that of Ernst Gombrich's wonderful children's book A Little History of the World, which was written, in fact, within two years of Benjamin's last broadcast before the worsening political climate meant that as a left-wing Jew he could find no more air time.
We are still powerless before earthquakes, yet "technology will find a way out, albeit an indirect one: through prediction". A fire in a Chinese theatre in 1845 killed 2,000, but gives Benjamin opportunity for digressions into Chinese drama and national character.
The Firth of Tay railway disaster is carefully placed by Benjamin "within the history of technology". This collection shows a lighter – though entirely characteristic – side to this most influential of 20th-century thinkers.
Reviews
“Radio Benjamin could hardly be bettered... There really is no parallel for what Benjamin did in these talks. Imagine a particularly engaging episode of Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time narrated by Alan Bennett – if Bennett were more profoundly steeped in Marx and politically engaged by the revolutionary potential of the medium of radio – and you have something of their allure.”
“Like the best of children’s writers, he never condescends to his audience, and he communicates his encyclopaedic passion for the teeming immensity of the modern metropolis in vivid, engaging prose...He takes the standard villains of the children’s tale – the witch, the Gypsy, the robber – and shows that they were men and women who were often the victims of cruel prejudice.”
“Walter Benjamin, one of the first theorists to ponder the social impact of mass media [...] was equally entranced by the way thin air mysteriously transmits radio waves. In 1927, five years before he exiled himself from Germany in advance of the Nazi putsch, Benjamin began a series of experimental broadcasts on this new medium.”
“[An] ebullient compendium...In both their tone and mesmerizing array of subject matter, the broadcasts avoid the treacly condescension of contemporary children’s programming.”
The German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin is best known as the author of seminal texts such as "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and for his influence on Theodor Adorno and the "Frankfurt School" of philosophy. But behind the much-mythologised figure of Benjamin the philosopher, there lies the little-known historical reality of Benjamin the broadcaster...
When the Gestapo stormed Walter Benjamin's last apartment in 1940, they stumbled upon a cache of papers which the fleeing philosopher had abandoned in his hurry to escape Paris. Amongst these papers were the scripts for an extraordinary series of radio broadcasts for children covering everything from toy collecting to the politics of tenement housing, from the psychology of witch hunts to human responses to natural catastrophes. Designed to encourage young listeners to think critically, to question sources and to challenge clichés, Benjamin's broadcasts stand in stark contrast to the fascist propaganda which would come to take their place.
Benjamin committed suicide in 1940, when his flight out of Europe was blocked at the Spanish border. He died believing that most - if not all - of his writings were lost.
Here Radio4 listeners have an exclusive chance to discover them in this Archive on Four documentary presented by Michael Rosen, and with Henry Goodman as the voice of Walter Benjamin. It's the first ever English recreation of his pre-war broadcasts to children.
Producer: Kate Schneider A Made in Manchester Production for BBC Radio 4.
Happy birthday to the late Louis Kahn, who described the Museum as having “ . . . as many moods as there are moments in time, and never as long as the museum remains as a building will there be a single day like the other.”
Can you guess where this is in the Museum? It is a photo of the natural light reflectors in the Kahn Building galleries. Next time you visit, don’t forget to look up!
Edited by Mateo Kries, Jochen Eisenbrand, Stanislaus von Moos. Text by William J.R. Curtis, Jochen Eisenbrand, Kenneth Frampton, Réjean Legault, Thomas Leslie, Neil Levine, Michael J. Lewis, Stanislaus von Moos, Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Florian Sauter, Susan Solomon, William Whitaker.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.The American architect Louis Kahn is one of the great master builders of the twentieth century. With complex spatial compositions, an elemental formal vocabulary and a choreographic mastery of light, Kahn created buildings of powerful archaic beauty. Among his most important works are the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California (1959–65), the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas (1966–72) and the National Assembly Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh (1962–83). Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture is the first comprehensive publication on this architect in 20 years, and presents all of his important projects. Essays by prominent Kahn experts discuss the sources, contexts and influences of his work; among the authors are such renowned art and architectural historians as Stanislaus von Moos, William J. R. Curtis, Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen and Neil Levine. Topics discussed include Kahn’s pioneering role in concrete construction; the visionary plans for his home city of Philadelphia; his years at Yale University; his dialogue with Josef Albers; and his importance for modern architecture in Southeast Asia. An illustrated biography provides new facts and insights about Kahn’s life and work. In interviews, leading architects such as Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, Peter Zumthor and Sou Fujimoto explain Kahn’s significance in today’s architectural discourse. An extensive catalogue of works features original drawings and architectural models from the Kahn archive, many of which are presented with high-quality images for the first time. The book is further augmented by a portfolio of Kahn’s travel drawings as well as photographs by Thomas Florschuetz, which offer completely new views of the Salk Institute and the Indian Institute of Management. Born in Estonia, Louis Kahn (1901–1974) emigrated to the U.S. with his family in 1906. After studying at the University of Pennsylvania, and working for several architecture firms in Philadelphia, Kahn founded his own atelier in 1935. From 1947 to 1957, Kahn served as a design critic and professor at the Yale School of Architecture, and later as professor of architecture at the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania.
Featured image is reproduced from Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture.
Like the Le Corbusier show at MoMA, Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture, organized by the Vitra Design Museum in Germany, reconsiders the legacy of a master architect with new scholarship. The view of Kahn as a hinge between modernism and postmodernism gives way to a broader understanding of the architect based on six themes: City, Philadelphia as urban laboratory; House, regional building; Science, the world as structure; Eternal Present, ruins and archetypes; Grounding, earth, water, wind, light; and Group Form, the logic of assembly.
These themes are addressed in the dozen-or-so essays that make up the bulk of the book (most are text, but one is photography and one is a thorough chronology of important events in Kahn's life), a portfolio of Kahn's sketches and drawings, and a 60-page catalogue section that corresponds to the drawings, models, and photographs in the exhibition. Additionally, there are transcripts of interviews with some well-known architects—Frank Gehry (who designed the building the exhibition was housed in during the summer), Robert A.M. Stern, Denise Scott Brown, Renzo Piano, Peter Zumthor, Sou Fujimoto, and others—on how Kahn influenced them.
The whole undertaking attempts to elevate the status of Kahn alongside those of Corbusier, Wright, and Mies, getting over the early antagonism of architects like Peter Eisenman who said (I'm paraphrasing) "he ruined modernism." Most architects in the 20th century probably consider Kahn to be a great architect, aided by Nathanial Kahn's 2003 film My Architect, but as the inclusion of the interviews with contemporary architects makes clear, it's all about his lasting influence. Is it on par with the "Big 3"?
I'd wager that Kahn's architecture will continue its influence for a long time, given his idiosyncratic attempts at getting to the beginnings of architecture. The poetic constructions of his buildings are undeniable, and the fact he's being given this major exhibition in Europe rather than the United States or India, where the majority of his buildings can be found, points to an attempt to sway a population lacking in first-hand Kahn experience (he didn't build anything in Europe). The scholarly essays may not be sufficient for positioning Kahn right next to Corbusier, Wright, and Mies (a debatable goal, anyways), but the illustrations serve to reinforce the amazing talent of an architect important enough to have a project realized decades after his death.
