Attire-moi! --- Stephanie's: Literature

Étrangeres en Paris

Wed, 14 May 2008 18:22:51 GMT

In the writings of E. E. Cummings (1894-1962), Paris is a city repleting with beautiful darkness.

"Where in Hell am I? What is Paris --- a place, a somewhere, a city, life, to live: infinitive...Paris. Life. Liberté. La Liberté. 'La Liberté'! --- I almost shout in agony."

"The streets. Les rues de Paris. I walked past Notre Dame. I bought tobacco. Jews are peddling things with American trademarks on them, because in a day or two it's Christmas I suppose. Jesus it is cold. Dirty snow. Huddling people. La guerre. Always la guerre. And chill. Goes through these big mittens. Tomorrow I shall be on the ocean... Les rues sont tristes. Perhaps there's no Christmas, perhaps the French government has forbidden Christmas. Clerk at Norton Harjes seemed astonished to see me. O God it is cold in Paris. Everyone looks hard under lamplight, because it's winter I suppose. Everyone hurried. Everyone hard. Everyone cold. Everyone huddling. Everyone alive; alive: alive."

For those who are or have been seduced by an exotic place would find the experience similar. Beauty and darkness coexist in a city while twisting our senses. The feelings are no longer coherent but fragmentary, being cut through by displacement. Cummings created an exuberant, heterogeneous narrative mixing French with English, which reinforces the impression of a stranger's struggle, the past/ native language is racing with the the present/ foreign language. He evokes a sense of the fast pace of passersby by using short sentences; after all, he can only talk to himself. His Paris, transformed by wars, was marked with fragments of city, people, images, and collision of identities.

After I searched for the desired images for several days and still couldn't quite get them, the anxiety surfaced. Walking around on a gray day, I thought about Cummings' alienated feelings for Paris. Suddenly my qualm seemed to be relieved a little bit. His words caught me.

Analyzing American Bestsellers

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 21:09:45 GMT

Source: http://www.artsjournal.com/bookdaddy/2007/09/7_easy_steps_to_feeling_bad_ab.html

有趣的一篇文章，該作者節選一書的內容，該書是從暢銷書單及其內容分析美國大眾流行文化，雖說以書本為主要討論對象，但從結論看來也適用於暢銷的好萊塢電影，頗值得一讀。本文沒有任何深奧的理論支持或作為論述基礎展開分析，非常容易理解閱讀。

8 Easy Steps to Understanding Bestsellers

book/daddy sincerely hopes that Lisa Adams and John Heath's Why We Read What We Read has some interesting observations about the 200 pieces of bestselling woodpulp the two authors read -- more interesting observations than what they had to say Thursday on The Diane Rehm Show.

Bear in mind that these are year-end bestsellers they're talking about, not the occasional bit of originality that pops on the list and then dies a quick, justified death as if the other books on the list instinctively gang up on any external threat. These are their conclusions:

