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Proust问卷
2009-11-24
一、VF普鲁斯特问卷：
——你最希望拥有哪种才华？
——我希望是弹钢琴。只要会弹黑键。（艾伦·德詹尼丝）
特地请教了会play这玩意儿的张爱球，为什么说只要黑键，她首先说黑键是突出来的，又在msn对话框里手绘了部分钢琴键盘给我看。。感情是因为黑键比白键少，黑键36个，白键有52个
二、 GQ的蔡崇达在微博上说：发觉自己的语言有个毛病——因为长期是周刊那种紧急状态的写作，能顺利拉开框架、找到逻辑就可以，导致语言不那么到位、准确——其实就是边写边整理思路落下的恶习。还好现在到了月刊，是应该重新开始学语法、找语言的精准性。毕竟语言最大的力量来自精准。这恐怕也是中国众多周刊记者的问题。
其实他在周刊时写的文章，besides框架清晰、逻辑严密，语言已经很到位、很准确了，语法上也无可挑剔，语言也异常有力。现在他仍然这样痛定思痛，真是一语惊醒梦中人哪。
三、普鲁斯特问卷里有一个问题是，你最瞧不起在世的谁
尼采替所有的女人说，女子最憎恨什么人呢？铁屑向磁石说：”我最憎恨你，因为你吸引，而力又不强，不够吸引我依附你。“
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IKEA
2009-11-18
去宜家买了一只椅子，本来挑了带扶手的，大概是记错货架了，装好之后发现没有扶手。觉得不如用原来的椅子，只要买一只好的垫子。。说来出租车的座位垫子挺厚的。。
本来蛮好在三楼办会员卡，然后免费喝咖啡。由于花了6块钱，就喝了两杯咖啡。想来有两种理解，第一杯6块，第二杯没付钱。或者，每杯3块钱。。
宜家被踢爆派線人監察員工 2009年11月16日
瑞典宜家傢俬（ Ikea）分店遍及全球 44國，員工多達 13,500人 ，有前高層出書踢爆，宜家管理層猶如秘密警察，除了敵視外 籍員工，還暗中監視全球員工，又安插線人向創辦人坎普拉德 （ Ingvar Kamprad）報公司情況。 瑞典籍的斯特內博（ Johan Stenebo）是德國漢堡分店前主管， 在分店工作逾 20年，去年辭職。他在新書《 Ikea真相》中，形 容宜家是「全球最神秘公司之一」，公司有條不成文規定，高 層職員要對坎普拉德絕對忠誠。 新書指，高層要「擦鞋」，瑞典籍員工對外籍同事無禮，稱呼 對方做「黑鬼」（ nigger），公司講求環保，皆因容易向供應 商壓價，而「宜家貨品夠便宜，全因公司用廉價材料，不在乎 質素。」 被前高層唱衰，宜家選擇沉默，指那只是「作者對宜家和坎普 拉德的個人意見」。 英國《獨立報》
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法国思想在美国2
2008-04-24
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1968
2008-04-23
Those were the days?
A celebrated decade is subject to a reevaluation in the new book "The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade" (Harvard University), by Gerard J. DeGroot.DeGroot, born in California in 1955 and now a professor of modern history at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, argues that what happened outside America in the '60s was as important as events within the nation's borders. He cites China's Cultural Revolution and the Six-Day War in the Middle East as evidence of the decade's "unbridled cruelty."
DeGroot touches on the decade's lighter side, such as the debut of the mini-skirt, but he always returns to politics. "People remember where they were when Kennedy was shot, but most cannot recall the year Reagan was elected governor of California," he writes. "Yet that election was far more important in shaping the world we live in today."