Vitra Design Museum The American architect Louis Kahn (1901-1974) is regarded as one of the great master builders of the twentieth century. With complex spatial compositions and a choreographic mastery of light, Kahn created buildings of archaic beauty and powerful universal symbolism. Among his most important works are the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and the National Assembly Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The exhibition ‘Louis Kahn — The Power of Architecture’, presented by the Vitra Design Museum, is the first major retrospective of Kahn’s work in two decades. The exhibition encompasses an unprecedented and diverse range of architectural models, original drawings, photographs and films. All of Kahn’s important projects are extensively documented — from his early urban planning concepts and single-family houses to monumental late works such as the Roosevelt Memorial in New York City (1973/74), posthumously completed in October 2012. The view of Kahn’s architectural oeuvre is augmented by a selection of watercolours, pastels and charcoal drawings created during his travels, which document his skill as an artist and illustrator. Highlights of the exhibition include a four-meter-high model of the spectacular City Tower designed for Philadelphia, as well as previously unpublished film footage shot by Nathanial Kahn, the son of Louis Kahn and director of the film ‘My Architect’. Interviews with architects such as Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, Peter Zumthor and Sou Fujimoto underscore the current significance of Kahn’s work, which is being rediscovered and made accessible to a wide public audience with this exhibition. The biographical introduction to the exhibition is followed by six thematic areas that illustrate the development of Kahn’s work over time. The leitmotif of this progression is found in Kahn’s quest for origins: in architecture and art, but also in the natural sciences — and even in the observation of human behaviour and society. The first section of the exhibition, entitled City, is closely connected with Kahn’s biography in its examination of the architect’s relationship to Philadelphia, which he came to regard as his home after immigrating to the US, and which became a kind of laboratory for the development of his own urbanistic and architectural principles.The second exhibition category, Science, demonstrates how Kahn studied the structural laws inherent in nature as a means of establishing a foundation for the renewal of architecture. In the third section, Landscape, it becomes clear that nature was not only a source of inspiration for Kahn, but that it became increasingly important as a context for his buildings. Kahn’s desire to create a stronger connection between architecture and the surrounding environment also formed the basis of his residential designs: he regarded the House as an archetype and starting point for his understanding of architecture and community. Kahn’s increasing success as an architect was accompanied by the evolution of an architecture that was closely linked to the timeless foundations of traditional building, yet radically innovative and future-oriented in terms of technology and construction. The underlying ideal of an Eternal Present resulted from Kahn’s intense engagement with architectural history and archetypical structures, something that is vividly documented in his travel drawings from Italy, Greece and Egypt. The conclusion and climax of the exhibition is represented by the section Community, which demonstrates how essential the social significance of architecture was to Kahn, and how he derived new forms for public buildings from it. Kahn is probably the only architect ever to have designed a church as well as several synagogues and a Muslim prayer room. They bear witness to the fact that Kahn’s spatial concepts were always physical manifestations of his social and political ideas, above and beyond their designated functions. Taken as a whole, the seven sections of the exhibition reveal a new view of Louis Kahn’s oeuvre that defies the common classifications of modernism or postmodernism. Kahn’s uniqueness lies in his syn-thesis of the major conceptual traditions of modern architecture — from the École des Beaux-Arts and the constructive rationalism of the nineteenth century to the Arts and Crafts movement and Bauhaus modernism — enhanced by the consideration of indigenous, non-western building traditions. Kahn gained important impulses from architectural movements such as metabolism or brutalism. He anticipated aspects of building that are highly relevant today, including a return to local resources and ‘soft’ factors such as air, light and water. He saw himself as part of a tradition that spanned thousands of years and that understood architecture not only as a means of satisfying utilitarian needs, but as an instrument of artistic speculation and a means of contemplating nature, history and human community. The exhibition is a cooperation of the Vitra Design Museum, the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and the NAI part of The New Institute, Rotterdam. Vitra Design Museum thanks global sponsor Swarovski for its generous support as part its cultural programme, which makes an important contribution to the rediscovery of a seminal architect. Global Sponsor Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
“Ideas change society; architecture changes the visible, functioning environment. Occasionally, one man’s creativity spans both; and the way men build to express their emotional and physical needs is never quite the same again. Louis Kahn was such a man.”—The New York Times "Like all good books on architecture, this one leaves you wanting to be there, to inhabit Kahn's meaningful and moving spaces. With each passing year, Kahn's importance to architecture and culture becomes evermore clear, his buildings' eternal and circumstantial attributes become evermore evident, and their exceptional quality becomes evermore present in our experience. Kahn loved beginnings, and for those wishing to explore Kahn's work and thought, this beautiful book is a very good place to start."—Robert McCarter, Ruth and Norman Moore Professor of Architecture, Washington University in St. Louis, author of Louis I. Kahn "Between Silence and Light beautifully captures the essence of my father's spiritual ideas about architecture. It is a luminous book."—Nathaniel Kahn, Academy Award–nominated filmmaker of My Architect
Description of Between Silence and Light
In the development of contemporary architecture, no one has had a greater influence than Louis I. Kahn, whose many buildings include the Salk Institute, the Yale Study Center, and the Exeter Library. He is remembered, however, not only as a master builder, but also as one of the most important and creative thinkers of the twentieth century. For Kahn, the study of architecture was the study of human beings, their highest aspirations and most profound truths. He searched for forms and materials to express the subtlety and grandeur of life. In his buildings we see the realization of his vision: luminous surfaces that evoke a fundamental awe, silent courtyards that speak of the expansiveness and the sanctity of the spirit, monumental columns and graceful arches that embody dignity and strength. Updated with a new preface, this classic work is a major statement on human creativity, showing us Louis Kahn as architect, visionary, and poet.
(新增影片，更新秀圖) 旅英台灣服裝設計師詹朴的母親王宣一15日在義大利猝逝，而詹朴今日強忍母喪、按原定行程，於倫敦發表2015秋冬系列「在森林深處」（Deep In The Woods），詹朴最新系列主要靈感為詮釋出人們對於森林的奇幻想像，有時陰暗、有時繽紛、有時迷惘。作品中包含各種森林元素，如動物、精靈、昆蟲、童話角色以及森林陰影。色調以黑白為主，並加入了深藍及酒紅，隱喻人的內心，隱藏著各種情緒與角色。
ry dropping the words Wolf Hall into a room full of historians these days and you’ll find out pretty quickly what they think of historical fiction. There will be those who make clucking sounds, roll their eyes and generally behave as though they’ve been introduced to Clio’s flighty little sister who has all of the fun and none of the responsibility. But then there are those who are happy that Hilary Mantel’s prodigious storytelling has drawn millions into the realm of the past where, once captive, they can be informed about what really happened.
Me, I’m with the relaxed crowd, though it grates a bit to accept that millions now think of Thomas Cromwell as a much-maligned, misunderstood pragmatist from the school of hard knocks who got precious little thanks for doing Henry VIII’s dirty work other than the earldom of Essex — about five minutes before being marched to the scaffold as a result of Anne of Cleves turning out to be a dog rather than the pussycat of Holbein’s portrait.
I don’t pretend to be an authority on the Tudor Reformation, but when I was doing research for A History of Britain, the documents shouted to high heaven that Thomas Cromwell was, in fact, a detestably self-serving, bullying monster who perfected state terror in England, cooked the evidence, and extracted confessions by torture. He also unleashed small-minded bureaucratic “visitors” to humiliate, evict and dispossess thousands of monks and nuns, not all of whom had their hands up each other’s robes or were passing off pig bones as holy relics. On at least one occasion he had the fake relic and the custodial friar burnt side by side. Witty, that. The fact that Thomas More (who could use some help right now) was likewise not averse to burning people as well as books, if they strayed from sound doctrine, does not mean that Cromwell, in comparison, was a paragon of refreshing straightforwardness. Sure, he was a good family man. So was More. So was Himmler.
But, as I say, I’m relaxed about all this. I don’t much mind that historical novels and films take liberties with the facts, commit sins of omission or make imaginative interpolations provided they do not pretend to claim the same kind of authority in telling you how it really was as accounts based on documented fact seek to do. When I wrote my own historical novella, Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations(1991), about the making and writing of history, I didn’t expect it to be held to the same standards as a work of non-fiction. Before publishing a review, the New York Times asked me whether it should treat it as fiction or non-fiction. “Fiction,” I told them. “I made up dialogue, monologue, all sorts of things.” It went into non-fiction.
Damian Lewis as Henry VIII in the BBC adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall’
Even though Leo Tolstoy refused to callWar and Peace a novel, fiction should candidly rejoice in its inventions. It is when a polemical point gets made through shifting the evidence around to suit some preconceived opinion that it gets morally murky. The film Selma, which I have yet to see, has been criticised for its representation of Lyndon Johnson as a wily procrastinator rather than the president who urged Martin Luther King to confront the worst outrages against civil and voting rights so that the country would be shocked into supporting legislation. Ava DuVernay, the film’s director, expressed surprise that so much was made of this emphasis but she must have known the stakes were high. For the film’s critics, an uninformed audience might confuse a movie interpretation with the documented truth: a rare instance of mutually interested partnership between presidential politics and the civil rights movement is in danger of being replaced by a model of conflict and deception.
Invention may compromise authority but then we don’t go to great historical fiction or feature films for hard documentary truth. What they deliver, instead, is an imaginative impression but when that impression emerges from rich research it is often capable of delivering a much more vivid sense of the past than an arrangement of unimpeachable data. No military history of the battles of Austerlitz or Borodino is ever going to transport the reader into the ferocious and chaotic reality experienced by both officers and ordinary soldiers better than War and Peace.
The mindset of historians and historical novelists is not all that divergent. Both strive for what Oxford philosopher RG Collingwood exhorted as the imaginative “re-enactment”; the getting inside an event. Without a grip on evidence, the historical novel is empty fable; without imaginative empathy, history is all bones and no flesh and blood. For some historians, who see their work essentially as the political science of the past, this may sound like a dangerous flirtation with romance. But then there are some who don’t mind admitting we were drawn to the subject in the first place precisely because of that romance.
. . .