-- American readers like happy endings.
-- We like simplistic answers.
-- For all of our search for answers, we're happiest with books that validate the values we already hold. We don't want to pursue any troubling inquiry into our own thinking.
-- Oprah views all literature as essentially the author's autobiography, but despite her taste for "uplifting" stories (and the understandable skepticism some have expressed toward her choices), many of the novels she's picked are actually worthwhile, often well-regarded by critics before the books ended up in her club. Terry Teachout has argued, along with others, that the middle-brow culture that we knew in the '50s, the middle-brow culture that often supported high-brow culture and ushered ordinary people into experiencing it on occasion, no longer exists. A central tenet of middle-brow culture, it seems to book/daddy, is the notion that "art is good for you, art is elevating" -- as opposed to the intellectual's approach of connoisseurship/fetishism/appreciation of complexity and difficulty for their own sake. book/daddy submits, therefore, that Oprah is the essence of middle-brow culture today. And doing quite well, thank you.
-- Americans confuse spirituality with self-improvement and with financial success. It's a mix going all the way back to the Puritans, and it's still selling self-help books like mad.
-- Romantic advice books posit that men and women are so utterly different, "it's a Darwinian miracle that they even breed." So we have to work at it. Meanwhile, romance fiction is based on the premise that if we meet the right person, happiness inevitably results. There's no work required at all, once you get over yourself. Sex involves vulnerable women being dominated by Big Strong Brutes. In both romance fiction and romantic advice, despite the ideology of the authors involved, traditional gender roles are enforced; women are nurturers; men are providers. Not a single best-seller, fiction or nonfiction, has espoused a "more modern" view.
-- Political/policy bestsellers are rarely balanced or nuanced. They're mostly just partisan ammunition. The only thing that can be said for the liberal side is the occasional welcome bit of humor.
-- Americans read for plot and character and don't care a fig about literary style.
-- The educational system is not doing a very good job at improving reading skills, but parental influence is an early and crucial factor.
-- And in a tidy demonstration of many of these points, there was the inevitable e-mail from one listener who complained about her student-child's summer reading list always involving downbeat topics like racism or the bad language in Hemingway, and why couldn't more uplifting role models be provided for teens?

Whether one agrees with these points or not, all of them would seem to be pretty much standard-fare intellectual analysis/dismissal of mass-market books. A grad student who spent Christmas vacation working at a Borders could have arrived at the same conclusions.

In fact, he could have found many of the same arguments -- though offered with a more casual and much less aggressive edge than I've presented here -- if our grad student had simply picked up Michael Korda's 2001 book, Making the List: A Cultural History f the American Bestseller, 1990-1999.

Sylvia Plath, female poet (1932-1963)

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 01:37:44 GMT

閱讀Sylvia Plath詩作時，我被她詩作中強烈的情感，憂鬱與痛苦所吸引。我最喜歡的詩人是T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath雖稱不上my favorite, 但是她的詩作很有可看性，只是不適合讀太久。如同Amedeo Modigliani的畫作，憂鬱的美感，但看久了也會讓人覺得憂鬱。

電影 The Bell Jar （中譯片名：瓶中美人）是她的傳記電影，描寫她憂鬱的一生。八歲時父親過世，給她帶來很大的震驚，她道：「我絕不再和上帝講話了。」她看待生命過於認真嚴肅，對感情執著，因此在得知丈夫Ted Hughes出軌到她自殺前，精神幾近崩潰下所寫的詩作充滿憤怒與失望的意象，既藝術又令人不忍卒賭。

在英國劍橋大學就讀期間，她的美貌與罕見的才華，常在雜誌發表文章與詩作，吸引許多人注意，但她從未動心過，直到遇到另一位詩人Ted Hughes（後來成為桂冠詩人），這是她一生唯一的愛情，強烈但充滿不安。結婚後兩人搬到美國居住，不久後Ted Hughes 移情別戀，Plath 被嫉妒吞噬著，而且數度發燒感冒。她母親恐怕她精神崩潰，曾要求她回家居住，但為她所拒：「我一旦開始了奔跑，就不會停下來；我這一輩子都要聽到Ted 的消息，他的成功，他的才賦。」

以下這篇詩作便是她描寫對Ted Hughes的感情。

Love Letter

Not easy to state the change you made.
If I'm alive now, then I was dead,
Though, like a stone, unbothered by it,
Staying put according to habit.
You didn't just toe me an inch, no--
Nor leave me to set my small bald eye
Skyward again, without hope, of course,
Of apprehending blueness, or stars.

That wasn't it. I slept, say: a snake
Masked among black rocks as a black rock
In the white hiatus of winter--
Like my neighbors, taking no pleasure
In the million perfectly-chiseled
Cheeks alighting each moment to melt
My cheek of basalt. They turned to tears,
Angels weeping over dull natures,
But didn't convince me. Those tears froze.
Each dead head had a visor of ice.