http://www.salon.com/books/review/2008/04/09/sixties/index.html
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/books/12/10/tom.brokaw/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/05/books/05masl.html
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/life/books/reviews/5636281.html
http://www.slate.com/id/2188734/
ohn McCain's biography -- written in the fire of war when the boomers were playing with matches in the safety of an indulgent culture -- is grounded in the virtues of an earlier era when patriotism was not an empty word. He was a child during World War II, when good and evil were everywhere understood; he grew up during the Cold War when it was clear that those who did not share the values of the West could kill us all. His courage and character were formed in a family of military men, and when he graduated from the Naval Academy he went to war without flinching.Biography, like culture, is not destiny, but it makes a difference. Can we believe the insistence of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that pulling pell-mell out of Iraq reflects a deep understanding of the chaos and consequences of what they would leave behind? John McCain separated himself from the Democratic candidates in a speech last week emphasizing the importance of paying the wages of war today to avoid paying higher wages tomorrow. "Any president who does not regard this threat as transcending all others does not deserve to sit in the White House," he said, "for he or she does not take seriously enough the first and most basic duty a president has -- to protect the lives of the American people."One of his strengths is his reputation as a straight shooter; for most of his critics, that reputation trumps another reputation as an unpredictable maverick. Like all pols, he occasionally plays politics; and like all successful pols, he occasionally plays politics well. His scrappiness seems to emanate from authenticity. Having matured in a wizened way, he occasionally seems an exile from a time before euphemism became the politically correct substitute for plain speech. He has a bit of Harry Truman's bluntness at a time when liberals are changing their label to "progressives" and reevaluating their naivete.Playwright David Mamet writes in a telling essay entitled "Why I am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal" (published in the Village Voice, of all places): "As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart."He finally realized the disconnect between what he said and what the characters he created were saying. He began to question his distrust of the "Bad, Bad Military," focusing instead on how men and women in uniform risk their lives to protect the rest of us in a hostile world. He began to see his hatred for "the Corporations" as resentment of his need for the goods and services the corporations provide. He read books by Thomas Sowell, Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson and Shelby Steele. (He should send his reading list to Obama and Hillary.)In his new book, The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade, Gerard DeGroot recalls that not all young people were marching against the Vietnam War when John McCain was hanging on a wall at the Hanoi Hilton. Many of them were beginning to re-examine the assumptions of the youth culture. "The most successful political revolution of the 1960s was not conducted by students, nor was it left wing," he writes. "It was instead a populist revolution from the right, which had Ronald Reagan as its standard bearer."John McCain does not pretend to be Ronald Reagan, but he describes himself as a foot soldier in the Reagan revolution. If he can link his long memory to a good memory, those boomers might take up another cry from that era now fading into history: "The times they are a-changin'." -
FT 本周书评
2006-02-27
1 Great escaper
By Nicholas Woodsworth
Published: February 24 2006 16:39 | Last updated: February 24 2006 16:39
WILFRED THESIGER: The Life of the Great Explorer
by Alexander Maitland
Harper Press £25, 448 pagesHe lived through the 20th century and died in the 21st - too late, one might think, to produce the kind of exploits and heroic reputation enjoyed by earlier British explorers. But in his long and extraordinary life Wilfred Thesiger was compared to the greatest travellers of the Victorian age. Having shunned the modern world for an uncompromising existence in some of the last wild places on earth, his books and photography transformed him from a social curiosity into an unconventional celebrity of international status.
It is to his credit that Alexander Maitland, in his full-length biography, sets out not just on the easier, well-beaten trail of Thesiger the flamboyant explorer. The true object of his discovery - Thesiger the man - is at times more elusive and difficult to access than the source of the Nile itself.
As Thesiger’s official biographer and intimate friend for the last four decades of his life, Maitland should have had an easier task than the biographers of earlier explorers. In addition to having close personal contact with Thesiger until his death in 2003, Maitland had a mass of correspondence available to him - Thesiger maintained an unusually close relationship with his mother until her death. Through his letters to her revealed as much of himself as he did to anyone.
Neither facility made the job any easier. As Maitland shows throughout Wilfred Thesiger, his subject was a complex man: he was full of contradictions, extreme in character and temperament, and dismissive of even the most commonly accepted values. What made him an especially difficult subject for biography was his unwillingness to reveal to others, and sometimes even to himself, his own inner nature. Maitland’s exhaustive examination of hoards of detail does not always fully enlighten - or make for fascinating reading.
Yet it was from his intricate make-up that Thesiger drew the resources needed to undertake his outstanding feats of travel. From Kenya to Sudan, from the deserts of Arabia to the marshes of Iraq, from the mountains of the Hindu Kush to the Moroccan High Atlas, Thesiger spent 40 years in almost constant, challenging travel.
But in exploration motivation is all, or nearly all, and we soon end up as interested in the “why?” of Thesiger’s achievement as the “what and where?”