I was born in 1945, into a Britain scarred and charred by the war. My personal histories, Jewish and British, had taken a beating but had somehow endured. The present was austerely rationed like the barley sugar twists I craved (and actually nicked once or twice from Woolworths); the future was atomic in a way that both excited and terrified but the past was a romance of inexhaustible splendour and I spent as much time there as I possibly could. My first “book”, created when I was eight, was a history of the Royal Navy consisting mostly of cigarette card pictures of battleships: Golden Hind to Ark Royal. Walked through the Tower of London by my dad, I thought I caught on the riverside breeze the whimpering cry of one of Richard III’s inconvenient nephews. I was the only boy I knew who liked Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae better than Treasure Island; Arthur Conan Doyle’s The White Company rather than Sherlock. I couldn’t get enough of Walter Scott (something that on rereading amazes me): not just Ivanhoe, but the lumberingWaverley, the novel that on publication in 1814 became the first international bestseller and inaugurated a mass market for historical fiction.
I remember being vividly struck by one scene in Waverley. The eponymous and somewhat drippy hero follows his own dreamy romance into the Highlands in 1745, the year of the Jacobite rebellion, which he duly joins. He is brought to a clan feast in which the main course is “a yearling lamb . . . roasted whole. It was set upon its legs, with a bunch of parsley in its mouth . . . The sides of this poor animal were fiercely attacked by the clansmen, some with dirks, others with knives which were usually in the same sheath with the dagger so that it was soon rendered a mangled and rueful spectacle.”
These were the table manners I hoped to imitate at home but I also remember Scott’s learned footnote explaining Scottish aversion (“till of late years”) to pork. These clansmen were apparently kosher; och oy! But it was the scene’s close-up physical detail that made me feel I was there with clan MacIvor.
You would suppose that the condition of becoming a working historian is to leave this kind of thing behind as fable: a genre not just distinct from a history but the antithesis of it. The distinction could not be clearer, some historians argue. On the one side stand the interpreters and analysts of documented evidence; on the other, the fabulists, free to come and go from the realm of truth as their literary fancy dictates.
Yet in the Edinburgh Review in 1825, the young Thomas Babington Macaulay thought that, while true historians must never invent, there was something they could learn from novelists. He knew that Scott was greedy for archival research into anything that might help him reconstruct a lost world: ballads and vernacular poems; games and diet, costume, furniture, weapons and architecture. It was the fabric of everyday life that “high” historians disdained as unconsidered trifles — their noses deep in state papers and the correspondence of the mighty — that Macaulay thought should be snapped up by any writer wanting to make his reader live richly in a different time and place.
Both Scott and Macaulay were beneficiaries of a wave of writing that began in the later 18th century by the likes of the costume historian Joseph Strutt and the eccentric vegetarian radical Joseph Ritson, a great anthologist of folk ballads and resurrector of Robin Hood. But they also felt instinctively that they were embarked on a common endeavour of storytelling from which historical truth could emerge. For Macaulay, it was the unfolding of the epic of British liberty. Walter Scott, the product of Enlightenment Edinburgh, also believed this to be the great motor driving British history, though the sunlight of progress was darkened by a sense of what was being lost: cue the plaid, the pipes and the standing lamb with parsley.
There was another bond connecting the novelist and the historian: their shared belief in the power of literary narrative and their healthy respect for its complexity. The instruction was not all one way. When he published A Tale of Two Cities in 1859, Charles Dickens openly professed how much he owed to the narrative genius of, as well as the learning behind, Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution (1837), a work that charges along like a bolting horse in the historical present. “See Camille Desmoulins, from the Café du Foy, rushing on, sibylline in face; his hair streaming, in each hand a pistol! He springs to a table: the Police satellites are eyeing him; alive they shall not take him; not they alive, not him alive. This time he speaks without stammering: Friends, shall we die like hunted hares, like sheep hounded into their pinfold; bleating for mercy where is no mercy but only a whetted knife? The hour is come.”
Before scholars brushed off historical novelists as dubious entertainers, there were many such fruitful collaborations. Victor Hugo could not have written his phenomenal (and absurdly unread) 1793 (1874) without the help of the histories of Jules Michelet, head of the Archives Nationales, and a virtuoso of storytelling. The greatest of all the historical novelists, Tolstoy, was himself a compulsive trawler through the archive. An unexpected treasure trove of Masonic papers led him to make Pierre Bezukhov flirt for a while with the mysteries of the Craft. His own experience of a military raid on a Chechen village bloodied the young Tolstoy in the cruelties of war. This did not stop him immersing himself in every conceivable historical source, in many languages, on Napoleon and the history of Russia 1805-1812.
. . .
To be sure, there are significant differences in working methods. Because historical novels use conversational dialogue, their inventors have to think very carefully about voice: the tonal music of their writing. There are many ways to get this disastrously wrong. If characters are made to speak in a modified version of the diction of the past, they risk pastiche. “Brook your ire!” one character says to another in Mike Leigh’s film Mr Turner. On the other hand, it was probably preferable to Turner telling him to “chill”. For if historical figures speak pretty much as we now do, only kitted out in breeches and farthingales, the alien strangeness of the past, wherein much of its magic lies, goes out of the window. In an essay on this problem, Marguerite Yourcenar, author of one of the most compelling historical novels ever written, Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), explains that the challenge of catching a reliable tone for Roman conversation from elusively scattered fragments of prose made her decide to make her book monovocal. After pondering the choices of voice for Hadrian, she plumped for a version of oratio togata, toga-speech: elastic and personal in ways in which a voice drawn exclusively from Cicero’s rhetoric could not have been. The result is a distinctive kind of address: poetic and ruminative; by turns brutal and sensual; a million miles from the studied disingenuousness and naked self-vindication that usually pass for non-fiction memoirs.
Lately there have been interesting voice inventions. Martin Amis’s tone for the SS inThe Zone of Interest — the heartiness of nonentities; (“but this is fucking ridiculous”) man-to-man pub talk translated to Auschwitz — is somehow more credibly horrible than lunatic ravings or the Hannibal Lecter-speak of evil geniuses. For the characters in his forthcoming The Buried Giant, set in post-Roman, half-Saxon Britain, the author Kazuo Ishiguro has chosen a mysteriously formal speech, full of stiffly exchanged courtesies, whether spoken by monks, knights or peasants, entirely stripped of the poesy of epic or legend. “Excuse us Master Wistan while I walk them to the longhouse. Then if we may sir I’d like to resume our discussion of just now.” But, as seems apt for the book, it undoubtedly casts a spell.
. . .
This is not the historian’s problem. We must content ourselves with the voices given to us by diaries, letters and speeches, which are audible enough without our having to put words into the mouths of the unprotesting dead. But there is one calculation we have to make that, from the first sentences, will set the tone: the manner of our own narrative voice. Most historians just go with the flow of what comes naturally; slightly popularised editions of their academic voices. Others make a great performance of their own presence, though none as operatically booming as Carlyle: “O beloved brother blockheads” — that’s us, his readers. Others still disappear into the action; just opening a door into the past and crooking a beckoning finger to the reader to follow.
Thomas Cromwell was, in fact, a self-serving, bullying monster who perfected state terror in England
Those who start in the thick of it, I like best of all. The writer who made me want to be an historian was Columbia University professor Garrett Mattingly. In 1959, he published The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, which has the imaginative grip of a novel but is grounded on the bedrock of the archives. It begins with a name the significance of which we, as yet, have absolutely no idea; with an exactly visualised place. Through the repetition of a single word “Nobody,” we hear the tolling of a bell ringing the doom of someone or other.
“Mr Beale had not brought the warrant until Sunday evening but by Wednesday morning, before dawn outlines its high windows, the great hall of Fotheringhay was ready. Though the Earl of Shrewsbury had returned only the day before nobody wanted any more delay. Nobody knew what messenger might be riding on the London road. Nobody knew which of the others might not weaken if they wanted another.”
What is this? Who is this? Where are we? You want to read on, don’t you? So you do so with the intense excitement of knowing every word is true.
Simon Schama is an FT contributing editor
Illustration by Toby Whitebread
Photograph: Giles Keyte
Renaissance Men
By CHRISTOPHER BENFEY
Published: October 29, 2009
“Try always,” says the worldly Cardinal Wolsey in “Wolf Hall,” Hilary Mantel’s fictional portrait of Henry VIII’s turbulent court, “to find out what people wear under their clothes.” Katherine of Aragon, the queen who can’t produce an heir, wears a nun’s habit. Anne Boleyn, the tease eager to supplant her, won’t let the king know what she’s wearing until their wedding night; she says “yes, yes, yes” to him, “then she says no.” Thomas More, willing to go to any lengths to prevent the marriage, wears a shirt of bristling horsehair, which mortifies his flesh until the sores weep. As for Thomas Cromwell, the fixer who does the king’s dirty work just as he once did the cardinal’s, what is he hiding under his lawyer’s sober winter robes? Something “impermeable,” Hans Holbein suspects as he paints Cromwell’s forbidding portrait. Armor, maybe, or stone.