And I slept on like a bent finger.
The first thing I saw was sheer air
And the locked drops rising in a dew
Limpid as spirits. Many stones lay
Dense and expressionless round about.
I didn't know what to make of it.
I shone, mica-scaled, and unfolded
To pour myself out like a fluid
Among bird feet and the stems of plants.
I wasn't fooled. I knew you at once.

Tree and stone glittered, without shadows.
My finger-length grew lucent as glass.
I started to bud like a March twig:
An arm and a leg, an arm, a leg.
From stone to cloud, so I ascended.
Now I resemble a sort of god
Floating through the air in my soul-shift
Pure as a pane of ice. It's a gift.

情書

很難述說你帶來的轉變。
如果我現在活著，那麼過去就等於死亡，
雖然，像石塊一樣，不受干擾，
習慣於靜止。
你不只是踩到了我一吋，不──
也不只是叫我空茫的小眼
再一次向天空抬起，當然，不敢奢望，
去了解蔚藍，或者星辰。

不是這樣的。我睡著，這麼說吧：一條
於黑岩中偽裝成黑岩的蛇
在寒冬雪白的裂縫中──
像我的芳鄰，不喜歡
萬千雕鑿完美的
面頰，無時不降下來融化
我玄武巖的雙頰。他們化做眼淚，
那是天使為單調的大自然哭泣，
但這未能使我信服。眼淚凍結。
每一個僵死的頭顱都戴著冰的面具。

我像根彎曲的手指繼續睡著。
我首先看到稀薄的空氣
緊鎖的水滴自露珠升起
明澈如精靈。許多岩塊
堆集，面無表情地環聚著。
我不知道這該如何解釋。
我發光，剝落，攤開
像流體把自己傾出一般
在鳥足和樹莖群中。
我未受愚弄。我立刻就認清了你。

樹石閃爍，沒有陰影。
我的指長透明如玻璃。
我像三月的嫩芽抽放：
一隻手臂和一條腿，手臂，腿。
踏石而上雲，我如是攀爬。
現在我彷彿某種神祇
穿空飄浮於換新的靈魂之中
純潔如片冰。這是天賜。

作家張芬齡如此評論Sylvia Plath的詩：
普拉絲生前出版的詩集有《巨神像》（The Colossus），死後出版的有《精靈》（Ariel），《渡河》（Crossing the Water）和《冬樹》（Winter Trees）。人性經驗被描繪成恐怖且無法駕馭，人際關係也像傀儡似地毫無意義，這兩大主題左右著她的想像；她的詩具有獨特的風格和技巧，憂鬱的氣質和苦痛的經驗瀰漫其間。
普拉絲的詩多描寫內心世界，交織著苦痛、抑鬱、嘲諷和淡淡的喜悅，尤其她晚期的作品是在一種極端神經質和創作力旺盛的情況下寫成的，有時意象轉換扭曲得很厲害，我們讀她的詩作時，似乎只是及時抓住了幾組意象，而無法掌握全詩。她曾這樣形容自己晚期的詩：「瘦瘦長長的，像我自己一樣。」當然，絕不僅止於形體上的相像，這些詩是普拉絲企圖反擊並超越那些縈繞其心的許多感情鬱結的記錄，在英文作品中幾乎很難找出與之匹敵者；我們可以說她的作品往往是一個小小的寓言，她企圖透過寓言的建立來超越原來的處境或心境，正如艾佛瑞茲（A. Alvarez）所說：「這種秩序的詩作是殘酷的藝術。」如果普拉絲活得久些，這類詩是否會更上一層樓，誰也沒法預言，因為她的詩作和死亡是密不可分的。如今她的詩名和作品都被人們渲染上幾分傳奇的色彩，和第一次世界大戰初布魯克（Rupert Brooke）的詩名相當。由於她是近代作家，我們無法騰出時間的距離來評估她在文學史上的最終地位，她詩中過於狂烈、過於內塑的語調是否對後代讀者也具有同樣的衝擊力，我們留待時間來裁定。