Thesiger’s attraction to uncomfortable and dangerous places seems to have been fixed in place by his first decade. He was born into an aristocratic family of over-achievers. The Barons of Chelmsford had produced generations of high-ranking colonial soldiers and administrators, including Thesiger’s uncle, a viceroy of India. Thesiger spent his early years in Abyssinia as the son of the British consul-general, inordinately proud of his heritage and determined to distinguish himself. It was the determining period of his life. His childhood home of Addis Ababa was at the time one of the most remote and exotic capitals on earth; he later wrote that these surroundings gave him “a lifelong craving” for “savagery and colour”.
An adolescence spent in England reinforced Thesiger’s desire to live far from restrictions and routine. His wild and untrammelled childhood, full of unspoiled landscapes and outlandish figures, became a kind of mythical, pre-industrial existence to whose return he dedicated the rest of his life. And his time at Eton and Oxford only added to his upper-class Englishman’s sense of confidence and superiority. Maitland suggests that the physical brutality and sexual abuse practised by the headmaster of Thesiger’s prep school may have damaged him psychologically.
Nothing lessened Thesiger’s distaste for technology, change and modern living. He was an anachronism, a romantic and a reactionary and, as Maitland says, he knew the pre-industrial world he loved was doomed - by own admission Thesiger “cherished the past, felt out of step with the present, and dreaded the future”.
This was the background that gave Thesiger a taste for adventure and what Maitland calls “an aggressive pride in being the ‘last’ in a long line of overland explorers and travellers, a refugee from the Victorians’ Golden Age”. But what made Thesiger different from his predecessors was his purpose in travel: to be worthwhile a journey had to be difficult and dangerous. Describing his exploration of the Empty Quarter of Arabia - perhaps his most impressive achievement in a lifetime of constant travel on foot, by camel or on horseback - Thesiger denied that his primary aim was exploration. Still less was it the writing of books. “I went there to find peace in the hardship of desert travel and in the company of desert peoples. I set myself a goal on these journeys, and although the goal itself was unimportant, its attainment had to be worth every effort and sacrifice... the harder the way the more worthwhile the journey.”
So was born the Thesiger legend. From far-off places around the globe came travellers’ tales of odd encounters with a tall, craggy-faced, eccentric Englishman, a wildman and a toff at the same time.
Thesiger is “the sort of man”, remarked a friend, “who will happily walk barefoot for months across a waterless desert, subsisting on a handful of dates and an occasional sip of camel’s piss, but who, back in civilisation, cannot endure the most trivial discomfort. He becomes frantic even if his egg isn’t boiled right for breakfast.”
Thesiger was a throwback to an earlier time, “a misfit”, wrote one of his rare employers, in the British colonial service, “only owing to excess of certain ancient virtues”. Today much of the world would judge his views as misconceived. He believed men were natural warriors, and that it was in their nature to kill. He was a killer himself, an aggressive and prolific hunter of big game. He was dismayed to see the benefits of modern life come to indigenous peoples. And, on a more personal level, says Maitland, although Thesiger denied any impropriety, he used his authority among those peoples to promote relationships with young boys - at the very least they were voyeuristic and coloured by a repressed sexuality.
Yet that same employer went on to write that Thesiger was a “brave, awkward, attractive creature”. Does Maitland capture that strange attractiveness, his undoubted love and understanding of a now-vanished world? He brings the man to life in so far as is possible, yet there remains the feeling of something missing. So singular and solitary is his subject, one cannot help but feel that the truly vital part of the man remains out in the wilds where it lived best. It will probably never be captured.
2 Occupational hazards
By Donald Morrison
Published: February 24 2006 16:38 | Last updated: February 24 2006 16:38 THE ASSASSINS’ GATE: America in Iraq
by George Packer
Faber £14.99, 352 pagesIts real name is the Bab al-Qasr, or Palace Gate, but American soldiers stationed near by called it the Assassins’ Gate - and that more dramatic nickname has stuck. Heavily guarded, it is the main entrance to the green zone, the immense Baghdad fortress where Iraq’s most senior US occupiers live in almost total isolation from their subjects. In George Packer’s sweeping, insightful account of the American war in Iraq, written after his time there with The New Yorker, it is also a metaphor for the arrogance, incomprehension and stupidity that shaped that misadventure.