Go to the Frick Collection in New York and compare Holbein’s great portraits of Cromwell and More. More has all the charm, with his sensitive hands and his “good eyes’ stern, facetious twinkle,” in Robert Lowell’s description. By contrast, Cromwell, with his egg-shaped form hemmed in by a table and his shifty fish eyes turned warily to the side, looks official and merciless, his clenched fist, as Mantel writes, “sure as that of a slaughterman’s when he picks up the killing knife.” One of the many achievements of Mantel’s dazzling novel, winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize, is that she has reversed the appeal of these towering rivals of the Tudor period, that fecund breeding ground of British historical fiction as the American Civil War is of ours. Cromwell is the picaresque hero of the novel — tolerant, passionate, intellectually inquisitive, humane. We follow his winding quest in vivid present-tense flashbacks, drawn up from his own prodigious memory: how he left home before he was 15, escaping the boot of his abusive father, a brewer and blacksmith who beat him as if he were “a sheet of metal”; how he dreamed of becoming a soldier and went to France because “France is where they have wars.” Cromwell learns banking in Florence, trading in Antwerp. He marries, has children and watches helplessly as the plague decimates his family. In short, Cromwell learns everything everywhere, at a time when European knowledge about heaven and earth, via Copernicus and Machiavelli, is exploding. At 40, he “can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury.” He knows the entire New Testament by heart, having mastered the Italian “art of memory” (part of the inner world of Renaissance magic that Mantel drew on in her comic novel “Fludd”), in which long lines of speech are fixed in the mind with vivid images. Cromwell is also, as Mantel sees him, a closet Protestant, monitoring Luther’s battles with Rome and exchanging secret letters with Tyndale, the English translator of the Bible, about the “brutal truth” of the Scriptures. “Why does the pope have to be in Rome?” Cromwell wonders. “Where is it written?” Historians have long suspected that Cromwell harbored Protestant sympathies, even before Anne Boleyn’s “resistant, quick-breathing and virginal bosom” caught the king’s eye. Mantel, with the novelist’s license, draws the circle more tightly. As a child, Cromwell is present when an old woman is burned at the stake for heresy: “Even after there was nothing left to scream, the fire was stoked.” Years later, he watches in disgust as Thomas More rounds up more heretics to feed to the fire. For Mantel, who acknowledges her debt to revisionist scholars, Henry’s divorce is the impetus for Cromwell’s “Tudor Revolution,” as the historian Geoffrey Elton called it, by which the British state won independence from foreign and ecclesiastic rule. In “Wolf Hall” it is More, the great imaginer of utopia, who is the ruthless tormenter of English Protestants, using the rack and the ax to set the “quaking world” aright. “Utopia,” Cromwell learns early on, “is not a place one can live.” More’s refusal to recognize Henry’s marriage was the basis for his canonization in 1935, as well as his portrayal as a hero of conscience in Robert Bolt’s play “A Man for All Seasons” and its 1966 screen version. To Mantel’s Cromwell, More is in love with his own martyrdom, his own theatrical self-importance, while Cromwell, more in keeping with the spirit of Bolt’s title, seeks a way out for his old rival. There’s a tense moment when More, locked in the Tower of London awaiting trial for treason, claims to have harmed no one. Cromwell explodes. What about Bainham, a mild man whose only sin was that he was a Protestant? “You forfeited his goods, committed his poor wife to prison, saw him racked with your own eyes, you locked him in Bishop Stokesley’s cellar, you had him back at your own house two days chained upright to a post, you sent him again to Stokesley, saw him beaten and abused for a week, and still your spite was not exhausted: you sent him back to the Tower and had him racked again.” Tortured, Bainham names names, who happen to be friends of Cromwell’s. “That’s how the year goes out, in a puff of smoke, a pall of human ash.” In her long novel of the French Revolution, “A Place of Greater Safety,” Mantel also wrote about the damage done by utopian fixers. And surely the current uproar over state-sponsored torture had its effect on both the writing and the imagining of “Wolf Hall.” Yet, although Mantel adopts none of the archaic fustian of so many historical novels — the capital letters, the antique turns of phrase — her book feels firmly fixed in the 16th century. Toward the end of the novel, Cromwell, long widowed and as usual overworked, “the man in charge of everything,” falls in love with Jane Seymour, lady-in-waiting to Boleyn, and considers spending a few days at the gothic-sounding Seymour estate called Wolf Hall. What could go wrong with such an innocent plan? Perhaps in a sequel Mantel will tell us. Thomas Cromwell remains a controversial and mysterious figure. Mantel has filled in the blanks plausibly, brilliantly. “Wolf Hall” has epic scale but lyric texture. Its 500-plus pages turn quickly, winged and falconlike. Trained in the law, Mantel can see the understated heroism in the skilled administrator’s day-to-day decisions in service of a well-ordered civil society — not of a medieval fief based on war and not, heaven help us, a utopia. “When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power,” Cromwell reflects. “Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.” Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” is both spellbinding and believable.
Christopher Benfey, Mellon professor of English at Mount Holyoke College, is the author of “Degas in New Orleans” and “A Summer of Hummingbirds.”
*****
Wolf Hall - the economic lessons
Five centuries may have passed but Cromwell’s Tudor times offer some remarkable parallels with the economic plight of Britain today
He works all hours, first up and last to bed. He makes money and he spends it. He will take a bet on anything. A description of a foreign exchange dealer taking big punts in the City? No, think again for this is Hilary Mantel’s description of Thomas Cromwell.
The TV adaptation of Wolf Hall ends this week with the fall of Anne Boleyn. Throughout the six episodes, the focus has been on the political themes addressed in the book: Henry VIII’s determination to have a male heir, who’s up and who’s down at court, the break with the Pope over the king’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon.
What the small screen adaptation can’t really capture from Wolf Hall and the follow-up volume, Bring Up The Bodies, is the book’s broader themes. Mantel’s Cromwell tells us a lot about power and intrigue at the Tudor court. But he also tells us about class, the rise of capitalism and an economy in flux.
The period of transition from feudalism to modern capitalism was long. Economic growth in the 16th century barely kept pace with the growing population. The economy had its ups and down but broadly flatlined between 1500 and 1600. More than two centuries would pass before the advent of the wave of technological progress associated with the start of the industrial revolution.
Even so, the economy was gradually being transformed. Cromwell was not a member of the old aristocratic families: a Suffolk or a Norfolk. He was a blacksmith’s son from Putney made good. Like his patron, Cardinal Wolsey, he did not have a privileged upbringing but had talent and ambition. Karl Marx would have seen Cromwell as a classic example of the new bourgeoisie. Mantel draws a contrast between the fanatically devout Thomas More and the worldly wise Cromwell: the one settling in for a day’s scourging, the other off to get the day’s exchange rate in the City’s Lombard Street, where all the big banking houses had their home.
The inference is clear. Men like More are the past. A new breed of men, pragmatic and servants of the state not the church, are on the rise. “He can converse with you about the Caesars or get you Venetian glassware at a very reasonable rate. Nobody can better keep their head, when markets are falling and weeping men are standing on the street tearing up letters of credit.”
This, of course, is fiction not fact. But the challenge to the status quo from men like Cromwell was real enough. In his book, theWealth and Poverty of Nations, David Landes argues that the challenge to the Vatican from the new religion was a major influence. It was the dawning of a more secular age.
“The Protestant Reformation changed the rules. It gave a big boost to literacy, spawned dissents and heresies, and promoted the scepticism and refusal of authority that is at the heart of scientific endeavour. The Catholic countries, instead of meeting the challenge, responded by closure and censure.”
Northern and southern Europe started to go their own ways in the 16th century. They had different beliefs, different ways of doing things, different cultures. Half a millennium later this gulf has yet to be bridged: witness the strong sense of protestantism that informs Germany’s attitude towards Greece.
Landes says there were two special characteristics of Protestantism that support the claim that it was crucial in the rise of capitalism. One was the emphasis on the need to read, for girls as well as boys. He says that while good protestants were expected to know how to read the holy scriptures for themselves, catholics were explicitly discouraged from reading the bible.
Modern economics stresses the importance of literacy as a building block of development. In England, male literacy more than doubled to 25% in the 16th century; female literacy rose from under 1% to 10%. Mantel shows Cromwell, an early adopter of protestantism, educating his daughters.
The second trait of protestantism identified by Landes was the importance accorded to time. Protestants were the makers and buyers of clocks and watches. “Nothing testifies so much as time sensibility to the ‘urbanisation’ of rural society, with all that implies for rapid diffusion of values and tastes,” he says.
But these were not the only changes happening. The voyages of discovery by Columbus and Magellan meant the known world was expanding. It was an era of globalisation, with new products available for import and fresh markets opening up.
Cromwell is part of this world. He has travelled widely in Europe. He has contacts in Antwerp, then a more important port than London. He is a man of the world with cosmopolitan views. He speaks foreign languages and is keen to add Polish to the list. He would not be a Ukip supporter.
The problems of the wool trader Wykys in Wolf Hall look suspiciously like a metaphor for the weaknesses of the UK economy in 2015. Presiding over a failing business, Wykys has got the wrong products, the wrong people working for him and is selling his goods in the wrong markets. “Latterly, Wykys had grown tired, let the business slide. He was still sending broadcloth to the north German market, when – in his opinion, with wool so long in the fleece these days, and good broadcloth hard to weave – he ought to be getting into kerseys, lighter cloth like that, exporting through Antwerp to Italy.”
In good company doctor fashion, Cromwell decides he can turn the business around. He takes a look at the stock, casts his eyes over the account, then fires the chief clerk and trains up a junior to take his place. “People are always the key, and if you look them in the face you can be pretty sure if they’re honest and up to the job.” Today we would say that he understood the importance of human capital.
Once he had made Henry supreme over the Church of England and disposed of Anne Boleyn, he set to work on the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
Rather like the privatisation programme of the 1980s, the main reason for the assault on the monasteries was financial: Henry was short of money and wanted the funds to fight his expensive wars. Cromwell could justify what was effectively the enforced nationalisation of church lands by pointing to the corruption of the monastic ideal, but this was of secondary importance.
Nothing really changes. Governments always seem to be short of money. A modern Cromwell charged with sorting out the public finances might conclude that the financial sector – rich, arrogant and with a lamentable record of corruption – was ripe for the picking. No question: if Cromwell was alive today, the former chief executive of HSBC, Stephen Green, would be in chains in the Tower and the Dissolution of the Banks would be in full swing.
Freeman Dyson: Heretical Thoughts About Science and Society
Uploaded on Mar 30, 2010
Freeman Dyson with dry wit and self-effacing good humor explains that by heretical he means ideas that go against prevailing dogmas, and that in his self-appointed role as heretic, he is unimpressed by conventional wisdom.
There is no such thing as a unique scientific vision, any more than there is a unique poetic vision. Science is a mosaic of partial and conflicting visions. But there is one common element in these visions. The common element is rebellion against the restrictions imposed by the locally prevailing culture, Western or Eastern as the case may be. The vision of science is not specifically Western. It is no more Western than it is Arab or Indian or Japanese or Chinese. Arabs and Indians and Japanese and Chinese had a big share in the development of modern science. And two thousand years earlier, the beginnings of ancient science were as much Babylonian and Egyptian as Greek. One of the central facts about science is that it pays no attention to East and West and North and South and black and yellow and white. It belongs to everybody who is willing to make the effort to learn it. And what is true of science is also true of poetry. Poetry was not invented by Westerners. India has poetry older than Homer. Poetry runs as deep in Arab and Japanese culture as it does in Russian and English. Just because I quote poems in English, it does not follow that the vision of poetry has to be Western. Poetry and science are gifts given to all of humanity.
For the great Arab mathematician and astronomer Omar Khayyam, science was a rebellion against the intellectual constraints of Islam, a rebellion which he expressed more directly in his incomparable verses:
And that inverted Bowl they call the Sky, Whereunder crawling cooped we live and die, Lift not your hands to It for help, —for it As impotently rolls as you or I.
For the first generations of Japanese scientists in the nineteenth century, science was a rebellion against their traditional culture of feudalism. For the great Indian physicists of this century, Raman, Bose, and Saha, science was a double rebellion, first against English domination and second against the fatalistic ethic of Hinduism. And in the West, too, great scientists from Galileo to Einstein have been rebels. Here is how Einstein himself described the situation:
When I was in the seventh grade at the Luitpold Gymnasium in Munich, I was summoned by my home-room teacher who expressed the wish that I leave the school. To my remark that I had done nothing amiss, he replied only, “Your mere presence spoils the respect of the class for me.”
Einstein was glad to be helpful to the teacher. He followed the teacher’s advice and dropped out of school at the age of fifteen.
From these and many other examples we see that science is not governed by the rules of Western philosophy or Western methodology. Science is an alliance of free spirits in all cultures rebelling against the local tyranny that each culture imposes on its children. Insofar as I am a scientist, my vision of the universe is not reductionist or anti-reductionist. I have …
In June 1948, as Jack Kerouac was recovering from another of the amphetamine-fueled joy rides immortalized in “On the Road,” Freeman Dyson, a young British physicist studying at Cornell, set off on a road trip of a different kind. Bound for Albuquerque with the loquacious Richard Feynman, the Neal Cassady of physics, at the wheel, the two scientists talked nonstop about the morality of nuclear weapons and, when they had exhausted that subject, how photons dance with electrons to produce the physical world. The hills and prairies that Dyson, still new to America, was admiring from the car window, the thunderstorm that stranded him and Feynman overnight in Oklahoma — all of nature’s manifestations would be understood on a deeper level once the bugs were worked out of an unproven idea called quantum electrodynamics, or QED.
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William E. Sauro/The New York Times
“One brick at a time”: Freeman Dyson at Princeton, 1972.
Dyson recounted the journey years later in “Disturbing the Universe,” contrasting Feynman’s Beat-like soliloquies on particles and waves with the mannered presentations (“more technique than music”) he heard later that summer from the Harvard physicist Julian Schwinger. On a Greyhound bus crossing Nebraska — Dyson had fallen in love with the American highway — he had an epiphany: his two colleagues were talking, in different languages, about the same thing. It was a pivotal moment in the history of physics. With their contrasting visions joined into a single theory, Feynman, Schwinger and the Japanese scientist Sin-Itiro Tomonaga were honored in 1965 with a Nobel Prize, one that some think Dyson deserved a piece of. In “The Scientist as Rebel,” a new collection of essays (many of them reviews first published in The New York Review of Books), he sounds content with his role as a bridge builder. “Tomonaga and Schwinger had built solid foundations on one side of a river of ignorance,” he writes. “Feynman had built solid foundations on the other side, and my job was to design and build the cantilevers reaching out over the water until they met in the middle.” Drawing on this instinct for unlikely connections, Dyson has become one of science’s most eloquent interpreters. From his perch at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he followed “Disturbing the Universe,” a remembrance of physics in the making, with “Infinite in All Directions,” his exuberant celebration of the universe, and other books like “Weapons and Hope,” “Imagined Worlds” and “The Sun, the Genome and the Internet” — speculations on how science and technology might one day ennoble humanity, eliminating war and poverty, if only we can avoid blowing ourselves up. Science, Dyson says, is an inherently subversive act. Whether overturning a longstanding idea (Heisenberg upending causality with quantum mechanics, Gödel smashing the pure platonic notion of mathematical decidability) or marshaling the same disdain for received political wisdom (Galileo, Andrei Sakharov), the scientific ethic — stubbornly following your nose where it leads you — is a threat to establishments of all kinds. He quotes the biologist J. B. S. Haldane: “Let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of the passions.” It’s debatable whether anyone’s book reviews — even those as thoughtfully discursive as Dyson’s — belong embalmed between covers, but “The Scientist as Rebel” can be perused for a sampling of his iconoclastic takes on a science that sometimes seems to be turning into an establishment of its own. So much has been written about the grand quest to unite quantum mechanics and general relativity into a theory of everything — “to reduce physics,” as Dyson puts it, “to a finite set of marks on paper” — that it’s bracing to consider his minority view: that the existence of a compact set of almighty equations may be a dogma in itself. “As a conservative, I do not agree that a division of physics into separate theories for large and small is unacceptable,” he wrote in a review republished here of Brian Greene’s book “The Fabric of the Cosmos.” “I am happy with the situation in which we have lived for the last 80 years, with separate theories for the classical world of stars and planets and the quantum world of atoms and electrons.” It’s jarring at first to hear the Scientist as Rebel describing himself as a conservative. But that’s Dyson: as resistant to categorization as the universe his colleagues are trying to mathematicize. “In the history of science,” he writes, “there is always a tension between revolutionaries and conservatives, between those who build grand castles in the air and those who prefer to lay one brick at a time on solid ground.” Dyson, the brick layer, comes down on the side of Baconian science, built piecemeal from scraps rather than deduced through pure Cartesian thought, a science driven more by new tools — microscopes, particle accelerators, gene sequencers — than new ideas. In contrast to the science of Athens, as he drew the distinction in “Infinite in All Directions,” he prefers the science of Manchester, where Ernest Rutherford, cobbling together a picture of the nucleus, complained of theorists who “play games with their symbols” while “we turn out the real facts of Nature.” In a science of unifiers, Dyson prides himself as a diversifier. “I gazed at the stars as a young boy,” he once wrote. “That’s what science means to me. It’s not theories about stars; it’s the actual stars that count.”
George Johnson’s books include “Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics.”
21世紀三事 台北:商務 贈送品
這本21世紀三事的翻譯或原文 在提到Richard Tawney 是有問題的 因為標準的名字是 Tawney, R. H. (1880-1962). Tawney made a significant impact in four interrelated roles, as Christian socialist, social philosopher, educationalist, and economic historian. In 1908 he became the first tutorial class teacher in an agreement between the Workers' Educational Association and Oxford University. The classes he took became renowned for their excellence. As a socialist, he wrote Secondary Education for All (1922), which informed Labour policy for a generation. His two most influential books, The Acquisitive Society (1921) and Equality (1931), exercised a profound influence on socialists in Britain and abroad and anticipated the welfare state. Tawney was also a professor of economic history from 1931, having made his reputation with Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926).