And this from a guy who supported it. “The administration’s war was not my war - it was rushed, dishonest, unforgivably partisan, and destructive of alliances - but objecting to the authors and their methods didn’t seem reason enough to stand in the way,” Packer writes. “I wanted Iraqis to be let out of prison; I wanted to see a homicidal dictator removed from power before he committed mass murder again; I wanted to see if an open society stood a chance of taking root in the heart of the Arab world.”
So Packer made several trips to Iraq following the 2003 invasion. Though much of his reporting appeared in The New Yorker, the book has a coherence and a narrative sweep that reflect Packer’s other career, as a novelist. The Assassins’ Gate is, so far, the definitive history of the US experience in Iraq.
And what a sorry tale it is. “Iraq will always be linked to the term neo-conservative,” he notes in tracing the war’s intellectual origins. The neo-cons, those messianic pupils of Plato and Leo Strauss, “conceive of themselves as insurgents, warring against an exhausted liberal establishment that doesn’t have the moral clarity to defend itself, let alone the country.” Having infiltrated Republican party policy circles over the years, they sweep into power with George W. Bush and are ready with a plan after the September 11 2001 attacks: Invade Iraq, a scheme that has less to do with al-Qaeda, Packer says, than with the neo-con impulse to spread democracy.
The problem is they had no plan for the invasion’s aftermath. Barricaded in the green zone, the undermanned US reconstruction team churns out documents that have little effect outside, in the “red zone” inhabited by suffering Iraqis and increasingly endangered US troops. Packer talks to a young American official who, using a Lonely Planet guide, draws up a list of 16 sites to be protected from looting; there are enough troops to guard only the oil ministry. More American civilians arrive, too many of them young Republican operatives. The Coalition Provisional Authority is derided outside the walls as Can’t Provide Anything. Meanwhile, the country dissolves into a full-scale guerrilla war, even as US officials back home deny it is happening.
Packer finds enough villains to fill Abu Ghraib prison: Bush, whose seemingly wilful ignorance sets the tone for the US response to the deteriorating situation; Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, an “8,000-mile screwdriver” whose relentless tinkering drives Americans in Iraq nuts and whose mania for a lean, modern military rules out enough troops for the occupation; the Pentagon planner Paul Wolfowitz, the war’s leading cheerleader, who agonises over the mess he has helped to make but who is unwilling to change course; Paul Bremer, the US viceroy who, within days of arriving, disbands its army and disqualifies even low-level officials of the Saddam regime from employment. “With a stroke of a pen, Bremer put several hundred thousand armed Iraqis on the street with no job and no salary,” marvels Packer.
There are also plenty of heroes, mostly the US soldiers and Iraqi civilians Packer befriends - until the danger level rules out such contacts. Packer spends some time with British troops in Basra, and compares their softly-softly peacekeeping approach to the shoot-first-ask-later American posture. He also credits Tony Blair with persuading the White House that its postwar public relations effort is a mess - though not with having much impact otherwise.
What is missing from the book is Packer himself. Apart from his early declaration of support for the war, he gives few clues on where he stands or what it all means. Occasionally, though, a note of sorrowful exasperation creeps in. “The Iraq war was always winnable; it still is,” he concludes. “For this very reason, the recklessness of its authors is all the harder to forgive.”
His meticulous account of that recklessness should be mandatory reading for the architects of this and any future US conflict, though he offers little evidence of an American willingness to learn from mistakes.
3 Hard to figure it out
By Julius Purcell
Published: February 24 2006 16:38 | Last updated: February 24 2006 16:38 THE WEIGHT OF NUMBERS
by Simon Ings
Atlantic Books £12.99, 414 pages
ADVERTISEMENT 被过滤的广告 -
周一
2006-02-27
伊拉克内战
菲律宾动乱
Christopher Caldwell: Taboos that undid Summers
By Christopher Caldwell
Published: February 24 2006 20:10 | Last updated: February 24 2006 20:10 
Warning that “complacency is among the greatest risks facing Harvard”, Lawrence Summers, the former US Treasury secretary, resigned from the presidency of the most prestigious US university this week after five years in power. He was forced out. The powerful Faculty of Arts and Sciences was set to censure him at its next meeting, and his position had become untenable.ADVERTISEMENT 被过滤的广告 Mr Summers was probably Harvard’s most successful president in many decades – and certainly its most intellectually accomplished. He opened the school’s doors to the poor, refocused attention on undergraduate learning and came up with a credible plan to recapture the university’s lost pre-eminence in the natural sciences. No one on campus has yet given a coherent and specific account of why he was put under pressure to resign.