"You may not always agree with Dyson's view of the future, but this fascinating book by one of the great scientific visionaries of our time will certainly make you think" - Marcus Chown, New Scientist
"Dyson's arguments are illuminating even if his strictures are sometimes less than just," - Walter Gratzer, Nature
"It's been a long time since a respectable scientist voiced such grand aspirations in print, making Dyson's book refreshing and thought-provoking, if a bit farfetched." - Wade Roush, Technology Review
Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.
We have always admired Freeman Dyson highly. A talented scientist with many interests he has also managed to convey his interests and thoughts in his thoughtful and accessible writing. From the brilliant (and brilliantly titled) Disturbing the Universe to the present he has never failed to be provocative and insightful -- and to express himself well. This small book, based on lectures given at the New York Public Library in 1997 again allow him to share his interesting thoughts with a wider audience. Meandering about through three chapters Dyson discusses the tools of scientific revolutions (so the subtitle of the book). Suggesting how science advances and could advance in the future, as well as the unexpected consequences of advancement, Dyson offers his broad and unusual perspective on significant questions facing the world. Dyson's greatest asset as a scientist and thinker is his openness to all possibilities. He understands that the unexpected is often the most likely of outcomes, and he is prepared to entertain that and most other possibilities. Dyson does not insist on being right, as so many scientists do, or get bogged down in a single idea. He truly is interested in the big picture, and is more than willing to acknowledge when he strays down the wrong path (as he does here in cheerfully recounting his 1985 guesses as to the three most important technologies of the coming century). Dyson is also a humanist in the broadest sense of the word. His writing always shows his humanist background (nowhere more clearly than in Disturbing the Universe, though it is also evident hear). In addition (though perhaps one should suggest that it is something that one should expect from a scientist, as well as a humanist) his great concern for the true betterment of the human condition comes to the fore here. For Dyson one of the marvels of science is that it can make life so much better for so many, and one of his goals is to help in that regard. In this small book he also gives some examples of what has been -- and what can and should be -- done to better the conditions of the world's population. Dyson's thoughts are always intriguing, his examples well-chosen and fascinating. He is an admirable fellow, and this is an admirable book. Our one regret is that there is so little of it, that he breezes through these topics, touching on them but not going into great detail. Nevertheless, we can recommend it for anyone interested in the future, and the possibilities before us.
Freeman Dyson is Professor Emeritus of Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, he has written numerous works. He is also the father of Esther, who gets a lot of press of her own. In 2000 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion -- a payday worth almost a million dollars.
Jean-Paul Sartre, the French thinker and writer, stressed an ever-present emotional element in human thinking that philosophers preoccupied with truth and validity tended to overlook. Sartre’s concern, in a phrase, was what it was like to be human. A thorough new biography offers expert analysis into his philosophical arguments http://econ.st/1D3qxwC
程大錦Francis D. K. Ching 的《建築：形式、空間與秩序》(Architecture：Form, Space & Order, 2nd edition) 第2版，英中對照，天津大學出版社，2005)--70年代，這本書第一版台灣有翻印。 建築：形式、空間與秩序英文版已是第4版。翻譯有些問題，譬如說326頁的torii翻譯成"牌坊"，查日文版Wikipedia項目，可知華表比較正確： 中国の「華表[2]」の訳を鳥居とするので、過去には漢文で「華表」と記したこともあったという[3]。http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%B3%A5%E5%B1%85
This edition includes an access card with a redemption code forthe online Interactive Resource Center, which featuresthirty-five animations, flashcards of key architectural terms, andan image gallery showcasing hundreds of photos that ...
Architects and students alike will treasure this book for its wealth of practical information and its precise illustrations. Mr. Ching has once again created a visual reference that illuminates the world of architectural form.
The online Interactive Resource Center contains resources tied to the book, such as: Interactive Animations highlighting key concepts Photo Gallery of architectural precedents illustrated in the book Flashcards for focused learning For more ...
.........儘管抱怨路康的沒效率、不懂結構、失控的預算控制力；但在他的專書《18 years with Architect Louis I. Kahn》中，康姆達留下這一段話: “沒有人可以否定一個好的結構系統絕對是能把它本質的功能處理好；但另有一些設計增加了”一些東西”，這些東西大幅增加的建築的價值。所謂的”一些東西”就是一個整合建築以及結構的設計，而不是那些只做力學計算的方案。在一個能被整合的設計中，結構是完全融入建築的，而它最終就成為了建築。”這段話說明他對於路康所做的努力是服務建築設計的努力，而最終這些結構內容也成為被尊榮的建築對象。..............
作者簡介 詩人托馬斯．特朗斯特羅默 Tomas Transtromer 2011年諾貝爾文學獎得主，1931年出生於瑞典，23歲時發表首部作品《詩十七首》，轟動了整個瑞典文學界。 托馬斯的創作圍繞死亡、歷史、記憶和大自然等主題，作品的特色在於獨特的隱喻，詩人最有名的隱喻之一為：「醒來就是從夢中往外跳傘」。 1990年，因中風而幾乎失去說話能力且右半身癱瘓，但他仍持續創作並用左手彈琴，1996年發表作品《悲傷的鳳尾船》，2004年再推出新作《巨大的謎語》。 2011年獲頒諾貝爾文學獎桂冠，得獎原因是：「因為透過他那簡練、透通的意象，我們以嶄新的方式體驗現實。」（“Because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality.”） 托馬斯一共發表了十二部詩集：《詩十七首》（1954）；《路上的秘密》（1954）；《未完成的天》 （1962）；《鐘聲與足跡》（1966）；《黑暗中的視覺》（1970）；《小徑》（1973）；《東海》（1974）；《真理的障礙》（1978）； 《狂暴的廣場》（1983）；《為生者與活者》（1989）；《悲傷的鳳尾船》（1996）與《巨大的謎語》（2004）。詩作已被譯成六十多種語言。
父母離婚以後，媽媽跟我搬到福爾孔街(Folkunga gat an)五十七號。那座大樓容納、混雜著一群屬於底層中產階級的人。我對那大樓與其房客的回憶有一點像一場三○年代或者四○年代的電影。可愛的看門人的妻子 和她那不愛說話且身體很壯的丈夫。我欽佩那看門人的一個原因是他曾被煤氣毒害過—那暗示他英雄般地接近過很危險的機器。
Tomas Transtromer’s Poems and the Art of Translation
By DAVID ORR
Published: March 9, 2012
If you’re a poet outside the Anglophone world, and you manage to win the Nobel Prize, two things are likely to happen. First, your ascendancy will be questioned by fiction critics in a major English-language news publication. Second, there will be a fair amount of pushing and shoving among your translators (if you have any), as publishers attempt to capitalize on your 15 minutes of free media attention.
And lo, for the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer, it has come to pass. The questioning came from, among others, Philip Hensher for The Telegraph (in Britain) and Hephzibah Anderson for Bloomberg News, both of whom implied that real writers — Philip Roth, for instance — had been bypassed to flatter a country largely inhabited by melancholic reindeer. And when Transtromer hasn’t been doubted by fiction critics, he’s been clutched at by publishing houses. Since his Nobel moment in October, three different Transtromer books have been released (or reissued): THE DELETED WORLD: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $13), with translations by the Scottish poet Robin Robertson; TOMAS TRANSTROMER: Selected Poems (Ecco/HarperCollins, $15.99), edited by Robert Hass; and FOR THE LIVING AND THE DEAD: Poems and a Memoir (Ecco/HarperCollins, $15.99), edited by Daniel Halpern. These books join two major collections already in print: “The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Transtromer,” from Graywolf Press, translated by Robert Bly, and “The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems,” from New Directions, translated by Robin Fulton. So a little complaining, a glut of books: pretty typical.
But what’s unusual about Transtromer is that the most interesting debates over English versions of his work actually took place before his Nobel victory. In this case, the argument went to the heart of the translator’s function and occurred mostly in The Times Literary Supplement. The disputants were Fulton, one of Transtromer’s longest-serving translators, and Robertson, who has described his own efforts as “imitations.” Fulton accused Robertson (who doesn’t speak Swedish) of borrowing from his more faithful versions while inserting superfluous bits of Robertson’s own creation — in essence, creating poems that are neither accurate translations nor interesting departures. Fulton rolled his eyes at “the strange current fashion whereby a ‘translation’ is liable to be praised in inverse proportion to the ‘translator’s’ knowledge of the original language.” Robertson’s supporters countered that Fulton was just annoyed because Robertson was more concerned with the spirit of the poems than with getting every little kottbulle exactly right.
To understand this dispute, it’s necessary to have a sense of the poetry itself. Transtromer prefers still, pared-down arrangements that rely more on image and tone than, say, peculiarities of diction or references to local culture. The voice is typically calm yet weary, as if the lines were meant to be read after midnight, in an office from which everyone else had gone home. And his gift for metaphor is remarkable, as in the start of “Open and Closed Spaces” (in Fulton’s translation):
A man feels the world with his work like a glove.
He rests for a while at midday having laid aside
the gloves on the shelf.
They suddenly grow, spread,
and black out the whole house from inside.
The first comparison is surprising enough — work is a glove? With which we feel the world? But notice how quickly yet smoothly Transtromer extends the metaphor into even stranger territory; the gloves expand from the refuge of the house (which is implicitly the private self) to obscure everything we know and are. The poem becomes a meditation on what constitutes a prison, what could be considered a release (“ ‘Amnesty,’ runs the whisper in the grass”) and whether these might lie closer together than we realize. It ends:
Further north you can see from a summit the
endless blue carpet of pine forest
where the cloud shadows
are standing still.
No, are flying.
The clouds appear motionless but are actually flying — just as our lives move, or fail to move, in ways we only dimly understand. Open spaces may become closed, but the reverse is true as well.
Transtromer, trained as a psychologist, has always been interested in the ways our personalities obscure as much as they reveal. “Two truths approach each other,” he writes in “Preludes” (translation by May Swenson), “One comes from within, / one comes from without — and where they meet you have the chance / to catch a look at yourself.” In this context, his heavy reliance on metaphor isn’t surprising. A metaphor insists on the similarity of its tenor and vehicle, but also declares their fundamental difference: after all, the metaphor itself would be unnecessary if its components were identical. These countervailing purposes become, in Transtromer’s hands, a way of holding together what he can and can’t say. As he puts it in Fulton’s translation of “April and Silence”: “I am carried in my shadow / like a violin / in its black case.” He balances these often startling juxtapositions with simple diction and generally straightforward syntax, making the complexity of his poetry a matter of depth rather than surface. His poems are small, cool fields dissolving into dreams at their borders.
This is exactly the sort of writing that tends to do well in translation, at least in theory. The plainer a poem looks — the less it relies on extremities of form, diction or syntax — the more we assume that even a translator with no knowledge of the original language will be able to produce a reasonable match for what the poem feels like in its first incarnation.
The problem is, simple can be complicated. It’s impossible to say how much Robertson did or didn’t rely on Fulton’s translations in preparing “The Deleted World,” but it’s not too hard (if you can corral a Swedish friend, as I did) to figure out where he deviates from the originals. The changes generally make Transtromer less, well, strange and more typically “poetic.” Consider “Autumnal Archipelago (Storm),” which in Robertson’s version begins like so:
Suddenly the walker comes upon the
ancient oak: a huge
rooted elk whose hardwood antlers, wide
as this horizon, guard the stone-green
walls of the sea.
And here is Fulton’s more literal take:
Here the walker suddenly meets the giant
oak tree, like a petrified elk whose crown is
furlongs wide before the September ocean’s
murky green fortress.
Robertson forgoes the poem’s Sapphic stanza form, which seems reasonable, but he also turns the passage’s deliciously bizarre doubled metaphor (an oak tree is like an elk turned to stone) into a less jarring formulation. Similarly, in “From March 1979,” Robertson translates the line “Det vilda har inga ord” into “Wilderness has no words” when a more accurate version would be “The wild has no words” (Fulton says “The untamed . . . ”). “Wilderness” is a bunch of trees; “the wild” is another thing entirely. But perhaps the least successful adjustment is in “Calling Home”:
Our phonecall spilled out into the dark
and glittered between the countryside
and the town
like the mess of a knife-fight.
There’s no fight, with knives or otherwise, in the original — Transtromer’s speaker “slept uneasily” after the call home, but the cause of his unease is unresolved. Again, the poem seems simplified.
That said, some of Robertson’s alterations do a fine job of conveying a poem’s spirit. Rather than using the literal “shriveled” to describe a sail, he says it’s “grey with mildew.” Rather than telling us that “dead bodies” are smuggled into “a silent world,” he says “the dead” are so transported. In general, while one can quibble about Robertson’s book, “The Deleted World” is pleasurable whether or not it’s a good translation of Transtromer.
Is that enough? In some ways, certainly — we read poetry for entertainment, not nutritional value. But translating a poem is like covering a song. We can savor the liberties someone is taking with, say, “Gin and Juice” in a way we couldn’t understand similar variations on songs written by Martians. And Transtromer, however popular he is among poets, remains largely unknown to readers eager to see work from the new Nobel laureate. In this instance, even a sincere imitation probably isn’t the most helpful form of flattery.
The first Swede to garner the Nobel Prize in Literature in 30 years, speech-impaired poet Tomas Tranströmer has his compatriots buzzing over the honor bestowed to him. One Swedish critic says the award is long-deserved.
The Swedish Academy said that 80-year-old poet Tomas Tranströmer received the prize "because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality." A stroke some 20 years ago left the poet aphasic, so he relies on his wife to help him write. But his writing from decades ago remains modern and accessible to even non-poetry lovers, says a Swedish literature expert. Deutsche Welle spoke with Ingrid Elam, Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Malmö University, a journalist and prominent Swedish literary critic, about the Swedish Academy's choice this year for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Why do you think the Swedish Academy decided to award the Nobel Prize to poet Tomas Tranströmer? The real question is, why didn't they do it before? He's been at the top of the list for many, many years. He's a well-known poet, not only in Sweden, but also abroad. He's been translated into many, many languages and he is held in great esteem all over the world - at least, in the world of poetry. Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Some have called him a poetic master 'of the mysteries of the human mind' This is the first time in more than three decades the Nobel Prize in Literature has been given to a native of Sweden. What does it mean to the Swedish people? And what does it mean for literature? I think there is one reason [the award committee] hestitated for a long time - because the prize was awarded to Swedish authors 40 years ago and there was a major discussion for some time after that and a lot of criticism. The Swedish Academy was criticized back then for awarding minor Swedish authors the award. It's a peculiar debate, really, because I can't think of any other prize in a country that doesn't go very often to compatriots of that country. Tranströmer has been talked about for a long time and it's good that he's finally received it. Swedes have never really had the prize very often. It's usually awarded to international authors. But of course, it's usually been awarded to white, male authors from the Western world - very few Africans and very few Asians. Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.His works have been translated into countless languagesBut if there's someone who was due to get the prize now, it was definitely Tranströmer. There's no discussion about that. Why do you say that? What is Tranströmer's defining characteristic as a lyricist? - his poetic signature? He's been writing poetry for 50 years and he's proven one can survive as a poet. New generations discover him and he's a poet who writes in a way that on the surface is very simple and accessible for anybody. Even those who normally don't read poetry can read Tranströmer. At the same time, he's very complex and very precise in his imagery. He tries to find one image for a feeling or a situation. He looks at the world in a way I would imagine the dead would look at the world - with all their knowledge, condensed into one image. That's one big reason why he has survived. But also, because he is a poet of modernity. He travels around in his poetry; he goes by car and by train, and by bus. It's a world that is recognizable, and at the same time, you feel you see this world for the first time - because he's found the perfect expression or the perfect image for what he sees and hears. There's a lot of music in his poetry as well. Tranströmer has been publishing since the 1950s. How much of the collective Swedish conscience do you think is reflected in his work? Is there a collective Swedish conscience? [Laughs.] I wonder. As I said, he's found expressions for modern life in Sweden. But at the same time, he's a very existentialist poet. There's a lot of sorrow and death and darkness in his poetry, not only in his late poetry, where it's so obvious, but right from the start. But also light, of course. Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Painting the world through words, here, in SwedenSomebody once said that it's like in the Bible when God has to show us all the animals and give them their names. In a way, Tomas Tranströmer sort of does that in his poetry. He creates the world anew through language. The poet was afflicted with a loss of speech and partial paralysis following a stroke two decades ago. How much do you think that event and his need for a helping hand affected his writing? A lot. A mean, he's written little since then. The last big, really important collection - "The Sorrow Gondola," inspired by a piano piece by Franz Liszt - consisted of poems written both before the stroke, and also some were written after the stroke. There's hardly any difference between them and I can imagine that those written after the stroke already existed in some form beforehand. After that, he has written one more collection of poetry where you can see that he's lost some of the touch. I mean, he still writes, but we don't really know how. He writes with the help of his wife, who interprets them. She writes things down, and he says whether or not that's what he meant. Of course it's affected him - after all, he's now aphasic. He can say "good" and "very good" and that's it. What significance does it have that this year's Nobel Prize was awarded to a poet and not a novelist? Is our abbreviated take of the world nowadays, due to e-mails, text messages and the ever more hectic pace of life, reflected in that choice? Poetry has fewer words, yet more poignant images after all … I think it was Wislawa Szymborska who was the last poet to be awarded the Nobel Prize [in 1996]. Perhaps I've missed someone, but it's been a very long time since a poet has been awarded the prize. I really don't know how the discussion goes in the Swedish Academy. They don't tell you now. They only tell you after 50 years. The last 10 prizes - I've been so surprised! Every time! On that note, in the run-up to the announcement, literary critics considered possible candidates to be everyone from Syrian poet Adonis, to poetic music legend Bob Dylan to Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. What do you think personally about the choice? Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Tranströmer celebrated his 80th birthday this past April I don't think Bob Dylan will ever get the prize! [Laughs.] I mean, I think he's a great poet, but I think the academy thinks he's in the popular sphere. Adonis has been on the agenda for quite some time and I haven't given up hope about him yet. But this year, I don't think they would ever have given it to him. Because he's Syrian, it would have been interpreted by the press in a political way and I think the academy wants to avoid that. I mean, the election of a Nobel Prize winner is a very long and complicated procedure, and the ones who are on the committee for the literary prize - they differ very much in opinions, and they all have their favorites. There's always lots of speculation about the winners every year, and rarely are they accurate. I'm almost always surprised myself. Is there anything else you'd like to add? Just that I'm very happy, and almost relieved that Tranströmer finally got the prize. It was almost too late, and it nearly drove tears to my eyes.