It is not that the reasons for his ousting cannot be explained, but that they cannot be avowed. At the simplest level, Mr Summers provoked a revolt of political correctness. A preliminary draft of last year’s faculty vote of no confidence blamed Mr Summers for three crimes against university orthodoxy: his treatment of Cornel West, the Afro-American studies professor, whom he accused of substituting activism for scholarship; his opinion that the faculty’s calls for an investment boycott of Israel were “anti-Semitic in their effect if not in their intent”; and his speculation, in the course of an economics colloquium, that “issues of intrinsic aptitude” might explain the low number of female faculty hires in quantitative disciplines.
That a serious university would make the expression of opinions a firing offence is an idea too painful for many of Harvard’s friends and alumni to bear. So almost everyone at Harvard – not just the people who got him axed – has tried to pass off Mr Summers’ departure as a matter of management style. “It’s hard for people who aren’t in these meetings,” one anti-Summers professor told a reporter, “to see why it’s been hard to work with him.”
It is bizarre to suggest that a university president be judged more on the ambiance of administrative meetings than on his record of managing a $25bn (€21bn) endowment and tens of thousands of students and employees. But maybe this was the case. Mr Summers’ intellectual curiosity, and his frankness in faculty meetings, collided with a structure of vested interests that is three decades old.
In the mid-1970s, under Mr Summers’ predecessor Derek Bok, Harvard faced allegations that its academic standards were slipping. (Mr Bok, who retired in 1991, has been named as Mr Summers’ interim replacement.) The antidote prescribed was something called the Core Curriculum, which is used to this day. The Core was an academic fraud. It was sold to donors and parents as a back-to-basics education and to the faculty as a way of having fun teaching their esoteric specialities to a captive audience. The Core mostly aimed at the capillaries of western culture. It seemed positively designed to thwart efforts to acquire anything resembling a liberal education. So “Beasts in Literature” would fulfil your humanities requirement, but “Shakespeare” would not. Ross Douthat, the young journalist and recent Harvard graduate, has written that, during his time there, Harvard “didn’t offer a single course focusing on the American Revolution”. Mr Summers’ attempts to reform the curriculum into something more serious are part of the reason he was wildly popular among undergraduates, who backed him by three to one in polls and demonstrated in the Yard to protest against his departure.
Harvard came to be organised around the enthusiasms of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, as if the university were (as the economist Edward Glaeser put it this week) “a worker’s co-operative run for the faculty of one particular school”. This orientation created a further problem for Harvard, as it did for many American universities. In the heyday of political correctness, which began in the 1980s, Harvard took on a number of faculty members – one could call them the films, clothes and gender humanists – whose disciplines have been exposed as fads.
Mr Summers’ own intellect and his standing as an economist (he is the youngest professor ever to receive tenure at Harvard) were a prima facie affront to many such faculty members. When he began to ask, implicitly, what Harvard scholars were doing to earn their money, and then to stand up to certain of them (such as Mr West) pour encourager les autres, he became an outright threat. The number of professors who could be classified as dead wood may have been low. But the coalition of those who feared for their scholarly reputations turned out to be vast. Mr Summers’ crime was, to quote the Harvard Crimson, “bestowing grants and professorships on those whose fields he deemed worthy”. That could serve as a definition of what university administrators have always done.
Last week’s revolt targeted not just Mr Summers but Harvard’s own students. Many faculty members were quoted as saying you cannot judge a Harvard education the way you would a piece of merchandise. This is not wholly convincing to the parents who fork out $50,000 a year to purchase one. A Harvard education is a product – one that over the decades came to be tailored to the convenience of its employees, not the needs of its consumers. Those curious about what happens when a large and seemingly invulnerable institution sets such priorities can look at General Motors and the rest of the US auto industry.
That is why Mr Summers’ seemingly innocuous remarks about women and mathematics a year ago scared the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He had revealed that he would not be constrained by the taboos that protect professorial privilege and self-regard. After that, it did not really matter to the Harvard faculty what he said.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
2 explains why Al-Qaeda wants to divide Islam
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-525-2058597-525,00.html
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