Interview: Louisa Schaefer Editor: Stuart Tiffen Tomas Gösta Tranströmer (born 15 April 1931) is a Swedish writer, poet and translator, whose poetry has been translated into over 60 languages.[1] He is the recipient of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature"because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality".[2] Tranströmer is acclaimed as one of the most important Scandinavian writers since World War II. Critics have praised Tranströmer’s poems for their accessibility, even in translation; his descriptions of the long Swedish winters, the rhythm of the seasons and the palpable, atmospheric beauty of nature.[1]
Tranströmer was born in Stockholm in 1931 and raised by his mother, a schoolteacher, following her divorce from his father.[2][3] He received his secondary education at the Södra Latin School in Stockholm, where he began writing poetry. In addition to selected journal publications, his first collection of poems, 17 dikter(Seventeen Poems), was published in 1954. He continued his education at Stockholm University, graduating as a psychologist in 1956 with additional studies history, religion, and literature.[2] Between 1960 and 1966, Tranströmer split his time between working as a psychologist at the Roxtuna center for juvenile offenders and writing poetry.[2] During the 1950s, Tranströmer became close friends with poet Robert Bly. The two corresponded frequently, and Bly would translate Tranströmer's poems into English. Bonniers, Tranströmer's publisher, released Air Mail, a work comprising of Tranströmer and Bly's mail, in 2001.[2] The Syrian poet Adunis helped spread Tranströmer's fame in the Arab World, accompanying him on readings.[4] Tranströmer went to Bhopal immediately after the gas tragedy in 1984, and alongside Indian poets such as K. Satchidanandan, took part in a poetry reading session outside.[5] Tranströmer suffered a stroke in 1990 that left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak; however, he would continue to write and publish poetry through the early 2000s. His last original work, The Great Enigma, was published in 2004. In addition to his writing, Tranströmer is also a piano player, something he has been able to continue after his stroke, albeit with one hand.[3]
Tranströmer is considered to be one of the "most influential Scandinavian poet[s] of recent decades".[2] Tranströmer has published 15 collected works over his career, which has been translated into over 60 languages.[2] An English translation by Robin Fulton of his entire body of work, New Collected Poems, was published in the UK in 1987 and expanded in 1997. Following the publication of Den stora gåtan(The Great Enigma), Fulton's edition was further expanded into The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems, published in the US in 2006 and as an updated edition of New Collected Poems[6] in the UK in 2011. He published a short autobiography, Minnena ser mig(Memories look at me), in 1993. Other poets, especially in the "political" 1970's, accused Tranströmer of being apart from his tradition and not including political issues in his poems and novels. His work, though, lies within and further develops the Modernist and Expressionist/Surrealist language of 20th century poetry; his clear, seemingly simple pictures from everyday life and nature in particular reveals a mystic insight to the universal aspects of the human mind. A poem of his was read at Anna Lindh's memorial service in 2003.[7] Tranströmer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011.[2][3] He was the 108th winner of the award and the first Swede to win since 1974.[8][7][9]> Tranströmer had been considered a perennial frontrunner for the award in years past, with reporters waiting near his residence on the day of the announcement in years prior.[10] The Nobel Committee cited that Tranströmer's work created "condensed, translucent images" that "gives us fresh access to reality."[2] Tranströmer and his wife Monica appeared at a brief news conference. They were sitting in front of their television waiting the announcement of the winner. Tranströmer managed to say "Very good, very good" when asked what it was like to have won.[10] Permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Peter Englund said, "He's been writing poetry since 1951 when he made his debut. And has quite a small production, really. He's writing about big questions. He's writing about death, he's writing about history and memory, and nature."[11]Prime Minister of SwedenFredrik Reinfeldt said he was ”happy and proud” at the news of Tranströmer's achievement.[12][13] Tranströmer's other awards include the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Övralid Prize, the Petrarca-Preis in Germany, the Golden Wreath of the Struga Poetry Evenings and the Swedish Award from International Poetry Forum. In 2007, Tranströmer received a special Lifetime Recognition Award given by the trustees of the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, which also awards the annual Griffin Poetry Prize.
Sony to fight back with Internet-compatible e-book readersBY SHOHEI MAKIUCHI STAFF WRITER
2011/10/01
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Sony Corp.'s new Reader device will come with Internet connections. (The Asahi Shimbun)
Sony Corp. said Sept. 29 it will introduce new versions of its e-book reader with Internet connections to overcome a tiresome weakness of the current-generation model. At present, users of Sony's Reader have to first buy electronic books on a personal computer linked to the Internet and then transmit the content to the device via cable. New models will come with wireless LAN and cellphone connections. Users will be able to directly access the online e-book store from the handheld device. Fujio Noguchi, a senior Sony official, said the company will focus on the dedicated e-book reader. But devices designed only for reading electronic books are facing tough competition from more versatile tablet computers, such as Apple Inc.'s iPad. Domestic shipments of dedicated e-book readers are expected to total 300,000 units in fiscal 2011, compared with 2.3 million tablet computers, according to market researcher ICT Research & Consulting Inc. The new Reader with wireless LAN connections will hit stores on Oct. 20 with a retail price of about 20,000 yen ($260), and the model with both wireless LAN and cellphone connections will go on sale on Nov. 25 for about 26,000 yen.
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This, of course, is fiction not fact. But the challenge to the status quo from men like Cromwell was real enough. In his book, theWealth and Poverty of Nations, David Landes argues that the challenge to the Vatican from the new religion was a major influence. It was the dawning of a more secular age.
“The Protestant Reformation changed the rules. It gave a big boost to literacy, spawned dissents and heresies, and promoted the scepticism and refusal of authority that is at the heart of scientific endeavour. The Catholic countries, instead of meeting the challenge, responded by closure and censure.”
Northern and southern Europe started to go their own ways in the 16th century. They had different beliefs, different ways of doing things, different cultures. Half a millennium later this gulf has yet to be bridged: witness the strong sense of protestantism that informs Germany’s attitude towards Greece.
Landes says there were two special characteristics of Protestantism that support the claim that it was crucial in the rise of capitalism. One was the emphasis on the need to read, for girls as well as boys. He says that while good protestants were expected to know how to read the holy scriptures for themselves, catholics were explicitly discouraged from reading the bible.
But these were not the only changes happening. The voyages of discovery by Columbus and Magellan meant the known world was expanding. It was an era of globalisation, with new products available for import and fresh markets opening up.
Cromwell is part of this world. He has travelled widely in Europe. He has contacts in Antwerp, then a more important port than London. He is a man of the world with cosmopolitan views. He speaks foreign languages and is keen to add Polish to the list. He would not be a Ukip supporter.
The problems of the wool trader Wykys in Wolf Hall look suspiciously like a metaphor for the weaknesses of the UK economy in 2015. Presiding over a failing business, Wykys has got the wrong products, the wrong people working for him and is selling his goods in the wrong markets. “Latterly, Wykys had grown tired, let the business slide. He was still sending broadcloth to the north German market, when – in his opinion, with wool so long in the fleece these days, and good broadcloth hard to weave – he ought to be getting into kerseys, lighter cloth like that, exporting through Antwerp to Italy.”
In good company doctor fashion, Cromwell decides he can turn the business around. He takes a look at the stock, casts his eyes over the account, then fires the chief clerk and trains up a junior to take his place. “People are always the key, and if you look them in the face you can be pretty sure if they’re honest and up to the job.” Today we would say that he understood the importance of human capital.
Once he had made Henry supreme over the Church of England and disposed of Anne Boleyn, he set to work on the Dissolution of the Monasteries.